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      How the Capitol Riot Led to a Broken America

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      “Things feel broken.”Those weren’t the first three words in a recent article in The Times by Sarah Lyall about our pandemic-frazzled nerves. They weren’t the fanciest. But they seemed to me the truest — or, rather, the truth of our moment distilled to its essence. This country isn’t working, not the way it’s supposed to.Oh, it’s functioning, with a mammoth economy (which distributes wealth much too unevenly), an intricate transportation network (about to improve, thanks to infrastructure legislation) and the historically swift and heroically expansive delivery of vaccines to Americans rooted firmly enough in truth to accept them.But in terms of our democratic ideals? Our stated values? Our basic contentment?We’re a mess, and the pandemic mainly exposed and accelerated an ugliness already there. Would the violence at the U.S. Capitol a year ago today have happened in the absence of Covid closures and fears? Maybe not then. But we were headed there before the first cough.The anniversary of the Jan. 6 rioting has rightly focused attention on the intensifying efforts to undermine our democracy, but it should also prompt us to contemplate the degradation of the country’s civic spirit and the foulness of its mood.That’s part of what Jan. 6 symbolized, and that’s what Sarah’s article was about. It specifically examined customer freak-outs and meltdowns, but those bespeak a nastiness and selfishness that go hand in hand with disrespect for the institutions and traditions that have steadied us. The attacks on democracy are inextricable from the collapse of decency.In my final newsletter of 2021, I pushed back against many Americans’ pessimism, noting that when I look at spans of time greater than the past few months or years, I see trajectories of improvement, arcs of hope. I still see those, and I believe that we can — and should — leaven any upset over, say, the shortfall of Covid tests with bedazzlement at the fleet development of vaccines. As a country, as a species, we’ve still got plenty of juice.But it’s erratically channeled. It’s squandered. And it often can’t compete, not these days, with potent currents of anger. Regarding those currents, another passage in Sarah’s article grabbed and stayed with me. “In part, the problem is the disconnect between expectation and reality,” she wrote, paraphrasing what a consultant had told her.The consultant was addressing the consumer experience, but that assessment can be upsized and applied to the American experience. One of our glories as a country is how high we tell everyone to reach, how big we tell everyone to dream. But that’s also one of our predicaments. A land of promise will invariably be a land of promises unkept.There’s too little joy at present. In its stead: recrimination, rancor and indecency — which is the prompt for this reflection and the pivot to a plea. As we begin and lurch through a new year, can we recognize that the best way to fix what’s broken isn’t with a sledgehammer? The rioters at the Capitol lost sight of that. The rest of us mustn’t.For the Love of SentencesPanta PetrovicOliver Bunic/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn part because of the holiday break, “For the Love of Sentences” hasn’t appeared since mid-December, so today’s installment will be a bit longer than usual, to accommodate nominations that stretch back that far. Without further ado:“When I read about the Serbian hermit Panta Petrovic this summer, I liked him immediately — even as I understood that he, being a misanthropic hermit, would not like me back,” wrote Jon Mooallem in The Times. “For starters, the man looked the part: 70 years old, smudgy-cheeked and virile, with a beard fanning off him like the bottom of an old broom, rope for a belt and white sleeves blousing from a tattered brown vest. Aesthetically, he resembled a fiddler on the roof without the fiddle. Or the roof.” (Thanks to Lynne Sheren of Greenville, N.Y., and Vipan Chandra of Attleboro, Mass., for the nomination.)Sticking with The Times, here’s Pete Wells, our restaurant critic, on a new British steakhouse in Manhattan: “One of Hawksmoor’s great attractions, though, is its custom of writing out the names and weights of other, larger cuts available that day on chalkboards posted around the dining room. These stretch from bring-your-rugby-teammates gigantic, like a 54-ounce rib chop, to condemned-prisoners’-last-meal huge, like a 38-ounce chateaubriand, on down to slabs of meat that you could conceivably eat by yourself if you could take the next day off to lie very quietly on the couch like a python.” (Christine Fischetti, Aspinwall, Pa.)Here’s the science writer Dennis Overbye on a special magnifying glass for the cosmos: “Sitting in a spaceport in French Guiana, wrapped like a butterfly in a chrysalis of technology, ambition, metal and wires, is the biggest, most powerful and, at $10 billion, most expensive telescope ever to be launched into space.” (Nina Koenigsberg, Manhattan)Here’s David Segal describing one of the people in his article about a Dickensian workhouse in London becoming — of course! — luxury apartments: “Mr. Burroughs, a 77-year-old chartered accountant, speaks carefully and barely above a whisper, as if he were narrating a golf tournament.” (Sharon Green, Owings Mills, Md.)Here’s Gail Collins, from her weekly online “Conversation” with Bret Stephens: “Registering as an independent is like telling a charitable fund-raiser