In today’s newsletter, the Trump Administration’s wholesale rejection of eighty years of U.S. foreign policy. But, first, a piece from Kathryn Schulz about facing her fear of the creatures that eat half a billion pounds of meat per year. Plus:
Kathryn Schulz is, like many of us, petrified of those eight-legged, often venomous cannibals that live in our homes. “My feelings about spiders were the opposite of those old Wild West posters: I didn’t want them dead or alive,” she writes, in a piece for the 100th Anniversary Issue. This past fall, she decided to confront her fears, picking up “The Lives of Spiders,” a book by Ximena Nelson, a professor of animal behavior. “Part textbook, part encyclopedia, part coffee-table book for those whose taste in décor runs toward shabby eek,” Schulz writes, the book is rich in scientific detail and in “endearing if not entirely contagious enthusiasm” about the arachnid world.
Schulz learns many fun facts about spiders: that, collectively, they eat at least half a billion pounds of meat per year (more than the amount consumed by humans); that they have a penchant for postcoital cannibalism; that one species lives underwater, attaching an air bubble to its web; that some have been known to travel hundreds of miles on a parachute of their own silk, occasionally landing on ships in the middle of the ocean. She’s coming around on spiders—at least theoretically. “It’s humbling to see a creature I’ve always reviled rendered so beautifully,” Schulz realizes. “Humbling, too, to be reminded of what none of us should ever forget, that reflexively hating anything alien to us is the beginning of evil.”
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Richard BrodyBrody has been reviewing movies for The New Yorker since 1999.
As I have written in a review this week, the theatrical release on Feb. 21 of the director Zeinabu irene Davis’s only fiction feature, “Compensation,” which premièred at Sundance in 2000, is cause for celebration—however belated. Though she hasn’t directed another dramatic feature to date, she did make a noteworthy documentary, “Spirits of Rebellion,” from 2016 (streaming on the Metrograph site). The film is both a work of journalistic investigation and a personal story. It relates the history and the legacy of one of the most important movements in modern cinema: the so-called L.A. Rebellion, a group of Black independent filmmakers who attended film school at U.C.L.A. in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Their movies depict Black life far more freely and candidly than mainstream Hollywood has done, and they developed original forms to embody their subjects. Davis, who is herself a part of the group, interviews many of these directors, such as Julie Dash (whose 1991 feature, “Daughters of the Dust,” Davis cites as the first by a Black woman to be widely released in the U.S.), Charles Burnett (“Killer of Sheep”), Billy Woodberry (“Bless Their Little Hearts”), Larry Clark (“As Above, So Below,” “Passing Through”), and Haile Gerima (“Bush Mama,” “Sankofa”). Their conversations reveal the obstacles that they’ve all faced in trying to get their films made and shown. Davis also discusses the origins of “Compensation” along with its rejection by the industry. “Spirits of Rebellion” tells the story of a collective body of work, largely neglected in its own time, that’s been crafted for the ages. Read Brody’s review of “Compensation” »
J. D. Vance and Pete Hegseth have each rebuked NATO, and Europe more generally, in recent speeches that were “not just verbal lashings of America’s allies but a wholesale rejection of eighty years of U.S. foreign policy,” Dexter Filkins writes. Filkins explores how NATO came to be, and what happens when those relationships are broken. Read the story »
P.S. The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to the public on this day in 1872. A couple of years ago, the cartoonist Will McPhail took a wander through the galleries, illustrating what he saw—and overheard. “Short king,” a woman said, admiring a standing sarcophagus. 🎨
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