January 11, 2012
With the results of the New Hampshire primary coming in almost exactly as expected last night, the 2012 Presidential race has now seen four significant developments within a few days. In order of importance, this is how I would rank them—number one being the most significant and number four the least:
4) Mitt Romney’s big victory: As the results came in, Mitt’s supporters were understandably keen to remind us that this is the first time a non-incumbent Republican candidate has been victorious in both Iowa and New Hampshire. According to exit polls, he did well among all the major voting groups in the Republican party, winning over forty-two percent of conservatives—more than twice the share of his closest rival, Ron Paul—and thirty seven per cent of moderates and liberals. He finished ahead among high school graduates, college graduates, and post-graduates. He was the first choice of Protestants and Catholics. He even came out in front among tea party supporters. And a hefty sixty-six per cent of voters said he would be the most likely candidate to beat Barack Obama.
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January 11, 2012
In her novel “How It All Began,” Penelope Lively moves expertly between streams-of-consciousness and a wry omniscient voice to investigate her characters with precision and tenderness. The mischievous narrative traces the consequences of a random mugging on a London street that ripples out into an interconnected urban universe, shaking marriages and ruining businesses. A retired teacher moves in with her daughter to convalesce; the daughter’s employer gives a bad speech; his niece leaves a damning message for her lover. There are pleasures to be had as well and the book concludes on an uptick. Yet the novel’s happy ending is deceptively simple—of all the book’s insights into human nature, the most perceptive regard growing old, as Lively portrays the grace and humiliations of old age with an even hand.
January 10, 2012
The Presidential race has been good to Mitt Romney. It now seems inevitable that, barring some scandal or other disqualifying event, he will eventually be the Republican nominee. But a candidate who should be raising his arms in unalloyed triumph tonight—with the networks having called New Hampshire for him as soon as the polls closed, he’s officially the first modern Republican who’s not already President to win both Iowa and New Hampshire—is instead battered and bleeding.
The attacks that Romney has faced in the lead-up to today’s New Hampshire primary haven’t done anything to shake his position as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. But they have made it clear that he must quickly bring the primaries to an end, and put a stop to the blows that his opponents have been raining down upon him, if he is to have any hope of unseating President Obama.
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January 10, 2012
Since the fifth of January, the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy has been escorting a Russian tanker through the frozen Bering Sea toward Nome. The tanker, the Renda, is carrying more than a million gallons of petroleum products for the Alaskan city, which did not receive its normal barge delivery of winter fuel this past autumn because of shipping delays and severe weather. Barge delivery may not be possible again until the summer; meanwhile, Nome could run out of fuel by March. The Healy’s progress had been slowed by what a Coast Guard spokesman yesterday called “some really dynamic ice.” (Check out the icebreaker’s webcam for some startling images of the frozen seas.)
For New Yorkers, who have so far enjoyed a milder-than-normal winter (today’s high, 49, was seven degrees above the historical average), such a situation may be difficult to imagine. Nevertheless, in February of 1948, a Coast Guard icebreaker, the Eastwind, was needed to guide tankers and barges up and down the frozen Hudson River. “The Eastwind is something less than handsome, being a squat craft with a foreshortened bow, a bulging middle, and a deck crowded with cranes, guns, boats, sailors, and an Airedale named Skunk,” Gardner Botsford and John Mcarten wrote in a Comment. They went on to describe the ship’s duties:
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January 10, 2012
This week in the magazine, Connie Bruck writes about the entertainment mogul Philip Anschutz. On Tuesday, January 17th, at 3 P.M. E.T., Bruck will answer readers’ questions in a live chat. Sign up for an e-mail reminder below, and come back Wednesday to join the discussion.
Illustration by Mark Ulriksen.
January 10, 2012
Since the destruction of the Twin Towers, ten years and three months ago, two new edifices have risen. Both were the subject of contentious battles in courts, the political arena, and elsewhere; both have a way of provoking irrational responses. One is maddeningly unfinished, and the other disturbingly unclosed. But one, the new tower at Ground Zero, is beautiful; that is becoming more and more evident as it gets higher, and its façade refracts the light of different seasons. We can look at it with some pride. The other, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which opened exactly ten years ago this Wednesday, is ugly, and only gets more so—distorting, rather than reflecting, our values. It is the bad twin.
