On an evening in December, 1980, the photographer Tseng Kwong Chi gate-crashed the party of the year: the gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the opening night of “The Manchu Dragon,” an exhibition (organized by Diana Vreeland) of Chinese costume from the Qing dynasty. Tseng used a medium-format camera to photograph the arriving guests. An era’s tony milieu pauses, flash-lit: an amused Yves Saint-Laurent, Halston in high spirits, a quizzical William F. Buckley. Nancy Kissinger turns up in the same Adolfo dress as two other women—but nobody looks embarrassed. Tseng himself is also in the pictures, grinning away beside his subjects, with a cable release in his hand. And he is dressed, as he frequently is in his dandy-conceptualist art, in a plain gray “Mao suit,” which reads here as a laconic visual rejoinder to the exhibit’s lavish Orientalism.

Andy Warhol was among the celebrities Tseng importuned at the Met, and there is something of Warhol’s nineteen-sixties self-invention in Tseng’s cultivation of an unvarying image, a mask that made the most of his outsider station. But Tseng’s art is emphatically of the eighties. He is best known for—that is, a little obscured by—his documenting, in more than twenty-five thousand photographs, the work of his friend Keith Haring. (One such photo, and more of Tseng’s work, is currently on view as part of the exhibit “Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989,” at the Grey Art Gallery, at N.Y.U.) As a prolific magazine photographer, he took portraits of Warhol, Julian Schnabel, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He was frequently found among the gaudy noctiluca of New York club life—the likes of Kenny Scharf, Ann Magnuson, John Sex, and Madonna. At venues such as the Mudd Club, where he had his first solo exhibition, Tseng was not always dressed in his estranging costume. But, when he wore it, the suit was a reminder that since the late nineteen-seventies he had been amassing a work of sober wit and coherence—and also, it seems, deepening ambivalence about life in America.

Tseng was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver by Chinese parents. His father had fought against Mao in the Nationalist Army; he and Tseng’s mother fled China in 1949, a year before Tseng was born. For college, Tseng studied photography in Paris; among his student projects was an artist’s book filled with passages from Gertrude Stein and street photographs (more accurately, park photographs) that owe much to Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson. He appears to have hit upon the rigors of the suited self-portraits—if that is what they are—soon after he moved to New York, in 1978. In a collection of Tseng’s work from 2015, his sister, Muna, describes how their parents organized dinner at the Windows on the World restaurant, at the World Trade Center. But her brother owned no formal attire other than a Zhongshan suit (as it’s more precisely called) that he had bought in a Montreal thrift store. His parents were aghast when he showed up wearing it, but the maître d’ treated him like a visiting dignitary; from there, Tseng began to assume the austere, mischievous persona that would dominate his art.

He called this character “an ambiguous ambassador,” and, in a series he called “East Meets West,” posed him—posed himself—in front of various icons of touristic America. He leaps into the air in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, stands impassive beside Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, gazes off into the distance with Niagara Falls behind him. All the early pictures were taken, square format, with his father’s nineteen-forties Rolleiflex; as in the photos from the Met in 1980, you can usually see the cable release in the photographer’s fist. To the top-left pocket of the suit, Tseng attached an I.D. badge—it said “visitor,” or sometimes “slutforart”—and so in many of the photographs there’s a sly reflexive quality: the artist is wearing a small portrait of the artist, mirrored sunglasses and all. In the late nineteen-seventies and early nineteen-eighties, Tseng also took the ambiguous ambassador to Europe, where he appears heroic before the Arc de Triomphe, and diminutive between two policemen at the Tower of London.

