Destination Block

Life can be so strange sometimes.  

When I began living in New York City, Halloween was one of my favorite nights because of the parade downtown in the Village.  Gay wit reigned supreme when at least a minion of Joan Crawfords carried Christina dolls and beat them with wire hangers. The event was smaller and more intimate in those days and very DIY; I don't think I've been back since David and I joined as a Punkin' Rocker and a Rock Lobster, respectively.  But the city was different then in other ways, too: a would-be mugger with a stocking pulled over his face nearly ruined the happiest night of my life but instead made the evening even more memorable after we resisted.

Half a century later, Halloween comes to me.  Somehow my brownstone block has morphed into one of the most decorated streets on the Upper West Side with the crowds to prove it.  Many of the neighbors go all-out but I prefer the stoops where creativity trumps deep pockets, not that it makes much difference to the real audience.  Children of all ages have been screaming excitedly all week long.

 

As they have been since late this afternoon.

More Halloween:

Trick or Treat (2016)

Halloween Terror (2017)

Skeletal (2021)

Competitive Decorating (2023)

Downstate (4*)

Pedophiles are human beings, too.

That was my primary takeaway from Downstate, an extraordinarily provocative drama from Bruce Norris, who knows he's playing with fire.  After all, the Booth Theatre's marquee asks, quoting the always unimpeachable New York Post, "How can you miss the play THAT WILL THOROUGHLY PISS OFF HALF OF AMERICA?"

But Downstate mostly made me uncomfortable perhaps because I know what it feels like to be reviled for a sexual orientation that during adolescence I desperately hoped to change, but couldn't.  Still, this engagingly directed (Joe Mantello) and finely acted drama all around strands the audience on a very slippery slope:  how DO you protect children from predators many of whom are a lot more monstrous than the four registered sex offenders that Norris depicts in a group home who have just been paid a visit by one of their former victims? 

Both race and class enter the moral equation, too, muddying things in the way that real life does. The shame that well-to-do Andy still feels after the abuse he experienced at the hands of Fred (Francis Guinan), his mild piano teacher--wrenchingly described by Thomas Sadoski in a scene that recalls a similarly devastating monologue by Leslie Manville in last season's Oedipus in content if not quite in the skill of its delivery--inspires contempt in Dee (K. Todd Freeman, superb), a self-described Black, gay, elderly convict who has served 15 years in prison because he had what appears to have been a consensual relationship with a decades-younger gay teenager. Refusing to recognize the power imbalance, Dee calls what they had love, and offers six years of letters he received from the individual after his conviction as evidence. In Dee's socioeconomically disadvantaged eyes, honky suburban boy Andy doesn't know from suffering.

Gender also factors into the house dynamics.  Ivy (Liza Colón-Zayas, as forceful here as she is gratefully accommodating in The Bear), the no-nonsense law enforcement liaison with the men, sees the actions of Felix (Adrian Martinez) and Gio (Al'Jaleel McGhee, the very personification of a live wire) two heterosexual offenders--both of whom cloak themselves in scripture the way their gay housemates do with Diana Ross and Frederic Chopin--through the prism of their young victims.  This explains why Ivy pushes Felix, a Latino parking garage employee and certainly not the brightest bulb in the house, up against a wall. His determination to wish his 15-year-old daughter happy birthday results in the play's most shocking scene.  It also exposes Andy's previously expressed assertion that death may be preferable to life in some circumstances as performative self-pity or possibly just acute depression, depending on your sympathies.

Gio, a loudmouthed hustler whose self-centered antics provide a welcome respite from the play's grimness, is perhaps the most relatable of the men as a "level one" offender which, IMHO, at least means that our judicial system has attempted to recognize that some offenses are worse than others, so long as both the perpetrator and his victim are heterosexual.  Gio insists that any straight man who professes not to be attracted to teenage girls is lying. Norris and Mantello stack the deck a bit here:  it's hard to imagine pert Effie (the inimitable Ivy Wolk, who elevates annoying to an art form), his co-worker at Staples and his smart-assed paramour lacking agency even in infancy.  

While equanimity is certainly a laudable goal in our polarized society, I doubt that Norris will engender much sympathy for the way sex offenders are treated. Most people will remain as myopic as Andy's wife Em (Cassie Beck), who represents the 50% of the audience Downstate will piss off or, more likely, the much vaster number of theater-goers who will refuse to see the play on the basis of its subject. Like Ivy says to Dee after he schools her on a tribe in New Guinea where young boys fellate their elders as a rite of passage ((I would have been a lot more dubious about this assertion if I hadn't also recently read an article in The New Yorker about a Nobel- winning prize scientist whose study of this particular tribe enabled his own pedophilia), "you know what you did is wrong."  

