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The Grammys have long been a dependable engine of outrage. Every year, it seemed, one humiliation or another would seize the ceremony, such as when Macklemore defeated Drake, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, and Jay-Z for Best Rap Album, in 2014, or when, the year before, the band Fun. beat out Frank Ocean for Best New Artist. All the way back in 2002, the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack somehow won Album of the Year instead of OutKast’s “Stankonia”—a decision that aged poorly even before presenter Janet Jackson had finished reading it off the card. Throughout the Grammys’ nearly seventy-year history, the Recording Academy has disproportionately favored the very white, the very male, and the very old, consistently rewarding legacy acts and industry darlings rather than the year’s most accomplished, essential music. In 2018, Neil Portnow, who was then the president of the Academy, suggested that women performers needed to “step up” if they wanted to win more awards. The comment confirmed what everyone already knew: the Grammys voting body was an out-of-touch boys club whose biases reflected an institution on the brink of irrelevance. (What else could explain Beck beating Beyoncé, in 2015, for best album?) When Portnow left his post, in 2019, his replacement, Deborah Dugan, accused the Academy of vote-fixing and mismanaging finances, which the Academy denied; she was put on leave and then eventually let go. In the aftermath of these scandals, the Grammys have been on something of an apology tour, signalling to audiences and artists alike that they’ve heard the criticisms and they know. They know!

Heading into Sunday night’s event, in Los Angeles, the Grammys were surprisingly short on salacious story lines. If one of the more compelling reasons to tune in to the show is to see just how wrong the Academy is going to get it, then this year’s ceremony promised to be a bit of a snoozer. The “big four” categories had few snubs; its nominees included preëminent stars such as Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Sabrina Carpenter. There were also three rap albums contending for Album of the Year—Clipse’s “Let God Sort Em Out,” Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX,” and Tyler, the Creator’s “Chromakopia”—the most nods the genre has ever received in the category. Adele, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift, meanwhile, would not be around to generate buzz over rivalries and record-breaking, and no major stars were sitting out the ceremony in protest, as Drake, Ocean, and the Weeknd have in the past. Would Sunday’s telecast actually be an accurate reflection of the year in commercial, major-label music? After decades of alleged corruption and catastrophic choices, was the Academy finally going to get it right?

Thankfully for the Grammys, Bad Bunny brought enough narrative intrigue with him to carry the ceremony. Aside from being the first Spanish-language artist to be nominated at once for Album, Song, and Record of the Year, the Puerto Rican superstar is scheduled to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show, on Sunday. It’s the first time that the main act will be performed entirely in Spanish, something the political right has deemed disgraceful. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement would “be all over” the Super Bowl, and D.H.S. adviser Corey Lewandowski scolded the N.F.L. for selecting “somebody who just seems to hate America so much.” (President Trump claimed not to know who Bad Bunny was, although he said the prospect of a Bad Bunny halftime show was “absolutely ridiculous.”) Bad Bunny has openly criticized the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, calling out the President himself and the malevolent militarization of ICE. Once again, the Grammys were at the heart of a politically charged moment in which its awards meant more than mere recognition—its choices would function as a cultural bellwether, a comment on where the industry stands on one of the most pressing human-rights issues of our time.

As the festivities began, it became clear that Bad Bunny would indeed serve as the night’s center of gravity. The show’s competent yet miraculously unfunny host, Trevor Noah, cozied up to Bad Bunny at his table and begged him to perform—a ploy, perhaps, to remind the audience that the real performance was soon to come, at the Super Bowl. Early in the evening, when Bad Bunny’s album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” was awarded Best Música Urbana Album, his acceptance speech opened with a rousing call to action: “ICE out,” he declared. (Artists from Carole King to Bieber wore pins that said the same.) In a night heavy on political statements but short on overt political performativity, his message was sharp and clear: “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.” Earlier, Billie Eilish—who, preposterously, won Song of the Year for “Wildflower,” a track from last year’s Grammy-nominated album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” that had been repackaged as a single, allowing it to be included in this year’s awards—affirmed, during her acceptance speech, that “no one is illegal on stolen land.” But it was Bad Bunny’s protestations that reverberated the loudest. “The hate gets more powerful with more hate,” he said. “The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love. So, please, we need to be different.”

The Grammys messaging was, by turns, as chaotic and predictable as ever. The performances were grandiose and frequently great, as highlighted by Sabrina Carpenter’s rendition of her hit “Manchild,” which saw her cosplaying as a pilot while cruising around the tarmac-like stage on luggage carts and conveyor belts. Carpenter has become one of pop music’s great performers; she’s a tremendous live vocalist with a wildly charismatic presence—someone who can command a room with a wink, a grin, a subtle flip of the hair. She left the evening, however, empty-handed, which was less an injustice than a fait accompli—she lost Best Pop Vocal Album to the Grammy titan Lady Gaga and Best Pop Solo Performance to Lola Young, an Amy Winehouse-redolent singer whose traditionalist approach to songcraft is catnip to Academy voters. Similarly, Bieber’s performance of “Yukon,” a standout from his album “Swag,” offered a much needed refresh for a night steeped in aggressive, glittery showmanship. He stood onstage alone, in nothing but boxer shorts, his singing accompanied by only an electric guitar, a loop pedal, and a syncopated kick drum. It was one of the night’s few moments when time seemed to stop, and the one thing that seemed to matter was the music. Naturally, Bieber, too, left the event without winning an award.