In a short film about him, made by Christine Lombard, in 1984, Tseng claims that the “East Meets West” series was partly inspired by Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The photographs, in other words, stage imaginary scenes of cultural friction, craving, and interpretation. Considering that he was a young gay Asian artist in New York in the nineteen-eighties, Tseng’s responses to resurgent conservatism were notably playful. In the series “It’s a Reagan World!,” he cast his downtown artist friends as straight, preppy, suburban couples; exuberant in their new cultural-political consequence, they recall Chinese propaganda of the nineteen-fifties as much as American. And in the “Moral Majority” photographs he invited certain princelings of the New Right (Jerry Falwell, Daniel Fore, and others) to pose before a rumpled American flag. Tseng told them it would look as if it were billowing in the wind, but the flag just looks abused, and the men in front of it appear puffed with vainglory. Once again, Tseng insinuated himself into some of the pictures, passing as an ally in seersucker and a smirk.

Tseng died, of AIDS, in 1990, less than a month after Haring did. He was thirty-nine years old. In the final years of his life, he acquired a new camera, enlisted his partner, Robert-Kristoffer Haynes, as his assistant, and took his uniformed alter ego further afield, into the vasts of American landscape. He found a land no less fraught with politics than the sights and monuments of New York and Washington, D.C. Here, the “inquisitive traveller” (as he also referred to the character) mimics Caspar David Friedrich’s Rückenfigur, whose back is turned to us while gazing upon the natural sublime. Or, in Tseng’s case, the ideological sublime: Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley. In these late photographs, he is dwarfed by the scenery, but his suited silhouette is no less insistent a reminder that belonging is always also performing. Romantic and wry, no longer willing to turn even his mirrored gaze in our direction, Tseng gets smaller and more distant, until he disappears.

One of the first images in “A Child’s Book of Poems,” a 1969 collection illustrated by the American artist Gyo Fujikawa, shows a boy on a hill, heading to a village under an enormous sun. This sun, unlike the real one, encourages staring: it’s layered with stunning oranges and yellows, a flourish of bright beauty filling the sky. The boy wears round sunglasses and a cap, and has a bindle slung over his shoulder—he’s contemplating the quiet harmony of the village and the celestial wonder that illuminates it. In Fujikawa’s children’s books—she illustrated fifty books, forty-five of which she wrote, and several are still in print—these elements consistently appear in harmony: the beauty and power of the natural world and the earthly pleasures of the people walking around in it. As a child, I knew that seeing her name on a book cover meant feeling connected to the page, being transported—by joy, cheerful fellow-feeling, occasional stormy moods and skies, and a hint of nursery-rhyme dreaminess. I associated her giant-sun image with the bounding pleasures of a favorite song, “Free to Be . . . You and Me.” Its opening banjo and this yellow sun both led to a land “where the children are free.”

Fujikawa was born in Berkeley, California, in 1908, to Hikozo and Yu Fujikawa, Japanese immigrants and grape-farm workers. Yu was an activist who wrote poetry and did embroidery. In the early twenties, the Fujikawas moved to Terminal Island, a fishing village near San Pedro, populated with many first- and second-generation Japanese-Americans. At mostly white schools on the mainland, Fujikawa struggled to fit in—late in life, she said that hers wasn’t “a particularly marvelous childhood”—but she excelled at art, and a high-school teacher helped her apply for a scholarship to the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), where she thrived. After a year travelling in Japan, she returned to Los Angeles, where, in 1939, she was hired by Walt Disney Studios. She designed promotional materials for “Fantasia,” and in a piece in Glamour, published in the early nineteen-forties and titled “Girls at Work for Disney,” a caption identifies her as “Gyo, a Japanese artist.”

The article was hardly alone in failing to recognize Fujikawa’s Americanness, especially as the Second World War gathered strength. One day, Fujikawa later told an interviewer, Walt Disney “came in to see me especially. . . . He said, ‘How are you doing? I’ve been worried about you.’ ” She said she was doing O.K., and that when people asked her what nationality she was, “ ‘I tell them the truth or I give them big lies, like half Chinese and half Japanese, or part Korean, part Chinese, and part Japanese.’ He said, ‘Why do you have to do that? For Christ sakes, you’re an American citizen.’ ” In 1941, she was sent to New York, to work in Disney’s studios there; in early 1942, her parents and brother, along with many Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, were sent to internment camps. The Fujikawas were sent to the Santa Anita racetrack, where they lived in horse stalls, and then to a camp in Jerome, Arkansas. Fujikawa visited them there and found what she described as “barbed wire and a sentry walking around the wall with a bayonet.”

