“Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” lives up to its title in both its narrative and its form.

The movie is, variously, a sci-fi-kung fu-family drama-absurdist-comedy-arthouse-action film. The plot evolves along at least seven different parallel timelines simultaneously, and one of the key emotional moments happens as a series of silent, near-static shot of two rocks. The movie is disgusting, hilarious, and heartrending, often all at once. There is no reason it should work — but it does, marvelously well.

The whole film feels like an amusement park ride, carefully engineered to create a functional whole that whips you through a set of thrills while seeming to teeter, always, on the edge of collapse. It is an asymptote, approaching, but never quite reaching, derailment. Indeed, the chaos allows for a near constant stream of homages, references and re-imaginings without ever once becoming predictable.

The first fight is a delightful, ludicrous nod kung fu films that swaps in a fanny pack for nunchucks, and absurdity builds from there. Over the course of the movie sign spinning, WWE and the contents of a kink dungeon all make an appearance in combat. Possibly the best scene begins with the main villain strolling out of an elevator in a rhinestone encrusted Elvis suit, walking a pig on a leash; it ends with her bludgeoning a hapless IRS guard with an oversized dildo — and it somehow all makes sense.

The movies ability to be unpredictable without being inexplicable carries through to the emotional narrative. The ending has at least three beats to it, each of which feels satisfying enough to be the ending the film lands on. By layering them the film manages to keep the viewer in suspense, and tells a familiar story of family reconciliation in a way that feels genuinely unexpected and wholly earned.   

Everything, Everywhere is very self conscious about the fact that it is cinema, with all the tools, tropes, and winking asides that entails. But the filmmakers can play with the medium because they know it so well. Ultimately what makes the film work is the fact that the rails are so solid, guiding the viewers through the multiverse with costumes, set design, and good screen writing. It is constantly surprising, always changing, but never confusing. The medium, astoundingly, is pushed to its limit while strengthening the message.

Selling a world is hard.

This is true of science fiction and fantasy, but even more so for literary novels. Inconsistencies in invented worlds can be explained away through further invention, while reality has no such excuse.

I’ve particularly noticed this in novels that are, for lack of a better term, family stories. In this category I put White Teeth by Zadie Smith, There, There  by Tommy Orange and The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea. Each book is intricately wrought, weaving different perspectives across generations in the past and present to an ultimate, dramatic conclusion, with guns drawn. The way these novels succeed or fail in selling these extraordinary endings to ordinary stories intrigues me.   

The novels, it should be noted, are unlikely bedfellows, compared mostly because they happened to be ones I read. White Teeth tells the story of at least four families over decades, while There, There tackles a few weeks with flashbacks and House of Broken Angels takes place over roughly 48 hours and concerns itself mainly with a single family. The Commonwealth milieu of White Teeth is distinct from the Native communities of Oakland in There, There and from the Mexican American De La Cruz family of The House of Broken Angels.

All three are enjoyable, engaging reads. The characters are unexpected, delightful, and feel utterly real. It is, perhaps, because the novels do such a good job of selling their respective stories that the overblown endings of White Teeth and There, There felt like a bit of a letdown.

This is not the say the endings are bad. White Teeth is slightly absurdist from the start, so the overly convoluted confluence of nearly every significant character for the climatic finally is not unexpected. There, There begins with a devastating essay about violence inflicted on Native communities, and the ending — another barely plausible re-union scene ending in a mass shootout — has a narrative logic to it.

I found, however, something jarring about them both. In real life there are no coincidental climaxes, where disparate characters from across the generations arrive just in time for a great showdown. People do get shot in real life, but the extravagant violence, particularly in There, There, where a straightforward robbery gone wrong turns into a mass casualty event, breaks the illusion of reality.

But The House of Broken Angels manages to pull off the climatic ending — re-union, reconciliation, even a gun — by curbing its drama. Urrea sets the plot around a birthday party, the perfect excuse to bring everyone together. As much as the other two novels, perhaps even more so, The House of Broken Angels deals with extreme experiences — violence, abuse, murder, sex, crime, poverty, addiction. But they all feel more real, not less so, by being slightly undersold and, frequently, awkward.

