What Happened Today: March 23, 2023
What Happened Today: March 23, 2023
TikTok dances for Congress; Judicial nominee gets Kennedy-ed; RIP Raphael
The Big Story
It probably couldn’t have gone any worse for TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew on Thursday as House lawmakers pummeled him with concerns over user safety and national security just as several congressional bills look to ban or severely restrict the video platform from having American users. Explaining his company’s $1.5 billion plan to ostensibly build a firewall between TikTok users’ data and Chinese officials, Chew said TikTok could remain “free from any manipulation from any government.”
That proposal didn’t convince Rep. Frank Pallone, the panel’s highest-ranking Democrat, who said, “I still believe that the Beijing communist government will still control and have the ability to influence what you do.”
Hoping to convince lawmakers that the forced sale of TikTok’s U.S. operation from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, wouldn’t be necessary, Chew largely kept on even keel despite withering criticism from legislators. “TikTok could be designed to minimize the harm to kids, but a decision was made to aggressively addict kids in the name of profits,” said Rep. Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat.
The unusually combative line of questioning from both Democrats and Republicans reflects concerns in Washington, D.C., over both TikTok’s effect on its 150 million users and the influence of U.S.-China geopolitics on American business affairs, particularly U.S. technology infrastructure. Chew’s campaign to win over Washington was undermined before it had even begun, when hours before the hearing, China’s Ministry of Commerce said the sale of the company’s U.S. division would require Beijing’s approval. “The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] believes they have the final say over your company,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R) during the hearing. “I have zero confidence in your assertion that ByteDance and TikTok are not beholden to the CCP.”
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-ceo-face-tough-questions-support-us-ban-grows-2023-03-23/
In The Back Pages: Women Holding Things
The Rest
→ The sometimes-violent protests that have roiled France since President Emmanuel Macron pushed his pension-overhaul bill through Parliament earlier this month have now coalesced into the first nationwide demonstration as workers of all stripes walked off the job on Thursday. Trains and buses were running minimal routes, schools were shuttered, flights were canceled, museums were closed, and storefronts in several cities were smashed and set ablaze by protestors as they clashed with police in riot gear. After surviving a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly, Macron said raising the retirement age was necessary to maintain France’s pension system, before he compared some of the street demonstrators to the mobs that attacked the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.
→ Thread of the Day:
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s other company, Block (formerly known as Square), saw its stock slump 20% to a three-year low after Hindenburg Research, an activist investment firm run by Nathan Anderson, took out a short position on Block and published the results of a two-year investigation that says Block’s lax oversight of its popular Cash App service facilitated massive fraud of government stimulus programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Anderson’s firm claims that despite obvious warnings, Block “facilitated billions in government payment fraud.”
According to a Bloomberg News analysis, Hindenburg Research has run this activist short-selling process on about 30 companies over the past three years, publishing investigations into alleged mismanagement or even criminal activity of public companies that have then seen their stocks drop by an average of 15% after the investigation is released.
Trevor Milton, the founder of electric car maker Nikola, was convicted of fraud after the release of a Hindenburg Research report in 2020.
→ Indian political-opposition leader Rahul Gandhi was sentenced to two years in prison on Thursday after a lower court in Ahmedabad found him guilty of defamation for using the surname of Prime Minister Narendra Modi when talking about a known fugitive businessman involved in government corruption. Critics say Gandhi’s case is a clear act of political revenge by the current administration, though it’s hardly hampered Modi’s popularity with voters, as he’s expected to win his third term next year by a wide margin. While defamation is a civil matter in India, there are also provisions that allow some instances to fall under the criminal code, with sentences up to two years in prison.
→ Video of the Day:
That’s Kato Crews, a U.S. magistrate judge nominated by the Biden administration for a federal trial-court position in Colorado, unable to answer confirmation hearing questions about Brady motions, the fundamental mechanism that allows defendants in criminal cases to compel prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence at trial. Brady motions were the result of the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brady v. Maryland and have become a bedrock in protecting defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. “I believe the Brady case involves something regarding the Second Amendment,” Crews said, before noting he hasn’t had to rule on a case involving a Brady motion previously. Exposing the extraordinary gaps in rudimentary legal knowledge has become something of a routine for Sen. John Kennedy. A 2017 Trump administration nominee, Matthew Petersen, withdrew himself from consideration after he failed to answer questions about a motion in limine from the Republican from Louisiana.
