Jennifer Szalai

During the 1930s, New York-based anthropologist Franz Boas grew increasingly worried about events in his native Germany. He was in his 70s, and close to retiring from Columbia University, where he taught his students to reject the junk science underpinning the country’s restrictive immigration laws, colonial expansion and Jim Crow. Born into a Jewish burgher family, Boas was horrified to see how the Nazis took inspiration from Americans’ pathbreaking work in eugenics and state-sanctioned bigotry. He started to put the word “race” in scare quotes, calling it a “dangerous fiction.”

Boas is at the center of Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air,” a group portrait of the anthropologist and his circle, who collectively attempted to chip away at entrenched notions of “us” and “them.” “This book is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time,” King writes, “the struggle to prove that — despite differences of skin color, gender, ability or custom — humanity is one undivided thing.”

A century ago, the prospect of a common humanity seemed radical to an American public that had been schooled in the inherent superiority of Western civilization. Boas and his disciples argued for pluralism and tolerance at a time when cross-cultural empathy was deemed not just threatening but almost unfathomable.

King’s elegant and kaleidoscopic book takes its title from Zora Neale Hurston, a student of Boas’ who contrasted the capacious perspective offered by the “gods of the upper air” with the cramped corner guarded by the “gods of the pigeonholes.” Conducting ethnographic research in the Caribbean, Hurston said that she planned to return to the United States with two books: “One for anthro. and one for the way I want to write it.” That second book became her lush novel about life around the Gulf Coast, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

Hurston, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Ella Cara Deloria are the other central figures in King’s book; like Boas, all of them came to see anthropology “not just as a science but also as a state of mind.” His ideas were particularly appealing to women who chafed at the patriarchal order. Men were constantly spouting specious and self-serving theories of what was natural; here was a man suggesting that those things might not be so natural after all.

Boas became a pivotal figure in the discipline — though at first he was marginal, an itinerant scholar who had a hard time landing a secure position in the United States. For a while he held a curatorship at the relatively young American Museum of Natural History, but the museum was a creature of the establishment, hosting grand conferences on eugenics and showcasing displays on the “ill effects of racial interbreeding.” The then-dominant school of anthropology propped up a narrative tracing “the stages of human culture,” from “savagery” through to “barbarism” and finally to “civilization.” Mainstream scholars insisted that white supremacy was justified by head measurements and heel length.

Overturning this terrible science required more than fervent criticism. King, a professor at Georgetown and the author of several books about Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, describes how Boas tried to use the methods of physical anthropologists against them, deploying calipers and eye-color meters to show that the children of immigrants, born in the United States, had more in common with other American-born children than with the national groups represented by their parents. But Boas’ work in the field only accounted for part of his influence. It was mainly through his teaching at Columbia and his nurturing of a new generation of anthropologists that he changed how many Americans saw the world and, consequently, themselves.

King weaves in the stories of Hurston and Deloria, who used what they learned from Boas to study their own communities. Hurston’s “Mules and Men,” a book about African-American folklore, included an immersive account of her return to the Florida she left during the Great Migration, and her experience as not just an observer of the community but a participant in it. Deloria, who was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was a co-writer with Boas of “Dakota Grammar”; she worked on it for a decade, explaining to Boas the delicate process of deciding on the right gifts to coax candid talk from her informants. “To go at it like a white man, for me, an Indian,” she said, “is to throw up an immediate barrier between myself and my people.”

Mead and Benedict found a measure of freedom in their work. The thrice-married Mead, whose “Coming of Age in Samoa” argued that many assumptions about adolescence and sexuality were culturally contingent, had little patience for the monogamy that was expected of her; what a puritan culture wanted to call “deviancy” was, King writes, “a simple mismatch between her own temperament and the society into which she had been born.” Benedict, for her part, had been a depressed housewife before she became an anthropologist (and, for a time, Mead’s lover); she articulated the Boasian approach in her book “Patterns of Culture,” and gave its core idea a memorable name: “cultural relativity.”

King includes some of the more vexed aspects of this history, including Boas’ involvement in a sham funeral for an indigenous Greenlander whose cadaver had been secretly harvested in the name of scientific research. “Boas’s ideas,” King writes, “were often ahead of his practice.” Not to mention that social science is, well, an inexact science. The honest observer was bound to realize “how hard it was to pin down anything at all about someone else’s culture.”

This looks to be the perfect moment for King’s resolutely humane book, even if the United States of the early 20th century isn’t quite the perfect mirror. Boas and his circle confronted a bigotry that was scientifically endorsed at the time, and they dismantled it by showing it wasn’t scientific at all; today’s nativists and racists generally don’t even pretend to a scientific respectability, resorting instead to a warped version of cultural relativism for fuel in their culture war.

But what Boas advised wasn’t so much a program as a disposition — an openness toward others and a scrutiny of oneself. As King writes, “The most enduring prejudices are the comfortable ones, those hidden up close.”

“Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century”

By Charles King

Illustrated. 431 pages. Doubleday. $30.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/books/review-gods-of-upper-air-charles-king.html" id="cf96aed5-1bbd-313f-ac09-b3b853f067a7">The New York Times</a>.

(Books of The Times)

How a Group of Heretical Thinkers Chipped Away at the Idea of 'Us' and 'Them'

Toward the end of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” linguist Gretchen McCulloch acknowledges a paradox at the heart of her book. On the one hand, books about usage tend to enshrine language in a set of rules, and woe to anyone who tries to break them. On the other, the “new rules” floating in the digital ether are constantly changing; anything tethered to the material world of dead trees can’t possibly keep up.

McCulloch doesn’t have a problem with this. “Rather than thinking of books as a way of embalming language, of rendering it fixed and dead for eternity,” she writes, “we can think of them as maps and guidebooks to help people navigate language’s living, moving splendor.”

With “Because Internet,” she has written an incisive and entertaining guidebook of her own. I was reflexively suspicious of her title — the “because noun” construction is quintessential internetese — but by reading this book I’ve gained a clearer sense why. To someone like me, who was introduced to email in college, the language of online chatter can look almost aggressively cute in the context of a book.

I’m one of what McCulloch calls, with her linguist’s affection for taxonomy, the Semi Internet People — those who “defined themselves by ambivalence towards technology and an orientation towards offline relationships over online ones.” Unlike Full Internet People, who grew up with the internet and never questioned its social potential, Semis tend to assume that conveying the entire social meaning of a message is better accomplished by a voice conversation, whether in person or (to the barely disguised panic of Full Internet People) in a phone call.

But the phone itself was once a profoundly disruptive technology for the English language (and presumably for other languages, too, though this book’s focus is English). As McCulloch explains in one of many illuminating historical anecdotes, simply settling on a standard greeting made for acute confusion. What initially started as a battle between “ahoy” and “hello” (another contender was “what is wanted?” — my new phone greeting) was eventually resolved in favor of “hello”; the word has the same origins as “holler,” and was used at the time as a call for attention.

“Hello” later became an acceptable greeting for all kinds of interactions, but it took a while for it to lose its whiff of impertinence. Now “hello” is not just polite but even a bit formal, compared with a nonchalant “hi!” or “hey!”

Or make that “hey!!!!!” Exclamation points, unlike the period, have so far escaped obsolescence in customarily punctuation-free online interaction; if anything, they’ve been cheapened by overuse, with a single exclamation point being negligibly more eager than no exclamation point at all.

But a string of them, in our age of hyperbole, can sound insincere. McCulloch doesn’t parse the ascendancy of the double exclamation, but “!!” — taking care to keep one’s exclamation points to exactly two — is apparently emerging as the marker of genuine enthusiasm.