The climatic conclusion finally arrives, an estranged child turns up just as a gunman turns up to settle a score, the moment is defused, the gun dropped, the gunman flees. The threatened escalation from familial drama to violence and blood is rapidly brought back into the realm of the real.

Chekov’s gun is a rule for writing satisfying narratives, not realistic ones. But in the real world we are used to untidy endings, to threatened disasters that end up being underwhelming, in a certain sense, to disappointment. If the world being sold is ours, a little narrative dissatisfaction can make it feel just that little bit more real.

To call “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow a “new history of humanity” — its subtitle— undersells the project considerably.

The book begins by rethinking questions we should be seeking to answer in history. A passion project for the two scholars, the book draws on new literature across social sciences, including archeology, history and anthropology, to write a history not of the origins of inequality, but of how Western political philosophy moved from a medieval cosmology that celebrated inequality to treating it as a social problem.

It is a huge, looping book — over 500 pages — that takes what seem like long diversions in each chapter. At times it feels more like a collection of essays rather than a cohesive argument. There are chapters on when European philosophers started talking to Wendat philosophers, the self-conscious splits in culture between northern and central native Pacific groups, why there is very little evidence for princes in the stone age, and why there was no agricultural revolution.

Out of these seemingly divergent chapters, though, emerges a clear point: that people throughout history were familiar with a broad range of options for societal organization and often self-consciously choose their political and religious systems, rather than being forced into them by particular modes of production.

In prehistory and modern history alike, we have archeological and anthropological evidence of groups moving between different systems of government throughout the year, from centralized to decentralized and back again. People knew how to grow plants for thousands of years before grains took over as the main source of calories, and massive Mayan cities moved between noble or priestly rulers to something that looked much more like councils, complete with public housing. Their answer to why modern western thinkers ask questions about equality and inequality is in part because Haudenosaunee philosophers, not far removed from their own brush with authoritarian government, had honed critiques of unequal societies which they turned on European society. The Europeans had to find a way to respond.

This is a book opposed to a teleological or materialist view of history. It uses each chapter to make a series of black swan arguments — if there have been egalitarian cities and autocracies of hunter gatherers, then it is hard to argue that societies progress in lockstep, with larger and more hierarchal social organizations as they unlock technologies. States with sovereignty and an administration to organize things for that sovereign are, the authors argue, neither inevitable or all that common outside of relatively recent times in Eurasia. Instead, they argue, people throughout history have debated, attempted, rejected and embraced a variety of ways to organize society. It leaves an impression of times and places without history (in the technical sense of surviving written documents) not as static, simplistic societies but dynamic, even playful ones.

If all the book did was provide some idea of what humanity was up to outside of recorded history, it would be well worth reading. But as the authors make explicit, this expanded view of social possibility ones has important consequences for not only our history, but our future as well. If our ancestors could play with their society, perhaps we can too.

“The Golden Rhinoceros” by François-Xavier Fauvelle, a history of Africa in the Middle Ages, faces a potentially prohibitive problem: throughout much of the continent, there was no systemic written record, and much archeological evidence is disputed or disrupted.

Under such circumstances, it is difficult to create a coherent historical narrative. One strategy is to deal with a less than ideal sourcing is to fill in holes with educated guesses and narrative conjecture. Another present multiple alternatives. When there are unfilled holes, some historians may turn poetry or philosophy to round out important ideas when the primary documents fall short.

