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    [post_content] => One of the world's most financially successful singers is a recluse who never performs, rarely gives interviews, and declines to play the role of a celebrity.

Enya, the Irish singer-musician, is perhaps one of the most mocked and memed artists of our time. Her body of work is often dismissed as New Age, a label she has disavowed. To many, her songs are the aural equivalent of astrology: mystical and fun, but lacking substance. Familiar tracks like “Only Time” provide ambience at yoga retreats, LARPs, facials, and tarot card readings. The singer has a reputation for being a bit of a recluse, rarely making public appearances or granting interviews. Music critics often offer muted or grudging praise for her albums, but they don’t take her seriously. I, however, love Enya—and not ironically.

When I was growing up, my dad often assumed the role of school chauffeur and minivan DJ. His taste was (and remains) eclectic; during those drives, he played everything from The Moody Blues, to German musical project Enigma, to ambient techno from the now-defunct 90s website mp3.com. Enya was always on heavy rotation and, as a result, still occupies a special place in my heart and on my Spotify playlists. 

My deep affection for Enya's music is rooted in more than just nostalgic childhood memories. Her ethereal songs are a testament to the worth of gentleness and beauty, qualities that have historically been categorized as feminine and, therefore, of little value. In a world where obsessive fans have endangered the lives of female musicians, her choice to live a private life is a salutary example; setting boundaries is an act of self-preservation and an empowering choice, not necessarily an eccentric one. It is also a mute but radical demonstration that professional success as a musician can be achieved without living the life of a celebrity, perpetually in the spotlight. As one of the best-selling artists in the world, Enya shows us there is another way to achieve wealth and fame.

Born Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin, Enya began her music career singing with Clannad, her family’s award-winning Irish music band. In 1982, she became a solo artist in partnership with Nicky Ryan, who she met when he was Clannad’s sound engineer, and his wife Roma, a lyricist; they remain her creative team to this day. The three began experimenting with looping harmonies, eventually creating what is now Enya’s signature layered sound. Unless otherwise noted in song credits, Enya performs all the vocals for her music and plays all the instruments. Known for her facility with languages, she has recorded songs in Gaelic, Latin, Japanese, and Sindarin—the latter an Elvish language invented by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The music industry tends to expect that female artists will offer up their private lives for public consumption, but Enya refuses to play the celebrity game. Instead she lives alone in Manderley Castle, the Dublin-area Victorian mansion named for the house in Daphne Du Maurier's novel Rebecca. She never tours, rarely performs, and spends years crafting each album.

[caption id="attachment_1601" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Manderley Castle, Enya's mansion in Killiney.[/caption]

On the rare occasions she sits for interviews, Enya frequently points out that fame and success are not synonymous. In a 2015 profile for BuzzFeed she notes, “There’s no rulebook that says, ‘Your music is successful; you must now become famous.’” She remains unwaveringly committed to the integrity of her music, and isn’t afraid to say “no” to even the most tempting offers. She famously declined to compose the score for “Titanic,” and turned down an invitation to speak at Harvard. In an interview for The Irish Times, she explains, “I just did things that I wanted to do.”

Rooted in Celtic, classical, folk, and choral traditions, Enya’s music has a timeless quality. I can imagine someone cleansing a room with sage and crystals to "The Memory of Trees" in 2020 as easily as I can channel the image of fourteenth-century women singing the Gaelic lyrics of "Ebudæ" while dancing in a misty green field. Enya’s body of work is both beautiful and deeply, wonderfully weird. 

Despite her refusal to play the role of celebrity, Enya is by all objective standards a superstar. She is one of the best-selling musicians in the world, surpassing even Nirvana in album sales. She’s a four-time Grammy Award winner, and has been nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. The eclectic range of artists who have sampled her music include The Fugees, Panda Bear, Diddy, and Meek Mill; her music has provided the soundtracks for countless commercials and movies, and inspired artists from Weyes Blood to Nicki Minaj. Enya’s music has spent over five years in the number one spot on the Top New Age Albums chart. (Check it out, she’s still there.) 

“There isn't another modern artist who can stay holed up with her cats in her castle (next door to Bono's!) watching “Breaking Bad” and still sell 23.8 million albums in the United States alone,” writes Melissa Locker in a profile for NPR. In 2017, VICE described her as “a musician capable of selling the unsellable”—spiritual, synth-infused choral music. In a 1989 review in the Orlando Sentinel, Bill Henderson describes Enya’s music “as light as a whisper, yet as strong as a scream.” The Irish musician has become an unlikely music industry powerhouse on her own terms, according to her own rules. 

So why are similarly reclusive male musicians, like Leonard Cohen, or those who are “eccentric,” like David Bowie, or genre-bending, like Brian Eno, respected as artists, while she is not? 

In a searing 2000 review, Entertainment Weekly summarized  "A Day Without Rain," her fifth album, as “New Age nonsense," adding: “Unless you’re bound in an herbal body wrap, there’s simply no acceptable reason to listen” it. According to the reviewer for Rolling Stone, “The Irish-multi-instrumentalist-singer-composer's skill at ephemeral sonic watercolors has grown wearisome.” In 1989, The Los Angeles Times panned Enya’s second album, "Watermark," calling it “a portentous pastiche,” and dismissively referring to her as a “young chanteuse.” According to critics, Enya’s music is “too much,” and yet not substantive enough. Her talent is pretentious and tiring. Her success is baffling. Her songs are strange, but not in a cool way. (Siri, play “The Man” by Taylor Swift.)

For his film “Eighth Grade," director Bo Burnham uses "Orinoco Flow" (Sail away, sail away, sail away) as a poignant commentary on the swirling emotions of a socially anxious, lonely 13 year-old girl seeking the acceptance of her peers in the Instagram generation. Burnham feels the singer has been unjustifiably maligned. "We’ve been trained by countless commercials and Will Ferrell movies to find the retro needle-drop inherently funny,” he tells Vulture's Sean O'Neal. In "Eighth Grade," Burnham sets out to redeem "Orinoco Flow," a song he loves without irony. The treatment of Enya’s music in popular culture has clearly warped our collective ability to take it seriously, but Burnham remembers that as a child, Enya’s music made him “feel bigger than [he] was...deeper and more exciting.” I can relate.