For now, at least. One of the overarching themes of “Because Internet” is how fluid all of these norms are. McCulloch says that online exchanges like chats, texts and social media posts afford linguists like her an ideal opportunity for study. Internet language is “beautifully mundane” and, unlike speech, it leaves behind a convenient written record.

Formal language, she says, is mostly disembodied; informal language isn’t. When we talk to a friend, we deploy gestures and facial expressions to give more context to what we’re saying; on the phone, without visual cues, our vocal inflections, volume and laughter do the job. McCulloch is remarkably good at showing how internet speech has been evolving “to restore our bodies to our writing,” as certain online conventions have changed over time.

Take “LOL,” or what is now more typically written as “lol.” As early internet slang, “LOL” meant “laughing out loud,” but then its definition softened, acquiring additional layers of meaning. The lowercase “lol” is still a “word in transition,” McCulloch says, signifying “amusement, irony and even passive aggression.” It can temper a statement that might otherwise sound confrontational (“what are you doing out so late lol”) or gently poke fun at someone (“good morning lol” to a friend who woke up at noon).

McCulloch is such a disarming writer — lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject — that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety. Emotions can be quickly and efficiently conveyed by the “sarcasm tilde” (“isn’t that ~special”) and “expressive lengthening” (“yesssss” and “bothhhh”). A lot of innuendo can be contained in the tiny emoji of an eggplant.

But being attuned to such fine gradations of meaning can make for extreme sensitivity, too. A Full Internet Person might read annoyance or anger into a sentence that ends with a period. I was surprised to learn that the dot-dot-dot of ellipsis in emails and texts, which I usually associated with a simple (and harmless) pause in thought, is “especially perilous.” Younger people indicate a simple pause with a line break or a new message; they “infer emotional meaning” from an ellipsis because they wonder what it’s doing there, and what it might be insinuating.

Reflecting on these changes in “expressive typography,” McCulloch is fully celebratory: “I’d gladly accept the decline of standards that were arbitrary and elitist in the first place in favor of being able to better connect with my fellow humans.” She sees internet language as offering us a chance “to write not for power, but for love.” But it’s hard to look at online discourse today and fail to notice that some people are writing for hate. The “in-group vocabulary” of internet language and memes isn’t just inclusive; its ability to induce a “rush of fellow-feeling” often relies on excluding an out-group, too.

Formal language can be chilly and impersonal, but it abides by explicit rules and can therefore be taught, rather than relying on fuzzier paths of transmission. As McCulloch herself observes, the formality is designed to appeal to a general audience — something that used to sound basic and boring but seems to be in awfully short supply these days.

“One type of writing hasn’t replaced the other,” McCulloch writes, taking care to emphasize that the situation between formal language and internet language isn’t zero-sum. She’s immersed in online life, where she sees the future looking emancipatory and bright. “There’s space, in this glorious linguistic web, for you,” she insists. I hope she’s right lol.

Publication Notes:

Understanding the New Rules of Language”

Illustrated. 326 pages. Riverhead Books. $26.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/books/review-because-internet-understanding-new-rules-language-gretchen-mcculloch.html" id="884d6247-fea9-3b82-acae-99e822f84465">The New York Times</a>.

Why Has Language Changed So Much So Fast? 'Because Internet'

In an age of glowing brain scans and plentiful pharmaceuticals, it can be hard to remember that psychiatrists — not exactly known for their aversion to dispensing medication — were once derided for not taking medicine seriously enough.

But as Anne Harrington reminds us, it wasn’t all that long ago when psychiatrists were pilloried as a bunch of woolly Freudians in thrall to specious ideas about absent fathers and smothering mothers. (Or absent mothers — there were apparently any number of ways for mothers to impair the mental health of their children.) In her new book, “Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness,” Harrington, a historian of science at Harvard, says that psychiatry’s biological turn took place sometime around 1980, and it was so revolutionary that before the decade was up, the profession’s “transformation into a biological discipline seemed complete.”

There’s a good deal of drama contained in that little word “seemed.” What “seemed complete” actually wasn’t, Harrington argues, as such biological triumphalism began to unravel in the 1990s and the 2000s. Anticipated discoveries in the biology of mental illness, vigorously hyped before they even arrived, never panned out; all of psychiatry’s diagnostic categories are still based on observations of clinical symptoms rather than biological markers of disease. Criticism from outside the profession precipitated “a sense of internal crisis” within it. A number of psychiatry’s practitioners are beginning to concede that “it overreached, overpromised, overdiagnosed, overmedicated and compromised its principles.”

This realization won’t necessarily put an end to what Harrington calls “the century-long — if also repeatedly frustrated — effort on the part of especially American psychiatry to define a biological mission for itself.” The potential rewards are too great. Biology is supposed to offer rigor, precision, measurements — enticing possibilities when it comes to something as nebulous and complex as the mind.

The story Harrington tells is one of push-and-pull, back-and-forth. She starts by presenting the myth she wants to dismantle — the heroic tale of biology’s triumph in the 1980s over a half-century of vulgar Freudianism. The clean lines of that cartoonish tale are easy to delineate. The case Harrington makes to rebut it is more intricate and winding, though her prose remains clear and crisp. Several times she alerts the reader to narrative road bumps by slipping in an “ironically.” I was grateful for these signposts. It turns out that psychiatry’s understanding of mental illness is full of hairpin turns and unintended consequences.

To hear the vanguard of psychiatry’s biological revolution tell it, the late 19th century was a period of incredible scientific progress for the profession, interrupted only when Freud and his acolytes took over in a palace coup. But the nostalgia obscures why psychiatry became vulnerable to a Freudian incursion in the first place. The 19th-century way of “thinking biologically,” Harrington writes, was fixated not on biochemistry but on brain anatomy. When it came to the prospect of individual recovery from mental disorders, clinicians were fatalistic rather than hopeful. They were preoccupied with “degeneration” and drawn to eugenics.

In the United States, “feeblemindedness” became a catchall diagnosis deployed by advocates of forced sterilization. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing the Supreme Court’s majority opinion for Buck v. Bell in 1927, called the eugenicist program “better for all the world” because, as he put it, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Six years later, the Nazis cited the Buck v. Bell decision as an inspiration for their own sterilization program — which in turn laid the foundations for the Third Reich’s systematic murder of those deemed genetically tainted and mentally ill.

Harrington is unsparing in her depiction of what often resembled a biological fetishism. Schizophrenic patients were subjected to insulin-induced comas or had their brains scraped by lobotomies. Some therapeutically minded psychiatrists, so impressed by the germ theory of disease, believed that psychosis could be cured by the surgical excision of “infected” organs like teeth, ovaries and colons.

Psychoanalysis and talk therapy were supposed to be antidotes to such cruelty and coarse reductionism, and by broadening psychiatry’s concerns from mental illness to the larger category of “mental hygiene,” the profession could serve a social function, too. In the postwar United States, robust mental health was seen as necessary armor for the Cold War. “The greatest prerequisite for peace,” President Harry S. Truman said in statement to the American Psychiatric Association, “must be sanity.” Neo-Freudian psychiatrists warned about bad moms who coddled their sons and thereby weakened national efforts to fight the Communist menace.

One pattern you begin to notice in “Mind Fixers” is how psychiatric theories — whether biological or psychoanalytical — had a way of grafting themselves onto prevailing prejudices of the day. Another pattern has to do with how each approach prided itself on being more compassionate and less stigmatizing than whatever had come before. Psychoanalysis might have emerged in reaction to biological psychiatry, but once the postwar psychoanalytic dispensation created “a generation of scapegoated parents” who had been blamed for their children’s mental illnesses, Harrington writes, the biological revolution of the 1980s started to look like a “road to redemption.”

