Politics
Ghosts of Tokyo: A Q&A with Barry Yourgrau
An author brings his flair for the fantastic to old Tokyo. Writer and performer Barry Yourgrau is a master of the surreal, intense, funny, and sometimes very short story. His eccentric career includes writing for The New Yorker and The Paris Review (among others) as well as starring both in the film adaptation of his memoir and in a music video for the heavy metal band Anthrax. I first met him with his partner, the author Anya von Bremzen, in Istanbul sometime in the mid-aughts, but it’s his deep, long-standing relationship with Japan, where his work has a steadfast following, that fascinates me most. He is the only American author to publish short fiction specifically for Japanese cellphones—an early form of viral smartphone content known as keitai sosetsu, or cell phone novels. His next ...
Farrah Berrou: Into the Beqaa Valley
Farrah Berrou takes The Trip into Lebanon’s wine country. It’s 6:45am and Farrah Berrou, host of the podcasts B is for Bacchus and A Better Beirut, is picking me up in her mom’s car to make the climb out of Beirut, past snow-capped mountains, dusty villages, endless military checkpoints, almost to the border of Syria itself, for a full day of Lebanese wine. We’re going to Domaine Wardy, one of the great wineries of the Beqaa Valley, a winery whose roots started out actually in Aleppo, Syria, long ago. But before that, it’s time for an early-morning trip to Baalbek, the ruins of the colossal roman temple of Bacchus, the god of, among other things, wine and group sex. What a combination, what a testament to the eternal determination of the people in this part of the world to live, and live w...
Tom Tillotson: The Midnight Voter
This week on The Trip podcast: Drinking baijiu with Tom Tillotson in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. At the stroke of midnight in the high mountains near the Canadian border, in a lodge on the property of the abandoned Balsams Resort, there’s a table covered with red-white-and-blue bunting, a podium, two closet-sized voting booths. Five voters, 30 journalists, four TV trucks, two cakes celebrating the 60th anniversary of the midnight voting at Dixville Notch, NH. Now, you may think this a departure from our usual subjects. But for me, the performative small-town democracy of New Hampshire’s primaries has always been the stuff of drinking podcasts. Photographer Shane Carpenter and I were first dragged up here to Dixville Notch 16 years ago by a hard-drinking fringe presidential candida...
Eva Castillo: Manchester Defender
This week on The Trip podcast: Eva Castillo on Presidential politics and immigrant advocacy in New Hampshire in the time of Trump. So this was it, election day in New Hampshire, the real starting gun of the race is that is now settling in. And if the Democratic primary looks a bit different nationally than it did when New Hampshire’s results started rolling in (Rest in peace, campaign of Mayor Buttigieg), critics of the first-in-the-nation primary usually point to one main factor: race. The numbers don’t lie: New Hampshire is a very Caucasian state. It is 93% white; that’s like, whiter-than-Wyoming White. Not to be essentialist here, but that not only affects how voters respond to candidates, but also how candidates respond back to voters; the kind of questions they get asked in those famo...
‘Becoming’ Doc Reveals Michelle Obama Was “Disappointed” In Black Voters For 2016 Turnout
Source: Netflix / Courtesy of Netflix Michelle Obama is clearly disappointed with Black people who didn’t come out to vote in the 2016 presidential election, and she’s letting her frustrations known in her upcoming Netflix documentary “Becoming.” According to the New York Post, Michelle Obama says it was a “slap in the face’’ that minorities didn’t go to the polls in 2016 — and has no plans on re-entering the political spotlight amid a push to make her Joe Biden’s running mate. “It takes some energy to go high, and we were exhausted from it … when you’re the first black anything,’’ Michelle Obama explained in the film, referencing husband Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential win. “You know, the day I left the White House, it was painful to sit on that stage, and then a lot of our folks didn’t ...
Zoltan Istvan: The Transhumanist Candidate
This week on The Trip podcast: Zoltan Istvan has come from the future with a message New Hampshire doesn’t want to hear. Here they are in the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office, paying their thousand dollars to be on the official primary ballot. They are the lesser-known candidates, the dramatic fringe of each presidential primary election up here. And they are the stars of my quadrennial quixotic reporting project with photographer Shane Carpenter. And listen, they aren’t like Tom Steyer lesser-known, they’re like Vermin Supreme lesser-known, Mary Maxwell lesser-known, Zoltan Istvan lesser-known. Almost nobody knows these people, but they’re running anyway. This is the fifth primary that Shane and I have spent ducking out of mainstream campaign press events to track down the people...