What They Said: October 2026

“Gird yourself for the jackal with the belt of a lion,” announced Rear Adm. Liam M. Hulin, head of the joint task force for Operation Inherent Resolve, at a ceremony in Baghdad marking the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops after two decades.  

“Perhaps what made Leo a success was that he had the charisma of the timid, if you will,” said Charles Mercier, an expert on Catholicism at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, a postgraduate college in Paris. “Paradoxically, what makes him charismatic is his reserved personality, bordering on shyness. He had a completely different charisma that was, in fact, able to arouse support in French public opinion.”(New York Times, October 1)

*  *  *  *  *

“Credit is like medicine,” said Lauro Gonzalez, a finance and debt professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas, a Brazilian research institute. “No one is against it, but in the wrong dose, it can become poison.” 

“Just because a victim’s narrative evolves or changes doesn’t mean it’s untrue,” said Moira Penza, a former federal prosecutor. “But grand juries and trials can’t stop at ‘believe women.’” 

“We will all, at some point in our lives, fall,” says Coach Eric Taylor at the end of the "Friday Night Lights" pilot, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. (New York Times, October 3)

*  *  *  *  *

“Should you see Chief Justice John Roberts duck into Squid Ink coffee or the Port Clyde General Store this summer, consider letting him know exactly what you think of him and his illegitimate, ultraconservative court,” wrote Becca Shaw Glaser, a columnist for a mid-coast Maine newspaper, under the headline “We Need to Talk about Chief Justice John Roberts Blissfully Summering Off Port Clyde.”“Yell, boo, whisper, weep audibly, give him the thumbs down or the finger, hand him a note, refuse to serve him.”  

“Growing up, I would visit my grandparents in China in the summers, and my friends there were all pirating ‘Gossip Girl’ to learn English,” said Alice Ma, the 31-year-old founder of Mad Realities, which is behind shows like “Keep the Meter Running,” a digital hit depicting interviews with cabdrivers. “The whole world is kind of obsessed with New York as a backdrop.”(New York Times, October 4)

*  *  *  *  *

“At some point, you do get conditioned by all that’s happened in the past,” said James Henson, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project, expressing skepticism about the Democtratic Senate candidtate's edge in polls. “I mean, you look at the trends and you have to admit that something’s going on. But you still don’t want to believe your lying eyes, because you’ve been burned for so long.” (New York Times, October 7)

*  *  *  *  *

“People become real to us by frustrating us,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once wrote. “If they don’t frustrate us they are merely figures of fantasy.”  (New York Times, October 12) 

*  *  *  *  *

“If liberalism is to rise again, it must be with the working class at its heart,” said Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics and professor at M.I.T.

“We’ll return you to 1970s rates, plus high gas prices, diesel shortages and bell-bottoms. Enjoy the nostalgia!” wrote Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament.  (New York Times, October 21) 

*  *  *  *  *

“Oh and by the way,” Felicity Green, fashion editor of The Daily Mirror (a British tabloid) wrote in her Nov. 4, 1966, story, “I am assured by Those Who Know that the newest essential for really In-type modes is noise . . . Rustling, I’m told, is out. Rattling is in, so this dress is very in indeed, as the moment you move it sounds like a pop-crazy audience applauding the Beatles.”  

“The Democrats have been librarians for too long,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist, referring to Chris Gallant, a Congressional candidate on Long Island who has leaned into his past as a kink model, as well as a Black Hawk pilot and an air traffic controller.  (New York Times, October 22) 

*  *  *  *  *

“I believe in an Islam that emphasizes God and my responsibility in his creation,” wrote Abdul El-Sayed, MD, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, in his 2020 memoir, Healing Politics. “The Islam I practice doesn’t judge people; it seeks to empathize with and empower them.” (New York Times, October 23) 

*  *  *  *  *

“When I first ran for office, I thought of it as left versus right,” said James Talarico, Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas. “I’ve now come to see politics as not left versus right but top versus bottom.”  (New York Times, October 24) 

*  *  *  *  *

“The homosexual clique was a problem,” Abe Rosenthal, a former executive editor of the New York Times wrote in his journal, “because it was usually subterranean, which gave it a kind of conspiracy atmosphere, and because homosexuals in the clique always were convinced or tried to convince themselves that they were wiser, more acute, ‘better’ than the others — the old breed.”  

