Singer-songwriter Huey Lewis on seeing his songs come to life on stage
Singer-songwriter Huey Lewis joins "CBS Mornings" to talk about his new Broadway musical, "The Heart of Rock and Roll," and working through hearing loss.
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cbsnews.com
Fox News ‘Antisemitism Exposed’ Newsletter: Hostage recounts Hamas' 'strange rules'
Fox News' "Antisemitism Exposed" newsletter brings you stories on the rising anti-Jewish prejudice across the U.S. and the world.
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foxnews.com
CNN hosts knock Biden for getting ‘snippy’ with press: ‘Far below his predecessors' in taking questions
CNN reporters spoke about how Biden has objected to being questioned directly by reporters, an interaction they argued is essential for both presidents and the media.
20 m
foxnews.com
Trump says there 'could be' alien life forms, but it's 'not my thing'
Former President Trump told YouTuber Logan Paul that there "could be" alien life forms that have visited Earth, but that he is not a serious believer himself.
35 m
foxnews.com
Retired LA cop disappears without a trace on vacation to Greece
Retired Los Angeles County deputy Albert Calibet, 59, never returned from a hike on a Greek island amid extreme temperature warnings - now, his worried family is working to find him.
44 m
foxnews.com
Mystery as huge group of people fall violently-ill while hiking through remote part of Grand Canyon
Dozens of tourists say they fell ill on a recent visit to a popular and picturesque stretch of waterfalls deep in a gorge neighboring Grand Canyon National Park.
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foxnews.com
World leaders gather in Switzerland for Ukraine peace summit, excluding Russia
Switzerland will host scores of world leaders this weekend to try to map out first steps toward peace in Ukraine. Russia, which launched the war, won’t take part.
46 m
foxnews.com
The Real Problem With Prices
The Great Inflation is, thank goodness, over.Four years ago, the coronavirus pandemic kinked the planet’s supply chains, causing shortages of everything from semiconductor chips to box fans. War and drought led to disruptions in commodity markets. Temporary lockdowns and a permanent shift away from offices altered consumers’ purchasing patterns. Families found themselves flush with government stimulus money. A tight labor market drove up wages. Those factors combined meant that families had more money to spend at a time when supply was constrained—and businesses took advantage. The price of everything went up, all at once. And for the first time since the 1980s, inflation became the central economic problem in American life.Now the annual rate of inflation has fallen from a peak of more than 9 percent to just above 3 percent. Retailers are starting to make well-publicized price cuts, seeking revenue by drawing customers in rather than just charging them more. Burger King and McDonald’s are promoting $5 value meals, and Target, Michaels, Giant, Amazon, and Walgreens are slashing the cost of tens of thousands of frequently purchased items such as diapers and cat food.Finally, families are getting a little breathing room—something that is already showing up in consumer-confidence surveys. A new Federal Reserve Bank of New York poll shows that nearly four in five respondents expect to be doing as well as they are now or better in a year, the highest proportion since 2021. I’d be surprised if Joe Biden’s approval ratings did not begin rising too.This is all good news. But the United States had a huge problem with prices even before this intense bout of inflation—and will continue to have a huge problem with prices going forward. The sharp increase in costs for small-ticket items that families buy on a day-to-day basis made prices far more salient for American households, but it is the big-ticket, fixed costs that have had the most deleterious impact on family finances over time. These are the costs that are truly sapping average Americans’ ambitions to get ahead, and they are not going down.From the aughts until the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, inflation was essentially a nonissue in American life. The country was suffering from anemic growth and anemic demand: low interest rates, low productivity growth, stagnant wages, and high inequality. The only upshot, really, was that prices were stable and stuff was cheap. Crummy earnings went pretty far at fast-food restaurants and big-box stores, thanks to global supply chains and manufacturing advances. Even homeless people had smartphones. This was the neoliberal deal, supported by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.[Rogé Karma: The inflation plateau]This paradigm began to shift during the Trump administration, as the country’s low unemployment rate started generating strong wage gains and ample demand. Then, the COVID crisis led to families being showered with stimulus money just as it throttled the supply of dozens of goods. People might have been happy about increased wages and declining inequality, but all they saw was inflation.The cost of just about everything went up, after more than a decade of not simply price stability but price stagnancy. The numbers on price tags in the grocery store climbed a whopping 13.5 percent from the summer of 2021 to the summer of 2022. Gas prices went up as much as 44 percent year over year. Landlords began asking for $300, $500, even $2,000 more a month for rent.In response, the Federal Reserve jacked up interest rates—making many things yet more expensive, including mortgages and car loans. Rising prices rattled everyone, rich and poor alike. The shock was repeated and insistent: Every cup of coffee, every Friday-night pizza, every taxi ride home, every flight to see the in-laws, every item that needed to go in the grocery cart acted as a reminder of the cost of living and the impossibility of thriving.But prices had been a problem long before this sharp burst of inflation. For decades, continuously high prices on big-ticket goods and services have been quietly eating away at American incomes and forcing families to make miserable financial decisions: to delay getting married, to give up the dream of a third kid, to settle in an exurb rather than a city, to put off starting a business.First, and by far worst, is housing. When the real-estate bubble collapsed during the George W. Bush administration, residential construction cratered and never fully recovered. We are building as many homes now as we were in 1959, though the population has doubled. And we are building a negligible number of homes in the superstar cities where wage and job growth have been strongest. The result is a catastrophic housing shortage and obscene prices, particularly for low-income renters. Indeed, rents have gone up 52 percent in the past decade, whereas prices in general have risen by 32 percent.Second is the cost of health care. The United States spends 17 percent of its GDP on health services, nearly twice the OECD average, for no better outcomes. The prices are the problem. Insurance costs more here. Prescription drugs cost more here. (Insulin, a century-old drug, costs nine times as much in the United States as it does in our peer countries; Ozempic is five to 11 times pricier.) Surgeries cost more here. Emergency-room visits cost more here. Administrative costs are absurd here. Aggregate health spending has flattened out since the Obama years, allowing for stronger wage growth. But the country has amped up out-of-pocket burdens: Adjusted for inflation, they have risen steadily and now sit at $1,400 per person, per year.Third, child care. The median annual cost ranges from $18,000 to $29,000, depending on the child’s age and the care setting. In high-cost cities, such as New York and San Francisco, families routinely shell out even more than that. Millions of Americans who can’t afford it, predominantly women, drop out of the labor force or quit working full-time to take care of their kids.These obscene costs for working families do not translate into living wages for child-care workers, many of whom live in poverty. The situation has gotten even worse lately, as tens of thousands of day-care workers and nannies have opted to switch to better-paid positions, including in retail, and as pandemic-related federal funding has dried up. Many centers have been forced to raise tuition, though parents are already paying more than they can afford.No wonder Americans report feeling like they just are not able to get ahead, no matter how much they are earning. In interviews, many folks tell me they simply do not believe that wage growth has outpaced inflation, or that wage growth has been stronger for low-income families than for high-income families, or that middle-class families are wealthier today than they were a few years ago, or that inflation has cooled off to unremarkable levels, despite all of those things being true. It feels awful to pay $15 for a fast-food lunch when you can barely cover your rent. It is infuriating to spend 40 percent more than you wanted to on your weekly errands when you just put a doctor’s bill on a credit card.Going back to the old neoliberal paradigm would be the worst of all worlds. Middle-class folks might not like spending more on McDonald’s and Uber rides, but paying more would be worth it if it meant that more American workplaces offered middle-class jobs.[Ronald Brownstein: Trump’s plan to supercharge inflation]Yet I worry that the new paradigm is not going to be much better. Washington has a huge range of options to increase demand in the economy. It can send families checks, amp up unemployment-insurance payments, and cut interest rates down to scratch. It has very few options to control costs and even fewer to increase supply, particularly because building homes, hiring nurses, and constructing new day-care centers would be inflationary in and of itself.Still, shortages in child care and housing, and obscene prices for health care, pose a threat to American families’ thriving. People should stop being mad about the cost of a Big Mac, and start being mad about the cost of that appendectomy and this month’s day-care bill.