The dual nature of Enya’s work is part of what makes it both hard to pin down and special. Are her songs beautiful, technical, and emotive? Or are they hilarious in their hyper-seriousness? The answer is, they are both.

“Derry Girls,” a comedy about a group of high school friends in 1990s Northern Ireland, channels these diverse elements of Enya’s music to great effect. “Caribbean Blue” opens and closes Season Two: In the first episode: a drone camera pans over Ireland’s iconic green hills and its urban rooftops, showing heavily armed British soldiers in armored personnel carriers, demonstrators throwing molotov cocktails, and walls covered in Irish nationalist graffiti; meanwhile we hear Erin, one of the protagonists, delivering a dramatic and very clichéd monologue about peace—and then the camera reveals she’s speaking from the bathtub. Here, the function of Enya’s music is to add humor—a comically solemn soundtrack to highlight the heroine’s sense of self-importance. 



The same song sets the mood for a serious moment in the season finale, when the girls stand sullenly in a cheering crowd, unable to join in celebrating President Bill Clinton’s visit to their town because their friend James is moving back to England. “Caribbean Blue” grows louder as one of the girls spots James, who has decided to stay; the song drowns out the crowd’s cheers, and the girls run to embrace their friend: If all you told was turned to gold, if all you dreamed was new… The song that provided comedy in the first episode of the season signals earnestness in the final one. Enya’s music is no longer the butt of the joke; it’s serious.

When I listen to Enya, I hear the sound of a woman in control, undaunted by those who underestimate her. Her delicate, ethereal songs affirm that in softness, there is power.
    [post_title] => Enya: icon of radical softness
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    [post_date] => 2020-01-31 04:25:33
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    [post_content] => Grassroots organizers are proving to be a formidable challenge to the Republican Party's voter suppression tactics. 

When Stacey Abrams, the first black woman ever nominated by a major party to run for governor of any state, ran as Georgia’s Democratic candidate for governor in 2018, voters knew she might lose. Abrams’ skills, tenacity, and national profile—enhanced by a decade of service in Georgia’s state legislature and an endorsement from Barack Obama—helped secure her historic nomination. But the state’s long history of voter suppression was a formidable obstacle to victory.

Brian Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial candidate then serving as Georgia’s Secretary of State, was responsible for overseeing voter registration. One month before the election, his office was holding 53,000 voter registration applications for review—nearly 70 percent of which were for black residents, who compose approximately 32 percent of Georgia’s population. In a leaked recording Kemp can be heard saying that the Abrams campaign’s voter turnout operation “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote.”

Abrams lost the election by 54,723 votes.

The United States has a long history of voter suppression. For decades following Reconstruction, black American residents of Jim Crow states who tried to exercise their right to vote were subjected to poll taxes, literacy tests, arrests, savage beatings, and murder. In the United States (and in Britain), women who agitated for the right to vote were arrested and imprisoned; when they protested by going on hunger strikes, they were violently force-fed.

Contemporary voter suppression tactics are just as prevalent, though implementation is no longer as violent. In 2011, New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien vowed to “tighten up the definition of a New Hampshire resident” and crack down on same-day voter registrations in college towns, which, he said, were full of “kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

Voter suppression has been a key component of Republican electoral strategy at least since 2008—particularly, but not exclusively, in the Midwest and South. The last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004. Republican strategists saw in Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories a rising tide of “kids voting liberal” and minority voter turnout that threatened GOP power. In response, they crafted a strategy to suppress the vote, especially among young people and black people.

It’s no secret that conservatives are deliberately targeting people of color. In a 2019 documentary called “Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook,” a North Carolina retiree named Michael Hyers describes his role in helping to purge thousands from his state’s voter rolls in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. While claiming—without evidence—that he’s working to counteract rampant voter fraud, Hyers, who is white, repeatedly uses language that suggests his true motives are to keep black people from voting. “We got to clean the rolls up one way or another,” he says. “It’s about time we turned the lights on in the kitchen and started cleaning the cockroaches out of here.” In explaining that people like him have a knack for spotting anomalies in registrations, he says, “It’s kind of like seeing a lump of coal in a bale of cotton—it’ll just pop right out at you.”

Don Yelton resigned as chair of North Carolina's Buncombe County Republican Party in 2013 after “The Daily Show” aired an interview in which he acknowledged that new state voting laws were designed to “kick the Democrats in the butt” and could hurt “lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything.”

This sort of overtly racist discourse can incite violence. Shortly before a gunman opened fire in 2019 outside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 and wounding 26, a manifesto that he is believed to have authored appeared online. The long, detailed document includes a description of the author’s intent to “remove the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc” through violent means.

While Republicans work to keep certain demographic groups from voting, institutions like the Electoral College sap the power of our votes. In November, Stacey Abrams told Oliver Laughland, a reporter for The Guardian U.S., that the Electoral College should be abolished. It was, she said, “designed because those who were in power did not trust the peasants and the working people to actually make good decisions, and we should all be in rebellion against that idea.”

One way to join Abrams’s efforts to fight back against voter suppression is to get involved with one of the grassroots organizations that have sprung up over the last decade to combat anti-democratic measures. After Brian Kemp was declared the winner of Georgia’s gubernatorial election, Abrams founded Fair Fight to “promote fair elections in Georgia and around the country, encourage voter participation in elections, and educate voters about elections and their voting rights.” Through Fair Fight’s nonprofit she also helped organize a lawsuit that challenged Georgia’s entire election system, arguing that it violates the constitutional rights of voters of color.

