The Atlantic
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Back to Bland Watching Back to Black, the new Amy Winehouse biopic, made me want to look up footage of the late British singer to be reminded of her originality and her liveliness, which no work of fiction could hope to ever fully capture. But in the search process, I ended up staring, for an inordinate amount of time, at Funko Pop dolls. Winehouse has been sold in three versions of the ubiquitous collectible figurines. Each affixes her trademark Cleopatra makeup to the same blank, black eyes that grace the Funkos of superheroes, sports mascots, and various other figures who did not sing songs about oblivion and then die of alcohol poisoning at age 27.To say that Back to Black gives Winehouse the Funko treatment on the big screen would not quite be fair; the movie renders her life with some intelligence, mercy, and painterly craft. But it certainly partakes in the tradition of turning a complex human being into a generic image, defined by superficial traits and tics, for other people to project their feelings upon. No great entertainer ever escapes this fate, but Back to Black should be an occasion to ask why cultural canonization requires such a relentless sanitizing process, and who is served by this sugarcoating.Back to Black begins with the adolescent Winehouse (played by Marisa Abela) at home with her boisterous, working-class Jewish family, singing jazz standards together. The spicy and sad songs she writes in her bedroom soon earn her international stardom—though she’s far less interested in the fame game than in her romance with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), whom the film portrays as a pub-dwelling bad boy who snorts cocaine before breakfast. Her cabbie father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan); her flinty grandmother, Cynthia (Lesley Manville); and her manager Nick (Sam Buchanan) try to steer her toward stability, while paparazzi, industry pressures, and drugs tip her toward destruction. Winehouse’s real-life trajectory was chaotic, but Sam Taylor-Johnson’s filmmaking relays the emotional beats in appealingly direct ways. During Winehouse’s exciting come-up, London’s graffiti pops colorfully in the background; later, as she sinks into drugs and isolation, the city feels dead and desaturated.Abela is a remarkable actor best known for her role on the HBO and BBC banking drama Industry. That show subverts her pageant-worthy poise and winsomeness; she plays a devil disguised as an ingenue. But in Back to Black, she’s playing an ingenue disguised as one of the most caustic and willful pop stars ever. Abela nails many of Winehouse’s mannerisms, though the mouth movements she makes while singing scat vocals do look like something Kristen Wiig would do on Saturday Night Live. The bigger problem is that her version of Winehouse is unshakably sweet and hapless, a puppy dog in smeared eyeliner. Each defiant or self-destructive choice she makes therefore feels oddly under-motivated, even arbitrary.[Read: Is old music killing new music?]This is more the fault of the script than the acting. The film does not really attempt a coherent argument about what forces created such a sui generis artist, or about the ones that drove her to doom. It touches lightly upon various themes of her story—such as the U.K. tabloid industry’s savagery—without saying much about them. The one point of emphasis is Winehouse’s pivotal and intense relationship with Fielder-Civil. Their temporary breakup inspired the lyrics of her breakthrough album, Back to Black, and the best sequence of the film depicts her recording that masterpiece while stunned numb from heartbreak. But the film fails to conjure an on-screen version of Fielder-Civil with any charm, much less a perspective. The viewer is left feeling, as many onlookers at the time were, baffled by the romance.Back to Black’s cast and crew have talked proudly about not portraying anyone as a “villain,” cutting against media narratives blaming Fielder-Civil, Mitch, or anyone else for Winehouse’s struggles. The film wants to be a counterweight to the 2015 documentary Amy, which collaged material from throughout Winehouse’s life to disturbing effect. Some viewers condemned that film for using lurid paparazzi footage of Winehouse at her lowest, and Mitch has said he was portrayed unfairly. But whatever the validity of such critiques, Amy did attempt to place Winehouse’s life within a complex web of cause and effect, personal and cultural. After all, if we are going to re-create a tragedy, should we not try to understand it?Back to Black, by contrast, just makes entertainment out of a saga that was, and should be, excruciating to witness. Winehouse is reduced to a list of traits—beehive hair, jazz inflections, inexorable addiction—that can be easily reproduced in merchandise and licensing for many more years to come. What’s especially jarring is that the film romanticizes Winehouse’s distaste for stardom, careerism, and money itself (“I ain’t no Spice Girl,” she says early on). The image of the iconoclastic, pure artist remains broadly marketable; the ideals behind that image, less so.theatlantic.com
