Viraldice

This weekend’s episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians featured a first for the show: a sit-down interview with Kanye West himself. While Kim Kardashian’s husband has, of course, appeared on the series prior to Sunday’s season 16 premiere, he’s never indulged in that reality show staple, the testimonial. According to Ye, you can go ahead and thank The Incredibles for his change of heart.

“This is my first time doing this. I’m not actually attempting to do good,” he explained. “This interview is because of the movie The Incredibles. It starts off with the interviews. The superheroes are giving interviews.” While a satisfying testimonial scene might be enough to convince some to address the cameras, it was apparently the similarities between the Kardashian-Wests and Pixar’s Parr family that really griped Kanye’s imagination. “The wife’s got a big butt,” he noted. “And I just see our life becoming more and more and more like The Incredibles until we can finally fly.”

A new Marvel movie is almost here, which means it’s time to break out the new LEGO sets. LEGO has announced five new sets for Avengers: Endgame. While some may want to over-analyze these sets for clues about the plot of the upcoming film, keep in mind that these sets aren’t necessarily drawn from the story, but rather are just ways of mixing and matching the characters to create fun playsets. I’m not saying there won’t be a battle against Thanos at the Avengers compound, but I wouldn’t count on it either. Here are …

In real life, Jussie Smollett just had all sixteen felony charges against him dropped following allegations he staged an assault against himself in Chicago this January. On Saturday Night Live, however, Jussie Smollett is pretty sure you won’t believe what just happened to him on the way over. Host Sandra Oh and Kenan Thompson play Smollett’s manager and Lee Daniels, respectively, to Chris Redd’s Empire star, who has this big plastic bag of Sesame Street-level clues to show you. You can probably already guess what they add up to.

If you think it’s been a rough year and change for real America — over whose citizens our Selina Meyer would love to preside, for reasons she can definitely explain — consider, for a moment, what a harrowing stretch it’s been for fictional America.

Over on House of Cards, the ghost of Kevin Spacey’s career haunted the final season as it sputtered to a gloomy, bloody end. And just when we needed her the most, Selina, our favorite fictional first female POTUS was, like Dan’s compassion, Amy’s chill, and Jonah’s common sense, nowhere in sight. (As Veep fans surely know, the series went on hiatus while Julia Louis-Dreyfus received treatment for breast cancer.) There was nothing for us to do but keep this show and its heroine in our thoughts and prayers.

Finally, Veep is returning, and with it are Selina’s hopes to win the White House. Like that friend who keeps getting back together with their objectively shitty ex, this time is going to be different, okay?? Selina will make sure of it. She is going to do things right. She is going to avoid humiliation and dysfunction at every turn. She is New. Selina. Now. (Gary, speaking for us all: “I don’t really get it, actually.”) She is landing in Iowa … not Cedar Rapids, where Amy is keeping the crowds photo-ready, but in Cedar Falls, where she is greeted by an empty airstrip. Campaign is off to a banner start!

One of my evergreen Veep questions, which I have posed to showrunner David Mandel, is: Why does Selina want to be president? The show is designed to avoid revealing her political persuasion, so it’s tricky to get a feel for her opinion on any political issue — generally speaking her stance is “whatever is most expedient to Selina at this particular moment, subject to change at any time.” And while she is obviously an ambition-monster, it seems like that sort of soulless climbing could be more swiftly rewarded in the private sector. So why does Selina aspire to the presidency?

Well, would it shock you to discover that Selina doesn’t know, either? She spends the whole episode asking her lackeys for an answer — Amy would take the Oval so she could nuke the whole country, Gary would win just so he could give it to Selina — and ultimately winds up finding a useful credo from a local working guy whose services she has no intention of paying for. The closest we get to an honest answer, a kind of egomaniacal word-vomit dictated to Gary, is that she believes she’s paid her dues and blazed all the trails and dumped on the glass ceiling — that she feels entitled to the presidency. I feel like Selina is the victim of some version of a Get Out experiment, but there’s a rich, tall, white man trapped inside her petite woman-body, begging to be set free.

Let’s check in on her team, shall we? There’s the baby, little Richard, handy campaign prop for grandma (or is it gam-gam?). Catherine has post-partum depression, and the only way to tell is her haircut and, if you ask her beloved Marjorie, her slightly decreased libido. Andrew is off-screen somewhere, running the Meyer Foundation, which I’m sure will be totally fine and involve no criminal dealings at all. Kent has a new predictive algorithm for election results, and its/her name is SHEILA. Ben is the secret campaign manager, and the public-facing campaign manager is Keith Quinn, who is not who Selina thought he was but it’s too late to fire him now! (My favorite JLD delivery of the episode: “It is not my job to know what Keith Quinn does or does not look like!”) Amy is still pregnant with Dan’s baby, even though he’d assumed she “sent that thing to the 7-11 dumpster in the sky already.” What are the odds Amy ends up having this baby not because she wants to but just because she never gets around to scheduling her abortion and is always campaigning in states where the clinics are a day’s drive from any major city and once you get there, there are still all these convoluted waiting periods and policies and other assorted anti-choice whatthefuckery?

Sweet Richard is working on Selina’s campaign and Jonah’s campaign. He just can’t decide who to support, because they’re both so wonderful! Jonah’s campaign aesthetic can best be summed up as “white Urkel” and, since we last saw him, he’s found himself a wife. One tiny catch about Beth, who seems lovely and travels with great snacks: She is Jonah’s former stepsister. How no one handles this by calling it “pulling a Clueless” is BEYOND me. Jonah, naturally, handles it very badly. Also speaking of handling things badly: On his team is Teddy, who you may recall as the man who was molesting Jonah at the office. Teddy supposedly had a court-ordered castration ( … did he though?) so as to become employable in politics again.

All these proceedings are punctuated by a series of mass shootings, because America. Selina takes a break from shaking Mayor Biscuit’s paw to offer up, well, not thoughts and prayers, obviously, she’s so over thoughts and prayers. No, she wants to send the families “my mindfulness, and meditations unto the Lord on their behalf.” As her team assembles for yet another botched announcement — this time at Susan B. Anthony’s residence, where Selina announced her first run back in 2008 — news of yet another shooting comes through. They pause for a moment, then two, and then Selina wonders aloud: “This … could … work for us?” And, well, it does. Prayer works, people!

Meanwhile, word has gotten out about Jonah’s stepsister-wife situation (or is it half sister? “whichever one when I bone her she doesn’t give birth to a pile of legs”) so Jonah’s team tries to do damage control by sitting down with CBS, which means we get to see Dan’s old boss again. Hi there, Jane McCabe! As you might expect, being together during such an emotional, intense time is reminding Jonah’s mom and his stepdad how much they miss each other, and the segment ends with Jonah holding his hands over his ears, rocking back and forth, shouting, “I’M GONNA BE PRESIDENT.” In related news, Jonah’s numbers are up 3 percent.

Said it before and I’ll say it again: I maintain the show will end with Jonah winning the White House.

• Selina solicits feedback on how to make the new campaign better than the old one, only to shut it all down within the first three minutes once she realizes the lion’s share of criticism will be aimed at “the candidate.” She dismisses Amy’s notes like so: “How about I write 500 pages about how you need to start wearing concealer?”

• After Beth makes a cute-dorky joke about how Jonah is going to “sweep” all the dirt out of Washington, Jonah steals back the microphone: “I just want to make it clear that she does do all the housework.”

• Mike is supposed to be posting ten times a day? What is this, 2011?

• Pray for Mayor Biscuit!

• Gary, when Selina asks if he think’s Amy is getting “fat in the front”: “It is literally all I think about.”

• Dan, ever the gentleman: “If you want to go Dutch or whatever on the abortion just send it to me on Venmo.”

• Jonah’s reaction to one of the shootings: “Sometimes hotshot lacrosse players who think they own the cafeteria can bring this on themselves.”

• Welcome to the race, Tom James.

Insult of the Episode

Selina, to the city of Lurlene: “Even the name sounds like it’s on meth.”

Compliment of the Episode

The way Gary tries to slip “pretty” into Selina’s speech (“Ever since I was a girl — ” “a pretty girl!”) and then, when she tells him to delete it, says to himself, “But you were so pretty.”

Jonah Shall Henceforth Be Known As

An 80-story sky-raper, h/t Teddy.

Spoilers for Season 2 Episode 1 of Barry follow below. If you’re a frequent reader of Collider, you may recall that last year, Bill Hader was kind enough to speak to us at length about the final four episodes of his HBO series Barry each week as they aired. And despite the fact that Barry is now an Emmy-winning hit series, and Hader is now a Directors Guild of America Award-winning director, the SNL veteran was gracious enough to not only speak with us again this year, but for all eight episodes of Barry Season 2. Each …

Sometimes it feels like The Walking Dead’s characters and audience could use a reprieve after a particularly brutal, draining episode. This is one of those times. Kudos to TWD for not only delivering what we needed, but also for doing so in a way that’s unlike anything we’ve seen on this show — specifically, with a wicked blizzard. While the Whisperers are mostly MIA and Alpha’s massacre casts a long, dark shadow, the survivors simultaneously come together and split apart. It all adds up to a very Game of Thrones ending to the season, with the big shocker coming in the penultimate episode rather than the finale, and danger arriving in the form of a crap-ton of white walkers.

