Join us at Cabinet Magazine HQ to celebrate the launch of Dominic Pettman’s new book, Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (Zero Books).

The panel (Pettman, Hugh Raffles, Masha Tupitsyn) will discuss their own totems, cultural taboos, and the various new and old technologies which enable them.

Are totems merely a thing of the distant past? Or might it be that our sleek new machines are producing totemic forces which we are only beginning to recognize? This book asks to what degree today’s media technologies are haunted by a Freudian ghost, functioning as totems or taboos (or both). By isolating five case-studies (rabbits in popular culture, animated creatures that go “off-program,” virtual lovers, jealous animal spirit guides, and electronic paradises), Look at the Bunny highlights and explores today’s techno-totemic environment. In doing so, it explores how nonhuman avatars are increasingly expected to shepherd us beyond our land-locked identities, into a risky – sometimes ecstatic – relationship with the Other.

Wed, May 8
Cabinet Magazine
300 Nevins St.
Brooklyn, NY
7 pm
Facebook RSVP here 

Turning essays into #longreads isn’t just about the future viability of the form; it’s changing the reasons we read and write

When I read “My Gucci Addiction,” Buzz Bissinger’s unexpected shopaholic leather-daddy confession in GQ, the first thing I thought of was a smiling, spritely man on a computer screen, masturbating with a pair of spotless white tennis shoes. I was at a college party, huddled drinks in hand with a bunch of friends around a laptop open to the Chat Roulette. We talked to an on-duty German military officer about the Red Army Faction and watched an insistent 14-year-old prove his joint-rolling skills before we hit upon the shoe masturbator. His mic was off, but he communicated nonverbally that he wanted us to watch him jerk off using a pair of sneakers on his hands. Requests like these were blamed for the swift death of Chat Roulette, but in the obituaries we rarely heard about the exhibitionists who were successful, who found curious and willing audiences. We told him to go for it, and boy did he.

In America, Ai Weiwei isn’t a dissident or a rebel, he’s a foreign policy asset and an artist of art’s limits

“What can they do besides exile or make me disappear? They have no imagination or creativity.” — Ai Weiwei

Large solo shows are risky for conceptual artists: too much coherence across the work and they might come off like a one-trick pony; too little, a dilettante. Wall after wall of polka dots makes a viewer feel like the butt of a joke called art, while a haphazard jumble of paintings, photographs, and sculptures raises the suspicion that there must be something second-rate in the bunch. An artist working in a single medium can develop themes or patterns, but for conceptual artists, their work too often collapses into a binary of one or not-one ideas. Either you can describe what they do in a sentence, or you don’t bother.

Down this narrow tightrope unicycles “Ai Wei Wei: According to What?” at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., with a balance that would make any daredevil jealous. It’s not a stretch to call Ai the world’s most famous living artist, as the New York Times did. He might well be the best-known artist in America. While his big-name market competitors have mined obscurantism and self-parody in a constant struggle to create stakes for their work, Ai’s collisions with Chinese censors make his significance readily — and internationally — apparent. CNN certainly wasn’t seeking out Damien Hirst for election commentary.

Inside the exhibit, the black-and-white photos of Ai hanging out in the East Village in the ’80s have an Instagram scale that’s in stark contrast with the spaceless wallpapering shots of the Beijing Olympic Stadium that he helped design. One radius of the Hirshhorn doughnut is devoted to Ai’s vases. Where Damien Hirst plays with diamonds, Ai  toys with artifacts: a Neolithic vase with a painted silver Coca-Cola logo. Against the gallery’s outer wall is the larger-than-life photo triptych of Ai dropping a Han Dynasty urn to shatter on the ground.

Though the show occupies the large second-floor gallery of the Hirshhorn (and the 12 great bronze lollipops that make up Ai’s “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” surround the outside fountain in the eye of the building’s hurricane architecture), “According to What?” still can feel like a zoo whose big cats are kept uncomfortably close. This is, after all, an artist who once memorably filled the Tate’s Turbine Hall with 100 million (possibly toxic) sunflower seeds. The expressly political balances with the innocuously abstract, but while the content is evenly weighed, the sheer volume threatens to overwhelm its bounds. It has the unnatural vibe of an all-star team or rock supergroup. Installation art, like other apex predators, demands a lot of space.

