Is it sacrilege to admit that I prefer Zadie Smith’s essays to her fiction? If you asked me to identify Smith’s most admirable qualities, the clear and precise thinking of her non-fiction work would be at the top of the list.
Thankfully, there’s very little end-of-the-world-ism in Intimations. Instead, Smith does what she does best, reflecting on the smallest details of the world remade by coronavirus: the way people interact, the noises that have disappeared, the language that people use. The closest Smith gets to End Times squalor is an essay hinging on President Trump’s March statement that “I wish we could have our old life back.”
Instead of blood and thunder, we get nuance and delight. Smith compares our willingness to keep working through the early days of the lockdown “like pugs who have been lifted out of a body of water, our little limbs keep pumping on.”
Smith compares the thought of carrying on small talk in the middle of all this to a meme of Mel Gibson talking normally to a hyper-gory Jim Caviezel in full costume for the bloodiest moment of The Passion of the Christ. She wonders how “all that prior abundance fit[s] into this new habitat.” She doesn’t make grand proclamations for the human race, just notices how we settle in the dust of this weird new world.
Intimations isn’t a heavy lift or a shocker. Most of its essays will likely be repurposed and absorbed into future editions of Smith’s essay collections. But for right now, it’s a visit from a friend a time when you most need it—a calming acknowledgement that, yes, the world has gone sideways, but we’re still here.
Last weekend, we passed a milestone moment in the 2020 election cycle: We are now less than 100 days away from Tuesday, November 3 — Election Day. In normal years, this would be the time when the general public really starts tuning in to the messages both parties are running with, familiarizing themselves with the candidates, and deciding who gets their vote.
But just as it has with every other aspect of our lives, the coronavirus pandemic has thrown everything we know about politics into disarray. It’s possible that voters, already familiar with Biden from his years as Obama’s vice president and well aware of President Trump’s COVID-19 response, have already made up their minds. Or it’s equally possible that the electorate will be rocked by a series of surprises that will change the foundations of the race between now and November.
Two things we do know for sure as we head into the home stretch of this never-ending presidential campaign season: first, people need to vote on Election Day; and second, coronavirus won’t disappear between now and then. Just as an economy is stronger when more people participate in it, a democracy is stronger when more people’s voices are heard. So how can we ensure that the people are heard, at a time when simply going into a busy public space is dangerous?
The coronavirus pandemic has made it almost impossible to operate the arts venues where people tend to gather and linger: galleries, arts education spaces and bookstores were all closed for months. For Ballard’s Push/Pull — a combination of outsider art gallery, small-press bookstore and education space — COVID-19 could hardly have been more devastating.
Director Maxx Follis-Goodkind says 2020 has basically been cursed from the start for Push/Pull: “There was major construction on the street for all of this year up until just a few weeks ago,” she says. “So we were already struggling and trying to figure out how to reach more people and establish different revenue streams.”
It’s not like it’s ever been easy; you don’t create an underground arts hub to get rich. Push/Pull was founded by Follis-Goodkind and her now-husband, artist Seth Goodkind, as a stall in the Greenwood Collective communal arts building. In Push/Pull, she says, “we wanted a space that was about art and illustration and comics and printing, encompassing the entirety of an artist’s career.”
A couple times an hour, a tiny swatch of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting flashes across my Twitter feed, courtesy of an automated account called @Bruegelbot. Bruegel’s paintings—and here we’ll just refer to him as “Bruegel,” setting aside the other painters with the same surname—are notoriously busy, packed with tiny figures going about their business in nearly every square inch of the painting. @bruegelbot is valuable because it removes the context of the painting; without all the business and busyness of Bruegel’s work surrounding them, I can better appreciate the details for themselves.
This tiny swatch of a painting has enough dynamic action in it to fill a painting on its own:
Of course, the too-muchness of a Bruegel painting is the point: you look at a Bruegel painting to feel overwhelmed, to hunt for the proverbial Waldo who will imbue your perception of the painting with a purpose. My focal point of a Bruegel painting will always, necessarily, be different than yours.