that you want to help by sending good thoughts.” (Paula Diamond, Amagansett, N.Y.)Bret differed. “I’m happy as an independent,” he wrote. “It’s like getting to order à la carte, whereas everyone else is stuck with a bento box of things that don’t actually go together.” (David Calfee, Lake Forest, Ill.)Bret also confided, regarding 2021: “I had such high hopes for the year, Gail. Melania and Donald would slink quietly out of the White House, she in couture, he in ignominy.” (Christine Sheola, Ithaca, N.Y.)Moving on to The New Yorker: Calvin Trillin examined the art of the lede — that’s journalistic jargon for an article’s opening words — by reproducing an epically packed one from a Louisiana newspaper’s account of a woman biting a camel. (Yes, you read that correctly.) “Notice,” Trillin observed, “how the reader is drawn in with a single unpunctuated sentence that starts slowly and gradually becomes an express train that whistles right by the local stops without providing an opportunity to get off.” (Steve Estvanik, Seattle, and Laurie Caplan, Astoria, Ore., among others)Here’s Jenny Turner, in The London Review of Books, on Hannah Arendt: “She wrote polemical essay-columns, in German at first, for the German-speaking New York Jewish press, and then in the spirited, sardonic English of a beer-hall fiddler who hasn’t forgotten her old life in the string quartet.” (Roman Kadron, Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.)In The Guardian, Catherine Bennett opined that despite all the damage that Covid has done, Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, “has treated masks as if they were a lefty plot against his face.” (Marilyn Wilbanks, Ellensburg, Wash.)In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank sized up the current state of gerrymandering: “Thanks to a breathtaking abuse of redistricting in G.O.P.-controlled states, all but an unlucky handful of members of Congress will henceforth be exempt from listening to those god-awful whiners called ‘voters,’ spared those bothersome contests known as ‘elections’ and protected from other disagreeable requirements of ‘democracy.’” (Valerie Congdon, Waterford, Mich.)Finally, a headline — we allow the occasional extraordinary one into the “For the Love of Sentences” sanctum. It appeared atop a review of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” by A.O. Scott, one of The Times’s movie critics: “The Thane, Insane, Slays Mainly in Dunsinane.” (Bonnie Friedman, Pukalani, Hawaii, and Laura Day, Wheatland, Mo.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading (and Have Written)Joan Didion in 1968.Julian Wasser/Time Life Pictures, via Getty ImagesJoan Didion’s death on Dec. 23 prompted many excellent appraisals of her work. One that particularly intrigued me was in The New Yorker, by Zadie Smith, who sagely noted and corrected many faulty assumptions about Didion. I wrote my own reflection on Didion’s early essays and how they pioneered a radical transparency in journalism. As it happens, I previously sang Didion’s praises, in this column from 2017.Another major loss: Betty White, at 99, last week. I got to spend a few hours with her a decade ago, for this feature. And here’s the audio from my 2011 interview with her onstage in Manhattan for the TimesTalks series.The conviction of Elizabeth Holmes on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud prompts me to resurface this column of mine from 2019 about her dreams and schemes in the context of both American history and this particular American moment.Although this hilariously irreverent obituary of Renay Mandel Corren, written by her son Andy and published in The Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina, went viral, I mention it anew just in case you missed it and its assertion that there “will be much mourning in the many glamorous locales she went bankrupt in: McKeesport, Pa., Renay’s birthplace and where she first fell in love with ham, and atheism; Fayetteville and Kill Devil Hills, N.C., where Renay’s dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried; and of course Miami, Fla., where Renay’s parents, uncles, aunts and eternal hopes of all Miami Dolphins fans everywhere are all buried pretty deep.” That’s pretty much the tone from start to finish. (Gail Lord, Santa Ana., Calif., and Priscilla Travis, Chester, Md., among others)Few political profiles have an opening as wild and memorable as Olivia Nuzzi’s take on Mehmet Oz in New York magazine does. The whole article is worth reading.So, in a different vein, is this beautifully written reflection by Honor Jones, in The Atlantic, on ending her marriage.Also in The Atlantic, James Parker’s appraisal of the new, nearly eight-hour documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” is a smorgasbord of spirited prose, which is par for the Parker course. (Kristin Lindgren, Merion Station, Pa.)Another keeper: Jon Caramanica, a Times pop music critic, eulogized his mother through his memories of going to concerts with her. “More than anyone, my mother — who died late last year — gave me music,” he wrote. “She gave me the idea that there was freedom, or identity, to be found within.” Jon added that nothing “will strip your varnish quite like watching someone you love wither. It made me tentative, as if any wrong move on my part might put her in peril.” (Paul Geoghegan, Whitestone, N.Y., and Ross Parker Simons, Pascagoula, Miss.)On a Personal NoteBarack Obama with his father.Obama For America via Associated PressIn a newsletter in early December, I mentioned that I’d begun reading, and was enjoying, the