שנה עטופה (A Year Wrapped)

And a request for resolution

The Days of Awe, the annual Jewish period of introspection and repentance, begin tonight, and I’m not even close to ready. That’s partly a comment on logistics: our fridge broke this past Thursday, and the fellow who came to repair it discovered much more serious issues than he anticipated, so we’re making dinner tonight for my family with only my son’s mini-fridge to keep food cool and fresh before cooking, which is not ideal. Fortunately, we’re a small group this year, and our freezer and oven are both working, so I’m sure we’ll manage just fine. But it’s an added stress.

I mostly meant it, though, as a spiritual comment. I am entering this period very betwixt and between, on multiple fronts. Speaking just from the perspective of myself as a writer (both a critic and a creator), incomplete projects large and small are strewn all about my office and all through my mind. I have no better plan this year for how to prioritize and bring them to completion than I did last year, nor any better idea how to prevent myself from waking up in the middle of the night in panic. Of course, I’ll keep plugging away—and it’s not like there haven’t been good developments. New folks have joined the team on my film, I’ve solved some problems with respect to a new script, I’ve written essays that I’m proud of. But, even more than most years, I’m going into this season unsettled and unsure of my personal direction.

This Substack is one of those unsettled projects where there has also been very good news. My subscriber base has more than tripled over the past year, and most of that increase has come in the past 3-4 months. I’m honored, and flattered, and I want to believe that the growth is a testament to the time, energy and thought I’ve put in to building a body of work here that readers want to read. But I’m also aware that, increasingly, I don’t even really know who my readers are. I don’t know what they came here for, I don’t know whether they’ve found it, and I don’t know whether, if they found something other than what they sought, that discovery has been a delight rather than a disappointment.

So I’m going to take this brief moment before I have to get back into the kitchen to ask you to please tell me: Why did you come here? Why are you still here? What has surprised you, in a positive way, about my writing, and what do you wish I would do differently? Put your answers in the comments; I’d truly love to hear.

Mind you, I can’t promise that I’ll change to be more like what you want. Indeed, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of doing the repenting thing, I can’t really promise that I’ll change at all. That’s why Yom Kippur begins with Kol Nidrei, a declaration in advance that all of one’s vows are, really, just hopes, not binding promises. But I can tell you that I’m curious, that I genuinely want to hear.

On Here

In the meantime, this is the first wrap in over a month. So here’s a complete rundown of what I’ve written here since last I wrapped:

• Putting a Price on Parenthood: speculation about the opportunity cost of raising children and its effect on fertility rates.

• Lula and Trump: a comparison between populists who’ve gotten into legal trouble, intended to provoke.

• Blame Yeltsin, Not Gorbachev: an attempt to reframe the narrative around Soviet collapse.

• Ranked Choice Voting Strikes Again: reflections on the election in Alaska and Republican reaction thereto.

• Does Constitutional Monarchy Deserve Any Cheers?: wondering whether the system’s apparent stability is all just a selection effect.

• What Does a Ukrainian Victory Look Like?: pondering the likely post-war tensions as Russia mobilizes and threatens nuclear strikes.

• A Stranger Among Us: Hasidic schools and the challenge to liberalism of deeply illiberal subcultures.

If there are topics you’d love for me to tackle in the weeks and months to come, feel free to put them in the comments too.

The World Elsewhere

Since The Week stopped publishing opinion pieces, and since I’ve been more focused on getting my film off the ground, my work elsewhere has been less frequent. But I did have a piece come out in Modern Age that I’m quite pleased with, about The Northman, Robert Eggers’s film, and Fat Ham, James Ijames’s play that was produced at The Public in collaboration with National Black Theatre. What ties the two together? Well, here’s how the piece opens:

In any given season, you’re bound to find at least one and probably several productions of Hamlet. Just this summer, New York has hosted a contemporary British production of Shakespeare’s drama directed by Robert Icke, which runs in rep (and places the play in dialogue with) the Oresteia, as well as a new operatic version adapted by Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn, and the Stratford Festival chose the play to open its first full season since the start of the pandemic.

Because it has been performed and studied so thoroughly, contemporary productions of Hamlet, even more than those of other Shakespeare plays, often feel challenged to find a novel “take.” But the most inventive retooling may obscure but not avoid the essential oddity of the text, which transforms a canny medieval trickster fixed on vengeance into a quintessentially modern hero too fully aware of the absurdity of his own quest to complete it.

For those determined to escape the mousetrap, the only thing to do is follow Shakespeare’s example and rewrite the play entirely. And so two prominent auteurs have recently done, in quite opposite ways. Robert Eggers’s film The Northman reaches back to Shakespeare’s own sources, offering us a cinematic version of the Amleth legend touted for its authenticity to its Dark Age pagan origins. James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Fat Ham, takes the opposite tack, turning Hamlet into a contemporary figure as apparently different from the prince as could be imagined, but acutely aware of his Danish antetype and equally determined not to follow the script he has been handed.

Needless to say, I encourage you to read the whole thing.

.לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו‎

May you all be inscribed and sealed for a good year.