While large black populations can make states like Georgia targets of voter suppression efforts, they also create bases of power from which those efforts can be fought. In a 2017 Alabama Senate election, black voters organized to propel Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate, to a narrow victory over Republican Roy Moore; his victory made Jones the first Democrat since 1997 to represent the state of Alabama in the U.S. Senate. Doug Jones is white, but 56 percent of those who voted for him were black. According to NBC News exit polls, 96 percent of black voters supported Jones, including 98 percent of black female voters and 93 percent of black male voters.New groups like Woke Vote, a “tiny” collection of students, church-going activists, and organizers, succeeded in getting out the vote for Jones by concentrating on “potential sites of latent black political power, including historically black colleges and universities and black churches,” writes Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic. Newkirk describes these institutions as “force-multipliers, turning each potential new voter into an organizer.” Woke Vote “secured pledges from members not only to vote, but to bring people with them to the polls.”

Steve Phillips, the founder of Democracy in Color, writes in a 2017 New York Times op-ed that “independent, under-the-radar, grass-roots, on-the-ground voter turnout efforts by black leaders and organizers in black neighborhoods” made the difference in Alabama—and not the Democratic Party, nor Doug Jones’ campaign. Phillips names organizations like BlackPAC, which canvassed the state and organized transportation for voters.

In his notorious interview for "The Daily Show," Don Yelton said that laws restricting voting only hurt lazy people. “If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get up off their bohunkus and go get a photo ID, so be it,” Yelton said.

Acquiring an ID card is, however, not an easy undertaking. Government agencies have limited hours and are often inaccessible to people who cannot afford time off work or the cost of travel. The 25 percent of Americans who do not have internet access at home face an additional obstacle: they have no easy way of looking up voter requirements in their area.

When election law is deliberately abstruse and selectively enforced, it’s rational to conclude that it might be safer to skip voting than to risk breaking the law. In 2018, a dozen people—nine of them black—in North Carolina’s Alamance County were charged with voting illegally in the 2016 presidential election. All were on probation or parole for felony convictions, and most had no idea they were committing a crime by voting while on parole. One of those charged, a man named Taranta Holman who was then 28 years old, told The New York Times that he had never voted before 2016 and never would again; it was simply “too much of a risk.” Residents of Texas, Kansas, Idaho, and other states have also been charged with voting illegally.

Grassroots efforts to counteract voter suppression have succeeded in part because many Americans see voting as a duty as well as a right. They want to vote, but they need information, encouragement, and support. Reported obstacles to voting include lack of time, lack of transportation, work and family responsibilities that preclude people from waiting in long lines, broken machines, unclear and/or onerous voter ID requirements—and, notably, anxiety. (I remember feeling slightly panicky entering a voting booth for the first time as an adult; the machines are not user-friendly!)

Accompanying a person who is nervous or uncertain because they haven’t voted in a long time, if ever, to the polls is not only an act of kindness—it’s a powerful act of solidarity. Like women seeking to exercise their right to a safe and legal abortion, marginalized people have, ever since winning the right to vote, been actively discouraged or prevented from using it.

We can’t reform institutions, repeal unjust laws, or ensure that every election official is capable and fair-minded overnight, but we can support one another, logistically and psychologically, in exercising our rights. Just as escorting one woman into an abortion clinic is an act of communal solidarity that communicates to all women the message “We are in this together,” escorting voters to the polls doesn’t just move the needle in one election: it helps build community power in the long term.
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    [post_date] => 2020-01-24 16:12:49
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    [post_content] => Can the law save our democracies? A new crop of podcasts, films, and television dramas attempt to answer the burning question of our times.

Legal dramas and police procedurals are hugely popular genres of entertainment. 12 Angry Men, Law & Order, and the Wallander detective novels by Swedish author Henning Mankell spring randomly to mind, but there are of dozens of examples in film, television, and literature. Recently, however, a crop of new dramas and documentaries that focus on the law and legal process seem to indicate, based on popularity and critical acclaim, to reflect a shift in the zeitgeist. Instead of providing escapism through fiction, the latest legal procedurals offer intellectual engagement with current events, and possibly answers to an urgent and poignant question: can the law, if implemented ethically, stabilize the shaky institutions holding up our democracies and redeem our social norms?



Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, which began this week with saturation media coverage, comes on the back of months of shocking revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein and what appears to be a high-level conspiracy between the state and Epstein’s defense team to look the other way for decades while he openly trafficked in and preyed sexually upon underage girls. In another case that is receiving global media coverage, opening arguments were presented this week at the New York City trial of Harvey Weinstein on two charges of rape and sexual assault; more than 100 women have accused the once-powerful producer of sexual assault, harassment, and rape.

All of these cases hold enormous implications. Can the law, which these powerful men flouted openly for decades, provide justice? The future of our vulnerable democracies seems to be predicated on an affirmative answer to this question.

Preet Bharara, a widely respected former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) who lost his job when Trump purged Obama appointees in early 2017, now hosts two popular podcasts that provide analysis of current events and their legal implications.

In Stay Tuned with Preet, Bharara offers a sober and non-partisan approach to the law that is remarkably appealing. Each episode is divided into two parts: Bharara opens by providing informed, engaged responses to listeners’ questions on the law, and moves on to a thought-provoking conversation with a feature guest. The latter have included Sally Yates, the former United States Deputy Attorney General; Jill Lepore, the prominent Harvard historian who is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker; filmmaker and actor Ed Norton; and George Conway, Kelly Ann’s stridently anti-Trump—but conservative—husband.

Bryan Stevenson, a prominent civil rights attorney who is often described as America’s Nelson Mandela, was Bharara’s guest on the December 26 episode of Stay Tuned.

