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As the first anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting approached, a group of students, teachers, and parents addressed reporters at a forum organized by the local school district. Sue Petrone, who lost her 15-year-old son, Danny Rohrbough, in the suburban-Colorado massacre that took the lives of 12 students and a teacher on April 20, 1999, appealed to journalists to focus on the victims and to be sensitive to the wishes and needs of the survivors. “[I] respectfully request that the media not broadcast any footage from April 20,” Petrone said. “That would be footage showing students running from the school, students on stretchers, and murdered students.” Finally, Petrone and the others asked that the killers’ names be omitted from anniversary coverage. The requests were, to some extent, honored. Nearly a year into reporting on what the journalist Dave Cullen has described as the first televised school shooting, and hoping to repair a relationship damaged by factual errors and accusations of sensationalism, broadcast networks decided to pool their anniversary coverage. Reporters agreed to stay away from Columbine on April 20 and instead attended a pre-anniversary tour of the school and an invitation-only meeting with victims’ families. But some news editors and executives were willing to bend only so much. “I feel for the parents who don’t want those images shown on television,” a producer with ABC’s Good Morning America said in the 2003 documentary Covering Columbine, “but I think it will be impossible to do that, for any television outlet to tell what happened without showing what happened.” [Read: Lasting grief after a mass shooting] A CNN vice president told the filmmakers, “As far as using the names of the people who committed the crime, to me, I understand why that bothers the folks who lost children there, but that just is not something I could go along with.” Twenty years and more than 230 school shootings later, reporters and media consumers have plenty—in fact, too much—experience covering and sharing news about these tragedies. But balancing the demands of journalism, human curiosity, and the well-being of survivors remains a work in progress. Headlines such as “Does the Media Have a Problem With Coverage of Mass Shootings?” have a tendency to appear after these events, as do warnings to not let “voluntary restraint … cross the line into censorship,” as a USA Today editorial put it in 2015. Still, evidence suggests that coverage is improving, and every new shooting brings a fresh round of guidelines for interviewing survivors, identifying shooters, minimizing the risk of copycats, and using social media as a reporting tool. Missing from much of this coverage, some journalists and media critics argue, is an emphasis on solutions journalism, and in particular substantive examinations into how mass shootings can be prevented. Last November, after a gunman killed 12 people and injured 18 more at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, Lois Beckett, a reporter who covers gun violence for The Guardian, tweeted: “In the face of an increasing number of mass shootings, media outlets give intense coverage to the terror and the trauma of these events, but almost no coverage of solutions, including solutions ordinary people can use.” In another tweet, Beckett wrote, “I am sick of media outlets making a case for hopelessness and stalemate after the latest mass shooting. There are ways to prevent some of these shootings. But people don’t know about them because WE DON’T COVER THEM.” [Read: Dave Cullen’s new book on the Parkland shooting is surprisingly illuminating] An example of what Beckett was advocating for could be found following a January 2018 school shooting in Benton, Kentucky, in which the 15-year-old shooter reportedly used a handgun taken from his parents’ bedroom closet. The day after the shooting, the Ohio Valley ReSource, a journalism cooperative that covers Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia, published a story on child-access prevention laws, which hold gun owners liable should children access their firearms. The ReSource reported that the laws work in states that have them, and in some cases have reduced accidental gun deaths among children by as much as half. Kentucky, the ReSource noted, is not one of those states. Last August, The Washington Post followed up with an investigation into the enforcement of these laws. Anniversaries present additional opportunities for media outlets to examine the role and influence of their coverage, but these often come at a cost to survivors. Even the most well-intentioned and journalistically sound stories can prove painful to people already feeling increased levels of anxiety. For many in the Columbine community, the days and weeks leading up to April 20 are especially