49 m
theatlantic.com
Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker attends Super Bowl ring ceremony with wife after controversial speech
The couple's appearance comes one month after the kicker ignited controversy over a commencement address.
1 h
nypost.com
US Weapons Are Forcing Russians to Step Back in Ukraine: Kyiv Deputy
Moscow's forces are relocating their most valuable assets into the "deep rear," Yehor Cherniev told Newsweek.
1 h
newsweek.com
Dogs Are Getting Their Own Airline
Seeing the world with your canine friends just got easier.
1 h
newsweek.com
Putin Names Conditions for Ukraine Peace Talks
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would issue a ceasefire in Ukraine, provided several conditions are met.
1 h
newsweek.com
Elections 2024 live updates: Trump to celebrate 78th birthday with fan group in Florida
Live updates from the 2024 campaign trail, with the latest news on presidential candidates, polls, primaries and more.
1 h
washingtonpost.com
Shop Hokas at new flagship, bid on Stephen Sondheim merch, more NYC events
Each week, Alexa is rounding up the buzziest fashion drops, hotel openings, restaurant debuts and celeb-studded cultural happenings in NYC. It’s our curated guide to the very best things to see, shop, taste and experience around the city. What’s making our luxury list this week? Cult French sneaker brand Hoka unveiled a huge new store,...
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nypost.com
Putin pledges a cease-fire in Ukraine if Kyiv withdraws from occupied regions
Russian President Vladimir Putin is promising to “immediately” order a cease-fire in Ukraine and begin negotiations if Kyiv started withdrawing troops from the four regions annexed by Moscow in 2022 and renounced plans to join NATO
1 h
abcnews.go.com
Explosions in a Swiss garage have left 2 people dead and 11 injured
Authorities say two people have been found dead after explosions in an underground parking garage at an apartment building in northern Switzerland and 11 others sustained minor injuries
1 h
abcnews.go.com
Fani Willis Responds to Critics: 'Idiots'
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis hit back at those who have mocked her name as she prosecutes Donald Trump in Georgia.
1 h
newsweek.com
Harrison Butker, wife Isabelle walk red carpet at Chiefs Super Bowl ring ceremony after ‘homemaker’ controversy
The NFL kicker married his high school sweetheart in February 2018. The couple share son James and a daughter whose name they have yet to reveal.
1 h
nypost.com
What to watch with your kids: ‘Inside Out 2,’ ‘Camp Snoopy’ and more
Common Sense Media also reviews “Ultraman: Rising” and “School of Magical Animals 2.”
1 h
washingtonpost.com
Republicans would really prefer to run against 2022 Biden
If only the last two years didn’t matter!
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washingtonpost.com
Readers critique The Post: Kelce knows how to ball, but we know Aristotle (this feels so high school)
Here are this week's Free for All letters.
1 h
washingtonpost.com
Inside the 30 frenzied days it took Eric Musselman to revive USC men's basketball
Through a flurry of calls and Facetime chats from his Manhattan Beach "Portal House," Eric Musselman and his staff worked to revive USC basketball.
1 h
latimes.com
Princess Kate's Trooping the Colour Fashion Highlights
Since her marriage in 2011, Kate has debuted a number of stylish looks for Trooping the Colour.
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newsweek.com
Everything Princess Kate Has Said Since Her Cancer Absence, So Far
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newsweek.com
The Harlem Renaissance Was Bigger Than Harlem
Sometimes it’s the sleepers that stay with you. In “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” a sprawling exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was a watercolor still life by Aaron Douglas. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1899, Douglas may be the most recognizable Black artist of the 1920s and ’30s. His appealing blend of Art Deco and African American affirmation enlivened books, magazines, and public spaces in his heyday, and paintings such as his grand Works Progress Administration cycle, Aspects of Negro Life, at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now part of the Schomburg Center), have kept him visible ever since.The watercolor, though, feels a world apart from his luminous silhouettes and vivid storylines. It houses no heroic figure pointing toward the future, no shackles being cast off. Instead we get leafy branches splaying out from a pot beneath a tattered picture hung askew on a wall. The branches might be magnolia—it’s hard to tell—but art nerds can recognize the crooked picture-within-a-picture as a loose rendering of Titian’s The Entombment of Christ (circa 1520), which has been in the Louvre for centuries. Turner copied it there in 1802, Delacroix around 1820, Cézanne in the 1860s. Douglas would have seen it when he was studying in Paris in the early 1930s.The Titian might have attracted his attention for many reasons—its display of crushing grief and unvoiced faith, its sublimely controlled composition, or the warm brown skin that Titian gave the man lifting Christ’s head and shoulders, usually identified as Nicodemus. The Titian connection is not highlighted at the Met, but in its own oblique way, Douglas’s watercolor encapsulates the most important lesson this show has to offer: Art’s relationship to the world is always more complicated than you think.Organized by Denise Murrell, who, as the Met’s first curator at large, oversees projects that cross geographical and chronological boundaries, this exhibition has a lot on its to-do list. It wants to remind us of Harlem’s role as a cultural catalyst in the early 20th century, while showing that those creative energies extended far beyond the familiar reading list of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, beyond literature and music, beyond the prewar decades, and beyond Upper Manhattan. It wants us to understand that Black American artists were learning from European modernists, and that European modernists were aware of Black contributions to world culture.The exhibit showcases an abundance of mostly Black, mostly American painters and sculptors, as well as pictures of Black subjects by white Europeans, documentary photographs, film clips of nightclub acts, and objects by artists of the African diaspora working in locations from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom. Like an exploding party streamer, it unfurls in multiple directions from a starting point small enough to hold in your hand—in this case, the March 1925 special issue of the social-work journal Survey Graphic, its cover emblazoned with “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” heralding a new cultural phenomenon.That issue, edited by the philosopher Alain Locke, contained sociological and historical articles by Black academics along with poetry by the likes of Hughes and Jean Toomer. James Weldon Johnson, the executive secretary of the NAACP, offered an essay on the real-estate machinations that had made Harlem Black, and W. E. B. Du Bois contributed a parable highlighting the Black origins of American achievements in domains including the arts and engineering. The German-immigrant artist Winold Reiss provided eloquent portraits of celebrities such as the singer and activist Paul Robeson, along with those of various Harlem residents identified by social role in the manner of August Sander photographs—a pair of young, earnest Public School Teachers with Phi Beta Kappa keys dangling around their necks, a somber-faced Woman Lawyer, a dapper College Lad. All of this made manifest the galvanizing assumption that what Black Americans possessed was not a culture that had failed to be white, but one rich with its own inheritances and inventions; its own brilliance, flaws, and challenges. And Harlem was its city on a hill.Working as an art teacher in Kansas City, Missouri, Aaron Douglas saw Survey Graphic and moved to New York, where he worked with Reiss and was mentored by Du Bois. When Locke expanded the Survey Graphic issue to book length (his pivotal anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation), Douglas provided illustrations.Locke and Du Bois were the intellectual stars of Black modernity, and they believed