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Winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2024 The German Society for Nature Photography (GDT) just announced the winning images in its annual members-only photo competition, selected from more than 8,000 entries in seven categories, including Birds, Mammals, Other Animals, Plants & Fungi, Landscapes, and Nature’s Studio. Contest organizers were kind enough to share some of the winning and honored photographs with us below.To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.theatlantic.com
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The Sadistic History of Reality Television More than a decade after watching it, I still get twitchy thinking about “White Bear,” an early episode of Black Mirror that stands as one of the most discomfiting installments of television I’ve seen. A woman (played by Lenora Crichlow) groggily wakes up in a strange house whose television sets are broadcasting the same mysterious symbol. When she goes outside, the people she encounters silently film her on their phones or menacingly wield shotguns and chainsaws. Eventually, trapped in a deserted building, the woman seizes a gun and shoots one of her tormentors, but the weapon surprises her by firing confetti instead of bullets. The walls around her suddenly swing open; she’s revealed to be the star of a sadistic live event devised to punish her repeatedly for a crime she once committed but can’t remember. “In case you haven’t guessed … you aren’t very popular,” the show’s host tells the terrified woman, as the audience roars its approval. “But I’ll tell you what you are, though. You’re famous.”“White Bear” indelibly digs into a number of troublesome 21st-century media phenomena: a populace numbed into passive consumption of cruel spectacle, the fetishistic rituals of public shaming, the punitive nature of many “reality” shows. The episode’s grand reveal, a television staple by the time it premiered in 2013, is its own kind of punishment: The extravagant theatrics serve as a reminder that everything that’s happened to the woman has been a deliberate construction—a series of manipulations in service of other people’s entertainment.The contrast between the aghast subject and the gleeful audience, clapping like seals, is almost too jarring to bear. And yet a version of this moment really happened, as seen about an hour into The Contestant, Hulu’s dumbfounding documentary about a late-’90s Japanese TV experiment. For 15 months, a wannabe comedian called Tomoaki Hamatsu (nicknamed “Nasubi,” or “eggplant,” in reference to the length of his head) has been confined, naked, to a single room filled with magazines, and tasked with surviving—and winning his way out, if he could hit a certain monetary target—by entering competitions to win prizes. The entire time, without his knowledge or consent, he’s also been broadcast on a variety show called Susunu! Denpa Shōnen.Before he’s freed, Nasubi is blindfolded, dressed for travel, transported to a new location, and led into a small room that resembles the one he’s been living in. Wearily, accepting that he’s not being freed but merely moved, he takes off his clothes as if to return to his status quo. Then, the walls collapse around him to reveal the studio, the audience, the stage, the cameras. Confetti flutters through the air. Nasubi immediately grabs a pillow to conceal his genitals. “My house fell down,” he says, in shock. The audience cackles at his confusion. “Why are they laughing?” he asks. They laugh even harder.Since The Contestant debuted earlier this month, reviews and responses have homed in on how outlandish its subject matter is, dubbing it a study of the “most evil reality show ever” and “a terrifying and bizarre true story.” The documentary focuses intently on Nasubi’s experience, contrasting his innocence and sweetness with the producer who tormented him, a Machiavellian trickster named Toshio Tsuchiya. Left unstudied, though, is the era the series emerged from. The late ’90s embodied an anything-goes age of television: In the United States, series such as Totally Hidden Video and Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape drew millions of viewers by humiliating people caught doing dastardly things on camera. But Tsuchiya explains that he had a more anthropological mission in mind. “We were trying to show the most basic primitive form of human being,” he tells The Contestant’s director. Nasubi was Tsuchiya’s grand human experiment.The cruelty with which Nasubi was treated seems horrifying now, and outrageously unethical. Before he started winning contests, he got by on a handful of crackers fed to him by the producers, then fiber jelly (one of his first successful prizes), then dog food. His frame whittles down in front of our eyes. “If he hadn’t won rice, he would have died,” a producer says, casually. The question of why Nasubi didn’t just leave the room hangs in the air, urgent and mostly unexamined. “Staying put, not causing trouble is the safest option,” Nasubi explains in the documentary. “It’s a strange psychological state. You lose the will to escape.”But the timing of his confinement also offers a clue about why he might have stayed. 