Nautilus Magazine: The Reinvention of Black

Black is technically an absence: the visual experience of a lack of light. A perfect black dye absorbs all of the light that impinges on it, leaving nothing behind. This ideal is remarkably difficult to manufacture. The industrialization of the 18th and 19th centuries made it easier, providing chemists and paint-makers with a growing palette of black—and altering the subjects that the color would come to represent. “These things are intimately connected,” says science writer Philip Ball, author of Bright Earth: The Invention of Color. The reinvention of black, in other words, went far beyond the color. [...]

Black also developed a second identity around this time representing the asceticism favored by monks, as noted by the French historian Michel Pastoureau. By the 15th century, black garb had become a fixture of regal courts in Europe, connoting power and privilege. Soon after, the growing middle class also adopted black garments to represent their growing wealth, as well as their piety. [...]

In the 1840s, August Hofmann extracted aniline (a benzene ring connected to a nitrogen-containing amine group) from coal tar. Then in 1856, William Perkin, a student of Hofmann’s, oxidized aniline to create a deep purple dye, subsequently called mauve. This marked the birth of a completely new industry: synthetic dyes. By 1860, other researchers had found that oxidizing aniline under different conditions, using sulfuric acid and potassium dichromate, created a new black pigment: aniline black. The reaction fuses together 11 aniline molecules to make a complex chain of benzene rings connected by nitrogen atoms. Mixed in paint or ink, it produces a neutral, matte black also known as Pigment Black 1. [...]

The starting pistol for this movement was Black Square by Polish-Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, first exhibited in 1915. A very early example of abstract painting, it is simply a square of canvas covered in black paint. Malevich called his style “Suprematist.” Relying on simple shapes and a limited palette, it marked an absolute rejection of the depiction of objects in favor of pure expression. Tellingly, the painting was mounted high in the corner of the room, where Russian Orthodox icons would traditionally have been placed—a rejection of religion in favor of the secular. “It symbolized the collapse of traditional values and social structure,” says Belgian artist Frederik De Wilde—processes that had been hastened by the industrial revolution and its creation of new socioeconomic classes.

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Longreads: The Rub of Rough Sex

When I read Mayer and Farrow’s New Yorker article, I was struck by their use of the phrase “nonconsensual physical violence” to refer to Schneiderman’s alleged acts. Unlike BDSM, which means so many things that it means almost nothing, “nonconsensual physical violence” is chillingly pure — it means that one person hurt another person’s body without permission. But the phrase also interests me because it holds the implication that physical violence can be consensual. Sometimes, the phrase “nonconsensual physical violence” allows, you and your partner can agree that pain, whether received or inflicted, is pleasurable. This discomfiting idea of pain is, as consent is, woven into the fabric of BDSM; it’s often the BDSM aspect (other than its black leather and chrome aesthetic) that alienates people who don’t dabble in rough sex; and it’s the aspect that’s most volatile, slipping from delight into agony with ease.  [...]

What strikes me, however, is this: While feminists, sociologists, and human behaviorists question women’s choice of the submissive role almost ad nauseam, the idea that kinky (cis-het) men are somehow naturally dominant goes without interrogation. Of course, culture murmurs, men want to be dominant — why would they want to give up their power? Men who want to be doms fit into the mystique of the “alpha male,” our culture’s idea that manly men get what they want by taking charge, spanking ass, and calling names — and, certainly, this masculine swagger has appealed to me. Much to my intellect’s shame, I have thrilled to hearing “good girl” growled in my ear. [...]

But maybe — just maybe — these men’s dominant kink is a cover for their misogyny and their anger. It’s easy for men to mistake their private motives when society already gives hypermasculinity a big blank check. It’s even easier if those men — perhaps including Schneiderman — strive to perform flawless feminist progressive politics in a culture that demeans caring men, in a society that tells women every day that their experiences don’t matter, and in a world where masculinity wafts with a toxic fug.  [...]