I stumbled across a perfect description of the seemingly random way details in a Bruegel painting latch onto your attention in “Heart Museum,” the sprawling lyric essay that opens Durga Chew-Bose’s collection Too Much and Not the Mood:
A Bruegel print hanging in our home was essentially my jackpot. I mined that peasant-wedding scene so intently that elements of its narrative details, like porridge bowls, the lip of a jug, that pureed Bruegel red—like tomato soup from the can—and a child in the foreground licking a plate, all belong to my memory’s reel. It’s the merging that occurs from housing a mental archive instead of contending with the sound of parents who were speaking to each other in a strained tone. Of momentarily acquitting myself of childhood grievances: of all the birds we hear in trees but never see, but know are there.
The word “narrative,” there, is key. Bruegel, to me, feels like the writer’s painter—though perhaps that could be colored by the fact that my introduction to Bruegel came in Michael Frayn’s comic novel Headlong, about the discovery of a lost Bruegel painting. But the stuffed locations and cramped characterization of Bruegel’s work are undeniably novelistic, and I believe that if a novelist like Donna Tartt or Cormac McCarthy could paint, their paintings would be like Bruegel’s: packed with human drama, as full of as much as they could realistically cram in before everything fell apart. The painting revealed at the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser novel Bluebeard must at least superficially resemble a Bruegel, because it’s a painting that basically contains everything the book had previously mentioned.
Bluebeard instilled in me the realization that most writers would be terrible painters. I worked at a newspaper for years, and listening to writers try to explain how the art department should illustrate their latest book review always led to blush of embarrassment. Often, the writers would unintentionally describe a hackneyed political cartoon from the early 1900s: “Maybe they could draw, like, Lady Justice standing in one corner and then over on the other side we could have soldiers and in the middle there could be a bunch of orphans standing and staring accusingly at the reader? But the reader won’t know they’re orphans, so maybe they should have a big ‘orphans’ label on them? And then in the sky is a general creeping sense of menace, with claws and fangs…”
A writer would never trust to a single picture what a thousand words could do. But I suppose that’s their job.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bruegel lately because I recently read Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels, a profusely-illustrated memoir-essay by Toby Ferris. The book’s conceit is, to put it kindly, a bit precious: at the age of 42—precisely half his recently deceased father’s age—Ferris sets out on a worldwide journey to view all 42 of the existing Bruegel paintings, in part because Bruegel died at the age of 42.
The premise is a bit like a bad high school algebra problem: a writer having a midlife crisis is on a train going west at 42 miles an hour, which is the same age his father hit midlife while on a train going east at 42 miles an hour, so what artificial quest can the writer choose to toss a narrative around this astonishing array of meaningless numerical coincidences? But thankfully, Ferris doesn’t make a big deal of sticking to the numerology laid out in the book’s promotional copy. Instead, Short Life is a rambling travelogue, an opportunity to see a small stretch of the world through Ferris’s eyes, magnified by the lens of Bruegel.
Ferris writes beautifully about the circumstances in and around Bruegel paintings. He’s the rare art historian whose prose can compete with its subject, in terms of sheer imagination:
When will the last Bruegel painting disappear? They are fragile. Which one will it be? And what about records of his paintings, his existence? Will his name vanish along with the last painting, or will he, some Apelles of a forgotten history, a forgotten Europe, persist as myth, the JPEGs flickering out on servers one by one, corrupt unreadable binary representations of long-forgotten cult objects?
Still, Short Life feels a bit like a comedic road trip film, with Ferris driving and Bruegel, the silent agent of chaos, riding shotgun. They play off each other in ways that seem to escape Ferris.
