John Hargreaves has been charged following the incident in the US state of New Jersey.

The ongoing Hollywood strikes may have dimmed the usual glitz that comes with the fall festival circuit—the star-studded red carpets, the applause-filled Q&As, the endless photo shoots—but this year’s Toronto International Film Festival still featured hundreds of new titles from established auteurs and first-time filmmakers alike. Earlier this month, my colleague David Sims and I caught as many of TIFF’s offerings as we could, leaving with plenty of movies to discuss and recommend. Below, David and I have rounded up our favorites from this year’s festival, most of which will be in theaters or streaming before long. — Shirley Li

TIFF

The Royal Hotel (in theaters October 6)

Kitty Green quickly proved herself a master of the slow-burn nightmare with 2019’s The Assistant, a film starring Julia Garner as a young woman forced to tolerate her unseen studio-executive boss’s sexual indiscretions. In her follow-up, Green casts Garner as a young woman backpacking across Australia with her best friend (Jessica Henwick). When the pair take bartending jobs in a male-dominated remote mining town to make some cash, they dress for work, not for play—no skirts, no heels—and even claim to be Canadian to ward off judgment about their American backgrounds. But the line between a gaze and a leer can be terribly thin—and The Royal Hotel shows in taut, tense sequences how being accommodating only works so well as a defense mechanism.  — Shirley Li

Anatomy of a Fall (in theaters October 13)

The winner of this year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s French legal drama is amassing buzz as one of the fall’s clear art-house breakouts. The plot is straight out of a ’90s paperback best seller—a novelist (played by Sandra Hüller) is arrested for murder after her husband dies in a fall at their mountain home, and must fight to prove her innocence during a long and complex trial. But Triet’s film delves beyond the (thrillingly showy) French legal system and into the intricacies of a troubled marriage, asking the audience to consider whether every subtle sign of decay in a partnership should amount to motive. The film works largely because Hüller, a German actress probably best known for her role in Toni Erdmann, gives an extraordinary performance already being tipped for Oscar success.  — David Sims

The Burial (in select theaters October 6, streaming on Prime Video October 13)

A legal drama about a man trying to save his business from a greedy investor may sound dreadfully serious, but this Maggie Betts–directed film—based on a 1999 New Yorker story—is a crowd-pleaser, full of well-drawn characters, show-stopping monologues, and a wonderfully energetic performance from Jamie Foxx. The actor stars as the boisterous personal-injury lawyer Willie E. Gary, who improbably joins forces with Jerry O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), his first white client—a funeral-home director being bankrupted by a heartless corporation taking advantage of low-income communities. But The Burial isn’t just a skin-deep look at an unusual partnership; it also observes the way a courtroom distills people into tidy narratives according to attributes such as their race, class, and gender, producing a microcosm of society’s most basic impulses.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Pigeon Tunnel (streaming on Apple TV+ October 20)

The documentarian Errol Morris is famous for using the “Interrotron,” a device for interviewing his subjects that allows him to look them in the eye as he explores their life stories. He’s used it on notably controversial figures such as Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, and Steve Bannon, but in The Pigeon Tunnel he tries to capture the essence of a much more celebrated personality: John le Carré. In what was le Carré’s final major interview before his death in 2020, the British novelist and former spy talks Morris through his childhood, his complicated relationship with his con-man father, and his life in the world of clandestine intelligence. Through it all is the tension of whether one can truly know le Carré, a man who first made a living hiding his true self, and then another living as a writer delving into it. Morris captures that paradox, and the author’s effortless intelligence and charm, quite perfectly.  — D.S.

The Holdovers (in theaters October 27)

After the muddled (if fascinating) Downsizing, Alexander Payne has tapped a familiar face for this return to form: a curmudgeonly Paul Giamatti, who last worked with the director on his Oscar-winning hit Sideways. In that film, Giamatti was a wine snob; here, he’s a classical-history teacher at a stuffy Massachusetts boarding school in the early ’70s, pressed into service as a caretaker for the few kids staying over during Christmas break. The Holdovers kicks off with all the grumpy cynicism of Payne’s past classics such as Election and Nebraska, but there’s a touch of holiday sweetness as it explores the deepening bonds between Giamatti’s character, a rebellious young student (Dominic Sessa), and a chef in mourning (the tremendous Da’Vine Joy Randolph).  — D.S.

Nyad (in theaters October 20, streaming on Netflix November 3)

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are well regarded as documentary filmmakers, with work such as the Oscar-winning Free Solo and the Thai cave-diver film The Rescue earning great acclaim. Nyad is their first narrative feature, but it’s a close cousin of their prior films, as it also delves into the strange passions and the involved process behind an extreme athlete—in this case, the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (played by Annette Bening). An accomplished athlete in the ’70s, Nyad resurfaced in the 2010s and declared that she would attempt a never-before-done free swim from Cuba to Florida. The film is a fairly standard triumph-over-adversity true story powered by strong work from Bening and Jodie Foster as her coach, Bonnie Stoll, but the exacting technical details of Nyad’s process are its most fascinating elements.  — D.S.

TIFF

Dream Scenario (in theaters November 10)

The premise of Kristoffer Borgli’s dark and surreal dramedy is a zany bit of speculation: What if, out of nowhere, people around the world started dreaming of the same person, someone they’d never met before? That starts happening with milquetoast professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage), who begins popping up in people’s subconscious for no discernible reason, and becomes a strange celebrity. Cage, balding and sporting a bushy beard, plays the character’s growing egotism and mania wonderfully as the script spins into ridiculous directions; eventually, Borgli loses some grip on whatever metaphor for fame he’s exploring, but there are some hilarious (and terrifying) swerves along the way.  — D.S.

Fallen Leaves (in theaters November 17)

The most consistent filmmaker working today might be Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish master who produces a soft-spoken and mordant comedy every six years or so and never, ever misses the mark. Even by his high standards, Fallen Leaves—an 81-minute yarn about a halting but tender romance between a lonely supermarket stocker (Alma Pöysti) and an alcoholic contractor (Jussi Vatanen)—is close to perfect. As both scratch out fairly meager existences in Helsinki’s working class, they’re troubled by news of Russia’s nearby war against Ukraine and besieged by uncaring bosses. But Kaurismäki delights in depicting how they forge a connection, lobbing pithy line after pithy line along the way.  — D.S.