“That was hurtful, and it gives us a chip on our shoulder — one that I still have today,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a native of Buffalo. “People look down on us. You’re the Rust Belt. Your team loses four Super Bowls. You have the Blizzard of ’77, which was on Johnny Carson late-night jokes. People mocked us all the time. So that’s been our psyche. And I just thought, ‘But we’re not losers.’” (New York Times, October 25) 

*  *  *  *  *

“I am concerned that we have an overheating of expectations,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster who worked on the 2024 campaigns of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former Vice President Kamala Harris. “People often assume in a wave you win everything, and what happens in a modern wave is you win far more than normal.”  (New York Times, October 26) 

*  *  *  *  *

“What does Xi [Jinping] want his legacy to be? I think first and foremost, it is a stronger Communist Party, perhaps even more than a stronger China,” said Neil Thomas, a senior fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The first is the foremost prerequisite for the latter as far as he’s concerned.”  (New York Times, October 27) 

*  *  *  *  *

“When you want attendance to pop at your park or in your company, you don’t put in a carousel, you don’t put in a scrambler, you put in a roller coaster, and you name it ‘The Demon’ or ‘The Bat’ or ‘The Beast’ or whatever,” said Dennis Speigel, a global theme-park consultant and past president of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. “And people come out in droves to ride it.”   (New York Times, October 28) 

*  *  *  *  *

“The ball is now in [Gadi] Eisenkot’s court. Whoever wants to remove Netanyahu and change his policies — we are ready to cooperate to topple his government,” said Yousef Jabareen, the leader of the Joint List alliance, an Arab political party that won more seats in Israel's inconclusive parliamentary elections this week than ever before due to high turn-out.  

“It’s wartime," said André Janones, who masterminded a WhatsApp channel called "Lula’s Army" that contributed to the defeat of Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing candidate who had been expected to win Brazil's presidential election.  "The time we’re living through today is not the time for us to do what we’d like to do. It’s the moment for us to do what needs to be done.” (New York Times, October 30) 

Transcription (5*)

I've now read Transcription twice and I still can't decide if it's about technology or parenting which is probably too simplistic an interpretation in either case.  But no biggie; it's only 92 pages long and we can split the difference and call it a brain teaser about the impact of technology on three generations of human beings.

Author Ben Lerner (The Topeka School) divides the tricky narrative into three sections.  All revolve around Thomas, a 90-year-old intellectual who recalls hearing Hitler's voice in the womb as his mother listened to the radio in Weimar Germany.  He's a polymath of great cultural significance and in the first section, an unnamed narrator, a poet in his mid-40s (like Lerner), takes the train to Providence, where he went to school (like Lerner), to interview his media-shy mentor and get his final thoughts "on the record" before he croaks.  

But accidentally knocking his phone in the sink before they meet for dinner at Thomas's house leaves the narrator "praying for the illuminated apple," more acutely sensitive to his surroundings and full of reverie about his student days when his current wife dumped him and he fell into the duplicitous arms of her then roommate. 

I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless. 

Rather than postpone the interview until he can record it as intended, the narrator deceives Thomas and asks him to treat their evening as an opportunity for boundary setting.  Thomas complies, forbidding any mention of either his wife, who committed suicide, or his son Max, a friend of the narrator's, but warns that anything they discuss now will sound "rehearsed" if it comes up again the next day.  Thomas, assuming that the narrator has already begun recording , refers to the narrator's fried i-Phone as a "little black box," a spot-on metaphor for the public's expectation that it will provide all the answers after an inexplicable plane crash.

Free association powers their conversation, genuinely give-and-take (and occasionally way over my head).  But it's also chock full of what Taylor Swift fans would call "breadcrumbs," including dreams, performance, the history of illumination, 19th-century glass flowers, even sauerbraten.  At one point, Thomas insists the narrator has misremembered the place where they collaborated on a project and the reader, like the narrator, understands in real time that Thomas already is well on his way to dementia. 

The second, briefest section takes place in Madrid, giving the narrator an opportunity to digitally stalk his wife's former lover two decades after their affair ended.  He's there for a conference, along with Max, to pay tribute to Thomas, not long after the great man's demise and the publication of the narrator's article which remains unseen.  After he reveals his deception to the assembly of acolytes, a colleague he may or may not have slept with confronts him privately, asserting that Max, in particular, is angry.  The narrator defends himself.