1998, when the comedian was first confined, was a moment in flux, caught between the technological innovations that were rapidly changing mass culture and the historical atrocities of the 20th century. Enabled by the internet, lifecasters such as Jennifer Ringley were exposing their unfiltered lives online as a kind of immersive sociological experiment. Webcams allowed exhibitionists and curious early adopters to present themselves up for observation as novel subjects in a human zoo. Even before the release of The Truman Show, which came out in the U.S. a few months after Nasubi was first put on camera, a handful of provocateur producers were brainstorming new formats for unscripted television, egged on by the uninhibited bravado and excess of ’90s media. These creators acted as all-seeing, all-knowing authorities whose word was absolute. And their subjects, not yet familiar with the “rules” of an emerging genre, often didn’t know what they were allowed to contest. Of Tsuchiya, Nasubi remembers, “It was almost like I was worshiping a god.”In his manipulation of Nasubi, Tsuchiya was helping pioneer a new kind of art form, one that would lead to the voyeurism of 2000s series such as Big Brother and Survivor, not to mention more recent shows such Married at First Sight and Love Is Blind. But the spectacle of Nasubi’s confinement also represented a hypothesis that had long preoccupied creators and psychologists alike, and that reality television has never really moved on from. If you manufacture absurd, monstrous situations with which to torment unwitting dupes, what will they do? What will we learn? And, most vital to the people in charge, how many viewers will be compelled to watch?Some popular-culture historians consider the first reality show to be MTV’s The Real World, a 1992 series that deliberately provoked conflict by putting strangers together in an unfamiliar environment. Others cite PBS’s 1973 documentary series An American Family, which filmed a supposedly prototypical California household over several months, in a conceit that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the “dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.”But the origins of what happened to Nasubi seem to lie most directly in a series that ran on and off from 1948 to 2014: Candid Camera. Its creator, Allen Funt, was a radio operator in the Army Signal Corps during World War II; while stationed in Oklahoma, he set up a “gripe booth” for soldiers to record their complaints about military service. Knowing they were being taped, the subjects held back, which led Funt to record people secretly in hopes of capturing more honest reactions. His first creative effort was The Candid Microphone, a radio show. The series put its subjects in perplexing situations to see how they’d respond: Funt gave strangers exploding cigarettes, asked a baker to make a “disgusting” birthday cake, and even chained his secretary to his desk and hired a locksmith to “free” her for her lunch break. “With the candid microphone, we are at the beginning of the Age of the Involuntary Amateur,” one critic wrote in 1947. “The possibilities are limitless; the prospect is horrifying.” Sure enough, a TV series soon followed.For all that critic’s revulsion, Funt was earnest about the potentially revelatory power of his shows. He was seemingly influenced by two parallel trends. One was a sociological school of thought that was trying urgently to analyze human nature following a wave of real barbarities: the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s great purges. The other was an interest in art that captured the contours of real life, in an outgrowth of the naturalist movement that had come out of the late 19th century. Émile Zola, one of its practitioners, argued in The Experimental Novel that fiction writers were essentially omnipotent forces dropping characters into realistic situations to consider how they might respond. Literature, he argued, was “a real experiment that a novelist makes on man.”The invention of television, as the academic Tony E. Jackson has argued, offered a more literal and scientific medium within which creators could manipulate real human subjects. This was where Candid Camera came into play. Funt’s practical jokes—setting up a subject in an elevator in which every other person suddenly turns their back to him—tended to consider the nature of compliance, and what humans will go along with rather than be outliers. Candid Camera was considered so rich a work that Funt was asked to donate episodes to Cornell University’s psychology department for further study.Funt was also highly influential to Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who turned his Yale studies on conformity into a documentary titled Obedience. The Milgram experiment, conducted in 1961, asked members of the public to inflict fellow subjects with electric shocks—faked, unknown to them—when ordered to do so by an authority figure. Inspired by the 1961 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and the experience of his own family members who’d survived concentration camps, Milgram tweaked the Candid Camera model to more explicitly study how far people would follow orders before they objected. As the film professor Anna McCarthy has written, Milgram paid particular attention to the theatrical elements of his work. He even considered using recordings of humans screaming in real, rather than simulated, pain to maximize the authenticity of the subject’s experience. “It is possible that the kind of understanding of man I seek is an amalgam of science and art,” Milgram wrote in 1962. “It is sure to be rejected by the scientists as well as the artists, but for me it carries significance.”This studied interest in human nature continued in PBS’s An American Family; its presentation of ordinary life up close, the anthropologist Margaret Mead once argued, was “as important for our time as were the invention of the drama and the novel for earlier generations—a new way for people to understand themselves.” Throughout the later decades of the 20th century, television was similarly fixated on exposure, although shock value quickly took priority over genuine curiosity and analysis. During the ’90s, on talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and Maury, people confessed their most damning secrets to anyone who cared to watch. Series including Cops and America’s Most Wanted offered a more lurid, voyeuristic look at crime and the darkness of human nature.[Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment]By the time Tsuchiya had the idea to confine a man to a single apartment to see whether he could survive the ordeal, the concept of humiliation-as-revelation was well established. “I told [Nasubi] that most of it would never be aired,” the producer explains in The Contestant. “When someone hears that, they stop paying attention to the camera. That’s when you can really capture a lot.” As an organizing principle for how to get the most interesting footage, it seems to stem right from Funt’s secret recordings of people in the 1940s. Tsuchiya appeared to be motivated by his desire to observe behavior that had never been seen before on film—“to capture something amazing … an aspect of humanity that only I, only this show, could capture.” And extremity, to him, was necessary, because it was the only way to provoke responses that would be new, and thus thrilling to witness.The reality-show boom of the early 2000s was intimately informed by this same intention. When Big Brother debuted in Holland in 1999, it was broadly advertised as a social experiment in which audiences could observe contestants under constant surveillance like rats in a lab; the show was compared by one Dutch psychologist to the Stanford prison experiment. (Another called the show’s design “the wet dream of a psychological researcher.”) The 2002 British show The Experiment even directly imitated both the Stanford setup and Milgram’s work on obedience. But although such early series may have had honest intentions, their willingness to find dramatic fodder in moments of human calamity was exploited by a barrage of crueler series that would follow. The 2004 series There’s Something About Miriam had six men compete for the affections of a 21-year-old model from Mexico, who was revealed in the finale to be transgender—an obscene gotcha moment that mimics the structure of Candid Camera. Without a dramatic conclusion, a nonfiction series is just a filmed record of events. But with a last-act revelation, it’s a drama.Contemporary audiences, blessedly, have a more informed understanding of ethics, of entrapment, and of the duty of care TV creators have to their subjects. In 2018, the British show Love Island spawned a national debate about gaslighting after one contestant was deemed to be manipulating another. There’s no question that what happened to Nasubi would trigger a mass outcry today. But reality TV is still built on the same ideological imperatives—the desire to see people set up in manifestly absurd scenarios for our entertainment. The Emmy-nominated 2023 series Jury Duty is essentially a kinder episode of Candid Camera extended into a whole season, and the internet creator known as MrBeast, the purveyor of ridiculous challenges and stunts, has the second most-subscribed channel on all of YouTube. What’s most remarkable about The Contestant now is how its subject managed to regain his faith in human nature, despite everything he endured. But the ultimate goal of so many contemporary shows is still largely the same as it was 25 years ago: to manufacture a novel kind of social conflict, sit back, and watch what happens.theatlantic.com
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China Has Only Itself to Blame for a Trade War A global trade war is starting, and China is at the center of it. A reckoning for Beijing’s economic model, which is designed to promote Chinese industry at the expense of the rest of the world, has long been coming. China’s trading partners have had enough. The result will be a wave of protectionism, with potentially dire consequences for both China and the global economy.The most obvious and dramatic evidence for this was unveiled yesterday by President Joe Biden, who announced that his administration would quadruple the existing tariffs on imported Chinese electric vehicles, to 100 percent. He will also hike tariffs on steel, aluminum, medical equipment, semiconductors, solar cells, and lithium batteries. The Chinese government instantly protested and threatened action of its own. “The United States should immediately correct its wrong practices,” the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement. “China will take resolute measures to defend its own rights and interests.”Yet China’s leaders have no one to blame but themselves. They joined a global trading system and then gamed that system. Biden’s tariffs are the natural response, though not an entirely positive one. Protectionism raises costs, hurts consumers, shields unworthy companies from competition, and punishes worthier ones. Disputes over trade will only intensify the rivalry between the world’s two great powers.This souring of trade relations wasn’t always foreordained—but it had become virtually unavoidable. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has failed to reform his economy in ways that would have made this trade war less likely. Facing this confrontation with the United States, he is even less likely to make reforms today. The result is trade conflict and heightened political tensions that benefit no one.[Derek Thompson: Trade wars are not good, or easy to win]Biden targeted EVs for a reason. Beijing’s leaders wanted to dominate that industry and threw the weight of the state behind Chinese companies. The program was undeniably successful. China is at the forefront of the EV industry, while the United States, with the exception of Tesla, has barely gotten out of the parking lot. But electrical automotive is also a sector in which China’s government has played such a heavy role, and created so much manufacturing capacity, that other governments believe their own industries are at risk.Both that prowess and that excess were on display recently at the Beijing Auto Show. The exhibition included no fewer than 278 EV models. That’s indicative of a market jammed with 139 EV brands. The already gridlocked Chinese car market didn’t dissuade the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi from jumping in, with its first EV offering in the show’s spotlight. China simply has too many car companies with too many factories making too many cars. Counting both EVs and internal-combustion-engine vehicles, China’s auto industry now has the capacity to produce almost twice as many vehicles as Chinese consumers are buying, according to the Shanghai-based consultancy Automobility Limited. Although oversupply in the EV sector, where demand is still growing, is not as severe as in the legacy business, Chinese automakers are still adding assembly lines. BYD, for instance, plans to more than double its EV production capacity by 2026.China now has the largest domestic car market in the world, but even Chinese consumers cannot sustain so many factories, especially as the country’s economy slows. So automakers are off-loading their surplus products into the global marketplace. China vied with Japan for the title of world’s largest car exporter last yearThis hefty outflow of Chinese cars has earned unwelcome attention from policy makers in the U.S. and Europe. They contend that the Chinese government unduly supports and promotes China’s bloated automobile sector; as a consequence, their own automakers are threatened by a deluge of cheap Chinese vehicles. During an official visit to China in late April, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the issue of China’s excess capacity was “front and center” for Washington. Chinese industry, he added, is “flooding markets, undermining competition, putting at risk livelihoods and businesses around the world.” While also visiting China in April, Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, expressed similar concerns.“The one thing that must always be clear is that competition must be fair,” Scholz said in a speech in Shanghai. China’s leaders think it already is. They retort that the success of Chinese automakers is due entirely to their competitive advantages. Premier Li Qiang told Scholz that greater supply “is conducive to full market competition and promoting the survival of the fittest.”[Michael Schuman: To China, all’s fair in love and trade wars]The state news agency Xinhua argued that China’s edge “has been honed through diligent efforts and genuine expertise, rooted in market competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” and went on to claim that “the world doesn’t want less of China’s capacity, but wants more.” Therefore, the criticism of China’s industry “may look like an economic discussion,” a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said, but it “ignores more than 200 years of the basic concept of comparative advantage in Western economics.”The fact that some Chinese EV companies have developed highly competitive products and technology, and benefit from real cost advantages in a relatively low-wage economy, is certainly true. Yet the government’s role in building and sustaining that sector is undeniable as well. Chinese economic planners wished to accelerate the EV sector’s development, so, almost a decade ago, they targeted electric vehicles for special state assistance through their Made in China 2025 industrial program. The assistance was controversial from the start because American and European business leaders and policy makers feared—rightly, it now appears—that Beijing’s backing for its favored industries would distort global markets. Tax breaks, low-interest loans, subsidies to make EVs more affordable, and other aid followed.These interventions encouraged private capital to jump in as well. The result was an explosion of investment in start-ups, factories, and supply chains. As Bert Hofman, an expert on China’s economy at the National University of Singapore, told me: “If the central government says this is the new growth area, electric vehicles are the future, everybody and their grandmothers start something in electric vehicles.”All governments place their thumb on the scale to promote their national industries to some degree. China’s thumb simply weighs more