“The Golden Rhinoceros” solves the problem by avoiding overarching narrative all together. The book is written in a series of brief chapters, perhaps no more than twenty pages at the longest. Each considers some surviving document, artifact or construction, from around the continent. There is a rough chronological order, but no particular geographic logic. Most of it falls within Muslim Africa, largely North Africa and the Sahel, as that is where most of the written records came from; the center of the continent is largely absent. West, Southern and East Africa all have a few chapters. The chapters are without footnotes, but contain brief bibliographies at the end that discuss what scholarship and primary sources were consulted. If the subject of another chapter is mentioned, Fauvelle puts in a note to it, but there is no clustering of chapters around given subjects and no particular reason to read the chapters in order. The book does focus largely on trade and could, generously, be described as an economic history, but many chapters deal with social, legal, religious or biographical topics.

This disjointed format has a few effects. One is that it the book is incredibly readable, each chapter conveying a tidy anecdote, laying out the evidence and making a brief historical argument. The bibliographies at the end are far easier to reference than endnotes, but less precise than footnotes; more interested in documenting the scope and state of scholarship instead of pinpointing every single fact to a page number. The effect is, in some way, a sort of Wunderkammer — a collection of wide ranging artifacts arranged in such a way that they are easy to take in and enjoy.

As a whole, however, the individual chapters begin to form a sort of cohesive impression, a sort of Chinese ink wash that conveys an idea in the gestures, not the details. It is emergent narrative, not linear, but it is effective all the same, perhaps even more so for not having a cohesive central thesis it is attempting to convince the reader of. There is no center to Fauvelle’s medieval African world and no periphery, just glimpse of a few mountains emerging from the blank scroll, remnants of an ancient range.

Kaia Kater sounds better after midnight. There’s something about the first hours of morning, the quite stillness, the music lays on you a weighted blanket, let you sink into her low voice and the rythms of the banjo and the poetry of the words —I’m soft and heavy as the night…

I don’t remember the first time I heard Kater, although I am almost certain she drifted into my Spotify feed over the lousy wired headphones plugged into my Dell desktop at my first job. I heard a few of her songs before I really started paying attention, but “Nine Pin” grabbed me —

These clothes you gave me don’t fit right
The belt is loose and the noose is tight

Kater’s music, I learned, is full of these Prufrock moments, twists that make you sit upright and pay attention just when Kater’s voice is lulling you into the music.

It was not until a good deal later that I learned the “Nine Pin” of the title is from a square dance formation, with an odd nine pin out in the center while the squares of eight spin around and around. The song still spoke to me as I walked around my new town, hundreds of miles from friends or family, listening to “Nine Pin” over and over.

Kater’s songs reward repeated listening. I find her songs need time to percolate — the first time I listen to one of her albums I tend to gloss over many of the tracks, only to find myself playing them on repeat months or even years later. The time it takes me to really latch on to the music is rewarded by songs that do not wear out, no matter how many times I’ve listened to them.

Part of this is that Kater is an excellent writer. Her lyrics are impressionistic, even abstract, in the modern folk tradition, but they tell stories all the same. In “Southern Girl,” apple picking and love are set beside strange fruit and graves. There’s whiskey and tumbles in the hay, as in any good country song, but there are ghosts too. On “Grenades,” she tackles colonialism head on, weaving interviews with her father — who fled Grenada as a teenager after the US invasion — in between the songs, which range from the overtly political title track to more surprising choices: what appears at first to be a lilting love song is based on a Swedish vampire film, a kaleidoscopic folk-rock piece is an homage to the Appalachian tradition of apocalyptic hymns.

            But her songs are more than the lyrics. I’ve seen her play solo, just her voice and banjo, and she manages to fill the space with far more music than seemed possible. Her voice is distinct — low, soft, strong; her banjo playing works as well on her protest anthems as her covers of old time songs.

            I must admit part of why I liked Kater so much was a certain unearned feeling of kinship. Fresh out of college, Kater was just a year older and putting out the kind of traditional and folk music I loved, music that until then I had associated largely with older artists and audiences. There was a little bit of the thrill of discovering an artist before she went big, and when I met her after a live performance I found she was engaging and exceptionally kind. But the music won me over first, and it is the music to which I return.