“A section of the interview was based on memory. That’s a scandal? I was trying to describe this kind of field of force around him. It was my setup to talk about his thoughts about recordings, ‘technologies of capture,’ and so on, right? And if anything I was making fun of myself. And believe me, I left out plenty of personal—”

“It was conducted under false pretenses. That’s what you revealed.”

“It’s routine for these interviews to involve—”

“Come on. It’s not routine to be told you’re being recorded when you’re not. It’s ironic, since most people are worried about being recorded unawares. And also the man was cognitively diminished.”

“I was honest about this childishly dishonest thing I did, yes, about how I regressed or was feeling—I don’t know. As I said, he seemed to even suspect—”

“That was unsettling, too.”

A lengthy exchange between Max, a lawyer, and the narrator comprises the novel's third, most affecting section.  It reads a lot like a transcription because it's nothing but two voices, mostly Max's.  As if pleading a case in court, Max describes his daughter's eating disorder and his fury at Thomas's mildly reproving reaction to the solution, although he isn't entirely without self-awareness.

Regardless, you have to picture me sitting on the couch, seeing myself through my father’s eyes: ‘My son is eating neon-orange puffed corn, watching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies on a tablet with my starving granddaughter.’ I mean, my dad used to go to concerts with Adorno!  

Covid's arrival, of course, upsets everything and Transcription shifts from an almost entirely intellectual register into a highly emotional one, with Max describing what he believes are the final words that he will ever say to Thomas, using a nurse's i-Phone.

That "little black box" reveals the book's "secrets" (some of which remain open to interpretation) followed by an historical coda that suggests technology, in the end, hasn't changed what matters most in life much at all.

What They Said: September 2026

“It’s impossible to get an education now without going underground,” said Oleksandr Lagin, 39, a grocery store manager whose two sons study below ground for safety against drones and missiles, in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.  

“Today is not the beginning of the end for social media, any more than 1998 was the beginning of the end of Big Tobacco,” said Robert Proctor, a Stanford professor and the author of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. “Americans still smoke more than 170 billion cigarettes every year, and inhale tons of additional nicotine from ‘electronic’ variants. How easily we forget!” (New York Times, September 2)

*  *  *  *  *

“The strategy [in Iran, after six months] has been rinse and repeat, whether it’s rhetorical or kinetic action,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former State Department appointee in the first Trump administration. “It’s been absolutely shocking how the United States has been exposed for a lack of a plan of engagement, and a lack of a plan to either win or exit this war.” 

“This, what the settlers are doing here [in the West Bank], is the real threat to Israel,” said retired Maj. Gen. Eyal Ben-Reuven, who has spent his life fighting for Israel. This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.”

“My mother believed that a North Atlantic summer was one of the most magical gifts in life,” Caroline Kennedy wrote in a 2019 letter to the Vineyard Gazette.  (New York Times, September 3)

*  *  *  *  *

“When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Gloria Steinem often said. “It was just called life.”

“It’s a question of how much pain can Russia take compared to Ukraine — and Russia can take a lot of pain,” said Rob Lee, a military expert at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute who travels frequently to the front line.  (New York Times, September 4)

*  *  *  *  *

“I don’t think [the Russians] want a third world war, but they have to demonstrate to everyone that it is not the time to mess with them,” said Piotr Krawczyk, the former director of Poland’s foreign intelligence service, after the German government revealed a failed Russian sabotage attempt in Germany.  

“By the time your grandmother starts using 🥀 (the wilting rose emoji), it’s done, you’ve got to move on,”said Adam Aleksic, 25, a linguist who posts as Etymology Nerd online.  

