Daily Archives: February 19, 2022

What Inspired Crime and Punishment? – The Nation

Posted: February 19, 2022 at 10:00 pm

Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1872.(Photo by VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty Images)

The first act of Fyodor Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment is not what you would call straightforward. The novel opens with a dropout law student heading to the apartment of a local pawnbroker, where he sells a trinket and then plans how he will murder her later. He then goes to a dive bar and listens to the endless sob story of a drunken civil servant, escorts him home, and goes to bed. The next morning he wakes up and reads a 10-page letter from his mom, wanders around the city, passes out in a bush, and has a nightmare about a bunch of guys beating up a horse. He then wanders around some more until he overhears the pawnbrokers sister saying shes going to leave their apartment the following evening, at which point he returns to his bed and sleeps through most of the next day. He wakes up in the evening, walks downstairs, steals an axe, heads to the pawnbrokers apartment, and murders her with it, then murders her sister when she unexpectedly shows up and finds him in the apartment.

As is ever the case with the novels of Dostoevsky, the opacity of this narrative is part of the reason for its irreducible magnetism. The works of the great Russian novelists major period often feel like they have been assembled post facto by some kind of collage artist, or else have been abridged at crucial points by a redactor who believed rationality and evenhandedness to be cardinal artistic sins. When reading Dostoevsky, one often gets the paranoid feeling that the real story is happening somewhere else, just around the corner or on the other side of town. Perhaps the best description of this phenomenon is from a long-lost lecture by T.S. Eliot, who states that in Dostoevskys novels there are everywhere two planes of reality, and that the scene before our eyes is only the screen and veil of another action which is taking place behind it.BOOKS IN REVIEW

The inscrutability of Dostoevskys fiction is also what has attracted so many of its interpreters. The gnomic pronouncements that fill his pages almost cry out for easy explanation, and that is what Kevin Birmingham tries to provide in his new book, The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece. Intertwining the tale of Crime and Punishments composition with the story of Pierre-Louis Lacenaire, an infamous French spree killer whose deeds fascinated Dostoevsky, the book announces itself as the first to provide sustained attention to what Lacenaire meant to Dostoevsky and how his years-long consideration of the French murderer shaped his understanding of both the nature of evil and the way it was evolving amid the centurys new ideas and tribulations. The author of a book about James Joyces Ulysses that discusses the novel in light of the censorship controversy that followed its publication, Birmingham attempts to do something similar with Lacenaire, using the real-world story of the French murderer to throw light on the famous character of Raskolnikov. The result is unsatisfactory on two counts. The first is that Birmingham has great difficulty proving his central claim, that the gentleman murdererinspired a masterpiece. The second is that the claim itself is not a very interesting one. What makes Crime and Punishment so great is not the character of Raskolnikov but the dark moral universe that he inhabits.

It takes quite a while for Birmingham to arrive at the book and Lacenaire. The first half of The Sinner and the Saint is devoted to a truncated biography of Dostoevsky, from his childhood until the time he began work on Crime and Punishment at the age of 44. The authors life story is one of the strangest and most compelling in literary history, so its understandable Birmingham wants to review the greatest hits. He shows us Dostoevsky ranting at his engineering academy classmates about Schiller, fainting in front of a blonde lady at a ball, getting condemned to death for taking part in a radical reading group, receiving a commutation from the czar just before his execution, gawping at fellow convicts during his eight-year sentence in Siberia, returning home to develop a roulette addiction, losing his brother to a liver ailment and his first wife to a disease that made blood gush from her throatyou get the idea.

The authoritative biographies of Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank and Leonid Grossman are bound to loom large over anyone who writes about the novelist, so Birmingham focuses on the material most relevant to Crime and Punishment. He interrupts Dostoevskys gruesome life story to tell us about the development of nihilism as an intellectual movement in Russia, running from the devilish German egoist Max Stirner to the famous radical thinker Nikolai Chernyshevsky, author of the seminal proto-socialist handbook What Is to Be Done? But Birminghams biggest innovation in the first half of the book is to splice into its sections some biographical chapters on Lacenaire, a well-to-do layabout poet who murdered two innocent people in the 1830s to provoke bourgeois society. These chapters build, and soon we begin to realize where they are going: A year before he began work on Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky started studying Lacenaires crimes. He did so not for a novel but an article about instincts and Lacenaire, an article he abandoned around the time he began Crime and Punishment.

The idea here is clear enough: Birmingham wants to show that Dostoevsky drew on the intellectual precedent of nihilism and the biographical precedent of Lacenaire in creating his famous murderer. The former claim is well-established, as a number of contemporary philosophers espoused an egoism that bears a resemblance to Raskolnikovs own professed belief system. The latter claim, though, gives Birmingham a bit more troublehe cant demonstrate in any meaningful way that Lacenaire was a primary influence on Crime and Punishment.

The first problem is that the differences between Lacenaire and Raskolnikov could not be more pronounced, choice of murder weapon notwithstanding. Lacenaire was a kleptomaniacal dandy who seems to have possessed a sincere enjoyment for violent acts, and he delighted in the hysterical attention he received from the press and the youth of Paris after his capture and imprisonment. Indeed, his prison cell became a kind of literary salon in which he would receive starstruck visitors and dispense memorable mots for dissemination in the newspapers. Raskolnikov shares his philosophy that humankind can be divided into headsmen and victims, but in everything else he is Lacenaires opposite: He is broke, erratic, self-loathing, and remains unsure about his murderous intentions up until the very moment the axe hits the pawnbrokers skull. Despite his ranting self-justifications, he has little interest in robbing the pawnbrokerhe neglects to take most of her money, for one thing, and he hides what little he does take under a rock in the courtyard of an apartment building. Current Issue