difficult. The Columbine teacher Kiki Leyba and the former principal Frank DeAngelis have both reported crashing their cars in April, with DeAngelis having done so six times in the years following the shooting. “I always tell people that April is a hard month for me,” the Columbine teacher Paula Reed told NPR last year. Linda Mauser, whose son Daniel died at Columbine, published a blog post following the shooting’s fifth anniversary in which she described the day as “a little tougher” than previous anniversaries because of the increased media coverage. “The media and the public has such a fascination with certain numbered anniversaries of events (especially 1, 5, 10, 20 … ),” Mauser wrote, “so I think we can expect there won’t be any significant media attention on Columbine again until the 10th anniversary … That’s a relief. We simply don’t like the painful reminders that come with the media attention.” In Columbine, Cullen’s best-selling book on the shooting and its aftermath, the author writes that after the fifth anniversary, “many survivors began to think in terms of how many events were left to slog through. Only two remained now: the 10-year and the dedication of the memorial [in 2007]. Surely they wouldn’t have to come back in 20.” No doubt, a similar hope surfaces every year in communities across the country, as survivors in places such as Parkland, Florida; Santa Fe, Texas; Roseburg, Oregon; Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania; and Newtown, Connecticut, brace for the first, second, fifth, 10th, or 15th anniversary of their own worst days. At the same time, in the best newsrooms, journalists remind themselves and others to “be careful to never turn away from other people’s grief, to never tune it out or grow numb to it,” as one columnist wrote earlier this year on the first anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. “There is today, tomorrow and 20 years from now,” Joe Samaha, who lost his daughter Reema in the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, told me in February 2018. “That’s some of the stuff that we thought about, that some of our families had the ability to think about: ‘What is going to happen to my brain 20 years from now?’ Let me tell you: It’s never the same, neither the heart nor the brain.” Or, as Cullen quotes Linda Mauser as saying in Columbine: “When your child dies, it’s always recent.” via Blogger The Humane Way to Cover School-Shooting Anniversaries James Fallows was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences today, honoring nearly fifty years of work in the media. Since being commissioned to write a profile of the senator from Texas, presidential hopeful, and “cool cat” Lloyd Benson in 1974, he has done most of that work as a writer, editor, blogger, and sometime talking head at The Atlantic over the course of a 43-year tenure interrupted just once by a stint as a speechwriter in Jimmy Carter’s administration. Fallows has held multiple roles in his time at the magazine; he's now an Atlantic staff writer. Over the past half century, Fallows has published millions of words in the magazine and on the website, composing thousands of articles and dozens of cover stories about politics and global affairs. Beyond his prolific production of long-form stories, Fallows has in more recent years become a beloved blogger, connecting with readers through shorter and more frequent online posts. During the 2016 presidential campaign Fallows began compiling entries for the “Trump Time Capsule” to “catalogue some of the things Donald Trump says and does that no real president would do” —and went on adding to it even after Trump became president and continued doing those things. His writing comprises its own kind of time capsule: a contemporaneous history of the events and developments of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He described the experience of owning a personal computer when most people still didn’t, covered the Vietnam-War origins of the guns now at the center of domestic gun-control debates, and questioned the merits of Reagan-era military spending as the Cold War drew toward its conclusion. His insight, extensive reporting, and engaging writing has made his articles essential reading in their moments of publication and has lent them a timeless relevance, and resonance. These eight pieces, written over the course of Fallows’s Atlantic career, offer a glimpse of what the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honored today. “The Passionless Presidency” In the last year of Carter’s administration, Fallows assessed where the president had gone wrong. “After two and a half years in Carter’s service,” he wrote. “I fully believe him to be a good man.” But he observed that Carter lacked “the passion to convert himself from a good man into an effective one, to learn how to do the job.” As a result, he wrote, Carter’s