Electioneering on the Eve of the Virus
Nathan Thornburgh and photographer Shane Carpenter were in New Hampshire last month for their longterm reporting project on the state’s odd presidential primary. In hindsight, it looks more surreal than ever. It is unnerving to look at the pictures at this moment, in this week. Photographer Shane Carpenter and I have been working on a longterm project about the New Hampshire presidential primary for four election cycles spanning 16 years, but the things I’ve come to love about the campaign up there—the intimacy of retail politicking, the electricity of the big rallies—now just trip alarms in my mind. All the handshakes. All the pressed flesh, the leaning in, the campaign buses filled with coughing staffers, the moist microphones, the communal pens at the polls. The collective spittle of a ...
Multi-Frame: Q&A with Sarah Palmer
Photographer Sarah Palmer on her process, blending images at Trump rallies, and accessing Celine Dion without a press pass. Canadian photographer Sarah Palmer’s unique double-exposure photography blends the emotion and theatrics of politics, sports, and even music into complex and nuanced imagery. It’s a niche she’s developed over years, and has employed for clients such as Buzzfeed News, The Walrus, and The Washington Post. But that wasn’t always the case. Palmer, who talked to R&K from her home in Toronto, still remembers her first portfolio review, in which a top photo editor told her she’d never get hired for the style because it was too ‘out there.’ “It just crushed me,” Sarah said. “But it also just pissed me off, because I thought, ‘Yeah, well I’m going to.’ And so then I just k...
A Death in Harlem
After losing her grandmother to COVID-19, marketing executive Tamika Hall then had to take over for vanishing hospice services in Harlem and help lead her father to the best death she could. It seems to me that the story of this pandemic is as much as anything, a story of the failure of technology. Not just the big healthcare failings or smaller infrastructure glitches like the busy signals I’ve been getting while trying to make calls from my New York apartment, but social technology, the innovations that we built to specialize society and to put distance between us and some of our oldest enemies: sickness, fear, death. Those social technologies seem to have withered away in so many places when we needed them most. That is what happened to Tamika Hall, who lost her father to cancer and her...
The Lincoln Project Takes Aim At President Donald Trump With “Mourning In America” Ad
Source: Chip Somodevilla / Getty A political action committee that has devoted much of its energy in decrying the policies of President Donald Trump just released a new ad slamming the former business mogul. The Lincoln Project, led by George Conway, the husband of Kellyanne Conway, shared the ad titled “Mourning In America,” which makes mention of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The minute-long ad made its round around social media and other outlets, highlighting the economic woes of the United States and how it relates to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. The advertisement is a flip of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 spot titled “Morning In America,” which was a fluff piece designed to acknowledge how the country flourished under the former actor’s leadership. For the Lincoln Pro...
Diddy You Listening?: Joe Biden Unveils “Lift Every Voice” Plan Geared Towards Black America
Source: The Washington Post / Getty The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden isn’t letting sexual allegations slow down his campaign to win the White House in November. The former vice president unveiled his plan that specifically addresses problems plaguing Black America in which he hopes will appeal to the base that saved his campaign and propelled him to the nomination. Biden’s “Lift Every Voice” plan aptly named after the “Negro National Anthem” addresses issues like criminal justice reform, gun violence. It would also set aside funds to help Blacks who have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Biden’s plan aims to help Black-owned businesses by supplying more funding. NewsOne reports that Ninety-five percent of Black-owned companies were p...
Jon Voight Calls Donald Trump a “Hero” For His Handling of COVID-19 Pandemic
By all accounts, the Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been an unmitigated disaster. Already 70,000 Americans have lost their lives due to the virus, and thousands more victims are being claimed each day. And that’s not to mention the economic consequences resulting from a nationwide shutdown that happened two months too late. But in the warped reality that is Conservative Twitter, everything is just fine and dandy. Just ask Trump’s old buddy and recent Medal of Freedom recipient Jon Voight who praises the president as a “hero” for his handling of the crisis. Voight made the remarks in a new Twitter video called “A Message of Hope”, in which the actor showers Trump with praise that sounds like something you’d hear out of North Korea. Each sentence is more ba...