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The second problem is that there were several other obvious models for Raskolnikov, some of them even more interesting than Lacenaire. First there was Orlov, an unrepentant murderer whom Dostoevsky met in Siberia and whom he described as a new type of man; then there was Chistov, a religious schismatic (or Raskolnik) who murdered two women with an axe and whose story made Dostoevsky sick for weeks. Even after the first volume of the novel was published, two more sources of inspiration appeareda law student named Danilov, who murdered a pawnbroker in Moscow (the similarities seem to be a coincidence), and a political radical named Karakozov, who attempted to assassinate the czar in broad daylight. All four of these models made deep impressions on Dostoevsky while he was writing Crime and Punishment, and though Birmingham has to mention them in order to stay faithful to the history, he never explains why Lacenaire gets star billing as Raskolnikovs prototype, especially since the two are so dissimilar in temperament . (This is to say nothing of Birminghams assertion that the lives of thepoet-murderer and convict-novelistfaintly resemble each other, a claim in dire need of emphasis on the word faintly.)

Birmingham thus understandably leaves it up to the reader to infer the parallels between Raskolnikov and Lacenaire, a tack that doesnt help out all that much given that Dostoevsky left a trail of evidence that undermines this thesis. The novelist drafted many hundreds of pages of notes for the noveloutlines, philosophical summaries, deleted scenes, alternate endings, even pictographic character sketchesand yet he does not appear to mention Lacenaire in any of them, at least not the ones that Birmingham has excavated for inclusion in his account. Indeed, the notes show that Raskolnikov was not modeled on any specific person or idea but rather hewn over the course of months out of a whole universe of psychological and philosophical material. Like Stavrogin in Demons and Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, Raskolnikov is not the facsimile of an existing person imported from the real world but an organic creation, the manifestation of a particular species of delusion and bad conscience.

The mystery [of Crime and Punishment] is not who killed the pawnbroker, Birmingham writes at the start of his book. The mystery is why. Is it, though? Thats what every high schooler who reads the novel is told, but in the narrative itself the question is far from mysterious. The erratic Raskolnikov is remarkably consistent throughout the novels 500 pages about his two reasons for murdering the pawnbroker: First, he wants to steal some money to raise himself out of poverty, and second, he wants to take a new step in the tradition of great historical figures like Napoleon. He offers this reasoning to himself and to the prostitute Sonya, and he even hears it repeated back by the detective whos trying to goad him into a confession. In one of the novels more ham-handed plot points, its even revealed that Raskolnikov wrote a law article called On Crime in which he justifies murder on the exact same grounds.

When it comes to Crime and Punishment, the question of motive may be the least interesting way to approach the great novel. As Birmingham himself points out, Dostoevsky refrained from bringing most of Raskolnikovs inner impulses to the surface of the narrativewe dont see him thinking to himself that hes falling in love with Sonya, we get almost nothing on the loss of his father, we dont even know why he dropped out of law school. That Dostoevsky confines all this material to the novels subtext but takes great pains to narrate Raskolnikovs reasons for committing the murder should tell us something about where he thought the true heart of the novel lay.

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Only once you look beyond Raskolnikovs motivation can you appreciate Crime and Punishment for what it is: a battle royal between psychologies. The novel isnt just about the nihilistic murderers journey into the arms of the all-virtuous prostitute but also about the cramped social sphere in which both his crime and his redemption take place. You cant understand Raskolnikov without setting him alongside his dithering mother, his all-seeing younger sister, the babbling and disgraced civil servant Marmeladov, the loving Sonya, and the pretentious fop Luzhin, to say nothing of the depraved and cynical landowner Svidrigailov, a presence so malign and irresistible that he hijacks the last portion of the novel altogether, overpowering Raskolnikov in a tense barroom conversation and stealing the show for a solo scene that leads up to his dramatic suicide. These characters reproduce the social types of their day, but they also transcend them, so that the novel is more a drama of spiritual fragmentation than it is one of ideological competition. Crime and Punishment is about more than one form of spiritual degradation: It asks not just what could drive an individual to murder but also what else can happen in a world where murder is possible. To focus on the historical genesis of Raskolnikovs motives and methods misses the forest for the trees: The murderer only becomes mysterious and inscrutable in the context of the psychological carnival that surrounds him.

Dostoevsky began Crime and Punishment as a first-person confessional in the tradition of his earlier Notes From Underground, but he changed to the third-person omniscient midway through the writing process, as new characters like Svidrigailov and Marmeladov came to take up more space in the narrative. Just as Dostoevsky had a reason for shifting his novel from the first to the third person, he may also have had a significant reason for calling the book Crime and Punishment instead of, say, Murder and Penal Servitude or even The College Dropout. There is more than one type of crime in the novel, and more than one punishment. It is understandable that Birmingham might want to focus on why Dostoevsky wrote about a man who kills a pawnbroker and gets sent to Siberia, but an attentive reader is apt to find that the novels true subject is a different kind of punishment, one that has nothing to do with the judicial system. This is the punishment of consciousness in a raucous world, Dostoevsky tells us; this is the punishment of living in a sinful universe and knowing that the afterlife may be nothing more than, as Svidrigailov puts it, a room full of spiders. Readers interested in criminal behavior will find no shortage of contemporary literature that can satisfy their curiosity better than Crime and Punishment or Birminghams exegesis on the novel. Those who are interested in the more profound sweep of human experience, though, will find that Dostoevsky still has a great deal to say.

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What Inspired Crime and Punishment? - The Nation

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His Conducting Wasnt Always Pleasant. But It Was the Truth. – The New York Times

Posted: at 10:00 pm

Read the reviews that the German conductor Michael Gielen received during his career, and you find a running theme.

He looks like an academician, Raymond Ericson reported in The New York Times after Gielens New York Philharmonic debut in 1971. His baton technique is not flamboyant; it is clear and precise.