achievements failed to live up to his intentions. “Living With a Computer” The first successful personal-computer models were released to consumers in the mid-1970s; Fallows got his at the end of that decade, and wrote about it for The Atlantic three years later. He described both how the machine had improved his writing and editing process and the new distractions and dangers it posed before making specific recommendations to readers. “I’d sell my computer before I’d sell my children,” he wrote. “But the kids better watch their step.” “Immigration: How It’s Affecting Us” Following the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act amendments, which lifted quotas governing immigrant nationalities, the flow of immigrants into the United States from the developing world increased significantly. With the rise in newcomers came a rise in anti-immigrant sentiments—sentiments which Fallows challenged in this 1983 article. “In countless ... place … the words heard in the air, the clothes and faces seen on the street, the courses taught in the schools, have all changed because of immigration,” he wrote. “But it is far from clear to me that the changes under way are ominous or bad.” “How the World Works” The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s was celebrated as a victory for the laissez-faire capitalism championed by Americans. But in 1993, Fallows explored alternate approaches driving growth in economies around the world—and the ways they echoed moments from the history of the United States. “Every country that has caught up with others has had to do so by rigging its rules: extracting extra money from its people and steering the money into industrialists' hands,” he asserted. “Why Americans Hate the Media” Fallows tackled this enduring question at a time when Fox News and the internet were still in their infancy and most Americans got their news from television and newspapers. His conclusion: There was a gulf between how the public and the media saw the world. Viewers wanted substance, and the media was covering the game instead. “The most depressing aspect of the new talking-pundit industry,” Fallows wrote, “may be the argument made by many practitioners: the whole thing is just a game, which no one should take too seriously.” “The Fifty-First State” Four months before American troops invaded Iraq, Fallows laid out why they shouldn’t. By entering the war, he argued, the United States would end up mired in a potentially decades-long period of occupation during which it would have to take responsibility for running and protecting Iraq. “The day after a war ended,” he cautioned, “Iraq would become America’s problem.” “China Makes, the World Takes” By 2007, China had become the manufacturing center of the world—the subject of much hand-wringing over the years from people who feel the associated jobs should return to American workers. But Fallows argued that Americans shouldn’t be so resistant to China’s new economic role. “Are we uncomfortable with the America that is being shaped by global economic forces?” he asked. “If so, those trends themselves, and the American choices behind them, are what Americans can address. They’re not China’s problem.” “The Tragedy of the American Military” Beneath frequent displays of support for the troops, Fallows assessed in 2015, America was “a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously.” And that relationship was good for neither the country nor the military. He described the dangers posed by the public’s “reverent but disengaged attitude,” and the more serious engagement that should take its place. via Blogger The Reigning King of the Cover Story An on-stage pyramid, two hundred performers, and an audience sprawling across a desert field: Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella show was big. Yet it was little, too. One could spend the two hours of Netflix’s new documentary Homecoming just taking in facial expressions—the furious widened eyes of the majorette who kicked things off, the stuck-out tongue of a male drummer gyrating low to the ground, the knowing wink of Destiny’s Child’s Kelly Rowland. Beyoncé gives supermodel smolder, and glistening pageant grins, and kiddy giggles. Individuals in the crowd perform the Wile E. Coyote jaw drop, or they just cry. Macro, micro, personal, political: Beyoncé always works on many levels, achieving the kind of complexity one might call “effortless” if she didn’t go out of her way to show how much sweat it took. Last year’s Coachella set wowed the festivalgoers and fans livestreaming it online, but the full footage hasn’t been available officially until now. Released today, Homecoming cuts together the two weekends of performance—yellow-costumed for the first and fuchsia for the second—with a multiplicity of camera angles and filters. As importantly, it zaps from the stage to the prep, which took eight months