            Kater’s latest single, “Parallels” is in some ways a long way from her first EP of traditional tunes, “Old Soul” — it features trumpet player Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, for one  — but Kater’s lyrics works just as well over the smooth jazz horn and soft drums as over banjo and bass. I know that at some point in a few months, I’ll find myself up at 1 or 2 am, letting “Paralells” wrap around me in the quiet of the night.

This past year, I’ve been enjoying not only the music, but also the journalism of Adia Victoria and Lizzie No, who have both begun outstanding runs as podcast hosts. I am always delighted when my two passions — journalism and roots music — cross in interesting ways, and I have been trying to unravel what makes these two women’s interviews stand out from most other folk music media I listen to.

Victoria’s “Call and Response” makes her interviews seem like a conversation between friends without bringing in the chaff that actual conversation has. She opens each episode with a typewritten letter, which she reads aloud, bringing her, her subject, and the listener in close. She will frequently break in during her guests response in the form of a well-placed “yes!” or “mhmm” that encourages them to go on, not stop speaking. It feels familiar and casual while being tightly crafted.

And then there are the questions themselves. Victoria cuts straight to the heart of the matter; in a recent episode with Jason Isbell she leads off by asking about a question about how pop country uses symbols (beer, denim, trucks) as empty symbols without ever engaging the assumptions they represent about southern life. It’s an astute question that kicks off 25 minutes of conversation about white southern masculinity. Only later in the episode does Victoria ease up a bit to talk about upcoming shows.  

I noticed a similar intensity to the questions when listening to Lizzie No, who is now a regular host of “Basic Folk.” The first interview she did was with Amathyst Kiah, and she came out strong — “This theme in Black literature of spirits and ghosts … Do you think about yourself as in conversation with the Black literary cannon in that way, do you about blackness and loneliness as linked, like is there a link there for you, or is it just the songwriter view of ‘I’m alone?’” What a question!

Both Victoria and No land in a sweet spot — neither asking the obvious questions that their subjects have answered numerous times before nor going deep into the technical weeds of industry or artistry, where it would be hard for a lay person to follow. Their personal knowledge of the music and the music industry informs their questions, but they also clearly know their subjects work well, citing past interviews and specific lyrics. And they are willing to ask intense questions — about race, gender, religion, sexuality, identity. Even with artists I have never heard of and may never listen to, the result is intimate, revealing, engaging, and leaves me wanting to hear more.

“Where in the world are the joyful motherfuckers”

So begins the final track of Allison Russell’s first solo album, “Outside Child” — a masterpiece of her reflections on trauma, abuse, love and legacy.

Born to a teenage Canadian mother and a Grenadian father, sexually and physically abused by a white supremacist stepfather, Russell ran away at age 15, living on the streets of Montreal before moving across Canada to some other relatives.

Much of the coverage I’ve read has focused on the narrative behind the album more than the details, so I want to say up front that the music is good — really damn good. Russell’s voice is rich and flexible, one moment high and soft, the next low and triumphant, then fading again, sliding the vowels of the lyrics into a hum. Her incongruous clarinet blends wonderfully with the more traditional folk-rock instrumentation. The lyrics are colored by light in azures and violets and blues, rooted in cathedrals and graveyards and basement windows.

Violence is omnipresent, more so in some songs than in others — “4^th Day Prayer” for example — but often decentered, the context for the song but not the topic of it. “Blood on my shirt, two ripped buttons, might have killed me that time, oooh if I’d let him,” is the lead in to “Persephone,” a love song to a high school girlfriend. The rest of the lyrics are about awkward teenage love and sexual awakening — “put your skinny arms around me, let me taste your skin.” The album is as much a celebration of the community that helped her survive as it is about what she survived.

Despite the personal and reflective nature of the album, Russell keeps looking outward, advocating an ethos of defiant solidarity, of celebration, of invitation to join the good fight — not only in the album, but in her interviews, her writing, her curated Newport set, and elsewhere. In every interview I’ve heard with her, she is frank, soft spoken, almost boundlessly compassionate, even to her stepfather, who she speaks of as being in part a product of his own abusive, racist upbringing.

