Listen6 minShareComment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight- What “Barbie” is missing, and “The Zone of Interest,” too
- The U.S. owes the Marshall Islanders it irradiated
- Measles is back — and ready for you to see its softer side
- A trio of State of the Union reactions
- Cookie Monster wants nothing to do with politics
Film + studies
Happy Oscars weekend. It’s like the State of the Union, for movies, if Republicans actually clapped and smiled and pretended to be happy for the Democrat they lost to.
One of the breakout moments of this years’ award contenders was the monologue in “Barbie” on the impossibilities of being a woman in the world, so widely lauded and memed that Kate Cohen writes “we might as well call it The Speech.”
But the sermon, stuck in its saccharine surroundings, never gets political, Kate says, and thus misses the entire point. The speech “suits this world perfectly,” she writes: “Like a fight scene without pain or a human without genitalia, it is a feminist complaint without teeth.”
Kate takes it upon herself to retrofit The Speech with a whole bunch of political realities, taking the movie’s gripes about having to be “pretty” and “thin” and a mother and the boss and making them, sorry, even grimmer. But — hello, Barbie — nothing is ever going to change without a full accounting.
Advertisement
Feminism, check. Now ready for some Hannah Arendt?
Humanities professor Lyndsey Stonebridge’s op-ed analyzing Best Picture nominee “The Zone of Interest” — about the German family going about their mundane lives in the shadow of the concentration camp run by Father — draws on theorist Arendt’s famous characterization of “the banality of evil.”
Specifically, Stonebridge comments on movie reviewers’ fixation with the phrase — and what so many of them are missing about Arendt’s work in invoking it. As with Kate and “Barbie,” Stonebridge is not “sure the film delivers the moral and political lesson we need right now.”
Finally, former Post reporter Walter Pincus’s guest essay this week isn’t about “Oppenheimer” — just about one of the horrific real-world consequences that came after the A-bomb development depicted in the movie.
Advertisement
In wrenching detail, Pincus relates how in 1954 radioactive fallout from the United States’ largest-ever test detonation of a nuclear weapon coated the Pacific atolls of Rongelap and Ailingnae — and their 82 Marshallese inhabitants.
Irradiated coral dust kicked up by the nearby explosion ran into their drinking water, stuck to the coconut oil in their hair and clung to their slick bodies on that humid day, “gathering particularly,” Pincus details, “at the folds of their necks.”
What followed was predictable: evacuation, health problems, paradise made uninhabitable. Pincus writes that “even seven decades late,” the United States still owes Marshall Islanders a different ending.
Chaser: How is it that some of the most impressive films in the world come out of one of its most repressive regimes? History professor Arash Azizi analyzes the conundrum of Iranian cinema.
Advertisement
Bonus chaser: “Dune: Part 2” won’t be up for Oscars until 2025. We can look forward to a whole year of its outrageous hype, cartooned here by Kwidith — sorry, Edith Pritchett.
Measles’ big comeback
Leana Wen is, like everybody else, dismayed by the resurgence of measles cases in a Florida elementary school. Well, everybody except, apparently, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.
Leana takes Ladapo to task for his “unthinkable” guidance allowing parents to continue sending their unvaccinated kids to school. “Instead of using the public health tools that have been proved time and time again to stop outbreaks,” she writes, “he is resisting them.”
What results could be a devastating — and totally preventable — tragedy.
Alexandra Petri, however, says measles is ready for you to see its softer side. Our satirist sat down for an exclusive interview with the infectious disease, writing one of those soft-focus profiles that seem perennially in vogue for subjects that are ultimately grave threats to American life:
Advertisement
Measles is there waiting for me, looking well-rested despite its whirlwind tour of classrooms and homes. It’s unprepossessing — tinier in person than you’d expect for such an impactful figure, but quite self-assured.
I apologize for my late arrival.
Share this articleShare
“Please!” measles says with a smile. “It took me decades!”
From The Post’s news reporting on Thursday’s speech; a C-SPAN host said on air that “for the first time in memory the president outlasted the House session.”
The chamber’s Republicans were long gone by that time, Dana Milbank writes. They’d already done their job: heckling, booing, general hooliganism. Perhaps they were lashing out at a speech that exceeded expectations.
David Von Drehle writes that Team Biden accomplished its top task with the speech, which was aggressive and relentlessly high-energy; it “put an end to murmurs in the Democratic Party about somehow pushing the old man out of the car.”
Advertisement
That means Americans will (almost certainly, yadda-yadda) face a choice between Biden and Donald Trump in the voting booth this fall. The Editorial Board writes that the incumbent’s address Thursday night should help wake us all to the stakes of that decision.
Chaser: In her latest newsletter, Jen Rubin examines the slate of choices that Biden, Republicans and the media will face in the general election.
More politics
Me want to be excluded from this narrative :(
Catherine Rampell writes that Sesame Street’s beloved Cookie Monster got caught up in politics this week after tweeting (lol) his distaste for shrinkflation. Offering less of a good at the same price means a smaller cookie.
Obviously, Biden’s team and allied senators seized on this as a chance to push their anti-corporate-greed agenda, making CM, Catherine writes, “look like a Democratic, ahem, puppet.”
Advertisement
Catherine has two main gripes: (1) Shrinkflation isn’t worse than in recent years (see the chart below), and harping on it when government intervention might not even be that good of an idea feels a lot like demagoguery;
… and (2) LEAVE COOKIE MONSTER OUT OF THIS!
Smartest, fastest
- Who wants to defund the police now? Gene Robinson pokes holes in House Republicans’ spending package that cuts the crime-fighting budgets.
- New York Times employees fighting over Chick-fil-A? Sounds about right, Erik Wemple reports.
