Some fans attending the game in Paris jeer the Israeli anthem played at the start of the game.

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Paris objected to France hosting the national football team of Israel.

No comment: Protests in Paris after pro-Israel gala organised by far-right figures

There were clashes in Paris on Wednesday night between French police and pro-Palestine protesters.

The event, intended to raise funds for the Israeli army, comes before a France-Israel football match in the capital.

Thousands of protesters march in Paris ahead of tense football match between France-Israel 

Exxon Mobil’s CEO said he wants Presidential-elect Donald Trump to keep the U.S. in the Paris Climate Agreement.

Read more...

In his tenth novel, Lazarus Man, Richard Price is, to borrow one of his own lines, on a “hunt for moments”—snapshots in time, chance encounters, fleeting interactions that reveal someone or something in a startling new light. “I’ve got like X-ray eyes for the little gestures that go right by everybody,” he explained in a profile timed to the publication of his 1992 novel, Clockers. “I don’t go for the big picture so much as a lot of little big pictures.” Mary Roe, a detective and one of the characters in his new book, shares that instinct. At the scene of a “larger horror,” what hits her most forcefully is not the dead bodies but a crushed USPS mail cart, “an everyday object so violently deformed.” It beckons her toward “an unasked-for comprehension of the whole.”

The currency that Lazarus Man—a patchwork of scenes from urban working-class life, set in the spring of 2008—trades in is the micro-epiphany. Price’s four interlaced East Harlem protagonists are big-souled people navigating narrow, “negotiated life.” What they want for themselves—someone to lie beside, a little more money, work that doesn’t involve selling something—rarely outpaces what is possible. They do not ask for much more of the world, or New York City, than it is ready to give. Each one of them is decent.

Felix Pearl is a 20-something photographer with a gig taking video footage of a playground and basketball courts for the parks department (to monitor safety protocols) and a habit of getting bamboozled by a pretty junkie. Mary, a respected member of the police department, is also the daughter of a prizefighter tormented by a mistake he made as a young man. Anthony Carter, a middle-aged divorcé, is a former salesman, former teacher, and former cokehead hoping to stumble onto a metaphysical truth that will mend the broken parts of his life. Royal Davis, a failed NBA hopeful, runs a funeral home and wishes he didn’t. When a tenement building collapses in Harlem, their paths become entangled and they reexamine their lives.

This disaster, which leaves six dead, is ostensibly the big event that sets the novel in motion, but it also feels almost beside the point. No one, including Price, shows much curiosity about what caused the collapse. In fact, Lazarus Man seems deeply uninterested in the idea of cause at all. The characters we encounter live a challenging existence; they are not quite on the cliff’s edge, but they are close enough to peer into the canyon without craning their neck. The novel has all the trappings of fiction as gritty urban social portraiture—the kind of enterprise that Price is associated with as the author of the drug-trade-steeped novel Clockers and a writer for HBO’s The Wire. Yet it isn’t.

[From the September 2024 issue: A satire of America’s obsession with identity]

Nor has Price written a gentrification novel about a changing Harlem, even as its Harlem is changing. Or a novel of proletarian discontent, though it is about discontented proletarians. Lazarus Man isn’t about structural racism either, despite being populated with minorities down on their luck and harangued by the police. What Price has given us is a retrograde novel. It is animated by unreconstructed, unembarrassed humanism.

His pages offer no fictional repackaging of uplift or pessimism or low-wattage Marxist theory. They depict no working-class heroes or Dickensian scoundrels. The characters are not pawns in some philosophical or political or cultural proxy war for which the novel is simply a vehicle. You would be forgiven for overlooking that the story is set amid the heat of Barack Obama’s historic presidential campaign, because this never comes up. Price’s characters are strapped but not completely stuck, battered by social structures but not paralyzed by them.

In his 1945 lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre observed that European existentialism had developed an undeserved reputation for being “gloomy,” denigrated as a philosophical movement obsessed with death, absurdity, anxiety, and the like. Sartre rejected this appraisal: Existentialism turned on the conviction that people can—in the face of history’s sweep, dehumanizing societal institutions, and unrestrained economic and technological development—choose how to live. Speaking before a sizable crowd at Paris’s Club Maintenant, Sartre addressed his critics. “Their excessive protests make me suspect that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism,” the philosopher wryly observed, “but, much more likely, our optimism. For at bottom, what is alarming in the doctrine that I am about to try to explain to you is—is it not?—that it confronts man with a possibility of choice.”