in the power of the arts to transform social perception. But where Du Bois once said, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda,” Locke was intrigued by the indirect but ineluctable workings of aesthetics. A serious collector of African art, he saw its severe stylizations and habits of restraint as a flavor of classicism, as disciplined in its way as Archaic Greek art, and hoped it might provide “a mine of fresh motifs ” and “a lesson in simplicity and originality of expression” to Black Americans.Locke also took note of how European artists, bored with the verisimilitude, rational space, and propriety of their own tradition, had become smitten with Africa: how Picasso claimed the faceted planes of African masks as the starting point of cubism; how German expressionists enlisted the emphatic angularity of African carvings in their pursuit of emotional presence. They might be woefully (or willfully) ignorant of African objects’ original contexts and meanings, but, as Locke recognized, an important bridge had been crossed. Something definitively Black was inspiring the foremost white artists in the world.No artist fulfilled the twin mandates of clear messaging and savvy, African-influenced modernism more successfully than Douglas. The style he developed took tips from the easy-to-read action of ancient-Egyptian profiles, the staccato geometries of African art, and the flat pictorial space of abstraction, and he put that style to work in narrative pictures designed to inspire hope, pride, and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. Du Bois might have called it propaganda, but under the name “history painting,” this kind of thing had constituted the most prestigious domain of pre-20th-century art. Think of Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (1784), Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), and John Martin’s cast-of-thousands blockbusters like The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822). Aaron Douglas, Let My People Go, circa 1935–39 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2015 / Image Courtesy of the Met / © 2024 Heirs of Aaron Douglas / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY) Let My People Go (circa 1935–39) is one of several majestic Douglas paintings included at the Met. Its design began as a tightly composed black-and-white illustration for James Weldon Johnson’s 1927 book, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (in addition to running the NAACP, Johnson was a poet). Even within the more expansive space of the color painting, Let My People Go has a lot going on: Lightning bolts rain down from the upper right; spears poke up from the lower left as Pharaoh’s army charges in, heedless of the great wave rising like a curlicue cowlick at center stage. Slicing diagonally across all of this action, a golden beam of light comes to rest on a kneeling figure, arms spread in supplication. It’s a John Martin biblical epic stripped of Victorian froufrou, a modernist geometric composition with a moral.Ambitious Black artists hardly needed Locke to point them toward Europe. “Where else but to Paris,” Douglas wrote, “would the artist go who wished really to learn his craft and eventually succeed in the art of painting?” Paris had the Louvre, it had Picasso and Matisse, it had important collections of African art, and for decades, it offered Black American artists both education and liberation. William H. Johnson arrived in 1926, Palmer Hayden and Hale Woodruff in 1927, Archibald Motley in 1929. Henry Ossawa Tanner, in France since 1891, was a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. The French were not free of race-based assumptions, but their biases were more benign than those institutionalized in the United States—enough so that Motley would later say, “They treated me the same as they treated anybody else.”One of the great pleasures at the Met is watching these artists feel their way in a heady world. The setting for Motley’s bright and bumptious dance scene Blues (1929) was a café near the Bois de Boulogne frequented by African and Caribbean immigrants, where he would sit and sketch into the night. The subject is unquestionably modern, as are Motley’s smoothed-out surfaces and abruptly cropped edges, but the gorgeous entanglement of musicians and revelers—the chromatic counterpoint of festive clothing and faces that come in dark, medium, and pale—recalls far older precedents, such as Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana (1562–63), the enormous canvas at the Louvre that people back into when straining for a glimpse of the Mona Lisa. Archibald Motley, Blues, 1929 (© Estate of Archibald John Motley Jr. 2024 / Bridgeman Images / Image courtesy of the Met / Photo by Juan Trujillo) Woodruff and Hayden took up the theme of the card game, closely associated with Cézanne but also a long-standing trope in European art and African American culture. In Hayden’s Nous Quatre à Paris (“We Four in Paris,” circa 1930) and Woodruff’s The Card Players (1930), the teetering furniture and tilted space set up a pictorial instability that can be seen as a corollary of social pleasure and moral peril, or just the reality of odds always stacked against you. But whereas Woodruff’s jagged styling in The Card Players nods to German expressionism and the African sources behind it, the caricatured profiles in Hayden’s Nous Quatre à Paris call up racist antecedents like Currier and Ives’s once-popular Darktown lithographs. Beautifully drawn in watercolor, it remains a stubbornly uncomfortable image some 95 years after its creation.William H. Johnson, for his part, spent his years in Europe mostly making brushy landscapes with no obvious social messages. Paired with a woozy village scene by the French expressionist Chaim Soutine, an early Johnson townscape at the Met looks accomplished and unadventurous. But with his wife, the Danish textile artist Holcha Krake, Johnson developed an appreciation for the flat forms and dramatic concision of Scandinavian folk art—a reminder that Africa was not the only place where modernists searched for outsider inspiration—and when he returned to the States, he began working in a jangly figurative mode with no direct antecedent. The dancing couples in his Jitterbugs paintings and screen prints (1940–42) may look simple and cartoonish at first glance, but those pointy knees and high heels are held mid-motion through Johnson’s brilliant machinery of pictorial weights and balances. William H. Johnson, Jitterbugs V, circa 1941–42 (Courtesy of the Met / Hampton University Museum Collection) There is more than a soupçon of épater le bourgeois in much of this, aimed not just at the buttoned-up white world, but also at the primness of many members of the Black professional class. Langston Hughes, writing in The Nation in 1926, expressed his hope that “Paul Robeson singing Water Boy … and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies” might prompt “the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.”The pursuit of that glimmer accounts for one of the Met exhibition’s most remarkable aspects—its preponderance of great portraiture. There are portraits of the famous, portraits by the famous, portraits of parents and children, and portraits of strangers. Some are large and dazzlingly sophisticated: Beauford Delaney’s 1941 portrait of a naked, teenage James Baldwin in a storm of ecstatic color is a harbinger of the gestural abstractions that Delaney would paint 10 years later. Some are tiny and blunt, like the self-portrait by the self-taught Horace Pippin, celebrated as “the first important Negro painter” by the art collector Albert C. Barnes because of his “unadulterated” ignorance of other art.This abundance is remarkable because portraiture was not central to European modernism or to 20th-century art in general. Never the most prestigious of genres (too compromised as work-for-hire), the painted portrait had lost its primary raison d’être following the advent of photography in the 1830s and never really recovered. Modernists went on drawing people, but instead of providing a physiognomy to be followed, the sitter was now a toy to be played with. Picasso’s drypoint of the Martinican poet and activist Aimé Césaire is representative, looking very much like a Picasso and not much at all like Césaire. (The Met’s wall text refers to it as a “symbolic portrait.”) The