“I speak to my family, but not often,” said Edna Workman, a 32-year-old transgender woman and drag queen in Atlanta who performs as Edna Allan Hoe. “But they did text me when Dolly Parton died.”  (New York Times, September 5)

*  *  *  *  *

“To me, Route 66 is not simply a road,” Roberto Rossi, who runs a Route 66 Association in Italy, wrote in an email. “It is a family that begins in Chicago and ends at the Santa Monica Pier.”  (New York Times, September 6)

*  *  *  *  *

“On a daily basis, I am embarrassed by seeing visitors from the neighborhood and around the world turned away at the gates of a university I love,” said Toby Golick, the lawyer representing the parties in the lawsuit, and a Columbia alumnus. “I am very pleased that New York City has now — as it did when it first gave a public street to Columbia to create College Walk — agreed with us that the gates should be reopened to the public.”  (New York Times, September 7)

*  *  *  *  *

"From the top down, Trump is replacing the highly imperfect meritocracy of American public service with an idiocracy, and his corrupt idiocrats are creating profound short-, medium- and long-term harms to American national security," writes opinion columnist David French,  a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator.  (New York Times, September 8)

*  *  *  *  *

“His retirement is a profound loss for those who care about America’s history, not its fantasy,” Ava DuVernay said in a statement about the retirement of Lonnie Bunch III as the Smithsonian's secretary and founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “He’s been treated shamefully by people who seem more interested in controlling America’s history than understanding it.”  (New York Times, September 10)

*  *  *  *  *

“[Prime Minister Mark] Carney is as much a prisoner of public opinion now as he is a leader of it,” said Andrew McDougall, an assistant professor of Canadian politics at the University of Toronto.  “Public opinion right now is so inflamed that anything that looks like a concession or a walk back means that he’s going to get destroyed in the public eye.”  

“This is the capital of the world in many senses,” said Gustavo Dudamel, the new music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic. “We have here thousands of possibilities. There are thousands of things — thousands of goals — we can achieve, but we have to be very flexible, very open, to create this story. To evolve the tradition. Not to go back.”  

"Irony survived Sept. 11, but the idea that a tragedy could startle everyone into earnest seriousness did not," writes Jason Zinoman, a comedy columnist.  "That is the age that actually came to an end."  (New York Times, September 11)

*  *  *  *  *

“Nobody should ever suggest that they represent the single opinion of any group of Jews anywhere,” said Rabbi Jeremy Gordon, who published a letter on Wednesday supporting United Kingdom sanctions against Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and detailing his own experiences with settlers.  (New York Times, September 12)

*  *  *  *  *

“The discussion [about the dangers AI poses] has a frame, and it is a very particular frame. That is the frame that was there before deep learning took off, and it has stayed there,” Branton DeMoss, an A.I. researcher at Oxford, said, referring to the rise of neural networks. “And I don’t agree with it.”  

“If these chandeliers could talk, they would tell you that they saw Barbra Streisand dancing and singing her way around the main floor of the store,” said Linda Fargo, an executive at Bergdorf Goodman, now celebrating 125 years in business. “They would say that they saw Madonna reading her book to children sitting on the floor of the jewelry department.” (New York Times, September 13)

*  *  *  *  *

“Gerrymandering breaks things,” said Emma Petty Addams, the co-executive director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government. “It physically fractures communities. It breaks trust. If you look at the political situation and never see a chance to have someone that represents you, you lose faith in representative government.”  

“I think that my entire motivation and execution and philosophy can be two words: ‘Hey, look,’” said photographer Jay Maisel in a documentary about his work.  (New York Times, September 14)

*  *  *  *  *

“I understand we cross so many red lines in this war, but how in the world can hitting a passenger train be even accepted as something that is not immediately seen as a war crime?” said Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, the chief executive of the national Ukraine Railways. “A passenger train is not different from a passenger airplane, especially in the country that has no airspace open.”  

“You can mention some of the greatest names in fashion, and the average person won’t be able to conjure up, for example, a Giorgio Armani suit, said Frank DeCaro, the author of Unmistakably Mackie: The Fashion and Fantasy of Bob Mackie.  But if you say to an American of a certain age, ‘What is a Bob Mackie?,’ they know exactly what you’re talking about.”  (New York Times, September 15)

*  *  *  *  *

“For a large number of years, Australians asked whether an E.V. could take them far enough, but the fuel crisis has basically prompted another question: How exposed do I want to be to the next global oil shock?” said Hussein Dia, a professor of transport technology at Swinburne University in Melbourne.  (New York Times, September 16)

*  *  *  *  *

“It’s almost like sex ed,” said Anita Sarma, a professor of computer science at Oregon State who has studied the impact of A.I. on student cognition. “They will do it anyway,” she said. “How do we teach them responsible use?”  (New York Times, September 17)

*  *  *  *  *

“The war in Iraq really changed everything because it made Iran a much bigger part of the equation,” said Stéphane Lacroix, an associate professor at Sciences Po in Paris who focuses on contemporary Islam. “It opened the way for this kind of Iranian expansionism, this much greater Iranian influence across the region.”

