| | | In today’s newsletter, Sarah Larson recommends an enthralling podcast about a battle on the high seas. But, first, Jia Tolentino on the election outcome. Plus: • Can direct democracy protect abortion rights?
• Reading “King Lear” during hurricane season
• Jesse Eisenberg’s strange Holocaust movie | | | | | Both Trump’s and Harris’s campaigns framed the Presidential election as a contest between men and women. Did the results prove them right?  Illustration by Ben Wiseman A battle between women and men has been building for decades, and with this heated election it arrived at an inflection point. Reflecting on how Donald Trump triumphed, Jia Tolentino argues that, when women gained firmer control over culture in the twenty-tens and the years since, it made a certain cohort of men “lose their grip.” “Over time, their numbers grew, fermenting in corners of the Internet that indulged their feelings of being left behind,” she writes. And then came a man who promised to reverse the shifts that had turned American life toward equality. In 2016, “Trump won despite and because of the fact that he’d bragged about sexually assaulting women; the fact that his wife was hot, silent, and seemingly miserable; the fact that he had so many accusers no one could keep track,” Tolentino explains. And now he’s done it again. Preliminary exit-poll data from this year show that young female voters went, by thirty to forty points, for Kamala Harris, while their male counterparts backed Trump by similarly significant numbers. The chasm between these voters is the chasm between conservative and progressive ideas of gender, and it is undergirded by fear. “It’s men fearing women’s enthrallment to independence at the expense of their own centrality,” Tolentino writes, “and women fearing their subjugation to men at the expense of their lives.” But the difference is about volition: “Men who voted for Trump fear what women might actually want; women who voted for Harris fear what will be done to them against their will.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | | | | More Election Coverage |  The Lede Can Direct Democracy Save Abortion Rights? Voters are amending their state constitutions to protect reproductive freedom—and discovering the limitations of these measures in the post-Dobbs era. By Jessica Winter |  Dispatch The End of Kamala Harris’s Campaign At Howard University, a sombre crowd came out to support their candidate and witness history. By Emily Witt | | | | | Editor’s Pick | |  Photograph by Rebecca Blackwell / AP The novelist Lynn Steger Strong grew up in Florida, and her family still lives there, on the Atlantic Coast. When Hurricane Milton was looming, she impulsively picked up her college copy of “King Lear,” to read about the Shakespearean storm. Paging through it this time around, she felt the play’s themes—“power, family, helplessness”—to be potent. “One of the gifts of ‘Lear,’ to me, is that the play doesn’t give hope,” she writes. “Instead, it grounds you—after pages of manipulation and condemnations, of a king railing and a storm raging—in the fleeting but real value of speaking, sharing, something true.” Read the story » | | | |  | If you know someone who would enjoy this newsletter, please share it. Was it forwarded to you? Sign up. | | | | | | The Critic Recommends | | Sarah Larson
Staff writer  Photograph from The Print Collector / Getty Like “Noble,” the podcast I reviewed last week, “The Belgrano Diary,” hosted by the writer Andrew O’Hagan, tells a brutal story but maintains an utterly diverting, appealing mood. In it, O’Hagan, a great and Scottish-accented narrator, investigates a scandal involving Britain’s 1982 sinking of the General Belgrano, the second-largest ship in Argentina’s Navy, in the early days of the Falklands War—a conflict, O’Hagan says, that Jorge Luis Borges described as “two bald men fighting over a comb.” The attack, which killed three hundred and twenty-three men, sparked patriotic fervor in both countries (“Rejoice!” Margaret Thatcher said), but the diary of a British officer, Narendra Sethia, sharply contradicted the government’s account, leading to war-crime accusations. The series, which plays like a movie-ready parable about political opportunism, is full of riveting audio, from O’Hagan’s intrepid interviews to archival parliamentary zingers. Its hypnotically lovely sound design—waves lapping, pen scratching across paper, and original music by Joel Cox—sounds like feverish contemplation. | | | | Culture Dept. |  The Front Row “A Real Pain” Fails to Stay in Its Discomfort ZoneIn Jesse Eisenberg’s film, a shticky bromance obscures a thoughtful attempt to probe the legacy of the Holocaust. By Richard Brody | | | | | Fun & Games Dept. |  Mini Crossword A Smallish Puzzle Stuff showered from the rafters after a championship victory: eight letters. By Kate Chin Park |  Daily Cartoon Thursday, November 7th By Zoe Si | | | | |  | Name Drop: Can you guess the identity of a notable person—contemporary or historical—in six clues? Play a quiz from our archive » | | | | | P.S. “The amazing journey of American women is easier to take pride in if you banish thoughts about the roads not taken,” Ariel Levy writes, in a survey of the progress of feminism. When you start to imagine what might have been, “it’s enough to make you want to burn something.” 🔥 | | | | Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition. | | | | | | | |
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