of intensive labor. You’re seeing the magic trick, and you’re seeing how it was done. It’s an amazing trick, still. In a voiceover, Beyoncé says she tried to make the show as “graphic” as it could be, which would seem to refer to bold shapes, bright colors, and other elements of clean, militant bombast. But she also talked about fussing over mini details, and now the world can rewind and scrutinize them as well. Someone’s seen stitching tiny jewels in a constellation pattern to the top of a beret. Beyoncé, fatigued post-pregnancy, struggles to learn intricate hand choreography. She says she personally picked each dancer, wanting to showcase “different characters” in the ensemble: unique faces, unalike body shapes, personal ways of moving. This was smart stagecraft, hypnotizing spectators with mass movement and surprising them with divergence. It also served a deeper purpose. Beychella, as the event was nicknamed, celebrated historically black colleges and universities, which is to say it was an outpouring of pride in black traditions and excellence. Beyoncé played teacher, and her teaching text was the body. “It was important to me that everyone who had never seen themselves represented felt like they were on that stage with us,” she says in the film. “Black woman often feel underestimated. I wanted us to be proud of not only the show, but the process … I wanted everyone to feel thankful for their curves, their sass, their honesty—thankful for their freedom.” Motivation such as this has long been her mission, expressed in what appears to be her favorite kind of choreography: the formation. Pop stars and marching bands both, of course, routinely order human beings into synchronized onenesses. But in Beyoncé’s case, a shiver of excitement often comes from slight difference. For the performance of “Partition” at Coachella, she sat at the bottom of her bleachers, with a single-file line of women extending up the pyramid behind her. As she opened her legs, they opened their legs. But they did so microseconds behind, for a waterfalling effect. It was like a hall of mirrors, but with each reflection her own person, with her own agency. Some of the most blazing moments, in fact, came when Beyoncé surrendered or shared the spotlight. Ligament-twisting ballerinas, the fluid-and-robotic breakdancers known as Les Twins, Francesca Simone’s heavy-metal shredding, Solange jerking and highkicking: The excellence was diverse, and viral stars are already emerging from the film (hello Bugaboo Rocket!). Homecoming spends a little time with a few team members’ personal stories but puts more focus on simply watching their talents at work. Beyoncé’s voiceover makes clear that she’s as amazed as the viewer must be: “The things that these young people can do with their bodies, and the music they can play, and the drumrolls, and the haircuts, and the bodies … It’s just not right! It’s just so much damn swag.” The soundtrack to this teeming human pageant was inclusive too, going beyond the star’s oeuvre to a wider black canon, including the rap classic O. T. Genasis’s “Everybody Mad,” the stately “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and Nina Simone’s anguished take on “Lilac Wine.” But Beyoncé’s own music wasn’t lost. As cuts from across her catalogue were reanimated with new acoustic vibrancy—bass became brass, drum machines rendered back into drums—so too were their meanings. The portable empowerment messages of “Flawless” and “Feeling Myself,” the smitten ecstasy of “Drunk in Love” and “Deja Vu,” the marital drama of “I Care” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself” all came through. Over the years, she’s sold the idea that these are songs about an actual woman with an actual husband who just happens to be actually famous. But on this stage, Beyoncé cheered how they’d become everyone’s songs. She’s released the Coachella set as a live album, and it’s a thunderous, welcome addition to her catalogue. It’s not its fullest self, though, without the images, which gratifyingly are no longer confined to bootleg clips. But the Homecoming movie’s combo of well-edited stage spectacle and behind-the-scenes segments—intimate, hard-fought, occasionally tense, politically explicit, personally specific segments—make it a career-defining document. Like Beyoncé’s two great visual albums, it’s about obsession, created by obsession, and sure to inspire obsession. Like all masterpieces, it’s almost angering, because so little else compares to it. “If my country ass can do it,” Beyoncé says at one point when talking about her desire to inspire others, “they can do it.” If only! via Blogger Homecoming Is One of Beyoncé’s Masterpieces The first words in Homecoming, the new Netflix documentary that expands on Beyoncé’s landmark 2018 Coachella performance, come not from the singer but from the author Toni Morrison. “If you surrender to the air, you can ride it,” the title card reads, a slightly modified quote from Morrison’s 1977 novel, Song of Solomon. After about 15 minutes of performance footage capped by the Lemonade surprise single “Formation,” the documentary shifts to a glimpse into the process of pulling the Coachella performance together. The first thing that viewers hear after the final echoes of “Formation” is the voice of the late Maya Angelou, played over recordings from some of Beyoncé’s Coachella rehearsals, which spanned eight months:
For Beyoncé, Homecoming presents another opportunity to continue the boundary-shifting semiotic work of the Coachella performance, which itself was built upon the black feminist symbolism of Lemonade and the artistic foundation she’d established for years beforehand. The singer’s headlining 2018 set, which was nicknamed Beychella, was chock full of references to black collegiate traditions—and also included a rendition of the black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Her performance served a sly dual function: For black audiences, it was a masterly celebration of familiar traditions, including social dance; for white viewers, it was an introduction and an assertion of her deeply rooted prowess. “Instead of me pulling out my flower crown it was more important that I brought our culture,” she says of the festival experience. Homecoming is, of course, a product—and Beyoncé is, fundamentally, an entertainer—but it’s still thrilling to see the world’s foremost musical talent giddily dedicate so much of her massive project’s screentime to citing a diverse array of black scholars. Not all of the thinkers the artist quotes throughout her documentary are graduates of HBCUs, but Homecoming still pulses with the kind of energy that black artists harness most often when working collaboratively with their own. Though Beyoncé has long occupied the upper echelon of pop stardom, Homecoming’s many references to black intellectual tradition also serve to underscore the milestone—and embarrassment—of the artist being the first black woman to ever headline Coachella, a massive music festival that’s been running for nearly 20 years. “Ain’t that ’bout a bitch?” she infamously said with a laugh onstage after thanking the festival for selecting her for the dubious honor. via Blogger Beyoncé Debuts Homecoming with a Focus on Black Artists and Thinkers Upon opening the Criterion Channel app, the user is greeted by a sight typical of any streaming service: an array of titles, tiles, and collections featuring a smorgasbord of movies for subscribers to choose from. But most streaming services—Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the like—look different for everyone, since they’re algorithmically designed to try and predict what your next selection might be. Not so with the Criterion Channel, which has emerged from the ashes of FilmStruck, a popular if niche classic-movie archive that was dismantled by its corporate ownership last November. This is an experience more akin to going to your local repertory theater, something outside of the deafening churn of the mainstream. “There’s a huge emphasis on focusing our attention on certain things at certain times, like Game of Thrones or whatever it is at the moment,” Peter Becker, the president of the Criterion Collection, told me in an interview at his company’s office. “A lot of energy and marketing is spent on those things, and a lot of our behavior is shaped by those things. Combined with algorithms, they speak for a lot of people’s time. So in order to really create an adventurous movie experience, you have to pull yourself out of the gravitational field of that. And that’s what this space is meant to be.” As industry behemoths like Disney and Apple roll out plans for their own streaming services that will be defined by big budgets, star power, and brand awareness, Criterion is selling itself to passionate film fans willing to shell out a $10.99 monthly fee for access to a more obscure archive. Part of that pitch is Criterion’s ability to exist as a space that isn’t governed by traffic concerns or a huge corporation’s bottom line. “We’re not going to be looking at what we think is a success based on the number of people who clicked on it,” Becker said. “I think we’re going to try and show things because we think they’re important to be shown.” The Criterion Collection first emerged as a home-video company selling LaserDiscs of classic films in the mid-’80s before moving to DVDs in the late ’90s. Its carefully assembled releases of forgotten masterpieces and canonical works are still coveted pieces of physical media in a digital age. But Criterion’s online library is similarly formidable. At one point it was exclusively hosted by Hulu, then it merged with the archives of Turner Classic Movies for the streaming service FilmStruck, which launched in 2016. Though FilmStruck