He observes that “Bruegel painted outsiders” including “beggars, peasants, children…at swim in a turbulent social sea.” It’s a striking observation because Short Life is a product of unobserved luxury: Ferris gets to travel in style, visiting large museums and reflecting on George Eliot in some of the world’s most beautiful locations. One can almost picture Bruegel wanting to stop to talk to a destitute woman at the side of the road, while Ferris turns up the radio and ever-so-slightly presses down on the gas pedal until the opportunity has passed.
To be fair, Ferris does occasionally come close to recognizing the Odd Couple-ness of the pairing: “I have just come from Prague, where summer is at its glorious height in the Lobkowicz Palace. But it is winter which underpins all of Bruegel,” he intones.
Ultimately, Bruegel proves to be an uncomfortable partner for an interior journey explained in a book-length monologue. Bruegel rejects interiority; he’s bursting to be social, running toward large crowds of people with his hands spread wide.
Perhaps that’s why Bruegel has remained so firmly stuck at the front of my mind for the whole of 2020. In the middle of the quarantine lockdown in April of this year, Bruegel scenes were basically unthinkable—all those bodies packed together so tightly, breathing and screaming on each other with no concept of personal space. Coronavirus would frolic through a Bruegel crowd like a happy puppy.
And then, as the later days of May arrived, the crowds came back, in the form of Black Lives Matter protests around the world. Even with the necessary masks on all those faces, Bruegel would probably adore the chance to paint the people taking over the streets with such unfettered energy, throwing statues of monstrous men into the sea and taking back public space that for too long had been ceded to politeness.
This is the central question of 2020: how do we as humans fill space in the world together, in a way that we all can survive? The answer can be found in most Bruegel paintings: by being messy and joyous and complicated and overwhelming and, most of all, human.
Even if you don’t know Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s name, you’ve likely heard him speak. In January of last year, you probably saw a viral video on social media of Bregman speaking truth to power in front of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Bregman’s speech, in which he told an audience full of CEOs, royalty, and heirs that if they really wanted to do good in the world, they should “stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes,” made him an instant celebrity.
Bregman did the requisite TV and podcast tour to explain why rich people should pay a lot more in taxes, and then he went silent for a while. Now, he’s back making headlines with a surprising new book. On the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein asked Bregman to sum up the book in a few words. His response?
“Deep down, most people are pretty decent,” Bregman announced.
You might not expect a notorious bomb-throwing firebrand to follow up his big sensational activist moment with a manifesto about human kindness and cooperation.
Bregman admits that the premise of his new book, Humankind: A Hopeful Historysounds like “it’s not really a threat to anyone,” but he explains that “it’s a really subversive idea if you really think it through, because throughout history a more cynical view of human nature has been used by those in power to legitimize power differences and hierarchy.”
In the late 1970s and very early 1980s, Capitol Hill was one of the few neighborhoods in the country where LGBTQ+ people could largely live out of the closet. To the young people moving to Seattle from more regressive parts of the country, the area around Broadway — with its openly queer arts organizations and its vibrant nightlife — felt practically utopian. (LGBTQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning, with the + denoting everything along the gender and sexuality spectrum.)
For those transplants, Capitol Hill seemingly had it all: restaurants, arthouse movie theaters, dance clubs, drag shows, alternative media. But after they lived there for a month or two, they’d start complaining about one particularly noteworthy hole in the fabric of the community: Capitol Hill needed a really good general interest bookstore.
When Michael Coy moved to Seattle in 1981, he wanted to fill that need…
I’m old enough to remember that, when Democrats were passing the Affordable Care Act through Congress, Republicans argued that they were tampering with the greatest healthcare system in the world. The argument I saw most often in comment threads and on cable news, if I recall correctly, went that a free market healthcare system made room for untold innovations in the medical space, taking care of more people with better, more efficient healthcare than in any other nation on Earth.
It’s pretty much impossible today to claim with a straight face that the United States has the best healthcare on the planet. If you Google “greatest healthcare in the world,” the first result is an article about the most developed public healthcare systems in the world which helpfully explains, “The US ranks 15th.”