We know what happened after that. Psychiatrists, seeking to distinguish themselves from other mental health professionals, moved away from talk therapy and guarded their prescribing rights. Financial incentives provided by the pharmaceutical industry meant that psychiatrists helped drug companies repurpose old medications for new illnesses, like “social anxiety disorder.” Antipsychotics would no longer be limited to schizophrenic patients; as one drug company researcher said, “It’s not like we’re making any more schizophrenic brains.” It was the medical equivalent of mission creep.

Harrington doesn’t romanticize the world of mental illness before drugs — drugs that many patients credit with offering relief and even a chance at survival. What psychiatry needs to do, she says, is narrow its focus to the most severe forms of mental illness and “make a virtue of modesty” rather than hubris. She knows it’s a somewhat fanciful idea, but it’s a measure of her own clear-eyed approach that she appeals to psychiatric practitioners’ self-interest by invoking that most valuable and (these days) elusive currency: trust. “The field would be freed,” she writes, “to find ways to rest its authority and status on more authentic foundations.”

‘Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness’

Illustrated. 366 pages. W.W. Norton &amp; Co. $27.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/books/review-mind-fixers-psychiatry-biology-mental-illness-anne-harrington.html" id="209c2bca-46d2-37a7-ad96-b1838a4a43bc">The New York Times</a>.

Mental Illness Is All in Your Brain -- or Is It?

Avid readers of Robert Caro may greet his new book, “Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing,” with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. On the one hand: Another Caro book, and it’s not a biography! On the other hand: Another Caro book — and it’s not a biography?

Considering that the 83-year-old averages a book a decade, his fans might wonder whether “Working” will reset the clock that started in 2012, when the fourth book of his multivolume magnum opus, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” was published.

No need to worry, although this assemblage of personal reflections and interviews may give the true Caro completist a creeping sense of déjà vu. Much of the material was either published before or distilled from stories Caro has recounted elsewhere, and the book reads as if it were designed to divert as little of his time as possible. (Caro says he has a “full-scale memoir” planned, to be completed after the next Johnson volume, although at his age, he says, he can also “do the math.”) Small and charming at about 200 pages, a quick spritz instead of a deep dive, “Working” is like the antithesis of Caro’s labor-intensive oeuvre, making it strangely reassuring proof that he is, well, working.

The next Johnson book will be “the fifth of a projected three volumes,” he writes, declining to get into specifics (“My writing seems never to come out well if I’ve talked about it beforehand”) while promising that it will be the final installment. That means it will have to cover, among other things, the presidential election of 1964; Johnson’s Great Society programs and his continuing feud with Bobby Kennedy; the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; the decision not to run for re-election in 1968; Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; Bobby Kennedy’s assassination; and Johnson’s post-presidency life until his death in 1973.

Not to mention the escalation of the war in Vietnam, a subject about which “the LBJ Library is opening up new files all the time.” It sounds like biography writing as Zeno’s paradox — getting infinitesimally closer to the end without ever reaching it.

Caro, though, wouldn’t have it any other way. His research methods are deservedly legendary. He and his wife, Ina, pore through archival documents with a determination to “turn every page.” He tracks down as many people to talk to as he can, counting 522 interviews for “The Power Broker,” his landmark biography of Robert Moses, and “thousands” for the Johnson books.

But these standard techniques are just a start. He and Ina moved from their home in New York to the Texas Hill Country in 1978, living there for three years to better understand Johnson’s childhood. (To get the local women to warm to her and open up about what their lives were like before Johnson brought electricity to the region in the ’30s and ’40s, Ina taught herself how to make fig preserves.) Caro has said he wants to spend time in Vietnam to get a sense of what it felt like “to fight in the jungle.”

All of this painstaking work takes time. The writing itself comes quickly and easily — so much so that critic R.P. Blackmur, who taught Caro at Princeton, admonished him to “stop thinking with your fingers.” The prose in Caro’s biographies is a mesmerizing combination of fine-grained, meticulous detail recounted in lush, incantatory sentences; he is, as he says repeatedly in “Working,” always trying to accumulate enough material to “show” rather than to tell — “to make readers not only see but understand and feel” the consequences of power.

Because power, Caro says, is his real subject. He doesn’t think of his books as biographies in the conventional sense. “From the very start,” he writes, “I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times.” Robert Moses was an unelected bureaucrat whose public works projects transformed the skyline and shorelines of New York City; Lyndon Johnson was a ruthless opportunist and an astonishingly effective legislator who transformed the country’s social landscape. These were men who channeled power, wielded it, embodied it.

Caro talks a lot about power in “Working.” It can corrupt, yes, but not always. “Once you get enough power, once you’re there, where you wanted to be all along, then you can see what the protagonist wanted to do all along, because now he’s doing it,” he says. “What power always does is reveal.”

It’s a memorable line, from an interview Caro gave to The Paris Review in 2016. It appears not only in “Working” but also in “Master of the Senate,” the third of the Johnson books, published in 2002. There are a number of anecdotes in “Working” that Caro has shared before — after all, his books are so comprehensive that it only makes sense for, say, “Means of Ascent,” the second book in the Johnson series, to include a section on how Caro tracked down Luis Salas, a former voting official who confessed to helping Johnson steal the 1948 Senate election.

The version of the Salas story that Caro includes in “Working” is presented as an example of what Caro calls “something in my nature” — “the part of me that, now that I was writing books, kept leading me, after I had gotten every question answered, to suddenly think, despite myself, of new questions that, in the instant of thinking them, I felt must be answered for my book to be complete.”

This is awfully windy — where is Blackmur when you need him? Caro makes the same point more succinctly when writing about “The Power Broker,” recalling how he was swept away by the scandalous material he was discovering and an accompanying sense of duty. “I just couldn’t write the book about the great highway builder — couldn’t outline it, even — without showing the human cost of what he had done,” he writes. “There really was no choice involved.”

For someone so interested in the power of others, Caro seems coy about his own power to shape legacies. The writer who emerges from these pages is so humble as to be self-effacing — a quality that makes his halting bids at introspection, for all their genial appeal, seem mostly denuded of the drama that normally fuels Caro’s work.

But then the stubborn willingness to keep digging, to rescue secrets from oblivion, is a form of power, too. Recalling why Moses finally relented and agreed to talk to him, Caro writes: “At last someone had come along who was going to write the book whether he cooperated or not.”

‘Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing’

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/books/review-working-robert-caro.html" id="f8c51f3d-d22b-3c9f-ae35-382a3558a5fe">The New York Times</a>.

In 'Working,' Robert Caro Gives Us a Brief Look at the Process of Writing His Epic Books

The dainty slippers pictured on the cover of “Women’s Work” may have been a marketing ploy on the part of the publisher, but the image is so precious, so trite and so likely to backfire that it deserves extra points for sheer perversity. Anyone who picks up Megan K. Stack’s new book anticipating a gentle meditation on domestic life will be swiftly disabused within the first 20 pages, when Stack describes in (legitimately) excruciating detail her experience of going into labor with her first child. “I distinctly felt my hip bones dragging themselves apart,” she writes. “My skeleton was being dismantled.”

Stack, formerly a war correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, left her plum journalism job in 2011, full of expectation for the child she was about to have and the second book she planned to write. “I imagined long, silent afternoons in spotless rooms, typing clean lines of prose while the baby napped beatifically in a sunbeam,” she recalls.

Needless to say, life as a new parent wasn’t so obliging — even if she and her husband, Tom, a journalist himself, could easily afford to outsource most of the domestic work in Beijing, where they lived. They hired a woman to watch their son and clean the house and cook the meals; a few years later, when Stack was pregnant with their second child and the family moved to New Delhi for Tom’s job, they employed two women at once to do the same things.