And yet politicians, including most of the candidates running for the Republican nomination, treat Guantánamo as some sort of singular treasure. (Ron Paul is a notable exception.) Mitt Romney has said that far from closing the prison “we ought to double Guantánamo.” Gingrich has made a point of complaining about Boumediene v. Bush, a decision that affirmed the right to habeas corpus for prisoners. (The plaintiff in the case, Lakhdar Boumediene, told his story recently in the Times; one wonders if it would surprise most Americans to know that he was seized not on some battlefield in Afghanistan, but arrested in Sarajevo? Or that in the end, with something like a shrug, it became clear that there was no real case against him?) But decisions like Boumediene are among the few solaces of Guantánamo’s decade. They allow one to see the actual prisoners, and not a scratched-out caricature, and prevent the government from using Guantánamo not to securely guard our enemies but to hide our mistakes.
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January 10, 2012
Adelson, like other members of his family, had been a Democrat. But, as his wealth grew, he began to favor tax-averse Republican economic policies. He argued to an associate recently, “Why is it fair that I should be paying a higher percentage of taxes than anyone else?” Three years ago, at an event in Washington, D.C., celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Adelson, who was being honored that evening, told the audience about the time he had spent with William Bush, the brother of George H. W. Bush, during the 1988 election. “He explained to me what Republicanism was all about … so I got to learn about it and I switched immediately!” Adelson said.
—Connie Bruck, “The Brass Ring,” June 30, 2008
Photograph by Mike Clark/AFP/Getty Images.
January 10, 2012
If there’s one thing most people can agree on these days it’s that political reporting has gone to the dogs. Even some of my colleagues subscribe to this view. In a Daily Comment last week, George Packer had a rip at the reporters covering the Republican primaries, lamenting that they no longer cover real issues but merely treat politics as light entertainment. George was particularly exercised about the campaign posse’s failure to dwell on Rick Santorum’s comment in Iowa that President Obama is engaging in “absolutely un-American activities.” George wrote, “Once demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.”
This sounds kind of serious. Maybe those tweet-happy, trivia-obsessed McMuffins really are letting down the profession and the country, turning Presidential politics into a game show. And since I’m sitting here waiting to find out how the horse race in New Hampshire turns out, rather than doing some research into the historical demonization of African-American political leaders, or whether Mitt Romney’s get-tough approach to China is credible from a game-theoretical perspective, maybe I’m guilty of the same thing.
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January 10, 2012
In an open letter that ran as a full-page ad in Variety yesterday, Kim Novak, who’s seventy-eight, did what divas do: she exaggerated, declaring, in all capital letters, “I WANT TO REPORT A RAPE”:
I FEEL AS IF MY BODY—OR, AT LEAST MY BODY OF WORK—HAS BEEN VIOLATED BY THE MOVIE, “THE ARTIST.”
She explains, of course, that she’s referring to the fact that brief excerpts from Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Vertigo” are used in the soundtrack of Michel Hazanavicius’s film. The fact that she feels herself to be the film’s defender (“I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN SPEAK NOW”) is ultimately less interesting, except from a psychological perspective (it’s an amazing episode in the life of a great actress) than the overall point she makes, in her final, all-caps paragraph, regarding those who would “USE AND ABUSE FAMOUS PIECES OF WORK TO GAIN ATTENTION AND APPLAUSE FOR OTHER THAN WHAT THEY WERE INTENDED.”
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January 10, 2012
The central drama in Lydia R. Diamond’s banal and tedious comedic play, “Stick Fly,” is not the wise-cracking, Neil Simon-influenced male characters (even when one of them takes a nap, it’s funny in quotes) but that old postmodern bogeyman: a white person. The LeVays are an affluent black family living in a Romare Bearden, Jean-Michel Basquiat dotted house in Martha’s Vineyard. Joe LeVay (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) is the crusty but benign (again in quotes) patriarch who has two sons: Kent (Dule Hill) and Flip (Mekhi Phifer) who bring their respective female partners home for the weekend.
Given the names of Joe’s sons, one suspects, despite all the LeVays talk of black pride, that the real model for success is how WASP and seemingly down every one can be, all at the same time. Indeed, when it’s revealed that Flip’s girlfriend, Kimber, is white (Rosie Benton, the only performer doing any real acting in the piece), the family insists that she’s Italian, and from Europe, and thus ethnic, too. But she’s just a regular white person, albeit one who teaches inner-city kids in a public school far, far away from the semi-rustic splendor of the LeVays beach getaway. And Kimber has heart. But since this play panders to black audiences, Kent’s girlfriend, Taylor (Tracie Thoms), voices the million and one reasons why white people—and white women in particular—are evil, shady, and vampiric.
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