In 2014, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates became a household name with his “The Case for Reparations,” the 16,000-word The Atlantic article exploring the devastating financial and social impact of redlining throughout the 20th century on Black Americans. After publishing his non-fiction books Between the World and Me in 2015 and We Were Eight Years in Power in 2016, he moved into writing comic books, movies, and a novel.
Next week, he publishes his latest book, The Message, detailing his recent trips to Senegal, South Carolina, and Israel. In advance of the book, New York Magazine sat down with TNC for a long conversation about his book, with a particular emphasis on his stance on the war in Palestine.
Coates traveled to the region on a ten-day trip in the summer of 2023. “It was so emotional,” he told me. “I would dream about being back there for weeks.” He had known, of course, in an abstract sense, that Palestinians lived under occupation. But he had been told, by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel was a democracy — “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.
For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a “world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy.” And this world was made possible by his own country: “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”
That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
What matters to Coates is not what will happen to his career now — to the script sales, invitations from the White House, his relationships with his former colleagues at The Atlantic and elsewhere. “I’m not worried,” he told me, shrugging his shoulders. “I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write it, I am fucking worthless.”
Every time a Chappell Roan quote goes viral we get a lesson in one of TOTI’s founding mottos “multiple things can be true at once,” as well as its corollary, “multiple things can be annoying at once.”
Even Bradley Whitford chimed in with his best Josh Lyman interpretation:
Of the prints [whose proceeds go towards aid to Palestine], Roan says very carefully: “It’s just my duty to help send resources to a community that is absolutely being destroyed.” And even though Kamala Harris used her deliriously goofy Femininomenon in a campaign video (“What we really need is a femininomenon!”) and seemingly copied the design of an official Roan baseball cap, Roan hasn’t endorsed her. And, in June, while dressed as Lady Liberty, Roan told the crowd at Governor’s Ball festival in New York that she had declined an invitation to perform at a White House Pride event: “We want liberty, justice and freedom for all. When you do that, that’s when I’ll come.”
“I have so many issues with our government in every way,” she says. “There are so many things that I would want to change. So I don’t feel pressured to endorse someone. There’s problems on both sides. I encourage people to use your critical thinking skills, use your vote – vote small, vote for what’s going on in your city.” The change she wants to see in the US in this election year, she says instantly, is “trans rights. They cannot have cis people making decisions for trans people, period.”
I hope Chappell Roan comes around on voting for Kamala, uses her platform to say so, and then takes a break from doing interviews; I would like the Harris campaign to find a way for her to take a stronger stance on the horrific tragedy in Palestine without alienating swing voters; for the sake of general media literacy – not to mention this newsletter – I’d like these viral accounts to link to their dang sources. Am I reaching for the stars here? Not really.
Over the weekend, an clip from the offices of Devil Wears Prada-era of Vogue, ostensibly posted to demonstrated how Gen Z-coded the late ’90s It Girls’ fashion appears through a modern lens, began to circulate.
But the clip’s virality took a pivot:
Last week was a big week for John Mulaney!
Five days later, he performed at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, and didn’t hold back:
From the San Francisco Standard:
“Let me get this straight,” John Mulaney said. “You’re hosting a ‘future of AI’ event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?”
Everyone inside the auditorium at the Moscone Center groaned. Any notion that the award-winning comedian would play the corporate gig safe (and clean) were thrown out the window Thursday, when Mulaney, closing the Dreamforce festivities, started roasting his host, Salesforce, and the audience sitting right in front of him.
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,’” Mulaney said.
“If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die,” he said, looking out to the crowd from center stage. “So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
He added, “Can AI sit there in a fleece vest? Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar?”
“Some of the vaguest language ever devised has been used here in the last three days,” he continued. “The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.”
Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter aren’t the only two pop girlies the pop culture accounts are posting about:
Finally, I know at least a few TOTI readers tuned into last week’s Survivor just to watch Jon Lovett g** v**** o** f****. Looks like we weren’t alone:
But also, lol:
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