Memoirs about motherhood are exceedingly common, but “Women’s Work” dares to explore the labor arrangements that often make such books possible. It brought to mind “My Hollywood,” Mona Simpson’s excellent novel about the knotty bond between a composer and the Filipina caregiver she hires. As Stack herself admits — in an author’s note that’s as ruthlessly and relentlessly self-aware as the rest of her book — she had little in common with the women she employed. “They were poor women, brown women, migrant women,” she writes. “And at first I pushed them to the edge of thought. They were important to me, primarily, because they made me free.”

In Beijing she hired Xiao Li, or “Little Li,” who had left her own daughter behind in the care of grandparents because she couldn’t afford child care. Later, in Delhi, Stack hired Mary and Pooja, women from the mountainous region between Bhutan and Nepal who had also left their children in the care of relatives. Soon Stack became privy to their private lives, including pregnancies, abortions, binge drinking and domestic abuse. Whatever boundaries she may have tried to erect between herself and the women in her employ began to dissolve as she learned what it meant to have a home that was also, as she puts it, “a job site.”

There’s something jarring in this blunt phrasing — perhaps because the bubble of moneyed parenthood tends to be written about in tones of such woolly sentimentality or strenuous zaniness that the reminder of a brute economic fact can feel like an intrusion. Stack writes sharp, pointed sentences that flash with dark insight. “Why was it that, whatever you desired, you could find a poor woman to sell it?” she asks, putting baby-sitting on a continuum with pornography. While living in India, she visited China and met Xiao Li’s daughter — “the girl whose rightful allotment of nurturing care I had rented.”

Stack clearly doesn’t look saintly in her own account, though she’s so attuned to her own ambivalence and complicity that she doesn’t look quite villainous either; she seems overwhelmed by new motherhood, trying to maintain a sense of human decency while also acknowledging the fundamental indecency that allows her to afford a retinue.

When Stack allowed Xiao Li to return home to tend to her sick daughter, she congratulated herself “for being superior to those other, nefarious bosses” before interrogating Xiao Li in a way that made clear that Stack wasn’t so superior after all. In Delhi, Stack would sometimes try to step back and listen to the conversations she was having with Tom as if she were eavesdropping “on a couple discussing their servants,” she writes. “It was a disgusting sensation.”

Tom, though — Tom looks bad. He isn’t cruel to Stack. He wants her to write. He wants her to have help so that she can write — hired help, that is, because as much as he’s a “picky eater” and a “neat freak” (her words), he’s too busy with his job to lift up a mop or a saucepan. In Stack’s memoir — and it’s entirely possible that Real Tom has much more to commend him than Memoir Tom — he carries himself like a comfortable neoliberal patriarch, apparently unbothered by the economic forces that have allowed his family to wield so much power over their employees’ lives.

“So fire her,” he told Stack at one point, when she explained that she wasn’t getting much writing done while Xiao Li was away, tending to her daughter. “We are not a welfare state.”

The harsh lines in Stack’s portrait of Tom soften a bit when the family is in Delhi: He magnanimously insists on clean water delivery to Pooja in the servants’ quarters; he graciously offers Pooja an air conditioner. But his noblesse oblige only seems to kick in when he’s flush with good feelings toward an employee — which simply serves to underscore that such modest gestures are his to bestow or withhold.

Stack includes an epigraph from Adrienne Rich: “The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.” “Women’s Work” is so full of keen insights and shrewd observations that by the time Stack arrived at her What Needs to Be Done moment, a mere six pages from the end, she had already won me over so fully that I was only mildly exasperated when she landed on this: “The answer is the men.”

It is? Men, she says, have to do more of the housework and child care. Sure, yes, of course. But from the sound of it, running a bourgeois household to her family’s exacting specifications will necessarily consume more work than two people are able to give (especially if one of those people is Memoir Tom). Her wan conclusion to an otherwise fearless book feels like a bit of a put-on and a bit of a cop-out. And you don’t have to take it from me — you can take it from her. “When at last I have nothing to lose,” Stack writes, “it will be safe to think honestly.”

‘Women’s Work: A Reckoning With Work and Home’

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/books/review-womens-work-megan-stack.html" id="19979218-9971-35e7-af3b-68f3d0803c7e">The New York Times</a>.

Domestic Confidential: What Happens When a New Mother's Home Becomes a 'Job Site'

“Who is Gómez? Nobody knows.”

The person who issued this cryptic statement was none other than Gómez himself — Leonel Gómez Vides, a coffee farmer from El Salvador who showed up in Southern California on the doorstep of poet Carolyn Forché in 1977, with a bundle of papers under his arm and his two young daughters in tow. Within a few days he persuaded Forché to make her first trip to El Salvador, just as the country was on the verge of civil war.

In “What You Have Heard Is True,” Forché traces how this initial encounter with a stranger irrevocably changed the course of her art and her life. Forché was 27 at the time, a Midwesterner living in San Diego, with a budding reputation for her work. She had heard Gómez’s name before, when she traveled to Mallorca to translate the poems of his cousin Claribel Alegría, though nobody could say for sure whether Claribel’s cousin was working with the Salvadoran guerrillas or with the CIA.

Until the publication of this memoir, Forché's experiences in El Salvador — seven “extended stays” between 1978 and 1980 — have mostly stayed distilled in her poetry. “The Colonel,” collected in “The Country Between Us” (1981), begins with an elegant dinner at a colonel’s home (rack of lamb, green mangoes) and ends with him emptying a grocery sack full of human ears onto the table — ghastly trophies from a dirty war.

Taking its title from the first line of that poem, Forché’s memoir starts off slowly, as she describes in minute detail how she made the fateful and seemingly inexplicable decision to follow a mysterious stranger’s directive to take such a perilous trip. But once Forché’s story gathers momentum, it’s hard to let the narrative go. “What You Have Heard Is True” is billed, per its subtitle, as “a memoir of witness and resistance.” That’s fair enough, but it does this riveting book a mild disservice; the memoir I read was more intricate and surprising than such an earnest descriptor lets on.

For a while, it isn’t at all clear how much Gómez can be trusted. When he first shows up, he draws Forché pictures of Spanish galleons, explains how the conquistadors brutalized the Indians, and uses a toothpick holder and a saltshaker to dramatize the infighting among Salvadoran officers after nearly 50 years of a military dictatorship. He offers grisly disquisitions on the death squads, on the disappeared, on body parts washing up on the beach. Forché tells him that he would be better off enlisting a journalist to document what is happening in his country. “I want a poet,” he insists. “Why do you think I came all this way?”

Once Forché arrives in El Salvador, Gómez drives her around in his white Toyota Hiace, constantly glancing in the rearview mirror, a handgun tucked into a copy of Time magazine between them. He takes her to the countryside to meet with peasant farmers, or campesinos, who don’t have enough to eat. He takes her to the U.S. embassy, where the ambassador warns her against Gómez because “we don’t know who he is.” Gómez even takes her to El Salvador’s military headquarters, where he talks candidly to a lieutenant colonel about how all the disappearances are making the army look bad — before he asks whether he might use the lieutenant colonel’s shower.

The whole thing comes across as baffling — much as it does to Forché herself, at least at first. We gradually become acquainted with Gómez and his country through Forché’s eyes, as she starts off knowing almost nothing, then learns a little bit, and then a little bit more. Gómez is incensed by the abject poverty in most of his country, where campesinos live in huts made of mud and junkyard scraps. “If the Salvadoran campesinos fight,” he says, “they must win. If they do not win, they will suffer for another 200 years.”

But he’s also a landowner. He’s against corruption and in favor of reform, yet he claims “no doctrinal allegiances.” His copy of Machiavelli has been thumbed through so many times that it’s held together with a rubber band. When Forché remarks on the Che Guevara poster in his home, he says: ‘Yes, well, I have posters of Mussolini too, if the need arises.”