Back in New York, heartbroken and feeling guilty about her own freedom, Fujikawa continued to make her way in the commercial-art world. In 1957, she was commissioned to illustrate a new edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” She was paid a flat fee, as was standard; the book was a hit; and she turned down future work until the company agreed to pay her royalties. It did, and her career flourished, as did her creativity. She illustrated “The Night Before Christmas” (1961) and, in 1963, her first original book, “Babies.” She told the publisher that she wanted to show “an international set of babies—little black babies, Asian babies, all kinds of babies.” The publisher was reluctant, fearing that images of black babies would impair sales in the South. Fujikawa stood firm, “Babies” was published as she wanted, and the book became a best-seller. Along with a companion book, “Baby Animals,” it has since sold more than two million copies. Fujikawa’s babies—red-haired, kimono-wearing, doll-wrangling, chamberpot-sitting, and otherwise—continue to roll around lovably in board books, distinctive and universal at once.

In the decades that followed, Fujikawa’s illustrations depicted children of all kinds, on adventures of all kinds, often in transcendent natural settings. The children’s faces can at times resemble the advertising work that Fujikawa did for Beech-Nut and other brands—they’re expressive but simply rendered, with dark points for eyes and almost smiley-face-like lines for mouths. Yet they’re focussed and intent, expressive, active. The pages of her books often alternate between black-and-white spreads of crosshatched spot illustrations and stunning color spreads of a single painting, often depicting a sweeping scene: a city and a helicopter above it, a girl under an enormous green-leafed willow tree on a blustery day; a child sleeping cozily in a hammock made of a leaf, under a patchwork quilt, attended by a fairy. In “Oh, What a Busy Day!” (1976), we see a boisterous group of kids in a treehouse, under a stormy greenish sky, playing and looking out at the rain. There’s a sign on the treehouse, and “NO GIRLZ ALLOWED” it isn’t: it says “MEMBERS ONLY,” and the members are a multiethnic group of boys and girls, happily communing with birds, a cat, and a squirrel. In “A Child’s Book of Poems,” Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, little black boys in cozy pajamas, pilot a Dutch-looking shoe-ship through a night sky full of stars.

Fujikawa didn’t insist that all of her children be cheerful. In “Gyo Fujikawa’s A to Z Picture Book” (1974), on the first painted spread, a girl stands in a marsh, looking neither happy nor sad, hands in pockets, looking at a frog on a rock. “A is for Alone, all by myself,” the text reads. “Hi, there, frog! Can I play with you?” Solitude and loneliness are natural, too, we learn. Later, at “F,” we see a boy leaning over a toadstool, looking at two fairies: “F is for friends, fairies, flowers, fish, and frogs.” All of these moods are presented with acceptance, just as her spot illustrations nod to an array of pleasant items in the world’s catalogue: “M” is for moose, marigold, milk, mockingbird, and moo goo gai pan.

Fujikawa died in 1998, at age ninety, and obituaries in the Times and the L.A. Times illuminated her life story well. But, considering that her work has mesmerized children for several decades, I’ve been surprised not to see more acclaim for her during my adult life—no articles or exhibitions, or calendars or tote bags or socks—as I have with other great children’s-book artists, such as Garth Williams, Arnold Lobel, Virginia Lee Burton, Margaret Wise Brown, William Steig, Maurice Sendak, Louise Fitzhugh, and so on. But lately, other artists have begun to pay homage to Fujikawa’s story. In 2017, the playwright Lloyd Suh staged a one-act called “Disney and Fujikawa,” imagining a dialogue between Walt and Gyo; this fall, HarperCollins will publish “It Began with a Page: How Gyo Fujikawa Drew the Way,” by Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad, which tells her story beautifully, in picture-book form.

