In “Seven Days in May,” a popular novel from the early nineteen-sixties that became a movie, a cabal of military officers conspire to overthrow the President of the United States, whom they regard as unduly sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
The story, along with such other Cold War fantasies as “Fail Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove,” belongs to a genre that shares certain assumptions and plot points. The President is a reasonable fellow, doing his best to insure the survival of the planet, and the villains are the defenders of the permanent bureaucracy, usually the military. Things don’t always end well in these sagas—to wit, the destruction of New York City, in “Fail Safe,” and of civilization, in “Strangelove”—but the underlying message is that the President always has the interests of the American people at heart.
The genre received a nonfiction update last week, when Andrew McCabe published “The Threat,” a book about his tenure at the F.B.I., which ended with a brief, tumultuous period as its acting director. The focus of his narrative is not seven but eight days in May of 2017, between President Trump’s firing of James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., and the appointment of Robert Mueller, the special counsel charged with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. McCabe’s tale is like a photo negative of the Cold War stories. Now the contest pits a despotic and, at times, seemingly deranged President against shocked and horrified bureaucrats scrambling to safeguard the basic principles of our democracy.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 4, 2019 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 4, 2019 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
The Puppet Masters - Compulsion, complicity, and the art of Bunraku.
The National Bunraku Theatre, in New York recently for the first time in more than thirty years, presented an evening of suicides. The performance, at the Japan Society, consisted of excerpts from two of the company’s most celebrated productions. In the Fire Watchtower scene from “The Greengrocer’s Daughter,” by Suga Sensuke and Matsuda Wakichi, from 1773, the titular character sacrifices herself to save a temple page boy she loves. In a scene from “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, from 1703, two lovers are driven to take their own lives. Both plays were inspired by real events, and Chikamatsu’s was followed by a wave of double suicides that led to a ban on further performances. This mirroring of life and art is all the more astonishing given the fact that the actors are not people but puppets.
The Convert - The sudden rise of J. D. Vance has transfixed conservative élites. Is he the future of Trumpism?
Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate had punctuated an astounding rise. Born in the small manufacturing city of Middletown, Ohio, he was raised by a drug-addicted mother and his beloved Appalachian-born grandmother, Mamaw. He worked his way up through storied American institutions: the Marine Corps, Yale Law School, Silicon Valley. “Hillbilly Elegy,” the best-selling memoir Vance published in 2016, made him famous, and his denunciations of Trump as “cultural heroin” for the white working class even more so. A few years later, he was a senator from Ohio, the Republican Party’s most effective spokesman for Trumpism as an ideology, and—both improbably and inevitably—the VicePresidential nominee. “If you think about where he came from and where he is, at forty years old,” the conservative analyst Yuval Levin, a Vance ally, said, “J.D. is the single most successful member of his generation in American politics.”
SONGS OF WAR
Early on in “Blitz,” Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a London factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan), aboard a train. Rather, George puts himself aboard; he twists angrily free of his mother’s grasp—“I hate you!” he cries—and tears off down the platform.
STAR-CROSSED
“Sunset Blud.” and Romeo Juliet,” on Broadway.
A PIECE OF HER MIND
Does the Enlightenment’s great female intellect need rescuing?
EACH MORTAL THING
What other creatures understand about death.
From the Wilderness
One morning in the rainy season, I went to bed at 6 a.m. after working all night and was on the verge of falling asleep when I was startled by the sound of my father’s voice coming through the air-conditioner next to my bed.
THE BIG DEAL
Joe Biden's economic policies are starting to transform America. Will anyone notice?
THE LAST MILE
The aid workers who risk their lives to bring relief to Gaza.
TAKE ME HOME
The filmmaker Mati Diop turns her gaze on plundered art.