attracted praise and a devoted subscriber base, it was always viewed as a specialized offering by TCM’s corporate owners, WarnerMedia. AT&T, which recently acquired Warner in a much scrutinized merger, has stressed the need for expansion and Netflix-sized scaling in its conversations with the employees of prestige properties like HBO. FilmStruck was a casualty of that new mindset, eliminated because it was too small. “We are committed to launching a compelling and competitive product that will serve as a complement to our existing businesses and help us to expand our reach,” WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey said last October of his plans for one giant catch-all service that could bundle in the classic-film library. He never directly commented on the end of FilmStruck, focusing only on his plans for a larger property. “From our perspective, FilmStruck was doing great,” Becker said of the Criterion team. “Audience was growing, programming was getting better and better. My feeling about it was that it didn’t matter [to AT&T] how successful we ever got.” Launched this month, the Criterion Channel is the company’s first attempt at a streaming service without a bigger partner like Hulu or TCM, which means it can diversify some of its offerings instead of only highlighting classic films. The Criterion library functions as the “spine” of the database, according to Becker, but there are also more contemporary art and foreign films, interviews and documentaries about filmmaking, and special imports such as the series of noir films from Columbia Pictures that helped kick off the channel’s launch. “We wanted to make it clear that we were making a commitment to continuing to show classic Hollywood cinema the way that FilmStruck did,” said Penelope Bartlett, a programmer for the channel. “But we try to make the series [that we feature] not overwhelming—we want you to get that sense of achievement that you can actually watch all of them. And we also feel like generally in the digital streaming environment, people are completely overwhelmed by choices.” Hence the careful efforts to curate. The current noir series unites 11 criminally underrated Columbia features, mostly from the ’40s and ’50s, including Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, Blake Edwards’s Experiment in Terror, and Don Siegel’s The Lineup. Becker said that while he’s proud of the Criterion library, he knew the service needed to offer more in order to succeed. “It had to be something where the whole film community was going to actually come together and contribute.” As the service expands, it will bring in new repertory series, curated suggestions for movies to watch as double or triple features, and even original documentaries about filmmakers and film technique. It’s all intended to spur communal viewing experiences for users around the country, a virtual arthouse theater of sorts. “We’re really trying to think about this in terms of people making something for people. There is literally nothing automatic about this site. When the carousel changes, a human being changed it that morning,” Becker said. “How do we keep this audience connected?” he continued. “With the idea that somebody is presenting and proposing these films to you in some coherent way.” Coherence is a feature that none of the behemoth streaming companies can boast about, even as they add more and more original titles to their archives. It may be the thing that helps set Criterion apart. via Blogger A Criterion Collection Streaming Service Lives Again “Writing The Overstory quite literally changed my life, starting with where and how I live,” the author Richard Powers told the Chicago Review of Books. Before writing the book, Powers had been living and teaching in Palo Alto, between tech-centric Silicon Valley and California’s old-growth forests. An encounter with a giant redwood shook him; in a Guardian profile, he describes it as a kind of “religious conversion” that showed him his place in “a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans.” Powers then began work on the novel, and his research took him to Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Months later, he moved there to live deep in the woods, where “walking a trail has become as important to me as writing.” The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction on Monday, is as close as it gets to a founding text for Powers’s environmentalism. The novel follows nine different characters—among them a Vietnam veteran, a young coding prodigy, and the last descendent of immigrant pioneers—whose close relationships with trees, lasting sometimes for generations, lead them to a deep appreciation of the world’s threatened forests. Nearly all of the characters become activists in some form—five of them eventually come together in protest against a timber company—and throughout their personal