“I think she wanted to create a body of literature that would invite all children onto the page,” Maclear told me recently. A later book, “Welcome Is a Wonderful Word,” saw Fujikawa getting more explicit about inclusion, but Maclear prefers her earlier works, where inclusion was “effortless,” and where Fujikawa seemed to create “new laws of the universe for the children she was making books for.” Fujikawa didn’t have a marvellous childhood, and she didn’t have children of her own. But, like Sendak and Fitzhugh and others, she stayed in tune with a child’s way of seeing the world. She also found a way to draw a better one. “I loved it, drawing children’s books,” she told an interviewer, late in life. “I always wanted to do art work for children about children. It was just what I wanted to do.” Their freedom was her freedom, too.

A Mississippi prosecutor went on a racist crusade to have a black man executed. Clarence Thomas thinks that was just fine.

That’s the message of an astonishing decision today from the Supreme Court. The facts of the case, known as Flowers v. Mississippi, are straightforward. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it, in his admirably blunt opinion for the Court, “In 1996, Curtis Flowers allegedly murdered four people in Winona, Mississippi. Flowers is black. He has been tried six separate times before a jury for murder. The same lead prosecutor represented the State in all six trials.” Flowers was convicted in the first three trials, and sentenced to death. On each occasion, his conviction was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court, on the grounds of misconduct by the prosecutor, Doug Evans, mostly in the form of keeping African-Americans off the juries. Trials four and five ended in hung juries. In the sixth trial, the one that was before the Supreme Court, Flowers was convicted, but the Justices found that Evans had again discriminated against black people, and thus Flowers, in jury selection, and they overturned his conviction. (The breathtaking facts of the case and its accompanying legal saga are described at length on the American Public Media podcast “In the Dark.”)

As Kavanaugh recounted in his opinion, Evans’s actions were almost cartoonishly racist. To wit: in the six trials, the State employed its peremptory challenges (that is, challenges for which no reason need be given) to strike forty-one out of forty-two African-American prospective jurors. In the most recent trial, the State exercised peremptory strikes against five of six black prospective jurors. In addition, Evans questioned black prospective jurors a great deal more closely than he questioned whites. As Kavanaugh observed, with considerable understatement, “A court confronting that kind of pattern cannot ignore it.“

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But Thomas can, and he did. Indeed, he filed a dissenting opinion that was genuinely outraged—not by the prosecutor but by his fellow-Justices, who dared to grant relief to Flowers, who has spent more than two decades in solitary confinement at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman prison. Thomas said that the prosecutor’s behavior was blameless, and he practically sneered at his colleagues, asserting that the majority had decided the Flowers case to “boost its self-esteem.” Thomas also found a way to blame the news media for the result. “Perhaps the Court granted certiorari because the case has received a fair amount of media attention,” he wrote, adding that “the media often seeks to titillate rather than to educate and inform.”

The decision in Flowers was 7–2, with Neil Gorsuch joining Thomas’s dissent. The two have become jurisprudentially inseparable, with Gorsuch serving as a kind of deputy to Thomas, as Thomas once served to Antonin Scalia. But Thomas usually has a majority of colleagues on his side, in a way that often eluded Scalia. The Flowers case notwithstanding, Thomas now wins most of the time, typically with the assistance of Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Kavanaugh.

Despite Thomas’s usual silence on the bench (he did ask a question during the Flowers argument), he is clearly feeling ideologically aggressive these days. In his Flowers dissent, Thomas all but called for the overturning of the Court’s landmark decision in Batson v. Kentucky, from 1986, which prohibits prosecutors from using their peremptory challenges in racially discriminatory ways. Earlier this year, he called for reconsideration of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, from 1964, which established modern libel law, with its protections for journalistic expression. And in a decision earlier this month, Thomas made the case that the Court should be more willing to overturn its precedents. It’s customary for the Justices to at least pretend to defer to past decisions, but Thomas apparently no longer feels obligated even to gesture to the Court’s past. As he put it last fall, in a concurring opinion in Gamble v. United States, “We should not invoke stare decisis to uphold precedents that are demonstrably erroneous.” Erroneous, of course, in the judicial worldview of Thomas. The Supreme Court’s war on its past has begun, and Clarence Thomas is leading the charge.