She realizes that what Gómez calls his “symphony of illusion” — “He talks to this one. He talks to that one.” — turns out to be the only way for him to help reformist efforts against a murderous regime while trying, as much as he can, to protect himself.

“Terror is the given of the place,” Joan Didion wrote in her 1983 book “Salvador.” Forché describes being chased by death squads — not once, but twice. The killings become so indiscriminate that she grows familiar with the “rotting, sweet, sickening” smell of dead bodies left by the side of the road. An excerpt from the unpunctuated notes she took at the time — scribbled in pencil, “to keep the writing light and erasable” — captures how corpses were mutilated into instruments of intimidation: “When mere death no longer instills fear in the population the stakes must be raised the people must be made to see that not only will they die but die slowly and brutally.”

Behind most of the killings during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war were government forces, which were in turn bolstered by American money and American training. Forché alludes to the political context in the book, but the shape of her memoir hews closely to what she herself saw and heard — and how, out of the horror, she began to discern what she needed to do.

Forché returned to the United States to write what she called “a poetry of witness” (“born to an island of greed / and grace where you have this sense / of yourself as apart from others”), married a war photographer, had a child. “You have to be able to see the world as it is, to see how it is put together, and you have to be able to say what you see,” Gómez said, but he left it up to Forché to figure out the rest for herself. “I do not have your answers,” he told her. “I am just a man.”

A Memoir of Witness and Resistance”

Illustrated. 390 pages. Penguin Press. $28.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/books/review-what-you-have-heard-is-true-carolyn-forche.html" id="8da1a63a-1249-33fb-aed8-66845b8d0359">The New York Times</a>.

A Poet Remembers Her Impulsive Trip Into a Civil War

The word “empire” has a distinct place in the American lexicon: readily applicable to other countries but rarely, if ever, to the United States itself.

Even in the spring of 2003, when U.S. forces were occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and government officials were writing torture memos, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemed almost offended when a reporter asked whether the United States was engaged in anything like “empire-building.” “We’re not imperialistic,” Rumsfeld insisted. “We never have been. I can’t imagine why you’d even ask the question.”

The tone of aggrieved incredulity may have been laid on a little thick, but Rumsfeld’s sentiment neatly aligned with how many Americans prefer to see their country — as a republic that was born from revolution and necessarily hostile to imperial rule.

This self-image is “consoling, but it’s also costly,” Daniel Immerwahr writes in “How to Hide an Empire.” “At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.” Even today, barely half of mainland Americans know that Puerto Ricans are fellow citizens.

Critics of U.S. foreign policy have long accused the country of imperialism in a general sense — of meddling and bullying, starting wars and inciting coups — but Immerwahr, a historian at Northwestern University, wants to draw attention to actual territory, to those islands and archipelagoes too often sidelined in the national imagination. For decades, scholars have researched American colonialism in places like the Philippines and Puerto Rico; Immerwahr builds on their work to encourage a shift in the typical “mainland” perspective of U.S. history, showing that “territorial empire” hasn’t been just an aberration but an inextricable part of the country’s fabric, woven throughout.

To call this standout book a corrective would make it sound earnest and dutiful, when in fact it is wry, readable and often astonishing. Immerwahr knows that the material he presents is serious, laden with exploitation and violence, but he also knows how to tell a story, highlighting the often absurd space that opened up between expansionist ambitions and ingenuous self-regard.

He divides the history into three phases. The first was the 19th-century period of westward expansion, including President Andrew Jackson’s forcible expulsion of Native Americans from their land. By the middle of the century, the second phase was also beginning, as the United States started to notice enticing bits of territory outside the continent, including small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

These places were rocky, barren and devoid of people; what they offered was plenty of nitrogen-rich bird droppings, the better to remedy the “soil exhaustion” of a rapidly industrializing United States. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 decreed that whenever an American citizen found guano on an uninhabited, unclaimed island, “such island, rock or key may, at the discretion of the president, be considered as appertaining to the United States.”

“It was an obscure word, ‘appertaining,'” Immerwahr writes, “as if the law’s writers were mumbling their way through the important bit.” It seemed to signal a discomfort, or at least the semblance of it. Soon enough, such official compunction was decidedly on the wane. Theodore Roosevelt, serving as William McKinley’s assistant secretary of the Navy, pursued the Spanish-American War of 1898 with the zeal you would expect of someone who toted around a book called “Anglo-Saxon Superiority.”

Immerwahr devotes several chapters to the ensuing five decades, as the United States annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines, brutally crushing independence movements, torturing Filipino insurgents with “the water cure” and giving mainland doctors veritable carte blanche to treat Puerto Rico as a medical laboratory. Seen through Immerwahr’s lens, even the most familiar historical events can take on a startling cast. Take World War II in the Philippines: Pointing to the murderous combination of American shelling and Japanese slaughter of civilians, he calls the war “by far the most destructive event ever to take place on U.S. soil.”

The role that racism played in the country’s colonial acquisitions was palpable but sometimes counterintuitive. While imperialists often spoke about “civilizing” the “savages,” some of the most ardent anti-imperialists in the 19th century were white supremacists like John C. Calhoun, the senator from South Carolina, who was wary of letting “any but the Caucasian race” into the Union. The 1867 purchase of Alaska from the Russians encountered similar resistance, with The Nation complaining about the prospect of “Exquimaux fellow citizens.” As Immerwahr tartly observes, “The deal went through only because, in the end, there weren’t that many ‘Exquimaux,’ and there was quite a lot of Alaska.”

Immerwahr brings the narrative up to the present day, exploring the American decision to give up territory after World War II, which he calls “virtually unprecedented” — after all, victorious countries tended to do the opposite. But this “twilight of formal empire” wasn’t simply the result of American selflessness. Technological advances eroded the connection between power and land. Securing access to a raw material like rubber mattered less when you could manufacture a synthetic version of it. The big exception, of course, has been oil — “the one raw material that has most reliably tempted politicians back into the old logic of empire.”

What the United States has now is a “pointillist empire”: specks of land scattered around the world that have served as military bases, staging grounds, detention facilities, torture sites. (The United States has 800 overseas bases, whereas Russia has nine; most countries have zero.) If Theodore Roosevelt was the swashbuckling emblem of the country’s formal empire, Herbert Hoover — “an astonishingly capable bureaucrat” before he became a not-very-capable president — represented the turn toward globalization, standardization and logistics.

It’s a testament to Immerwahr’s considerable storytelling skills that I found myself riveted by his sections on Hoover’s quest for standardized screw threads, wondering what might happen next. But beyond its collection of anecdotes and arcana, this humane book offers something bigger and more profound. “How to Hide an Empire” nimbly combines breadth and sweep with fine-grained attention to detail. The result is a provocative and absorbing history of the United States — “not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.”

—

“How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States"

Illustrated. 516 pages. Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux. $30.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to-hide-empire-daniel-immerwahr.html" id="38203826-5edf-317f-ac17-96aeafa94b47">The New York Times</a>.

'How to Hide an Empire' Shines Light on America's Expansionist Side

When it comes to experiencing music, our ears tell us only so much. In “Go Ahead in the Rain,” his book about A Tribe Called Quest, poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib recalls the determination with which he listened to the hip-hop group’s fourth album, “Beats, Rhymes and Life,” when it was released in 1996. Thinking it would be their last, he was intent on loving it.

His hands, though, were narrating another story. At the time, Abdurraqib was a teenager in Columbus, Ohio, where it got unbearably cold during the winter; fiddling with the buttons on his Walkman to skip a song on the cassette entailed exposing his skin to the frigid air. And yet: “I would pull my fingers out of gloves and rush to fast-forward what I could before the wind forced my hands back to the warmth they craved.”