Rustin (in theaters November 3, streaming on Netflix November 17)

Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, Rustin is a biographical drama about the civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo), an architect of 1963’s March on Washington who worked closely with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph. George C. Wolfe’s film stresses Rustin’s status as a brilliant outsider, often ostracized even within the civil-rights community for his homosexuality and his past membership in the Communist Party. Domingo’s outsize performance gets across how he survived and succeeded through charm and sheer force of will. The film is most interesting when it examines the staging of the march, and the internecine politicking that went on behind the scenes, even as the script (co-written by Milk’s Dustin Lance Black) often veers into more typical biopic formula.  — D.S.

American Fiction (in select theaters November 3, everywhere November 17)

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (a witty, wondrous Jeffrey Wright) is an English professor and an author, and, yes, he’s Black—but must all of his work be classified as Black writing? Frustrated that only stereotypical characters and narratives find success with mainstream readers, Monk comes up with an obnoxious parody of such novels, only for his work to become a hit. Based on Percival Everett’s book Erasure, the Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut dissects Monk’s psyche with a surprisingly light touch, turning his grift into an intimate character study that explores his love life and family (including siblings played by Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown). Smart, meaty, and funnier than expected for a film juggling weighty relationship drama with the philosophical conundrums running through Monk’s head, American Fiction is a dramedy with a refreshing point of view.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Boy and the Heron (in theaters December 8)

The masterful Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has been supposedly approaching retirement since the mid-’90s; each of his films from Princess Mononoke on has been rumored to be his swan song. With The Boy and the Heron (originally titled How Do You Live?), the 82-year-old has made a transfixing statement on the perils of guarding one’s legacy too closely, and the necessity of letting younger generations conjure up new worlds on their own. The Boy and the Heron begins as a direct enough fable, following a 12-year-old who loses his mother during World War II and is then moved to the countryside when his father marries his mother’s younger sister. There, he encounters a mythical bird-creature and a forbidden tower containing a dimension beyond our own, but that’s merely scratching the surface of the wild dream logic that unfolds. The Boy and the Heron may or may not be Miyazaki’s final movie, but either way, it’s a staggering addition to one of animation’s most totemic filmographies.  — D.S.

The Zone of Interest (in select theaters December 8)

Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, which tracks a family living just outside Auschwitz, casts an unsettling chill that’s hard to shake. All day, every day, the concentration camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss (a real-life figure, played by Christian Friedel); his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller); and their children can hear screaming, but they go about their lives with blissful thoughtlessness. Based loosely on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, Glazer’s film would be a completely nauseating watch if not for the way the writer-director keeps the audience at a distance. He isn’t trying to humanize the Nazis or retell the terrors of Auschwitz; instead, he delivers a mesmerizing, almost anthropological study of how evil can manifest in mundane ways, through ordinary people.  — S.L.

La Chimera (TBA)

There’s nothing quite like La Chimera—which is typical of the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who is fond of adding dashes of magic to tales that explore her country’s past. On paper, her latest effort sounds absurd beyond belief: It’s a film about a vaudevillian Italian troupe that robs ancient Etruscan tombs by using a vaguely mystic human dowsing rod (played by Josh O’Connor). The movie uses O’Connor, known for his stuffy work as Prince Charles in The Crown, wonderfully against type as an oddball in a group of outsiders who’s mysteriously connected to ancient times. In case that wasn’t enough, the film also features Isabella Rossellini as a swoony Italian grandma. — D.S.

Origin (TBA)

Ava DuVernay’s first film since 2018’s bizarre adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time attempts something even more ambitious, dramatizing Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents—a work of cultural anthropology that examines America’s history of racism through historical systems of caste, such as Nazi Germany and India’s stratified society. Origin plumbs all of that, but it also retells Wilkerson’s personal narrative, with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor playing the author as she faces personal tragedy and professional skepticism on the way to publishing her book. The overall result is possibly too muddled to function as a successful piece of dramatic storytelling, but too much inventiveness is on display to easily dismiss.  — D.S.

TIFF

Woman of the Hour (TBA)

In a festival packed with directorial debuts from actors turned filmmakers, Anna Kendrick’s effort stands out for its gutsiness. Though the movie tells the story of the real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala (played by Daniel Zovatto), Woman of the Hour is not just a true-crime drama. It’s a study of how violence can loom at the margins of courtship—and how dangerous rejecting advances can be for women. Kendrick juxtaposes scenes of Alcala killing victims throughout the 1970s with sequences from the day he infamously appeared on the blind-matchmaking game show The Dating Game and wooed the contestant Cheryl Bradshaw (played by Kendrick herself). With so much screen time devoted to Alcala baiting, stalking, and hurting women, the movie can be punishing to watch; I certainly struggled to sit through my screening. Still, Kendrick proves herself a skillful director, with a knack for building suspense.  — S.L.

Hit Man (TBA)

Leave it to Richard Linklater, the director behind Dazed and Confused and the Before trilogy, to pull off what’s perhaps TIFF’s most tonally versatile film. Hit Man tells the story of Gary Johnson (played by Glen Powell), a bland college professor who works part-time as a tech consultant for the local police department. When the precinct’s usual assassin impersonator—yes, such a thing exists—is sidelined during a sting, Gary steps in and proves himself a surprisingly dashing replacement. The movie is based on a Texas Monthly article, but Linklater has taken plenty of welcome liberties with the material, turning Gary’s tale into a delightfully mischievous romance-noir about the appeal of pretending to be someone else, if only for a while. The police scenes are just light enough to be funny, the screwball sequences are just dark enough to keep you on the edge of your seat, and Powell, along with a playful Adria Arjona as one of Gary’s marks, is obviously elated to be handling such twisty material.  — S.L.

Sing Sing (TBA)

Few creative outlets exist for people in prison, but the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program isn’t just an extracurricular activity; for some inmates, it’s a lifeline. In Sing Sing, Colman Domingo delivers a soulful—but, crucially, never showy—performance as Divine G, a real-life former program participant who was incarcerated for murder but has long maintained his innocence. He’s surrounded by a skilled cast of actors, most of whom are real alumni of the RTA; together, they engage in acting exercises and brainstorms as they build their next show. The film can sometimes feel like an earnest documentary as a result, but Bryce Dessner’s score and Domingo’s deeply felt work help anchor Sing Sing as a lyrical depiction of a unique way of life.  — S.L.