It’s not quite clear how things got so ugly so fast at the Kingdom, but the neighborhood really looks like shit, as Judith would say: Pipes have burst, stone has crumbled, roofs are blackened and tattered. No one’s taking it harder than Zeke and Carol, of course; she’s always been a bit of mope, but poor Zeke is curled up in bed and is resigned to leave his home behind. What’s a king without a kingdom? And what’s this couple without their son? (To be fair to Carol, she’s now lost four kids—Sophia, adopted daughters Mika and psycho Lizzie, and Henry. The fact that she’s not in a stress-induced coma is a miracle.)

Alpha hinted at what the future would bring with her “sweater weather” comment at the Faire, but the storm that rolls in turns the otherwise easy trek to Hilltop into a life-or-death adventure. Making matters worse, everyone is super tense: Alden gets lippy with Lydia — her mom did kill his girlfriend, after all — but Daryl swiftly tells him to shut it. (I’m liking Daryl’s dad/big brother vibe with Lydia. They have a lot in common: outcasts, abuse survivors, no family, not afraid to roll around in the dirt.) Lydia contemplates a most horrible suicide — death by zombie bite — until Carol interrupts. Daryl also takes an earful from Zeke, who straight-up tells him life at Hilltop would be better for him and Carol if Daryl wasn’t around. Bad move there, King.

The storm hits A-town first, and Negan gets furloughed so he doesn’t freeze to death in jail. That show of mercy isn’t enough to keep him from mouthing off, of course. (Even Gabe has to chuckle at his “Father Not The Father” line.) Good thing he’s around, because when Judith runs into the storm to find Dog, he’s the only one who chases after her. (I thought that limp he had, along with the zero visibility, would lead him to being mistaken for a walker. Glad that didn’t happen. It would have been dumb. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned this at all. Let’s move on.) Yeah, Negan smashed Glenn and the Sarge’s heads to smithereens, but when he wraps up Judith in his coat and leads her and Dog to safety, it’s hard not to like the guy he’s becoming.

The blinding snow works well as we toggle from A-town to the caravan, and no one (including us) can quite tell what the hell is in front of them. After a pit stop at the Sanctuary, the Hilltoppers have no choice but to cross through Alpha’s territory and pray they don’t attract unwanted attention. (Unless the Whisperers have also been busy making some necro-puffers and skin-hoodies, they likely aren’t sitting around in the snow, but hey, can’t be too careful these days.) The ol’ Hidden Walker trick catches everyone by surprise, as zombies emerge from the deep powder. But the real drama is with Lydia, who sneaks away and is oddly pursued by Carol, not Daryl. Why? To set up another attempted suicide, this time with Lydia begging her dead bf’s mom to do the honors. Considering Carol once murdered her own adopted daughter and also set a bunch of people on fire, killing Lydia is not off-brand for her. The clincher is when Lydia tugs at Carol’s heartstrings by saying Alpha was right in calling her own daughter weak; Carol is 0-4 in the mom game, but she isn’t giving up. With tears in her eyes, Carol opts to take out a sneaky walker and take Lydia by hand.

As the storm settles down, bonds are forged and broken. Michonne visits Negan in the same room where he recovered from Rick’s throat slice and you can see her beginning to warm up to him. One thing he offers Michonne is the perspective of a leader, of which there aren’t many left. “I know what it’s like to lose a kingdom and see things fall apart,” Negan says. “It sucks ass.” When Michonne talks of how evil brings good people together, Negan throws her a curveball: “It’s just that no one ever thinks that they’re the evil one.”

Meanwhile, the sad trombone replaces royal trumpets for Zeke, as Carol breaks the news that she’s headed to A-town. Zeke doesn’t seem surprised when she hands him back his ring—deep down he must have known that Carol wasn’t cut out for the fairy tale life (or for LARPing). Though this move could set up something between the two archery experts, I hope it doesn’t; I’m still pulling for a Daryl/Connie coupling.

Before their long winter ends (and our summer break from zombie mayhem begins), we’re left with two relatively light cliffhangers. Somewhere in the woods far away from the cold weather, there’s a skinmask installation that’s sure to draw raves from the apocalyptic avant-garde art crowd. Beta removes Alpha’s mask like a good boy and she says she needs to become stronger “for what comes next.” Rather than trying the keto diet or finding an abandoned Peleton bike, Alpha’s workout involves Beta whipping her across the forearm. She flinches with each strike but holds her head a little higher as the hits keep coming. Did she somehow know that her territory was breeched? Maybe she was planning to weaponize her zombie army no matter what her neighbors did.

The other mystery arrives courtesy of Zeke’s radio transmission. He’s chatting with the endlessly adorable Judith, fresh off a snowball fight that offered a brief moment of joy and definitely did not make any recappers I know get choked up a little. After they sign off, a muffled voice comes through: “Hello… is anybody out there?” Whoever’s on the line had better be heavily armed and willing to help Hilltop and A-town with Alpha’s what-comes-next.

So it appears season 10 (that’s 131 episodes so far, folks) will be the official kick-off of the Whisperers War and the introduction of some fresh meat that just might help the survivors survive. At the start of this chapter back in the fall, I was feeling a little TWD’d out; thanks to this fresh, risk-taking season, there’s plenty of reason to come back for more.

Grab a bucket of fried chicken, unwrap a Reggie bar, and let’s dig in to this feast of an episode.

Up until now, Chuck and Axe’s alliance was dubious at best, amorphous at worst. Their interactions were minimal enough that I didn’t see the need to delve into them just yet. But this is Billions, after all, so I suspected there was a method to the madness — and, oh, was there ever. In the final minutes of “Chickentown,” Chuck, solidifying his position as a submissive in both his personal and professional lives, indebts himself to Axe in a way I doubt he’ll ever be able to repay.

Any Billions fan knows that Chuck’s reputation as a prosecutorial champion is all smoke and mirrors. Do a little digging (as Bryan Connerty has been), and underneath is a man who sells out the vulnerable to protect his daddy’s rich friends. Chuck spends the episode trying to quash an article that will blow the whistle on his career hypocrisy, and ultimately fails in his mission, because he forgot once again that Kate Sacher (Condola Rashad) is a political animal. His bid for state attorney general appears to be over before it’s begun: No amount of crooning from Michael Bolton — whom Charles Senior hired to perform at his son’s glad-handing event — will help your campaign when no one wants their picture taken with you.

If politics is a dirty game, then Chuck is about to soil himself with, ironically, his sudsiest next move: In the shadows of his office, in hushed tones (we get it, Billions, you like overstated drama), he promises the favor equivalent of a blank check if Axe not only funds his campaign, but also drains his opponent’s resources.

There is no way this partnership is going to end well for Chuck. Axe agrees to his request, but the billionaire is shrewdly holding back on naming his price until they’re on “the other side of the war.” Remember how Chuck got his jollies this episode by snapping a rubber band against his thigh? (Paul Giamatti does all his own stunts on the show.) Well, I got the same rush from Axe’s nonresponse. Whatever he wants, it’s not good — and what’s bad for Chuck is good for me.

(Who here thinks it has to do with Wendy?)

Shockingly (no, not really), that isn’t Axe’s only shady meeting of the night. Right before he positions himself as the dominant in his alliance with Chuck, Axe has his first face-to-face of the season with his even thornier adversary, Taylor. Billions is never a show to shy away from a good nocturnal setting to raise the intimidation factor — this one has the two of them standing at the water’s edge — but after yet another episode spent outsmarting each other, Taylor is waving a white flag.

Still in possession of a moral center (at least I think they are), Taylor opens up peace talks, making the astute point that neither they nor Axe are operating in top form due to their feud. Axe consents to a truce, but Taylor’s gotta know he was lying, because where’s the fun in an armistice for our hoodie-loving antihero? Considering they’ve flawlessly predicted his sneaky tactics, I have to believe Taylor had a microphone planted in Axe’s car when he mentions the “next part” of his evil plan to Wags. After all, Taylor is someone who deliberately made a mistake in a derivative, somehow knowing that they were being recorded by Israeli spy technology capable of penetrating privacy glass. Axe may have finished the episode by firmly pressing his feet on Chuck’s and Taylor’s necks, but my money is on Taylor to grab an oxygen mask before any real damage is done.

Also, this wouldn’t be a proper recap of “Chickentown” if “Dollar” Bill Stearn (Kelly AuCoin) wasn’t given his due, even though he ends up being the episode’s biggest loser. Bill’s romp through Arkansas poultry country is a showcase for AuCoin, who flexes his scene-stealing muscles in his first major storyline since being promoted to a series regular.