The first time I noticed that quite a lot of people on the Internet seemed to be begging celebrities to kill them was a couple of years ago. “Can lana del rey step on my throat already,” one person tweeted. “Snap my neck and hide my body,” another announced, when Lady Gaga posted a new profile photo. Taylor Swift could “run me over with a tractor and I’d say thank you and ask her if she wants to do it again,” another wrote. If you performed a cursory search, you’d find hundreds of such messages, mostly lobbed by young millennials and members of Generation Z. There was an emphatic queerness to much of this discourse, whether or not the person tweeting identified as anything but straight. Many of the messages were about women and sent by women; the subset of men who attracted these tweets tended to be girlish, in a boy-band way. There were lots of appeals to sweetly handsome Korean pop stars, lots of “harry styles punch me in the face” requests, lots of wishes for the still-babyish Justin Bieber to run people over with his car. Nowadays, on Twitter, every hour brings a new crop of similar entreaties.

One takeaway from all this is that young people really love celebrities. Another is that we’re craving unmediated connection so desperately that we would accept it in the form of murder. It’s also possible that we simply want to die. Earlier this year, at the Cut, in a piece about the upswing of “run me over” tweets, Gabriella Paiella observed that the popularity of these jokes can’t be separated from the ambient fatalism inculcated by attention to actual real-world problems—“the fact that we’re living during a time when we’re constantly being reminded that the Earth is going to be virtually uninhabitable by the end of the century, that capitalism is wholly unsustainable, and that we’re just one push of a button away from perishing in a nuclear war.” Paiella talked to the writer Brandy Jensen, who had recently tweeted that her primary reaction to seeing a hot person was to think “back over me with a truck.” Everyone, Jensen said, seemed to be constantly posting about how they were horny and how they wanted to die; it was natural that the two would converge.

Devotion, by its nature, tends to invite agony. “Love has brought me within the reach of lovely, cruel arms that / unjustly kill me,” Petrarch writes, in Robert M. Durling’s English translation of “Rime Sparse,” a set of poems written in the fourteenth century. Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” published in 1593, describes Venus as a maiden who “murders with a kiss.” In the early seventeenth century, John Donne famously begged, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” (A degraded Internet-era version of the poem, “Holy Sonnet 14,” might involve the impassioned poet pleading with God to choke him.) But this language appears to be spilling over. It may originate in a sort of erotic consecration, but love and pain, joy and punishment, seem increasingly convergent, at least in the ways that people express themselves online. Love may be timeless, but the half-ironic millennial death wish has become an underground river rushing swiftly under the surface of the age.

Earlier this month, I got on the phone with Mistress Velvet, a dominatrix in Chicago with a day job in social work, to ask her what she made of all this. She’d started noticing the prevalence of punch-me-in-the-face talk in 2011, she told me, when she was first coming into her queerness, in her early twenties. “Saying that I’d ‘literally let her stab me’ was a way of linguistically valuing my queer relationships over my heterosexual ones,” she said. “But I’ve also become interested in it in the context of B.D.S.M.” Mistress Velvet told me that, when clients came to her with this sort of intense sacrificial devotion, they often were seeking replacements for powerful people who were absent from their lives. “It reminds me of when I transitioned from Christianity to atheism,” she said. “I was suddenly afraid of death—I was nihilistic—and I had to find something else that could fill that gap.”

That parallel had never occurred to me, I told her.

“I mean, if we’re thinking of it,” Mistress Velvet said, “Jesus died for our sins, and believers are supposed to give our lives back to him. My clients sometimes talk to me like this. They’d let me run them over with a truck. I’m like, ‘That’s not even what I want! Your life is sacred!’ ”

“Right,” I said, suddenly dazed. “Maybe it’s a dream of mutuality—of sacrificing yourself for someone in such a way that they would then be permanently tied to you.”