A year later, the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, of a concert with the National Orchestra of Belgium at Carnegie Hall, that his Mahler was almost painfully literal.

A sensuous approach is exactly what the unsentimental Mr. Gielen is unprepared to give, he added.

Eleven years after that, Donal Henahan complained of a Carnegie visit with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which Gielen led for six seasons in an initially confrontational, eventually admired tenure: Even Bruckner wants to sing and dance at times. This rather schoolmasterish performance denied him that pleasure.

These were meant as barbs. But Gielen gloried in the critical discomfort, in defying the expectations of a culture industry he thought had its priorities all wrong. When a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter asked in 1982 if he was too cerebral an artist for his own good, Gielen said, If I compare what I do to what I hear of certain less intellectual colleagues, then I must say I agree myself. Nothing is more horrible than stupid music-making.

Nobody could possibly accuse Gielen, who died in 2019, of that. One might now think him narrow in his doctrinaire modernist focus; or see him as misguided, even elitist, in forcing listeners to hear what he thought good for them; or not share the ever more pessimistic leftism that informed his work.

But Gielen raised fundamental questions in his conducting. He interrogated music for what it had said at its creation, and asked what it had to say to the present. He insisted that old and new works said similar things in different accents, and he thought audiences lazy if they could not hear that. He believed it dishonest to settle for easy answers: Beethovens Ninth Symphony so troubled him in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima that he spliced Schoenbergs A Survivor From Warsaw between its slow movement and its Ode to Joy finale, a choice that expressed his lifelong commitment to shattering complacency.

Art offers the opportunity to encounter the truth, Gielen wrote in 1981 to Cincinnati subscribers who were rebelling against his rule. And thats not always pleasant.

Even if Gielen mellowed a little over the years, pleasant would be the wrong word to describe the recently completed Michael Gielen Edition from SWR Music: 88 CDs that cover five decades of recordings and offer the deepest insight yet into this conductors work, from Bach to Zimmermann.

Many have been available before; some are new to disc; other important releases must be found elsewhere. But there is more than enough in its 10 volumes to confirm Gielen as one of the most stimulating conductors of the 20th century.

He made the bulk of these recordings with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, the radio ensemble that he led from 1986 to 1999 and worked with until just before its demise in 2016 in part with the intention of using its practically unlimited rehearsal time to make an archive of recordings as close as possible to his intentions.

Those intentions were often provocative, in the best sense. With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could, which had immense payoffs in Mahler, even in Beethoven. His Haydn does not chuckle as freely as it might; his Mozart is robust, not prettified; his Bruckner has little interest in storming the heavens he denied, though it does plumb the depths he saw all around him.

But relaxation or enjoyment could more properly be found eating well, or taking a good shower, than in engaging with music, Gielen told The Times in 1982. His recordings were made for the head more than for the heart. Gielens was conducting to think with, and he is worth thinking with still.

Music and politics were combined from the start for him. Born in Dresden in 1927 to Josef Gielen, a theater and opera director, and Rose Steuermann, a soprano noted for her Schoenberg, Michael and his family fled the Nazis, eventually settling in Buenos Aires in 1940.

Surrounded in Argentina by refugees who had no sympathy for the style of the conductors who stayed behind to serve the Third Reich, Gielen, a rptiteur and budding conductor at the Teatro Coln, gravitated toward the textual literalism of his two antifascist idols, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini. He shunned what he called the gigantomania of Wilhelm Furtwngler, under whom he would uncomfortably play continuo for Bachs St. Matthew Passion in 1950.

Back in Europe, Gielen focused on opera during the first half of his career, though not exclusively so. He was a staff conductor at the Vienna State Opera, then had spells leading the Royal Swedish Opera and the Netherlands Opera, before eventually triumphing as general music director of the Frankfurt Opera, then the most aesthetically ambitious house in Germany, from 1977 to 1987.

Lamentably little of Gielens operatic legacy survives. But working with the dramaturge Klaus Zehelein, he built Frankfurt into a crucible of Regietheater or directors theater, in which the directors vision tends to dominate hoping to restore something like the original shock of pieces that he thought had become bland under the weight of performance traditions.

For Gielen, there were two ways to do something similar in the concert hall. One was to come up with programming that radicalized the old and contextualized the new. So he made a montage out of Weberns Six Pieces and Schuberts Rosamunde; put Schoenbergs more classically-inclined works next to Mozarts more Romantic ones; and stuck Schoenbergs Expressionist monologue Erwartung before Beethovens Eroica.

Gielens other method remains bracingly apparent on record: an interpretive technique that prized restraint. Other musicians working at the same time explored period instruments as a way to recover the shock of the worn, but he thought that path illusory (even if he invited Nikolaus Harnoncourt to conduct in Frankfurt). Putting on a wig doesnt make me an 18th-century man, he wrote in his memoirs.

Instead, Gielen tried to clarify structures through a careful analysis of tempo relationships, and to expose details, though not so many as to muddy the overarching form. Critics often suggested that he aimed for an objective interpretation, but he knew that there were many ways to expose the truths he found in a work. The three accounts of Mahlers Sixth that are available on SWR, from 1971, 1999 and 2013, take 74, 84 and 94 minutes: the earliest brisk, streamlined; the middle one the dark heart of his essential complete Mahler survey; the last unbearably slow and heavy, consumed from the start with a desperate nihilism.

Gielen thought he would be remembered as an exponent of the Second Viennese School and of contemporary music, and the two SWR sets dedicated to that work are exemplary. There is anguish in his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but also a forlorn lyricism; like much of Gielens conducting, these sit somewhere between the clinical angularity of Pierre Boulez and the warm intensity of Hans Rosbaud, Gielens predecessor in Baden-Baden. The six-disc volume of post-World War II music one CD, dedicated to Jorge E. Lpezs astonishing Dome Peak and Breath Hammer Lightning, comes with a health warning for its extremes of volume is a despairingly intense affair. Ligetis Requiem, which Gielen premiered in 1965, practically smokes with rage.

