Elections

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.It’s Independence Day, when Americans traditionally gather to grill meat and blow things up while they celebrate the nation’s founding — but in our recommended books this week, we’re casting an eye on more recent history: Tom McGrath’s “Triumph of the Yuppies” looks back to the “greed is good” era of the 1980s and shows how it marched unimpeded to the present day, while John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke” finds the roots of today’s culture wars and ascendant right wing in the seemingly quieter politics of the early 1990s. Also up: the biography of an influential book editor, a novel set on a small Welsh island in the 1930s, and a graphic novel that explores themes of independence and self-invention. Happy reading, and Happy Fourth. — Gregory CowlesTRIUMPH OF THE YUPPIES:America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal NationTom McGrathIn this breezy history, McGrath sets out to explain why the United States suddenly fell in love with finance while inequality skyrocketed in the 1980s. He follows a series of colorful figures in their pursuit of crass materialism, including the junk bond king Michael Milken and the former yippie activist Jerry Rubin.“Graduating from an elite college and moving to the city to try to get rich has become so common that we barely notice it. The ultimate triumph of the yuppies is that we don’t even call them yuppies anymore.”From Jacob Goldstein’s reviewGrand Central | $32WHEN THE CLOCK BROKE:Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990sJohn GanzThe 1990s marked the end of the Cold War and the beginning of Clintonian “triangulation,” giving the impression of a bland consensus coalescing around a political middle. But as Ganz shows, the early part of the decade was also a time of social unrest and roiling resentments. His vibrant narrative account captures an emerging “politics of despair” that would eventually benefit the far right.“Captures the sweep of the early ’90s in all its weirdness and vainglory…. Ganz recounts all of this with a formidable command of the history. But he also has the skills of a gifted storyteller — one with excellent comedic timing, too — slipping in the most absurd and telling details.”From Jennifer Szalai’s reviewFarrar, Straus & Giroux | $30WHALE FALLElizabeth O’ConnorBrief but complete, blunt but exquisite, Connor’s debut is set in the fall of 1938 on an unnamed Welsh island with a population of 47, including the bright and restless 18-year-old Manod, her mysterious younger sister and her lobster fisherman father. Unsettling disruptions to the landscape include a whale corpse washed up on the beach and English ethnographers who enlist Manod’s help but woefully distort island life in their work.“An example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude. … Understanding is hard work, O’Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions.”From Maggie Shipstead’s reviewPantheon | $27THE EDITOR:How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in AmericaSara B. FranklinThis essential if adulatory biography argues that Jones has been given short shrift, credited mostly as the culinary editor who championed Julia Child, but who did much more to burnish Knopf’s exalted reputation in the book business.“Jones’s contribution to the history of regular old literature has often been minimized or outright erased. … She burnished and sustained Knopf’s reputation as the most prestigious publishing house in the country while also earning it piles of money.”From Alexandra Jacobs’s reviewAtria | $29.99VERA BUSHWACKSig BurwashIn this graphic novel debut, Burwash transports the reader to Nova Scotia by exploring the lives of a nonbinary protagonist named Drew and their alter-ego, Vera Bushwack (a chainsaw-wielding, chaps-wearing nonbinary hero of sorts), as they work to clear land in order to build a cabin in the woods, exploring gender, independence and several other big themes along the way.“Burwash gives the book’s art a lovely personality. It is surprisingly plastic; sometimes their renderings of Drew and her environs are simple contours, sometimes the images are drawn from such a height that they’re almost maps.”From Sam Thielman’s graphic novels columnDrawn & Quarterly | $29.95 More

Most young people in France usually don’t vote or they back the left. That is still true, but support has surged for the far right, whose openly racist past can feel to them like ancient history.In the 1980s, a French punk rock band coined a rallying cry against the country’s far right that retained its punch over decades. The chant, still shouted at protests by the left, is “La jeunesse emmerde le Front National,” which cannot be translated well without curse words, but essentially tells the far right to get lost.That crude battle cry is emblematic of what had been conventional wisdom not only in France, but also elsewhere — that young people often tilt left in their politics. Now, that notion has been challenged as increasing numbers of young people have joined swaths of the French electorate to support the National Rally, a party once deemed too extreme to govern.The results from Sunday’s parliamentary vote, the first of a two-part election, showed young people across the political spectrum coming out to cast ballots in much greater numbers than in previous years. A majority of them voted for the left. But one of the biggest jumps was in the estimated numbers of 18-to-24-year-olds who cast ballots for the National Rally, in an election that many say could reshape France.A quarter of the age group voted for the party, according to a recent poll by the Ifop polling institute, up from 12 percent just two years ago.There is no one reason for such a significant shift. The National Rally has tried to sanitize its image, kicking out overtly antisemitic people, for instance, who shared the deep-seated prejudice of the movement’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. And the party’s anti-immigrant platform resonates for some who see what they consider uncontrolled migration as a problem.Young people at an anti-far-right gathering in Paris after the results of the first round of the parliamentary elections. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