Sorry/Not Sorry (TBA)

How should we treat public figures who have abused their power? Sorry/Not Sorry, a documentary about the comedian Louis C.K.—who, in 2017, admitted to a pattern of sexual misconduct toward female comics—and his subsequent return to the stage never fully answers this question. But the film, directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Mones and produced by The New York Times, considers this through interviews with female comics who spoke up about C.K., as well as male colleagues who wrestle with how they responded to C.K.’s “open secret.” Though a movie with C.K.’s involvement would probably have been more illuminating, Sorry/Not Sorry remains a fascinating documentary as it breaks down, scene by scene, how easily misbehavior can be twisted into a punch line.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Beast (TBA)

One of the oddest and most compelling films I encountered at TIFF this year was Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, the rare drama that actually bears comparison to surreal masterworks such as David Lynch’s Inland Empire. A three-part story that zaps from our present into the distant future and back to the turn of the 20th century, each strand of The Beast centers on a woman (Léa Seydoux) and a man (George MacKay) having a chance encounter and sensing some distant familiarity. Bonello uses these encounters to pose questions about love, desire, and more terrifying masculine urges, depicting moments of pure tenderness and tense, unsettling threat.  — D.S.

Backspot (TBA)

The phrase cheerleading movie probably brings to mind montages of showstopping flips, energetic routines, and bitter rivalries between squads. But Backspot is not Bring It On. Rather, it’s an intense study of a perfectionist athlete whose enthusiasm and drive can work against her. It’s a film about mental gymnastics, in other words. Directed by the DJ turned first-time filmmaker D. W. Waterson, the story stars Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs as Riley, a teenager whose joy and anxiety are wrapped up in her extracurricular activity; she’s dating her fellow cheerleader, Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo), and she sees her steely new coach, Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood), as akin to a demigod. Competition, then, both excites and scares her, and the film’s greatest strength is how it conveys that turmoil. Riley’s entire identity is cheerleading. Being so passionate about something is beautiful, the film posits, and brutal too.  — S.L.

Concrete Utopia (TBA)

An earthquake destroys Seoul at the beginning of Concrete Utopia, but it would be a mistake to call South Korea’s Oscar entry a mere disaster movie. The film, directed and co-written by Um Tae-hwa, blends spectacle with social satire as it follows the people inside the only apartment complex still standing. What begins as a sanctuary for the city’s survivors rapidly turns into hell on Earth: Those who lived in the structure before the apocalypse clash with the desperate newcomers, corruption plagues their attempts to self-govern, and supplies rapidly dwindle as winter stretches on. Concrete Utopia traces familiar themes of class warfare—think Snowpiercer in a building—but sets itself apart with impressive production design, inventive set pieces, and an ensemble of memorable characters, including Yeong-tak (played by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun), a man whose unyielding vigilance when it comes to protecting his home becomes calamitous.  — S.L.

His Three Daughters (TBA)

Indie filmmaking is robust with stories about dysfunctional families, but His Three Daughters does more than just mine difficult dynamics for tension. Starring Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as three stepsisters reuniting to care for their ailing father, the film is at once bitingly funny and disarmingly honest about how siblings treat one another under pressure. The writer-director Azazel Jacobs’s assured, dialogue-heavy script keeps the melodrama to a minimum, focusing instead on the ways in which each sister reacts to her situation. Moving but never maudlin, His Three Daughters is a film packed with delicate moments and realistic conversations, bolstered by a uniformly excellent cast.  — S.L.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers, “Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago? Why?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Judith sees distrust as a sign of cultural maturity:

I believe that the widespread loss of trust in institutions is a combination of two equally strong forces. The first is our culture’s maturing beyond facile acceptance of what we are told by those institutions into a more confident posture of questioning what we are told based on what we know and believe.

The second force is the universal availability of information about every topic of interest in every country and every culture on Earth.

The second force feeds the first, and vice versa, leading to a noisier and more active populace.

The more naive an individual, the more trusting; the more knowledgeable the individual, the less trusting. As our society has matured over time, and as knowledge has spread exponentially, as a culture we have come to understand that institutional malfeasance is nothing new.

The mature within a society will naturally question institutional dominance and more responsibly and openly hold those institutions to higher standards of trustworthiness. Today more people are more knowledgeable than in all of history, and institutions have not quite caught up to that reality.

M. argues that “it is not the institutions that people distrust, rather it is the individuals who represent, work for, or act in the name of those institutions who have lost the public’s respect and trust.”

For example:

So many of our leaders across business, politics, religion, and social organizations see a leadership role as a way to enrich themselves or their families in the short term, regardless of the long-term cost to their organizations. It is much more difficult than in the past to do so without getting caught. Additionally, incremental changes that bring long-term gain are no longer considered success. We have to get everything we want immediately or we have failed, as reflected in short-term-ism for quarterly results in business and passing legislation only when you hold the White House and both houses of Congress in politics. That results in people cutting corners or working in the gray to get theirs while they can––and a decrease of trust in the institution, which is an innocent victim.

NK is “unbearably horrified with what has been happening to academia,” and explains:

I call it social-justice fundamentalism, or SJF. The pursuit of truth has been replaced with the pursuit of one faction’s preferred power dynamics. While this tendency has metastasized throughout our society (an example being that if I signed this email using my full name, I would undoubtedly lose my high-paying job due to the “harm” I cause to my peers with it), the battle over it should start and end in academia. The experiment done by Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay where they managed to get bogus papers into prestigious journals, combined with the DEI litmus tests that weed out social-justice fundamentalism’s critics, mean that academia cannot be trusted.

Gary perceives double standards and urges procedural fairness:

Americans love the idea of fairness. Institutions lose trust because they are viewed as playing favorites. Institutions that want trust from the nation need to rise above the political fray and latest social-media frenzy. Well-publicized standards and transparent execution of processes are essential to trust. We seem to be lacking all of that currently.

Errol is disappointed in public-health officials and media outlets:

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William says the question doesn’t quite apply to him:

I guess I don’t really think about trust; I try to analyze a shifting web of facts, policies, and motivations and try to understand why things happen. Then if something happens that I don’t like, I don’t necessarily feel betrayed but more resigned.

Peggy shares her professional background:

I have trust in institutions because I was once part of the most trusted: the military. I spent 35 years in the Army. I understand the training and the values that we embrace when taking on the mission. These things inculcate trust. The idea that suddenly people aren’t to be trusted is a fantasy––a willful, petulant, childish fantasy wrought by people who have everything. Journalists go to J-school to learn standards and their editors, supervisors, and fact-checkers hold them to account. Judges and lawyers go to law school where the Constitution, the laws, and their peers hold them to account. Officers and noncommissioned officers go to military-leadership schools designed to maintain readiness, and that includes diversity training because experts in readiness say it’s important to understand each other if we are to fight and win wars. And then our Uniform Code of Military Justice holds us to account.

The broadcast media, the internet, social media, and other permission structures have led the masses to distrust institutions. Our billion-dollar outrage machines pander to intellectual toddlers in order to make money. What don’t those things have? Standards and accountability.