Ai is a conceptual artist in a more straightforward sense than most of his contemporaries. It’s possible to place his installations in part because his more notable pieces have specific referents: a pile of painted ceramic river crabs puns off the similarity of the animal’s name with the word for “harmony” — a euphemism used to justify Chinese government censorship. Thousands of crustaceans abut large stacks of rebar salvaged from schools that collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, an indictment of the government’s shoddy building practices and equally shoddy cover-up. Ai has been investigating the truth behind the earthquake’s consequences and he’s listed the results in classically grim fashion: floor-to-ceiling names of the dead. Overhead, there curves an undulating centipede of children’s backpacks, representing those lost. It’s not the full piece, but the viewer gets the idea.

In Ai, American pundits find a rare bird indeed: he’s a well-respected and politically conscious international artist who doesn’t have a grudge against the United States. In fact, he kind of likes the good old U.S.A. In an interview with New York Times columnist and Inspector Clouseau of imperialism Nicholas Kristof, Ai said, “China still needs help from the U.S. To insist on certain values, that is the role of the U.S.” When goaded to complain, he faults America for not dealing with China more actively on human rights.

This is certainly how America likes to think of itself — as a global force for liberal enlightenment values like free speech — especially in comparison with China, its largest rival and creditor. But artists, including Ai, have been quick to point out the USA’s inconsistent moralizing. What good is artistic freedom to a drone strike victim?

As a liberal critic of the Chinese government, Ai makes a great addition to the American line. The same country — and it is very much the same country — that denied Paul Robeson his passport for fear he would shed too much light on his home uses China’s refusal to let Ai attend the Hirshhorn opening as just another example of backwards chauvinist totalitarianism. Wrenched from his context as an internal critic, Ai’s pieces take on new meaning, and a new violence. His pile of rebar wreckage tells a different story when displayed in a country that spent over $100 million remaking and watching Red Dawn as a paranoid fantasy about Chinese invasion.

If we think of America as a neutral space, a Switzerland for the celebration of the world’s art, it blinds us to historical context. We’re not that far from the time when General Douglas MacArthur told a French reporter, “Give me a handful of bombs and I’ll take care of China’s industrial bases.” When it comes to art, Americans view ourselves as cosmopolitans, citizens of the world; we forget that everyone else doesn’t have cause to draw our self-serving separation between policy and pretension.

When the National Art Museum of China rises next to the Bird’s Nest Stadium Ai helped design, how would Americans react if they displayed a giant posthumous show by David Wojnarowicz? How would we read a cross covered in ants in Beijing? We wouldn’t see a pile of American rubble or a scorched flag in a Chinese museum as a celebration of transnational artistic vision, it would appear to us as thinly veiled aggression, as a provocation. China’s motives would seem obvious and opportunistic in equal measure.

Ai is no naive painter stuck between two superpowers in a bipolar world. The artist is clear as can be about his geopolitical thoughts in Weiwei-isms, a poorly named collection of Tweets and other short statements turned aphorisms published by Princeton Press and excerpted in the global market’s official paper, The Wall Street Journal. “Everything is art. Everything is politics.” is embossed on the black back cover in gold. He’s upfront about the collusion between his home country and America: “Because of the economic crisis, China and the United States are bound together. This is a totally new phenomenon, and nobody will fight for ideology anymore. It’s all about business.”

Though the lines between nations are blurred, Ai’s calculus is simple. In Weiwei-ism after Weiwei-ism, he puts freedom of expression on a pedestal. It’s circular logic: artists need freedom of expression so they can further the cause of freedom expression. Art is for politics, politics is for art. He’s been willing to offer a tacit endorsement of American policy — the headline on his CNN op-ed was “Despite flaws, America should be proud” — under a kind of Cold War enemy-of-my-enemy logic.

But there’s more than one way to tame an artist, and liberal democracies have developed their own strategies of containment for the unruly. The deal liberalism has made with art is that artists can say whatever they want as long as they don’t touch anything that doesn’t belong to them. And artists have to compete for attention with multibillion-dollar corporations bent on entertaining their way into viewers’ pockets. That way, the risk to current structures of power is minimized without disturbing the state’s ostensible commitment to freedom of expression. And when art struggles in its fuzzy handcuffs, it generates new images for sale.