Stevenson, who is black, grew up in racially segregated rural Delaware. He was deeply affected by his childhood experiences of institutional racism, and by the murder of his grandfather. During the podcast conversation, Stevenson explains that while he was keenly aware of how the law had been used to oppress black people in the United States, he also saw how it could be implemented to address inequities. The law ended school desegregation, for example, and it provided due process after police arrested his grandfather’s murderers; they were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Stevenson, who has a law degree from Harvard, founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit law firm based in Alabama that is dedicated to challenging racial injustice and ending mass incarceration. He is also the author of Just Mercy, a memoir about his experience of representing Walter McMillan, a man wrongfully accused of murdering a white woman. Critics have responded positively to recently released film based on the book, and starring Jamie Foxx.

The subject of Café Insider (tagline: Make Sense of Law & Politics), which Bharara co-hosts with Anne Milgram, the former New Jersey Attorney General, is the week’s events. In a single episode on August 12, 2019, Bharara and Milgram discuss and analyze Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide; the lawsuit by two former FBI officials claiming that they were wrongfully terminated as political retaliation; and the massive raids conducted by ICE agents of food processing plants in Mississippi. With their seasoned and engaging legal minds, Bharara and Milgram fill an urgent need for legal and factual clarity.

In television, the critically acclaimed series The Good Fight, a spin-off of The Good Wife, stars Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart, now a partner at a majority black Chicago law firm. The plot of each episode is based on stories “ripped from the headlines” — but always with a thought-provoking “what if?” twist. Lockhart, a liberal whose commitment to the law is challenged by the rise of Trump appointees in the judiciary, confesses to exhaustion and is tempted by gonzo feminist activists who claim that the only path of resistance is through dirty tricks and extra-legal activity. But each time Lockhart seems ready to capitulate to temptation, someone or some incident pulls her back, reminding her of and re-asserting the value, effectiveness and function of the law and adhering to legal process.

The law plays a major role in the gripping HBO miniseries Our Boys, which was broadcast to international critical acclaim. The series, which is co-directed by an Israeli and a Palestinian, dramatizes the horrific events of the summer of 2014 in Israel-Palestine, when three Jewish boys abducted and immolated 16 year-old Mohamed Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, in retribution for the abduction and murder by Palestinians of three yeshiva students from a West Bank settlement.

The story is framed as a police procedural, with a forensic dramatization of how the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, identified and arrested Abu Khdeir’s murderers, and how the criminal justice system prosecuted them. The series provides one of the most nuanced portrayals of the social, cultural, religious, and political divisions in contemporary Israel-Palestine, shining an uncomfortably bright light on the fissures between various subcultures of Jewish society, and between Jewish and Arab-Palestinian society.

From the moment they report him missing to the police, Mohamed Abu Khdeir’s parents are under enormous pressure. Not only must they rely on their political oppressors, the Israeli state, to pursue and prosecute their son’s killers, but they must also justify to their Palestinian community their controversial decision to abide by the Israeli legal system, trusting it to provide justice.

State Attorney Uri Korb, played by Lior Ashkenazi, communicates superbly the Israeli liberal intelligentsia’s failure to recognize that the country's legal system does not define justice for Palestinians in the same way it does for Jews. This is particularly true for Palestinians like the Abu Khdeir family, who are stateless residents of East Jerusalem with nebulously defined legal rights. Korb sees himself as the representative of the Israeli state, rather than a pursuer of justice on behalf of any one party. He does not, for example, see cognitive dissonance in dismissing Mohamed Abu Khdeir’s father, portrayed with luminous verisimilitude by Jony Arbid, when the latter demands that the homes of the Jewish Israelis convicted of his son’s murder be destroyed. This, after all, is a punishment that the Israeli state commonly metes out to Palestinians who are convicted of having committed political violence against Jews.

The ambiguous ending of Our Boys leaves open the question of whether or not the law can provide justice to Palestinian victims of a crime committed by Jews. There are, however, several gripping and complex scenes that illustrate the violent, anarchic consequences of rejecting the law and choosing extra-judicial action. As a dramatic device, the granular reconstruction of the police investigation provides a compassionate and insightful portrayal of contemporary Israeli-Palestinian society.

Also from Israel, Advocate (2019), an award-winning documentary that was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination, is a portrait of Lea Tsemel, an Israeli human rights lawyer who has spent most of her life defending Palestinian political prisoners. Miri Regev, the populist right wing Minister of Culture, predictably proclaimed her loathing for the film even as she acknowledged that she had not seen it; this type of criticism from Regev has become something of a badge of honor for left wing Israeli artists.

Advocate traces Tsemel’s career from the genesis of her left-wing activism in the 1970s, while she was a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to the present; it follows her as she represents one of her most highly publicized recent — that of Ahmad, a 13 year-old boy who is accused of attempting to kill a Jewish teenager with a knife. In a memorable scene that takes place in her cramped office, Tsemel explains to Ahmad and his family that they must choose between pleading guilty and seeing Ahmad charged as a minor, or going to trial; the latter option means that the barely adolescent boy could be sentenced as an adult if he is convicted. Ahmad, who insists that he had no intention of causing injury with the knife, and who was, as video footage shows, brutally questioned for hours by Israeli security without a lawyer or guardian present, opts for a trial. In court, Tsemel predicates her legal argument on the demonstrably true assertion that Jewish Israelis accused of the same crime as the one for which Ahmad is on trial are not charged with attempted murder. Nor do they risk being sentenced to life in prison.

Tsemel mentions frequently during the film that she has never won a case. Given the legal and political climate in Israel, she knows that her losing streak is likely to continue uninterrupted, but she is ideologically and morally committed to challenging the structures imposed on her clients. She has chosen her path of resistance, which is to demonstrate the legal system’s failures by the very act of working within the system. Giving up is not an option and refusing to work within the system will not, she seems to believe, help anybody.

Many observers of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the senate hope that the legal process will reverse what seems, due to partisan politics, to be a predetermined result. News outlets are providing saturation coverage of the lead-up to the trial, the role of Chief Justice Roberts, the number of Senate votes required to bring forward new witnesses and new evidence, and many other matters of procedure.