WJM has similar frustrations:

Yes, I have a lot of trust in governmental institutions. What I don’t trust is the people that make it their mission to erode this trust by weakening those institutions to make them seem ineffective and counter to popular will, thus making a self-fulfilling prophecy of their decline.

Andrew is pessimistic about the future:

My faith in American institutions has never been lower. Like the printing press before, the communication revolution of social media has continued to chip away at the old paradigm where information was disseminated from leaders down to their constituents. Now misinformation spreads like wildfire across platforms and leaders are forced to indulge the passions of the mob. The printing press ignited a century of warfare in Europe and I fear that social media will continue to have a similar destabilizing effect in our current era.

Gordon, however, is optimistic:

I have about the same trust in our institutions as 10 years ago. Our nation has gone through a great test these past six years. And it has withstood all challenges. Today our nation better realizes that the voters are the ones in charge. Also, due to those recent challenges, office holders, bureaucrats, and people serving in the military are all more aware of the oaths they took: to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I think by the end of next year, after the election results are in, this nation will be more unified and its positive feelings about institutions will be even stronger.

RS felt cynical about institutions for a long time, but two things changed that:

First, air travel. It’s gotten safer and safer year after year. When you reflect on how incredible air travel is—from planes to flight systems to air-traffic control to flight administration to FAA safety regulations—it’s an astonishing achievement. And if you think along these lines, you realize that a lot of institutions work really well.

Next: I’ve come to realize that so much of the mistrust we experience is because it serves political interests to make us feel bad all the time. Rage and fear fuel mistrust, which is used to propel us into action. Once you realize that, the mistrust begins to fade and you realize that a lot of things do in fact work, especially on the ground level. Criminals get caught. Doctors aren’t always beholden to drug companies. Deciding NOT to get manipulated into feeling bad helps one to see the things that do work, which are a lot.

John is down on SCOTUS:

I’m in my mid-70s and have experienced quite a number of events that could lead one to mistrust our national institutions, but until Mitch McConnell denied President Obama the ability to put a Supreme Court nominee before the full Senate for an up-or-down vote, I had felt that our federal justice system was trustworthy. During their confirmation hearings, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh, when asked about Roe v. Wade, answered [ambiguously] and then when the first opportunity came to overturn it, they did. I will not trust there will be a good-faith constitutional ruling from this Court as long as those three and Alito and Thomas (who should be impeached) are on the bench. I expect Congress and the president to be political, not the Supreme Court.

Ben is down on business:

I’ve become a lot more politically engaged in the last eight years, and I’m much more apt to be suspicious of American institutions based on how they act, rather than just trusting or distrusting them writ large. For example, I tend to get frustrated with “mainstream” news outlets for the way they cover the news sometimes, but that’s quite a bit different than mistrusting say, Fox News, when they were cheerfully spreading 2020 election misinformation. I tend to view government agencies like the DOD, FBI, and CIA favorably regardless of who sits in the White House, because they’re staffed by career professionals. But when they misbehave, I feel they should be held to account. By contrast, the DHS, which is a post-9/11 creature, has not in my view maintained the same standards of lawfulness and professionalism as its peer agencies.

But if there’s one American institution whose trust has “bottomed out” with me, that would be our business community. The movie Erin Brockovich came out 23 years ago, detailing a story about a California utility company that willfully poisoned a huge number of innocent Americans. In the decades that followed, it seems to me that American corporations have become more unaccountable, not less. Oil companies lying about climate change, tech companies lying about privacy and social harms, food manufacturers squeezing out safety precautions and devastating the farmers who rely on them—the list goes on.

The behavior of America’s 21st-century business community calls to mind the behavior of big monopolies in the early 20th century. It took some huge steps from labor activists and eventually the federal government to rein them in, and decades of deregulation, Borkian antitrust policy, lax campaign-finance laws, and overall consolidation seems to have returned us to the dynamics of that miserable era. I feel extremely firmly that this is the biggest systemic issue facing our country, and breaking up a very large number of these huge conglomerates would do an incalculable amount of good.

Ryan muses on living in interesting times:

The institutions held, just barely, in the face of Trump’s incompetent attempt to be an autocrat. That’s a point for trust. And yet the institution (or system) of our two parties is failing. A point against trust. While no one beyond the age of 10 years old could ever trust either party, both always spinning for their advantage, we now have a fully anti-democracy party that cannot help but degrade all other institutions, some more than others. One thing we can say with certainty is that things change. Are these the growing pains of a young democracy (which actually begins in practice with the end of Jim Crow)? Are these backlashes against institutions part of a cycle that exposes systemic racism and the vilification of poor people by (mostly) those who are trying to destroy our institutions? Is this anti-democracy party in its slow death throes, leading to an era where genuine common ground can be reached? The easy answer to the question you pose is obviously “less trust.” But have we not seen our current administration use institutions very effectively to create new laws that will actually help many people who need it and change the way we use energy (Inflation Reduction Act)?

So the answer is my trust is more fragile than 10 years ago, not less or more, because I can see very easily how our institutions could be completely destroyed in a matter of months, and yet I can also see how our institutions might be strengthened by enduring this period of great stress, and emerging with two (mostly) pro-democracy parties. I mean, the Cold War 2.0 has already begun. I wish there was a better motivating force (like saving the planet, ending needless suffering), but that very well might be what aligns people’s interests and shores up institutions in the near(ish) future.  

And Robin harkens back to the first viral video of police misconduct:

There used to be an adage that “seeing is believing.”  The day that notion died was March 3, 1991, over 32 years ago, when the LAPD were videoed beating up Rodney King … yet a subsequent jury found them not guilty. Since then there have been numerous examples of the public being disappointed and let down by institutions that they had always trusted: widespread sexual abuse throughout the Catholic Church, abuse within school systems, fraud on Wall Street and in the mismanagement of insurance and pension funds. I could go on, but, since 2016 and his arrival on the political scene, Donald Trump (and his many lies) has accelerated American delusion with just about everything, including the Supreme Court.

It’s fortunate that somebody filmed George Floyd being beaten up and justice was served. But the damage was done over 30 years ago and nothing has been the same since.

Back in 2014, I published “Video Killed Trust in Police Officers,” a thesis that held up well in ensuing years.