For outstanding examples of tamed art, you needn’t look further than the Hirshhorn’s basement. There, Barbara Kruger’s giant anticonsumerist slogans cover the floors and walls, “MONEY MAKES MONEY” on one escalator and “YOU WANT IT. YOU BUY IT. YOU FORGET IT.” on another. They’re blunt, leaving little to the imagination; it’s advertising against advertising, and good work at that. But the room’s punchline is off to one side: Here the giant slogans are miniaturized and made portable on T-shirts and tote bags.  You can actually buy “I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM” on a postcard. No art show, even at a state-supported museum, is complete without the merch table.

In one of the basement projector rooms, there’s a film by Democracia, a Madrid-based arts collective. Ser y Durar (To Be and To Last) is a video of Spanish parkour runners as they traverse the city outside the implied routes. It looks like a very cool Nike ad; their hoodies are emblazoned with emblems the creators explain “refer to the working class, internationalism, anarchy, secret societies, and revolution.” Referring to revolution is something late capitalist branding agencies are really good at: your cell phone carrier is revolutionary, your body spray is revolutionary, your nail polish remover is revolutionary. Art, however, merely refers.

Sinead Murphy describes liberalism’s pacification of art well in her book The Art Kettle: “‘freedom’ as a regulative ideal tends, once it begins to operate at the level of form rather than content, to reduce political action to a mere performance of action, to remake it as an ‘installation’ with merely aesthetic import, and thereby to manage very well its scope and its effects.” Duchamp’s readymades proved that, within the rules, anything could be fetishized as art, any object could become art and earn protection as such. But once a toilet becomes art, the process isn’t reversible. Freedom of artistic expression is the freedom to create fetish objects, to invest a thing with enough value that it can’t help but be a representation, a reference. Ai marvels in Weiwei-isms about what he can get away with under the label of “art,” but he doesn’t attempt to probe why that’s the case, to measure the costs.

As a case study, let’s look at Ai’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn.

On the surface level, the photo set appears to mock artistic fetishism: Ai looks like he could not possibly give a fuck as he lets the valuable artifact shatter on the ground. There’s a sublime disregard in the pictures; it’s art against art like Kruger’s sentences are ads against ads. But as an artist, Ai can’t destroy art, he can only make more. From one urn, he gets three pictures. If I went into the Hirshhorn, grabbed one of the photos off the wall, and let it fall to ground like I didn’t give a fuck, I would be arrested and taken to jail. It’s only freedom of expression if you break something you own, otherwise it’s vandalism.

One true vandal learned this lesson (or taught it) very publicly when Vladimir Umanets was sentenced to two years in prison for writing “a potential work of yellowism” on a Mark Rothko painting in London’s Tate Modern. Yellowism is the idea that if anything can become art regardless of its use value, then we could imagine a third category of stuff past art, in light of which the art/non-art distinction dissolves. Both are equally potential works of yellowism, just like a soup can and a urinal are equally art objects. Umanets writing “a potential work of yellowism” on a Rothko is the same as Duchamp Sharpie-ing “a potential work of art” on a toilet while he takes a piss. Except Umanets isn’t an artist. We know he’s not an artist because he’s in jail in England, and England, Ai would remind us, has freedom of expression.

Umanets wasn’t looking for freedom of expression, but freedom from expression, out from under the artistic injunction to replace what you destroy. He wanted to break without buying, but that’s not in liberalism’s deal. And no one cries for a vandal.

Because Umanets is a vandal and not an artist, there won’t be any complaints from the U.S. State Department. Because this is England and not Russia, there won’t be a Human Rights Watch report, as there was for the band Pussy Riot when they were arrested for trespassing. Even anti-capitalist arts writers called for his head on a platter.

Art, like the market, promises that you can do anything you want, as long as you keep your hands to yourself. You can put an iPad in a blender, but you can’t just take one off a store shelf to do it. You can break a Han Dynasty urn, but not a framed picture of someone else breaking a Han Dynasty urn.

In America, Ai Wei Wei’s pieces are paired with their imagined absence in China. It’s a single gigantic work of implied distinction, a portrait of freedom of expression drawn in negative space. In the Hirshhorn he is to art as art is to capitalism: a reminder of what’s allowed.