In the Academy’s ongoing quest to reform their relationship with Black art, they staged a genuinely moving in memoriam to D’Angelo and Roberta Flack, with guest appearances by Anthony Hamilton, Bilal, Chaka Khan, John Legend, and Raphael Saadiq, among others. The tribute was anchored by Lauryn Hill, who was performing at the Grammys for the first time in almost thirty years. Hill was intimately connected to both D’Angelo and Flack: she duetted with D’Angelo on “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” her Grammy-winning Album of the Year, and famously interpolated Flack’s hit “Killing Me Softly with His Song” as a member of the Fugees. These grand ensemble segments have become a staple at the Grammys, a space to acknowledge legends lost and to repent for past wrongs. (The hip-hop medley of the 2023 Grammys was a forced, if not stirring, apology for the failure to have meaningfully included the genre throughout the ceremony’s history.) Less deftly, the show awarded Pharrell Williams with the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award, a prize seemingly designed to recognize Black artists who had been historically excluded. It’s not that Williams doesn’t deserve the honor—he’s one of the most influential artists of the past century. The problem is the ham-fisted way in which the Grammys contrives to acknowledge its previous mistakes. One can only wonder which contemporary artists will receive such an award twenty years from now.

On the one hand, rap’s integration into this year’s major categories marks a significant step in the right direction for the Grammys. Hip-hop and R. & B. have long been recognized only in the awards for their respective genres, despite dominating mainstream culture and music for more than thirty years. Even a chart-topping, widely celebrated artist such as Frank Ocean came to view his place within the Academy as a perverse form of tokenism. “That institution certainly has nostalgic importance,” he told the Times, in 2016, explaining why he withheld the landmark album “Blonde” from consideration. “It just doesn’t seem to be representing very well for people who come from where I come from, and hold down what I hold down.” In 2019, when Drake accepted the award for Best Rap Song, he told the crowd, “You don’t need this,” gesturing to the Grammy he was holding. (Drake’s speech was cut short; he has not attended the show since.) To atone for its sins, the Academy seems set on incorporating hip-hop more firmly into its DNA, elevating the year’s premier rap achievements to prime time. Though it’s powerful for elder statesmen like Clipse, Lamar, and even Tyler, the Creator, whose début album came out fifteen years ago, to experience recognition in the “big four” categories, there remains a striking disconnect between what is relevant in contemporary hip-hop and what receives institutional praise. For the average Academy member, who likely votes for Lamar by default or checks the box next to an artist with a household name, such as Pharrell, who produced Clipse’s album, what is most alive and innovative in the genre will take years to make its way to the Academy’s boardroom. By then, of course, it’ll be far too late to pay proper respects, but may I interest you in a lifetime-achievement award?

This year’s live telecast of the Grammys was not without its blunders. From the moment the seventy-nine-year-old Cher walked onstage to both accept a lifetime-achievement award and to announce the winner of Record of the Year, the broadcast entered into a sort of incorrigible fugue state. First, Noah joined Cher onstage to present her with the commemorative Grammy, which he then offered to hold. It was unclear whether she was meant to give an acceptance speech, but, oh, did she ever. Sincere and strange in equal measure, she detailed the ups and downs of her career, and encouraged artists to follow their dreams, before concluding, “I guess I’m supposed to walk off now.” As she retreated backstage, Noah rushed into the crowd to ask her to return: she’d forgotten about Record of the Year. After the nominees appeared onscreen and Cher had been handed the red envelope from which to read the winner, she stared into the teleprompter for several seconds, apparently waiting for a name to appear before her. “They told me it was going to be on the prompter,” she said finally, looking down at the envelope as the crowd laughed. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “The Grammy goes to Luther Vandross!” In fact, Kendrick Lamar and SZA won for their duet “Luther”; Lamar gave a good-natured smile before getting up from his seat. With the win, he became the most awarded rap artist in Grammy history.