In Israel, meanwhile, the question of whether and for how long Benjamin Netanyahu can continue to occupy the position of prime minister while he is under criminal indictment is keeping everyone on edge, with the media providing saturation coverage of every new development. Does the law permit Netanyahu to run as head of his party in a third election while he is charged with criminal corruption? It does. Americans and Israelis are discovering, more or less in tandem, but for different reasons, the extent to which the law is predicated on social norms. Can the law provide justice even as populist authoritarianism systematically undermines and destroy those norms?

For social and political activists, the silver lining of these deeply troubling times is a noticeable uptick in civic engagement. Demonstrations, grassroots activism, and artistic resistance play a crucial role in social transformation, but so does the law. Three years into the Trump administration and a decade into the global rise of authoritarianism, it seems that many people are also recognizing with new appreciation the critical function of the law and legal process in maintaining a democracy.
    [post_title] => Desperately seeking answers in the law
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    [post_content] => Two decades after her breakout memoir was published, a writer once dismissed as a narcissist died a literary heroine.

When Elizabeth Wurtzel published Prozac Nation in 1994, she seemed all too eager to regale the public with her struggles. Raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she was the gifted daughter of a prosperous family who attended private schools and graduated from Harvard. In her memoirs, however, Wurtzel luridly described her depression: snorting coke to kick her lithium dependence, curling up on bathroom floors sweating and sobbing, and falling into bed with the wrong man at every turn. Yet, she looked gorgeous as she lived this self-destructive life. Posing on the cover of a magazine with a come-hither stare and a crop top, Wurtzel embodied the dark and angsty glamour of the 1990s—a literary Courtney Love or Tracey Emin. The memoir sat atop best-seller lists and was made into a movie starring Christina Ricci. Critics, however, were split. Was this the second coming of Sylvia Plath (had she survived a suicide attempt to promote The Bell Jar on MTV); or, was she merely a raving narcissist who, in Wurtzel’s own words, “didn’t even come across as sad any longer, just obnoxious”?  

Elizabeth Wurtzel died last week, and she died young—if not as young as she once predicted. (“I’m starting to wonder if I might not be one of those people like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath who are just better off dead…Perhaps, I, too, will die young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven.”) She was 52 when she died of breast cancer. 

By the time of her passing Wurtzel had cleaned up and, in defiance of her erstwhile Gen X slacker image, had graduated from Yale Law School, joined a white-shoe firm, and even—GASP!—married. Parsing her legacy, however, is more complex than simply caring about whether or not she “grew up,” as the New York Times obituary writer suggested. Wurtzel laid herself bare, but we did not know her. It’s a profound compliment to her writing that her readers—detractors and admirers alike—assumed that they did. Confessional writing as a genre can have great value, transforming both the lives of individuals and the cultural discourse. Wurtzel’s impact, though inextricably bound up in her celebrity, lies in the role she carved out for herself—and in everyone else who has since played the same part.  

Prozac Nation inspired a robust national conversation at the time it was published. Although many dismissed Wurtzler as a whiny egomaniac—no less a critic than Walter Kirn called the book “a work of singular self-absorption”—she kicked off a trend. The publishing market suddenly made room for confessional memoirs meant to make the reader at once cringe and relate, from Dani Shapiro’s Slow Motion (raised in a traditional suburban Jewish home, she dropped out of college and became the kept woman of a wealthy married man) to Susan Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (recollections of leaving a mental institution; Angelina Jolie starred in the film version and won an Oscar for her performance). What critic Nathan Rabin deemed “the Manic Pixie Dream Girl” came to define an archetype of the 1990s; the educated-woman-as-hot-mess trope can be traced directly down the line to more recent cultural fare, including Lena Dunham’s television series Girls, as Meghan Daum asserted in The New Yorker. 

A friend of Wurtzel’s hit upon the importance of her legacy in an interview for her New York Times obituary, 
“Lizzie’s literary genius rests not just in her acres of quotable one-liners...but in her invention of what was really a new form, which has more or less replaced literary fiction—the memoir by a young person no one has ever heard of before. It was a form that Lizzie fashioned in her own image, because she always needed to be both the character and the author.” 
This runs deeper than genre or medium. Allow me to explain it in the context of what you are reading right now: at some point in this essay, I will tell you something about myself. Why? Because I have to; that’s what writers do now. Last week, Geraldine Brooks wrote an excellent opinion piece to contextualize Iranian perceptions of American aggression. It wasn’t enough for her simply to mention in her bio blurb that she used to report from Iran for the Wall Street Journal; she also incorporated information about her background anecdotally into her argument, as though to prove she had the right to her opinion. Writing no longer exists on its own: it is a given that the author is a character, with their own motivations for writing. It’s almost as though they have a duty to contextualize a piece of writing within the greater timeline of their lives. 

Memoir may well be the narcissist’s playground, but the exhilarating rides the reader shows up for are not the high points. Wurtzel knew well that darkness was the draw. Whereas in 1994 readers perceived her style of memoir as wallowing, a 2020 reader might see plenty of space for a very contemporary word: empathy. Wurtzel spoke fearlessly about her problems. Depression, addiction, family dysfunction, and self-harm were all dragged out into broad daylight. She didn’t worry about what was in good taste: she told her truth, no matter who called her a poor little rich girl or a “brat”—as the writer of an unusually spicy Kirkus review opined. In 2020, therapy and mental health are talked about openly. 

Confessional writing played a part in this sea change, allowing for a more intimate glimpse into pain. And for those who contend Wurtzel looked too chic as she profited handsomely from her suffering, her own cancer advocacy offers a riposte. Although she failed to have herself tested for the BRCA gene, she campaigned for wider testing in the wake of her diagnosis. “I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer,” she wrote. “I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so.”