If we view love as a complex and contradictory social script rather than shorthand for the highest good, it’s hard to separate the right to care from the right to kill.

Michael Haneke’s Amour isn’t an ironically titled film about love’s entropy, how a relationship cools over time; it’s not about acrimony, withering, or divorce. It’s about storybook romance, undying true love, the idealized couple. One summary of the movie goes like this: An old man loves his old wife. As she suffers multiple strokes and dementia sets in, he patiently devotes himself to her care before finally making the tough decision to obey her wishes and euthanize her. At first look, palliative romance is a strange choice for a director whose subject matter usually ranges from dark stories about children (Time of The Wolf, The White Ribbon) to really, really dark stories about children (Benny’s Video, The Piano Teacher). It sounds more like Mitch Albom than Haneke. Amour is, on paper, sweet. On screen, it’s something else entirely.

The movie begins with a police battering ram knocking open the doors to the bourgeois home where the story is set. Inside, investigators find a room with doors sealed from the outside with packing tape. In the room, they find the body of an old woman arranged lovingly, holding flowers across her abdomen, as is the habit of well-dressed corpses. They’re overcome by the smell.

Another summary of Amour goes like this: A man murders his wife.

The old man and old woman are Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva). They are a successful retired French couple, they have a good enough relationship with their successful adult daughter. They eat together, they go out together, they are the stuff of Hallmark cards and inspirational posters. But one morning at breakfast Anne has an episode, and from there her health — mental and physical — rapidly deteriorates. Georges is willing to do whatever it takes to care for her; he even keeps his promise not to take Anne back to the hospital. He helps her through arduous physical therapy despite its toll on his aged frame; he feeds and cleans her with an admirable minimum of expressed frustration; he sings children’s songs with her so she can enjoy her last fragmented moments of lucidity. Georges does everything we could possibly hope for from a loving partner with a dying spouse. And then one day he pulls a pillow over Anne’s face and holds it there until she stops kicking.

Saying true love isn’t real is like saying money isn’t real, or race isn’t real, or the desire for deodorant isn’t real. You might be right in a base, materialist sort of way, but nations build policy not only on the existence but the desirability of love. The loving and stable two-parent household, bound together indefinitely, is society’s implied ideal, from the birth certificate to the obituary announcement. Little kids chant the story of social reproduction like a mantra: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage.

Even if it’s “just a social construct, babe,” true love structures the world in very real ways, not least of which in the way it organizes our stories. Coupling gives narratives the appearance of a clean finality, the establishment of a bipartite they that allows for happily ever after. People hope to end up together and grow old. But the end in end up together usually refers to just an intermediate stage. Love is everlasting, but bodies are not. How do Prince Charming and the Princess die?

We know one version from the local news and The Notebook. Here are some headlines from the past few months: “Couple dies days apart after 33 years together,” “Jersey City couple die 2 days apart after 55 years of marriage,” “Wed 46 years, they died three days apart,” “Couple married 65 years die hours apart,” “Couple of 62 years die within hours of each other.” It’s one of the most reliable local stories there is. You can look up the same line with any number from 20 to 70 and find a variant. What makes a story about two deaths coming close together so heartwarming that papers repeat it again and again? The titles vary according to understandable confusion as to whether couples are singular or plural in death. If they die simultaneously, as in February’s Des Moines, Iowa, story “Couple married 72 years dies holding hands,” then the singular is safe. But how many hours after death does the singular dissolve?

If love has the power to legally and semantically meld two people into one, then dying leaves a monstrous remnant. As Anne deteriorates, Georges’s tender care begins to look more like torture, independent of his intent. She can’t drink water on her own, so he has to pour it into her mouth with a sippy cup. When she doesn’t want to drink, he has to force her. It’s gruesome, but perhaps more honest than signing a form to allow a hospital orderly to do it. One of the arguments for gay marriage is that a patient’s true love should be the one making custodial medical decisions. Only love entitles one adult to make another suffer.