heavily. A 2022 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington conservatively estimated that China spent $248 billion supporting its industries in 2019. That’s twice as much as the United States did. “It’s the whole financial system, the whole economic system that is leveraged for industrial policy, which is very different than what’s been happening in market economies,” Camille Boullenois, an analyst of Chinese industry at the research firm Rhodium Group, told me. Where electric vehicles are concerned, “it’s very hard to imagine the industry growing as fast without government support.”The excess capacity, however, is not so much by design. As the automobile industry in China was revving up, the economy was slowing down. Bill Russo, Automobility’s founder, explained to me that automakers overestimated the growth of the Chinese car market and ended up building factories to churn out vehicles for customers that never materialized. Passenger-car sales are still below where they were in 2017 thanks to a stumbling economy, the ravages of the pandemic, and other factors. Such investment, he said, “has been the formula for cashing in on China’s growth, and you’re going to have a reckoning at one point in time—and that’s what we’re faced with right now.”This problem is not confined to cars. China’s steel industry has maintained its output even though demand at home has been declining. The Australian bank Westpac said recently that steel exports, which are approaching record levels, have become a “release valve” for this excess. Even as China’s leaders rebutted foreign criticism of its bloated industries, they released draft regulations in early May to rein in expansion of lithium-battery manufacturing. Chinese state-owned media are reporting that a glut of solar panels—another sector dominated by Chinese companies—is depressing prices and squeezing profits. A surge of Chinese investment into manufacturing “legacy” microchips (those using older technology) is sparking fears they could flood the global marketplace.[Richard Fontaine: The China problem isn’t going away]Facing this Chinese onslaught, governments around the world are stepping in to protect their own industries. The European Commission is currently conducting an investigation into China’s subsidizing of electric vehicles with an eye to imposing its own tariffs on their import. Rhodium anticipates that the EU will apply a duty of 15 to 30 percent on EVs, but the group argues that even this may not be sufficient to deter Chinese automakers. The Biden administration’s move to a 100 percent EV tariff no doubt reflects similar thinking. Chile has already slapped tariffs on some Chinese steel products, while Brazil imposed quotas and duties to stave off an influx of cheap steel, mainly from China.Beijing could fend off these restrictions by reforming its domestic market. The flip side of China’s excessive supply is weak demand. This is caused not just by slowing growth, but also by its entire economic model. As Michael Pettis, a specialist in China’s economy at Peking University, recently pointed out, Beijing’s dirigiste policy has a side effect of subsidizing China’s industry even more than it appears, by both directly and indirectly transferring wealth from families to factories: Rather than encouraging spending on goods, all of the economic incentives are to make capital investment in manufacturing. China’s economic model favors producers over consumers, which holds down household incomes and limits their spending. Lacking customers at home, Chinese industry is forced to seek them abroad.New policies that nudge Chinese families to spend more and save less could alleviate the problem. One way to do this would be to strengthen the country’s feeble social safety net. But Chinese leaders have done little to encourage that transition, perhaps because the necessary liberalizing reforms could weaken the Communist Party’s control over the economy and society. That leaves China’s industrial giants little option but to spew their excess into the global marketplace, in an effort to sustain growth and employment. The outcome is that China sells to the world more goods than it buys from it. Hofman calculated that China recorded trade surpluses with 173 economies in 2023 and deficits with only 50. That added up to a merchandise trade surplus of more than $800 billion.Xi Jinping seems set on making matters worse. His principal economic goal of achieving “self-sufficiency” aims to reduce what China purchases from other countries and substitute goods made by foreign companies with Chinese alternatives—especially in industries, such as green energy, that other governments find strategic. In doing so, Xi is practically inviting more intense trade disputes.In Xi’s thinking, economic growth “is going to come from churning out a lot of this stuff and exporting it to the world,” Leland Miller, a co-founder of the research firm China Beige Book, told me. “Why they think they can get away with that when they are already running giant, politically charged trade surpluses with most of the world, including the United States, and they’re going to supercharge those surpluses and think that’s going to be successful … it doesn’t make much sense.”The big point is that China is not just exporting too much stuff; it’s also exporting its economic problems. Xi intends to maintain Chinese jobs and factories at the expense of other countries’ workers and companies, to avoid necessary but potentially disruptive reform at home. That means Xi is actually undermining the great hope of China’s rise. A wealthier China was supposed to be an engine of global prosperity. Xi’s version is promoting protectionism and confrontation that threaten that prosperity.Facing political pressure at home, politicians around the world are forced to defend their economies from Xi’s strategy, even if that leads to trade wars that sour relations with Beijing. This is not a good outcome for the global economy or for geopolitical stability. But Xi’s policies have made it inevitable.theatlantic.com