Mistaking Axe Cap for an Asbury Park club, Bill introduces his plan to corner the chicken market to Axe and Wags by belting the opening lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” (which references a “chicken man” — also the name of Bill’s guy on the inside).

Bill is not uncertain about his intel, so he gets the green light to move forward. Too bad he didn’t have the same level of not-uncertainty about the health of the Chicken Man (Danny L. Chapman), whose sudden death has the zip-up-fleece aficionado contemplating a minimum-wage future in KFC’s employ.

You know how Bill once tossed a Molotov cocktail onto his family for the sake of his boss? Yeah, that’s nothing compared to the “chicken holocaust” he has in store to recoup Axe Cap’s losses. In this rare case, Bill’s flair for the theatrical (after arriving in Arkansas to do damage control, a phone call with Axe reveals his plans for a “final solution”) is what saves the company from Ice Juice 2.0.

The next several beats of this subplot are a master class in unscrupulous lunacy: Set to a twangy tune called “Chicken Bill” (Billions, I love you), a dust-masked Bill kicks open the door of a quarantine facility where feathers descend like snowflakes, carrying a bag seemingly moving of its own accord. Fortunately for the nation’s poultry consumers, Axe and Wags land on the scene just in time to avert Bill’s intention to toss a diseased capon into a healthy chicken supply.

Now, while I’m not condoning Bill’s actions, I don’t blame him for taking the “I learned it from watching you!” approach: If Axe could contaminate juices, why can’t Bill do the same with fowl? (Because, as Wags rationalizes, DIY doesn’t work when it comes to poisoning a section of the population. “It requires meticulous calibration. Otherwise we’re all in Contagion.”)

That, and Axe doesn’t want to be indicted again. Sure, it’s nice that he stopped Bill from causing another health crisis, but something tells me it wasn’t for humanitarian reasons.

After throwing a temper tantrum over Axe’s decision to accept a loss — Bill, these outbursts demonstrate why work-life balance is so important; go spend time with your two families — the Axe Cap sycophant is persuaded to let the sick chicken go in a language he can understand.

In the series’ second, and much funnier, use of the immortal closing line from Chinatown, David Costabile, AuCoin, and Damian Lewis not only replicate the blocking from the last scene of the classic 1974 film, they pay homage in a way only Billions could: “Forget it, Bill,” says Wags. “It’s Chickentown.”

• Billions wisely dropped its soap-opera template for the subplot featuring Taylor’s father, Douglas Mason (Kevin Pollak, a welcome addition to any TV show). His strained relationship with Taylor is palpable, but it’s not because Douglas is narrow-minded — he’s a guy coming to terms with the fact that his child never was his “little girl.” Taylor deserves better than what they’re getting from Douglas, but at the same time, I like that I don’t hate him.

• That “Baker Street” sax riff is still playing in your head, isn’t it?

The fourth episode of the lackluster second season of American Gods does actually achieve a bit of thematic coherence, but you have to dig for it and end up hoping it amounts to more in terms of storytelling. Worst of all, it sidelines Laura Moon and Mads Sweeney for an entire episode, and they’re arguably the two performers keeping this show afloat, by bringing an energy that the rest of the show notably lacks. Finally, there’s a scene between two of the most captivating characters/performers from last season, who have been reduced to shadows of their former selves in this episode, which may serve best as the one to watch when people are considering how this season went wrong.

First, back to that thematic coherence: “The Greatest Story Ever Told” is really about how Gods that no one thought could ever change have done so in the new millennium, largely through technology. The long introduction — which almost feels like a welcome throwback to the intros of season one episodes — presents a young man with a technical mind. We first see him playing Pong and later Game Boy, but his father encourages his skill as a pianist, playing Bach for him and admiring the ineffable in the composition. How could someone suffering so much grief in his life write something with so much grace? But the father is crestfallen when his prodigy son comes home with a beautiful composition that was created by a computer program. When even art can be recreated by technology, what remains to keep us human?

While that thread is being explored in the Technical Boy subplot of this episode, there’s a parallel commentary about how something once considered inalterable has been impacted by tech. Mr. Wednesday and Shadow Moon are together again and race off to find the God of Money, played too-briefly by the great William Sanderson, allowing for a mini-Deadwood reunion before the real thing in May. Odin and Mr. World are still recruiting Gods for the impending war, and the deity to whom we all bow when we spend our hard-earned cash would be a natural No. 1 prospect. But, as Mr. World points out, even money ain’t what it used to be. It’s more 0s and 1s now than physical cash — transactions run over the information superhighway in a way that makes them more new school than old. Like art, something once deemed inalterable has been forever transformed. It’s no wonder the God of Money refuses to take sides — money is both old and new school at the same time. Why choose?

Those two subplots of “The Greatest Story Ever Told” reflect each in other in interesting ways, but ultimately don’t add up to a satisfying episode. This is a chapter that features some of the flattest writing and dullest visuals of the series to date. A scene in which Anansi monologues at Bilquis and Ibis is particularly frustrating. Remember the passion and fury of Anansi’s first appearance on the slave ship in season one? A monologue in which he rails about things like the alt-right, gun violence, and football players taking a knee feels intended to rekindle that passion, but it’s simply poorly written. On the one hand, addressing the race of Ibis, Anansi, and Bilquis is ambitious and feels like it should be important to the show, but the delivery is tone-deaf and simply not up to what we thought we knew about the eloquence of these characters from last season.

Did we forget that Shadow Moon has sex with a cat lady? In one of the season’s most unusual tangents, Shadow has an elaborate sex dream in his first scene of the week. It’s long and somewhat explicit — almost as if someone at Starz added a note in the margins of a script that read “Could this season have more nudity?” Shadow awakens from a dream in which a sexy woman scratches him to find marks on his chest and a cat wandering the room. He then speaks to Ibis, who gets a decent scene about how he settled in Cairo and about what he does, but Shadow seems too distracted by whether or not he did it with a cat.

Meanwhile, Technical Boy is ordered by Mr. World to find a replacement for Argus, which will eventually lead him to the now-famous CEO from the opening sequence. It’s a company called Xie Comm, and Technical Boy seems to be calling in this tech whiz to the side of the Gods, but Mr. World interrupts. He shows the CEO something on a screen with flashing lights that mesmerizes him and then Technical Boy races off until he’s caught by what could be called a computerized face-hugger. It’s a really weird scene. It seems to allow Mr. World access to the diner in which Odin is meeting with the God of Money. Was Technical Boy the payment?

Before the final scene in which Money refuses to take sides, there is one nice subplot with Bilquis and a woman named Ruby Goodchild in a chapel. Their second encounter leads to a conversation about how Jesus was a rebel and a troublemaker. He refused to be controlled and now look at the power he wields and the worship he commands. Thematically, this is what American Gods should be — a show that subverts the traditional story of Gods and the people who worship them. There’s still time for it to become that once again. But the resurrection better come soon.

• I kind of love that Crispin Glover pronounces Zorya differently than Odin because not only does it feel like a very Glover-esque acting decision, but it fits that the Old Gods and New Gods would even use language differently. Let’s do more of that.

• Speaking of Glover, his appearance this week reminded me a great deal of Agent Smith from The Matrix. He is similar in not just fashion and tone but the way both characters use technology to achieve their goals.

• Someone should GIF up Technical Boy’s totally weird pronunciation of “ignorant” through gritted teeth. I rewound it a few times and it’s truly bizarre. Maybe Glover suggested it.

• Music cues this week included “We Care a Lot” by Faith No More, “Why Go?” by Pearl Jam, and “Money” by Buddy Guy. And, of course, some Bach, including “Chaconne.”

• Given the drama that had already erupted on set by the time this episode filmed, it’s kind of fun to question if Orlando Jones’ is acting or speaking to producers when he says, “I’m getting bored watching this bullshit.”

In response to news of his death on Sunday, Nipsey Hussle’s fans, friends and peers took to social media to remember the rapper, who was reportedly shot and killed outside his clothing store in Los Angeles at the age of 33. NBC News was the first to confirm his death following reports of a shooting that wounded the rapper and two others.

Following the success of several mixtapes, including The Marathon, The Marathon Continues and Crenshaw (Jay-Z famously bought 100 copies of 2013’s Crenshaw at $100 each as a sign of support), Hussle’s debut album Victory Lap was nominated for Best Rap Album at this year’s Grammys. Longtime partner to The Game actress Lauren London, the pair recently gave a rare interview to GQ. “The artist part of me always wants to be appreciated,” he said at the time. “I read every review. But I never wanted to seek validation by awards or anything controlled by politics.” On Sunday, SZA, Vince Staples, 21 Savage and many others reflected on his life and music, which was still very much in progress at the time of his death, according to his would-be collaborators.