But Gielens approach generated equally fascinating, complicated results in other music, too. His taste for detail fully convinces in late Romanticism, where his repertoire was particularly broad. Rachmaninoffs The Isle of the Dead comes off as a colossal masterpiece; Schoenbergs Gurrelieder is given expansive treatment, a Klimt glittering blindingly; Schrekers Vorspiel zu einem Drama has never sounded so glorious.

Gielens ability to seem as if he was getting out of the way of the music he conducted lets these kinds of scores stand in full bloom, with the effect of demonstrating exactly why later composers reacted so strongly against them including Gielen himself, in his few, stark works.

Elsewhere, Gielen felt it necessary to stamp out overkill in Romanticism where it was unwarranted above all in his Beethoven, which still has unusual energy, even if many conductors have since come around to Gielens once-unusual insistence on trying to keep up with the composers controversial metronome markings.

That energy is not at all benign; for Gielen, the violence in Beethovens scores is as much a part of their humanity as their idealism is. While the Eroica was for him a genuinely revolutionary piece that built a new social existence around individual dignity in its finale he recorded it repeatedly, and enthrallingly the Fifth Symphony he believed a terrible awakening. The relentless C major hammering of its finale evoked not triumph or freedom, Gielen wrote, but affirmation without contradiction, and with it the trampling of any opposition, imperial terror. If his 1997 recording does not fully convince it sounds empty, even barren you suspect its not supposed to.

Complexity where others found simplicity; enigmas where there might seem to be answers. For Gielen, there was no escape. You see me helpless before the confusing picture of the last century, he wrote near the end of his autobiography.

All that was left was to think about music. That always had more truths to offer.

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Why Jordan Peterson Should Think Again on the Energy Transition – Carbon Tracker Initiative

Posted: at 9:58 pm

On a recent episode of Joe Rogans controversial and highly influential podcast, Canadian psychology professor and best-selling author Jordan Peterson repeated several false claims about the energy transition. During the show, which is Spotifys top-rated podcast and boasts an audience of 11 million, Peterson claims rising prices, which he assumes will be caused by the energy transition, will hurt the most vulnerable.

When discussing the move to a low carbon economy, he told Rogan, There is the old saying, When the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia. So fine, increase energy costs. Well, what happens? A bunch of poor people fall off the map and the more you increase the energy cost, the more that happens.

While Peterson, who New York Times columnist David Brooks has called the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now, paints a dire picture the reality is that his claims are not backed up by reality. Our research shows that the transition to renewable energy will lower energy costs over time and in many areas, we are already seeing wind and solar outcompeting fossil fuels.

For example, our 2021 report Put Gas on Standby showed new onshore wind and solar investment options are already cheaper than the costs associated with the continued operation of existing gas plants in the US. By 2030, we project the costs for both renewable technologies will fall to levels less than half the long-run marginal cost for gas.

The ability of renewables to provide cheaper power is also true when it comes to coal. In 2018, we found that by 2030 building new renewables will be cheaper than continuing to operate 96% of todays existing and planned coal plants.

Given Jordan Petersons concern for the poor, he should know that instead of impoverishing people, our research finds that the opportunities for growth are greatest in emerging markets. This is driven by the fact that many developing nations are building out their energy systems, and cheap renewables offer a route to bring cheaper power to more people, create new industries, jobs and wealth. These benefits could be especially felt in Africa which has a massive 39% of global potential growth in renewables and could become a clean energy superpower.

In addition, providing jobs and cheaper energy, moving to a low carbon economy will cut greenhouse gas emissions and protect us from the worst impacts of climate change. This is critical if we want to help those living in poverty for the simple fact that, as numerous studies have shown, the extreme weather created by global warming will disproportionately impact the poorest communities around the world.

There has been a great deal of blowback about the Joe Rogan interview. Jordan Petersons comments on climate science have been panned by scientists, such as UN IPCC author and leading climate researcher Professor Michael Mann, as absurd, nonsensical and false. However, one thing Peterson is right about is that we do face choices regarding the energy transition.

Fortunately, it is not a question of whether we burn fossil fuels or starve the poor.

The choices we really face are about how we might enable a just energy transition. This involves several challenges, including finding ways to help workers in the fossil fuel sector transition to a new career in clean energy and making sure the vast economic benefits created by the growth of renewables are widely shared.

If someone is truly concerned about uplifting the poor, as Peterson claims he is, then these are places they should be focusing instead of on framing false choices that would lock us into polluting, and increasingly expensive fossil fuels.

The photo of Jordan Peterson was taken by photographer Gage Skidmore.

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Broadway and the prisoners of Mask-aban this isn’t the show we need – New York Post

Posted: at 9:58 pm

Is the city back to normal?

Thats the question every non-New Yorker asks about our city. And the answer, Im afraid, remains nope.

On the outside, it can look as though things are normal-ish. In reality, we have simply adapted to a set of insane, unsupportable rules which look set to remain in place forever.

While thousands packed into the Super Bowl stadium last Sunday, schoolchildren in California, like New York, continue to do physical exercise outside with masks over their faces. A New York friend relates that last weekend he watched his double-vaxxed son play soccer outside in a mask. For the first time, parents were allowed to observe. Also in masks. Only to be policed by officials threatening to expel parents should their masks slip below the nose.

I had a taste of this fresh hell last Saturday. Some Canadian friends were in town and generously took a group of us to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway.