The free market hasn’t kept pricing down, either. The New York Times recently caught one Texas firm charging over $2000 per coronavirus test. After the Times investigation, the firm lowered their charges to “just” $300. And some hospitals have charged patients $400,000 — or even over one million dollars — for lifesaving coronavirus treatments. The coronavirus pandemic has also put the lie to the idea that the American employer-based health insurance model is a good idea. As soon as businesses had to lock down to flatten the curve, nearly 27 million Americans lost their insurance, at the time when many of them needed it most.
When unemployment numbers exceeded expectations last Friday, the Trump administration wasted no time in rolling out the metaphorical mission accomplished banner. President Trump himself declared the addition of two million jobs to be “the greatest comeback in American history.” While it is undeniably good news that two million Americans went back to work in April, anyone who reads beyond the headlines knows that those gains reflected the early reopening of some states that are now facing a second wave of coronavirus infections, and the administration’s celebration ignored the tens of millions of Americans who have lost their jobs since the coronavirus pandemic began.
And the tone-deaf premature celebration ignores another huge jobs crisis that’s unfolding in slow motion around the country: the loss of state and local government jobs to budget cuts. Over half a million state and local government employees lost their jobs in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and one million more were laid off in April.
Still more job losses are sure to follow. State and local governments are trapped in a negative feedback loop. The coronavirus shutdown effectively killed revenue from sales taxes and other income for government services, which blew a hole in state and city budgets. Lawmakers in city halls and state houses around the country are responding to those lowered income levels by laying off or furloughing employees. Of course, those laid-off employees then have to cut back on spending, which causes the economy to contract even further, thereby decreasing revenue for state and local governments.
If cutbacks at the state and local level continue, we’ll be stuck in a destructive cycle that could extend the recession for months, even years. How do I know that? Because it’s exactly what happened in the Great Recession of 2008…
“I don’t buy into the notion of white privilege,” Limbaugh said. After a second of stunned silence, Breakfast Club co-host Charlamagne tha God told Limbaugh he was “being delusional.”
In response, Limbaugh doubled down, calling white privilege “a liberal, political construct … designed to intimidate and get people to shut up and admit they’re guilty of doing things they haven’t done.” Limbaugh then offered instances in his own life when he felt unjustly targeted with bad behavior — being fired, having his car keyed — as evidence that he was a victim and not a perpetrator of discrimination.
Many conservatives buy into the same fantasy that Limbaugh pushed in his Breakfast Club conversation: they don’t understand and refuse to consider that societies are made up of dozens of invisible systems that protect and support some citizens at the expense of others. When your ideology centers itself around personal responsibility, issues like racism, sexism, and economic inequality simply disappear. It’s a blissfully simple life philosophy: bad things that happen to you are your own fault, while good things that happen to me are achieved through hard work and clean living.
Of course, it’s simply not true. It’s incredibly easy to prove the existence of white privilege: look no further than the impact of coronavirus on Americans and you’ll see a clear delineation between white and Black Americans — one that favors the former at the expense of the latter…
There’s no feeling quite like the stomach-clenching dread that hits when you hear a Nobel laureate in economics label the coronavirus recession as “a textbook example of showing that markets don’t work.”
The concept of markets — defined simply as the system that allows buyers and sellers to interact — is a cornerstone of mainstream American economic thought. Free markets are supposedly the most efficient way to determine everything from your salary to the cost of a loaf of bread to the most efficient way to deliver supplies in the midst of a pandemic. “Let the market decide” has become a rallying cry for Republicans and neoliberal Democrats as a refutation of government’s role in everything from healthcare to package delivery.
In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, Joseph Stiglitz — the aforementioned Nobel laureate who also serves as chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute — questions the role of markets in essential services like public health and recovery from a recession. He identifies our unshakable belief in markets as one of the biggest stumbling blocks in America’s lackluster response to coronavirus…