The retailer says inflation and investments mean its plan to return to profit will be pushed back to 2028.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked, “What roles should ‘color-blindness’ and race-consciousness play in personal interactions?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Adam is of two minds:

The phrase “I don’t see color” is deservedly a joke; it’s hard to imagine growing up in America and never noticing the racial category that society has placed the person into. Occasionally, that awareness is helpful. I might have doubted a Black friend’s stories of discrimination if I didn’t have an awareness of her race and what that can mean. But, as a white person, color and race are not things I usually try to think about when I’m talking to individuals. I thought it was a good thing when, after moving to an urban area with a racially diverse population, I realized that I no longer always took note of the racial composition of the passengers when I rode city buses. To me, keeping race in the forefront of personal interactions is more likely to lead to false assumptions than real understanding.

And who prefers to be treated as a type?

So long as race means something in our society, and means something to individuals, it’s something to keep in mind. But kept in mind too much, it can create distance, not understanding.

Jaleelah believes that Americans and Canadians tend to approach interpersonal interactions differently:

This question only makes sense in the context of the U.S.A.’s “melting pot,” which replaces ethnocultural identity with racial identity. Slaves and their descendants did not choose to give up their heritage, but many white and Asian immigrants did: They either assimilated happily or assimilated to avoid discrimination. The “melting pot” framework creates taboos against asking people where they are from and being curious about their unique cultures. It dictates that people of all ethnicities should be treated as Americans, and that inquiring about their non-American ancestors and traditions is a rude form of questioning their Americanness. But while the melting pot can blur cultural differences, it cannot obscure the fact that people from different ethnic groups look different. That is why race’s role in American interpersonal interactions needs to be explored.

Ethnicity is much more relevant than race when it comes to casual conversation. In Toronto, which is highly multicultural, asking where someone is from is practically a standard icebreaker. Of course the conversation that ensues will include speaking about ethnicity. There’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t “divide people”; it just helps us share basic parts of our lives and selves. Canada’s “mosaic” model makes it easier to perceive different cultural histories and values as beneficial to the identity of the country as a whole.

Karen struggles with how best to interact in Canada:

My prior hairdresser hated that people kept asking her where she was from. She was a person of colour, but she was fifth-generation Canadian on one side and seventh-generation on the other—deeply Canadian, indeed, in a country that continues to experience significant immigration. I am an immigrant—but from the U.S.A., and white, so mostly invisible. My hairdresser’s unfailing answer was “I’m from Victoria (B.C.),” and if people kept pressing, as they often did, with “But where are your parents from?,” she’d just repeat “Victoria.”

My daughter-in-law, when asked about this response, said, “I disagree, at least for myself. I like to tell people about my heritage (which is Malaysian Chinese on the one side, and Filipino on the other). I’m proud of my background.” She feels this way despite receiving significant, sometimes very overt racist comments, and despite people often assuming she is her own children’s nanny, not their mother, since, unless observed closely, her children, my grandchildren, look white. These comments hurt her, and make her angry, but don’t change her desire to discuss her background forthrightly.

It is polite in our First Nations context to describe one’s origins in the process of introductions, which in my case, allows me to say I am mostly of Northern European settler stock. Where appropriate, I can mention my plantation-owning, slave-owning maternal ancestors. But this is mostly not appropriate in majority-white contexts—people look at me like, “Why are you bringing this up?” The answer, of course, is that I am attempting to honestly locate myself as a person who has benefitted from centuries of unjust acquisition and privilege. Colour-blindness in my case would be incredibly self-serving.

Given that I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where as of 2021, over 54 percent of the inhabitants were visible minorities—meaning, of course, that people of colour as a whole are a majority of our population—this question [of where a person is from] is a vexing one. I tend to ask other questions now, assuming that those who want to tell me more will do so. And I tolerate a degree of chronic anxiety about getting it right, not least because it mirrors what people of colour have [to contend with] all the time, even in a majority people-of-colour city, when dealing with us white people. Finally, most of the people of colour I meet are very gracious about all of this, so long as they can assume that one is trying to understand and engage out of a position of humility and human interest.

John describes another approach:

I’m not color-blind; I’m conscious of your race. I just don’t care. Do you want to go fishing with me this weekend? If so, I could use the help on deck. Do you want to get out of the house and go see the world, from my boat or the windshield of the truck on the way to go hunting? Then you are in. Do you want to talk about fishing for hours, comparing tactics and past success? Then we are friends. In fact, I could simplify. Are you a friendly person? If you don’t have too many friends already (and nobody has too many friends), I’m in.

On several of these trips, the subject of race has come up. And I’m better for it. I’m sure this sounds clichéd, but unless you meet people where they are, you might never know.

Jake lays out a case against interpersonal color-blindness:

Racism still affects individuals; these experiences become part of their identity, and you can’t fully understand the person without understanding that. By analogy, having been raised Mormon or being a former Division 1 athlete or having a disability will color one’s experience in a way that makes it impossible to know someone without understanding the implications.

But what logically follows departs from the constant centering of race as progressives sometimes practice it. First, this should only begin to matter if you’re close friends with someone—if you’re trying to actually know and understand them. Interactions with strangers truly should be color-blind. Second, there’s not really a need to proactively bring up a person’s identity. One should familiarize oneself—from pop culture, literature, and patient friends— with what it means to be Black or Asian or Hispanic or Indigenous (or gay or trans or a woman or disabled) to be a good citizen and a good (potential) friend to those who have those identities. But the effect should be on how one listens and reacts, not approval-seeking or showing off of how educated and understanding you are.

The goal of interpersonal non-color-blindness is to reduce gaps of understanding as much as possible, but also having the discipline to make it about making others feel more comfortable rather than making oneself seem cultured. Put that way, any excesses can be self-correcting: If part of life as a person of color in America is dealing with overbearing apologetic white people, those who care should understand that and take it into account.

Maureen argues that “color-blindness has no role in personal relationships.” She writes:

Color-blindness diminishes the enormously valuable lessons history has taught each race; it ignores the cultural treasures unique to each race; it requires us to be blind to our own race, whatever it may be, and thus, the gifts we can offer others. Race-consciousness, on the other hand, opens wide the gates of understanding. Awareness of our inherent and experiential differences sparks new ideas, solutions, and—surprise—cooperation! All races have yet to explore the potential power of race-consciousness, the exponential growth and advancement of all races. Race-consciousness is a worthy aspiration, available to each of us. May we embrace the qualities unique to each race, and those common to all.

Nan distinguishes between race and culture:

In my view, being color-blind means and feels like no longer seeing skin color as a dominant characteristic––like when people fall in love with a beautiful person, but after some years, that beauty has faded into one of many characteristics instead of the dominant one. In my friendships with people of color, the comfort factor that occurs after years working side by side makes skin color more and more irrelevant. Culture and personal experience, however, remain, as they do for all exchanges in all friendships.