This doesn’t make any sense! My spirit is shaken by this! Dear God may His spirit Rest In Peace and May You grant divine comfort to all his loved ones! 💔🙏🏿I’m so sorry this happened to you

Rihanna (@rihanna) April 1, 2019

When the novelist Susan Choi arrives at the launch party for the new Center for Fiction in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a woman bearing a clipboard is waiting to take her name. Choi pulls off her soft gray beanie as the woman scans the list with a furrowed brow and then scurries over to another staffer. “Hmmm,” says the gatekeeper. “Are you sure you’re on the list?” Choi explains that she’s a member of the workspace and was personally invited. “But did you buy a ticket?” the woman presses. Finally, she shrugs her shoulders, as if to concede that she’s just too polite to reject a partycrasher. “You can go in I guess.”

With a shining silver bob and a strong brow, Choi, who recently turned 50, looks like a cross between Stacy London and a younger Susan Sontag. She has just driven two and a half hours after teaching back-to-back writing seminars at Yale, then negotiated a series of contradictory parking signs out front. She’s usually so exhausted after six hours of teaching and four hours commuting that she heads home and immediately crashes. But she joined up to use the Center’s dedicated “writers’ room” and is curious to check out her new digs.

As we venture into the party in our February parkas — the coat-check attendants tell us there is no room — Choi can’t help but giggle at the indignity of nearly being bounced. She grabs a plastic cup of wine and eyes the new space, which resembles a Barnes & Noble designed by West Elm — thick blond wood and black walls with impractically tall bookshelves. In the vast, modish reading room upstairs, dozens of portraits of the greatest living writers — from Karl Ove Knausgaard to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — loom over partygoers. The real Salman Rushdie swoops past his portrait. Elizabeth Strout stands nearby in a black leather jacket, prompting me to look around for her photo, too. Choi bumps into the photographer, who insists he once took her picture at a festival. I can’t find it on the walls.

Choi has been writing novels for 20 years, but Trust Exercise, her mind-bending new book, is her best shot at joining the pantheon of authors whose faces are mounted on walls and recognized at the door. It is the sort of page-turning metafiction that readers love to argue about — a Gen-X bildungsroman that speaks to younger generations, a Russian nesting doll of unreliable narrators, and a slippery #MeToo puzzle-box about the fallibility of memory. It’s also a paean to anger, arguably the defining emotion of our time, and after decades of tamping it down, Choi came by it honestly around the time Donald Trump got elected and she separated from her husband. “I’m conscious of having been so mad during so much of the writing of this book,” she says. “Like really mad.”

I’m not entirely sure if I should believe everything Susan Choi says. Not because she’s a liar — nothing about her demeanor suggests she’d even make up an excuse for running five minutes late. In person, she is expressive and very friendly. But in conversation and in Trust Exercise, every fact comes couched in clear bubble wrap: refracted, cushioned, cramped. Choi always wants me — and perhaps you, too — to know that there is no such thing as a single truth.

In her first four novels, Choi asked broad, deep questions about what it meant to be an American. She personalized the real-life dramas behind the news — Patty Hearst’s lost year (in the Pulitzer-nominated American Woman), the Unabomber’s letter-writing campaign (in Person of Interest). She dug up the intellectual roots of unlikely love affairs (in The Foreign Student and My Education). Her sentences were like quilled paper, rolling up into curlicues, folded together so elaborately that their meanings couldn’t always be extracted.

Critics, especially those who are also novelists, have always liked her work: “If we’re lucky, [Person of Interest] may turn out to be a prototypical 21st-century novel,” Francine Prose wrote in the New York Times. Of her most recent novel, My Education, Meg Wolitzer wrote, “I felt like I was in an obsessive relationship with it. I wanted to read it all the time.” Jennifer Egan, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, first came to Choi’s work while reviewing American Woman. The two are now friends and neighbors in Fort Greene. “She’s really an original,” Egan says. “She’s following an internal rudder to territory that’s always fascinating.”

Which is to say, Choi is a writer’s writer: “A lot of people that I have a high opinion of have a high opinion of her,” says another friend, the author Sigrid Nunez. But the public has never quite sunk its teeth into Choi’s work, and she knows this. “By the time American Woman was getting critical accolades,” she says “it was underperforming already.”

Trust Exercise is preoccupied with many of Choi’s enduring themes — shifting power balances in relationships, the violence that undergirds American life, sex’s stranglehold on intimacy. But unlike the first four novels, Trust Exercise is self-aware. It’s a perfectly stitched together Frankenstein’s monster of narrative introspection and ambiguity. Before writing it, “I got sick of myself,” Choi explains. So in her latest novel, “I wasn’t laboring over making the sentences pretty.”

This time, Choi’s sentences don’t curlicue; they end in pointed spikes. Like Muriel Spark, whom Choi read while conceiving of Trust Exercise, it has a “lean self-effacing tartness.” Instead, it’s the plot that contorts. Some writers told me the novel is already hotly debated in literary circles for the tricks it plays with its narrators — or, rather, for the tricks its narrators play. One novelist told me that everyone she knows “either adores it or loathes it.”

The first 131 pages are the story of Sarah and David, two freshmen at CAPA, a performing-arts high school in an unnamed southern city that’s “rich in land, poor in everything else.” It’s the early 1980s, and as part of their induction to the cultish, elite theater program, the freshmen embark on a series of bonding drills — the trust exercises of the title. One day Mr. Kingsley, the intellectual high priest and kingmaker of CAPA, turns off all the lights, “plunging them all into a locked lightless vault.” Sarah, with her bedazzled jeans, is easily identified by touch, and David finds her body in the dark, takes her thumb in his mouth, and begins to kiss her. The exercise sets off a rapid fall of dominoes: David and Sarah’s torrid summer romance, their wordless breakup on the first day of sophomore year, one last screw on the cold, hard floor of CAPA’s hallway, and an escalating sequence of humiliations.

Over all these events, Mr. Kingsley presides as puppet master. His teaching methods are the sort that we might once have termed “unconventional” but now read like borderline abuse, perhaps even a kind of predation. In the spring of junior year, he invites a “performing troupe” of British students to campus, accompanied by 20-something Liam, and their middle-aged teacher, Martin. Martin pursues Sarah’s classmate Karen and Liam chats up Sarah. A party at Mr. Kingsley’s house becomes an Ice Storm for the children of Rick Moody’s generation. Sarah ends up in a bedroom with Liam, and what proceeds is a revoltingly astute rendering of her “unwanted pleasure” and emotional paralysis. He squashes her on the bed. Sarah is disgusted by his “dead white hairy limbs” and “unaccountably wrinkly erection.” She yells out “Noooo, noooo, noooo”—but then orgasms. It’s a sticky scene, heaving with sweat and indignity, landing perhaps at the edge of rape.

This isn’t the first time Choi has written about sexual-power dynamics between older men (often teachers) and younger women (including teenagers). Her first novel, The Foreign Student, involves a middle-aged professor who lures a 14-year-old girl into a relationship. My Education centers on a love triangle between a graduate student, her professor, and his wife. But all that came before Harvey Weinstein and Trump. “I wanted Trust Exercise to somehow be about how radically differently we’re seeing this stuff,” says Choi. “But then again, how many of us are seeing it differently, and is it making a difference?”

Choi spent her first nine years in South Bend, Indiana, where her father, Chang, who emigrated from Korea in the mid-1950s, taught mathematics at Indiana University. After her parents’ divorce, she moved to Houston with her mother, Vivian, an administrative secretary at Rice University. Her first published work was a contest winner for 5-to-8-year-old writers in the magazine Cricket, which was thought of as “The New Yorker for children.” She kept up what she calls a “literary persona” and attended a performing-arts school not very different from the CAPA of Trust Exercise. She confesses to a minor wild streak in those days: “We’re very close, but my mom did not have much of a handle on me.”

At Yale, Choi says (repeatedly) that she “floundered,” bouncing around in four or five different majors before landing on literature, “this realm of black turtleneck sweaters and chain-smoking. Sexy jargon that no one understood.” It was late in the era of Lacan and poststructuralism. By the time Choi graduated and headed to Cornell for a Ph.D. (which she didn’t complete), she’d come to believe that “I’ve really never been properly educated.”

In New York, she found a job at a literary agency, but a couple of days in, the agent “wrote me a check for the rest of the week and said, ‘You’re a literary snob, and I can’t have you working for me.’ ” She applied to work at The New Yorker as the assistant to the fiction editor but ended up in fact-checking. During her time there, she wrote The Foreign Student. A friend of a friend connected her with an agent; she sold the book, did a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and won the 1999 Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction.

“What’s so embarrassing to admit but what is probably pretty true,” says Choi, “is when I was a young writer trying to finish my first novel, I really thought if I could just finish this book and sell it, everything else will be okay. I’ll be a real writer.” She waits a beat. “It’s totally untrue.”

She told me this over lunch the day before the party, at a hushed restaurant in Tribeca, where I also gained a small insight into the relationship between Choi’s shifting perspectives and those that animate Trust Exercise’s shattering first twist. We were tucked inside a bentwood booth of pale oak, scanning our menus, when Choi tucked her glossy, photogenic silver hair behind her right ear. Every time she glanced back down at the menu, the hair slid back out, and she tucked it away — over and over.