On the way into the theater, bouncer-like staff screamed at us to form the correct queues and have the right documentation ready. We appeared to be visiting Azkaban, not Hogwarts. It was just the first of the evenings delights.

Inside the Lyric Theatre, they had tried to recreate the atmosphere of an English boarding school. As a survivor of such an establishment, I can tell you they did a grand job emulating the most sadistic aspects of such institutions.

The trouble started when one of our party bought water and a couple of beers for the group. With not much change for $100 for this pleasure, we took our seats. All through the auditorium prefects marched around with signs saying, Masks Up. We were in the welcoming arms of the Ambassadors Theatre Group.

Soon a member of staff came to warn me that I had failed to pull my mask up fast enough after my most recent swig of beer. As the show began, someone with a name badge saying Libby came over and told off another member of our group for failing to bring their mask up swiftly enough after sipping another of the overpriced drinks the Lyric Theatre had just sold us.

As the show began, it seemed that Libby (aka Dolores Umbridge) had identified us as troublemakers. Flagrant sippers. After the lights had gone low, I noticed Libby standing at the end of our row staring down it, hands on hips. There she stayed, glaring through the dark.

To say this distracted from events on stage is an understatement. Impressive though the effects are, the 3/-hour plot was already pretty arse-numbing. What made it more so was knowing Libby was monitoring us throughout. Whenever she slipped out briefly, another monitor took her place. Eventually, Libby got what she wanted. About an hour into Act 1, she spied through the dark that a female member of our party had failed to replace her mask swiftly enough over her nose and mouth. Libby clambered behind our row in the stalls and startled my friend by spitting at her loudly to pull her mask up.

By the time the interval came, one of my Canadian friends Jordan Peterson and I decided it might be a good idea to do that regrettable thing and ask to speak with the manager. We asked. At which point we were reintroduced to Libby. Libby was the manager, and explained that we were under suspicion because our group had already received three warnings for insufficiently speedy remasking after sips. Jordan and I both asked for further guidance on what exactly constituted permissible sip length.

But there is nothing you can do when you meet blank officialdom like this. Libby told us that this demented policy applied to all theaters run by the Ambassadors Theatre Group. These are the rules, she kept saying, and if we didnt like them we were welcome to leave. Jordan Peterson and I appeared on the brink of expulsion from Hogwarts.

I later checked the ticket prices and was astonished to see that stalls tickets for Harry Potter range between $149 and $329. Meaning that my kind hosts had paid a couple of thousand dollars for a night out at a theater where we were sold drinks we could not enjoy in a theater we were invited, without refund, to leave. Eventually, Libby wielded her ultimate threat. A thread of my own mask had come undone and had been harmlessly tied up. Infraction number four. Libby struck.

I am going to get my COVID safety team she announced, storming off. I imagined being pursued by Dementors. In fact, the COVID safety team turned out to be a large girl with a new mask for me.

It is hard to relay how reluctantly we returned for Act 2. The only moment of relief came at the shows climax when the dark lord Voldemort appeared on stage. Very scary. High tension. Some cowering from the younger members of the audience. Eventually, the Dark Lord came down off the stage and made his way scarily through the center of the audience. Hes going to tell us to pull our masks up, said some wag. A portion of the theater dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.

On the way out, we took our masks off with an air of abandon. But the Ambassadors Theatre Group was not done with us. Bouncers stood outside, bellowing at us to exit in particular ways. Only once we had thrown off this last line of Dementors were we finally free. For all the effort of the performers, I wouldnt go back to Harry Potter or any other theater run by the Ambassadors Theatre Group if they paid me.

But I was left thinking, not for the first time, how our city needs liberation from these people. The COVID enforcers have to go. Along with all the stupid, pointless, carefully demeaning rules they are making us live under after most of the world has clambered out from them.

What will happen to the mask enforcers when their empire finally does fall? Well, I dont know about Azkaban, but I know Rikers Island always needs wardens. How strange that Broadway should have been the place that trained up its next intake.

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Broadway and the prisoners of Mask-aban this isn't the show we need - New York Post

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What Do Men Want? by Nina Power review a misguided defence of the male – The Guardian

Posted: at 9:58 pm

The philosopher Nina Power believes men are under attack. Western society has done away with the positive dimensions of patriarchy, that is, the protective father, the responsible man, the paternalistic attitude that exhibits care and compassion. In her new book, What Do Men Want?, she expresses the hope that, following a great deal of bitterness in recent years, men and women can reconcile on the basis of a renewed and greater understanding of one another and advocates a return to old values and virtues honour, loyalty, courage; rather than being made to feel guilty for their gender privilege, Boys and men must be allowed to be good, to become better.

These are worthy sentiments, but the underlying premise is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Just how prevalent is the current demonisation of men? Have compassion and virtue really been abolished? Are boys not presently allowed to be good? The sweeping, simplistic and vaguely sour tone recalls the handwringing culture wars opinion pieces that have proliferated in recent years. They invariably follow a template: an obscure incidence of arguably overzealous identity politicking usually involving a university campus is held up as evidence of a deep civilisational malaise. The alarmist register can make for compelling clickbait, but whether it can sustain a serious, book-length work is another matter.

To give us a sense of 21st-century male ennui, Power presents a cursory overview of the masculinist online communities known collectively as the manosphere. At the relatively respectable end of the spectrum we find Canadian self-help guru Jordan Peterson, whose brand of commonsensical conservatism has helped lots of young men find a sense of direction in their lives. (Many people, it seems, desire the kind of certainty that comes from someone saying basic things in a stern manner, she notes.) At the more extreme end are gender separatist groups such as Men Going Their Own Way, and self-styled incels (involuntary celibates).

