“See You Yesterday” and the Perils—and Promise—of Time-Travelling While Black
Loopholes, resurrected characters, plot resets, ever-branching arcs: time travel is an infinitely flexible conceit, limited only to its own pseudoscientific rules of causality. The new Netflix movie “See You Yesterday” makes an unusual contribution to the time-travel canon while highlighting one of its most prominent flaws: the racial privilege baked into these stories, or the…
Ayşegül Savaş on Imitation and Identity
In “Canvas” the narrator, a graduate student, is renting an apartment from an older woman, an artist named Agnes. The artist has arranged to use her studio there whenever she visits the city, yet while the two women sometimes share the same space, they barely know each other. What does that type of relationship—one of…
The Impeccably Understated Modernism of I. M. Pei
In John Updike’s story “Gesturing,” first published in 1980, the newly separated Richard Maple finds himself in a Boston apartment with a view of a startling new skyscraper. “The skyscraper, for years suspended in a famous state of incompletion, was a beautiful disaster,” Updike writes, “famous because it was a disaster (glass kept falling from…
Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations
Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic, in 2014, he didn’t expect the government to make reparations anytime soon. He told David Remnick that he had a more modest goal. “My notion,” Coates says, “was you could get people to stop laughing.” For Coates, to…
This Summer’s Do’s, Don’ts, and Things That Will Inevitably End Up Happening
Do: Explore a new warm-weather hobby, like kayaking, gardening, or hiking. Don’t: Invest a lot of money in accessories for your hobby before trying it out. Thing That Will Inevitably End Up Happening: You purchase gardening shears, a single oar, and cute hiking boots, only to spend the bulk of your free time watching a…
Is America Ready to Make Reparations?
Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn Late in the Civil War, the Union general William T. Sherman confiscated four hundred thousand acres of land from Confederate planters and ordered it redistributed, in forty-acre lots, to formerly enslaved people—a promise revoked by President Andrew Johnson almost as soon as it was made. More than a hundred…
What to Stream This Weekend: The Third Season of Joe Swanberg’s “Easy”
The third season of Joe Swanberg’s Chicago-based series “Easy,” which dropped on Netflix two weeks ago, is anchored by an idea that’s as much a matter of aesthetic form as of dramatic substance. The nine episodes are centered on crucial conversations on which the very stuff of life—love and money, work and family, long-held dreams…
How Nancy Pelosi’s Tactics Affirm the Trumpian Style of Politics
The President of the United States is erratic, illiterate, and doesn’t want to know what he doesn’t know. The President has alienated former allies, befriended or courted murderous dictators, and has repeatedly brought the country to the brink of nuclear confrontation. The President lies constantly, knows that he is lying, and demands that Administration officials…