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It’s Okay to Like Barry Manilow

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 09 › barry-manilow-las-vegas › 675507

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Barry Manilow is an American institution. It’s okay if you think so too: I won’t tell anyone.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Mark Leibovich on a lesson of Dianne Feinstein’s career Have Republicans learned nothing from the War on Terror? One big benefit of remote work Good luck getting into the club.

You Know the Words

Her name was Lola. She was a showgirl.

Come on. You know the rest. Everyone does.

And so did the crowd at the Barry Manilow concert I attended in Las Vegas last week, on the night that he broke Elvis Presley’s record for the most shows at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino.

Oh, I know. Roll your eyes. We’re all too cool for Manilow, the Brooklyn kid who became a schmaltz superstar, the guy whose music for almost five decades has practically been the definition of unhip, shamelessly sentimental “adult contemporary.” We smirk—yet we know every word.

Think of the scene in the 1995 movie Tommy Boy—and if you haven’t seen it, it’s better than you’d think—where Chris Farley and David Spade are on a road trip and “Superstar,” by the Carpenters, comes on the radio. Neither of them changes the station. “Talk about lame,” Spade sneers. “I can live with it if you can,” Farley says. A minute later, both of them are singing along and crying.

So, kind of like that.

But how is it possible that even those of us who aren’t dedicated fans know Manilow’s songs so well? In the days of vinyl, I never bought a Barry Manilow album. And yet, reviewing my old iTunes list, somehow, over the years, I have managed to accumulate something like 15 of his songs, and even more on Spotify. Who could have put those on there? I have every Steely Dan record; a full trove of the Beatles; classics from Squeeze, The Alan Parsons Project, the Clash, and … This One’s for You?

Barry Manilow is woven into my music collection because he is a cornerstone of the late-20th-century American soundtrack. He’s not going to appear in the canonical music histories, especially because some of his hits were written by others. His musical structures are not going to be analyzed; his lyrics are not going to be pondered. (He is, however, an aging white male, so he might pass muster with Jann Wenner, a co-founder and the former publisher of Rolling Stone.)

You may not realize it, but if you’re of a certain age—really, of almost any age beyond childhood—Manilow has likely been a part of the musical backdrop of your life. He certainly was part of mine.

I can admit this now that I’m approaching the phase of life that scientists call “geezer.” If you had told me when I was in high school, back in the 1970s, that one day I’d drop a chunk of cash on a Manilow concert, I’d have snorted in disgust. It’s not that we didn’t appreciate Barry back then, but if you were trying to be a virile young fellow, you were only supposed to tolerate him, and only around girls.

And yet, despite my ostensible indifference to him at the height of his fame, there was always some Barry in the background, especially where early romances were concerned. I had a big high-school breakup with a girl across town just as “Even Now” came out; thank heavens I was too darn manly to admit that the song put a lump in my throat (and still does). I fell for a young lady who lived far away from me during a too-brief summer stay in Boston, and of course we had a lovely “Weekend in New England,” and … well, if all this sounds corny, of course it was. To be dramatic and corny about love—about everything, really—is one of the great privileges of youth.

By the time I was heading off to college at the end of the ’70s, I was a typical mainstream-rock consumer: Boston, Bob Seger, Meat Loaf, the Cars. (I also had Partners in Crime, by Rupert Holmes. I stand by this choice.) Once in college, I immersed myself in new wave, synth-pop, the “second British invasion,” and the roster of glittery superstars and one-hit wonders created by a new thing called MTV. Clearly, I had outgrown Barry Manilow.

Except I hadn’t. I first heard “Ships” in my 20s—an Ian Hunter song popularized by Manilow—and to this day, it reminds me of my difficult relationship with my own father. “Copacabana” is always going to remind me of dancing with friends right into my 40s. In my 50s, with a first marriage behind me, I called up a nice divorcée I had been dating and told her, with a bit of warbling Manilow in my voice, that I was “ready to take a chance again.”

So was she. And that’s how both of us, years later, ended up in Las Vegas, watching an 80-year-old Barry Manilow belt out his greatest hits at the Westgate.

I am not a professional music critic, but it’s a great show. Other aging stars have had to dial down the pitch and bring in backup singers, but Manilow did some justified showing off, his voice climbing his trademark modulations. I suppose when you’ve done more than 600 shows in a row, you’ve got it down to a science, but somehow, Manilow came across as if it were one of his first appearances and he was just amazed that so many people showed up. (I didn’t realize, until seeing him in person, how intensely his fans, the self-dubbed “Fanilows,” love him. He clearly loves them back.) Most of all, it was just fun.

Sure, I’ll admit that some of Manilow’s stuff gives me hives. He is famously the composer of some well-known commercial jingles, including for State Farm and Band-Aid, so some of the songs I’ve always disliked, such as “Can’t Smile Without You,” always sound to me like an annoying commercial earworm. Manilow himself admits that Andrew Lloyd Webber hated Manilow’s version of “Memory.” So do I. (Don’t tell Sir Andrew, but I hate the song no matter who does it; Manilow’s rendition is just especially treacly.) And it might earn me the enmity of the Fanilows, but I never liked Barry’s first big hit, “Mandy.”