Lazarus Man’s protagonists, confronted with exceptional circumstances they had no hand in generating, must nonetheless contend with the discomfiting reality of their own agency. This leaves Price walking a tightrope. His novel at once invites and undercuts the polarized attitudes toward social crisis that have recently become familiar—either fatalistic acceptance or righteous denunciation. Lazarus Man is about a traumatic event that defies a reflexive victim-culture response, as well as the lazy buck-up bromides favored by that culture’s critics.

Put a different way, it is a trauma novel without a trauma plot—pushing back against the formulaic storyline, so thoroughly skewered by The New Yorker’s Parul Sehgal, that reduces characters to predictable symptoms after some fateful event. The book’s author, too, isn’t readily fazed: Price, a white novelist writing yet again about Black urban life, betrays no signs of racial anxiety. “Northern white writers sometimes see black people as another species,” he noted in 2006. “I think the white writer sometimes says, ‘No, no, that’s a hornet’s nest.’ ” He’s still poking it.

The possibility that Price might have adopted the identitarian conventions of the previous decade or so—the last novel he wrote under his own name was Lush Life (2008), which unfolds on New York City’s Lower East Side—is swiftly ruled out by Anthony, the novel’s anchoring character. A half-Black, half–Italian Irish Ivy League screwup—years ago, he lost a full ride to Columbia for dealing drugs—he has been on a downward trajectory ever since. In his sober and unemployed middle age, he has been living in his dead parents’ tenement apartment and resists any attempt to frame himself as a victim. “A therapist suggested that as a Black student he might have subconsciously felt pressure to act out the role expected of him by the white students,” he reflects. Then he adds, “But that was bullshit.”

When Anthony is pulled out of the soot-gray rubble a third of the way through the novel—the reborn Lazarus of the book’s title—he is a changed man. Or, more accurately, he is a man desperately trying to play the part of a changed man. It is never quite clear, even as Lazarus Man rushes toward its devastating denouement, whom exactly Anthony is trying to convince of his redemption: the audiences who eventually come to hear him speak at community events, enchanted by the wisdom he has wrung from brute survival, or the man he sees in the mirror. To the extent that Price’s novel has a message, it is that epiphanies are a kind of theater we perform for ourselves. Faced with disaster or a momentous encounter, we are not gripped by revelation or metamorphosed in the fire of circumstance. Events do not transform us against our will. We decide, always retroactively, that some unexpected joy or undeserved blow is the stuff out of which a new life is made.

This idea, that we choose our own epiphanies, appears again and again. Mary, the worn-down detective, is especially epiphany-haunted, surrounded by people who have undergone sudden shifts of self. Her father, disturbed by his capacity for cruelty after a boxing opponent ended up permanently disabled, abruptly gave up the sweet science. Her husband is a reformed violent drunk whom Mary finds boring in his new meditative sobriety. And Mary herself lives in the long shadow of a halfway epiphany, restless in marriage and motherhood after a freak elevator accident two years earlier nearly killed her, leaving her searching for—and failing to find—new moorings. Mary spends much of the novel playing the role of dutiful detective, looking for a resident of the imploded building who hasn’t been seen since the day it crumbled. She tenuously connects the search to absolution for herself—guilt-ridden about being a distant mother—and for her father, convinced that discovering the missing man, dead or alive, will somehow land her on terra firma.

Lazarus Man possesses the same kind of telegenic quality that made Clockers an inspiration for The Wire. Some vignettes read like hilarious set pieces. When the tenement dissolves into a haze of white smog and rubble, Royal is dozing in one of his unsold coffins. Awoken by the noise, he pushes open the lid of his pine box and sits bolt upright, scaring witless the group of film-school students to whom he’s rented out his struggling funeral home so they can shoot a bad zombie movie. This slapstick gives way to something darker as Royal, knowing that the rumbling boom means bodies—and thus business—instructs his son to put on his best black suit and go hawk their services. Other moments give way to a gentle melancholy.