These two “woke” guys publicly performed a feminist sensibility while privately assuming a bad-boy, sexy, naughty BDSM identity. But the feminism was fake, while their rage — at women, at themselves, at their families, at society, at whatever it is that angers white men with advanced degrees — was real. These men appeared to embody the fascinating dichotomy of enlightened politics and raw male sexual magnetism, and this bifurcated appearance was as important to them as it was to me. For as much as these guys’ façades and naughty underbellies fed their egos (and got them sex), together they also formed a shield. After all, you can’t possibly be a misogynist when you’re a feminist, right?

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Foreign Affairs: Sanctions on Russia Are Working

This was also a landmark in sanctions history. No economy as big as Russia’s has been subject to major sanctions in recent times. Only the restrictions imposed by the League of Nations on Italy, and by the United States on Japan, before World War II bear comparison. But unlike Italy and Japan back then, Russia is a key supplier of oil and gas to the rest of the world. An embargo on its major exports—a traditional sanctions tool—is all but unthinkable. Designing effective sanctions against such a hard target was a new challenge. 

How have the sanctions fared? Russia has not returned Crimea or withdrawn from Ukraine. Nor has its economy collapsed. But sanctions were never intended to achieve those things. Rather, they were designed for three goals: first, to deter Russia from escalating military aggression; second, to reaffirm international norms and condemn their violation; and third, to encourage Russia to reach a political settlement—specifically, to fully implement the Minsk agreements, which oblige it to observe a cease-fire, withdraw military equipment, and allow Ukraine to restore control over its borders—by increasing the costs of not doing so. [...]

Sanctions have failed only in their most ambitious goal, to nudge Russia toward fulfillment of the Minsk agreements. Russia’s routine violations of the agreements and its other actions, such as its recognition of identity documents issued by the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics within Ukraine, make reaching this goal less likely than ever. Russia is prepared to incur large costs to maintain its influence in Ukraine. [...]

If a critical mass of oligarchs feels its core interests are harmed by Western responses to the Kremlin’s behavior, it may begin to view Putin in a different light. The interests of political power and wealth in Russia will become less aligned than at any time since Putin asserted dominance over oligarchs in his first term, from 2000 to 2004. This will not lead to change today or tomorrow. But as the “2024 question” looms—will Putin leave office as the constitution mandates, and if so, who will succeed him?—tensions between power and money could create an important new force for change, not only on Russia’s actions but also on its governance.

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Crooked Media Wilderness: The Blob

How can Democrats avoid conventional thinking on foreign policy? A discussion about what a new era of American leadership might look like.

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The Atlantic: My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes

When his father died, Charlie Tyrell realized he knew next to nothing about him. Tyrell and his reticent father hadn’t been close; as a young adult, Tyrell had been waiting for “the strange distance he felt between them to close,” as he describes it in his short documentary, My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes. Now, he wouldn’t have the chance.

Still, Tyrell thought that there must be some skeleton key to his late father’s experience of the world. Greg Tyrell had been something of a modest hoarder—what if, like a mosaic of memory, Charlie could piece together who Greg was through the “weird stuff he had left behind?”  “I had this lingering impulse to make a film about him that looked at our relationship. Then, I found [his] porno tapes,” Tyrell told The Atlantic. “I thought it would be an absurd and funny way to approach the subject. It's hard to talk about a deceased loved one without sucking all of the air out of the room. So, by approaching it with a sense of humor, I found a way to invite people into the story in a less weighty way.”

Told through a mixed-media style that combines scrapbook animation, narration performed by David Wain, interviews with Tyrell’s family, and footage of places that were meaningful to Greg, My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes is a spirited cinematic elegy. Through the process of making the film, Tyrell would indeed discover who his father was—particularly, the tragic family history that had caused Greg to behave in a way that seemed impenetrable to his children. What begins as a story about what Tyrell describes as “some of the tackiest video pornography the 1980s had to offer” becomes the story of the courage to extricate oneself from a vicious cycle of abuse.

“It was emotionally draining at times,” Tyrell said. “This was me exposing mine and my family's relationship with our dad. But the process of looking at our relationship and shaping it into a story for a film allowed me to articulate my thoughts and feelings in a way that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.” 

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