→ Media reports that Coinbase was hit with its second Wells Notice from the Security and Exchange Commission, which warns companies of possible forthcoming legal action, caused the crypto exchange’s stock to drop 11% on Thursday. Jefferies analyst Trevor Williams told the Financial Times that the SEC move was an “ominous sign” not just for the platform but also for crypto outfits generally, suggesting regulators might require certain types of coins and crypto vehicles to be registered as SEC securities. “We estimate around 35 per cent of net revenue is potentially at risk, depending on the SEC’s course of action,” Williams said.
→ Every year IHOP serves up 700 million pancakes and 1.5 million gallons of syrup, a high-volume buttermilk output that drew in two inmates on Monday after their escape from a Virginia prison. Using toothbrushes to break down a wall that contained the rebars they needed to crack a hole big enough for their escape, the men were found by police at the International House of Pancakes around 4 a.m. on a tip from other customers who’d become suspicious something was amiss.
→ Israeli chemist Raphael Mechoulam, who led groundbreaking research into the field of cannabis science, died earlier this month at his home in Jerusalem. Mechoulam, less interested in the popular cultural associations with the plant that flourished in the 1960s, investigated the chemical structures of cannabis and its psychoactive compound THC, which helped unlock details of other key structures in the plant, including CBD. Leading a team at Hebrew University, he also published pioneering work on the human body’s endocannabinoid system, which deals with sleep, memory, and appetite. “In a small country like Israel, if you want to do significant work, you should try to do something novel,” Mechoulam told Tablet in a 2019 profile of his work.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/raphael-mechoulam-israel-cannabis
→ More than half of all adults in West Virginia and Mississippi are obese, according to a new University of Chicago study. The obesity rates of the two states aren’t that much higher than the national average, either, with 42% of all U.S. adults now considered obese, according to the Body Mass Index scale. It’s worth noting, perhaps, that the study was made possible in part because of funding from Novo Nordisk, the makers of both insulin and the increasingly popular weight-loss aid Ozempic.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Literary Phenom Flames Out by Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel is a tedious progressive frog march through the horrors of the 20th century
The Joys of Garlic by Paola Gavin
It’s delicious, it’s good for you, and even the Talmud recommends adding it to your diet
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Women Holding Things
An interview with author and artist Maira Kalman
By Frances Brent
I recently went to the Mary Ryan Gallery in Chelsea to see a group of paintings—gouache on paper—by the artist and illustrator Maira Kalman. Born in 1949 in Tel Aviv, Kalman is a force of nature. Since her first children’s book, illustrating the lyrics to David Byrne’s “Stay Up Late,” she’s published extensively for children and adults, contributed covers for The New Yorker, designed costumes and sets for the Mark Morris Dance Company, played the part of the duck in Isaac Mizrahi’s production of Peter and the Wolf, and starred in the title role of her own short film, My Name Is Alice B. Toklas.
In the gallery, my eye was immediately drawn to a detailed image: “E. F. Benson’s garden room, destroyed in a German bombing raid during WWII.” What struck me was the beautiful arrangement of color within this scene of catastrophe. On one side of the picture, two men wearing green flat caps are shoveling debris. On the other, a grand piano, a radiator, and a straight-backed chair have haphazardly landed on the roof of a garden shed. The zigzagging red walls of the brick shed lead your eye toward the painted façade of a London house. Look carefully and you’ll see that the Suffolk pink surface is variegated with streaks of lavender, gray-blue, and orange, as well as patches of greenish shadows behind the workmen. All of this is brightened by the golden yellow caning of a broken chair and what appears to be yellow gorse in the foreground. Kalman is well known for such fusions of contradictory elements, and that was what I wanted to explore when, in late December, I invited her to my apartment to talk about her new book, Women Holding Things.
A picture book with text passages, Women Holding Things is filled with overlays of seemingly irreconcilable elements. The 85 lushly colored illustrations (some pulled from earlier books) are whimsically idiosyncratic and often bitingly funny. Partly a compendium of portraits and partly an inventory of things concrete and abstract, it’s also a truncated family memoir that includes jokes, secrets, and confessions. Kalman’s grandfather makes an appearance, wearing a beard long enough to stretch across the floor. Her father, with his collar open, Israeli-style, and his eyes closed, is portrayed as a strong young man holding his small daughter to his shoulder. On the facing text page Kalman writes about his generosity: “He held his side of the bargain. / He paid for everything. / We ate well. / We travelled well.” But she also lists his deficits: anger, withholding, paranoia, and betrayal of her mother. And she acknowledges the shortfall on her side: “What did he not hold? I am sad to say, / as I got older, my love and understanding.”