latest novel by Amor Towles, “The Lincoln Highway.” I didn’t finish it until last week: Deadlines, holiday commitments and more got in the way. Also, I wasn’t in a hurry. I wanted to make it last.Only in its final stretch did I fully appreciate one of its principal themes: the degree to which none of us can escape our parents.Oh, we can get away from them physically, if that’s what we very much want or need. But emotionally? Psychologically? For better or worse, I don’t think we’re ever free.I have friends who readily tick off the ways in which they’re unlike their mothers or fathers, as if to prove how little their parents have to do with them. But that cataloging — that consciousness — is the very evidence of their parents’ enduring presence, no less potent for them than for friends who dwell proudly on the values that their parents instilled in them. Whether attracted by their parents’ example or repelled by it, all of these daughters and sons are using the same point of reference. They’re measuring themselves with the same yardstick.I’ve been stuck by the especially pronounced stamp left by parents whose sons have reached most intently for the presidency or attained it. (I say “sons” because the sample set of daughters remains much, much smaller, though I hope not for long.) Those men’s relationships with their fathers, in particular, fascinate me.Look at the title of Barack Obama’s initial memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” Look at his predecessor George W. Bush, who tried so hard not only to match but also to exceed his father: He would get that second term; he would drive deep into Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein and remake the Middle East. Look at Bill Clinton, whose father died while his mother was still pregnant with him. What a hole that left. What a hunger that fed.I wrote at greater length about the paternal shadows cast on presidents in a column in 2014, so there’s no need for more of that now. Besides, those presidents are just amplified versions of most of the rest of us, who are destined to try to live up to or live down the people who produced us. To prove them right or wrong about us.Some of the unkind assessments that my parents made of me — throwaway remarks in most instances — are like inerasable chalk on the blackboard of my memory. But some of their more abundant expressions of faith also remain there, and if they’re fainter and smudged, well, that’s on me. All those words, all those judgments: They’re like the operating instructions for my personality. They explain how it works.And among the reasons that “The Lincoln Highway” moved me is how it brought all of that to the surface. For its main characters, the actions and inaction of parents aren’t just details from the past. They exist as gravity does — a grounding force, a constant pull. More

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      in Elections

      Democrats' Infighting Only Helps Republicans

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      The other day, something extraordinary happened. I went six hours — maybe even seven — without seeing anything on the internet about what a disaster Kamala Harris is.I must have been haunting the wrong sites. I’d clearly failed to check in with Twitter. Whatever the reason, I had a reprieve from Democratic carping about Democratic crises that reflected Democratic disunity and brimmed with Democratic doomsaying. Being briefly starved of it made me even more aware of the usual buffet — and of Democrats’ insatiable hunger for devouring their own.To follow Harris’s media coverage, made possible by the keening and wailing of her Democratic colleagues and Democratic analysts, she’s not merely mismanaging an apparently restless, frustrated staff. She’s bursting into flames and incinerating everything in her midst, including Democrats’ hopes of holding on to the White House in 2024.The chatter around Joe Biden is hardly cheerier. Riveted by low approval ratings for him that they’ve helped to create, Democrats in government murmur to Democrats in the media that he’s in dire political straits — which is partly true, thanks in some measure to all those fellow Democrats. As Jonathan Chait wrote recently in a cover story for New York magazine, Biden is trapped “between a well-funded left wing that has poisoned the party’s image with many of its former supporters and centrists unable to conceive of their job in any terms save as valets for the business elite.”“Biden’s party has not veered too far left or too far right so much as it has simply come apart,” Chait added. And it has done so noisily, its internal discontents as public as can be.These intraparty recriminations aren’t unusual in and of themselves: Democrats have never possessed Republicans’ talent for unity. But the intensity of the anger and angst are striking, especially given the stakes. A Republican takeover of Congress in 2022 and of the presidency two years later would endanger more than the social safety net. It would imperil democracy itself.“Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real,” Barton Gellman wrote for The Atlantic this month. “Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.”Gellman’s article, titled “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” had an apocalyptic tone, matched by an accompanying note by the magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. He wrote that while he prefers to avoid “partisan entanglement,” he and the rest of us must confront the truth: “The leaders of the Republican Party — the soul-blighted Donald Trump and the satraps and lackeys who abet his nefarious behavior — are attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy. This must be stated clearly, and repeatedly.”Chait put it this way: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the fate of American democracy may hinge on President Joe Biden’s success.”But the media is drawn to, and amplifies, Biden’s failures. The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank recently collaborated with the data analytics unit of the information company FiscalNote to measure journalists’ treatment of Biden versus Trump, and he concluded that “Biden’s press for the past four months has been as bad as — and for a time worse than — the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020.”“My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy,” he wrote, later adding: “The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.”That news media includes more Democrats than Republicans. And its naysaying depends on the irascibility and volubility of Democratic officials complaining about other Democratic officials. Democrats don’t need Pelotons: They’ve turned finger pointing into an aerobic workout.Such self-examination and self-criticism are healthy to a point. And Democratic pessimism isn’t unfounded: Polls show real frustration and impatience among Americans, who reliably pin the blame on whoever is in charge. Additionally, the party’s loss in the Virginia governor’s race — and the implications of that — can’t be ignored.But neither can the potential consequences of some Democratic politicians’ refusals to compromise and come together. None of the ideological rifts within the party matter as much as what the current crop of Trump-coddling Republicans might do if given the chance.So enough about Biden’s age, about Harris’s unpopularity, about the impossibility of figuring out precisely the right note of Omicron caution, about lions and tigers and bears, oh my! It’s scary out there, sure. But it’ll be scarier still if Democrats can’t successfully project cooperation, confidence and hope.For the Love of SentencesPismo Beach, Calif., in 1951.Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries/Corbis via Getty ImagesYou’re going to giggle or groan at this line by Justin Ray, in The Los Angeles Times, about the disappearance of bivalves from a California beach: “The clam community’s crash created a calamity.” (Thanks to Roy Oldenkamp of West Hollywood, Calif., for spotting and nominating this.)Same goes for this headline on an article in The Bulwark about a certain physician’s recently announced Senate bid: “Dr. Oz Quacks the Code of Republican Politics.” (Steve Read, Nice, France)Here’s Derek Thompson in The Atlantic on the devolution of Congress: “From 1917 to 1970, the Senate took 49 votes to break filibusters, or less than one per year. Since 2010, it has had an average of 80 such votes annually. The Senate was once known as the ‘cooling saucer of democracy,’ where populist notions went to chill out a bit. Now it’s the icebox of democracy, where legislation dies of hypothermia.” (Weigang Qiu, Queens, N.Y.) Derek’s entire article is insightful, thought-provoking and very much worth reading.Here’s Michael J. Lewis in The Wall Street Journal on some of the more untraditional proposals for restoring the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, damaged from that 2019 fire: “Is that lovely victim, saved in the nick of time and made whole again, now to be whisked, still groggy, straight from the hospital into the tattoo parlor of contemporary art?” (Jim Lader, Bronxville, N.Y., and Kathleen Hopkins, Oak Park, Ill.)In a characteristically tongue-in-cheek commentary in The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri advocated the banning of all books: “They make you cry, show you despair in a handful of dust, counterfeit life in strange ways and cheat you with shadows.” (Irma Wolfson, Irvine, Calif.) I was equally fond of these additional snippets: “Books follow you home and pry open your head and rearrange the things inside.” They “replace your answers with questions or questions with answers.” “They make strange things familiar to you and familiar things strange again.”Moving on to standouts from The Times: Reggie Ugwu profiled Ron Cephas Jones, noting that he’s “the kind of actor who works like chipotle mayo — you don’t always think to look for him, but you’re happy when he shows up.” (Peggy Sweeney, Sarasota, Fla.)Following his return to an area of Alaska that he hadn’t visited in more than 35 years, Jon Waterman contemplated climate change and caribou: “We didn’t see many, but we knew they were out there, somewhere, cantering in synchronized, thousandfold troupes, inches apart yet never jostling one another, their leg tendons a veritable orchestra of clicking castanets, their hooves clattering on stones.” (Harriet Odlum, Bloomfield, Conn., and Robert Lakatos, Glenmoore, Pa.)Adam Friedlander for The New York TimesIn Bret Stephens’s weekly online conversation with Gail Collins, he noted: “The supply-chain situation has gotten so out of hand that there’s even a cream-cheese shortage at New York City bagel shops, which is like one of the 10 biblical plagues as reimagined by Mel Brooks.” (Susan Gregory, Bala Cynwyd, Pa., and Deborah Paulus-Jagric, Landvetter, Sweden, among others)In a review of the Mel Brooks memoir “All About Me!,” Alexandra Jacobs trots out the technical term for fear of heights to fashion this gem: “Brooks himself reads as the opposite of acrophobic: scaling the icy pinnacles of Hollywood without anything