What’s so disturbing about Amour is that the situation is only exceptional because Georges shoulders the burden of killing Anne personally. When was the last time you heard someone say they wanted to be kept alive by machines for as long as medically possible? Do you want to force your beloved to shove food down your throat over your own demented protestations? In a summary, it’s easy to describe Georges as euthanizing Anne, but the way Haneke shoots it, the killing is a murder. It would have been easy enough to depict Anne with an oxygen tube Georges could pinch, tears running down his cheek. Instead he struggles the life out of her. With her last breaths Anne flails violently, displaying real vitality for the first time in the film.

I don’t know about France, but in America, had he hospitalized his wife, within a short amount of time he likely could have ended her life without violating the law or even informal expectations. As the Terri Schiavo case made clear, the final use of medical custody is sometimes to let die. Once again, Georges’s choice is unsavory but arguably more loving; he won’t sacrifice a minute with her in order to distance himself from her death.

Is there such a thing as a loving murder? At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates says no. After Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins and then himself, a police spokesman said he “cared a lot” about her. Coates disagreed on empirical grounds: “Should we intentionally kill the person we claim to love (or care about) I think it’s fair to say that this ultimate act of unlove, makes all other acts of love irrelevant.” The philosophe Alain Badiou is perhaps a bit more honest than Coates when he confesses

There are murders and suicides prompted by love. In fact, at its own level, love is not necessarily any more peaceful than revolutionary politics. A truth is not something that is constructed in a garden of roses. Never! Love has its own agenda of contradictions and violence.

But this admission comes in a longer dialogue called In Praise of Love, and Badiou spends more time conceiving of love as the repetition of not breaking up, the “successful struggle against separation.” He worries that online dating is rationalizing love, taking the danger out. Another aging continental philosopher of love, Franco Berardi, agrees, urging us to throw off our digital shackles and make sweet tender love in a hammock. Love’s costs are taken into account but justified by its metaphysical truth value, which I suppose suffices for a Platonist. But while Badiou alludes to love’s relationship with death, he refuses to draw it out as Haneke does, to the space of necessary conclusion.

Till death do us part may be in the marriage oath, but I can’t live without you is the true slogan of undying love. Ask any seventh grader for a story about true love, and odds are you’d get Romeo and Juliet or Twilight, both of which end with couples united in death. Plato rebuked Orpheus not for looking back and reburying his Eurydice but for lacking the courage to join her forever among the dead. At the end of The Hunger Games, Katniss and Peeta perform love by threatening simultaneous suicide. Titanic needs the bifurcated timeline so Rose can symbolically drown herself and join Jack in the afterlife. And with its bloodsoaked 50 pages of love as sexy suicide pact, it would be a crime to leave Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism out.

The love-is-death story is so common we could do nothing but list sentence-long summaries of examples for weeks. In its lasting depictions, love is a way to die more often than a way to live. In Amour, Georges leaves home for the last time following a vision of Anne (Into dementia? Into death?), and it’s hard to imagine he has much time left in front of him. True love, we’ve learned, is a death sentence.

Looking at love death-first shrinks the distinction between traditional romantic relationships and progressive variations on the model that locate its flaw in sexual jealousy. As Clémence X Clementine writes in the feminist journal Lies, “Polyamory is a multiplication of the couple, not its destruction. Casual sex, primary partners, physical and emotional availability, and other such distinctions contain amorous relations with the negotiation of the couple.” What looks like hedonism is a safeguard for the couple hidden at its core, an attempt to make it less brittle so it can bend without breaking. Amour, as a love story sans sex, isolates the part of partnership that polyamory seeks to protect from the consequences of ephemeral desire. But the controlled situation reveals a core violence that isn’t nearly as extraneous as these love Protestants would have us believe.

If we view love as a complex and contradictory social script rather than a shorter referent for the highest good, it’s hard to separate the right to care for from the right to torture or kill. Arguing that real love by definition never intentionally harms doesn’t address the character of actually existing love, which is shot through with pain, torture, and death.

In the near future, when same-sex couples in California are permanently granted the right to marry, one of the privileges they will inherit is detailed in a special section in the criminal code that allows a sentence of probation for convicted rapists, provided they raped only their spouse. The U.S. banned use of DDT (1972) before the first state criminalized marital rape (1975). At least one in four American women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, and though the statistics don’t tell us how many loved their abusers or how many abusers loved their victims, the literature indicates both sums are substantial. A spouse is both your default next of kin and the family member most likely to murder you. Those like Coates who claim that crimes justified by love aren’t motivated by real love offer no stronger a defense than the blind and pious who blame the church’s sins on impostor Christianity and pronounce the true faith as healthy as ever.