In creating a space to speak about her own problems, Wurtzel made a niche for other writers to inhabit, too—those who aren’t white or rich or Ivy League-educated. Prozac Nation was certainly not the first confessional memoir, but it pioneered something far more particular. Maya Angelou and James Baldwin wrote memoirs, but they did so in order to shine a light on the plight of a larger group of people—i.e., black people in the United States. Wurtzel’s motives were not quite so high-minded: she was unsparing in her depiction of her own individual privilege. Sylvia Plath certainly covered a lot of the same ground as Wurtzel, but she veiled it as fiction and, because The Bell Jar was published shortly before she killed herself, the book reads like a suicide note—an explanation of the writer’s absence rather than a plea for her presence. Although she was derided for self-pity, Wurtzel notably did not ask for sympathy. 

Arguably, Wurtzel ripped herself open so effectively that it has taken a couple of decades to see the precedent she set and its value as literature. The wounded, weird, yet compellingly charismatic individual is now a literary trope in memoirs written by a broad spectrum of writers. It is a space as suited to Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation as it is to Saeed Jones’ How We Fight For Our Lives, about growing up black and queer in a small Texas town, or to Roxane Gay’s Hunger, in which the author describes her struggles with sexual trauma, obesity, and her own identity. 

Perhaps we don’t like the idea that Wurtzel—wealthy, white, Harvard-educated—created this space, but the access those qualities granted her created a more accepting landscape for others. We cannot know if this was her intent, but it is the effect of her writing. What Gloria Steinem’s looks were to second-wave feminism, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s were to a platform capable of accommodating almost anyone brave enough—or exhibitionistic enough—to inhabit it. 

What does the reader gain from coming in contact with all of this? The confessional memoir opens a window onto the aspects of human nature that we tend to hide, mostly out of shame. It allows us to see and accept that we are messy, complex, and multifaceted human beings. It’s a genre with a natural intersectionality about it, like a soapbox on which anyone can stand. And you, the reader, don’t need to love any of these authors to appreciate that by putting themselves out there, they make more space for the rest of us, not only to be messy but to understand one another. On the one hand, we can see ourselves in the problems we share; we are less alone, validated. As someone with cancer in the family (and, just like that, I told you something about myself!!), I know the nerve Anne Boyer’s The Undying hits all too well. On the other hand, I will never be a queer man of color from rural Texas; reading Saeed Jones allows me to step inside an experience that isn’t mine, but also to appreciate our shared realities—and maybe even weigh the social and political ties that bind us. There is a great deal of courage in the kind of vulnerability that begets those bigger conversations.  

This kind of discourse is vital to any pluralistic society and to any democracy. We must understand one another to truly value one another, and there isn’t enough space for that transaction in a tweet. This kind of understanding can never be credited to a single confessional memoir, but rather to the aggregate effect they have had on how we treat one another and accommodate one another’s needs. As we continue to fight for various civil rights in a precarious political moment—an election year, no less—we should remember that, even if there is not a direct line between Prozac Nation and gender-neutral bathrooms, there is certainly a direct correlation between how the culture allows us to express ourselves and what arguments the body politic is capable of understanding and integrating. 

As a teenager reading Prozac Nation a few years after it came out, I wondered if I needed to be a bigger mess to succeed as a writer. Perhaps I was a Millennial rolling her eyes at Gen X. I asked myself if we really needed to know that Wurtzel’s “mouth was getting tired and chapped from giving so many blowjobs” to appreciate gems like, “If you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.” The answer is no. No, we did not. But we also don’t need to like someone to admire them. More importantly, any exercise in empathy is a chance at community building, both an opportunity to feel less alone in this world and to see more of it from a perspective that glories in its lack of varnish. Confessional memoirs—even in their most profound self-absorption—are just that: a chance to be let in on something other than ourselves. 

 
    [post_title] => The personal (even on Prozac) is political: Elizabeth Wurtzel's literary legacy
    [post_excerpt] => The confessional memoir allows us to see and accept that we are messy, complex, and multifaceted human beings.
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    [post_content] => As Americans worry about suffering reprisals for the killing of Iran's top general, they overlook the civilians who have already been paying for many years — with their blood.

In an Egyptian political satire play called al-Za’im (The Chief), a military dictator who is an archetype representing the Middle East’s various tyrants dies of a sudden heart attack. His inner circle scrambles to replace him with a two-bit actor who looks exactly like the deceased president, so they can buy time to consolidate their power.

When told that he would be the new leader because the real one had perished, the actor smirks and lets out a derisive laugh. “Are there presidents who die, Sir?”

Many of us Middle Easterners and observers of the region had a similarly incredulous reaction to the death of General Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top military general, who was killed in a US airstrike over the weekend. Analysts and experts claimed that his death would change everything and nothing, that it would lead to World War III; it had the American president vowing to commit war crimes just a few days into the new decade.

These predictions appear to be overblown. Soleimani’s legacy of violence and dispossession in Syria and Iraq will, however, endure. For his many victims, there is momentary relief at his passing.

Soleimani was the leader of the Quds Force, the unit responsible for external operations of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The IRGC’s remit is protecting the Islamic Republic’s political system from internal and external threats. Soleimani gained his formative experience fighting on the frontlines of the cruel eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, during which Saddam Hussein deployed chemical weapons with impunity while continuing to enjoy western backing. He witnessed the enormous loss of life – more than half a million, including children and soldiers who were sent into minefields as human detonators, in what was ultimately a pointless war of attrition. 

By 1998 Soleimani was head of the Quds Force; and in 2011 he was promoted to major general. Meanwhile the Arab Spring was sweeping through the region, with Syria the focal point of the Islamic Republic’s paranoia.

Soleimani loomed large as the face of Iran’s campaign for regional dominance, a figure of mystique and mythical brilliance and strategic wisdom. He was the second-most powerful man in Iran, after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; he battled the US for influence in Iraq during the American occupation, arming and backing Shia militias in order to guarantee a weak Iraqi state that functioned under the shadow of Iranian influence.

Though he was always an elusive figure, Soleimani had grown less wary of the limelight in recent years. He allowed himself to be photographed and took selfies with Shia militias on the frontlines in Iraq and Syria. 