I messaged a seventeen-year-old Harry Styles fan whose social-media bio included the sentence “harry can run me over, use my crumpled corpse to wipe his car off and then use me to avoid puddles on the street.” She’d been on “stan twitter” since 2012, she explained, and “us stans have always been pretty harsh with expressing our love.” (A stan, as the Oxford English Dictionary now recognizes, is an obsessive fan of a celebrity; the term comes from the 2000 Eminem song “Stan,” and it can be used both as a noun and a verb.) “I say these kinds of things because . . . it would honestly be an honor for Harry to run me over,” she wrote. An eighteen-year-old whose Twitter bio was “tom holland could run me over with a truck and I would say thank you” told me, “Even just being near him or in his presence would make me sooo happy, even if it meant he was running me over with a truck.”

After perusing the ample and growing archive of tweets in which people ask Cate Blanchett to step on their throats, I messaged a twenty-four-year-old woman who’d posted a photo of Blanchett with the caption “she’s so tall pls step on my throat ma’am.” Step-on-my-throat language, she wrote back, was all about “the LGBTQ people who just love to love and support women, and get more creative every passing day. its our safe place.” Plus, she added, “It’s Cate freaking Blanchett, you’d do anything she wants you to do.”

But not all run-me-over tweets direct their sentiment at an object. Plenty of people on Twitter are begging to simply be run over, stepped on, punched in the face. The Twitter user @alwayssaddaily, whose name is stated as simply “Anxiety,” recently posted a series of emoji snowflakes that formed a giant “F,” followed by “UCKING RUN ME OVER.” It received twelve hundred likes. “I honestly feel that this new trend of expression is because people in society as a whole these days are becoming more and more numb to life and are losing perspective on the physical part of reality, which in turn causes the brain to react and express things a certain way in order to satisfy the need for feeling in our bodies,” the twenty-year-old woman behind the account told me. “Life is becoming increasingly redundant, which makes me iterate these thoughts out loud to myself—hit me with a car, fucking kill me—for psychological satisfaction.”

In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” published in 1930, Freud wrote about the unconscious sense of guilt he attributed to his patients, who tended not to believe what he was suggesting; it was hard to become conscious of being unconsciously guilty. “In order to make ourselves at all intelligible to them,” he wrote, referring to the approach that analysts took with such patients, “we tell them of an unconscious need for punishment, in which the sense of guilt finds expression.” In this framework, masochism is the ego’s desire to atone.

In my life—which is mostly, I would say, a vibrant and happy one—this masochistic tendency surfaces constantly, in a sidelong way. About a month ago, while spending a rowdy weekend at a music festival on the beach with nine other people, I started counting the jokes we made about walking into the ocean and dying together. A friend and I kept talking about drowning each other “as a bit.” For me, the capacity to experience such unfettered pleasure—the fact of having the time and capital and freedom required for it, at a time when we know that so many people’s lives are worsening—is often what instigates the murmur of guilt. I do deserve to be run over with a dump truck, I think, at home, opening my delivery packages, thinking about how much plastic I have put on this planet, how much labor I have exploited for the sake of my own convenience. Longing and guilt intertwine every time I think about having children, who, if they exist, will exist in a world defined by man-made crisis and natural disaster. On the beach, flooded with joy, I felt the tug of that familiar undertow. “Fucking kill me,” I thought, suddenly desiring a sensation strong enough to silence itself—which is, I suppose, one way of defining love.