transformations, the trees around them are so exquisitely rendered that they seem like characters themselves. The result is what the Pulitzer committee praises as “an ingeniously structured narrative” that approaches trees and the threats facing them with wonder, reverence, and an urgency that could be enough to change minds. Powers’s novels can be categorized as part of “the grand realist tradition”; Nathaniel Rich, writing in the June 2018 issue of The Atlantic, noted the author’s penchant for critical documentation of contemporary society, exploring “our most complex social questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma.” Powers himself, however, views his work as allegorical, and indeed, The Overstory in particular has a mythic scope. The trees at its heart are godlike in scale, “as old as Jesus or Caesar”; over hundreds of years, they engage in social behaviors, communicating with each other through a vast network of roots. Human characters treat them as revered ancestors; after all, they share significant amounts of DNA with us. Fantastic as they might sound, all these qualities of trees are real. With The Overstory, Powers has not created a fable so much as translated reality into a compelling system of belief. The Overstory fits well within the growing genre of climate fiction, which explores the effects of climate change and humans’ impact on the earth. Although the term, coined by the former journalist Dan Bloom, has been in use for about a decade, it’s gained new prominence within the last few years as a number of recent works have tackled ever-more-pressing problems like global warming, drought, and rising sea levels. Climate fiction is often speculative: Books such as Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, for example, envision drought-stricken dystopias in the American West. But as other novels—like C. Morgan Babst’s The Floating World, set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—demonstrate, the consequences of climate change don’t need to be imagined. They’re already very real. Powers was a Pulitzer finalist in 2006 for his novel, The Echo Maker, about a woman struggling to care for her brother after a brain injury, which also won the National Book Award for fiction. That book, as Powers told the Los Angeles Review of Books last year, was also in part “a story of forgotten kinship” between humans and birds, whose intelligence is “deep and foreign enough to be invisible to many of us.” The Overstory takes this theme of connection with the natural world a step further, challenging people to recognize trees as creatures like themselves. It is the 12th novel Powers has published, and after a storied three-decade career, he seems to regard it as a kind of arrival, artistic and personal, at the place where he’s always been headed. “I just want to walk, look, listen, breathe, and write this same book,” he told the Chicago Review of Books, “again and again, from different aspects and elevations, with characters as old and large as I am able to imagine.” via Blogger Writing the Pulitzer-Winning The Overstory Changed Richard Powers’s Life This story contains spoilers through Season 8, Episode 1 of Game of Thrones. “I used to think you were the cleverest man alive.” Sansa Stark may as well have been speaking for the audience as she dissed Tyrion Lannister during Game of Thrones’s Season 8 premiere. In a show full of schemers, Tyrion’s ruses once not only had a tendency to work, but also carried an element of righteousness: He was smart, and he was good. He smoked out a rat in King’s Landing; he wheedled himself and others out of bullies’ chains and prison cells; he engineered a special riding saddle for Bran. “My brother has his sword, and I have my mind,” Tyrion said to a sullen new ally in Season 1. “And a mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow.” Maybe he’s stopped reading. Sansa dismisses him as not-so-clever in this recent episode due to his belief that Cersei Lannister, the most venal and cruel ruler in Westeros, would keep her vow to help her enemies, the Targaryens and the Starks, defeat the army of the undead. In the previous season finale, this promise was revealed as a bluff nearly as soon as it was made, with Cersei spelling out her obvious, self-interested logic in private to Jaime, the brother she loves. No one should be more familiar with that sort of logic than the brother she’s long despised. Yet Tyrion’s fallen for her ruse and convinced Queen Daenerys to stake her armies on it. [Read: ‘Game of Thrones’ makes time for love before war] It’s the latest in a line of blunders. My colleague Chris Orr listed them in his Season 8 preview: “Tyrion hasn’t had a good idea in seasons now (truce with the slaver cities? sneak attack on Casterly Rock? let’s go snatch a zombie?).” Each of these weren’t mere dicey gambles whose upsides were mixed with