Compared to the acolytes, Haneke is a love Gnostic. He’s heretical not because he doesn’t believe, but because when he looks at the cross, he doesn’t see a savior but the dangling corpse of a tortured man and the God that let it happen. Amour shows love as a janitorial regime that keeps violence and death secreted inside the home, sealed like Anne’s corpse in the bedroom. It’s the part after happily ever after that we rarely see, where untarnished care meets murder, where death parts with a sharp gasp.

Sex and gender journalists ask our sources to bare highly personal details that others find painful to discuss even in private. Our subjects are not compensated when they tell us their stories. Instead, comments sections around the Web compile the most heinous reactions to their private lives, written by the world’s foremost anonymous bigots. Our story fades from the news, but it continues to hover over their Google search results, possibly forever. Their friends are free to constantly rewrite their online personalities with a new Facebook status update, but our subjects’ life stories are crystalized at a moment in time — and in someone else’s words. The reporter who lent them a sympathetic ear has shifted her focus to the next piece.

I’ve been that reporter, the one encouraging a source to sign up for all of the above. Sometimes — when a stranger emails me to thank me for a years-old piece I wrote on sexual assault, or a bewildered colleague asks me for a primer on what “transgender” means — I get the sense that my work is contributing, however modestly, to a broader social shift. But I’ve also watched as my reporting has shaken the private lives of my subjects.

Read More | “Suicide reminds reporters how vulnerable their sources can be” | Amanda Hess | ᔥPoynter

This Friday join The New Inquiry at Book Court to celebrate the release of Kate Zambreno’s new memoir in the form of a history of the “mad wives of modernism” Heroines from semiotext(e). Kate (the author of the novels O Fallen Angel and Green Girl as well as the blog Frances Farmer is My Sister) will be reading an excerpt from the book before sitting down with TNI contributing editor (and accomplished columnist and author) Laurie Penny for a chat about gender, writing, mental illness, and more. Some audience Q&A will follow. BYOB.

Read an interview between Kate and TNI co-founder Mary Borkowski here
Read an excerpt of Heroines here

Friday, November 9
7 pm
Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
Facebook RSVP

New Inquiry Senior Editor Malcolm Harris talked with science historian Laurel Braitman about her work on animal personality and taste. Braitman is a 2012 TED fellow, finishing her PhD at M.I.T., and the author of the forthcoming book Animal Madness.

If you judged by TV and movies alone, you’d think “pure” drugs were seeping out of American society’s every pore, along with hot doctors and secret agents gone rogue. Even if suburban 15-year-olds don’t ask their dealers for THC percentages after seeing Oliver Stone’s Savages  — and smart money says some of them are — craft beer isn’t the only boutique intoxicant buzzing around the nation’s subconscious. In the shadow of the high-fructose-corn-syrup backlash, everyone from the Olive Garden to the proverbial Brooklyn popsicle startup is trying to cash in on craftsmanship. Meanwhile, screenwriters (clever advertisers in their own right) have found that the easiest way to hook viewers on drug-dealer protagonists is to sell crack as small-batch artisanal rock cocaine.

Would AMC’s Breaking Bad be as popular if high school chemist turned meth cook Walter White made an average product instead of his “99 percent pure” blue glass? From the pilot on, the quality of White’s output has driven the show’s narrative arc. As a careful midgrade cook with DEA connections, he could have flown under the radar in a community overrun with the stuff and taken care of his chemo costs and family just fine. But what makes White more attractive than your garden-variety tweaker to both international cartels and viewers alike is his craftsmanship and attention to detail. He brings class to the New Mexico meth scene.

For a show set in the dirty world of methamphetamine, Breaking Bad is obsessive about cleanliness. Hardly an episode goes by without a discussion of potential impurities. The equipment always seals perfectly, the vats stainless steel. But that’s how you make meth! No, it’s not. That’s how Walter White makes meth on Breaking Bad.