After Barack Obama abruptly called off a missile strike on Syria, in August, 2013, he appeared in the Rose Garden on a Saturday afternoon, alongside his Vice-President, Joe Biden, to explain that his decision was driven by a desire to obtain congressional authorization. (The authorization never came; neither did the strike.) Donald Trump’s Rose Garden is Twitter. So, on Friday morning, the world was anxiously monitoring the @realDonaldTrump feed to see what he had to say about the decision he made on Thursday evening, to call off a missile strike on Iran. According to a blockbuster report in the Times, Trump authorized the strike in response to Iran’s downing of an unmanned American spy plane, only to change his mind, even as U.S. warplanes tasked with carrying out the mission were already in the air. (In an interview with Chuck Todd, Trump said that he had not yet approved the strike when it was cancelled, and that the planes had not taken off.) Sure enough, shortly after 9 A.M., Eastern Time, Trump posted four long tweets in which he sought to explain what happened. First, he recounted his decision to end the nuclear agreement that Iran reached with the United States and five other countries in 2015. As he has in the past, he called the agreement a “terrible deal” and falsely claimed that it gave Iran “a free path” to nuclear weapons. Then he moved on to the Iranian downing of the RQ-4A Global Hawk spy plane, which took place on Wednesday evening, Washington time, and claimed that the drone had been flying in international waters. (Iran claims that it was in Iranian airspace.)

“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die,” Trump wrote. “150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not . . . proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!”

As with virtually everything that Trump does, the immediate responses to his turnabout were mixed. In this instance, though, the criticism largely came from the Republican side, and some of the praise came from the unlikeliest of quarters, including John Brennan, the former C.I.A. director who has repeatedly blasted the President as a corrupt authoritarian. “I do applaud Trump’s decision not to carry out what would have been a disproportionate strike . . . that could have led to a dangerous escalatory spiral,” Brennan told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “I give him credit for being almost the adult up in the room, because of the war hawks like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo who are pushing towards this confrontation, which is not in anyone’s interest, especially the United States.”

According to the Times, Bolton, Pompeo, and Gina Haspel, the current head of the C.I.A., all favored a military response, whereas top Pentagon officials took Brennan’s line, cautioning that “such an action could result in a spiralling escalation with risks for American forces in the region.” (In an interview with Reuters, an anonymous Administration official disputed such a split, saying, “There was complete unanimity amongst the president’s advisers and DOD leadership on an appropriate response to Iran’s activities.”) In any event, earlier this week, the Pentagon dispatched another thousand troops to the Middle East, with the specific goal of securing U.S. bases and installations against possible attacks from Iranian forces and their proxy groups.

Nonetheless, on Friday, a number of Republicans criticized Trump’s decision not to go ahead with the strike, and some of them compared it to Obama’s reversal in 2013. The Republican representative Adam Kinzinger, who is a pilot in the National Guard, wrote on Twitter, “America is facing a crisis in confidence. Obama’s decision to cancel a strike in Syria in 2013 has had ramifications that are still being felt today. We cannot let the provocations and attacks by Iran go unanswered.” In a television interview, Kinzinger followed up this tweet by saying that the cancellation of the strike “sends a message that you don’t really know what the red line is . . . the red line may not be so red.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a faithful Trump stooge, sought to defend his decision, saying, “He has a long-term game plan here.” But, of course, such a game plan is exactly what Trump lacks. For more than two years now, his Administration has been building up the pressure on Iran by withdrawing from the nuclear deal, employing aggressive rhetoric, and imposing ever-tighter economic sanctions. To many observers in the Middle East and elsewhere, it appears that the Administration’s real goal is a regime change in Tehran, even though Trump has recently denied that. But what is undeniable is that Trump’s policy has been inexorably leading us to a moment like this one.

“Now what we see is we are trapped between the belligerent rhetoric of Trump towards Iran . . . and the Donald Trump who said he didn’t want to get us into another war in the Middle East,” Ben Rhodes, a former Obama Administration official, said on MSNBC. “They are at a point of complete strategic incoherence. They are saying they don’t want a war but everything they are doing is making a war more likely.” On Thursday night, Trump stepped back from the brink. But the policy that got him into this mess is still firmly in place.