Jerome, who is 80 and white, discusses his interracial marriage of more than 50 years:

When we were first married, interracial marriage was uncommon, and my wife and I felt like we were living in a fishbowl. But I can recall only one overtly racist comment ever directed at us. Interracial marriage is more common now. People don’t even give us a second glance. Perhaps I was naive about my white friends, or fortunate in my choice of white friends, but I never encountered any overt racism among them, and there was never any talk of racial politics. If I had brought up issues of race with them, I feel like they would have responded with puzzlement and disinterest. They were too busy living their lives.

After we married and moved away, seeking work and new opportunities, I naturally gravitated to my wife’s family and her friends. They seemed to have no interest in my take on issues regarding race either, perhaps for a different reason than my white friends, but in any case, they were not consumed on a personal level by racial issues. I believe that Jamelle Bouie’s assessment about being color-blind in our day-to-day relationships is correct. By and large, our better angels seem to be in charge in regard to our personal relationships, and in the interest of preserving social comity, it’s best to follow the instincts of our better angels.

When first married, I think we were both race-conscious on a personal level. Now, after all these years, I think we can honestly say that on a personal level, we are really color-blind. It just never enters our mind. True color-blindness isn’t easy. It takes familiarity and practice.

J. describes a change in perspective:

I always believed I was color-blind and tried my best to treat everyone the same. I’ve never made a big deal of race or espoused any type of acknowledgment practice to any person of color.

Several years ago, my nephew asked me to review and critique an admissions essay he wrote for a summer engineering program. He's the perfect mix of brains and brawn, with an easy-going personality and quick-witted sense of humor. His essay stopped me cold. My nephew is half Native American and half white. I neither thought of nor treated him as different. He’s just my nephew, whom I love and adore. I also never thought about the difficulties he faces as a child of two very different cultures. His words cut like a knife, shredding my self-perceived color-blindness and leaving it in tatters. My idealistic view of equality was naive at best and ignorant at worst. He’s faced maltreatment from both sides of his heritage. He’s too Native for some whites and too white for some Natives. That, alone, blew my mind. He described many instances and situations from his unique perspective. When I finished, I gave him a hug and suggested a few changes to wording. I reiterated how proud I was of him and thanked him for opening my eyes.

At home that night I cried for my nephew and the struggles he has faced. I cried for the stupidity of humanity and its ignorant belief that one color is superior to another. And I cried for myself, for not realizing that I’m white and I’ll never truly understand what any person of color goes through. I haven’t changed the way I treat others and never will. But for me, that is the day I realized color-blindness doesn’t exist. It's a made-up term used by those who’ll never understand the ignorance of its perceived meaning.

Seth asks, “Is it even possible to be color-blind?” He writes:

While it’s nice to aspire to be better, it’s counterproductive to aim to be something we’re not capable of. Race, like other personal traits, contributes to, but doesn’t define, who we are. We shouldn’t let race dictate how we relate to anyone, nor should it be factored out. Everybody wants to be seen and heard as an individual, and your race is one of the many elements that contribute to who you are. A better goal in our interactions would be self-awareness. Recognize our prejudices. Question our assumptions. Then relate to everybody with a sense of curiosity, openness, and compassion.

Leo stakes out a middle ground:

I don’t think there’s a “should.” There’s more of a natural sorting process. There will always be proponents on both sides of this debate, but we will naturally gravitate to those people more in line with our own thoughts and feelings. And we should be left in peace to do so. My main issue with this debate is when activists or individuals on one side or the other attempt to impose their view on others. I’m not opposed to debating the issue with people who disagree with me, but the topic is often just too heated for a calm and reasonable conversation. And there seems to be little point in such debate when modern anti-racists rush to declare anyone inclined toward color-blindness to be an evil bigot.

I am inclined toward color-blindness. I do not think that the best response to racial discrimination is more racial discrimination. I don’t think that fire is the best substance for putting out a fire. I acknowledge, however, that there may be a place, in certain circumstances, for race-consciousness. I try to remain open-minded. I believe in entertaining doubt. But if I sense that race-conscious leftists have zero receptivity toward anything I say, I avoid them. That’s how this issue impacts my interpersonal relationships.

David argues:

It shows respect to treat people as equals, and it shows arrogance to act as if one is on top of a social hierarchy—even when that may be true. I never learned much about race issues in America until I started reading history in my late 30s. The violence directed at people of color that was officially sanctioned, or condoned by silence, was shocking. I do now have a basic understanding of the systemic racism that has held African Americans and others back. That sort of “race consciousness” should inform policy choices. However, it seems to me (a 65-year-old moderately progressive white guy) that race-consciousness might get in the way of normal interpersonal interactions with people of color.

Being too self-conscious can interfere with social interactions, because one cannot be fully present. Being race conscious in personal interactions seems more likely to create barriers to understanding and relating to the individual in front of you than to invite discourse and understanding. One should be attuned to potential societal burdens experienced by others and how that may manifest, but excessive sensitivity seems to create a new form of “white man’s burden” thinking coming from the left. Like accommodating a disability for people who are not disabled, it seems patronizing.

HOBOKEN, N.J. (AP) — HOBOKEN, N.J. (AP) — John Wiley & Sons Inc. (WLY) on Thursday reported a loss of $92.3 million in its fiscal first quarter.

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Jimmy Buffett, the chiller laureate of Key West, died on Friday at 76. His legacy goes well beyond music: He also parlayed the power of his loyal community into a business empire.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

How American democracy fell so far behind How telling people to die became normal A DeSantis speech too dangerous to teach in Florida You already got into Yale. Now prepare to be rejected.

A Distinctly American Figure

If you have never spent a lunch hour in Times Square at the Margaritaville restaurant, or a cocktail hour at the 5 o’Clock Somewhere bar upstairs, allow me to paint a picture: An enormous shiny flip-flop greets you at the door of the restaurant cum bar cum resort tower. A massive replica of the Statue of Liberty holding a margarita glass pokes through the floor of the restaurant. Should you choose to ascend, a long elevator ride delivers you to the top-floor bar, which features turquoise furniture, tequila drinks on offer, and a beautiful view of Manhattan. Some elements of Margaritaville are kitschy, and some are charming. But above all, when you’re there, you don’t forget for one second that you are in a Margaritaville.