more than a pang of self-doubt, using humor as his alpenstock.” (Jennifer Finney Boylan, Rome, Maine)And in a preview of the new limited series on HBO Max “And Just Like That,” which continues and updates “Sex and the City,” Alexis Soloski noted how little about its plot was revealed or known in advance: “Eager fans have analyzed that 30-second teaser clip with the exegetical rigor typically reserved for ancient hieroglyphs.” (Allan Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.Bonus Regan Picture!Mike ValerioMany of you chide me if I go two weeks or more without publishing an image of my furry companion. I love you for that. So here she is, during our walk on Sunday morning. We covered five miles, mostly in the woods, which we had to ourselves, because we headed out early and the weather was cold. She looked for deer and settled for squirrels, sprinting madly toward many of those she spotted. Much about dogs fascinates me but nothing more than their mix of tameness and wildness — of gentleness and ferocity — and the suddenness with which they shift between the two. One minute, a hugger. The next, a huntress. Regal all the while.What I’m Reading (and Watching, and Listening To)The director Jane Campion, right, on the set of “The Power of the Dog.”Kirsty Griffin/NetflixPeople are often more complicated than you imagine. So is life. Both of those truisms animate Bill Adair’s engrossing, moving account, in Air Mail, of Stephen Glass’s journey after he was exposed as one of contemporary journalism’s most prolific and audacious fabulists. Glass went on to tell another big lie. But you may find yourself cheering him for it.Moral complexity: It’s present in the elegant, addictive novels of Amor Towles, and I’m currently listening to, and relishing, his latest, “The Lincoln Highway.” The Times’s adoring review of it is precisely right.A friend and I have argued fiercely over the director Jane Campion’s latest film, “The Power of the Dog,” which is streaming on Netflix. He thinks that it’s genius. I think that it’s overrated — and that, like some of Campion’s other work, it plods at times, more cerebral than visceral, a bid for your admiration rather than your involvement. But the intensity of our back-and-forth means that there’s plenty in “Dog” to chew on. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) I’m glad I watched it.On a Personal NoteI’m sick of the sound of my own voice.I know, I know: Writing those words is like wearing a “kick me” sign. The obvious rejoinder is that you’re sick of my voice, too. But you’d mean my musings, my opinions, and I mean the actual sound of my audible voice. I mean that I’ve been in a recording studio for much of this week, talking and talking and talking into a microphone.My next book is done — more on that below — and for the audio format, the publishers asked me to be the one to read it aloud. That made abundant sense: The book is largely about my own experiences, with long stretches in the first person. But, still, I was hoping they’d recruit someone else.That’s because I’ve done this twice previously, for earlier books, and it’s no cakewalk. (Or should that be caketalk?) You have to go slowly and enunciate clearly, and if you bobble a word, you redo much of the sentence or even paragraph. Forward, backward, forward, backward. You’re a Sisyphus of syllables.For my memoir “Born Round,” I was in a studio in Manhattan devoted to audiobooks. I noticed a basket of muffins and bagels right outside the airless, soundproof booth in which the reader sits. “How hospitable!” I thought.No. How strategic. Many readers, like me, have skipped breakfast and may be planning, for efficiency’s sake, to skip lunch. Their stomachs growl. Mine did. And the microphone picked it up. The solution was a chunk of sound-muffling starch.The studio’s technicians told me that some of the actors hired to record novels refuse those calories. So blankets are wrapped around their tiny waists, to silence hunger’s roar.The studio I’ve been using this week is here in Chapel Hill, N.C., just a 15-minute drive from my house. I’ve eaten a light breakfast each morning; my stomach has behaved. And so the audio should be ready for release, along with hardcover and digital versions, on March 1.The book, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,” is about my brush with the prospect of blindness and how that changed the way I look at setbacks and limits and aging. And I mention it in part as a segue into an update on my eyes, which many of you kindly and regularly ask about.My right eye will forever be useless for reading, computer work and the like, but my left eye hangs in there, undiminished. The nature of what happened to me, a kind of stroke of the optic nerve, is such that if my left eye does fail me, it is likely to do so in an instant. There’s perhaps a 20 percent chance of that.So I’ll be good until I’m not. But even then, I’ll manage. That’s what I’ve come to see. That’s what the book is really about: acceptance, resilience, optimism. It describes the honing of those qualities. It’s also the fruit of them.It’s alchemy — trepidation into determination — or at least intends to be. And the opportunity to tell my story is a privilege, as is the invitation to perform it, no matter how Sisyphean. I shush my stomach. I clear my throat. I raise my voice. I even make peace with it. More

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      in Elections

      Scams and Slippery Slopes