But Manilow and the songs he sings are critic-proof. Even Manilow gets it: During the show last week, he admitted that his music is a standard on elevators and in dentists’ offices. “As long as there are teeth,” he quipped, “my music will never die.” It’s not great art, but then, neither were the Carpenters, another beloved ’70s act. (“We’ve Only Just Begun” was written by Paul Williams for a bank commercial, by the way.) Manilow’s voice—much like Karen Carpenter’s, come to think of it—has always just been there as part of my life, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t like it back then or that I don’t like it now.

You don’t have to admit that you agree with me. I understand. Let’s just say that I can live with it if you can—and that neither of us is going to change the station.

Today’s News

Senator Dianne Feinstein died last night at the age of 90. House Republicans failed to advance a short-term spending bill to avoid a government shutdown this weekend, in a major blow to Speaker Kevin McCarthy. A state of emergency has been declared across New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley due to severe flooding.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: A new book looks at the “underground historians” of China resurfacing moments from the past that authorities would prefer be forgotten, Gal Beckerman writes. U p for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks readers whether Democrats should stick with Joe Biden, and discusses controversy over a talk about racial color blindness.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read
Courtesy of The National Zoo

Basil the Opossum Has One Eye, a Big Heart, and a Job to Do

By Elaine Godfrey

This week was a bittersweet one at the zoo. Visitors to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, with their panda-patterned hats and panda umbrellas, flooded in to say farewell to the zoo’s three giant pandas, who will soon be on their way back to China. To honor their departure, zoo staff are hosting a multiday Panda Palooza, with panda-themed movie screenings, kids’ activities, and cake for the bears. After all, the pandas have been D.C. icons since the first generation arrived more than 50 years ago. Today, zoo-adjacent restaurants sell panda pancakes and panda cake pops. The D.C. metro system sells panda tote bags, and the Washington Mystics women’s basketball team adopted Pax the Panda as its mascot.

But I went to the zoo last week to see a very different animal. I arrived at the Small Mammal House, walked past the South American prehensile-tailed porcupines and a pair of Australian brush-tailed bettongs, and found Basil the opossum asleep, his fuzzy body curled into a ball, his chest rising and falling. When Mimi Nowlin, a Small Mammal House keeper, climbed through a door into the back of his enclosure carrying a plastic tub of capelin, the creature’s eye—he has only one—fluttered open. He stood up on tiny legs. And as Nowlin held out a chunk of fish with a pair of silver tongs, Basil waddled forward, opened his toothy mouth, and chomped. A few minutes later, after the tub was empty, Basil shoved his head in and licked the sides. He had bewitched me, body and soul!

Read the full article.

One Big Benefit of Remote Work

found Sep '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2023 › 09 › women-remote-work-shecession-employment-rate › 675488

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The year was 2020, and schools abruptly closed. Kids Zoomed into kindergarten, and someone had to supervise them. Disproportionately, that task fell—because of course it did—to moms. So out of necessity, the moms quit their jobs. Thus began America’s first female recession.

Beyond the immediate trauma of job and income loss, economists worried that this “she-cession” would scar female employment for the long term. The thinking was that once women stepped back from the workforce, reentering would be difficult or impossible.

But that appears not to have happened. Recently, the she-cession largely ended—or, at least, women’s employment has seen a robust recov-her-y. (Sorry.) In fact, remote work appears to have allowed mothers of young children in particular to join the workforce in record numbers.

[Read: The professional women who are leaning out]

Nearly as many women are working now as before the coronavirus pandemic. Women’s labor-force participation was 57.9 percent in February 2020 and 57.7 percent last month. So-called prime-age women—those from 25 to 54—are working in even greater numbers: More than 77.6 percent of them are in the workforce, compared with 77 percent before the pandemic.

Perhaps more surprising is the group of women whose employment has rebounded the most: Women whose youngest child is under 5 are “powering the pack’s upward trajectory,” a recent Brookings Institution report found. In particular, mothers of young kids who are highly educated, married, and/or foreign-born are working in greater numbers today than before the pandemic. “Labor force participation among mothers with young children who have at least a bachelor’s degree has exceeded its pre-pandemic peak,” the Brookings-report authors, Lauren Bauer and Sarah Yu Wang, write.

The rebound has been so dramatic that, when I emailed Misty Heggeness, an economist at the University of Kansas, she emailed back, “What she-cession.” To be sure, women’s employment did suffer in the pandemic’s early days: Women’s jobs accounted for 55 percent of the 20.5 million jobs that were lost in April 2020, in part because service workers, who are disproportionately female, were laid off in large numbers, and in part because the closure of schools and child care meant that many women stopped working. The pandemic quickly wiped out nearly a decade’s worth of progress in women’s employment.