Jimmy Buffett, the troubadour and celebrant of a good-times lifestyle, deserves to be remembered for more than just his music (fun though it may be). Buffett also parlayed his name recognition into a business empire that, starting with the first Margaritaville in Key West, Florida, swelled to include resorts, restaurants, food, and merchandise; Buffett became a billionaire later in life. He was beloved by his many fans, known as Parrot Heads, and he leveraged that fan base into a loyal community of customers. Beyond the Parrot Heads, he also reached hungry and thirsty visitors of all stripes: Some 20 million people visit Margaritaville-branded establishments annually.

In recent years, a variety of brands have become obsessed with building community. Tech start-ups in particular have glommed on to it as a marketing buzzword. If people feel connected to a brand, the thinking goes, they will buy more stuff. Buffett was an early master of this art: He was selling goods and services, but he was also offering a sense of belonging. And though it has become de rigueur for celebrities to peddle branded products, be it skin care or tequila, Buffett has been translating pop-culture recognition into product sales for decades.

Buffett was a multi-hyphenate before it was cool. He first became known as a musician, with his beach hit “Margaritaville” in 1977 and, the next year, his cheeky “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” He was also an author: Starting in 1989, both his fiction and nonfiction books topped the New York Times best-seller lists (a distinction he shares with an elite smattering of writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Dr. Seuss). He had a Broadway show. Margaritaville sold frozen shrimp, blenders, margarita mixes, and a lifestyle. The New York Times reported that Margaritaville Enterprises, a corporation with ties to more than 100 restaurants and hotels, brought in $2.2 billion in gross annual revenue last year, largely through licensing and branding deals. Though Margaritaville Resort Times Square recently began Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, Margaritaville Enterprises is reportedly still investing in new properties.

For a man who made his name on visions of relaxation, Buffett got things done. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2018, “Mr. Buffett is still the lone occupant in the Venn diagram of People Who Outearn Bruce Springsteen and People Who Are Mistaken for Men of Leisure.” Though a 23andMe test reportedly confirmed that Jimmy was not related to Warren Buffett, the two men became friends, and the latter offered business advice to the former; Jimmy called him “Uncle Warren.” (The Oracle of Omaha is also an investor in Margaritaville Enterprises through subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway.)

Jimmy Buffett even created literal Margaritaville communities: Last year, Nick Paumgarten wrote a long dispatch in The New Yorker recounting his time visiting Latitude Margaritaville, a “55 and better” active-living community in Florida. Paumgarten notes the sense of belonging that Latitude Margaritaville provides its older residents—even if it comes with a heavy dose of hedonism. “If it’s isolation that ails us—our suburban remove, our reliance on cars, our dwindling circles of friends, our lack of congregation and integration and mutual understanding, of the kind described by Robert Putnam in ‘Bowling Alone,’” Paumgarten writes, “then the solution, especially for those tilting into their lonelier elderly years, would seem to be fellowship, activity, fun. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol.” (As it happened, Paumgarten’s article was published the day before my first visit to the Times Square location next to my then-office; the sweet—and also thoroughly capitalist—context about Buffett’s empire enhanced what was already a novel experience.)

Buffett’s Florida development, Paumgarten wrote, “came off both as an escape from America and as the most quintessentially American setting of all.” And Buffett himself was a distinctly American figure—a canny self-mythologizer who brought people joy and made very good money along the way. I hope you all will embrace your license to chill in his honor. As they might say at Margaritaville: Fins up. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

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Today’s News

All the defendants in the election-interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, have now pleaded not guilty. Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chairman, was sentenced to 22 years in prison, after being convicted for seditious conspiracy in the January 6, 2021, attack. Senator Mitch McConnell released a letter from Congress’s attending physician stating that evaluations ruled out a stroke or seizure, after McConnell visibly froze on camera on two recent occasions.

Evening

Vivian Maier / Howard Greenberg Gallery

The Novel That Helped Me Understand American Culture

By Rafaela Bassili

Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent many of my waking hours reading American young-adult books, rigorously studying the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t always beautifully written, but I loved them all the same, the way another kid might have loved dinosaurs: I was compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking lots, and malls; their descriptions of what girls in the U.S. ate and how they lived. None of it had anything to do with me, so I was surprised when, at 16, I saw myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.

With a diligent thirst for knowledge, I began to understand Plath’s reputation as an archetypal mid-century American girl. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visual mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing—that developed alongside the baby boom.

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P.S.

Tom here, peeking in after reading Lora’s essay on Jimmy Buffett. Buffett’s last public appearance was just up the way from me here at a venue in Rhode Island, and when I heard he’d died, I was on my way to a nearby beach. I reminisced with my wife a bit as we drove to the shore about how I didn’t appreciate Buffett when I was growing up, mostly because “Margaritaville” was overplayed when I was a teenager. Also, I didn’t really get that whole Gulf and Western sound. My New England (I was raised near the mountains) doesn’t seem like Jimmy Buffett’s natural environment: The beach is far, the water’s cold, and the first snows come soon after the last beach day.

But when I moved to Rhode Island in my 20s, I spent my first summer at the beach and the Newport bars, where Buffett’s music was everywhere. One day, I heard “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” and it clicked. The beach wasn’t really the point. The palm trees and tropical nights and steel drums? Those were just the decor. That day in Newport, I realized that you didn’t need a beach to love Jimmy Buffett, whose music was so kind, so American, and so fun. The next day, I went to the local record store and bought my first Buffet CD. After that, no matter where I lived, I always had a beach and a friend.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent many of my waking hours reading American young-adult books, rigorously studying the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t always beautifully written, but I loved them all the same, the way another kid might have loved dinosaurs: I was compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking lots, and malls; their descriptions of what girls in the U.S. ate and how they lived. None of it had anything to do with me, so I was surprised when, at 16, I saw myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.

With a diligent thirst for knowledge, I began to understand Plath’s reputation as an archetypal mid-century American girl. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visual mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing—that developed alongside the baby boom. The Bell Jar, with its sneering descriptions of ski trips to the Adirondacks and boys who ran cross-country, offered me permission to write a certain way: intensely, cuttingly, in English. It also provided an emotional context for the East Coast culture I found so alluring, and that I’d been trying to figure out. But my teenage self missed part of the novel’s project: its effort to tear down the veneer of complacent satisfaction that enveloped the American suburban lifestyle.  

The Bell Jar first appeared in England 60 years ago, a month before the author’s suicide, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. After a copyright battle, it was finally published in the United States in 1971 with Plath’s name on the cover. The novel begins when Esther leaves her small town in Massachusetts for New York City, having won a coveted spot for a summer job at Ladies’ Day magazine (a fictionalized version of Mademoiselle). The glitz and artifice of the fashion world shock and repel her; upon her return to the cloistered suburbs, she comes undone. The plot culminates with her suicide attempt and her stay at a mental institution, based on Plath’s own experience at the renowned McLean Hospital.