In Iraq, he organized militias that defeated ISIS; but then those militias turned around and launched military reprisals against ordinary Sunni civilians, thus alienating the very people they had just liberated from the jihadi terror group. 

In Syria, the Iranian general’s self-appointed mission was to save the dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime from collapse. In doing so, he presided over the country’s destruction, the displacement of millions of civilians, the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War, and the survival of a tyrannical regime.

All the while, he was portrayed as a master strategist who foiled American designs in the region at every stage.

Iran’s pro-Assad policy is based on its desire to maintain regional influence. The Islamic Republic needs Syria to be stable in order to maintain a secure overland avenue for the transportation of military supplies to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is its most powerful proxy force. Iran also needs to maintain an overland route to ports on the Mediterranean. When the Arab Spring of 2011 spread to Syria from Egypt, where protesters set a precedent by forcing the resignation of long-time ruler Hosni Mubarak, Iran sent advisors to Syria. Soon after that, it sent proxy militias to fight alongside Assad’s forces. In 2013, Hezbollah forces entered Syria to fight for the regime as well.

These proxy forces were responsible for some of the cruelest tactics of the war. In early 2016, I reported on the siege of Madaya, a border town that was home to 30,000 civilians who were being systematically starved to death by Hezbollah in an effort to force their surrender. To survive, people ate grass, leaves, and spiced water instead of soup.

These starvation sieges were replicated throughout the country, with Soleimani’s proxy forces often leading the charge into areas held by anti-Assad rebel troops. In addition to using hunger as a weapon of war, the pro-regime militias used scorched earth tactics. To recapture Aleppo, they bombarded from the ground while the Syrian and Russian air forces bombed from the air; as they reclaimed territory from the rebels, they carried out extrajudicial killings.

When the rebel forces eventually surrendered, tens of thousands of civilians, fearing the regime would persecute them for suspected anti-government sympathies, were forcibly displaced. Soleimani’s tactics are responsible for rendering countless Syrians destitute and homeless, and for driving many to seek refuge abroad. The ensuing refugee crisis contributed enormously to sectarian tensions in the Middle East. Those who stayed inside Syria continue to suffer from the violent tactics of the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian allies.

In 2015 Soleimani traveled to Moscow and personally convinced the Russians to intervene on Assad’s behalf. Russian warplanes have carried out dozens of attacks on hospitals in rebel-held areas, and they have killed thousands of Syrian civilians in various air strikes.

In Iraq, the extent of the atrocities carried out by Soleimani’s proxy forces in Sunni communities liberated from ISIS was so extreme that, according to cables leaked by rivals, the intelligence services worried they were undermining Iran’s popular reputation.

More recently, Soleimani was reportedly involved in the crackdown on the popular protest movement against government corruption in Iraq. Security forces and Tehran-backed militias killed hundreds of Iraqi protesters in the weeks leading up to Soleimani’s death. According to reports, the Iranian general attended key security meetings in Iraq; he advised his counterparts to learn from Iran, where security forces killed over a thousand civilians in anti-government demonstrations that took place in December.

In the weeks and months before the Trump administration assassinated Soleimani, the Iranian regime carried out several calculated provocations against the US, as payback for their having pulled out of the multilateral nuclear deal. They threatened and disrupted shipping in the Persian Gulf and bombed Saudi oil installations; more recently, Iran launched rocket attacks against Iraqi bases housing American troops and attacked the US embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve.

The question of whether assassinating Soleimani was legal or not is an academic one. Not just because it is already done and nobody will be held accountable for it, but because Soleimani had been waging an overt and covert war against the US and its allies for years. He orchestrated the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians over nearly a decade of war in Syria, against a backdrop of a broad violence and civil warfare in Yemen and Libya, as well as political crackdowns and resurgent authoritarianism throughout the region. 

The Middle Eastern conflagration that American pundits claim to be so concerned about Soleimani’s death sparking has already been raging for a decade, with hundreds of thousands of civilians paying in blood.

For now, the worst predictions of the alarmists have not been realized. World War III has not started, and Tehran responded with a calculated attack that didn’t kill any Americans. It did kill or injure Iraqi soldiers stationed on the military base housing American troops, but this was a matter of indifference to both Iran and the United States. As we have seen since the invasion of 2003, America places little value on Iraqi lives.

If there is a future escalation, it will take place on the backs of Arab civilians, because Iran does not have the capacity to match American military aggression. If it does respond further, it will do so through its proxies, further destabilizing the region and risking war. Tehran and Washington will never allow Arab civilians to stand between them when it comes to pursuing their foreign policy goals in the Middle East.

Trump does not care about Arab lives — about this, there is little doubt. Nor is he concerned about human rights, international law, or even having an actual strategy for his foreign policy in the most volatile part of the world. 

But amid the hand-wringing, spare a thought for Soleimani’s victims. For a brief moment, their suffering has been eased.

 
    [post_title] => Dear America: the death of Qasem Soleimani is not all about you
    [post_excerpt] => For now, the worst predictions of the alarmists have not been realized. World War III has not started, and Tehran responded with a calculated attack that didn’t kill any Americans. It did kill or injure Iraqi soldiers stationed on the military base housing American troops, but this was a matter of indifference to both Iran and the United States. As we have seen since the invasion of 2003, America places little value on Iraqi lives.
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    [post_content] => There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in.
 — Leonard Cohen

I’m writing these words from a yoga center in the snow-covered Berkshires, in an atmosphere of extreme serenity that is both deeply comforting and somewhat intimidating. On the second day of my little retreat, during a silent meditation walk in the snowy woods, the woman leading the group had us stop at a particularly idyllic spot and stand still, listening to the quiet. Tree branches creaked gently in the wind, a stream of water bubbled over rocks, a woodpecker tapped on a tree, and someone (it might have been me) struggled to control her jagged breathing (it was a steep climb!). Gazing up at the treetops, the instructor asked us to describe what we heard during the silent walk. Reader, I was honest: during the meditation walk, all I could hear was the cacophony in my head — and it sounded like a super highway at rush hour. 