Now, though, we’re coming off of “hot mom summer,” as Heggeness put it—by which she means high levels of female employment, of course. Several things seem to be driving women back to the workforce. Inflation is high, and student-loan payments are restarting, so many families simply need more money to cover expenses. The labor market is tight, so many women can find jobs with relative ease and negotiate for terms that feel favorable. Child care has finally mostly reopened, so women who want to work are no longer stuck without someone to watch their kids. Also, the pandemic acted as a stress test of sorts, proving to families that they can do hard things. The thinking among many women, as Brookings’s Bauer told me, was something like “the pandemic sucked, but now I can get through anything.”

Another big factor seems to be remote work. Bauer and Wang point out that mothers of young children who have a bachelor’s degree or higher are the most likely group of workers to be teleworking, and married mothers of young kids are among the likeliest groups to be teleworking. These are also the groups that have made the biggest gains in labor-force participation since the pandemic: More than 40 percent of college-educated mothers with young kids teleworked at least one day a week in the early part of this year. “That is so high,” Bauer told me.

Several other data points prop up the idea that remote work is helping women rejoin the workforce. Women’s employment rebounded especially quickly in New England and California, where many jobs can be performed remotely, compared with the Midwest, where in-person manufacturing work is more common. Nearly a dozen women interviewed by The Washington Post recently said that a combination of rising prices and workplace flexibility had prompted them to get jobs.

Across Europe and America, work-from-home days have quadrupled since the start of the pandemic, and 35 percent of Americans who can do their jobs from home now work remotely all the time, compared with 7 percent before the pandemic. Last year, women were more likely to work remotely than men were, and women are generally more interested in remote jobs than men are. Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, told me that surveys the job site conducted show that 54 percent of men and 69 percent of women are interested in remote jobs. “Work-from-home is by far the largest change to have happened in the labor market,” Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who studies remote work, told me.

About 90 percent of the candidate pool at the staffing firm FlexProfessionals is female, says Maura Connelly, the company’s senior recruiting manager. Their preference for remote work is overwhelming: Though some are interested in hybrid work, “nobody I talked to wants to be on site five days a week,” she told me. “Nobody.” The candidates say they want to be able to meet the bus when their kid gets home, or drive the occasional carpool. Connelly says many women might have returned to work recently because the pandemic showed them that remote work is out there—that it exists, and that they could get those jobs.

Though families must still pay for child care when parents work remotely, remote work allows them to pay for less child care. Instead of leaving the house for your commute at 7 and returning at 6, you’re rolling to your home office at 8 and “returning” from it at 5. That’s two fewer hours of babysitter coverage every day.

Kerri Sterowski’s son was just a few months old when the pandemic began, and working full-time didn’t feel safe or practical for her. Instead, she helped watch a friend’s child and did some part-time work remotely. She returned to full-time work in August 2022 because she lives in expensive Northern Virginia and her family was feeling financially pinched. Still, she turned down jobs that would have required her to be in the office most of the time, because she wanted to be around in case her son was sick or had a half-day at school. “If I were to have a job in person, then I would be missing out on a lot of my son’s life,” she told me.

Remote work might also have encouraged new mothers who would otherwise have left the workforce to instead stay in. Rather than see themselves trapped in an office all day, they might have figured out that they can breastfeed around Zoom meetings and knock out memos at naptime. After Mozi Nolte’s daughter was born in October 2020, she and her husband spent two years taking care of her at home, without paid child care, while working full-time. She was worried about the infection risk, and she also wanted to save $2,000 a month on day care. It was hard: Her bosses were very understanding, but there were times when she was on a conference call, changing a diaper, and pumping at the same time.

Now Nolte has child care, but she would never consider a job that requires five days a week in the office. She goes in two days a week, but it takes her an hour and a half each way to get to her office. Doing that every day, “it’s three hours when I could pick my daughter up and do laundry, play with her. The quality of life is just not worth it,” she says.

[Read: The other work remote workers get done]

What’s less clear is whether remote work will continue to boom, and women’s employment along with it. There are currently not as many remote-job openings as there are job seekers who want to work remotely. But Bloom believes the work-from-home trend is shaped like a Nike swoosh: There was an initial post-pandemic drop as even Zoom called some of its employees back to the office a few days a week, and now we’re in the fat, flat part of the swoosh. But soon, he thinks, the trend will be on its way up again as technology improves. Beyond videoconferencing, he envisions a future of virtual reality and holograms that would allow you to interact with colleagues in 3-D. What’s more, newer companies that have always been remote will expand and inspire others, he believes, so the norm may shift away from big offices.

Working remotely has some downsides: A spread-out workforce makes mentorship more difficult, so if women are flocking to remote work, they might lose out on valuable networking and learning opportunities. And it’s not clear that remote work is sufficient to keep women in the labor force. Pandemic-era child-care funding is set to end this month, which might cause some day-care centers to close and some parents to step back from work again. You might not need as much child care when you work remotely, but you do need some.

If the remote-work trend continues, though, and women’s employment stays high, it might mean that in the future, women will face less of a “motherhood penalty” for taking time off when their children are born. “If there are more women who can stay on the track that they were [on] prior to having a baby, or closer to an ideal track,” Bauer said, “then that sets their whole family and her on a different trajectory in terms of her participation, earnings, and career ladder.” Far from a she-cession, we might see a future of prosp-her-ity.