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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.

The GOP’s New Obsession With Attacking Mexico

found Sep '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2023 › 09 › us-military-intervention-mexico-fentanyl-crisis › 675487

This story seems to be about:

Today’s Republican Party has made a turn toward foreign-policy isolationism or, less pejoratively, realism and restraint. After Donald Trump shattered the GOP’s omertà about the disastrous Iraq War—a “big fat mistake,” he called it in 2016—Republicans quickly learned to decry “endless wars” and, often quite sensibly, argue for shrinking America’s global military footprint. During the 2020 election, Trump’s supporters touted his refusal to start any new wars while in office (though he got very close).

When it comes to America’s southern neighbor, however, Republicans have grown more hawkish. Party leaders, including members of Congress and presidential candidates, now regularly advocate for direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico to attack drug cartels manufacturing the deadly fentanyl flooding into America. “Building the wall is not enough,” Vivek Ramaswamy said at Wednesday night’s GOP-primary debate. The best defense is now a good offense.

The strategic stupidity of any potential U.S. military intervention in Mexico is difficult to overstate. The calls for such an intervention are also deeply ironic: Even as Trump’s epigones inveigh against the possibility of an “endless war” in Ukraine similar to those in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are reprising the arguments, tools, and rhetoric of the global War on Terror that many of them belatedly turned against.

The War on Terror was a disaster, devastating countries and leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions of refugees adrift. A botched U.S. attack on Mexico, America’s largest trading partner, could create a failed state on the 2,000-mile U.S. southern border, an outcome that would be far, far worse for the United States. The toll of the U.S. fentanyl epidemic is staggering: More than 100,000 Americans died of an overdose in 2022. But a unilateral military “solution” holds the potential, if not the near certainty, of causing far more death and destruction than any drug.

[Read: ‘Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber’]

Trump, not surprisingly, sowed the seeds for this new jingoism. After launching his presidential campaign in 2015 with an infamous verbal attack against Mexican migrants, in office he mused about shooting missiles at Mexican fentanyl labs, according to the memoir of his then–defense secretary, Mark Esper. “No one would know it was us,” Trump assured a stunned Esper.

Fast-forward to last month, at this election cycle’s first Republican presidential debate: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pledged to launch Special Operations raids into Mexico on his first day in office. His rivals for the nomination have issued similar promises to wage war against the cartels—in the form of drone strikes, blockades, and military raids. Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley breezily promised at this week’s debate to “send in our Special Operations” to Mexico. Republican senators and representatives have introduced bills to classify fentanyl as a chemical weapon, designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and authorize the use of military force in Mexico.

If you’re inclined to dismiss this saber-rattling as primary-season bluster, don’t be so sure. Pundits and voters seem to be falling in line behind the politicians. The conservative commentator Ben Domenech recently said that he is “close to becoming a single issue voter” on the issue of attacking Mexico (he’s for it). A recent poll found that as many GOP voters consider Mexico an enemy of the United States as an ally, a marked shift from just a few years ago.

The parallels to the War on Terror aren’t exact—no prominent Republican has advocated a full-scale invasion and occupation of Mexico, at least not yet. But the rhetorical similarities are hard to ignore. America’s tragic interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began with politicians inflating threats; seeking to militarize complex international problems; and promising clean, swift, decisive military victories. The language regarding Mexico today is eerily similar. The Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld recently assured his viewers that a unilateral attack on Mexico would “be over in minutes.” The labeling of Mexican cartel leaders as “terrorists” sidelines even the most basic analysis of the costs and consequences of a potential war. Just like in Iraq, a war on Mexico would be a war of choice, with American moral culpability for whatever furies it unleashes.

[David Frum: The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous]

It’s worth remembering that the war in Afghanistan included a failed counter-drug campaign. In my time there as a Marine lieutenant a decade ago, U.S. troops engaged in erratic, futile attempts to interrupt opium-poppy cultivation. Partnered with Afghanistan’s version of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, my company wasted days fruitlessly searching motorcycles at checkpoints on dusty village trails, finding no drugs. On one occasion, I was ordered to confiscate farmers’ wooden poppy scorers, simple finger-mounted tools used to harvest opium; at a cost of maybe a penny a piece, they were immediately replaced. U.S. planes bombed 200 Afghan drug labs during the occupation. Yet opium production skyrocketed—Afghanistan produced more than 80 percent of the global supply of the drug in the last years of the war.