title of the wonderful Edvard Munch painting in the show originally emphasized the polygonal slab of green scarf at its center, not the identity of Abdul Karim, the man wearing it. We might well be curious about Karim—Munch apparently encountered him in a traveling circus’s ethnographic display, and hired him as a driver and model—but Munch wants to lead us away from the distractions of biography and toward color, form, and paint. It was a common ploy. James McNeill Whistler, after all, titled his famous portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1.For Black artists and audiences, the situation was different. Painted portraits have always been an extravagance, their mere existence evidence of the value of the people in them. But after 500 years of Western portrait painting, Black faces remained, Alain Locke wrote, “the most untouched of all the available fields of portraiture.” The American Folk Art Museum’s “Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North”—which overlapped with the Met show for a month before closing in March—aimed to fill in that lacuna, with rare commissioned portraits of 19th-century Black sitters, more numerous examples of Black figures (often children) presented as fashionable accessories in portraits of white sitters, and still more dispiriting mass-market material, like a pair of Darktown lithographs showing grossly caricatured Black couples attempting to play tennis.Against this background, portraiture—the quintessential celebration of the individual—could serve a collective purpose. Far from merely gratifying the vanity of a sitter or the creative ego of an artist, it was a correction to the canon, offering proof of how varied beauty, character, or just memorable faces can look. The subject mattered, regardless of the style through which he or she was presented. Laura Wheeler Waring was no avant-gardist—her blend of precision and moderately flashy brushwork gives Girl in Pink Dress (circa 1927) the demeanor of a society portrait. The arrangement is conventional: The sitter is seen in profile, hair in a flapper bob, a spray of silk flowers tumbling over one shoulder like fireworks. But that shade of pink, which might look simpering on a blonde, acquires visual gravitas on this model. She does not smile or acknowledge the viewer. For all her youth and frothy attire, she owns the space of the canvas in no uncertain terms. The dress is frivolous; the picture is not.Waring, like Munch, does not give us a name to go with the face. For modern artists—whether Black or white, male or female—models, most often young women, were an attribute of the studio, there to be dressed up and arranged like a still life with a pulse. At the Met, they look out at us from frames next to titles that point to their hats and dresses, their jobs and accessories. In some cases, an identity is discoverable—Matisse’s Woman in White (1946) was the Belgian Congolese journalist Elvire Van Hyfte; Winold Reiss’s Two Public School Teachers are thought to have been named Lucile Spence and Melva Price—but many remain anonymous. They are decorative markers for something larger than themselves.In contrast with Waring’s Girl in Pink Dress, Henry Alston’s Girl in a Red Dress (1934) is stridently modernist, reducing its subject to elemental forms. The erect pose could have been borrowed from a Medici bride, but the elongated neck and narrow head and shoulders were inspired, we are told, by reliquary busts of the Central African Fang people. For Alston, neither European modernism nor Fang tradition was a mother tongue, which helps give the picture its modern edge. He is less interested in the distinctive features of a living individual than in how those features might serve new relationships of form and color.Other artists, notably the watercolorist Samuel Joseph Brown Jr., succeed in inducing portraiture’s most magical effect—the eerie sense of a real person on the other side of the frame. His Girl in Blue Dress (1936) leans slightly forward, hands casually clasped, a half smile of anticipation on her lips, like someone rapt in conversation. The play of light and the puddled blues and browns are beautifully handled, but the appeal is also social: She looks like someone who would be fun to know. Laura Wheeler Waring, Girl in Pink Dress, circa 1927 (Laura Wheeler Waring Family Collection / © Laura Wheeler Waring / Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Photo by Juan Trujillo) Black portraiture also carries special clout because of the existential consequences that physical appearance can have in Black life. It was at the core of race-based slavery, and perception of color, which is a painter’s stock in trade, retained its ability to dictate life’s outcomes. Picasso and Matisse might be cavalier about skin tone—painting faces in white and yellow, or green and blue for that matter—but many Black artists recognized it as an optical property riddled with storylines. William H. Johnson gave each of the girls in Three Children (circa 1940) a different-colored hat and a different tone of face. Waring (whose self-portrait resembles my third-grade teacher, a middle-aged woman of Scandinavian extraction) addressed the complexities of color and identity in Mother and Daughter (circa 1927), a double portrait whose subjects exhibit the same aquiline profile but different complexions. Archibald Motley’s The Octoroon Girl (1925) is rosy-cheeked and sloe-eyed, perched on a sofa with the frozen expression of someone expecting bad news. (Motley had a gift for capturing this kind of social discomfort.) The title, which points to the existence of one Black great-grandparent, all but dares the viewer to bring a forensic eye to her face, her hands, the curl of brown hair escaping from under her cloche.It’s worth noting that for a show about Black culture in the first half of the 20th century, “Harlem Renaissance” gives little space to the continued horror of lynching, the everyday brutality of Jim Crow, and the nationwide rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which reached peak membership around the time that Locke’s Survey Graphic was published. Only a handful of works explicitly address either violence or what Hilton Als, writing about the show in The New Yorker, called the “soul-crushing” realities of the 1920s for Black people. (The most wrenching of these pieces is In Memory of Mary Turner as a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence, a 1919 sculpture by the Rodin protégé Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller.) The emphasis here is on agency and survival, not trauma.Here, too, the portraits operate as a reservoir of weighty meaning, especially those of elderly relatives. Some sitters, like Motley’s Uncle Bob, were old enough to have been born into slavery. All are endowed by the artists with as much dignity as the conventions of portraiture can muster. Uncle Bob is wearing the plain clothes of a farmer, but is seated like a gentleman, pipe in hand, with a book and a vase of flowers at his elbow. John N. Robinson’s 1942 painting of his grandparents (titled, with curious formality, Mr. and Mrs. Barton) is filled with the hypertrophic detail of a Holbein painting, and as in a Holbein, everything signifies: Mrs. Barton’s look of sober patience; Mr. Barton’s suit, tie, and wing-tip shoes; the oak table and the sideboard with its pressed-glass pitcher and glasses; the framed studio photographs of what must be their great-grandchildren on the wall. John N. Robinson, Mr. and Mrs. Barton, 1942 (Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. Atlanta Art Annuals. 