Power argues we should try to understand these communities rather than treating them as pariahs. She invokes the trajectory of notorious pickup artist Neil Strauss, who authored a bestselling manual on chatting up women before eventually seeing the error of his ways, to show that redemption is possible. Intriguingly, she suggests the subculture around obsessive self-improvement contains a kernel of radical leftism: If pro-masculinist books have an appeal it is in large part because they present an image of an escape from various kinds of depressed, morose types of masculinity in a consumerist, hedonistic society. In this analysis, the restraint and discipline advocated by, for example, the NoFap movement which preaches abstinence from masturbation and pornography is re-conceived as a form of anti-capitalist resistance.

After years of febrile identity politics discourse, it can be refreshing to read a writer urging us to come together and put aside our differences. But what does that actually mean? To whom is Power referring when she writes, in an apparent dig at contemporary feminists, that we should be wary of those who seek to generate resentment by pitting men and women against each other? Set against her caricaturing of bien-pensant liberalism, Powers ostensibly reasonable call for compassion feels at best platitudinous, at worst disingenuous or even reactionary: most forms of political struggle involve some measure of conflict between competing groups; to renounce this altogether amounts to a politics of quietism.

There is of course something to be said for the idea that cultivating personal virtue can mitigate the apathy and alienation of modern life, but most people already do this after a fashion. There may indeed be some pockets of misandry here and there, but they hardly amount to a societal war against men. And while many members of incel communities are probably just decent guys who lost their way, enough of them are thoroughly vile for the movement to be of concern. As with so many sallies in the culture wars, there is little substantive insight here just a simmering animus against a largely imagined enemy.

What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents is published by Allen Lane (18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The Set of ‘Euphoria’ Sounds Like an Extremely Stressful Place to Be – The Mary Sue

Posted: at 9:58 pm

The Daily Beast offers a lengthy, exclusive dive into what it terms the messy, behind-the-scenes drama plaguing the production of HBOs hit teenage wasteland series Euphoria. As the show has gained accolades and an obsessive audience in its second season, so too have issues behind the scenes apparently ballooned.

Its worth reading the entire Beast piece in full. Unlike the interpersonal frictions that fuel Euphoria, the alleged issues offscreen dont seem centered between the young actors. Instead, there appears to be tension between creator and writer Sam Levinson and some of his cast (and maybe HBO?), as well as what sounds like difficult and draining working conditions for both cast and crew. Some actors, like Barbie Ferreira, are said to be upset about the direction or sidelining of their characters in season 2, with Ferreira alleged to have walked off the set multiple times.

Even when cast members praise Levinsons willingness to change a scene at their behest or take their feedback, it feels a bit cutting. Syndey Sweeney, who plays Cassie, seems to appreciate that Levinson is so willing to change up scenes on the fly, but shes also had to ask him to cut back on the amount of nude scenes he wanted for her and her character. While Sweeney is 24, Cassie is meant to be a high school senior.

For instance, Sweeney said she felt there was room to expand upon a blowout fight between Nate and Cassie, and Levinson ended up writing a five-page scene right then and there. Another timeSweeney toldThe Independentthat she gently pushed back on Levinson over some scenes that required nudity. There are moments where Cassie was supposed to be shirtless and I would tell Sam, I dont really think thats necessary here. He was like, OK, we dont need it, she explained.

The article also offers an intriguing look into what happens these days when a show captures a young and extremely online fandom. Fans pore over every inch of Euphoria as though it were a mystery like Yellowjackets or Lost, generating wild theories, and the spotlight is mercilessly on its young stars.

Of course, much in the Beast exclusive amounts to so many whispers and gossip and quotes from other interviews, with several central figures declining to comment. Everything here is, shall we say, extremely high school. I hope for the sake of all involved that the network takes steps to help the cast and crew feel comfortable and graduates them to more pleasant conditions.

(via The Daily Beast, image: HBO)

Here are some other things that we saw today:

And finally:

LMAO LOL let me out of this timeline. But its finally Friday! What did you see this fine pre-weekend day?

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USCs Drew Peterson and the development of a point forward – The Pasadena Star-News

Posted: at 9:58 pm

Growing up as a middle child in suburban Chicago, Drew Peterson was something of a sport contrarian. When his family rooted for the Cubs, he was in Yankee pinstripes. On Sundays, he was cheering the Chiefs rather than the hometown Bears.

And while his father and older brother considered Michael Jordan the greatest basketball player ever, Peterson preferred LeBron James.

That could simply be a generational bias at play, but its also revealing about the type of player Peterson always wanted to be, and has become as a member of USC mens basketball the past two seasons: A pass-first guard, despite his height at 6-foot-9.

Peterson was not a point guard who had a late growth spurt in high school. He was always taller than his classmates, towering over other kids while playing first base in Little League.

But because he was also so skinny and could not keep up with the physical battles in the post, his father, Mike, emphasized guard skills.

And that suited Peterson just fine.

He likes to make plays, his father said. As much as he likes to score, he likes to drive the ball and dish and make people happy. Its as much his personality as any training he had.

I always liked to pass the ball growing up, even as more of a three, Peterson added. So I always tried to develop my handle and just be able to prove that I can control the ball for more of the game.

Peterson spent his first two college years at Rice, where he displayed many of the same tendencies as a pass-first guard. But he struggled to control the ball against quicker defenders with lower centers of gravity, averaging a career-high 2.7 turnovers as a sophomore.

When he entered the transfer portal in the early months of the pandemic, he rushed into a commitment to Minnesota. But he backed out, wanting to further explore his options.

A scholarship had opened at USC in the meantime, and Peterson was attracted to the university and the basketball program.

Early after Peterson enrolled at USC, head coach Andy Enfield began to emphasize Petersons ability to spread the ball around and run the offense. In Petersons first year with the Trojans, he got some opportunities to back up the teams point guards.