I might not have noticed this if it weren’t the same tic that so agitates the surprising new narrator of the second section of Trust Exercise. We had just been reading a third-person omniscient narrative, but suddenly here is Karen, standing outside a bookstore in L.A., ten years after high-school graduation, watching through the window as Sarah begins to read from her new novel — which is the 131 pages we just read. “It couldn’t be an accident,” Karen narrates, “that [Sarah’s] side-parted hair was just slightly too short to remain anchored out of her face every time her right hand, in a demure little movement, tucked it behind her right ear. She tucked; and it fell out … She tucked; it fell out.”

Karen is watching and constructing Sarah as a performer. At the same time, Karen’s story — the next 102 pages of Trust Exercise — is also a performance. “‘Karen’ is not ‘Karen’s’ name,” she explains of herself in the third person, “but ‘Karen’ knew, when she read the name ‘Karen’ [in the novel], that it was she who was meant … ‘Karen’ is a yearbook name, filler, a girl with a hairstyle like everyone else’s and a face you’ve forgotten.” Sarah (or is it “Sarah”?) has stolen away “Karen’s” life, or a version of it, and gotten it wrong, or so “Karen” says. She remembers that Sarah turned to writing as consolation for being ostracized in high school. But then Sarah actually succeeded, “having aimed lower,” according to Karen, “and chosen a talent anybody could fake with the right kind of tools.” That is, fiction.

This outrage sets Karen off on what will become Choi’s suspenseful second act — a mission to reunite Sarah, David, and Martin for a final reckoning. It could all be so hokey in the wrong hands, like a high-school creative-writing assignment. In the hands of the kind of faker Karen believes Sarah to be, a narrative this self-referential and overt could explode into a fireworks display of narcissism or collapse under its own scaffolding. Instead, it flexes its own meta-existence — as a novel about the manipulation inherent in any kind of narrative — brilliantly. “It cheapens it to imply it’s a game,” says Nunez. “This is a very serious book about a human experience and what goes on inside people’s heads and hearts.”

Trust Exercise’s first section is compelling enough as a straightforward tale about teenage romance and the distortions adults impose on it. But Karen’s section, with its pulsing oscillation between the first and third person, its whiplash-inducing self-questioning, its spectacularly assembled voice, is itself an exercise in how to compose a text about artifice that never feels artificial. The third section — a coda that I dare not spoil with even a single detail more — swathes the story in a final narrative layer that doesn’t so much tie up loose ends as explode the whole contraption.

Trust Exercise’s most obvious ancestor is Ian McEwan’s Atonement, another novel in which characters emerge from the future to contradict a story about sexual power and abuse. But unlike McEwan’s metanarrative, Trust Exercise isn’t concerned with a definitive and “correct” conclusion. Atonement ends with a revelation and perhaps redemption. Trust Exercise never really guarantees that it has given you an ending at all.

Karen accuses Sarah of taking liberties — creating composites, sidelining people, and perhaps dangerously romanticizing Mr. Kingsley. Sarah, we learn from Karen, “had spent the summer [after junior year] in England with her much older lover,” which surely complicates that bedroom scene. But Karen, too, is manipulating her own story. She’s self-reflective beyond believability, and she often punctures her own authority. Her interiority is a hall of mirrors; each reflection is the product of so many others that it stops mattering where they originate.

What seems to anger Karen most of all is Sarah’s neat, linear gloss on a horrific story — a #MeToo story, though Karen would never say that. Mr. Kingsley, she implies, hypnotized his students in far more nefarious ways than Sarah lets on. And Sarah may have been coerced, but Karen was a victim, too, one whose story has gone untold.

Choi is admittedly biased toward Karen, whom she sees as a valiant underdog: “I so enjoy her intelligence. I so enjoy the fact that she knows that everyone underestimates her … and Karen just quietly says, “‘Your loss.’ I really … I had a great time with that.”

Time and again, Choi tells me that Trust Exercise owes its final form to an upswell of rage, public and private. It began as a side project while she worked on what she thought would be her fifth novel — a story loosely based on her grandfather, a renowned scholar and critic in Korea, “a figure of both prominence and scandal.” She would head to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in between writing seminars to research Korean history, but find herself scribbling Sarah and David’s story. As the fall of 2016 and the election crept closer, “I was really irate and unruly with myself. I was feeling very much as if I’d wound up traveling down this road I hadn’t meant to travel.”

At the same time, Choi’s marriage of 13 years, to Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, came undone. The two have continued to share a house, though they live on separate floors, and co-parent their two sons, who are 11 and 14. They’d been together for six years prior to their marriage, encompassing Choi’s entire writing career. The Foreign Student and American Woman are both dedicated to Wells.

The couple had recently separated when the Access Hollywood tape leaked. Trust Exercise was initially inspired by abuse scandals like the one at the Bronx prep school Horace Mann. As the election grew closer, however, Choi realized that the conversations around sexual assault were becoming more urgent, as if Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” comments had uncorked a geyser of women’s anger.

Along came “Karen,” in a moment Choi remembers vividly. Choi was about to eat lunch with a friend who’d brought Russ & Daughters to her workspace. “I remember sort of dealing with the elevator to let him in so that we could eat together in the kitchen,” when a sudden idea popped into her head like a cartoon bubble. “She’s mad,” Choi thought, “and I heard her voice … I just thought, Karen’s pissed off. She probably didn’t experience those years, and those events, the way Sarah did, and that’s going to make her really mad.”

Choi also reexamined her own memories. “I remember beginning to feel the interest of grotesquely, inappropriately older men,” she says. She offers an anecdote, “like something out of Joyce Carol Oates”: When she was in middle school, Choi began calling a local radio station for song requests. The DJ flirted with her over the phone. “He would play my song, and I don’t know how it happened, but we developed this sort of telephone banter. I felt sophisticated and recognized as a smart, interesting girl, and somehow I gave him my address. I never met him. I don’t think. But he left me a package” — a T-shirt, a card, maybe a photo; she doesn’t really remember.

She had an older boyfriend in high school, too. (“Don’t tell my mother,” she says, laughing.) In grad school, “it was barely surprising that there were affairs being conducted between professors and graduate students.” It was gossip, not scandal.

But as Trust Exercise came together, Choi began to reevaluate her earlier use of sexual trauma as fictional backstory. In the late ’90s, when she came to the conclusion that The Foreign Student’s Katherine had been abused by that older professor; it “felt so deeply familiar and inevitable.” But with Trust Exercise, she began asking herself, “Why does it feel so inevitable?” Catherine, like Sarah, is “smart, she’s discerning, she’s attractive, she has agency, she has the power to choose things. Why does it seem so inevitable that she ends up tangled up with a much older man, who uses her and discards her? Why is that such a familiar story?”

Although sexual abuse is the through-line of Trust Exercise, the novel doesn’t hand down a verdict. That’s what makes it so riveting. “It’s not this simple scenario of the vampire men and victim girls,” Choi says on our long drive, growing animated. “I finished the book in draft form before the #MeToo autumn of 2017, but I wasn’t happy with it. I didn’t think it was done.” She had to write three more endings until she found the right one. But the Weinstein revelations didn’t encourage her to reconstruct it as a social-justice fantasy. “I completely disagree with this idea that we can just identify all of the bad men, and haul them into a pen, and lock the gate, and everything will be fine.” Choi expresses no sympathy for sexual abusers, but she does see something to be gained from breaking free of the tyranny of one single truth to examine how individuals distort and magnify their own memories.

The Kavanaugh hearings crystallized “everything that I’d ever thought about regarding Trust Exercise, in a nutshell,” she says. “I started to suspect that it wasn’t even about someone telling the truth, and someone telling lies, as much as it might have been about how differently two people can see the world.” If you grew up white and very privileged, like Kavanaugh, “you may not even remember the sorts of damage you might’ve inflicted on someone, because they didn’t even register to you at the time.” In this light, the title of her novel has a double meaning. It’s an acrobatic working out of the ultimate #MeToo question: Whom can we trust? Can we even trust ourselves?

The more time I spent with Susan Choi, the more I wondered who exactly she was. She tends to deflect questions about her hobbies, how she spends her time, even what we should do together. When I ask her whether some readers might look for remnants of biography in her fiction, she is highly resistant. Ultimately, Choi says, she is simply “not an interesting person.” (She uses a Flaubert quote as a sort of mantra: “Be steady and well ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”) While Karen does her best to glamorize her life as a professional organizer, Choi does the opposite. She is “not one of these people who worked on a lobster boat for a summer, or went hiking in Kathmandu, or volunteered with Doctors Without Borders, or lived in Guatemala.”

She seems wistful, though not disappointed by any of this. But on the subject of career expectations, she suddenly opens up. “To be really blunt, I think I had really youthful and naïve expectations of what a career as a novelist would be.” When I ask her about the writers whose stature she hopes to emulate, she offers “somebody like Alice Munro, who achieved recognition relatively late.”

Recognition is relative, after all. “Your book can make the cover of the Times Book Review, as my second book did, and not necessarily sell very many copies,” she says. “People still find that really shocking. I know people who are aware of books of mine because they got really great reviews, who assume that I must be sitting on this mountain of wealth as a result.”