After a tremendous “Swan Lake” performance, Chloe Misseldine was promoted onstage at the Metropolitan Opera House. The audience went nuts.It was an extraordinary performance from Chloe Misseldine on Wednesday afternoon, the kind of debut that reminds us how rare it is for a dancer to have not only access to strength and delicacy, but also the ability to weave them together in real time.The moment Susan Jaffe, artistic director of American Ballet Theater, stepped onto the stage after the matinee of “Swan Lake” at the Metropolitan Opera House, it was apparent what was about to happen.“So, Chloe Misseldine doesn’t know this yet,” she said. “But as of this moment, she’s just been promoted to principal dancer.”A roar followed. This isn’t the usual way dancers are told about their promotions at Ballet Theater. Jaffe, in a statement, said that she expected she would name Misseldine a principal at the end of the season, but changed her mind after Misseldine’s New York debut in the dual role of Odette-Odile. “I felt no need to wait,” Jaffe said. “The moment was right.”More than that, the moment was necessary. Both the performance and surprise promotion gave a needed jolt to Ballet Theater’s summer season, a sleepy one so far that has included the company premiere of Wayne McGregor’s ponderous three-act “Woolf Works,” and more traditional repertoire: “Onegin” (with its melodrama and big lift energy) and “Swan Lake” (from 2000 and in need of an overhaul).In “Swan Lake,” Misseldine, dancing with an impressive Aran Bell as Prince Siegfried, showered the stage with glittering dancing, first as Odette — a princess who has been turned into a swan by the evil sorcerer, von Rothbart — and then as Odile, his deceptive daughter who tricks Siegfried at the ball.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Karamba Diaby, whose 2013 victory was considered a win for equality, said he wanted more time with his family. But he has also spoken of the death threats he has received.Germany’s first African-born member of Parliament said this week that he would not seek office again in next year’s general elections. Although he played down racism as a factor, he made the announcement a short time after his staff released the contents of a slew of hate mail and death threats that his office had received.The lawmaker, Karamba Diaby, a 62-year-old Senegal native first elected in 2013, said in a letter written to his colleagues that he wanted to make way for a new generation of politicians and that racism was “not the main reason” for his decision. But he has been outspoken about the abuse he has experienced, which has markedly increased in volume and tenor in recent years.Bullets were fired through the window of his district office in 2020, and the office was a target of arson last year.“I can’t wipe all this away,” Mr. Diaby was reported as saying in an interview, according to the Funke Media Group, a major German newspaper and magazine publisher. “These are not small things.”The election over a decade ago of Mr. Diaby, who holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and emigrated to East Germany in 1985, was at the time hailed as a major win for equality. Mr. Diaby, who belongs to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats party, cited a desire to spend more time with family as a main reason for his departure.Yet the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as AfD, has been far outpolling his center-left party in his constituency.Mr. Diaby has blamed the rising AfD, whose populist platform won them second place in Germany in the recent European Union elections, for the spike in racism and threats.“In the last few years, I’ve faced several murder threats,” he said in a podcast interview with Politico.eu this week. “This has now overstepped the mark.”“The hatred that the AfD sows every day with its misanthropic narratives is reflected in concrete psychological and physical violence,” he added. “This endangers the cohesion of our society. We cannot simply accept this.”The city of Halle, which Mr. Diaby represents, is in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the eastern states where the nationalist and anti-immigrant AfD dominates.Just last year, Mr. Diaby struck a very different tone against those who had threatened him.“Over 42,000 people in Halle voted for me,” he said in an interview with Der Spiegel newsmagazine. “Quitting would mean giving their votes less weight than those of a hateful minority.”“I would never allow that to happen,” he added.Christopher F. Schuetze More

