The arts and literature pages offer no respite from the New York Times political thrust. Lisa Birnbach (The Preppy Handhook) hung out with actor Mark Ruffalo, perhaps best known for his role as The Hulk in the series of Avengers superhero movies, for her front-page Arts story “The Actor’s Activist, Onstage.” Ruffalo is participating in a politicized revival of Arthur Miller’s relatively obscure anti-capitalism play “The Price,” and Birnbaum indulged the actor’s love of Bernie Sanders, John Kerry, and left-wing protests. Meanwhile, Sunday book reviewers found ominous parallels to Stalin and the Red Scare in Trump's America.
Birnbach wrote:
Recently, the actor Mark Ruffalo sent “a prayer out into the universe” for a kind of experience he wanted in 2017.
....
That his wish was answered by Arthur Miller seems particularly heaven-sent: In the almost 11 years since he last appeared on Broadway, in a revival of Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing!,” Mr. Ruffalo has crammed an enormous amount of social activism into his busy career, which has garnered him three Oscar nominations (most recently for “Spotlight,” from 2015) and his family life (he and his wife, Sunrise, have three children, aged 15, 11 and 9). So the playwright’s examinations of economic and class struggles resonate beyond the script for Mr. Ruffalo.
....recently, he helped deliver solar panels to the people of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation who were protesting the pipeline; and he helped organize and address a rally in New York City the night before the inauguration of President Trump (“We got 27,000 people within four hours....
....
“It’s about capitalism at its most tenacious, heartless and dehumanizing worst,” Mr. Ruffalo said. “It’s a dialectic. We all have to choose between our humanity and survival, and it gives us a lot of hard choices to make.”
....
The activism that consumes much of Mr. Ruffalo’s time comes from a deep place. He says it began during the second gulf war. He campaigned for John Kerry, a senator at the time, when he ran for president in 2004, and he marched for peace in Los Angeles in 2008. He connects the peace movement with preserving the environment and helped organize the People’s Climate March in New York in 2014. “It took a year of really hard organizing to get 100,000 people there.” (It’s estimated that there were more than 300,000 people total at the march.)
....
His support of Senator Bernie Sanders’s president campaign was a natural fit, given the overlap in their progressive interests.
Birnbach fawned:
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“....And for the issues that move him the most, like contaminated water in Flint, Mich., or the building of the Dakota Pipeline on land belonging to the Sioux tribe, he takes a diligent approach: He meets with scientists and reads their studies, speaking with great passion about renewable energy, something he has discussed with Prof. Mark Jacobson of Stanford. (They are both on the board of directors of the Solutions Project, which aims to move the country to clean power by 2030.)
Ruffalo evidently sees his lucrative film career in Hollywood (which causes its share of pollution in the making of blockbusters) as a necessary evil to fund what he really wants to do, which is agitprop plays:
....“I have to go back to work in April,” he said, making it clear that what pays the bills feels like something entirely different from “The Price.” “We’re doing ‘Avengers’ 3 and 4.”
Politics also cropped up in unlikely spots in the Sunday Book Review. A review of Stalin and the Scientists by Simon Sebag Montefiore indirectly compared President Trump to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin: “....Filled with priceless nuggets and a cast of frauds, crackpots and tyrants, this is a lively and interesting book, and utterly relevant today when the Trump administration is challenging the scientific establishment on climate change. We in the West have long laughed at the ‘Coryphaeus of Science,’ but has the United States now elected its own?”
A review of a book about theoetical physics, of all things, resulted in this paragraph from reviewer and particle physics professor Lisa Randall:
At a time when people can disagree about the sizes of the crowds before their eyes, it should come as no surprise that they can disagree on scientific theories that are even harder to discern. But in today’s toxic political climate, when deliberate ambiguity and “alternative facts” stand in for knowledge, it’s never been more important for scientists and academics to be accurate in their presentation of what we know. I admire Rovelli’s goals, but they would be better served if he were more careful.
Two books on film classics, one on Casablanca and the other on High Noon, were reviewed by Peter Biskind, who found yet another ominous parallel:
Speaking of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), “...the blacklist is a gift that keeps on giving. There always seems to be something new to chew on, in this case the transcripts of HUAC’s secret executive sessions. Besides, it’s a story that bears retelling because Hollywood, not to mention the rest of the country, is haunted by ghosts that won’t go away (witness Newt Gingrich’s recent call for a resurrection of HUAC, now to be wielded against ISIS, not Communists).”
