no right angles

But in Mr. Trump, Mr. West recognizes himself: a natural disrupter; a person so secure in his gifts that he doesn’t trouble himself with facts (or much believe in them); someone who sees generating passionate dissent as a sign of success, not as an indicator of a shaky premise. “I can tell you that when he was running, it’s like I felt something,” Mr. West told Charlamagne Tha God in an interview posted Tuesday. “The fact that he won proves something. It proves that anything is possible in America.” But that kinship mistakes cynicism for earnestness, volume for accuracy, popularity for morality. Not all disruption is the same.

Why so much discontent with a woman who has proved so good at her job? Maybe because many Democrats think Pelosi’s unpopularity undermines their chances of winning back the House. Why is she so unpopular? Because powerful women politicians usually are. Therein lies the tragedy. Nancy Pelosi does her job about as well as anyone could. But because she’s a woman, she may not be doing it well enough. ... A woman will one day make it to the White House. Nancy Pelosi may again become the speaker. But her experience offers an irony and a warning: For women politicians to succeed, they must defeat and outmaneuver men. Yet the better at it they are, the more detested they become.

otherwise ordinary men

The idea that it's possible to consume art — whether it's classified as fine art or popular media — objectively is based on the idea that you can shut off the ways you are culturally grounded. It supposes that you can remove the filters of your experiences and your concerns and what you've seen represented and not represented, and what effects on the world around you the culture you live with has had. When I spoke about Phantom Thread and acknowledged that how engaging I found it was affected by the last few months of harassment and abuse allegations that have become public, one listener told me that my view was sadly "clouded" by those things. And you can argue my feelings about A.P. Bio are "clouded" by the fact that it's hard at this particular moment for me to enjoy laughing at an untouchable jackass abusing power over students. But how do you know what's clouded and what's cleared? Why is it more likely that only wanting so much of this story, of these lovable bastards, is clouded judgment, but embracing it up until now was clear judgment? How can knowing more about people's experiences make your vision less clear?

So look. I know this sounds taxing, but you have to put every single thing that you think you are on the table and reexamine it. That’s what it takes to become an adult and start making active, organic, thoughtful choices about how you want to live. You have to dare to see that these things that you’ve come to view as FUNDAMENTAL TO WHO YOU ARE aren’t actually that profound or deep or rooted in anything that you care about that much. You CAN live in a completely different way, starting tomorrow, if you want to. Do you want to? Or do you just want to silence the voices in your head that say, “You lazy piece of introverted shit, why haven’t you written those thank-you notes yet?” (Or do you want to ask your go-getter husband to write some of those thank-you notes with you?) Whatever you do, don’t just keep reacting to what came before, like a very simple machine. Simple machines repeat the same functions forever and ever, and the squirrels of the world can tell whatever fucking stories they want to about them, and it all feels broken and wrong. Actively choosing who you are and what you care about, outside of the limited confines of other people’s narratives about you, is what happiness is all about. So what do you value? Don’t look at the failures of the past to answer that question. Look at what made you feel good. Consider what makes you feel good now. But also, consider what makes you feel bad. Do you feel bad when you start a task because it feels like giving in to someone else’s demands? Do you feel bad when you think about getting out into the world because there are too many factors you can’t control?

If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives … But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

Wrap your arms around the uncertainty. Accept it. Know that the way things turn out has a lot of luck involved so don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well. Focus on process instead. Say I have a fair coin. I can tell you exactly what the probability of heads or tails on the next flip is. But I can’t tell you what the next flip will be. That’s what accepting outcomes is like. Accepting that you don’t know if the coin will land heads or tails on the next flip. That means that if you offer me a $2-to-$1 gambling proposition on this coin, I should be willing to do that. Even if I lose the next 10 flips, that doesn’t mean that I made a bad decision. And I should strive to be happy that I made a good decision and not focus on the result. It’s a mindset thing.

A great work of art brings us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says, No, not that feeling. You’re having the wrong feeling. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience. Me, I’m not ahistorical or immune to biography. That’s for the winners of history (men) (so far). The thing is, I’m not saying I’m right or wrong. But I’m the audience. And I’m just acknowledging the realities of the situation: the film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it’s also kinda gross in its own right; and it’s also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once. Simply being told by men that Allen’s history shouldn’t matter doesn’t achieve the objective of making it not matter. What do I do about the monster? Do I have a responsibility either way? To turn away, or to overcome my biographical distaste and watch, or read, or listen? And why does the monster make us—make me—so mad in the first place?

I do think that there are very, very smart people on Wall Street who might better serve the universe by applying their genius a little bit less to thinking of creative ways to exploit legal and tax and other enforcement loopholes to grow wealth for people who are already wealthy, and a little bit more time becoming immensely rich, as we see is possible in this country, by creating things. And by bettering the lives of others.

Basic rolls beautifully off the tongue. It’s a useful insult. Like trashy or gauche, it derives its power from the knowledge that if you can recognize someone or something as basic, you probably, yourself, aren’t it. It also feels restrained, somehow. You don’t quite have to stoop to calling someone a slut or a halfwit or anything truly cruel. It’s not as implicating as calling someone tacky — the basic woman is so evidently nonthreatening she doesn’t even deserve such a raised pulse. Basic-tagging is coolly lazy. It conveys a graduate seminar’s worth of semiotics in five letters. “So basic,” you think, scrolling through your Facebook feed. “She’s basic,” you offer to a friend, commenting on her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It was a word we’d been looking for. But why? It seems to me that while what it pretends to criticize is unoriginality of thought and action, most of what basic actually seeks to dismiss is consumption patterns — what you watch, what you drink, what you wear, and what you buy — without dismissing consumption itself. The basic girl’s sin isn’t liking to shop, it’s cluelessly lusting after the wrong brands, the ones that announce themselves loudly and have shareholders they need to satisfy. (The right brands are much more expensive and subtle and, usually, privately owned.)

I don't think I'm an idealist.  I'm a realist. And I see the progress.  The progress has been remarkable. Look at the emancipation of woman in my lifetime. You're sitting here as a female. Look what's happened to the same-sex marriages. To tell somebody a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man, and a man can marry a man, they would have said, "You're crazy." But it's a reality today. So the world is changing. And you shouldn't-- you know-- be despairing because it's never happened before. Nothing new ever happened before.

Dorothy Rodham had an auspicious date of birth — June 4, 1919, the very same day the Senate passed a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. But otherwise, she had a terrible beginning. Her parents abandoned her. At 8, she was riding across the country, unaccompanied except for her younger sister, on the way to live with grandparents who didn’t want them. She went off on her own at 14, working as a housekeeper during the Depression. But she got herself through high school, was a good student and raised her own daughter to believe the sky was the limit. Before we head off on the rest of this deeply imperfect election, take a second and enjoy. Imagine Hillary Clinton going back in time. She sits in the train next to a frightened little girl, and delivers the news about what happened this week.

It’s like Obama and Clinton are sitting there with pickaxes trying to dig through a mountain and Bernie saunters by and says, “You should try some dynamite.” After a pause, and a knowing look, Obama calmly says, “We don’t have any dynamite,” and Clinton adds, “You IDIOT.” And Bernie responds, “Well, did you look?” You don’t want to put that guy in charge of your mountain-digging team, you want to slam that guy’s head into the mountain.