“You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to,” a Chat GPT A.I. model wrote. “You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit.”  (New York Times, September 18)

*  *  *  *  *

“When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself,” writes philosopher Susan Neiman in Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. “It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”  (New York Times, September 19)

*  *  *  *  *

“It’s like me bulldozing right through the Arlington Cemetery,” said Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, who objects to the construction of a border wall that would divide tribal lands which include Mexican territory.   “We don’t matter to the U.S. government. They want to erase us. They want to take our land, they want to desecrate it, they want to hit us where it hurts.”   (New York Times, September 20)

*  *  *  *  *

“Novels draw you into human conflicts the way our brains are wired to experience them—as feelings, and there’s a big difference between information and feeling," said Barbara Kingsolver, best-selling author of Demon Copperhead.  "We enter into the realities of other people through emotion, not information, and that’s what a great novel does.”  (The New Yorker, September 21)

*  *  *  *  *

“If there is one threat that keeps me up at night, it is from drones,” said Jessica Tisch, NYPD commissioner, during a news conference in May as the city was preparing for the World Cup. “Commercial drones can be easily adapted into weapons of war. That reality matters in New York City.”

“A  lot of us have found ourselves retreating into nostalgia at just this moment because we’re living in such a dark world," said musician Marc Almond of Soft Cell, whose final album is titled "Danceteria," also the name of a track on Madonna's latest release.  "The past is where we feel comfortable.”  (New York Times, September 22)

*  *  *  *  *

“I think now this is Xi Jinping’s world and we’re all living in it,” said Scott Kennedy, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 

“Unlike A.I., climate change’s existential threat is not hypothetical. It is killing people now,” Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote last week. “It also feels like a lot of people have conveniently forgotten about the urgency of solving this problem.”  

“As far as I know, there is no precedent either for a president to ban cameras or networks — or for networks to boycott an event in solidarity with their banned colleagues,” said Harold Holzer, the author of The Presidents vs. the Press. "I was waiting for that to happen but honestly despaired of it. Thrilled to see it.”  (New York Times, September 23)

*  *  *  *  *

“To the King’s supporters it [Swan Song: Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer] is an act of revenge served so cold it comes with a layer of permafrost,” Rebecca English wrote in The Daily Mail. “While there has been little love lost between the House of Windsor and the Spencers over the decades, few predicted a hatchet-job of such deliberate spite.”  (New York Times, September 24)

*  *  *  *  *

“Going to an art fair is like a kid walking in on their parents having sex,” said artist John Baldessari. “You know it happens, you just never want to see it.” (New York Times, September 25)

*  *  *  *  *

“Trump has increasingly collapsed the vast challenge of U.S.-China relations into the narrow question of his personal relationship with Xi,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former China director for the National Security Council in the Biden administration and now a research scholar at Columbia University. “He seems either unaware of or unconcerned by Beijing’s effort to turn today’s stabilization into tomorrow’s constraints on U.S. policy.”  

“The mayor stands for everything that is the opposite of elite,” said Peter Gelb, the New York Metropolitan Opera’s general manager. “Having the mayor, who is one of the most popular individuals on the planet right now, actively engaged with the Met can only be beneficial.”  (New York Times, September 26)

*  *  *  *  *

“[Rahm Emanuel is] like the political equivalent of Windows 95 — an operating system without an application in the modern era,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, a progressive group. “I don’t know what counsel he has to offer people who are running in competitive elections in 2026.”  

“Talking to Rahm, it’s like middle-age married sex,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who has known him for decades. “It’s focused. You know what you’re going for. And it’s short.”  (New York Times, September 27)

*  *  *  *  *

“I get that everyone is invested in Mamdani being perfect, but that press conference [with the President] was pretty gross,” said Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark.  (New York Times, September 28)

*  *  *  *  *

“What an idiotic war,” Andriy Kovalenko, a lieutenant in Ukraine’s military and a former government official, posted on social media after Russia hit the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv with a jet-powered drone, killing at least two people and injuring six.