1945.004.) William H. Johnson’s Mom and Dad (1944) departs from tradition in style, but not in purpose. His gray-haired mother faces us from her red rocking chair, hands folded, eyes wide with something like worry. His deceased father presides from his portrait on the wall behind her, his handlebar mustache and celluloid collar decades out of date, but lasting evidence of respectability. These people don’t show a lot of laugh lines, nor the haughtiness endemic to so much society portraiture. Instead there is poise and forbearance, along with the knowledge that they weren’t bought cheap.Harlem was pronounced the “Mecca of the New Negro” 99 years ago. That cultural renaissance is as far from us today as the contributors to that Survey Graphic issue were from the presidency of John Quincy Adams. The Met’s is not the first big show to survey Black artists’ achievements in that era, but it is the most ambitiously global, a quality that makes that vanished world feel more familiar than we might expect—a place where Black artists move back and forth across the Atlantic, absorbing every influence on offer, coping with questions of identity, and struggling to make ends meet. Against this, the abundance of photographs—the marching men in bowler hats, the marcelled ladies who lunch, the couple posing in raccoon coats with their shiny roadster like Tom and Daisy Buchanan—works to remind us of the temporal distance that painting and sculpture can collapse.Attempting to define modernism is a thankless task. But a few years ago, the painter Kerry James Marshall offered this observation: “Modern is not so much an appearance or a subject matter. It is, indeed, a process of always becoming and a negotiation for attention between the contemporary artist’s ego and the legacy of previous masterworks.” At its best, what “Harlem Renaissance” provides is a chance to witness that becoming, to peek at those negotiations in progress, through the work of artists whose achievements have, in many cases, been insufficiently celebrated. Which brings us back to that Aaron Douglas still life.History painting went out of vogue in the 20th century because modern art stopped believing in simple stories. Douglas’s narrative paintings, beautifully designed and eye-catching though they can be, are throwbacks—spectacular, efficient, impersonal engines for delivering public-service messages. The still life is different. Sure, the sloping magnolia branches and off-kilter Titian conform to his love of diagonals on diagonals. But the things represented are not abstractions; they are objects that lived in the real world—the leaves are curled and brown in spots; the margins of the Titian are torn and stained. What is pictured isn’t a lesson, but a meditation on learning, and on the many ways that meaning can make itself felt.Douglas was a native Kansan. It is possible that Titian’s Nicodemus echoed, for him, the abolitionist song “Wake Nicodemus,” whose hero, a slave “of African birth,” was the namesake of a Kansas town founded after the Civil War by the formerly enslaved. Or maybe Douglas just loved that painting in the Louvre. Or both.This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “The Harlem Renaissance Was Bigger Than Harlem.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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A Novel Without Characters
Start, as one tends to do in Rachel Cusk’s writing, with a house. It is not yours, but instead a farmhouse on the island property to which you have come as a renting vacationer. It has no obvious front door, and how you enter it, or whether you are welcome to do so, isn’t clear. You are, after all, only a visitor. Built out in haphazard fashion, the house seems both neglected and fussed over, and as a result slightly mad. A small door, once located, opens to reveal two rooms. The first, although generously proportioned and well lit, shocks you with its disorder, the riotous and yet deadening clutter of a hoarder. As you navigate carefully through it, the sound of women’s voices leads you to a second room. It is the kitchen, where the owner’s wife, a young girl, and an old woman—three generations of female labor—prepare food in a clean and functional space. When you enter, they fall silent and seem to share a secret. They consent to rather than encourage your presence, but here you will be fed. Of the first room, the owner’s wife comments dryly that it is her husband’s: “I’m not allowed to interfere with anything here.”This is a moment from Parade, Cusk’s new book, and like so much in this novel of elusive vignettes, it can be seen as an allegory about both fiction and the gendered shapes of selfhood. After reading Parade, you might be tempted to imagine the history of the novel as a cyclical battle between accumulation and erasure, or hoarders and cleaners. For the hoarders, the ethos is to capture as much life as possible: objects, atmospheres, ideologies, social types and conventions, the habits and habitudes of selves. For the cleaners, all of that detail leaves us no space to move or breathe. The hoarder novel may preserve, but the cleaner novel liberates. And that labor of cleaning, of revealing the bare surfaces under the accumulated clutter of our lives and opening up space for creation and nourishment, is women’s work. Or so Cusk’s allegory invites us to feel.Whether or not the typology of hoarder and cleaner is useful in general, it has licensed Cusk to push her style toward ever greater spareness. For the past decade, since 2014’s Outline, Cusk has been clearing a path unlike any other in English-language fiction, one that seems to follow a rigorous internal logic about the confinements of genre and gender alike. That logic, now her signature, has been one of purgation. The trilogy that Outline inaugurated (followed by Transit and Kudos) scrubbed away plot to foreground pitiless observation of how we represent, justify, and unwittingly betray ourselves to others. Each of these lauded novels is a gallery of human types in which the writer-narrator, Faye, wanders; finding herself the recipient of other people’s talkative unburdening, she simply notices—a noticing that, in its acuity and gift for condensed expression, is anything but simple. Cusk’s follow-up, 2021’s Second Place, is a psychodrama about artistic production that sacrifices realistic world making for the starkness of fable.[Read: Has Rachel Cusk reached the limits of the English sentence?]Now, in Parade, the element to be swept away is character itself. Gustave Flaubert once notoriously commented that he wanted to write “a book about nothing”; Cusk wants to write a book about no one. No more identities, no more social roles, even no more imperatives of the body—a clearing of the ground that has, as Cusk insists, particular urgency for writing by women, who have always had to confront the limits to their autonomy in their quests to think and create. The question Parade poses is what, after such drastic removal, is left standing.If this sounds abstract, it should—Cusk’s aim is abstraction itself. Parade sets out to go beyond the novel’s habitual concretion, to undo our attachment to the stability of selfhood and its social markers. We are caught by our familiar impulses; trapped within social and familial patterns and scripts; compelled, repelled, or both by the stories of how we came to be. What if one didn’t hear oneself, nauseatingly, in everything one said and did, but instead heard something alien and new? This is Cusk’s negative theology of the self, a desire to imagine lives perfectly unconditioned and undetermined, no longer shaped by history, culture, or even psychological continuity—and therefore free from loss, and from loss’s twin, progress. It is a radical program, and a solitary one.To be concrete for a moment: The book comes in four titled units. Its strands are not so much nested as layered, peeling apart in one’s hands like something delicate and brittle. What binds them together is the recurring appearance of an artist named “G,” who is transformed in each part, sometimes taking multiple forms in the same unit. G can be male or female, alive or dead, in the foreground or the background, but G always, tellingly, gravitates toward visual forms rather than literary forms: Parade is in love with the promise of freedom from narrative and from causality that is offered by visual representation. We remain outside G, observing the figure from various distances, never with the intimacy of an “I” speaking to us. G is sometimes tethered to the history of art: Parade begins by describing G creating upside-down paintings (a clear reference to the work of Georg Baselitz, though he goes unnamed); a later G is palpably derived from Louise Bourgeois, the subject of an exhibition that figures in two different moments in the novel. Yet G tends to float free of these tethers, which threaten to specify what Cusk prefers to render abstractly.