Most of us walk around with a head full of noisy thoughts. Meditation is supposed to help quiet the mind, but sitting still (or walking in deliberate silence) while thinking about nothing is incredibly difficult. Still, I don’t think I am alone in feeling that the normal roar inside my head has become much louder and shriller in recent months. When I mentioned to a friend, a journalist who covers the Christian and white nationalist right in the United States, that I was feeling overwhelmed by an unending stream of worried thoughts, she said, without missing a beat: “It’s the fascism.”

For those of us who are concerned about the state of civil society and democracy, 2019 was a disquieting year. Authoritarianism continues to rise and spread, while once robust democracies falter as the pillars of supporting institutions — the judiciary, the independent media, and the legislative branch — are weakened. Around the United States, in New Zealand and in Europe, we have seen a notable uptick in violent racist and antisemitic incidents. Perhaps most worrying of all, governments continue to dither over the climate crisis, even as scientists issue dire warnings about the consequences of a failure to implement policy changes. 

The news is so bad, and the sense of hopelessness so pervasive, that there’s a constant temptation to withdraw and focus inward rather than fight back. This is especially true when the exigencies of daily life — working, raising children, worrying about money, and trying to find a little time for oneself — are so all consuming. Where do people who don’t have any experience of struggling for their rights, because they took them for granted, find the inner resources to fight back? 

The story of this yoga retreat center provides some insight and inspiration on the matter of fighting for what is important. For many years, it was an ashram led by a guru. His devotees and disciples lived on the property in a communal lifestyle that involved providing a lot of free labor, from teaching yoga classes to cooking meals and cleaning rooms for paying guests. In return, the devotees received all the emotional benefits of being part of a nurturing, close-knit, spiritual community. In the mid-1990s, however, the guru was discovered to have “abused his power” — i.e., preyed sexually on some of the devotees. For the community, this was a devastating betrayal. Many had lived at the ashram for years; they had taken on new names bestowed by the guru; their friends, community, and identity were all tied up with the ashram and its spiritual leader.

Twenty-five years later, the ashram is a thriving, non-profit educational center, which provides a nurturing, peaceful place for people who need some time to take care of their bodies and their spirits. 

The center provides scholarships to grassroots community leaders interested in learning how to broker and teach non-violent conflict resolution in challenging environments, and to people who want to use yoga as a means of enriching their professional practice — as healthcare providers, teachers, or corporate wellness consultants. The people who clean and cook are no longer volunteer religious devotees, but staff who are paid and treated well — many of them refugees, or people who live with physical or intellectual limitations. The instructors have stripped the yoga classes of Sanskrit chanting, except for the occasional “om” or “namaste.” Instead, they emphasize that yoga is a science and a practice that promotes physical well being, but not a religion. Slowly, some of the disillusioned devotees who moved away after the guru’s betrayal are drifting back to spend time at the ashram-turned-yoga center. They’ve reconnected with old friends, and rejoined a changed community. 

Nothing about this trajectory was obvious in 1994, shortly after the guru was exposed and ousted. I remember, because I happened to visit at the time and saw how crushed and unmoored the devotees were. They could easily have closed up shop and dispersed into a fog of bitterness and loneliness, but they decided that the place had too much to give and teach, and that it must be salvaged. And so they set to work, and after a few years they realized that they hadn’t needed a guru, after all.

I am inspired by people who are willing to face and overcome emotional devastation.

Over the past year, as I mourned the decline of democracy and civil society and tried to fight my way through the spiritual malaise that is caused by fear and a perception of helplessness, I saw some thought provoking inspiration around the world. 

In a Moscow courtroom, a 21 year-old university student named Yegor Zhukov was tried for “extremism,” after he was arrested for posting YouTube videos in which he extolled the virtues of nonviolent protest, criticized Vladimir Putin, and discussed his campaign for a seat on the Moscow City Council. Masha Gessen translated the moving and powerful speech Zhukov gave at his court hearing, after which he was sentenced to only three years of probation. In Putin’s repressive Russia, this was a surprisingly light sentence. The explanation, Gessen writes, lies in Zhukov’s speech, the response it elicited from the public — and the fact that several Russian media outlets “dared” to publish it.

Globally, the number of grassroots movements challenging corrupt and/or authoritarian governments with sustained protests is breathtaking. In Chile, protestors have faced down police using live ammunition and mass arrests as they continue to protest the social and economic inequality in their country. In Lebanon and Iraq, protestors have joined forces across sectarian lines to challenge the corrupt and ineffective governing systems in their countries. In Hong Kong, the sustained pro-democracy demonstrations are entering their eighth month. The Chinese government issued dire threats and even indicated it was prepared to intervene militarily, but has so far done nothing. 

In India, just this week, a stunning number of ordinary citizens flooded the streets of major cities to protest the controversial new citizenship act that discriminates against Muslims. 

And last October, just steps from my home in Montreal, an estimated 500,000 people gathered to cheer for Greta Thunberg, the 16 year-old Swedish girl who single handedly inspired a global movement to raise awareness of the climate crisis. 

The power of authoritarians can and must be challenged. The temptation to check out and turn inward must be fought. Giving up is not an option. 

I think I’ll adopt those thoughts as my meditation mantras. Meanwhile, The Conversationalist will continue to publish insightful, knowledgeable, thought provoking articles about the urgent issues that we all care about so deeply. I don’t know if 2020 will be better than 2019, but let’s get ready to meet its challenges. 

 
    [post_title] => Lessons in resistance at a former yoga ashram
    [post_excerpt] => Over the past year, as I mourned the decline of democracy and civil society and tried to fight my way through the spiritual malaise that is caused by fear and a perception of helplessness, I saw some thought provoking inspiration around the world. 
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