March 2, 2018 On Sports How Do You Judge Je Ne Sais Quoi? By Brent Katz Madison Chock and Evan Bates at the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games. Photo by Bernat Armangue. On February 19, when the American pair Madison Chock and Evan Bates glided onto the ice for the free-dance competition at the Winter Olympics in Pyenogchang, some Darwinian instinct in me whispered, Root for them. You won’t be disappointed. They were calm, focused, attractive. My faith was shaken for a moment when their risky music choice began playing—a cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” sung live from inside the arena. But when Chock and Bates met eyes and began their routine, their synchronicity had a strange, tranquil power. A hush descended on my friend’s living room. Watching TV felt like being in nature. Their dreamy routine evoked stillness with motion, and their movements were so linked that it felt as if their individual personalities converged into one. I couldn’t tell the ice dancers from the ice dance. A few minutes in, they tangled blades and Bates went down like a teen at Chelsea Piers. The pathos of the moment was intense—years of work and hope vanished in an instant. In addition to their deduction, they got no points for that combination spin. They were hemorrhaging points. Read More
March 2, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Langston Hughes By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Langston Hughes’s 1931 classic Not Without Laughter, recently rereleased as a Penguin Classic, tells the coming-of-age story of Sandy, a light-skinned black youth in a small, mixed-race Kansas town in the 1910s. Sandy wants great things for himself but can’t see how to achieve them in a world rife with racism. Late in the novel, he muses that “being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred—and the white folks live upstairs.” Out of context, this may seem simplistic, but it follows Hughes’s devastating explication of how the adult black role models in Sandy’s life have tried, and failed, to thrive. Sandy’s mother is a cook for a white family. She feeds her own family on scraps from her employer’s table, bringing home things like “a large piece of fresh lemon pie,” “two chocolate eclairs in her pocket, mashed together,” or “a small bucket of oyster soup.” Sandy’s grandmother, Aunt Hagar, cleans laundry for whites. She works herself to the bone for pennies with the belief that a quiet respectability will, in the end, save black people. Sandy’s father, Jimboy, and Sandy’s aunt embrace the blues and enjoy what they have, though Hughes does not sugarcoat the reality that what they have is too little. Read More
March 2, 2018 The Lives of Others The Misunderstood Byzantine Princess and Her Magnum Opus By Edmund White The history of the Byzantine Empire is threaded with dynastic clashes and family feuds. The Byzantines do not hold the same familiar spot in the Western imagination as their Roman forbears, but the narrative history of their scandals and intrigues is easily as compelling as the episodes Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio recorded of Caesar, Caligula, and Nero. For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison. Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political players, whether they were power-grabbing populists, slick backroom schemers, or principled reformers. It started with Empress Theodora, sometimes described as a kind of sixth-century Eva Perón, who interceded in a wave of riots that shook Constantinople, put an end to the fighting, won the adoration of the public, and saved her husband’s throne. Irene, an empress from the late eighth century, ruled for several years with a mixture of silky court diplomacy and unflinching ruthlessness—to maintain her grip on power, she ordered that her chief rival, who also happened to be her son, be blinded. The princess Anna Komnene was another of these influential women. To Edward Gibbon, who framed her reputation for modern audiences with his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she was a Lady Macbeth character who attempted to bump off her brother so she could rule the empire through her husband. The plot failed, and Anna was forced to flee to a monastery, where she spent the rest of her life stewing with resentment and thwarted ambition. Gibbon dismissed Anna as vain, vengeful, dissembling, and reckless, the embodiment of a particular type of unpleasant Byzantine woman. But to a generation of historians currently revisiting her reputation, Anna Komnene is not a lethal Machiavel but a sparkling litterateur, one of the great figures of her age who exhibited something that one might call distinctly, beguilingly Byzantine: a flair for disruptive innovation while, paradoxically, striving to keep centuries of tradition alive. Read More