[From the January/February 2017 issue: Rachel Cusk remakes her fiction in Transit]Cusk imagines a series of scenarios for G, often as the maker of artworks viewed and discussed by others with alarm, admiration, or blasé art-world sophistication. When the shape-shifting G moves into the foreground, shards of personal life surface. As a male painter, G makes nude portraits of his wife that lurch into grotesquerie, imprisoning her while gaining him fame. As a female painter, she finds herself, as if by some kind of dark magic, encumbered with a husband and child. Another G abandons fiction for filmmaking, refusing the knowingness of language for the unselved innocence of the camera: “He wanted simply to record.” Whatever changes in each avatar—G’s gender; G’s historical moment; whether we share G’s thoughts, see G through their intimates, or merely stand in front of G’s work—the differences evaporate in the dry atmosphere that prevails in Parade. G, whoever the figure is, wants to disencumber their art of selfhood. So we get not stories but fragmented capsule biographies, written with an uncanny, beyond-the-grave neutrality, each of them capturing a person untying themselves from the world, casting off jobs, lovers, families.People on their way out of their selves: This is what interests Cusk. From a man named Thomas who has just resigned his teaching job, putting at risk his family finances as well as his wife’s occupation as a poet, we hear this: “I seem to be doing a lot of things these days that are out of character. I am perhaps coming out of character, he said, like an actor does.” The tone is limpid, alienated from itself. “I don’t know what I will do or what I will be. For the first time in my life I am free.” Free not just from the story, but even from the sound of himself, the Thomasness of Thomas.Parade’s hollowed-out figures have the sober, disembodied grace of someone who, emerging from a purification ritual, awaits a promised epiphany. The female painter G, having left behind her daughter with a father whose sexualized photographs of the daughter once lined the rooms of their home, is herself left behind, sitting alone in the dark of her studio: This is as far as Cusk will bring her. They’ve departed, these people, been purged and shorn, but have not yet arrived anywhere, and they stretch out their hands in longing for the far shore and lapse into an austere, between-worlds silence. Cusk observes an even more disciplined tact than she did in Outline. If regret lurks in their escapes—about time wasted, people discarded, uncertainty to come—Cusk won’t indulge it. She seems to be not describing her figures so much as joining them, sharing their desire, a kind of hunger for unreality, a yearning for the empty, unmappable spaces outside identity. The result is an intensified asceticism. Her sentences are as precise as always, but stingless, the edges of irony sanded down.What Cusk has relinquished, as if in a kind of penance, is her curiosity. Even at its most austere, her previous work displayed a fascination with the experience of encountering others. That desire was not always distinguishable from gossip, and certainly not free of judgment, but was expressed in an openness to the eccentricities of others as a source of danger, delight, and revelation. These encounters appealed to a reader’s pleasure in both the teasing mystery of others and the ways they become knowable. In Parade, Cusk seems to find this former curiosity more than a little vulgar, too invested in what she calls here “the pathos of identity.”Nothing illustrates this new flatness better than “The Diver,” Parade’s third section. A group of well-connected art-world people—a museum director, a biographer, a curator, an array of scholars—gathers for dinner in an unnamed German city after the first day of a major retrospective exhibition of the Louise Bourgeois–like G. The opening has been spoiled, however, by an incident: A man has committed suicide in the exhibition’s galleries by jumping from an atrium walkway. (It is one of the novel’s very few incidents, and it occurs discreetly offstage.) The diners collect their thoughts after their derailed day, ruminating on the connections between the suicide and the art amid which it took place, on the urge to leap out of our self-imposed restraints—out of our very embodiment.Their conversation is detached, a bit stunned, but nonetheless expansive: These are practiced, professional talkers. The scene is also strangely colorless. In discussing the hunger to lose an identity, each speaker has already been divested of their own, and the result is a language that sounds closer to the textureless theory-Esperanto of museum wall text. The director weighs in: “Some of G’s pieces, she said, also utilise this quality of suspension in achieving disembodiment, which for me at times seems the furthest one can go in representing the body itself.” Someone else takes a turn: “The struggle, he said, which is sometimes a direct combat, between the search for completeness and the desire to create art therefore becomes a core part of the artist’s development.”It is politely distanced, this after-suicide dinner in its barely specified upper-bourgeois setting, and all of the guests are very like-minded. The interlude generates no friction of moral evaluation and conveys no satiric view of the quietly distressed, professionally established figures who theorize about art and death. What one misses here is the constitutive irony of the Outline trilogy, the sense that these people might be giving themselves away to our prurient eyes and ears. One wants to ask any of Parade’s figures what anguish or panic or rage lies behind their desire to cease being a person—what struggle got them here.If Parade feels too pallid to hold a reader’s attention, that is because it tends to resist answering these questions. But abstraction’s hold on Cusk isn’t quite complete, not yet, and she has one answer still to give: You got here because you were mothered. The book comes alive when Cusk turns to the mother-child relationship—a core preoccupation of hers—and transforms it into an all-encompassing theory of why identity hampers and hurts, a problem now of personhood itself as much as of the constraints that motherhood places on women. Every one of Parade’s scenarios features mothers, fleeing and being fled. Between mother and child is the inescapable agony of reciprocal creation. The mother weaves for her child a self; the child glues the mask of maternity onto the mother’s face. They cannot help wanting to run from what they’ve each made, despite the pain that flight exacts on the other. And so, pulling at and away from each other, mother and child learn the hardest truth: Every escape is bought at the expense of struggle and loss for both the self and someone else. Cusk is, as always, tough; she insists on the cost.This is where Parade betrays some sign of turbulence beneath its detachment. The novel’s concluding section begins with the funeral of a mother, of whom we hear this, narrated in the collective “we” of her children: “The coffin was shocking, and this must always be the case, whether or not one disliked being confined to the facts as much as our mother had.” A knotty feeling emerges in this strand, sharp and funny—the angry rush of needs caught in the act of being denied, both the need for the mother and the need to be done with her. It is the closest Parade comes to an exposed nerve. We both want and loathe the specificity of our selfhood. Cusk understands the implicit, plaintive, and aggressive cry of the child: Describe me, tell me what I am, so I can later refuse it! That is the usual job of mothers, and also of novelists—to describe us and so encase us. By Cusk’s lights, we should learn to do without both; freedom awaits on the other side.It may be, though, that the anguish of the mother-child bind feels more alive than the world that comes after selfhood. The problem is not that Cusk has trouble finding a language adequate to her theory of the burdens of identity—the problem may be instead that she has found that language, and it is clean indeed, scoured so free of attachments as to become translucent. Parade wants to replace the usual enticements of fiction—people and the story of their destinies—with the illumination of pure possibility. As such, the novel seems designed to provoke demands that it won’t satisfy. Be vivid! we might want to say to Cusk. Be angry; be savage; be funny; be real. Be a person. To which her response seems to be: Is that what you should want?This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “A Novel Without Characters.”