And as Anthony is slowly transformed into a minor New York celebrity—first thanks to a local-news appearance, and then through a series of speeches he is coaxed into giving—his ordeal gels into an earnest if squishy doctrine, one part self-help and one part call to duty. He proclaims again and again that his only goal is to “be of service.” His lectures are full of clichés and pseudo-profundities—“The street can be a brutal sculptor”—but his overwrought aphorisms also land, the kinds of phrases that audience members scribble down and later recite around the dinner table. Anthony’s underlying theme is always that change is possible, that the worst that comes to pass will end up being “the best thing that could possibly happen to you.” Personal catastrophe, Anthony preaches, is a gift. A sheep in wolf’s clothing.

[From the May 1976 issue: A review of Richard Price’s second novel, Bloodbrothers]

But in the end, Lazarus Man rejects its own Lazarus. Or at least Price subverts his post-traumatic gospel. When a woman approaches Anthony after one of his appearances, interrogating him about his mantra—“Whatever befalls you no matter how heartbreaking or onerous will turn out to be the best thing”—he finds himself, for the first time, at a loss for words. She tells him about a husband of two decades, newly dead. Three young kids at home and an ailing mother. An apartment slipping through her grasp. Plainly, no alchemy is forthcoming: The fragments of her life will not turn to gold if she just hopes hard enough. After Anthony mumbles something about God, she lets him have it.

When the novel at last gives up its final secret—who our Lazarus Man is, really—the big reveal does not hand over any certainty as to what lies in Anthony’s heart. The question that haunts the second half of the book is whether he is a con artist or a genuine street prophet. The answer ends up being neither. Or both. The simple truth is that one bad decision led to worse decisions, then to better ones. The same could be said of each character. As to the question of whether that building collapse truly made a new man, no one (including Anthony) is sure.

The genius of Price’s novel is that it rejects all mechanistic accounts of human existence—tragic or utopian, religious or otherwise—without downplaying the social forces that shape lives of labor. Price isn’t peddling a bootstraps humanism. Anthony, Felix, Royal, and Mary cannot pull themselves up into a more comfortable middle-class existence through sheer will, or by the thaumaturgic power of some hoped-for epiphany. They cannot be exactly who they want to be. But Price holds them accountable for who they are, and the choices they make within the world as it is given to them. Lazarus Man leaves us with four people still lurching toward an uncertain transformation. “I’m thinking a few things,” Royal muses. “All I know for sure is that I have to make a life that I can live with.”

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Richard Price’s Radical, Retrograde Novel.”

Macron and Starmer lay wreath at Paris' Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Armistice Day

In what will probably be the warmest year in recorded history, in a month in which all but two U.S. states are in a drought, and on a day when yet another hurricane was forming in the Caribbean, Donald Trump, a climate denier with a thirst for oil drilling, won the American presidency for a second time. And today, delegates from around the world will begin this year’s global UN climate talks, in Baku, Azerbaijan. This UN Conference of Parties (COP) is meant to decide how much money wealthy, high-emitting nations should channel toward the poorer countries that didn’t cause the warming in the first place, but the Americans—representing the country that currently has the second-highest emissions and is by far the highest historical emitter—now can make no promises that anyone should believe they would keep.

“We know perfectly well [Trump] won’t give another penny to climate finance, and that will neutralize whatever is agreed,” Joanna Depledge, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and an expert on international climate negotiations, told me. Without about a trillion dollars a year in assistance, developing nations’ green transitions will not happen fast enough to prevent catastrophic global warming. But wealthy donor countries are more likely to contribute if others do, and if the U.S. isn’t paying in, other large emitters have cover to weaken their own climate-finance commitments.

In an ironic twist for a president-elect who likes to villainize China, Trump may be handing that nation a golden opportunity. China has, historically, worked to block ambitious climate deals, but whoever manages to sort out the question of global climate finance will be lauded as a hero. With the U.S. stepping out of a climate-leadership role, China has the chance—and a few good reasons—to step in and assume it.

The spotlight in Baku will now be on China as the world’s biggest emitter, whether the country likes it or not, Li Shuo, a director at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said in a press call. The Biden administration did manage to nudge China to be more ambitious in some of its climate goals, leading, for example, to a pledge to reduce methane emissions. But the Trump administration will likely shelve ongoing U.S.-China climate conversations and remove, for a second time, the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which requires participants to commit to specific emissions-reduction goals. Last time around, Trump’s withdrawal made China look good by comparison, without the country necessarily needing to change course or account for its obvious problem areas, like its expanding coal industry. The same will likely happen again, Alex Wang, a law professor at UCLA and an expert on U.S.-China relations, told me.