The book progresses associatively. It moves backward and forward, jumping in and out of chronological time. The ebullient, double-page spread of Kalman’s contemporary Kiki Smith holding honey in a garden, bursting with cone flowers, anemone, and larkspur, is followed by three pictures of dour Hortense Cézanne and then a bowl of Cézanne-like cherries. I asked Kalman if she was thinking about time as she put the book together and she said, “I always say, that’s the only subject there is. Everything falls under that. What do you do with your time. How much time do you have. What do you do with your time? Where did the time go? There’s never enough time. Even now that I think I have all the time in the world, that’s delusional. And as you get older there is an interior monologue. How much time do you have? Is it 10 years? Is it 20 years? Is it one day? The mystery’s very present.”
When I asked if that was particularly the case for this project, she talked about the pandemic. “That had a lot to do with the distillation of these ideas because, of course, time stopped and the world stopped. So, what do you do with that information? And on a very pragmatic level, ‘What do you do with your day?’ Because I was with my son and his wife in our house upstate, we wondered if there was a possibility to help other people during this time. How would that happen? So we created limited edition booklets to raise money for causes we felt were important. And that sense of ownership was an amazing gift from that time. We did a booklet about trees. A booklet about bed. And one about women holding things. That booklet expanded into this longer version. I had more to say about women and home and family and loss and all of those things that we lived, and live through. So that was how it began.”
I was curious about the opening of the book, in which she writes about holding as an act of kindness or relatedness:
And perhaps someone you are walking with
will ask you to hold something for a minute
while they tie their shoelaces.
“Of course” is the answer
“As long as you like.”
But the visual starting point, the first illustration, is the rather surreal image of a woman, in a dark green dress and red Spanish dancing shoes, holding a chicken. I wondered how this odd image came about. Was it about relatedness or was it questioning relatedness?
“The images that I collect have an appeal that I can’t explain,” Kalman said. “When I look at the paintings and at the sequence, it is more a following of instinct. My son and I changed the order many, many times until we felt that the emotional narrative was clear. The woman holding the chicken had an immediate appeal. Very grounded and very absurd. Things like that speak to me. The way most things happen, or a lot of things happen, is that people send me images that they think I’ll like, that have my name on them. I have something like 50,000 photographs that I’ve taken myself or collected, and that’s an incredible range of imagery to look at and to say, yes, that’s going to be a painting. I don’t have any memory of who sent it to me or how it appeared, but the minute I saw it I thought this is a terrific image and I knew someday I’d use it.”
“And the woman holding the chicken?” I asked. “She’s followed by the woman holding a garden shears. What are you saying about holding there?”
“The woman holding the shears was a famous gardener, Lady Rhoda Birley,” Kalman explained. “I love the self-confidence. ‘I know what I’m doing,’ she seems to be saying. ‘I know what flowers to cut and I know what I’m holding.’ I look at that and I think, that’s a good role model. There are strong women and there are vulnerable women. I like them all.”
Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell are similarly strong women who make important appearances in the book. I asked Kalman if she thought of them in the same vein as Lady Birley, the gardener with the shears. Did they serve as guardians?
She agreed: “When I encounter characters like Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell (Cecil Beaton said you couldn’t take bad pictures of them—they are extraordinary models), I think maybe the overriding feature is that they couldn’t care less what people thought of them. Or it seemed they couldn’t care less what people thought of them. They had phenomenal self-confidence. This air of eccentricity of personality is intoxicating, particularly in literature. Edith is in practically everything I’ve done, even Next Stop Grand Central. I’m more interested in the persona than in the work. The same thing with Gertrude Stein. I love The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Four Saints—fantastically enjoyable—and The Mother of Us All—that’s also terrific. A person who just goes ahead in what she believes in and is not swayed, ‘I believe in myself and I know what I’m doing!’ I like that.”