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Tornado Watch
Lee Isaac Chung was a junior in high school in 1996 when he and his father walked into a theater in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to watch a movie about tornadoes. Chung was skeptical of the premise. How could you make a whole movie about this? he wondered. If a tornado comes, you just run and hide.Throughout his childhood, when tornado season descended upon rural Arkansas, Chung would head outside to gaze at approaching storms. He found the buildup irresistible—the darkening skies, the shifting temperatures, the way the air itself seemed to change. “I would stay out there until it started raining,” he told me recently. “The adults are grabbing all the stuff, and I’m just standing out there, like …” He demonstrated: neck craned upward, eyes open wide, arms outstretched as if ready to catch the clouds.Generally, though, a tornado warning meant boredom more than thrills. The first time his family heeded one, they piled into his father’s pickup truck at two in the morning, ready to leap out and duck into a ditch if a twister got too close. Waiting inside the truck, Chung fell asleep. The funnel never arrived. Hours later, he woke up and asked his sister if the whole experience had been a dream.But that day in 1996, the movie Twister mesmerized him. He watched a vortex tear apart a drive-in theater and a cow get lifted into the air, mooing mournfully as it soared. More than anything, Chung was compelled by the movie’s storm-chaser heroes. Like his boyhood self, they were awestruck by the uncontrollable forces before them. Unlike his family, they rushed toward the danger.Twister captivated America, too. It was the second-highest-grossing movie of the year (behind Independence Day) and helped launch a series of climate-centric movies—The Perfect Storm, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012—that swallowed fishing boats, leveled cities, and demolished landmarks.Directed by Jan de Bont, who’d previously made the thriller Speed, Twister arrived in the golden days of CGI: Dinosaurs had been resurrected in Jurassic Park (1993), and one year after Twister, a massive ocean liner would splinter into the sea in Titanic. De Bont made the most of the rapidly improving digital tools, while also relying on the analog special effects of his earlier career. “When things fell from the sky, there were real things falling from a helicopter,” de Bont told an interviewer last summer. “If you film a car escaping a tornado in a hailstorm, it was real ice that came at us. It’s a movie that cannot be remade.” Perhaps not, but nearly three decades after Twister’s release, the film is getting an update called Twisters—and Lee Isaac Chung is directing it. Lee Isaac Chung in May 2024 (Photograph by Philip Cheung for The Atlantic) Chung is an unlikely choice for the job. His previous movies have mostly been quiet character studies. In his debut feature, 2007’s Munyurangabo, two friends travel across Rwanda years after the genocide there. Without depicting the violence in their families’ past, Chung traces how unspoken pain frays their friendship. Despite stellar reviews—Roger Ebert called Munyurangabo a “masterpiece”—what followed was a decade of making micro-budget indie movies. Then, in 2018, Chung accepted a job teaching filmmaking, believing that his time behind the camera was coming to an end. But first he wrote one more screenplay, in which he set out to tackle “the thing that matters to me the most”: the story of how his parents, South Korean immigrants, built a home in a place they struggled to fully understand.Minari (2020) is based on Chung’s childhood in the 1980s, when his father settled their family in Arkansas to start a farm. The movie, which ends in a devastating fire that nearly destroys the livelihood the family has worked so hard to build, is a delicate portrait of the sometimes bitter realities of chasing the American dream. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Chung was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.Chung recognizes how bizarre it must seem that his follow-up project is Twisters. He remembers seeing online commenters wondering what he could possibly get from taking on such popcorn fare, aside from a sizable paycheck. But his decision to make Twisters is a surprise, he told me, only to people who haven’t seen his work. “You know,” he said, smiling, “Minari is like a disaster movie, but on a smaller scale.”In the original Twister, Jo Harding (played by Helen Hunt) is a professor who reunites with her estranged meteorologist husband, Bill (Bill Paxton), to test out his prototype for a new tornado-data-gathering device on a uniquely powerful cyclone. Part of the movie’s appeal is the infectious camaraderie of its ragtag crew of storm chasers (including two played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Alan Ruck). But Twister is a thriller, not a character study—backstory and dialogue are mostly in service to the action. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt in Twister, 1996 (Everett Collection) To get the job directing Twisters, Chung had to pitch his vision for the film to its producers, including one of his childhood heroes: Steven Spielberg. Chung explained that he imagined the movie as something more than a frenetic natural-disaster story. To him, the original Twister was a comedy of remarriage between Hunt’s and Paxton’s characters; he wanted Twisters to draw its own tension (and occasional levity) from the shifting interpersonal dynamics at its center.The new movie centers on Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a meteorologist traumatized by a past brush with a particularly vicious tornado. When she returns to Oklahoma to help a former classmate, Javi (Anthony Ramos), on a mission to plant data-tracking radar devices near tornadoes, she struggles to overcome her fear of the storms that are now her life’s work. Little by little, her bond with Javi and her evolving friendship with Javi’s rival storm chaser, Tyler (Glen Powell), help her rediscover her purpose. “The twisters are there to challenge the characters, drawing out their fears and testing their courage,” Spielberg told me in an email. “Isaac and I talked about the power of these storms as background for the characters to explore their relationships.”Of course, the movie only works if it also delivers the pulse-quickening action of the original, a style of directing that Chung had to learn. To prepare, he studied how action-film directors he admired—including de Bont and Top Gun’s Tony Scott—used long lenses and shaky camerawork to heighten the “pure energy and intensity” of their set pieces.Chung understood, too, that a movie about tornadoes would land differently in 2024 than in 1996. Although Twisters is far from a climate-change polemic, Chung, who majored in ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, sought to base his film in an atmosphere of heightened anxiety about extreme weather. Kate’s mother (Maura Tierney), a hard-bitten farmer, is convinced that there are more tornado outbreaks than ever before. Chung incorporated actual climate science as well, foregrounding new technologies that have emerged alongside the global rise in extreme-weather events. Javi’s mission to create three-dimensional maps of tornado structures using radar data, for instance, is based on a real initiative to improve weather-forecasting models.One morning in April, I visited Chung at his office in Los Angeles, where he was editing the movie. In the hallway hung a poster displaying the Enhanced Fujita scale, which measures a tornado’s intensity from EF0 to EF5—EF5 being, as any Twister fan knows, the kind that rips telephone poles from the ground and sends tractors hurtling through the air. With the film’s release date approaching, the staff had added a magnet reading We Are Here to the chart as a way to track their collective stress level. When Chung and I walked by the poster, he slid the magnet a smidge closer to EF0. It was a tranquil day.The making of Twisters was less serene. Though the funnels themselves would be inserted digitally, Chung pushed to film in Oklahoma so he could shoot overcast skies during tornado season. But this meant that actual tornadoes caused frequent delays, forcing cast and crew to halt production and hunker down until a storm passed.And then, two months into the shoot, Chung faced a personal tragedy: His father died suddenly. He was devastated; he’d chosen to make Twisters in part because his father had loved the original. The Hollywood strikes started soon after his father’s death, giving Chung time to mourn. When he returned to set, he found it helpful to carve out moments to pray—for his family, and for perspective on the daily challenges of filmmaking. He’d grown up religious, attending church regularly, and he took solace in prayer. “It crystallized for me on Twisters that I had to rely on faith a lot more,” Chung said. “I do feel like I surrender to something much bigger than me.”The more tumultuous things became on set, the more Chung found he had to let go. As Steven Yeun, who played the patriarch in Minari, told me, Chung “is someone who has control and is willing to relinquish control at the same time.” Steven Yeun (left) in Minari, 2020 (Josh Ethan Johnson / Courtesy of A24) In some ways, Chung’s movie is a classic