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      I’ve always believed that part of education — especially higher education — is learning to ask better questions about complex topics, knowing you might not have the right answers. In my graduate seminars, one of my favorite ways of prompting students to pursue deeper lines of inquiry is by asking this question: If we take off the table that something is racist, sexist or classist, what else can we say about it?Society is embedded with power imbalances and inequalities. Of course there are gender disparities and discrimination, of course there is a racial hierarchy and a racial order. But if we set that aside, what more can we say about a text, about a person, about a moment?I was thinking about this when reading a “rare interview” with Politico this week, in which Kyrsten Sinema weighed in on writing about her clothes, including our three-part discussion of her sartorial presentation as a form of political speech:“It’s very inappropriate. I wear what I want because I like it. It’s not a news story, and it’s no one’s business,” Sinema said. “It’s not helpful to have [coverage] be positive or negative. It also implies that somehow women are dressing for someone else.”The idea that women dress only for themselves is a truism in modern feminism, one that we could dispute or qualify. But let’s set that aside, for now, and stipulate that she’s right, generally speaking.It still remains that she is a politician. And part of the job of politicians is to court attention and manage their image. As I have argued, since presentation and style are part of the politician’s tool kit, the question for us is whether we are willing to allow this kind of political communication to go unexamined and without critique.Here, it’s important to consider the context when setting the bounds of appropriate discourse. The details of the Democrats’ social spending bill, Build Back Better, are in flux. But it has funds for Pell Grant increases, affordable child care, paid family leave and expanded health care coverage. It contains policy to slow climate change and mitigate its effects. It is not an exaggeration to say that lives hang in the balance with the fate of the bill.And Sinema has placed herself at the center of this political drama. So it matters how she marshals her power. It also matters how she manages attention.Sinema largely allows her performance to speak for her. She avoids interviews, and has been quite guarded about what she wants out of these negotiations. As Politico writes, “On policy, the first-term senator has remained almost completely quiet during breakneck negotiations to finish Biden’s agenda.”That silence puts a curtain between a powerful political actor and the public, who have a lot on the line. It also means it is more than fair to discuss and critique the political rhetoric coded in her performance, and that includes what she is wearing. Politicians should not be allowed to have a one-way dialogue with the American public. One-way political communication is a very slippery slope to a closed political process — one that trades real accountability for a process that appears transparent only because we can see the moving images on our screens.We get to talk back. And we should.Speaking of talking back, many of you wrote in and said we should be keeping our eye on what matters. A pair of reports, both from this month, got my attention. I think they point to an important trend.First, Politico reported that Sinema has received donations from the multilevel marketing industry:The political action committee associated with Alticor, the parent entity of the health, home and beauty company Amway, gave $2,500 to the Arizona Democrat in late June, as did the PAC for Isagenix, an Arizona-based business that sells nutrition, wellness and personal care products. Nu Skin Enterprises, another personal care and beauty company, gave $2,500 that month, as did USANA Health Sciences, which sells similar products. In April, Richard Raymond Rogers, the executive chair of Mary Kay, a Texas-based cosmetics company, gave $2,500 to Sinema. Herbalife, which also sells nutritional supplements, gave $2,500 in July. All are affiliated with the Direct Selling Association, a trade group that promotes multilevel marketing.These are not enormous sums of money, but it is notable for a few reasons. As Politico notes, it’s relatively uncommon for some of these companies to get involved in national politics at all. And Sinema has had a friendly relationship with the Direct Sellers Association, which represents 130 multilevel marketing companies, including Amway and Herbalife.This alliance is unusual for a Democratic senator given her party’s longtime alliance with unions and labor more generally. In multilevel marketing structures, the independent contractors who sell the product are paid commissions from their own sales of the product, but they also can receive income based on the sales or purchases of the sellers they have recruited. Sinema is the one of only three Democratic senators who do not co-sponsor the PRO Act, which would allow the “independent contractors” to unionize, as well as making it harder for companies to classify workers as independent contractors at all.Second, Dr. Mehmet Oz is reported to be considering running for Senate in Pennsylvania, to fill the seat being vacated by Pat Toomey. Through a very convoluted process of media culture that is possible only in the celebrity-obsessed American culture, Dr. Oz has become one of the most visible and wealthy endorsers of a host of scientifically questionable vitamins, herbal remedies and miracle cures.These news items brought to mind the way