1.
“Let’s Open This Up,” January 15–28
New York’s latest cover story featured a practical guide to the increasingly mainstream world of polyamory. Nancy Rommelmann tweeted, “I feel like it all ends in grubbiness and tears somewhere
in Park Slope,” while sex columnist and
non-monogamy advocate Dan Savage joked, “Okay, I take it all back.” Some hosts of The View were also skeptical. Sunny Hostin asked, “Some of these people are married, have children, and have jobs: How do you have the time to do that with, let alone with one man, several men or women?” Whoopi Goldberg, though, noted, “If you can chew gum and walk, you can do more than one person.” Writer Magdalene J. Taylor observed that “the more polyamory gets discussed by the mainstream the more I respect the swingers. No philosophizing about the ethics of the lifestyle, no self-pitying about the identity, just couples who keep it simple and like to sleep with each other.” She wasn’t the only one to comment on the proliferation of polyamory coverage. Rainer Diana Hamilton said, “Every article about non-monogamy is a psyop designed to make traditional marriage suddenly appealing.” Academic Tyler Austin Harper argued that “the normalization of polyamory that is currently underway isn’t a threat to, but is the ultimate expression of, bourgeois individualism … It’s downstream from a culture that is allergic to limits and personal sacrifice and that embraces the idea that human beings are fungible commodities to whom no permanent attachment is owed.” Foreign Policy editor James Palmer countered, “The rash of coverage of polyamory isn’t because of capitalist atomization. It’s because half of the world’s most annoying polyamorists live in NYC while the other half live in SF and so do journalists.” Some were more forgiving. Davey Davis tweeted, “Polyamory isn’t for everyone, but what I don’t get is the inability to see it as, for many, a partial response to socioeconomic conditions.” Screenwriter-director Ingrid Jungermann said, “As a poly person, I’d really love to see more articles where the focus isn’t on anxiety and what could go wrong.” Of the cover image, by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, National Review’s Madeleine Kearns wrote that “cats are widely recognized to be domesticated sociopaths, a perception the image does very little to challenge.”
2.
“Do You Remember the Ecstasy of Electing Joe Biden?”
In his essay examining the fracturing of the anti-Trump coalition, Jonathan Chait asked, “Do You Remember the Ecstasy of Electing Joe Biden?” The New York Times’ Nick Confessore called it a “sharp … analysis of the exhaustion of American politics,” and Politico’s Jonathan Martin said it was “a devastating assessment of Biden’s challenge.” Helder Gil said, “Excellent read … on how the far left, the far right, and the center right all seem to be united in making sure Biden loses reelection — all to own the libs.” Journalist Brian Beutler wrote, “With Trump defeated but not vanquished, Dems had one overriding political imperative: Maintain an anti-authoritarian coalition. Instead they tried to move on to ‘normal politics,’ and watched the coalition crumble. If it can’t be reassembled, all’s lost.” Novelist Joseph O’Neill said the story failed “to reckon with the unmentionable elephant in the political room. Namely Dems lucked into the largest, most effective, most (self)organized grassroots movement in the modern U.S. history. For 4 years, millions of liberals put careers on hold, emptied their wallets, lost sleep, to do what they could to defeat the GOP (not just Trump). What did Dems do? They did their utmost to dismiss their own grassroots. From Biden downward, DC Dems pretended that the Blue Wave had never happened & embraced a bipartisan, business-as-usual, normal-service-has-resumed politics. Trump could no longer be mentioned; a fictitious normalcy ruled. This gaslighting has been Biden’s greatest weakness.” But John Frame II said, “I may be ‘exhausted,’ but the choice is clear: freedom under a Republic with (small ‘d’) democratic principles, or, an autocracy we might not survive. I choose the Republic.”
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