A stubborn matriarch played by Ellen Burstyn lodges in a furniture store and wages emotional warfare with her adult children.In a furniture store devoid of customers, an elderly matriarch, referred to only as “Mother” and played by Ellen Burstyn, has settled on a couch. That is, she’s really settled on a couch. She’s sitting on it and refusing to budge. She promises that if anyone tries to move or carry her off the couch, she will struggle to the extent that, “I will fall and hit my head so hard it will burst.”No one in “Mother, Couch” is inordinately pragmatic, or else this movie, written and directed by Niclas Larsson, adapted from a novel by Jerker Virdborg, would be much shorter. Granted, Burstyn’s character, first seen in black wraparound sunglasses and sporting a helmet-like flip hairdo, is a formidable figure. And stranding her multi-accented adult children (it’s explained, weakly) in the store with her over a few days is one way to effect yet another cinematic contemplation on Why Families Are Dysfunctional.Mother’s children are Ewan McGregor’s David, buttoned-down and flying apart; Rhys Ifans’s Gruffudd, medium shambolic by default; and Lara Flynn Boyle’s Linda, snarling and swearing a blue streak.Apple, meet tree: Mother is stubborn, and frankly mean, albeit more formal in her language. “I never wanted any children, David,” she practically snarls after having given this son a nasty cut on the palm that won’t heal. Hey! Symbolism! Or, one should say, another bit of symbolism.While the film’s premise may suggest black comedy (and the sometimes fake-jaunty, fake-portentous score by Christopher Bear underscores that idea), Burstyn’s character, which the actor plays with her customary expertise, is so utterly disagreeable that viewing the picture is a mostly anxious experience with not much of a reward at the end, which shifts to magic realist mode for lack of anywhere better to go.Mother CouchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

This poignant animated film casts the world of imaginary friends as an arena to reckon with emotional turmoil and loss of innocence.Imagination is the abstract space that can most potently symbolize childlike joy and wonder — at least, according to the opening scene of “The Imaginary,” with its sweeping fantastical vistas sprouting from the inside of a child’s mind. In truth, our imaginations and the friends we make along the way are, within this poignant and inventive animated film directed by Yoshiyuki Momose, arenas where we reckon with emotional turmoil and the loss of innocence.The third work out of Studio Ponoc, an offshoot of the revered Studio Ghibli, the movie follows Rudger (voiced by Kokoro Terada), the imaginary (i.e. imaginary friend) of Amanda (Rio Suzuki), a young girl who recently lost her father. Their days of play are interrupted when Mr. Bunting (Issey Ogata), a mustachioed villain accompanied by a wordless spectral imaginary, tries to consume Rudger and separates him from Amanda. After he is sent to a kind of imaginary heaven, Rudger must team up with other imaginaries to find and save her.It’s a visually splendid film with a restless inventiveness — too restless, at times. The movie falters periodically under the weight of its own dream logic, which can be hard to follow or flimsily constructed as the story gains momentum. But it’s mostly easy to move past those flaws in a work of such rich magical realism and heart.While the film is pushing for the kind of grand emotional and mythic proportions of a Ghibli work, it may not exactly stack up for some viewers with such great expectations. But, held up against more recent imagination-centric stories (with apologies to John Krasinski), Yoshiyuki’s film has the creative verve to sweep you away nonetheless.The ImaginaryRated PG for scary images, peril, thematic elements and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

President Biden told a group of Democratic governors on Wednesday that he was staying in the 2024 campaign, as the group peppered the president with questions about the path forward after Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week.After the meeting, a handful of governors spoke with reporters outside the White House, with one, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, declaring, “President Joe Biden is in it to win it, and all of us said we pledged our support to him.”Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, said: “He has had our backs through Covid, through all of the recovery, all of the things that have happened. The governors have his back, and we’re working together just to make very, very clear on that.”But he added, “A path to victory in November is the No. 1 priority, and that’s the No. 1 priority of the president.”Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland echoed the sentiment.In a statement, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said, “I heard three words from the president — he’s all in. And so am I.”And Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan posted her support on the social media site X.The meeting closed with Vice President Kamala Harris describing the threats to democracy that a victory by former President Donald J. Trump could pose, tossing at least one expletive into her remarks, according to a person briefed on what took place.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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