March 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Astrid Lindgren, the Gutsy Creator of Pippi Longstocking By Chantel Tattoli Original art by Ellis Rosen. In Jens Andersen’s biography, published this week in English by Yale University Press, Astrid Lindgren, the famed Swedish author of the Pippi Longstocking series, is a Walden-loving modern mind taken with loneliness. Lindgren, as Andersen notes, believed that we ought to learn to be solo artists at every stage of life. “If they’ve never learned to be alone, people develop only weak and fragile defenses against the ways life decides to hurt them,” she said. “It’s almost the most important thing of all.” Even love can barely renegotiate the fact of everyone’s self-containment, when it can at all. Lindgren writes in a letter to her best friend, “Suddenly, a person comes rushing up to you and says, ‘We’re kindred souls, we understand each other.’ And inside you hear a voice saying with painful clarity, ‘Like hell we do.’ ” Lindgren was the eldest, dance-crazy daughter of farmers in a small town in southern Sweden. By 1924, at sixteen, she was dressing in slacks, jackets, ties, and caps and scissoring her blonde hair to boy length like the radical bachelorette in Victor Margueritte’s La garçonne (a mode Scandinavian male columnists scorned as the “Apache cut”). Her instinct for storytelling—so evident to her teachers—landed young Lindgren a gig as a trainee journalist at a local paper. There, the tomboy geared into temptress. She was not yet eighteen when her romance with the fifty-year-old married editor in chief resulted in pregnancy. “I didn’t know a scrap about contraceptive methods, so I never realized how dreadfully irresponsibly you behaved toward me,” Lindgren wrote to him later. Elsewhere she explained, “I wanted the baby but not the father.” As her belly swelled, her hometown swirled with gossip, so Lindgren left for Stockholm. “I threw myself out!” she said. Read More
March 1, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Snowy Forests and Urgent Hearts By Sarah Kay In our new column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion (like “when you love someone so much you want to rip them apart and live inside them”) and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay inaugurates the series. A quick note on Poetry Rx: This is not meant to be an advice column in the traditional sense, in that we are wholly unqualified to offer you any solutions for the dilemmas in your life. Something Sarah says a lot is, “No, I don’t think that poetry will save us. And yet, and yet … ” The “and yet” is what this column is for. And yet, maybe we can find poems that vibrate at the same frequency that your heart is humming. And yet, maybe we can find a poem you can escape inside of for a few minutes. And yet, maybe you just needed an excuse to share the vulnerable parts of yourself, and what better way to honor that courage than to offer you the poems that carry us through our own vulnerable times. —Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz Read More
March 1, 2018 Arts & Culture What Would W. E. B. Du Bois Make of Black Panther? By Clint Smith Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o in Black Panther. “Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans?” This is the question posed by W. E. B. Du Bois in his lecture “Criteria of Negro Art.” The remarks were made at the 1926 NAACP annual meeting in Chicago and later published as part of a multi-issue series titled “The Negro in Art” in The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine. Du Bois gave the speech at a ceremony honoring the contributions of the eminent author, editor, and historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson had made it his life’s work to document the positive cultural, social, and political contributions black Americans had made to the development of the United States. He did so in an effort to combat the empty but popular rhetoric of those who suggested that black people had no history, no culture, and had nothing to add to the country beyond the labor of their bodies. That same year, Woodson developed Negro History Week, the precursor to what would eventually become Black History Month, an extension of his effort to illuminate black contributions to the American project. And while Du Bois sought to honor Woodson in his remarks, he also used the opportunity to espouse his own beliefs regarding the role and importance of black artists as America wrestled with the evolution of white supremacy only a generation after the end of slavery. I was thinking of Du Bois and the concerns he raised when I entered the theater to watch Black Panther. I was thinking of what he might make of the scene unfolding across the country: sold-out cinemas with lines snaking out the door and around the block; the intergenerational thrill experienced by families of every hue ornamented in African garb, an array of spectacular patterns and colors exploding across theater lobbies from Atlanta to Oakland. I imagine Du Bois and his distinctive handlebar mustache, its thick, curled edges accentuating his smile as he observes black children and adults dressed as a cast of characters too often unseen in a mainstream cultural production. Read More