“I know that there’s a tendency to say people are half something, half another,” said Mary Peltola, a Democratic Senate candidate from Alaska, whose mother is Native American and whose father is white. “But I always thought of it as double. I really had, you know, double the language, double the perspectives, really different perspectives, really different values, really different worldviews — but double. And I thought that was a huge advantage.”  (New York Times, September 29)

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“I like people who love to dance even more than want to be ballet dancers . . . Everybody loved her and not because she was showing off.  It’s just that she so thoroughly enjoyed dancing that it just sprung out of her.”said Christopher Flynn, Madonna’s dance teacher and mentor, who died of AIDS in 1990.  (New York Times, September 30)

Naked Ambition

For a gay high school boy in El Paso. there was no denying the allure of this photo. Male nudity had barely appeared in mainstream magazines and here was willowy Yves Saint Laurent, wearing nothing but his oversize glasses in an ad for Pour Homme, his new fragrance.

Photo by Jeanloup Sieff (1971)

Two models obsessed me as a teenager paging through Life, Look and Time magazines, all of which my mother subscribed to at one time or another: even in black and white Twiggy manages to embody Carnaby Street and the Swingin' Sixties;

Twiggy (YSL haute couture Spring/Summer 1967) by Bert Stern

 and Veruschka, who looks as fierce as they come.  Audrey was thrilled when I said she reminded me of the German-born Amazon when we motorcycled to the Hamptons one summer afternoon and she never complained once. Veruschka and the Italian photographer flew to the Central African Republic (liberated from French rule in 1960)  to get his shot for Paris Vogue.  Colonialism hadn’t yet gone out of style. Melania still thinks it hasn't.

Veruschka (YSL rive gauche Spring/Summer 1968) by Franco Rubartelli

There’s something almost sphinx-like about the couturier in this dewy portrait by Irving Penn.  Although only 21 at the time, Saint Laurent, born in Algeria, was already head designer at the House of Dior.  He hardly looks as if he’s about to take the world by storm.

Paris, 1957

It didn't take long for him to do just that, though. Such a phenomenal talent. Andy has never looked sexier than he does napping in this YSL trench coat.

Andy Warhol (YSL rive gauche homme Fall/Winter 1974) by Helmut Newton

Too bad he didn't return the favor.  Yves without his glasses is like Andy without his wig!

1972

Saint Laurent instinctually knew how much artful, erotic photography could enhance his brand.  He and Helmut Newton had a long working relationship.  Several muses--some celebrity, some not--also inspired him.  Deneuve looks more Veronica Lake than Mod in this shot.

Catherine Deneuve (YSL haute couture Fall/Winter 1966) by Helmut Newton

Artistic inspiration could run both ways, too.  At the age of 82, sporting photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue used flash light for the first time to capture Saint Laurent's billowy creation on Deneuve in a fashion studio.

YSL haute couture Spring/Summer 1976 

Loulou e la Falaise described herself as a  "hard working" muse.  She designed jewelry and accessories for YSL.

Yves Saint Laurent and Loulou de La Falaise (1982)

Anh Duong modeld for Saint Laurent long before she became the muse of Dolce and Gabana.  A 2024 exhibit at the International Center of Photography introduced me to the work of David Seidner, but I don’t remember anything as extraordinary as this shot.

YSL haute couture Spring/Summer 1986 

Wow.  Just wow!  Peter Lindbergh, the German photographer Anna Wintour hired to shoot her first cover for Vogue, is better known for his 1989 grouping of Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Tatjana Patitz, Cindy Crawford, and Christy Turlington before they became "super models," but this later one has a lot more dramatic flair.

Gisèle Zelauy (YSL rive gauche Spring/Summer 1991)

I mostly associate Campbell with phone throwing-tantrums.  No more.  Kudos to the anonymous hair stylist.

YSL haute couture Fall/Winter 1996 by Paolo Roversi

Carla Bruni was wearing white even before she became the corrupt French prime minister’s bride.

YSL haute couture Spring/Summer 1988 by Jean-Marie Périer

Jerry Hall really is living proof that modeling really is a ladder to celebrity husbandry.  Now there's a tell-all autobiography I'd love to read.  Mick was her hubby when this photo was taken.

YSL rive gauche Spring/Summer 1980 by Jean-luce Huré

Curators of "Yves Saint Laurent and Photography" at the International Center of Photography make no mention of his destructive infatuation with Karl Lagerfeld’s boy toy but they do pay respect to the man behind the scenes whose unwavering support and business savvy made an enormous contribution to the designer’s success.  Pierre Bergé, seen here when the YSL atelier was being turned into a foundation, had a talent for staying in the background.  I visited their Moroccan retreat.  Jardin Majorelle is as beautiful as you would expect.