China is, after all, the leading producer and installer of green energy, but green energy alone is not enough to avoid perilous levels of warming. China likes to emphasize that it’s categorized as a developing country at these gatherings, and has fought deals that would require it to limit emissions or fork over cash, and by extension, limit its growth. But with the U.S. poised to do nothing constructive, China’s position on climate looks rosy in comparison.

[Read: A tiny petrostate is running the world’s climate talks]

By cutting off its contributions to international climate finance, the U.S. also will give China more room to expand its influence through “green soft power.” China has spent the past five years or so focused on the construction of green infrastructure in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, Wang said. Tong Zhao, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Reuters that China expects to be able to “expand its influence in emerging power vacuums” under a second Trump term. Under Biden, the U.S. was attempting to compete in the green-soft-power arena by setting up programs to help clean-energy transitions in Indonesia or Vietnam, Wang noted. “But now I suspect that those federal efforts will be eliminated.”

[Read: Why Xi wants Trump to win]

Most experts now view the global turn toward solar and other clean energy as self-propelled and inevitable. When Trump first entered office, solar panels and electric vehicles were not hot topics. “Eight years later, it is absolutely clear that China dominates in those areas,” Wang said. China used the first Trump administration to become the biggest clean-tech supplier in the world, by far. The Biden administration tried to catch up in climate tech, primarily through the Inflation Reduction Act, but even now, Shuo told me, Chinese leaders do not see the U.S. as a clean-tech competitor. “They have not seen the first U.S.-made EV or solar panel installed in Indonesia, right?” he said. “And of course, the U.S. lagging behind might be exacerbated by the Trump administration,” which has promised to repeal the IRA, leaving potentially $80 billion of would-be clean-tech business for other countries—but most prominently China—to scoop up. In all international climate arenas, the U.S. is poised to mostly hurt itself.  

[Read: How Trump's America will lose the climate race]

More practically, Baku could give China a chance to negotiate favorable trade deals with the EU, which has just started to impose new carbon-based border tariffs. But none of this guarantees that China will decide to take a decisive role in negotiating a strong climate-finance deal. Climate finance is what could keep the world from tipping into darker and wholly avoidable climate scenarios. But news of Trump’s election is likely to lend COP the air of a collective hangover. EU countries will surely assume a strong leadership posture in the talks, but they don’t have the fiscal or political might to fill the hole the U.S. will leave behind. Without surprise commitments from China and other historically begrudgingly cooperative countries, COP could simply fail to deliver a finance deal, or, more likely, turn out a miserably weak one.

The global climate community has been here before, though. The U.S. has a pattern of obstructing the climate negotiations. In 1992, the Rio Treaty was made entirely voluntary at the insistence of President George H. W. Bush. In 1997, the Clinton-Gore administration had no strategy to get the Kyoto Protocol ratified in the Senate; the U.S. has still never ratified it.

But although President George W. Bush’s administration declared Kyoto dead, it in fact laid the groundwork for the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement survived the first Trump term and will survive another, Tina Stege, the climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, told me. The last time Trump was elected, the EU, China, and Canada put out a joint negotiating platform to carry on climate discussions without the United States. That largely came to nothing, but the coalition will now have a second chance. And overemphasizing U.S. politics, Stege said, ignores that countries like hers are pressing on with diplomatic agreements that will determine their territories' survival.

Nor is the U.S. defined only by its federal government. Subnationally, a number of organizations cropped up in the U.S. during Trump’s first administration to mobilize governors, mayors, and CEOs to step in on climate diplomacy. These include the U.S. Climate Alliance (a bipartisan coalition of  24 governors) and America Is All In: a coalition of 5,000 mayors, college presidents, health-care executives, and faith leaders, co-chaired by Washington State Governor Jay Inslee and former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, among other climate heavy hitters. This time, they won’t be starting from scratch in convincing the rest of the world that at least parts of the U.S. are still committed to fighting climate change.