these kinds of businesses — on the border of illegality and not quite respectable — have gone mainstream in America. Donald Trump is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. Among other things, he happened to be the founder and namesake of one of the most blatantly fraudulent for-profit school apparatuses that I have ever seen: Trump University, which National Review called a “de jure” scam.Donald Trump’s election seems to have opened the door to us not even pretending anymore that these kinds of scams aren’t legitimate parts of our political and economic system, and even pathways to power.Whenever I talk about multilevel marketing, people often make two suggestions of things to check out. One is a podcast called “The Dream” by Jane Marie. The other is a recent documentary about LuLaRoe, which sells leggings. Both of these tell stories about the mechanisms of multilevel marketers, how they work and why they work.With the holiday coming up, I’m going to spend some time on your behalf listening to the “The Dream” as I travel around by car. And I’m going to watch the LuLaRoe documentary. I have questions about why scamming has become mainstreamed as a legitimate part of national politics, and what it says about culture. We’ll be talking about that soon. I’ll be off next week to celebrate Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you the week after that.Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. More

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      On Virginia's Election and a Battle That Has Already Been Lost

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      On Tuesday, Virginians will vote to choose their next governor. The Democratic candidate is Terry McAuliffe, who served as governor from 2014 to 2018 but was term-limited out of office. The Republican candidate is Glenn Youngkin, a private equity executive and newcomer to electoral politics.There are real, material issues at hand in Virginia, where I grew up and where I currently live, from transportation and housing costs to climate, economic inequality and, of course, the commonwealth’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The battleground for this election, however, is culture, identity and the specter of the previous president.McAuliffe and his supporters want Virginians to feel that a vote for Youngkin is a vote for Donald Trump. “I ran against Donald Trump and Terry is running against an acolyte of Donald Trump,” said President Biden while speaking at a rally Tuesday night in Arlington. “We have a choice,” said McAuliffe at the same event. “A path that promotes conspiracies, hate, division, or a path focused on lifting up every single Virginian.”Youngkin, for his part, wants Virginians to know that a vote for McAuliffe is a vote for “critical race theory.” Not the legal discipline that deals with the distance between formal and actual equality, but the idea, spread by right-wing activists and their wealthy supporters, that public schools are teaching a racist ideology of guilt and anti-white sentiment. Youngkin’s singular message has been that he will keep this “critical race theory” out of Virginia’s schools.What this means, if the rhetoric of Youngkin’s strongest supporters is any indication, is an assault on any discussion of race and racism in the state’s classrooms. In an interview with the journalist Alex Wagner, a leading Republican activist in Virginia said exactly this, asserting that it should be “up to the parents” to teach students about racism and condemning a school assignment in which a sixth grade student blamed President Andrew Jackson for violence against Native Americans.Try to imagine what this would look like.Virginia is where African slavery first took root in Britain’s Atlantic empire. It is where, following that development, English settlers developed an ideology of racism to justify their decision to, as the historian Winthrop Jordan put it, “debase the Negro.” It is where, in the middle of the 18th century, a powerful class of planter-intellectuals developed a vision of liberty and freedom tied inextricably to their lives as slave owners, and it is where, a century later, their descendants would fight to build a slave empire in their name.And all of this is before we get to Reconstruction and Jim Crow and massive resistance to school integration and the many other forces that have shaped Virginia into the present. Just this week came news of the death of A. Linwood Holton, elected in 1969 as the state’s first Republican governor of the 20th century. Holton integrated Virginia schools and broke the back of the segregationist Byrd machine (named for the domineering Harry F. Byrd), which controlled the state from the 1890s into the 1960s.To take discussions of race and racism out of the classroom would, in practice, make it impossible to teach Virginia state history beyond dates, bullet points and the vaguest of generalities.One of the closing advertisements from the Youngkin campaign features a woman who took umbrage over Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” after her son, a high-school senior, said that the book gave him nightmares when he read it as part of an A.P. English class. (I do not doubt that this is true, but I also think that if Black students have to encounter racism — and speaking from experience, they do — then white students should at least have to learn about it.)Democracy requires empathy. We have to be able to see ourselves in one another to be able to see one another as political equals. I think history education is one important way