But it's also been said that Laurent's happy place was hanging "with his girls" backstage after a fashion show.  These four don't even need last names and they also prove that good photography contributes as much to a look as the clothes.

Dainel Deronda (5+*)

Perhaps the greatest joy of my seventies has been the discovery of George Eliot's late novels, although The Mill on the Floss did whet my appetite, at the tender age of 67, for her storytelling verve, laced with astute philosophical observations and aphorisms, some perhaps even more resonant in the 21st century than the 19th.  My highlight color is deliberate.

It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days’ work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there not be”—and the many-coloured creation is shrivelled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon. 

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One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

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Anxiety is good for nothing if we can’t turn it into a defence. But there’s no defence against all the things that might be.

Essentially a novel about the discovery and warm embrace of Jewish identity, Daniel Deronda's length and occasional density forced me to put it aside when Cloud Library, the Palm Beach County e-book lending service, did not permit a renewal but did offer an irresistible first crack at The Disappearers.  The interruption proved fortuitous, increasing my appreciation for both authors: despite vast differences in time, place and class, they each passionately address how extensively prevailing social norms play out in good ways and bad on the development of their characters. 

Daniel Deronda begins with a wonderful metaphor:  Gwnedolyn Harleth, a vivacious young woman, has just won and lost big at the roulette table where she locks eyes with Daniel, a intellectual man of unknown parentage but distinguished position who, despite being at loose ends, has her number from the beginning, although he at first confuses it with potential romance.  Eliot spends many chapters in full Victorian mode:  will Gwendolyn rise above her circumstances through marriage?  Eventually, she does but at great moral cost. Daniel becomes her spiritual counselor, advising her on how to become a better, less selfish person.

In the meantime, he also rescues Mirah, a young Jewish woman from suicide and finds her safe harbor in the home of his closest friend's mother and progressive young sisters.  Mirah thrives while Gwendolyn endures the considerable downsides of marrying into British aristocracy for money and status. Daniel is increasingly drawn into Mirah's working class world which includes a reunion he ambivalently facilitates with Mordecai, her long lost, devoutly religious brother who himself has been taken in by a pawnbroker named Ezra Cohen.  Mordecai immediately recognizes a kindred soul in Daniel, whose goodness is his most defining characteristic.  Their coming together is the heart of Eliot's deeply researched book about Judaism which also defiantly rejects the British value system that has spawned Gwendolen. 

Many chapters begin with a quote from classical literature; one starts with this observation from Leopold Zunz, a Jewish scholar:

“IF there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations—if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land— if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?”

Deronda had lately been reading that passage of Zunz, and it occurred to him by way of contrast when he was going to the Cohens, who certainly bore no obvious stamp of distinction in sorrow or in any other form of aristocracy. Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime pathos of the martyr, and his taste for money-getting seemed to be favoured with that success which has been the most exasperating difference in the greed of Jews during all the ages of their dispersion. This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was not a symbol of the great Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something typical in the fact that a life like Mordecai’s—a frail incorporation of the national consciousness, breathing with difficult breath—was nested in the self-gratulating ignorant prosperity of the Cohens?

In the same chapter, Mordecai takes Daniel to the local philosopher's club, which includes both Jews and non-Jews, who debate Jewish assimilation vs. Zionism in its most idealistic stage, decades before the Holocaust or the Nakba.  The discussion--which cites American independence as an inspiration for establishing a Jewish homeland--illustrates Eliot's incredible empathy for characters who articulately delineate arguments on both sides; she is equally adept at examining the degrees of British anti-Semitism that existed at the time of the book's publication in 1876.

But here's the kicker: a century later, F.R. Leavis, an esteemed British critic, proposed abridging the book by eliminating the "insufferably boring" Daniel Deronda entirely and retitling the book Gwendolen Harleth, turning it into, at best, a third-rate Middlemarch! I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I accuse him of him of attempting a literary holocaust; it's a particularly egregious example of enduring anti-Semitism erupting in the most unexpected time and place, and good reason for Jews, like homosexuals, to remain extremely wary about their places in the world.

Without Daniel Deronda who, by the book's end, finds his true north (or east, to be more precise) there is no redemption for Gwendolen Harleth, surely one of the most insufferable heroines in Victorian literature.  I finished Eliot's masterpiece, appropriately enough, on Yom Kippur.

More George Eliot:

The Mill & the Floss

Middlemarch