The Pulitzer nomination did nothing to alter that self-perception. And yet, Choi has just written an astonishing whirling dervish of a story about a novelist from a big southern city who has hit it big writing a bildungsroman about the wide-ranging implications of her years at a theater-arts high school. If she can imagine that kind of success for Sarah, why not for herself?

When I ask Nunez, who won a National Book Award last year after decades in relative obscurity, if Choi has gotten the recognition she deserves, she doesn’t hesitate: “Certainly not. Certainly not. I think that she’s enormously respected, she’s won important awards, she’s gotten stellar reviews. But it isn’t just a question of sales. She deserves a much larger readership.” Trust Exercise is picking up steam. It’s on virtually every major media outlet’s “most anticipated books” list—which seems minor but could boost preorder sales, which can launch a novel in its first, crucial weeks out in the world. At the Center for Fiction party, another novelist who had read an advance copy of Trust Exercise eagerly approached me and asked for an introduction to Choi. Nunez, who knows about the power of awards, offers some unsolicited prophecy: “This book could be a big prize-winner.”

If that happened, the world would validate not just the writer Choi has been but the one she’s become. You could argue — though she would certainly shudder to hear it — that for the first 20 years of her career, Choi was the Sarah of her own story. She wrote neat, lyrical novels that purported to tell a Truth. The sexual lives of her earlier protagonists unfolded like a passed note. It’s no surprise that she found solace in the words of Flaubert, the man who radicalized and then popularized realism hatched out of misery.

But Choi is now Karen, born of her own fury. She is willing to set fire to traditional narrative, to undermine her own characters, to stomp all over her own beautiful sentences. A couple of hours into our drive from New Haven, she spoke of Monica Lewinsky, whose treatment in the early ’90s “just made me sick.” Stories like Lewinsky’s are what made the sexual-power dynamics in Trust Exercise so interesting to her. “That’s why I related to Karen,” she says. “I think Karen was like, No, I don’t want to be someone who comes forward with the label of victim.” It should be said that Karen, the underdog Choi so relished writing, does eventually surprise everyone.

I worry that Choi will read this and scoff at my armchair analysis, or grow angry that I’ve left important bits out of a period of her life that’s extremely important to her. Choi would argue that she is neither of her protagonists. But perhaps she’d appreciate that she’s also no longer just herself. She’s now a subject, a character, an idea of a novelist.

The party at the Center for Fiction is winding down, and we’re milling around the emptying space when Choi and I notice that everyone else is departing with a tote bag. The coat checkers who declined to take our parkas earlier in the evening are handing out the party favors, so we pick up bags of our own. It isn’t until we’re back among a group of Choi’s friends that she reaches into her tote and pulls out a familiar book. It’s a bright-pink galley of Trust Exercise.

“Wait,” she says with a half-stunned grin, “did everyone get this?” She looks at me with disbelief. “They’re giving everyone my book?”

Trust Exercise will be published on April 9.

*A version of this article appears in the April 1, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

Following reports of a shooting late Sunday afternoon, Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hussle has reportedly been pronounced dead at age 33. NBC announced his death following news of the attack, first reported by TMZ. According to TMZ, Hussle, born Ermias Davidson Asghedom, and two others were shot outside Hussle’s clothing shop The Marathon Store in L.A.’s Hyde Park neighborhood. A beloved figure in rap, Hussle’s album Victory Lap was nominated for Best Rap Album at this year’s Grammys.

As of now, the other shooting victims are reportedly in critical condition. According to TMZ, police are still searching for the shooter who allegedly approached Hussle and his crew on foot and fired multiple rounds, then fled the scene in a nearby car. Sources tell TMZ that police are investigating the shooting as gang-related. Hussle is survived by a son with his longtime girlfriend, actress Lauren London, and a daughter from a previous relationship.

This post contains breaking news and will be updated accordingly.

Following reports of a shooting late Sunday afternoon, Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hussle has reportedly been pronounced dead. NBC announced his death following news of the attack, first reported by TMZ. According to TMZ, Hussle, born Ermias Davidson Asghedom, and two others were shot outside Hussle’s clothing shop The Marathon Store in L.A.’s Hyde Park neighborhood. A beloved figure in rap, Hussle’s album Victory Lap was nominated for Best Rap Album at this year’s Grammys. As of now, the other shooting victims are reportedly in critical condition. We’ll update this post with more information as it becomes available.

Barely three months after completing its extended run at New York Theatre Workshop and the Greenwich House Theater, Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me has made the jump to Broadway. At this point, it isn’t hard to find out what I think about the play—or, for that matter, what Tony Kushner thinks of it—and so I thought, in the show’s own spirit of debate, it would be great to talk to someone about it. Enter my colleague Irin Carmon, a senior correspondent at New York and co-author of Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I spend most of my waking life writing about theater; Irin spends hers writing about where gender, the law, and politics meet. What the Constitution Means to Me might be called, to steal from its own metaphors, a crucible of all of the above. So Irin and I took to Google Chat to see what Schreck’s “living, warm-blooded, steamy document” means to us.

Barely three months after completing its extended run at New York Theatre Workshop and the Greenwich House Theater, Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me has made the jump to Broadway. At this point, it isn’t hard to find out what I think about the play—or, for that matter, what Tony Kushner thinks of it—and so I thought, in the show’s own spirit of debate, it would be great to talk to someone about it. Enter my colleague Irin Carmon, a senior correspondent at New York and co-author of Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I spend most of my waking life writing about theater; Irin spends hers writing about where gender, the law, and politics meet. What the Constitution Means to Me might be called, to steal from its own metaphors, a crucible of all of the above. So Irin and I took to Google Chat to see what Schreck’s “living, warm-blooded, steamy document” means to us.

Irin Carmon: My first theater writing — how should we start?

Sara Holdren: Well, are there specific things from the show that you’re still thinking about today? Things that stuck with you?

I.C.: I need to confess that I was afraid I would hate it.

S.H.: Oh, that’s fascinating! Why?

I.C.: I obviously approve of and celebrate its intentions. But political art that doesn’t feel self-celebrating or preachy is hard.

S.H.: The hardest. And it’s everywhere these days, in extremely mediocre forms.

I.C.: I did not like Gloria: A Life. Nanette left me cold. I’m still irritated about Sweat.

S.H.: I expected to hate Gloria and walked out really moved, though I think I was moved by the real-life facts rather than by the play as a piece of theater. Nanette left me pretty cold too, and colder the further I get from it. But in a way I think that Schreck is attempting something like what Hannah Gadsby is attempting and succeeding on many more levels. Gadsby has that great moment in Nanette where she says that she’s angry but she doesn’t have the right to spread anger — but I don’t think that she’s actually held herself to that standard throughout the piece. Whereas there’s something much more delicately balanced and expansively humane about what Schreck is doing. By the time Mike Iveson—the male actor who’s in the play, the source of “positive male energy,” they joke, but seriously—comes forward to talk to us as himself, instead of as his legionnaire character, we really need to hear from him. He’s integral to the piece—as are Rosdely Ciprian and Thursday Williams, the young women of color who debate with Schreck at the end of the play on alternate evenings. [I saw Thursday this time; Irin saw Rosdely.]

I.C.: There’s an amazing moment in that debate when Rosdely snaps at Heidi, “Pandering!” And I guess I want to be pandered to just enough as an audience member — but not too much. An inherent challenge of works like Nanette is drawing in the 101 audience while being sophisticated and nuanced enough for your most engaged people, the ones who already knew about Picasso. When we made Notorious RBG, the book, we thought about how to speak to both. But as I hope we all know, the most layered politics are no substitute for a story and characters and emotional stakes. So ultimately, I was taken aback by how emotionally affected I was by the play. I kept wondering why I was on the verge of tears the entire time.

S.H.: I’ve seen the show three times now in three different iterations.
Back in 2017 at the Wild Project (the tiniest little room in the East Village), then last year at New York Theatre Workshop, and now on Broadway. And I think Schreck’s performance, while it hasn’t changed in huge ways, has developed muscles. It’s gotten more visceral — more risky and exposed. The pain of it all—and the defiance—is more visible underneath what she calls her “psychotic politeness.”

I.C.: Yes! It was like Tracy Flick’s revenge.

S.H.: But I think we’re also on the verge of tears (me too!) because there really is a solid-as-a-brick-shithouse backbone in there. Schreck has us in hand both as a performer and as the constructor of the play. I don’t feel like I’m being manipulated (in a bad way) or, worse, like I’m in one of those horrible, mushy “Let me read you my diary and call it art” situations. She really is pulling off the double whammy of Tricky Theater: Political and Memoir.

I.C.: She starts out brilliantly with this familiar performance of white womanhood that toggles between her younger self and the present day: stiff-jawed cheer, barely-disguised ambition, the horniness and the fear of youth. And what the generational iterations have in common, you realize as it goes on, is that even our most compliant performances won’t save us from violence, and our institutions sure as hell won’t. I know you wrote about seeing the show during the Kavanaugh-Ford hearings, before their grim resolution affirmed that even being the nicest, most accommodating, most careful and gentle and credentialed white woman won’t be enough in the face of brute institutional power.