Mexico would be an even riskier proposition. Start with the obvious: proximity. The direct costs to the United States of the War on Terror were enormous: $8 trillion squandered, more than 7,000 U.S. troops killed in action, tens of thousands wounded. Across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians, were killed in counterinsurgency campaigns and civil wars. Governments were toppled, leaving behind anarchy and nearly 40 million refugees, who have further destabilized the region and its neighbors. But America itself was shielded from the worst effects of its hubris and militarism. Flanked by oceans and friendly neighbors, Americans didn’t have to worry about the conflicts coming home.

Any unilateral U.S. military action in Mexico would risk the collapse of a neighboring country of 130 million people. It could unleash civil war and a humanitarian crisis that would dwarf those in Iraq and Syria. This carnage would not be confined to Mexico. Some of America’s largest and wealthiest cities are a few hours’ drive from the border; nearly 40 million Americans are of Mexican descent, many of them with family members still living across the border. The cartels would not have far to travel to launch retaliatory terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. And the refugee crisis that many Republicans consider the preeminent national-security crisis would worsen.

The United States would also lack one major War on Terror asset: partners. A host of NATO and non-NATO partners contributed troops and resources to the fighting in Afghanistan; none would be willing to participate in an American attack on Mexico. Despite government corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan and dependency on U.S. weapons and technology, soldiers from those countries did the lion’s share of the fighting and dying in the long struggle against insurgents there. But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has publicly rejected U.S. military intervention. One can easily imagine uniformed Mexican soldiers and policemen firing on American troops and aiding the cartels. If the U.S. were to attempt to build competing Mexican militias or proxies in response, it would further fracture the Mexican state.

[David Frum: The autocrat next door]

If there is an overriding lesson of America’s post-9/11 conflicts, it is that war unleashes a host of unintended consequences. A war of choice seldom respects the goals or limits set by its architects. External military intervention in a country fighting an insurgency—ideological, criminal, or otherwise—is particularly fraught. Foreign troops are far more likely to be an accelerant of violence than a dampener. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, cartel members would be likely to hide out among civilians, infiltrate Mexico’s already compromised security services, and find havens in bordering countries (the United States included). American forces would in turn be susceptible to corruption and infiltration, especially if an intervention were to drag on longer than expected.

Lacking a definable end state, a counter-cartel campaign would likely devolve into a manhunt for a few narco kingpins. Such an operation would be liable to create folk heroes out of brutal drug traffickers, one accidental wedding-party drone strike at a time. Some of the worst men on Earth could become global symbols of resistance to U.S. imperialism, especially if they are able to evade U.S. forces for a decade, as Osama bin Laden did. A U.S.-Mexico conflict would then become an opportunity for other American adversaries. Russia and China would undoubtedly be happy to arm the cartel insurgents, perhaps even overtly. Mexico already hosts more members of the GRU—Russia’s military intelligence—than any other foreign country. American arms and assistance are taking Russian lives in Ukraine, as they did in Afghanistan a generation before. The Russians would welcome an easy opportunity to return the favor.

Since Trump’s ascent in 2016, the most bellicose neoconservatives in the GOP have been ousted, the Republican Party’s views on Russia and China have become muddled, and the Iraq War is now widely accepted as a disaster. But Republicans’ enthusiasm for launching a war on Mexico reveals the shallowness of their conversion. The rise of fentanyl is mostly a demand-side problem. Whatever Republican leaders say about “endless wars,” they’re once again pulling out the military hammer first, then looking for nails.

South China Sea: Philippines' Marcos defends removing Chinese barrier

found Sep '23 BBC News

www.bbc.co.uk › news › world-asia-66956776

This story seems to be about:

President says Manila's defence of its territory does not mean it is 'looking for trouble'

Should Russia's talks with the Taliban be a cause for concern for the West?

found Sep '23 Euronews

www.euronews.com › 2023 › 09 › 29 › should-russias-talks-with-the-taliban-be-a-cause-for-concern-for-the-west

This story seems to be about:

Russia is hosting a Taliban delegation for talks on issues of ‘counter-terrorism’ and ‘narcotics’ on Friday, 29 September. China, Pakistan and Uzbekistan are among the powers heading to meet representatives in Kazan, south west Russia.

Evergrande: Anxious Chinese home buyers reel from crisis

found Sep '23 BBC News

www.bbc.co.uk › news › world-asia-china-66956769

This story seems to be about:

As China's housing crisis grows, so have fears that dreams of home ownership have been bulldozed.

Photos of the Week: Andean Bear, Burial Chamber, Secret Heart

found Sep '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › photo › 2023 › 09 › photos-of-the-week-andean-bear-burial-chamber-secret-heart › 675496

This story seems to be about:

Fencing at the 2022 Asian Games in China, flooding in South Africa, the felling of a famous tree in England, an active volcano in Chile, a heat wave in Brazil, drag racing in England, the the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in India, a 150-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton up for auction in Paris, and much more