White isn’t some junkie cook; he’s a scientist. The exurbs are going crazy for the special meth that only he can make because it’s pure and a scientist made it with stainless steel and it’s blue. That’s how a timid high school teacher became a regional drug kingpin over the course of a year. The point isn’t that the show is unrealistic or hard to believe, but the narrative function of the ways in which it is: Which disbeliefs are viewers asked to suspend, and which ideologies are they encouraged to retain?

As far as Breaking Bad is concerned, Walter’s meth is bought and used in unadulterated form, whereas in any believable scenario distributors would dilute (“step on”) the product for sale. Finally, toward the end of the fifth season, Walter is forced to explain to a new organization that customers will pay more for his product than, say, one that was 85 percent pure. The other manufacturer seems to accept Walter’s logic even though, as an ostensibly experienced dealer, he should know it doesn’t make any sense. America isn’t flooded with pure meth, and it’s not because our chemists are too ethical. The illegal drug market simply doesn’t reward peerless expertise in the same way celebrity cooking shows do.

The idea that people will always pay more for purer or small-batch products makes a lot of sense to demographics used to paying more for quality gimmicks — conveniently, the same demos advertisers pay a premium for. But it doesn’t make sense for the consumers Breaking Bad so sparingly depicts. When we do see White’s ultimate customers, they’re zombies: all scabs and eroded teeth. We’re not talking about impulse buyers or comparison shoppers here; it’s a textbook case of what freshman economics students call inelastic demand. As Stringer Bell told D’Angelo Barksdale in another show about drugs, in direct contrast to what Walter claims, “When it’s good, they buy. When it’s bad, they buy twice as much. The worse we do, the more money we make.”

Demographically, the viewers AMC wants are more likely to do a lot of pills than unscrew a light bulb to smoke some ice, even if the substances are chemically similar. There are plenty of expert scientists making tons of money cooking up and selling amphetamines, but they’re not robbing trains or toting guns. Big Pharma brings in a $250 billion annually in the U.S. alone, much of it from the same chemical compounds in White’s lab. When it’s 89 percent pure, it’s illegal meth; when it’s 99 percent pure, methamphetamine is sold by Lundbeck Inc. under the trademark name Desoxyn, for “the short-term management of exogenous obesity.” Walter isn’t making crank; he is manufacturing black-market pharmaceuticals.

A Breaking Bad in which the street dealers were diluting the product would have had Walter and his partner Jesse Pinkman competing with every local operation, struggling to set up a larger distribution network without costly middlemen and, well, interacting with meth users a lot. But The Wire on Ice isn’t sexy enough to sell a Dodge, and a teacher slanging to his fucked-up former students would turn stomachs, not open wallets. Suffice to say it would be a darker show.

Which brings us to the other thing that sets White and Pinkman apart from their competitors: color. And I don’t mean blue.

The white guy who enters a world supposedly beneath him where he doesn’t belong yet nonetheless triumphs over the inhabitants is older than talkies. TV Tropes calls it “Mighty Whitey,” and examples range from Tom Cruise as Samurai and Daniel Day Lewis as Mohican to the slightly less far-fetched Julia Stiles as ghetto-fabulous. But whether it’s a 3-D Marine playing alien in Avatar or Bruce Wayne slumming in a Bhutanese prison, the story is still good for a few hundred million bucks. The story changes a bit from telling to telling, but the meaning is consistent: a white person is (and by extension, white people are) best at everything.

In Savages, another recent story of Mighty Whitey getting people stoned, Berkeley-educated botanist Chon (maybe the only name whiter than “White”) and his war-vet buddy Ben combine exported Afghan seeds and a public-Ivy STEM degree to create a strand of superweed. A narrator asserts Afghanistan is the source of the best weed on earth with the same revelatory reverence that Anthony Bourdain might declare Iberia the source of the best pork. It’s not enough that these two 20-somethings grow and sell weed; they have to do it better than anyone else by a huge margin. Chon and Ben’s bud has a THC content of 40 percent (the 2011 Cannabis Cup winner Liberty Haze tops out at 25 percent) and sells for a laughable $6,000 per pound. The botanist-manager uses his profits the way you’d expect a self-respecting white person to: sustainable charity projects in Asia and Africa.

Because of their (third-)world-beating products, Ben and Chon, and Walter and Jesse, attract the interest of the big bad other in the American drug imaginary: Mexican cartels. The cartels (often referred to in the singular, as if monolithic) are merciless and invincible, with money and power that seems limitless. But for all their government connections and firepower, the cartels have a Kryptonite: white people.