But this season as a senior, Peterson has acted as the Trojans primary ball handler for long stretches of games. As he led 17th-ranked USC in every major category in last weeks win over UCLA, he was bringing the ball up the court on most possessions.

And as impressive as his scoring was that game with a career-high 27 points, Peterson still found opportunities for his teammates, like a perfect skip pass to Chevez Goodwin for an easy dunk.

We were able to flourish together, [Enfields] philosophy and how I play, Peterson said. I always had the confidence, I always wanted to play point guard. Now Im just trusted in big situations to be able to come off ball screens and be able to make plays for my teammates.

When: 4:30 p.m. Sunday

Where:Galen Center

TV/Radio:Fox Sports 1/AM 790

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Remember When Martin Luther King Was Arrested? Because Jonathan Turley Sure Doesn’t! – Above the Law

Posted: at 9:58 pm

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Jonathan Turley transcended his own meticulously cultivated clown status with an epic performance yesterday. In recent years, the George Washington University Law School professor embraced the role of national joke by contradicting his own scholarship and wildly misstating basic principles of law, all in service of getting one more sweet, sweet five-minute cable news hit.

Its a lot easier to get on TV when youre giving voice to utter nonsense people want to hear than when youre constrained by legal reality. But Turley upped the game like Michael Jordan playing through the flu yesterday. And, like Jordan, it was all avoidable with a vaccine.

Turley went on Fox News to talk about the Canadian truckers running an impromptu blockade of the nations capital because they dont want to get vaccinated. After days of letting the toddlers cry about it, the Canadian government invoked emergency powers to clear the streets.

Fox wanted to talk to a Canadian legal expert ABOOT the decision. So they brought on Turley?

Turleys credentials to opine on the Canadian legal landscape run no further than mine and mine are limited to the value of tag up offsides. Can Fox News not recruit at least one Canadian professor to prostrate their academic reputation at the altar of anti-vaccination nonsense? Isnt Jordan Peterson available? Eh?

Anyway, heres what Turley offered by way of cogent legal analysis:

Wow! Imagine if overzealous law enforcement had tried to crack down the Civil Rights movement or arrested Martin Luther King? Would we even have literary classics like Letter From Birmingham Day Spa?

Actually, that was a popular joke construction and social media quickly flooded with references to Birmingham Summer Camp or Birmingham Starbucks. Others just wondered if Turley thought the letter was written from the visiting room.

Martin Luther King Jr was arrested 29 times. Many of those times, he entered the situation anticipating an arrest, knowing that civil disobedience would be met with charges. Southern law enforcement engaged in a lot of abuses like arresting King for loitering when he would show up at a courthouse to monitor another injustice but other times the whole point was to take actions reasonably expected to end in arrests. News of the arrests was part of the strategy to wake up the rest of the country.

But Turley and Fox want their precious anti-vaxxers to enjoy the benefits of escalating protests to the point of technical illegality with none of the costs. Its like Diet Protest, to compare it to a substance thats certainly way more dangerous than the vaccines theyre complaining about.

While its easy to misspeak on television, Turley cant wipe away this error as an off-the-cuff mistake. The entire frame for his commentary involves drawing parallels to the civil rights movement. This bonkers analysis stems from his prepared remarks on the subject. His rhetorical strategy from jump is to tie anti-vax hosers to the iconography of anti-segregationism.

Or more specifically to the whitewashed iconography of Martin Luther King,TM the fictionalized construct of the civil rights leader based on a childrens book mythologizing where King led a march without incident and then delivered a couple cherry-picked lines about having a dream. This revisionist King is central to Foxs editorial mission as the ever-shifting signifier that they can whip out to brand quarterbacks kneeling as too extreme and truckers blockading all access to a national capital as heroic.

But dont mistake his willing contribution to this cynical agenda for some sort of intentional action on his part. Hes soaking up and spitting out talking points with little regard for their actual truth or falsity he just knows its what the bookers on these shows want to hear and hes more than happy to give it to them for another hit. Theres nothing calculated about Turleys latest public depantsing.

Hes just an idiot.

Joe Patriceis a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free toemail any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him onTwitterif youre interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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Hallelujah: Jesus Announces Plan To Return Before Amazon Can Ruin Lord Of The Rings – The Babylon Bee

Posted: at 9:58 pm

HEAVENIn a surprise reversal from long-standing policy,Jesus has decided to announce the date of his Second Coming, which will now occur right before Amazon is able to ruin Lord of the Rings.

"After seeing what Jeff Bezos's company is doing to Tolkien's work, the King of Kings decided to go ahead and just call it," said Spokesangel Gabriel. "He will come in August of this year, sparing mankind from the horrific tragedy of seeing Tolkien's life's work dismantled and destroyed on their TV screens. Seriously, Amazon? DWARF WOMENHAVE BEARDS! What are you thinking?"

Some sources reported Jesus moved up his second coming at the urging of Tolkein himself, who has not stopped bugging the Almighty about it since Amazon acquired the rights to the story.

"Fear not," said Gabriel. "You will all be spared the suffering and unbearable cringe of a timeless myth being turned into a soulless product by a woke corporation."

The Spokesangel went on to remind Christians that they only have a few months left on earth to watch Peter Jackson's trilogy a few more times and get Jordan Peterson baptized before time's up.

Hallelujah!

This woman - er, wymxn? - was pulled over for driving alone in the carpool lane. But she's got a surefire way to get out of the ticket: her preferred pronoun is they!

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Men are trapped in a gender prison: Ivan Jablonka on the crisis of modern masculinity – The New Statesman

Posted: at 9:58 pm

During his childhood, the French social historian Ivan Jablonka rarely saw his father cook. It was a traditional and sometimes unhappy family set-up. His father worked as a nuclear physics engineer and his mother taught literature at a secondary school. While his father would occasionally change Ivans nappies, as a husband he wouldnt share in the household chores. When he was upset, he sometimes turned violent and beat his son.