Today, the novel is seen as a poignant account of the stifling oppression of the Eisenhower years, particularly as experienced by young women. In the introduction to her recent biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark writes that The Bell Jar “exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even ‘the best minds’ of a generation crazy.” In life, Plath had trouble squaring her idea of herself as an ambitious writer with the expectations held for a girl like her—to marry young and start producing children. Some of the impact of her poetry emerged from this misalignment. Oft-quoted lines from her poem “Edge” read: “The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.” Clark, parsing the image, notes, “Only a dead woman is ‘perfected.’ Not perfect, perfected––like … something controlled, without agency.”

The Bell Jar’s achievement, in turn, was to paint a portrait of America full of jagged inconsistencies. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life,” Esther declares in the first couple of pages. Described as “drinking martinis … in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures,” she embodies the mid-century’s ideal of an accomplished, educated girl—but only up to a point. At Ladies’ Day, Esther, an aspiring poet, hopes to discuss literature with her editor; instead, her goals are treated with condescension. On campus, her sense of achievement is limited to four years of pseudo-freedom that are supposed to climax in marriage to a respectable Yale medical student, for whom she is expected to “flatten out … like Mrs. Willard’s [her would-be mother-in-law] kitchen mat.” This prospect––which would assure a secure, suburban life––is an urgent threat to someone who desires the tumult of experience; it makes Esther feel “very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

[Read: Why Sylvia Plath still haunts American culture]

Pitted against her decaying sense of self, the overdone polish of the Northeast becomes sinister. Taut prose elucidates this feeling: Swimming far from the shore, Esther considers drowning before admitting to a self-preservation instinct (“I knew when I was beaten”). Longer, more rambling sentences describe the off-kilter beauty of the landscape, and how it corresponds to Esther’s mood: Driving to the Adirondacks, “the countryside, already deep under old falls of snow, turned us a bleaker shoulder, and as the fir trees crowded down from the gray hills to the road edge, so darkly green they looked black, I grew gloomier and gloomier.”

Writing about the novel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick observed that “the pleasures and sentiments of youth––wanting to be invited to the Yale prom, losing your virginity––are rather unreal in a scenario of disintegration, anger, and a perverse love of the horrible.” As a teen eager to understand these signifiers of American adolescence, I was drawn to that sense of unreality, even as I responded to Esther’s frustrations with her codified environment. From the writing, I understood that the purportedly joyful rituals of growing up were attended by rage, but Plath was also gesturing at a source for this rage: the culture that created these rituals in the first place.  

The title of the novel, as readers might recall, is an image of Esther’s claustrophobia: Trapped by her surroundings and her depression alike, Esther feels as though she will always be “sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in [her] own sour air.” According to Clark’s biography, Plath considered an ending that would see Esther going to Europe, fleeing the brutality of the Northeast. It was what Plath did herself; she wrote her best work—The Bell Jar and Ariel, the poetry collection that propelled her to posthumous fame—while living in England. In this sense, The Bell Jar’s mistrust of suburban prosperity can be read as a precursor to later works that similarly explore the dark underside of small-town America; it is often paired with Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, its influence deeply felt on the depiction of the Lisbon girls. And Esther’s description of the grimy hole in her mother’s basement, into which she crawls to attempt suicide, calls to mind the opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, when the camera digs under an immaculate suburban lawn to reveal the rot lurking underneath.

Plath’s writing and biography seem to indicate that what she really wanted was freedom: to be herself and to wear her contradictions on her sleeve. But that aspiration was accompanied by an obsession with emphasizing the distance between herself and others—and, by the same token, stereotyping those she was defining herself against. As the writer Janet Malcolm points out in The Silent Woman, her book about Plath’s legend and biographies, critics including Leon Wieseltier and Irving Howe have criticized Plath’s appropriation of the suffering of the Jewish people in her poetry: Through her use of Holocaust imagery in “Daddy,” she equates her individual pain to the generational trauma caused by Nazism. And in The Bell Jar, as in poems such as “Lady Lazarus,” her fetishization of difference could be a myopic way to assert her distinction from those she seemed to see as beneath her.

As such, the novel occasionally enacts the overbearing homogeneity that characterized the America Plath supposedly held in contempt. Racist imagery pervades the text: the anti-Black sentiment that emerges in her description of a Black worker in the hospital where Esther is institutionalized is particularly unsettling. In the first few pages, Esther compares her pallor to the skin of a “Chinaman,” and my own home country is a symbol of faraway exoticism: On a humid day, the rain “wasn’t the nice kind … that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they have in Brazil.” The bell jar that descended over the suburbs seemed to come into focus for Plath only insofar as her entrapment went. She couldn’t quite look outside of herself to see how that bell jar might be suffocating for others.

[Read: The haunting last letters of Sylvia Plath]

When I first read The Bell Jar, New England was an abstract concept to me: a made-up place where the push and pull of conformity and subversion appeared to emerge in perfect clarity. Growing up in a country that idealized the American experience, I held Plath’s America at a remove. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, it stood still in time, immoveable, sentimental, and untrue. To revisit the book now, as an adult who has lived in the United States for almost a decade, is to see the idea of a romantic, preppy East Coast collapse under the harsh, more revealing light of experience. Plath’s novel didn’t materialize out of those beautiful images of coastal American adolescence; it was born of a thorny, damaging relationship with an environment that could be as cruel as it was rewarding.

In college, I fell in love with a boy from Massachusetts and went to see New England for myself. Everything looked just as I’d expected it to, even if, in the past 70 or so years, a lot had changed; not least of all the fact that, according to a University of Massachusetts at Boston report from 2020, the state is home to the second largest Brazilian population in the country. But the air in Massachusetts is thick with history, and its cunning appearance still compels. The sight of those colonial houses surrounded by maple and pine, their floors trod on by feet clad in G. H. Bass loafers, combined with the strange recognition of visiting a place I’d only ever imagined before, kept me tethered to Plath’s own descriptions. Still, as much as her legend insists that she was a prototypical all-American girl, Plath died a foreigner and an outsider. The last dinner party she ever attended, according to Clark’s biography, was at the English house of family friends from home.

It took me years to realize that no matter how diligently I studied the America I initially saw in Plath’s work, I would always be foremost a foreigner and an outsider—someone with a tormented predilection for a culture that excludes, confines, and punishes you for not fitting in. Still, I like to think that Plath wrote The Bell Jar for those who, like me and her, are seized and haunted by certain images and certain notions—even those that may, at any point, turn on us.