All posts tagged: overall effect

Jennifer Lopez Is a Postmodern Artwork

Jennifer Lopez Is a Postmodern Artwork

The latest avalanche of content from Jennifer Lopez has me thinking about Richard Wagner, the German composer who argued in 1849 that the “consummate artwork of the future” would be Gesamtkunstwerk—“total artwork,” combining elements of many forms into one. This lofty notion, once associated primarily with opera and architecture, is now commonplace. Visual albums, installation art, video games, and TikToks routinely blend the auditory, the visual, the narrative, and the poetic—sometimes spectacularly, quite often unsatisfyingly. Human beings can be Gesamtkunstwerk too. Or at least, that’s the best way of thinking about what Lopez is up to at age 54. Since the ’90s, Lopez has been culturally inescapable not for any single skill, but for gliding between acting, music, fashion, and various ceremonial duties. Now she’s made a multi-hyphenate manifesto of sorts with the Amazon Studios musical film This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. Mashing up pop videos and dialogue-driven dramedy over 65 minutes, it fuses sci-fi, slapstick, and Hallmark-movie aesthetics—as well as cameos from Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, and a grab bag of …

A Major Climate Force Has Been Ignored for Decades

A Major Climate Force Has Been Ignored for Decades

Finding a vole on Alaska’s North Slope takes practice. The open plain pulls the eye upward, toward grand things: the horizon line, the distant shimmer of snow in the mountains. The nearest tree is more than 50 miles away. The low shrubs and sedges toss and wave in the wind. It’s a place where a 600-pound musk ox can look dog-size. In this landscape, even a very large vole—weighing less than three ounces and no more than nine inches long—is easy to miss. But Nick Patel knows what to look for. Last August, Patel pointed my attention toward a depression worn into the moss, a path that disappeared into a yellowed tuft of sedge. Voles are creatures of habit, scurrying so often over the same route that they wear trails—runways—into the soil. Once you know to look for them, the tundra is laced through with vole runways. Patel is a field tech with Team Vole, a group of some 20 researchers studying Alaska’s voles and lemmings. Despite their size, these creatures are a force on …

The British Left Makes a Sharp Turn on Gender

The British Left Makes a Sharp Turn on Gender

When Keir Starmer wanted to change the Labour Party’s stance on sex and gender, he didn’t give a set-piece speech or hold a press conference. Instead, the leader of Britain’s main opposition party stayed in the background, leaving Anneliese Dodds, a shadow minister with a low public profile, to announce the shift in a short opinion column in The Guardian. In just over 800 words, she made three big declarations. One was that “sex and gender are different.” Another was that, although Labour continues to believe in the right to change one’s legal gender, safeguards are needed to “protect women and girls from predators who might abuse the system.” Finally, Labour was therefore dropping its commitment to self-ID—the idea that a simple online declaration is enough to change someone’s legal gender for all purposes—and would retain the current requirement of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Dodds supplemented her article with a few explanatory tweets, but didn’t go on television to reiterate the message. The next day, Labour declined to provide a spokesperson for comment …