downsides. They each backfired terribly, with consequences for his new queen, Daenerys, and the cause of liberation and world-saving she’s thought to represent. She’s lost soldiers, cities, and a dragon on his account. He, in turn, has lost not only his cunning but also his place within the show’s hierarchy of characters. In the first few seasons, Tyrion could nearly be thought of as the protagonist. He defended his life and his principles in the face of his family’s villainous plotting and the prejudices he faced for being born a dwarf. That arc saw him bonding with other underestimated sorts—Bran, Jon, Sansa—while trying to curb the excesses of the entitled Joffrey, Cersei, and Tywin. His family marked him for death; he took his horrible father’s life; he escaped by getting smuggled across the sea in a crate. But since bursting out of that box—seemingly a moment of final liberation from the Lannister yoke—he’s held an oddly diminished place on the show. Part of the problem must be that he’s a mere adviser now, so he’s helping rather than driving action. That doesn’t explain why his advice is bad, though. Thrones has repeatedly identified that Tyrion’s instincts have been faltering, but it hasn’t offered up a theory for why. Maybe it’s been hinting at one, though: love. In the Season 6 finale, Tyrion skulked outside the door while Daenerys and Jon consummated their love. It looked like he was jealous—and indeed, information in the official Game of Thrones scripts, as well as an interview by the actor Peter Dinklage, basically confirm Tyrion has a crush on her. This crush may result in plot complications as Jon and Daenerys’s relationship and loyalties are tested in episodes to come. But perhaps it explains Tyrion’s general glumness so far in Season 8. On the ramparts of Winterfell, he, Davos, and Varys look down on Jon and Dany. Davos proposes that the two leaders should get married for the good of the realm. Tyrion has only this to offer: “They do make a handsome couple.” If Tyrion is resentful of Jon and Dany, a comment like that one—about appearance—might indicate it’s resentment tied to his status as physically different from others. Jon and Dany originally appealed to him as friends because they, too, were underdogs—a bastard and an exiled sex slave—who’d worked to transcend their lot. By now, the two of them are royalty, lovebirds, and dragon riders. Tyrion is on the sidelines, kvetching with two other advisory figures who, in their way, are phenotypically marginalized too. Davos is an old man: much older than Tyrion, as Tyrion goes out of his way to point out. Varys is a eunuch: unlike Tyrion, as Tyrion, again, goes out of his way to point out. [Read: The authoritarian heroes of ‘Game of Thrones’] The very first dialogue of Season 8, indeed, hints that Tyrion’s been stewing on bodies and marginality. Tyrion quips that Varys doesn’t have balls to freeze off, to which Varys poses this: “You take great offense at dwarf jokes, but love telling eunuch jokes. Why is that?” Tyrion’s response: “Because I have balls, and you don’t.” It’s a juvenile punchline, but you could read more into it: an assertion of his virility. That assertion takes on an especially acidic edge with the knowledge that he’s been feeling like a third wheel to the most important, blossoming affair in the realm. One could, then, speculate that jealousy informed some of his botched schemes. The mission to grab a Wight endangered Jon, and Tyrion counseled against Dany going to save him. The truce with Cersei—secured in a private meeting between the two Lannister siblings after Jon’s unwillingness to lie about his loyalties derailed the negotiation—would have seemed to shore up Tyrion’s value to Dany. But the odd thing about this reading is that throughout the eight seasons, viewers were never led to think of Tyrion as petty. Tywin once called him a “spiteful little creature full of envy, lust, and low cunning,” and even if that description drew on a kernel of truth, Tyrion’s actions have repeatedly shown how conscientiousness can sit alongside and even be powered by baser traits. If he’s been poisoned by envy—for Dany’s love, and for the heroic agency Jon has been able to access lately—it’s a sad and somewhat inexplicable turn for a beloved character. The show hasn’t earned it. Of course, the malaise that appears to be swamping Tyrion may well turn out to be one last obstacle in a valiant journey. Transcendence, or sacrifice in the name of love and country, could be on the way. But there’s a possibility of darker tragedy. Cersei has dispatched Tyrion’s old buddy Bronn to assassinate both Lannister brothers, and it’s exactly the kind of evil plot that Tyrion once would have been able to foresee and thwart. But his mind seems clouded lately. Is it so impossible that a crossbow bolt may end up in his broken heart? via Blogger Why Has Game of Thrones Sidelined Tyrion? |