- Megan McArdle reviews leaked files and sees a lot of uncertainties when it comes to treating transgender youth.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Dollhouse politics
And problems as large as life
Not a matching set
Plus! A Friday bye-ku (Fri-ku!) from reader Charles I.:
People still want him?
Almost half of the people?
Scary times ahead …
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. Have a great weekend!
Share Comments Sign up
You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
Happy Oscars weekend. It’s like the State of the Union, for movies, if Republicans actually clapped and smiled and pretended to be happy for the Democrat they lost to.
One of the breakout moments of this years’ award contenders was the monologue in “Barbie” on the impossibilities of being a woman in the world, so widely lauded and memed that Kate Cohen writes “we might as well call it The Speech.”
But the sermon, stuck in its saccharine surroundings, never gets political, Kate says, and thus misses the entire point. The speech “suits this world perfectly,” she writes: “Like a fight scene without pain or a human without genitalia, it is a feminist complaint without teeth.”
Kate takes it upon herself to retrofit The Speech with a whole bunch of political realities, taking the movie’s gripes about having to be “pretty” and “thin” and a mother and the boss and making them, sorry, even grimmer. But — hello, Barbie — nothing is ever going to change without a full accounting.
Feminism, check. Now ready for some Hannah Arendt?
Humanities professor Lyndsey Stonebridge’s op-ed analyzing Best Picture nominee “The Zone of Interest” — about the German family going about their mundane lives in the shadow of the concentration camp run by Father — draws on theorist Arendt’s famous characterization of “the banality of evil.”
Specifically, Stonebridge comments on movie reviewers’ fixation with the phrase — and what so many of them are missing about Arendt’s work in invoking it. As with Kate and “Barbie,” Stonebridge is not “sure the film delivers the moral and political lesson we need right now.”
Finally, former Post reporter Walter Pincus’s guest essay this week isn’t about “Oppenheimer” — just about one of the horrific real-world consequences that came after the A-bomb development depicted in the movie.
In wrenching detail, Pincus relates how in 1954 radioactive fallout from the United States’ largest-ever test detonation of a nuclear weapon coated the Pacific atolls of Rongelap and Ailingnae — and their 82 Marshallese inhabitants.
Irradiated coral dust kicked up by the nearby explosion ran into their drinking water, stuck to the coconut oil in their hair and clung to their slick bodies on that humid day, “gathering particularly,” Pincus details, “at the folds of their necks.”
What followed was predictable: evacuation, health problems, paradise made uninhabitable. Pincus writes that “even seven decades late,” the United States still owes Marshall Islanders a different ending.
Chaser: How is it that some of the most impressive films in the world come out of one of its most repressive regimes? History professor Arash Azizi analyzes the conundrum of Iranian cinema.
Bonus chaser: “Dune: Part 2” won’t be up for Oscars until 2025. We can look forward to a whole year of its outrageous hype, cartooned here by Kwidith — sorry, Edith Pritchett.
Leana Wen is, like everybody else, dismayed by the resurgence of measles cases in a Florida elementary school. Well, everybody except, apparently, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.
Leana takes Ladapo to task for his “unthinkable” guidance allowing parents to continue sending their unvaccinated kids to school. “Instead of using the public health tools that have been proved time and time again to stop outbreaks,” she writes, “he is resisting them.”
What results could be a devastating — and totally preventable — tragedy.
Alexandra Petri, however, says measles is ready for you to see its softer side. Our satirist sat down for an exclusive interview with the infectious disease, writing one of those soft-focus profiles that seem perennially in vogue for subjects that are ultimately grave threats to American life:
Measles is there waiting for me, looking well-rested despite its whirlwind tour of classrooms and homes. It’s unprepossessing — tinier in person than you’d expect for such an impactful figure, but quite self-assured.
I apologize for my late arrival.
“Please!” measles says with a smile. “It took me decades!”
From The Post’s news reporting on Thursday’s speech; a C-SPAN host said on air that “for the first time in memory the president outlasted the House session.”
The chamber’s Republicans were long gone by that time, Dana Milbank writes. They’d already done their job: heckling, booing, general hooliganism. Perhaps they were lashing out at a speech that exceeded expectations.
David Von Drehle writes that Team Biden accomplished its top task with the speech, which was aggressive and relentlessly high-energy; it “put an end to murmurs in the Democratic Party about somehow pushing the old man out of the car.”
That means Americans will (almost certainly, yadda-yadda) face a choice between Biden and Donald Trump in the voting booth this fall. The Editorial Board writes that the incumbent’s address Thursday night should help wake us all to the stakes of that decision.
Chaser: In her latest newsletter, Jen Rubin examines the slate of choices that Biden, Republicans and the media will face in the general election.
Me want to be excluded from this narrative :(
Catherine Rampell writes that Sesame Street’s beloved Cookie Monster got caught up in politics this week after tweeting (lol) his distaste for shrinkflation. Offering less of a good at the same price means a smaller cookie.
Obviously, Biden’s team and allied senators seized on this as a chance to push their anti-corporate-greed agenda, making CM, Catherine writes, “look like a Democratic, ahem, puppet.”
Catherine has two main gripes: (1) Shrinkflation isn’t worse than in recent years (see the chart below), and harping on it when government intervention might not even be that good of an idea feels a lot like demagoguery;
… and (2) LEAVE COOKIE MONSTER OUT OF THIS!
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Dollhouse politics
And problems as large as life
Not a matching set
Plus! A Friday bye-ku (Fri-ku!) from reader Charles I.:
People still want him?
Almost half of the people?
Scary times ahead …
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. Have a great weekend!
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