to build that empathy. To understand the experiences of a person in a fundamentally different time and place is to practice the skills you need to see your fellow citizens as equal people even when their lives are profoundly different and distant from your own. This is why it’s vital that students learn as much as possible about the many varieties of people who have lived, and died, on this land.This democratic empathy is, I believe, a powerful force. It can, for example, lead white children in isolated rural Virginia to march and demonstrate in memory of a poor Black man who died at the hands of police in urban Minnesota.I do not know who will win the Virginia election. It looks, at this point, like a tossup. But I do know that, viewed in the light of empathy and its consequences, the panic against critical race theory looks like a rear-guard action in a battle already lost: a vain attempt to reverse the march of a force that has already done much to undermine hierarchy and the “proper” order of things.What I WroteMy Tuesday column was on the history of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and why Congress should expel those members who played a part in the Jan. 6 insurrection.If the ultimate goal of Section 3, in other words, was to preserve the integrity of Congress against those who would capture its power and plot against the constitutional order itself, then Representative Bush is right to cite the clause against any members of Congress who turn out to have collaborated with the plotters to overturn the election and whose allies are still fighting to “stop the steal.”My Friday column was a little more introspective than usual, as I tried to explain why I keep writing about structural and institutional changes I know will never happen:All of this is to say that I do not write about structural reform because I believe it will happen in my lifetime (although, of course, no one knows what the future will hold). I write about structural reform because, like Dahl, I think about and want readers to think expansively about American democracy and to understand that it is, and has always been, bigger than the Constitution.Now ReadingKeisha Blain on Fannie Lou Hamer for Time.Ali Karjoo-Ravary on Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of “Dune” for Slate.Garrett Epps on critical race theory for Washington Monthly.Talia B. Lavin on corporal punishment in her Substack newsletter.Anna Gaca on the Clash for Pitchfork.Andrea Stanley on the trauma of climate change in The Washington Post Magazine.Feedback If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to your friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at jamelle-newsletter@nytimes.com. You can follow me on Twitter (@jbouie) and Instagram.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieHere is something a little more lighthearted than what I’ve written this week. It is from Dinosaur Kingdom II, a bizarre attraction near the Luray Caverns in central Virginia. It features life-size dinosaur figures engaged in pitched battle with Union soldiers. It’s very strange. I visited not long after moving back to Virginia and wasted a few rolls of film taking pictures. This was one of the keepers.Now Eating: Creamy Cashew Butternut Squash SoupThis is a great, if nontraditional, butternut squash soup. My only recommendation is that you should roast your butternut squash before adding it to the pot. I prefer to cut a squash into large chunks and then roast it at around 400 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes, to develop the flavor of the squash. It’s a little extra work, but you won’t regret it. Recipe comes from NYT Cooking.Ingredients3 tablespoons olive oil or unsalted butter1 large onion, peeled and finely chopped1 cup raw cashews1 clove garlic, finely chopped1 large butternut squash (about 2 pounds), peeled and cut into ½-inch dice5 cups vegetable or chicken stock, plus additional if needed2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger2 teaspoons ground cumin2 teaspoons ground coriander1 teaspoon curry powder1 teaspoon ground turmericKosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste1 cup coconut milk, plus additional1 sprig fresh rosemaryDirectionsIn large stockpot or Dutch oven set over medium-high heat, warm the olive oil until shimmering. Add the onions and cook, stirring, until they begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the cashews and cook, stirring, until the onions are translucent and the cashews have slightly browned, about 3 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add the squash, broth, ginger, cumin, coriander, curry powder and turmeric and stir to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and bring the soup to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low, cover the pot, and cook the soup until the squash is easily pierced with a knife, 20 to 25 minutes. Uncover the soup and let it cool for 15 minutes.Starting on slow speed and increasing to high, purée the soup in small batches in a blender until smooth. Place a towel over the top of the blender in case of any splatters. You can also use an immersion blender (let the soup remain in the pot), but it will take longer to purée until smooth.If using a blender, return the soup to the pot, add the coconut milk and rosemary sprig, and cook over low heat, covered, until slightly thickened, for about 15 to 20 minutes. Serve immediately or refrigerate until ready. If serving the soup later, while reheating the soup, thin it out with more broth or coconut milk until the desired consistency. More