Like Paul Simon, you might think Allison Russell would have trouble with the word motherfucker — it’s the only profanity on the record. But there’s no hitch when she sings “joyful motherfuckers” in breathy, light voice, capturing the ethos of the album in two words, hard edged, unapologetic, uplifting.

And yet it is not the most thrilling and challenging line of the song. That one is saved for the last line, when, after 49 minutes, Russell breaks the fourth wall, stares right out at the audience and sings “hey you, hey you, who you think I’m talking to, show ‘em what you got in your heart.” And then the album ends.

In part, I agree with Spencer Ackerman’s concluding criticism of his own book — that Reign of Terror, a much-anticipated work on the ways that the war on terror has influenced American politics over the past 20 years by one of its premier chroniclers, is in some ways a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” version of the forever war.

It is always a little disappointing when a book by some prominent journalist comes out and the best revelations have already been excerpted in newspaper article. In the case of Reign, most of the reporting was already in newspaper articles. The book is thoroughly researched and clearly written, but unlike a Bob Woodward special, there are no shocking on-deep-background revelations from the rooms where it happened.

Ackerman’s book is at its best when it steps from chronicles of events and engages in analysis — how a generation of military leaders and security state apparatchiks turned the Forever Wars into career builders; the rise of military leaders like Jim Mattis into the lauded “adults in the room” and into MAGA favorites like Michael Flynn; the trend of trying to “de-troop” political opponents by claiming their military service did not count.

But there is value, too, in the laundry list. The War on Terror, after all, did not happen behind closed doors nearly as often as those who fought it would have wished.

“In retrospect, any failure — especially by the war’s architects, stewards and chroniclers — to see the War on Terror was seeding the ground for a figure like Trump testifies to the power of American exceptionalism, which is nothing more than white innocence applied globally,” Ackerman writes in the introduction. His argument is that the facts were all there to see where this lead, and that many refused to look. Ackerman’s frustration with this failure burns through every page as he lays out what the public knew when.

Dara Lind, the fantastic immigration journalist who receives a note of appreciation in Ackerman’s acknowledgements, called Reign a second draft of history — not a journalistic first draft, and not exactly history, either, but a review of what we already know in light of what we later learned. Following the news is often like scrutinizing pointillist artwork, knowing generally that each dot of color connects to its neighbors in a meaningful way but being unable to pick out the figures. Especially as the longest, but by no means the last, chapter of the forever war draws to a close, Reign serves as a step back to see the painting as a whole.

I recently watched The Joker for the first time and almost turned it off 20 minutes in. My decision to grit my teeth and bear it out was not rewarded.

The film is not original — everything it tries to do has been done before, and better. An unreliable and mentally unstable narrator goes on a killing spree he believes is heroic? Taxi Driver. A dismantling of the fascistic, elitist themes in superhero movies? Watchman is such a trope that Alan Moore got tired of it.  If it added interesting nuance to these prior plots that would be one thing, but the entire movie is unbearably on the nose.

“What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society who abandons him?” the main character asks at the climax of the film. If you have not realized that that is what the movie is about at that point, you have probably — and mercifully — fallen asleep.

The Joker lays on the darkness so thick that it slips into self-parody. The bleakness has no relenting moments — not one gesture of kindness, not one actual joke told between friends. It mistakes edginess for tragedy. Hamlet is a very funny play. The Joker tries scrupulously to avoid humor. The political commentary feels at once too blatant — the rich and powerful openly mock the poor — and also remarkably thin — the underclass just starts destroying things, in what is supposed to be the sympathetic movement inspired by the main character. There is no organizing, there is no community, there is capitalism and there is nihilistic destruction. Nothing else is possible; certainly nothing better. 