Abdurraqib’s slender book is full of tactile moments like this, remembrances making it clear that A Tribe Called Quest will always evoke more for him than just a sound. “Go Ahead in the Rain” traces the story of the group over the past three decades. It pays attention to the larger changes in the culture, but its overall tenor is warm, immediate and intensely personal.

Abdurraqib begins with a soaring, wide-angle view of the musical traditions that slaves brought to America from West Africa — drawing a path from a percussion that was outlawed by 18th-century slave codes to a jazz that was “born out of necessity” — before landing on his own childhood as a “shy and nervous kid” who took up the trumpet in an attempt to connect with his father. A Tribe Called Quest offered another chance for connection; their early albums, like “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm” (1990) and “The Low End Theory” (1991), with their jazz samples and socially conscious lyrics, were deemed “acceptable” in his parents’ house, where a lot of rap was not.

Readers looking for a biography of the group will find some of the basics here, but it’s how Abdurraqib filters the information — absorbing it, refracting it through his own distinctive lens — that gives this compact book its power. He covers, among other things, A Tribe Called Quest’s beginnings in New York City; its involvement in the Afrocentric rap collective Native Tongues; and its nadir in the late ‘90s, when the visionary energy the group brought to bear on its first three albums dissipated into something that started to sound dutiful and desultory.

Two forces hastened A Tribe Called Quest’s breakup in 1998, according to Abdurraqib. One was large and impersonal, having to do with the state of hip-hop in the ‘90s, when a flood of money deepened the apparent divide between commercialism and authenticity, presenting artists with a stark choice: “Be real enough to stay underground, or go pop enough to get money.” He locates A Tribe Called Quest and its wide-ranging appeal “at the center of this tug-of-war,” with the group getting worn down by the strain.

This smart structural analysis is plausible enough, but what moves Abdurraqib the most is the intense and fractious friendship between two of the group’s core members, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. (Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White are also acknowledged as essential members in the book, but they appear mostly as onlookers to the main emotional drama.)

Abdurraqib remembers identifying with Phife from the start: the scrappy emcee who mastered the ironic art of the punch line, cutting grandiose bombast with comic self-deprecation. Q-Tip gets respect here for his brilliance and ambition, but Abdurraqib likens him to a perfectionist older brother: demanding and a bit aloof, seemingly oblivious to how hard Phife was trying to prove himself.

The theme of mortality runs through the book, which is billed as a “love letter” on the cover but could also be called an elegy. Phife died of complications from diabetes in March 2016, just after A Tribe Called Quest had reunited and recorded “We Got It From Here ... Thank You 4 Your Service,” their first new album in 18 years. The album was released just before midnight on Nov. 10, 2016, bearing lyrics that sounded veritably prophetic in light of the election results from just a couple of nights before. “All you black folks, you must go / All you Mexicans, you must go”: What might have constituted biting satire in a more (ostensibly) innocent time was beginning to sound like a news transcript.

“Black folks have been creating with their backs against the wall for years, telling the future, speaking what is coming to the masses that aren’t eager to hear it until what’s coming actually arrives,” Abdurraqib writes. He says he is drawn to vibrations, beats and bass lines — “that which can be felt more than heard.” You can trace a line between this sentiment and Abdurraqib’s stubborn loyalty to cassettes long after CDs became available. CDs promised convenience and flawless digital sound, but cumbersome tapes — “the most tedious and least practical” listening technology — offered something more tangible; their fragility and physical constraints, the effort it took to skip songs, “locked a listener into a commitment.”

Hip-hop albums in the 1990s were “sprawling, overrun with skits and Easter eggs” that you might miss if you messed with the fast-forward button. Similarly, the small size of Abdurraqib’s book belies how much it contains. In one chapter, he moves from The Source magazine to Toni Morrison to Emmett Till and Otis Redding; in another he moves from Philando Castile to Alton Sterling to Sterling’s job selling bootleg CDs and another “CD man” Abdurraqib once knew.

“It’s funny, isn’t it — the things that play on our screens and in our heads for years, detached from any fullness,” he writes. To isolate something, to shear it from its context, is to distort it; by gathering stories from the past, Abdurraqib situates A Tribe Called Quest within the fullness of history and memory.

With Phife gone, “a group like A Tribe Called Quest will never exist again,” Abdurraqib writes. “At least now, I think, we can lay them to rest.” This lush and generous book is a call to pay proper respects — not just to a sound but to a feeling.

“Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest"

207 pages. University of Texas Press. $16.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/books/review-go-ahead-in-rain-tribe-called-quest-hanif-abdurraqib.html" id="99fc9d44-920d-3cb6-a825-db981adffe63">The New York Times</a>.

An Intensely Personal Tribute to A Tribe Called Quest

Americans supposedly have little patience for expertise these days — except, it seems, when it comes to parenting experts, who continue to churn out guides as quickly as their audience can consume them. This appetite for counsel inevitably reflects deeper, often unspoken middle-class aspirations and anxieties; as psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips once observed, the appeal of such books goes beyond the immediate need to deal with a sullen teenager or a sleepless newborn. “Our obsession with child development and with so-called parenting skills,” he wrote, “has become a code for our forlorn attempt to find a sanity for ourselves.”

Jennifer Traig apparently agrees. In “Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting,” she takes solace in how useless, contradictory and downright harmful so much advice has historically been. “The things we take for granted as normal and natural strike parents in other parts of the world as absurd and dangerous,” she writes, in this brisk survey of child-rearing tips through the ages.

As the parent of two children and the author of previous books about obsessive-compulsive disorder and hypochondria, Traig wanted to examine how “developed-world, middle-class Westerners” learned to follow a script that is so culturally specific. She ended her research feeling not just informed but relieved: “People have done crazy, crazy things to their children throughout history, and the species continued all the same.”

The species may have survived, though the fates of individual children were another matter. The history recounted in this book is studded with violence and death. Child abandonment was once routine; in ancient Rome, 20 to 40 percent of babies were left to die of exposure. Even the advent of foundling hospitals in European cities didn’t help much; the mortality rates in some institutions (understaffed, suffused with disease) could reach 90 percent.

Parents have always found raising children to entail a great deal of work, enlisting relatives and servants — sometimes handing offspring over to religious orders. As Traig says, “the history of parenting is, in large part, a history of trying to get out of it.” This was true even when babies were considered little laborers-to-be, expected to contribute within a few years to the family livelihood.

Philosophers like Locke and Rousseau published treatises on childhood education, but it was only toward the end of the 19th century — when children became, in sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s memorable phrase, “economically worthless but emotionally priceless” — that parents began to see themselves as wholly responsible for cultivating a child’s intellectual and emotional life. In the 1970s, the term “to parent” emerged as an active verb.

A lot of parenting advice has historically had to do with the physical needs of the mother and child; a lot of it also turned out to be fatal. Colostrum, for instance, was once considered so toxic that mothers were instructed to feed their newborns honey instead, thereby trading the antibodies in breastmilk for botulism.

It was often male doctors who dispensed such advice — the same cohort that was so sure of its expertise that it unwittingly infected laboring mothers with puerperal fever in maternity hospitals during the 18th and 19th centuries. Doctors blamed the epidemic on sour breastmilk, tight corsets, bad air; it took a while before they grudgingly bought into the germ theory of disease and started to wash their hands between patients and after autopsies.

Traig’s book is filled with tales of men telling women what to do, and she’s candid about how furious it makes her. She calls one eminent 19th-century doctor “A PATRONIZING CHAUVINIST” (the all caps are all hers; she later admits that her go-to disciplinary move with her own children is to yell). Old medical textbooks, from the ancient Greeks through the medieval Europeans, are filled with men’s specious assertions about feminine hygiene: “I think we can agree that anyone who feels qualified to hold forth on something he has no actual knowledge of can, rather accurately, be called a douche,” she quips.