S.H.: Yes. And I cried over those hearings — cried in my own version of the bleak, intense, dramatic way Schreck talks about in the show (her “Greek Tragedy Crying”). So it’s a pretty amazing thing to see her both enact and analyze that kind of emotional response. To dig to the deep, ugly roots of it and get past the “Why am I crying? I can’t do anything about this” stage—the stage where we put our heads down and go on—and try to get to some sort of reckoning. Some sort of going on, but with heads up.

I.C.: What gives the play its emotional valence, I think, is the intimate storytelling of her family that speaks more vividly than any statistic she cites (my least favorite part) about the ordinariness of violence or the fear of violence in women’s lives.

S.H.: I agree with you about the statistics — they’re horrifying, but in that kind of numbing way. And I’m never a fan of news-shaming: “If you don’t know this fact, you should read more!” Those moments come off as relatively cheaper or clunkier partly because the biographical material Schreck surrounds them with is so on fire, so real and devastating but also so carefully arranged into a dramatic arc. The statistics feel deadening while the play feels invigorating.

I.C.: But we’ve seen strong personal, emotional storytelling before. The high-stakes risk that pays off, I think, is the huge ambition of making this a piece of constitutional analysis.

S.H.: Yes — that’s the jump. She’s using memoir as a vaulting horse up into a broader, extremely sophisticated conversation. A legal one, a historical one —

I.C.: And that’s ultimately what I found so bold and moving: That she unapologetically puts herself—and to some extent the story of other people left out of the Constitution—at the center of it. She shows how the quotidian reality of the Supreme Court is a bunch of men (save four women, ever) quibbling over the statutory construction of the word “shall,” but it is equally true that it’s an expression of our values and hierarchies. We overheard someone as we left the theater saying, “That’s not what the Constitution is about! She didn’t even mention the Bill of Rights.”

S.H.: Lord, what a response. Did they miss the last two words of the title entirely?

I.C.: And, actually, shaping your constitutional analysis around the 14th Amendment is as good a place to grasp the unevenly kept promises of the document as anywhere else. Ask RBG! Although I have some tiny, uh, quibbles there.

S.H.: Go for it.

I.C.: Okay, I feel like the most pedantic person on earth, but RBG’s cases as a litigator were NOT about equal pay and sexual harassment, although the underlying principles didn’t preclude those issues.

S.H.: It’s not pedantic to know your shit.

I.C.: It matters because what RBG actually did would lend itself seamlessly to the play’s arguments. She was up against a century of cases that said that discrimination was a favor to (white) women, a pedestal that she and her fellow feminist litigators correctly identified as a cage. Picking up from where brilliant theorists like Pauli Murray had left off, she convinced nine male members of the Supreme Court through a series of cases that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause—another unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction—applied to gender. And not only to women, but to men whose roles the law was constricting. She represented men who wanted to be recognized by the law as caregivers or spouses. Which would have been a great segue to Mike!

S.H.: So, just to parse this out, essentially we weren’t even at arguing for equal pay or protection from sexual harassment yet?

I.C.: Yes! First someone had to get the justices to recognize that women were even persons deserving of equal protection under the law. And—in what gets to the central conundrum of the play—the question for feminists was whether to try to find that in the existing dusty old document or try to start over.

S.H.: So RBG was being brilliant and wily while taking the route that Thursday and Rosdely take at the end of the play, when they argue for keeping the Constitution while Schreck argues for throwing it out and starting from the ground up. RGB was squeezing the existing document as hard as she could. Just to achieve acknowledgement of women as human beings.

I.C.: I kept thinking about Hamilton, because how can you not? And how Hamilton gave this unearned gift to the founders by endowing them with the energy and creativity and diversity of hip-hop. It’s the Obama of musicals. But What the Constitution Means to Me is what comes after, which is thinking seriously about the very structures that the founders made and how those structures both reinforce our subjection and provide paths out of it.

S.H.: The Obama of Musicals. Do they give Pulitzers for single lines? Because I think you just won one.

I.C.: And just as you’re thinking, well, if we were to write a new Constitution, could our deeply balkanized and unequal society do any better without the NRA hijacking whatever comes next, the play actually goes there!

S.H.: Yes, and that’s new! They’ve bumped up the ferocity of the show’s final debate. There’s more intense, semi-extemporized back-and-forth between Schreck and the young debaters. It’s the first time I’ve heard that—very scary, very real—NRA argument from Thursday.

I.C.: That really illustrates how the structure of the play, which is also very risky, is brilliant— because it can absorb those changes as our debate gets more layered. Which is, by the way, how RBG sees the Constitution: as a living document that can get better as we hear from more people left out of it.

S.H.: The play’s simultaneous sophistication and solidity of construction and its breathing room, its elasticity, make the thing itself a metaphor for the Constitution.

I.C.: So here’s the RBG sound-bite I would have used:

I have a different originalist view. I count myself an originalist, too, but in a quite different way….
Equality was the motivating idea, it was the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But equality was not mentioned in the original Constitution.
Why? Because the odious practice of slavery was retained. So the equality principle does not appear in the Constitution until after the Civil War, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. The genius of the United States has been its growth capacity. Recall that “We, the People,” were once white, property-owning men. That concept, “We, the People,” has become ever more embracive. Native Americans were originally not part of “We, the People,” nor were people held in human bondage, women, newcomers to our shores. Today, “We, the People,” has a marvelous diversity, wholly absent in the beginning.

S.H.: You know, I could be wrong, but if I had to place a bet, I’d say Schreck knows about this quote and it’s actually too perfect. It lets someone else sum up her thesis instead of her.

I.C.: That’s a great point — and, by the way, I think this particular iteration of RBG’s view is more passive than she intends. Because of course the inclusion happens in movements through the agitation and organization and strategy of the people left out. And through art!

S.H.: It’s also exhilarating because it really places Schreck in a different kind of legacy. She comes from a line of survivors, of “covert resistors,” but she’s also, now, part of a legacy of interpreters and humane intellectual warriors. Women on a public stage making this argument again and again as many times as it takes.

I.C.: Yes, and what the play does that RBG wouldn’t do is ground its arguments in the messy realities of women’s bodies — the terror of a gray-area sexual encounter and women who didn’t protect their daughters from bad men and abortion storytelling and everything else.

S.H.: It’s the blunt fact of systemized dehumanization that really is the show’s central punch-in-the-stomach for me. Getting audiences to recognize—in the same way, perhaps, as RBG got the court to recognize—that the thing at the root here is so horribly simple. It’s all there in Schreck’s creepy-funny story from very early in the play, about her childhood fantasy of talking down a rapist: “And then you see me for the first time as a human being and you say, ‘You’re right! Oh my god, you are a human being!’”

I.C.: My debate counterpoint is that just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. Kate Manne’s theory of misogyny is not that the misogynist doesn’t recognize humanity, but that misogyny arises from anger at other humans (women) refusing to subordinate themselves in roles that benefit them. This play is also that refusal. It gets to our intimate relationships — the people we love and how they hurt us and fail us. And—this is less in the play but hinted in Mike’s story about failing to intervene in another dude’s toxicity—how we hurt others too and benefit from the existing hierarchies. It’s fucking personal.

S.H.: Excruciatingly personal.

I.C.:  I loved that. That, and the recurring Dirty Dancing references. I am pandered to just enough.

What the Constitution Means to Me is at the Hayes Theater through June 9.

You’d better get right with your God, dear reader, because this is on all of us, or at least, all of us who took part in 2016’s seemingly never-ending Harambe meme. In news more cursed than a literal accused doll, tech billionaire Elon Musk inexplicably released “RIP Harambe,” a rap song dedicated to and about Harambe, the late, great ape-turned-internet punchline, on Saturday. Nearly three years after the Western Lowland gorilla was tragically shot and killed after a child climbed into his enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo, Musk celebrated his memory with lyrics like: “RIP Harambe/Sippin’ on some Bombay.” It should go without saying the song is extremely autotuned, officially making it the second worst thing to ever happen to poor Harambe.