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The Writer Who Leaves Behind a Pounding Heart Because of my reverence for Alice Munro’s work, I was often asked if I’d ever met her. I felt that I had totally met her in her books and said as much. I never desired to meet her in person, for what I loved would not necessarily be there. The one time I was scheduled actually to meet her—at a reading and ceremony in her honor—she canceled. Stupidly, I was relieved. Because what could one possibly say to this human, Alice Munro, who was also a genius but would probably turn out to resemble a nice, ordinary, once-beautiful-now-forever-middle-aged woman with an Ontario accent (though perhaps also a sparkle in her eyes)? Reality was too full of annoying disguises—one of her many themes. Would she appear to lack something?Throughout her stories, there is admiration for skills of every sort—piloting an airplane, horseback riding, plucking turkeys—but she did not drive a car. This boggled my mind! Yet it also caused me to think that maybe marriages could be held together this way. The husband would have to drop you off and pick you up so he always knew where you were, even if you didn’t always know where he was (or deeply care). Perhaps this was an essentially literary—Munrovian—condition. Also, in the plus column, I could see in her work that she did not admire rich people but also did not sentimentalize the poor, though her sympathies and interests were more deeply located there. The way a hired girl in “Hired Girl” sweeps the floor and then hides the dirt behind the broom propped in the corner was exactly how I swept when young. A metaphor for secrets, but also an actual (poor) way of sweeping. I was always thinking about her in one way or another, so actually meeting her seemed beside the point. I loved her forensic plots and her gothic gruesomeness. In one collection, she has two decapitations. What would be the point of actually meeting her?Her stories were radically structured—built like avant-garde sculpture. In this way, she completely revolutionized the short story, pulling it away from conventional form altogether. She understood that life was layered, that stretches of time did not neaten themselves out into a convenient linear shape but piled themselves up in layers that were sometimes translucent and contained revisions of thought and opinion, like a palimpsest. These layers seemed to have access to one another. This nonlinear way of course mimics the mind and memory and how life is bewilderingly lived and then recalled. She embraced Chekhov’s movement away from the judgmental finish and built on it, supplying similar narrative oxygen to the lives of North American girls and women. Because the story genre is end-oriented—one must stick the landing—she brought this power to her open endings as well, which were sometimes torn from the middle of the story and thrown down like a beating heart on an altar.One wonders whether she felt that all of her artistic devotion and productivity had been worth it. I hope so. I do not want to pity her; I want only to treasure her. Munro’s career seemed to involve an entire life handed over to art, so, from a distance, it is hard to know whether she felt she’d missed out on some other, easier, sweeter life. (Though, I suppose, for a writer there is no other kind of life.) She is one of those women writers who took a rebel’s stance toward motherhood and partially (not completely) left their children in order to get the literary work done and be free of conventional and gendered expectations. (Literary men, of course, leave their children all the time.) To turn one’s life inside out in order to make short stories for people you’ve never met is a kind of contortion and sacrifice one cannot stop to measure, or the gift may flee. Such hesitation, I suppose, would be like a magician stopping to feed and then cage the tiresome rabbit, who then will not go back into the hat.When someone of Munro’s stature passes away, the world feels a little empty for a while and may never completely get back to its ever-elusive purpose. Still, there remains her great, great work. Even if, like all literature, it wrestled un-victoriously with the meaning of the world, even if, like all interesting characters, hers were not always at their most admirable, her writing kept its eye on the dramas of power in human relations and communities. She explored the upset and consequences of love, hate, desire, devotion, despair, illness, social class, gender—and, most of all, time, its magical uses in art and its sly surprises in life. And so, at the culminating close, there is a still-pounding heart. May she reside in pages forever.theatlantic.com