The Political Scene | The New Yorker
News:Politics
The writer and director Cord Jefferson has struck gold with his first feature film, “American Fiction.” Nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jefferson, the film is winning praise for portraying a broader spectrum of the Black experience than most Hollywood movies. It’s based on the 2001 novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, a satire of the literary world. And Jefferson, who began his career as a journalist before branching out into entertainment, has long seen up close how rigid attitudes about what constitutes “Blackness” can be. “Three months before I found ‘Erasure,’ I got a note back on a script from an executive” on another script, Jefferson tells his friend Jelani Cobb, “that said, ‘We want you to make this character blacker.’ ” (He demanded that the note be explained in person, and it was quickly dropped.) Jefferson hopes that his film sheds some light on what he calls the “absurdity” of race as a construct. He finds race “a fertile target for laughter. … On the one hand, race is not real and insignificant and [on the other hand] very real and incredibly important. Sometimes life or death depends on race. And to me that inherent tension and absurdity is perfect for comedy.”
A G.O.P. Strategist on the Republican Voters Who Could Abandon Trump
What Do We Know About How the World Might End?
The Trans Athletes Who Changed the Olympics—in 1936
A “Stunningly Decisive” End to Donald Trump’s Trial
Sam Altman Dreams of an A.I. Girlfriend
How the Reality-TV Industry Mistreats Its Stars
Why Vladimir Putin’s Family Is Learning Mandarin
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on Why He’s Running
The Most Profoundly Not-Normal Facts About Trump’s 2024 Campaign
Stormy Daniels’s Biggest Role Yet
The TikTok Ban Is “a Vast Overreach, Rooted in Hypocrisy,” Wired’s Katie Drummond says
Will Young Americans Tip November’s Election?
The Pure Chaos Inside Donald Trump’s Criminal Trial
Randall Kennedy on Harvard Protests, Antisemitism, and the Meaning of Free Speech
Who Should Be More Worried about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.– Biden or Trump?
Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Trying to Oust House Speaker Mike Johnson?
Georgia’s Secretary of State Prepares for Another Election
Trump’s “Bonkers” Immunity Claim, with Neal Katyal
A Student Journalist Explains the Protests at Yale
Jonathan Haidt on “The Anxious Generation”
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The New Yorker: Fiction
The New Yorker: The Writer’s Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker
The New Yorker: Poetry
Polygon Cutscene