Be aware there are spoilers for The OA Season 2. Anyone who watched the wild, unpredictable first season of Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's hyper-bingeable Netflix series The OA knew to expect surprises in the second season. Boy did it deliver with robots, tree internet, and a telekinetic octopus, just to name a few. But the most welcome surprise of the new season is the addition of Kingsley Ben-Adir as a new co-load, Karim Washington, a private detective with a dark past who gets tangled up in OA's (Marling) world of interdimensional travel and metaphysical …

AMC has released the first trailer for Fear the Walking Dead season 5, which shuffles its way on to AMC on June 2. It's a lengthy trailer with some legitimate reveals, but boiled down the gist seems to be that doing genuinely kind and good things in the zombie apocalypse will most likely get you killed. Sound advice! But no, the trailer also reveals the return of two familiar faces. First, Rubén Blades' Daniel Salazar, not seen since the dam explosion that closed out season 3's finale, "Sleigh Ride." And then there's Austin Amelio's Dwight …

Despite severing ties with Coachella earlier this year due a lack of dome to perform in (???), Kanye West, just like our lord and savior Jesus Christ, works in mysterious ways. The festival confirmed on social media that Ye has indeed been lured back to perform next month in the scorching Indio wastelands, but with two caveats: He’s being billed as “Kanye West’s Sunday Service” as opposed to a solo act, and he’ll only be performing during Coachella’s second weekend on Easter Sunday. (Sorry, week one-rs.) There have been reports for awhile about how West is in the process of starting his own church, in the format of religious-themed weekly concerts that favor gospel versions of his songs. As such, the festival will double as his official public debut. Allulue-Ye!

Kanye West's Sunday Service on Easter, Weekend 2 🙏

Coachella (@coachella) March 31, 2019

As Vulture extensively reported last week, the Writers Guild of America was engaged in a big dispute with the Association of Talent Agents, a.k.a. the people hired to find the writers work and negotiate their pay. The crux of the fight boils down to money, due to, among other things, the ATA being allowed to freely collect “packaging” fees from production studios and own stakes in conflicting entertainment properties. But as of today, a vote has prevented agents from doing either of those going forward. Per the Los Angeles Times, members of the WGA overwhelmingly voted for a new code of conduct that would tighten these talent agency practices. (7,882 members were in favor, with 392 voting against.) This code could dramatically change the ways Hollywood agencies operate — if the ATA and WGA don’t reach a new contract by April 6, it will be implemented the following day.

“Now that the WGA is past its vote, we look forward to getting back into the room to work through an agreement that serves the best interest of writers, respects their individual choice, and prevents unnecessary disruption to our industry,” the ATA said in a statement. “We stand ready and waiting.” Prominent writers in the industry, such as Tina Fey, Shonda Rhimes, and Oliver Stone, had previously voiced their support for this new code.

In Season 2 of the Starz series American Gods, the battle between the Old Gods, or the traditional gods of mythological roots from around the world, and the New Gods, who reflect society’s modern devotions (i.e. money, technology, media, celebrity and drugs), is really heating up, and Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) is on his own path to figuring out exactly what he believes. One of those New Gods is New Media (Kahyun Kim), who has evolved from the Media (Gillian Anderson) of Season 1 into this goddess of global content and master of manipulation who will stop at …

hero forever

rob delaney (@robdelaney) March 31, 2019

Following the band’s induction segment, Smith admitted backstage he’s still a bit skeptical about the Rock Hall’s ethos — but not so much that snubbing it was on his agenda. “I’m not quite sure about the whole thing. It’s probably a cultural thing. And I just don’t know,” he explained. “On the red carpet, they asked me was I super excited? In a funny way, I feel like we’ve been subsumed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” He added, thinking about how his younger self would’ve reacted to the honor: “There’s a part of me who’s like, ‘C’mon if you were 15, you’d be like, ‘Fuck this.’ But at the same time, there are people in it who are my heroes. So it would be really really wrong of me to be anything other than delighted to be part of this.” There’s nothing wrong with some healthy ambiance, as others could tell you.

The two-part, true-life mini-series Mrs. Wilson (airing on Masterpiece on PBS) tells the story of Alison McKelvie (Ruth Wilson) who fell in love with Major Alexander Wilson (Iain Glen) after meeting him while working a secretarial job with the Secret Intelligence Service. During the years of their marriage, Alison believed that her husband was a popular author of spy novels who was also doing real intelligence work for the war effort, only to find out that he actually had other wives and other families, making her wonder whether she ever really knew him, at all.   During this …

They did it. The madmen really did it. MGM went and made the Child's Play reboot something I might support by adding Mark Hamill as the new voice of Chucky, the homicidal doll. The man himself made the announcement over social media. "I can't wait to bring such an iconic character to life, and present him in a way you've never seen him before," the Star Wars legend said. This is a twisty situation! I'm a fan of the seven-movie Chucky franchise—which I genuinely don't think has an outright "bad" entry—and always …

If you watch a lot of Netflix films, you may have noticed the original movies they’ve been producing have been getting a lot better. This trend continues with director J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier. Loaded with some fantastic actors – Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Pedro Pascal – the action-thriller, written by Chandor and Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), centers on a group of former Special Forces operatives that decide to steal a South American drug lord’s money. while you’ve seen a ton of movies about big heists, what’s …

…

Tom Cruise is a high-ranking member of the Church of Scientology, and now, his daughter Isabella Cruise has appeared in a major recruitment email for the organization, the Daily Beast reports. Isabella, Cruise’s adopted daughter with his ex-wife Nicole Kidman, recently appeared in a promotional email for Scientology London, as she resides in the U.K. city. The email includes an image of Isabella, as well as a lengthy story of her “auditing adventure” and the phrase, “WE ALL NEED TO DO THIS.” The Daily Beast notes that the email was published Sunday on The Underground Bunker, the blog of journalist and Scientology whistle-blower Tony Ortega. The email reportedly included a link at the end for Scientologists “to find more information about getting trained as an auditor.”

Isabella reportedly wrote of her experience in an “internship” that taught her how to become an auditor. (Ortega explained to the Daily Beast, “It doesn’t mean what we use the word internship for. It’s just a practical training to be an auditor. So what she was doing was, she was being observed questioning somebody else.”) She reportedly wrote, in part:

The internship, for me, is what made me a Scientologist. I don’t just believe the tech works now. I know without any doubt that it does.

With a court appearance looming due to her alleged involvement in the college admissions bribery scandal, it’s the same as it ever was for Lori Loughlin. Captured on video by those TMZ hounds for the first time since her indictment, Loughlin was spotted leaving a yoga class in Brentwood, Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon, where she very nicely told the cameras she was unable to discuss the case. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you,” she said. “You can follow me around all day if you want, but I just can’t comment right now. But thank you for your time.” When the cameraman wished her well for her trial and family, Loughlin was even friendlier: “You have a beautiful day, thank you so much, thanks honey.”

Loughlin, along with her husband Mossimo Giannulli, are accused by prosecutors of paying bribes up to $500,000 in exchange for their two daughters to become recruits on USC’s crew team “despite the fact that they did not participate in crew.” Both of their daughters, one of whom is the very popular influencer Olivia Jade, are still enrolled at the university, although they reportedly have no intention of returning. Due to her alleged role in the scandal, Loughlin lost her two most prominent acting gigs: Her marquee star status in the Hallmark Channel’s films and television shows, and her recurring role as Aunt Becky on Netflix’s Fuller House. Loughlin will be appearing in court sometime this week, where she’s facing a felony charge of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud.

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For an elephant that can fly, Dumbo sure is having a hard time getting off the ground. Tim Burton's live-action reboot—or "reimagining" if you're nasty—officially nabbed $45 million in its debut weekend, flying below the $50 million mark that early predictions pointed to. This isn't anywhere close to a home run, especially for a Disney project. Dumbo now sits toward the bottom of the Disney live-action bracket, beating out the openings of Pete's Dragon ($21.5 million) and Alice Through the Looking Glass ($26 million), but well below the loftier numbers of …

“What?” I said when I saw actor and former half of Hiddleswift, Tom Hiddleston, say “Good morning,” to the camera (me?) and then slide a heart-shaped egg onto a breakfast salad. “What?” I said again when he presented the camera (me) the salad and said, “I finished early so I thought I’d pop back and make you breakfast.” (It is never explained what he finished early, or where he popped back from.) “What?!” I gasped when he handed me a bottle of Centrum multivitamins to go with my breakfast salad. “What???????” I shouted, when he pulled on his suit jacket, turned to me sheepishly, and said, “Probably be a bit busy for the next few weeks … But, um. I’ll make it up to you soon. I promise,” before rushing out the door. Those were just my personal reactions to Hiddleston’s new ad for Centrum multivitamins, filmed for the company’s Chinese market. Maybe you will respond differently.

What did you think? On the one hand, I guess it is kind of nice to imagine an apologetic-looking and well-dressed British hunk making you breakfast, showing concern for your health, and then disappearing for your life for several weeks. On the other hand: What?

The ad, rather brilliantly, raises far more questions than it provides answers. What is my (our) relationship to Tom Hiddleston, exactly? Is it romantic? Is he my caretaker? Why is he so worried about my vitamin intake? What was he doing in the middle of the night-slash-early morning that he “finished early”? Where is he going for several weeks? Why does he look so apologetic the whole time? Has he wronged me?

In my opinion, this scenario casts me (us) as Hiddleston’s oft-neglected mistress, who he is hiding away from his family, and who he sometimes stops in to see on his way to work. Also, maybe we have a cold and he’s worried about us, but not worried enough to see us for more than 15 minutes once a month. We deserve better.

Does this ad make me want to buy Centrum vitamins? No. Does it make me want to watch the ad 30 more times. Yes. Also, what?