Critics are formed by their early experiences, which congeal into the ideas, tastes, habits, and prejudices that inform a lifetime of work. If they’re both conscientious and lucky, critics also find ways of overcoming their prejudices. The joyful shock of watching new movies is one way of doing so; confronting the work of other critics is another. I’ve written about my longtime disagreements with the writings of Pauline Kael, who was a film critic at The New Yorker from 1967 to 1991, but—especially since I started working as a critic—I’ve often found those disagreements immensely fruitful in reconsidering my own preconceptions. Kael, who would have turned a hundred this week (she died in 2001), was the most vigorously, immediately responsive critic of her time; she was bracingly alert to the experience of watching movies, and her nuanced and engaged attention to them provides a vast amount of substance for a reader to wrangle with.

Despite our many differences of opinion, Kael and I have plenty of beloved movies in common, and rereading her reviews of some of those films makes me appreciate them afresh. Take, for instance, Kael’s enthusiastic review of Paul Mazursky’s first feature, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” in the October 4, 1969, issue of the magazine. Significantly, the film hadn’t yet been released in theatres (it would come out on October 8th of that year); rather, it had already played as the opening-night offering at the New York Film Festival and, as Kael notes, had already proved controversial. Amos Vogel, a founder of the festival, was outraged by its selection, as he wrote to Susan Sontag at the time, and three (three!) negative pieces were published in the Times. The very prominence of the festival in the city’s, and the country’s, cinematic landscape was news in itself; in discussing and endorsing Mazursky’s film, Kael was also responding favorably to the changing times in the world of movies.

Mazursky’s comedy addresses what the Coen brothers would dub, forty years later, “the new freedoms.” It’s a story of two married couples, four best friends, in a posh Los Angeles suburb—Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol (Natalie Wood), and Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon)—who ultimately confront the possibility of partner-swapping. Where Vincent Canby, in the Times, was bewildered that the festival would show “a film that is already assured of wide commercial release,” Kael praised “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” for its overtly commercial intentions and for how it shared the tone and style of popular movies (for her, this was a career-long ideal)—yet she also recognized that “though it looks conventional, it isn’t.” More importantly, she recognized the specifics of Mazursky’s individuality as a filmmaker: “ . . . Mazursky, directing his first picture, has done something very ingenious. He has developed a style from satiric improvisational revue . . . and from TV situation comedy, and, with skill and wit, has made this mixture work.”

In “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” Mazursky, born in 1930, seems to be channelling the complex experience of the late nineteen-sixties, the tangle and the clash of past and present, settled habits and sudden changes, into the actions of his characters and the over-all tone (and often striking visual identity) of his movie. The four protagonists’ lurches toward openness and frankness (Bob and Carol, blithely; Ted and Alice, grudgingly) as ideals is matched by the lurches and leaps in their behavior, their dialogue, and their performances, which are infused with a quasi-improvisational spontaneity and a janglingly disjunctive clash of tones. With its conflict-riddled and boldly symbolic expressions of emotional impulses and sexual drives—and its sense of collapsing boundaries, both social and aesthetic—“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” is as much a vision of Mazursky’s artistry as it is of the times; that’s the glowing point where Kael’s critical acumen and ardor fuse.

Kael was writing at a moment when political crises and historical shifts coincided with vast changes in the art and the business of movies. The studios were on the verge of collapse, and a new generation of filmmakers was pulling Hollywood into a new era. Kael’s writings were crucial to the recognition of many of these artists (including Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola), and Mazursky was among the first of them to make his mark. (Kael also rejected many of the best of the time, such as Elaine May, John Cassavetes, and Terrence Malick, but that’s another story.) She had the good fortune to be writing in exhilarating cinematic times and to have the insight—and the passion—to know it and to make those epochal innovations her very subject. Recent cinematic times have seen similarly drastic shifts in the aesthetics and the business of movies. Critical resistance to those changes is as strong now as it was then, and—disagree as one might with the specific targets of Kael’s praise and disdain—her excited enthusiasm for change remains exemplary.

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