Even more recently I saw the new Suicide Squad, which I genuinely enjoyed. It embraces its own absurdism — a polka dot wielding supervillain with mommy issues, a man shark, and a teenager who controls rats take down a Godzilla scale cartoon starfish. Harley Quinn is there too, and a mercenary character whose only memorable feature is being played by Idris Elba.

But Suicide Squad is a good movie only because it’s not trying to be a good movie — it promises lots of quality CGI, some great fight scenes, and your favorite actors wisecracking, and by golly, it delivers that.

Otherwise the whole movie feels low stakes. It is, after all, a story of anti-heroes on a suicide mission, the audience has no reason to mourn them when they die. The plot is sketched out in two to five minutes of screen time and leans heavily into American’s internalized narratives about third-world coups to fill in the rest. There is perfunctory nod to America’s historical misdeeds abroad — the United States is complicit in terrible crimes involving the aforementioned cartoon starfish — but the whole narrative is so familiar that even the critique is a cliché. Even the threat the anti-heroes face seems only moderately existential. Americans have known how to deal with city-destroying monsters since the 1930’s stop-motion King Kong, the starfish could have been dispatched by a few attack planes if our protagonists fail.

While Joker drags each moment of existential angst, Suicide Squad takes its que from Marvel, which has perfected the art of undercutting any genuine emotion with a joke.[1] But it doesn’t try that hard to actually convince you of any emotional weight in the first place — no one expects it to last anyway.

I genuinely enjoy superhero stories, which I’ve mostly consumed them in the form of movies. But it feels like Joker and Suicide Squad are two logical ends of the same push to keep making these films.

The Joker is an attempt to make an art film out of the absurd premise of a clown who fights a detective dressed as a bat, and fails to either make anything of artistic merit or, really explain the Joker as a character (in an effort to make him sympathetic enough to watch for a feature length film, the Joker is given plenty of motivation but little competence, it’s hard to imagine him continuing as a supervillain once the credits roll).

The Suicide Squad takes nothing seriously because it knows you’re just there for the gory slapstick. Like its main characters, it’s disposable — watch once and discard. The Joker is even worse, a self conscious attempt to make a classic — don’t watch at all.

It may be that the genre is, after miles of cellophane, wearing out its possibilities, but I have to believe these extremes are not the inevitable end of the premise. Superhero stories are inherently a little absurd, but it is possible to use them to tell compelling stories — look at HBO’s recent Watchmen series, which uses the premise of superheroes to ask genuinely interesting questions about what kind of world such people would live in.

There has to be a balance between the self-serious attempt to turn comics into highbrow entertainment and the absolute refusal to do anything more interesting than one long running fight scene.

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[1] This is not an original observation, it was highlighted by a Tik-Tok I saw but could not retrace the provenience of

Recently I drove from Georgia to North Carolina for the funeral of a friend, leaving before dawn to make it to the service. In the early morning light, I searched for an original version of the traditional shape note song “White.”

Although the name of this blog comes from the song, I had only heard single artists cover it, not a Sacred Harp chorus. I listened to one version, then listened to it again, then a second version, and a third. The song can be lilting, even haunting, with just one singer, but within the foursquare shape note choir it took on a triumphant tone.

Farewell my friends whose tender care
Has long engaged my love
Your fond embrace I now exchange
For better friends above

I’m a long time travelling here below
I’m a long time travelling away from home
I’m a long time travelling here below
To lay this body down

There are many joyful religious songs in the American folk tradition that are about dying — some treat life is a burden of suffering best left behind, others are eager for the infinite joy of heaven. “White” is unusual in that it both celebrates the life that has been lived and looks forward to peace when we lay this body down. There may be better friends ahead, the springs of joy on earth may be dry, but there was happiness and love here below, at least for a time — a triumph indeed.

Perhaps that is why the song has been following me since that morning, driving between South Carolina pines, sleep deprived and uncomfortable in a rarely worn suit. Like a good funeral, it is a celebration of the life that has been lived as much as a marking of its end. It is a reminder that even at the end of a long road, there can still be brightness and joy.