You see, the Mexicans need white college graduates because only the white graduates know the secret drug recipes. But these white craftsmen don’t want to work for such swarthy operations, and so, despite being far outmatched in both resources and experience, they contrive plots to bring down the heretofore untouchable organizations.

The scene in Breaking Bad’s fourth season, when Pinkman — a failure at high school chem — shows up a room of Mexican scientists is full of supremacist glee. The Mexicans can wave their skill and experience around, but the science equipment knows objective quality, and there’s no competing with the only white guy in the room. These plots expect viewers to cheer while pale protagonists repeatedly triumph over their southern enemies, leaving them dead or in jail. By the start of season five, White is so successful that Breaking Bad becomes no more diverse than Big Love, leaving the show’s anchoring team visually indistinguishable from the senior cadre of a skinhead gang. In the recent half-season finale, White goes so far as to actually enlist the Aryan Nation to perform a series of expertly timed prison assassinations. But Walter is a bad guy! He still drives the car the show is trying to sell you.

The drug world is a convenient setting for selling white supremacy because it allows for a white underdog in an openly racialized conflict. Besides the War on Terror, there aren’t a lot of other scenarios in which it’s possible to root for the particularly American cocktail of meritocracy, the little guy, the good guy, and the white guy, all at the same time. Put it this way: A show about a small American toy manufacturer laying waste to the villainous and inferior Mexican industry would be such a transparent and reactionary play on post-NAFTA anxieties that no luxury advertiser would dare sponsor it. But when Jalopnik‘s Travis Okulski expressed understandable confusion about what Chrysler thought it had to gain from being associated with an abusive husband and meth cook, the luxury carmaker responded with a staid “The placement on Breaking Bad is part of an overall marketing strategy to place products in TV shows and movies. This vehicle was the right fit in terms of the plot line and the character.”

White-washing the illegal drug market involves depicting it like markets wealthy viewers are more comfortable and familiar with, namely those of the farmers market or the local pharmacy. Walter White combines the ostensible moral complexity television audiences demand in a post-Soprano protagonist with a cleanliness that allows him to market expensive cars. The U.S. is still very much a white supremacist country, but classic cowboys-kill-Indians narratives don’t play with wealthy viewers or the critics who help determine those tastes. And Jack Bauer can drive only so many cars. For the credulous viewer who likes to imagine he’s a couple of life crises from being the Larry Bird of meth  — and for the people who sell him stuff — White is right.

On Tuesday tracker John Ndayambaje spotted a trap very close to the Kuryama gorilla clan. He moved in to deactivate the snare, but a silverback named Vubu grunted, cautioning Ndayambaje to stay away, Vecellio said.

Suddenly two juveniles—Rwema, a male; and Dukore, a female; both about four years old—ran toward the trap.

As Ndayambaje and a few tourists watched, Rwema jumped on the bent tree branch and broke it, while Dukore freed the noose.

The pair then spied another snare nearby—one the tracker himself had missed—and raced for it. Joined by a third gorilla, a teenager named Tetero, Rwema and Dukore destroyed that trap as well.

Read More | “Gorilla Youngsters Seen Dismantling Poachers’ Traps—A First” | Ker Than | ᔥNational Geographic

The venue was crammed. People were jostling for position on the floor, on the stairs. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, interspersed with a few visible Hungarian emigrés (elderly, formally dressed, disgruntled at the mob scene) and one or two poorly groomed men carrying those bulging, faintly sinister plastic bags that for some reason are the mark of the obsessive cinéaste, the characters who never miss a screening at Anthology Film Archives, and whose London cousins are, at this very minute, loudly shushing someone talking through the credits at the BFI.

When Krasznahorkai turned up, escorted by his interviewer, the critic James Wood, he stood on stage to receive a protracted round of applause, which he absorbed genially, turning and bowing slightly, his hands steepled in a vaguely clerical gesture you usually only see from Indian politicians or high-ranking organised criminals on HBO.

Read More | “Why is New York’s literary crowd suddenly in thrall to Hungarian fiction?” | Hari Kunzru | ᔥThe Guardian