She isn’t wrong, but the nonstop vaudeville can get wearying. Some of her punch lines are so broad that they should be accompanied by a sad trombone. She describes the Puritans arriving to the U.S. “like a wet, smallpox-infected blanket to put a damper on all the fun” (genocide, amirite?). Lewis Carroll’s creepy overture to a young girl “starts to sound an awful lot like an invitation to a pool party at Roman Polanski’s.”

Parenting is a subject that generates so much piety that you can’t fault Traig for having a sense of gallows humor, though the calibration is off. Part of this has to do with how skillful and fluid a writer she is otherwise — the facts seem to tumble forth, in a way that makes her jokes feel superfluous (when they aren’t awful) and strenuous (when they are). Much of the story she tells is pieced together from other books, including Ann Hulbert’s “Raising America” and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s “Mother Nature.” Still, it’s a fascinating narrative, tracing the long history of mistakes and reversals and cultural presuppositions that have structured our most intimate relationships.

Depicting herself as both extremely lazy and extremely anxious, Traig says that what she wants the most as a parent is some reassurance that she isn’t doing it wrong: “Parenting is so hard; and like our kids, we’re all looking for permission to slack off in some areas.” Sometimes, though, Traig can’t help herself, declining to step away from the kid or the joke. “Doing nothing,” she admits, “is often the hardest thing to do.”

‘Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting’

Illustrated. 336 pages. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/books/review-act-natural-cultural-history-parenting-jennifer-traig.html" id="9fd55f04-bb4e-3c08-abd5-1c744cacba7b">The New York Times</a>.

Raising Kids Isn't Easy. Parenting Advice Often Makes It Harder.

It can be hard for criticism to cohere when it’s perforated by ambivalence. A rave coasts along, buoyed by enthusiasm. A pan serves up the dramatic tension on a platter: The people trying to sell you a book (or movie or play) insist that it’s great, and here’s why it’s unremittingly awful. Mixed feelings are trickier, and more vulnerable. They’re like unstable elements waiting to be pulled into a wishy-washy middle ground.

Reading “The Earth Dies Streaming,” a collection of film writing by A.S. Hamrah, you realize it doesn’t have to be this way. As the resident movie critic of the journal n+1, Hamrah is committed to his ambivalence, conveying it with a mixture of precision and conviction that will remind you how much more there is to be gleaned from a review than whether a movie is “good” or “bad” (even if it’s a movie you happen to deem very good or very bad indeed).

When he first started reviewing films, Hamrah was bothered by how easily his sentences could get sucked into the maw of the entertainment industry, and so he resolved “to never include anything in my writing that could be extracted and used for publicity.” Nothing that might become a blurb, that is, if he could help it. He decided to make his negative opinions unusable too, resistant to algorithm-driven cultural curation.

“Write so that Rotten Tomatoes cannot apprehend your work,” he suggests, “which will allow its meaning to be deformed to the point where studios will not know what to do with it.” This is perverse. It is also delightful. A review that begins with “Whit Stillman’s movies are like porn films with the sex scenes cut out” will entice a curious human and confound an aggregation machine.

Hamrah’s tenure at n+1 began in 2008, with an Oscars roundup that he literally phoned in because his day job kept him too busy. (For money and health insurance, he uses “semiotics to analyze television programming for a brand consultancy” — a postmodern occupation if there ever was one.) The riffs he dictated to his editor were terse and funny, with judgment slyly imparted through insinuation and association. He had this to say about “Atonement,” an adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel: “Everything McEwan writes ends up as a movie. Someday his shopping lists will be filmed.”

As clever as such lines are, they were recorded in another era. If you read “The Earth Dies Streaming” from beginning to end, and I suggest you do, you won’t get to that 2008 Oscars roundup until you’re almost finished with the book, which mostly proceeds in reverse chronological order. The first review meets us where we are right now, in Trump’s America. Hamrah describes “A Quiet Place,” a post-apocalyptic fantasy in which a nation of whiners is forced by noise-seeking monsters to stay silent, as “a horror movie for MAGA-ites.”

A political awareness imbues Hamrah’s criticism without weighing it down. He doesn’t succumb to a leaden moralizing because he pays close attention to the medium he’s writing about, alert to what he sees and hears. Gérard Depardieu in 2017 is “still half man, half wildebeest.” Anthony Hopkins, playing Alfred Hitchcock, is remembered for his prosthetic lips and his noisy slurping.

Steven Spielberg shows up periodically in these pages as a stand-in for a certain kind of Hollywood vision: so unquestionably talented and so exquisitely banal that even his vaunted liberalism can’t prevent him from churning out movies that often end up being fundamentally conservative, full of empty grandeur. Spielberg says how much he admires elders like Stanley Kubrick but then unwittingly botches the homage, using classic footage of Kubrick’s “The Shining” in “Ready Player One” only to deface it with what Hamrah calls “Scooby-Doo action.”

On the movies he likes, Hamrah is idiosyncratic, sometimes apparently surprised by his own surprise. “Flight,” starring Denzel Washington as a heroic pilot with an alcohol problem, “is so good, except for the syrupy last 10 minutes, that it is hard to believe Robert Zemeckis, who directed it, has spent the last 25 or so years since he made ‘Back to the Future’ directing the things he’s directed.” The quietly unnerving “First Reformed” prompts Hamrah to decide “it is time to admit that Ethan Hawke is the great survivor of his generation of male leads,” even if he “may play too nice sometimes.”

Every critic has a bugbear, and whenever you see the word “nice” in one of Hamrah’s reviews, you know he believes that something has gone awry — or maybe not awry enough. Nice is too comfortable and comforting to be trusted. It’s a gentrifying force, replacing whatever is “twisted and ugly” and singularly weird with an attractive sheen that might seem safer but ultimately isn’t. Like painter and critic Manny Farber, the subject of an incisive and moving essay in this volume, Hamrah is suspicious of anything that dulls the senses, lulling audiences into a false sense of security and therefore complacency.

Part of his vigilance extends to being attuned to the circumstances under which he watches movies. He contrasts the experience of sitting next to other critics at a press screening to watching a blurry bootleg video of “The Spiderwick Chronicles” in the crowded waiting room of a walk-in health clinic in Brooklyn. “As I sat there,” he writes, “in pain myself and barely able to focus, I realized that this was the future of moviegoing.”

Hollywood tries to be a dream factory, but real life inevitably intrudes. Hamrah misses a festival screening because of a therapy appointment. He slips in a conversation with his aunt, whose friend “sees a lot of movies for free” because “he knows people” through his job as a prison guard. Hamrah gets mistaken for Orson Welles, even though Hamrah doesn’t wear a hat or a cape and, unlike Welles, is very much alive.

Now that online streaming has made for a glut of unwanted DVDs, entire cinematic eras are being offered on the cheap. “I will never forget the time I saw a man in a parking lot scraping the snow off the windshield of his car with the DVD of ‘Independence Day’ he had just bought,” Hamrah writes. The image is so real and so vivid and so reflective of where we are now that my first thought was, “That ought to be in a movie.”

“The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/books/review-earth-dies-streaming-film-writing-a-s-hamrah.html" id="f60508f7-c36f-3eca-afff-2af8763dcf82">The New York Times</a>.

In 'The Earth Dies Streaming,' Film Criticism That Transcends Raves and Pans

These are fraught times, and while you may be scared, Tim Wu suggests that you may not be scared enough. Like Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk,” a recent book that shows how something most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about — government bureaucracy — is consequential (and potentially terrifying), Wu’s “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age” is a surprisingly rousing treatment of another presumably boring subject: mergers and acquisitions.

Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, argues that the M&amp;A; arcana that lawyers and economists haggle over have effects that spill far beyond their rarefied areas of expertise. “Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding an appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership,” he writes, by way of introduction and warning. “The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public.”

Unlike Wu’s previous books, “The Master Switch” (2010) and “The Attention Merchants” (2016), “The Curse of Bigness” is skinny, more of a dip with a snorkel than a deep dive. But the pithiness of this new volume is ideally suited to its subject. Wu doesn’t want to get into all the intricacies of antitrust law; if anything, an enormous book on the problem of enormity would only fool us into believing that the subject is more impenetrable than it really is — and stoke the confusion and apathy that have allowed decades of corporate consolidation to flourish in the first place.

Wu’s point is simple. Giant corporations, seeking to protect their advantage, try to turn their outsize economic power into political power. So to break their grip on American democracy, the government needs to break them up in turn. That this proposal might sound outrageously radical to certain ears is, Wu says, just one sign of how unprepared we are for our current moment. To show how busting up big businesses into smaller parts was once a veritable American tradition, he charts how antitrust law emerged in response to the grotesque inequality of the 19th-century Gilded Age.

When the Sherman Antitrust Act was signed into law in 1890, it had unanimous support in the House, though the language it deployed was both sweeping and severe, stating bluntly that “every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize” any area of business “shall be deemed guilty of a felony.”

Enforcing the law turned out to be another matter. A decade later, J.P. Morgan — “history’s greatest monopolizer,” as Wu calls him — created the behemoth U.S. Steel by merging hundreds of smaller firms, even buying out his fellow tycoon Andrew Carnegie in 1901 for an exorbitant sum ($480 million back then) that would make Carnegie the richest man in the world.

Wu is an able guide through the history — from Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign against “bad trusts” all the way to the expansive bloat of AT&amp;T; and Microsoft’s competition-crushing ambitions of more recent memory — but it’s on the level of ideas that his book comes into its own. Similar to the tech moguls of today, the monopolists of a century ago “liked to portray themselves as part of a progressive movement, striving toward a better age,” Wu writes, even if the endgame they were pursuing — essentially “pure economic autocracy” — was a direct rebuke to the foundational values of the republic.

But then competition can feel menacing — a grueling free-for-all that anyone with grand ambitions in business would prefer to do without. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel said as much in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in 2014, in an article with the piquant title “Competition Is for Losers.” “Capitalism and competition are opposites,” Thiel declared. “Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.”

No doubt the most die-hard Marxist would agree — as would Thiel’s fellow disrupters in Silicon Valley, though they tend to play down the allure of profit-making while talking a lot about how much value and “connection” they bring to the public.

Wu, who advised the Federal Trade Commission on competition issues during the Obama administration, doesn’t buy all the piety; nor should he or anyone have to, he says. Trying to distinguish between gigantic corporations that bring value to consumers from gigantic corporations that don’t is ultimately a mug’s game. Competition is a process, and the process should be protected; to fixate too much on the other stuff is to expect the legal system to make distinctions it isn’t equipped to make — pushing up the standard of proof and allowing enforcement to go slack.

But we’ve been conditioned to think that the only goal of antitrust law is to protect consumer welfare; as long as a business like, say, Amazon delivers lower prices on doodads for your home and diapers for your kid, it isn’t supposed to pose a monopoly threat, even as it gobbles up its competitors. This idea was once “considered absurd and even insane,” Wu writes. But its fiercest advocate, the rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, knew how to make it seductive to legal minds, offering a simple theory that allowed judges to make decisions with apparent precision and rigor. Explaining the theory’s journey from heresy to orthodoxy, Wu is gently scathing: “Bork’s antitrust economics are easy.”

Against Bork’s strictly minimalist idea, Wu advances another, more complex one, which was proposed in the early 20th century by the lawyer and eventual Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Worrying about the tendency of giant corporations to “exterminate” the competition in their inexorable march toward domination, Brandeis believed that the economy, and the businesses that are part of it, needed to operate at a human scale.

“What Brandeis really cared about was the economic conditions under which life is lived,” Wu writes, “and the effects of the economy on one’s character and on the nation’s soul.” It’s a big idea for a little book, but Wu knows how to keep everything concise and contained. “The Curse of Bigness” moves nimbly through the thicket, embracing the boons of being small.

“The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age”

154 pages. Columbia Global Reports. $14.99.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/books/review-curse-of-bigness-antitrust-law-tim-wu.html" id="a7d87acd-11c8-38b1-acba-a237fac64bc3">The New York Times</a>.

'The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age': Think Small When Too Big Poses a Danger

But it’s not as if the Trump team became more disciplined and tight-lipped in its second year. As Wolff explains in “Siege,” a number of the people who helped him on the first book have left the administration but are still in on the gossip loop, joining Wolff in what he calls “my train-wreck fascination with Trump — that certain knowledge that in the end he will destroy himself.”

One of these people is Steve Bannon, who gets pride of place in Wolff’s acknowledgments, thanked for “his trust and cooperation” as “the Virgil anyone might be lucky to have as a guide for a descent into Trumpworld.” Wolff says “it is a measure of Bannon’s character that he stood by his remarks in ‘Fire and Fury’ without complaint, quibbles or hurt feelings.”

This is a strangely effusive measure of gratitude for Bannon, whom Wolff calls “the man arguably most responsible” for Trump’s presidency. After all, Bannon isn’t exactly known for holding traditional values like “character” and “trust and cooperation” in much esteem.

“Siege” is ostensibly about Trump — portrayed here as a very unstable nongenius cracking under the pressure of being thrust into the highest office — but its guiding worldview looks remarkably like Bannon’s. It’s a mordant, readable tell-all designed to show how Trump, simply by being Trump, has made himself the perfect wrecking ball, blasting holes through an array of institutions.

There are salacious details in this book — many of which Trump’s critics will want to eat up — though with so many unnamed sources, Trump’s compulsion for hyperbole and Wolff’s own journalistic record, it’s hard to know which tidbits to trust. It makes more sense to read “Siege” less as a news report and more as a rhetorical gambit — a twisted bid to burnish Bannon’s anti-establishment legacy.

“Siege” begins in February 2018, and takes us up to the delivery of the Mueller report this past March. Leaked information about the book has homed in on Wolff’s claim that the Mueller team, back in March 2018, drafted a proposed indictment of the president — an assertion that a spokesman for the special counsel has already denied.

For anyone eager to relive the last year, Wolff tracks the scandals (or the major ones, at least — who can count?) in all their bewildering abasement. A sampler: There’s Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit. There’s Trump’s insistence that he could, if he needed to, pardon himself. There’s Melania’s mysterious hospitalization (Wolff doesn’t seem to know why she was hospitalized either). There’s the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, and Jared Kushner “in an off-the-record conversation with a reporter” trying to defend the Saudis by disparaging Khashoggi as a “terrorist.”

Kushner comes across in this account as perhaps the saddest figure of all: a hapless schemer. Wolff says that Kushner failed to pass the normal security clearances, and was granted a reprieve only when Trump intervened (calling this assertion “a fact baldly denied by Kushner and his wife”).

The Kushner family’s Byzantine real estate troubles were, Wolff says, mysteriously solved once a Toronto-based investment firm that worked with a number of sovereign wealth funds stepped in to bail Kushner out. Wolff has Kushner petitioning Henry Kissinger for his advice on international affairs, even floating the suggestion of Kissinger as Trump’s secretary of state soon after the 2016 election; at the time, Kissinger was already 94 years old.

(Books of The Times): You might think that Michael Wolff, whose blockbuster “Fire and Fury” wasn’t exactly a glowing portrait of President Donald Trump’s first year in the White House, might have burned so many bridges that a second insider book on the administration would have been an impossible task.

Jennifer Szalai

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