thriller in the Twister mold. It’s undeniably fun, with harrowing, windswept action scenes. Chung channeled de Bont in mixing computer animation and practical effects—including pelting actors with real ice—to re-create the visceral feel of the original. But he was also at pains to make his own movie. He told me he had to dissuade his crew from inserting distracting callbacks to the old film. “Everybody has been trying to sneak a cow into this movie, and I’ve been systematically removing them,” he said with a laugh. He kept just one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of flying livestock for hard-core fans to find.The final film feels distinctly Chung’s. Twisters dramatizes the turbulence of his characters’ relationships, and their individual arcs of self-discovery, as much as the building storms. Daisy Edgar-Jones recalled how much thought Chung put into Kate’s trajectory—his determination, “amongst all of the kind of fun and the thrill, to also find that really human story of a person who’s grieving and who’s dealing with PTSD and heartbreak.” On-screen, she conveys an unusual vulnerability and depth for a thriller heroine.Chung also gives the movie a vivid sense of place. He pushed to stage scenes on a farm and at a rodeo, spaces he remembered from his youth. After leaving Arkansas, Chung had discovered how often people misunderstand rural America; he wanted to depict the toughness and resilience he’d seen during his childhood, “to get this right for back home.” In one scene, Glen Powell told me, Chung asked him to say the word home as if his character, a researcher and YouTuber who frequently drives straight into the middle of storms to livestream the chaos, was surprised by how much the idea meant to him. “It became the seed I built a lot of my character off of,” Powell said. The movie, he added, “is really about pride in this place, pride that you stay in a place in which danger can fall from the sky at any point.” Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, and Glen Powell in Twisters, 2024 (Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures & Amblin Entertainment) Before a screening at the end of April, Chung asked the sound team to incorporate more seasonal bug noises—crickets, grasshoppers—into a sequence of Kate driving home to her mother’s farm. As the new mix played, Chung felt transported to his childhood as well as to the moment when he’d filmed the scene last summer. It had been his father’s birthday, he told me, and they’d spoken on the phone. Watching the scene again, he was hit by a wave of emotion. “I just lost it while I was watching the movie, and I kind of felt like, Well, I needed that,” he said. “I needed to realize how personal this thing is to me.”Around the postproduction offices, Chung has sketched several doodles of the film’s characters, peeking out cheerfully from the corners of whiteboards. On the wall in one office, his 10-year-old daughter added her own stick figure: Chung admiring a tornado, a grin stretching across his face. In her rendering of her father, his arms are outstretched, as if he’s about to catch the twister himself.This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “Tornado Watch.”
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What’s the deal with Jerry Seinfeld?
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 30: Jerry Seinfeld attends SiriusXM's 'Unfrosted' Town Hall at SiriusXM Studios on April 30, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for SiriusXM) In the last few months, Jerry Seinfeld — the comic whose eponymous sitcom perfected consciously apolitical nattering about the mundanity of modern life — has repeatedly popped up in the media because of his weightier opinions. During and after the promotional cycle for his recent Netflix movie Unfrosted, a comedy about Pop Tarts that divided critics and snagged few viewers, Seinfeld ruffled audiences on the left and repeatedly won accolades from the right with headline-grabbing comments on everything from student protesters to toxic masculinity. Many of these comments are the typical “comedian bashes woke audiences” shtick we’ve heard so often in recent years. His Seinfeld co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus recently addressed this rhetoric in an interview with the New York Times magazine, stating that she’s wary of comedians who complain about “political correctness.” “To me, that’s a red flag,” she said, “because it sometimes means something else.” Typically, the more comedians protest the intrusion of politics into comedy, the more they themselves start sounding awfully political. That’s what we’re seeing now with Seinfeld, who has for years bemoaned political correctness and whose public profile has become more complex since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. While more and more celebrities began to publicly advocate for a ceasefire on behalf of Gaza, Seinfeld continued to vocally support Israel, even attending a controversial military training camp in the occupied West Bank. This has led to ongoing backlash and public protest against him — criticism Seinfeld has frequently reframed as antisemitic. In an interview with incendiary anti-woke provocateur Bari Weiss, he suggested the criticism was “silly” and misguided since comedians “really don’t control anything.” He also pivoted to domestic concerns like his nostalgia for “real” men, “dominant masculinity,” and the absence of “an agreed-upon hierarchy” in society — which, he implied, is why we have road rage. This notion of comedy and politics as separate is one Seinfeld clearly holds sacrosanct. To Weiss, he stated that the only rule in comedy is “Is it funny?” adding, “Nobody cares really about anything else.” Of course, people care greatly about the “anything else”; it’s why comedy as an art form has constantly faced censorship, blacklisting, and backlash when it gets too stridently political — as it often does. Seinfeld seems to want to pretend that he is fully apolitical, taking a kind of “who, me?” approach to the idea that he’s a political person. It’s a position he’s adopted repeatedly over the last decade, all while complaining regularly about “political correctness.” He’s explicitly brought this “harumph, kids too woke” rhetoric into his comedy shows, like his lackluster 2020 Netflix standup special 23 Hours to Kill. The dearth of cultural traction that special got, as well as the then-and-gone blip of Unfrosted, speaks to how Seinfeld is situated as a public figure now. Though his cultural influence is huge, his post-Seinfeld output has had little staying power; his most successful recent work, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, was a conversational web series that ran from 2012 to 2019. To be fair, almost nothing can equal Seinfeld’s imprint, but in the absence of another true breakout (like, say, Louis-Dreyfus’s Veep or Seinfeld creator Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm) Jerry Seinfeld, the person, has more interest among fans than his current creative works. What he says offstage matters, and what he’s saying feels indicative of how insulated decades of fame and wealth have made him. He isn’t on top of the cultural conversation. He became famous well before the social media age, and he hasn’t had to contend with the two-way communication celebrities are forced to be in with their fans today. It’s reminiscentof Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has tainted her legacy with a campaign of transphobic hate, all while depicting her justifiably upset critics as an angry mob. Like Rowling, Seinfeld’s current politics are intruding on fans’ enjoyment of his past and present work. Like Rowling, Seinfeld’s doubling down on his anti-woke opinions has metastasized into other revanchist takes, like the desire to return to an outmoded, Mad Men-eramasculinity.And like Rowling and other tarnished popular figures such as Elon Musk, Seinfeld doesn’t seem prepared to handle online discourse and criticism. It seems self-evident that Seinfeld’s angst isn’t about” or even the deterioration of some kind of cultural order, but rather what happens when politics get in the way of his relationship with the audience. Seinfeld wouldn’t be the first person who wanted to divorce his celebrity from his personal politics. In a previous era of comedy or celebrity, that wouldn’t have mattered; but today’s cultural and political climates aren’t extricable from each other — a reality famous people often seem unwilling or unable to grasp. For some in the audience, separating Seinfeld the comedian from Seinfeld the tacit supporter of the Israeli government just isn’t possible — not when that government has conducted a horrific offensive that has led to the loss of tens of thousands of civilian lives and what my colleague Zack Beauchamp has called “a humanitarian nightmare on an unimaginable scale.” Seinfeld’s thoughts on gender and tradition only add to the confusion about his current persona, so at odds with the one he spent decades cultivating. Seinfeld clearly thinks his opinion shouldn’t matter much; after all, he’s just one late-career standup guy. But the audience is paying more attention than ever to personal opinions, and as the master of inconsequential comedy, he should know better than anyone how much the tiny things can matter.
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