I mentioned another image in the book, “boy standing / in front of a / blackboard / full of numbers / holding his hands / while a man / plays the accordion.” The illustration looks like a still from a French new wave film and shows a child in distress. His head’s bent down and you sense that he’s listening to a teacher’s voice: “This just won’t do, your answer’s not good enough.” I asked if that was her demon, that voice?
“I don’t know anybody who’s creating anything who doesn’t have that voice,” Kalman said. “I haven’t met a human being who doesn’t have that struggle and that insecurity of ‘What am I doing?’ and ‘How am I doing it?’ … a daily struggle: ‘Is it good enough? Is it funny? Is it smart? Is it interesting?’”
That gave me the opportunity to ask about the darker side to her images.
“The dark side is present in the light all the time,” Kalman said. “The two of them are together for me. I can’t distinguish. In my books, that’s unavoidable. I inevitably bring in the Holocaust. We were born a few minutes after the Holocaust. You’d have to make a leap not to be imbued with it. It was a daily presence in my family. For my father particularly, who lost his family. And the population in Israel, where I was born, was made of people who had lost their lives in a true sense. So, it was not only my family, but it was everybody, it was everywhere. A whole country built on this sense of loss, this sense of striving not to be annihilated, that’s an extraordinary place to have been born. So, in moments of great lightness, there’s an undertone of some kind of sorrow and, vice versa, that sorrow can lead to moments of great joy.”
We looked together at one of the most startling illustrations in the book, “mother holding the hand of her child / as they are being killed by Nazi soldiers.” Like the picture of E. F. Benson’s garden room, there’s meticulous artistry in the tragic composition. The leafy foliage of a forest comes alive with spots and smears of green paint. Smoke from the rifles collects in a vapor that’s stippled like white cherry blossoms. I asked if the picture was based on the photograph taken in the Ukraine, in Mariupol, in 1941, now made famous by historian Wendy Lower’s book, The Ravine.
Kalman nodded, “Yes, it’s from that photograph … there’s the shock of the moment, of that moment, and also the shock that I felt when I saw the photograph, knowing instantly that eventually I would do a painting of it. I had an instant recognition. It was not difficult to work on and it was very sad at the same time. My job was to paint it. That allows me to enter that world, but also to lose myself in the work.”
“And then there’s the great joy in your work,” I said, “You bring it in through color, your use of color. Can we talk about the inspiration of Matisse?”
“Matisse is my strongest inspiration,” Kalman said, “But I have to put in [French painters Pierre] Bonnard and [Édouard] Vuillard. These are influences that I try to escape, but I can’t. Of course, every artist is relating and working with influences. Also, Ludwig Bemelmans [author and illustrator of the Madeline books], in a very real way, is part of that group. Bemelmans wrote for adults and children, wrote and painted, and traveled … there’s something about the style of Bemelmans which speaks to me, you know, he’s also influenced by Vuillard and those painters.
“And why do you think you turn to them?” I asked.
“I think I resonate to all of them because they were struggling with finding a new way of expressing themselves … they knew a lot more than I do about painting, they were great painters, but what I think I understand is that they’re trying to find a truth in how they paint … and some styles you just respond to … you vibrate to a certain color palette or a certain way of drawing a line, or isolating a chair in a room and saying, I need to paint that chair.
I wondered if these artists were solving particular problems.
“They are great forces of un-painting,” Kalman said. “Which is a very complicated thing to try to do because it’s always a struggle between painting too much and not painting enough. So, you have to decide, ‘Where is the not-doing?’ And ‘How much not-doing can I do? How much empty space?’ And ‘How much undefined space?’”
We looked at a double-page spread that had puzzled me: “Woman holding baby in garden.”
“I’m glad you reminded me of that,” Kalman said. “Yes, the woman’s feeding the baby and there’s very little definition of her face. So, the conversation with oneself is: ‘What do you need to show?’ And I think that maybe, as I get older, I think I’m more self-confident about not having to show everything. You know, many painters don’t do the faces and who has the time for hands? That would take me a lifetime, to do hands.”
I told her how a friend of mine said she had created an “imaginarium” with so many characters we’ve come to know throughout her books. Though, in fact, it seems she’s reality-bound.
Kalman concurred, “My dearest inspiration is what’s happening all around.”
“And the next project?” I asked.
“I’m thinking about writing more stories about remorse with paintings of flowers and fruit. It takes a good amount of remorse to paint a good bowl of fruit,” she answered.
This is my first time to comment ... Great stories with good insight !!!