Speaking to me from his home study in Paris, Jablonka told me his father was orphaned by the Holocaust. His parents my grandparents were murdered during the Second World War, and as an orphan he embodied this figure of masculine vulnerability. This complicated Jablonkas childhood because he was both under the influence of a traditional male role model and aware of his fathers shortcomings. I could feel that as an orphan my father was weak he was fragile; he was weak.

After the publication in 2019 of Jablonkas book, Des hommes justes: Du patriarcat aux nouvelles masculinits, his father, who is now aged 82, visited him. My father came to me and said: You know, I think that I was a problem father. This expression was interesting, Jablonka told me. He meant not only a father who had personal problems, but also a father for whom masculinity itself was a problem. And I inherited this reflection.

With his silvery hair swept to the side and wearing black-rimmed glasses, Jablonka, 48, has the look of a tech entrepreneur rather than an academic. He graduated from Pariss prestigious cole normale suprieure and eventually became a professor at Universit Sorbonne Paris Nord, where his research topics have included gender violence, masculinity and the Holocaust.

In 2016 Jablonka won the prestigious Prix Mdicis for his book Latitia, ou La fin des hommes, which recounted the real-life murder of an 18-year-old woman. The book forced him to confront the question of what a just man was: could masculinity and justice be reconciled? Soon after, in Pariss bars and cafs, Jablonka began to write Des hommes justes, which became a surprise bestseller in France.

His work has now found a much wider audience: a lucid English translation by Nathan Bracher was published at the start of February, entitled A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice. Jablonkas study of masculinity, by which he means the cultures, institutions and norms that shape ideas of the male self, begins in the Palaeolithic period. He traces how the unequal division of labour kept women in the home, having and raising children, while men were free to hoard resources and pursue power. Over millennia, a patriarchal system that benefited the majority of men was established, bolstered by a masculine culture of domination through which women were subjected to sexual violence and sexist stereotypes.

In the second part of the book, Jablonka explains why traditional concepts of masculinity are outdated and harmful. He argues that the value societies place on traditional masculinity serves to undermine and control not only women but also men whose masculinity is deemed illegitimate. Jablonka calls on men to rid masculinity of its pathological tendencies: he points to sexual violence, discrimination in the workplace and sexist stereotypes as perversions of masculinity that need to be excised. To combat this, he proposes a new form of gender ethics that starts with sharing household chores and listening to what women say.

Jablonka does not want to abandon masculinity completely, but rather make it compatible with gender equality. He argues that men are suffering under the traditional conception of masculinity and must redefine it to keep up with a changing society. While the 20th century brought feminist progress, it was also a period of masculine decay. Deindustrialisation stripped men of their role as breadwinners. In many societies, suicide rates for men are several times higher than for women, and since the 1970s, this disparity has widened in the US, Japan and several European countries.

[see also: Why do students still want Jordan Peterson to tell them how to live?]

Today, masculinity is often portrayed as being in a state of crisis, with some men seeking to push back against what they see as an attack on the traditional standards of manliness. Personalities such as the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson have attracted huge support from young men looking for answers about how to live and behave.

It seems to me that the lives of so many men are poor, are narrow, Jablonka told me. So many men are imprisoned in what I would call a gender prison, with the model of compulsory virility, the model of hyper-masculinity and what we should call a male alienation This male alienation can be summed up with social facts, such as the shrinking of psychological life, or addictions, or car accidents, or suicides, and so on. The result, as Jablonka argues in his book, is that some men are worried about no longer being dominant.

This fear breeds inertia. Jablonka believes that many men resist social change and act as their grandfathers did. The truth is that many men still live in what I would call the old world The risk is less of being an alpha male than of being an archaic man, shaped by patriarchy and completely overwhelmed by the march of society. Jablonka thinks that men, stuck in a bygone era, no longer embody modernity. Instead, women are the archetypes of freedom and equality.

Jablonkas solution is to task men with stripping masculinity of its misogyny. He argues that there are a thousand ways of being a man, and that enabling men to express their gender in multiple ways can help build a culture that supports gender equality. If a man wants to drive a fast car or a motorcycle, or eat meat, or have a knife in his pocket to cut wood in the woods, well, I dont care A man can be the man he wants provided that [his form of] masculinity doesnt rhyme with misogyny or homophobia.

He takes comfort in the example set by a younger generation more open to different expressions of gender and sexuality, which he thinks partly demonstrates a distrust of patriarchy. He cited the Korean band BTS as an example of young people challenging traditional conceptions of masculinity. I can feel that its a real issue for young people and something they feel they must reflect upon. I can feel that there is something new in the air and it makes me more optimistic.

Whether masculinity can become compatible with social progress is a personal question for Jablonka. He has three daughters, aged eight, 13 and 17. For me, equality is no longer a theoretical word, he said. As a father of three daughters, equality became a daily struggle and a very concrete challenge. So, I wrote the book for mens use, but also for the sake of my own daughters I would like to change the world for the sake of my daughters, because I would like a safer and happier world for us, but also for them.

Jablonka used this conviction to steel himself against some of the criticism his book received in France. On the right, people would sneer at the book in a condescending tone and say I had undertaken a kind of feminist act of contrition, Jablonka said, while on the left, people were upset that a straight, white man dares to take part in the debate.

But Jablonka rejects the notion that feminism is solely for women. Equality of the sexes very much concerns men, he writes in the book. The problem is not of sex, but of gender; it is not about biology but rather about culture. As such, everyone can fight against it: feminism is a political choice.

[see also: Whose freedom?]

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This article appears in the 16 Feb 2022 issue of the New Statesman, The Edge of War

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