But the show could rightfully end with only one person—Bad Bunny. When “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” was announced as Album of the Year, he covered his face with his hand, and then remained in his seat for nearly half a minute, the crowd applauding and chanting along to his song “DtMF.” Say what you will about the Grammys’ relevance, their usefulness, their tortured and terrible history, their ability to comprehend transgressive and experimental art, their snubs and screwups and insufficient apologies—this was a breathtaking moment, one that perhaps necessitated all the inane pageantry that preceded it. “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is the first album sung entirely in Spanish to win the Album of the Year award, and the scale of the honor clearly took Bad Bunny a moment to metabolize. “Puerto Rico,” he announced when he arrived onstage, beaming with emotion. He dedicated the award to “all the people who had to leave their homeland, their country, to follow their dreams.” It wasn’t an empty dedication—“DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is an album that spans generations and genres, synthesizing the totality of Puerto Rican music into a totemic modern masterpiece. It’s music to dance to, to find hope within, to fall in love with. Can you believe it? The Grammys got it right. ♦

In 1978, the actress Catherine O’Hara, then a twenty-four-year-old cast member on the cult Canadian sketch-comedy show “SCTV,” told a late-night interviewer that at times she felt underestimated as a performer. “It sounds like I’m complaining here,” she said. “But I think people don’t take comedy seriously enough.” She went on: “When I get sent for auditions, even for commercials and things, it’s never for an acting commercial, nothing you could act for. It’s always, We need silly goof-off girls.” O’Hara’s gripe, relayed with a wide, warm smile, seemed to stem not from self-pity but from genuine befuddlement; what she was doing on “SCTV” was acting, insomuch as it involved inhabiting characters with such conviction that she more or less disappeared completely into the work. O’Hara, a self-professed “good Catholic girl at heart,” was a natural at the art of sublimation; she had an almost ascetic impulse to vacate her own gentle personality in order to serve as a vessel for whatever eccentric, delusional, hammy weirdos might speak through her. She was nothing like Lola Heatherton, her oblivious, preening lounge-singer character on “SCTV”—who once began an interview with Mother Teresa by asking, “What do you get out of this?”—but there was never a sense that she stood in judgment of Lola’s delusions of grandeur. She approached even her most insufferable characters with compassionate curiosity; they came from within her, but she also couldn’t wait to see what they were going to do next. She once told Rolling Stone, “When I pretend to be someone else, I go to the depths of nothingness. The more I do that—become nothing—and the more I let the character take over, the more I feel like that person. When you become the person, nothing is contrived.”

O’Hara, who died last Friday, at the age of seventy-one, was a great character actress, in the most expansive sense. Over the years, the term has come to have a slightly pejorative slant, signifying a marginal kook who never quite made it into leading-lady territory. But in the case of O’Hara there can be no other way to fully encapsulate her talent. If her death feels like a compounded loss, it is because she takes with her the dozens of offbeat women (and sometimes men) whom she coaxed out of her person and into existence. Her character Kate McCallister, from the 1990 classic “Home Alone,” with her casually elegant wardrobe and her steely determination to get home to her unattended child, became an idealized maternal figure for an entire generation. (When she ran into Macaulay Culkin over the decades, they would greet each other as family; a eulogy Culkin posted for O’Hara on Instagram began with “Mama. I thought we had time.”) I don’t think, for her part, that O’Hara would mind the conflation; she had an innate Canadian modesty and insisted that her favorite role she ever played was “mother of my children.” (O’Hara married the set designer Bo Welch in 1992; she is survived by him and their two children.)

In 2019, I interviewed O’Hara, over cocktails, at the height of a late surge of fame brought on by her Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning role in the surprise-hit sitcom “Schitt’s Creek,” alongside her frequent comedy collaborator Eugene Levy. Unlike her recurring “SCTV” character Chatty Cathy, who prattled incessantly on a talk show called “Enough About Me,” O’Hara was gracious and self-effacing—“I’m talking an awful lot about myself right now,” she said, mid-conversation, as if that wasn’t the point. O’Hara extolled the virtues of improvisational comedy, which she described as the art of “listening to others”—and, in turn, learning how to listen intently to oneself. Like the best sketch comedians, O’Hara was possessed of an impeccable internal tuning fork, and much of her best work came out of an almost musical sense of delivery. Individual words and phrases came out of her mouth with such oddball precision that they became lasting comedic earworms. Think of the stumbling way that Moira Rose, her narcissistic, bewigged matriarch from “Schitt’s Creek,” struggles to pronounce the name “Herb Ertlinger” in a cheesy local commercial for fruit wine; or the way Sheila Albertson, from “Waiting for Guffman,” drunkenly whispers loudly, across a table during an ill-fated double date, “What’s it like to be with a circumcised man?”; or the way Delia Deetz, her deranged sculptor character from “Beetlejuice,” screams, “If you don’t let me gut out this house and make it my own, I will go insane and I will take you with me!”; or the anguished way that Kate McCallister, realizing that she’s abandoned her son during a holiday vacation, sits bolt upright and cries to the heavens, “Kevin!”

O’Hara maintained that she was at her best when she was part of an interdependent troupe. She began her career as a member of the Second City theatre, in her native Toronto, and its stacked “SCTV” cast, which included the likes of John Candy, Rick Moranis, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, and Levy. Later, she became part of the merry band of players who worked regularly with the director Christopher Guest in films including “Guffman,” “Best in Show,” “A Mighty Wind,” and “For Your Consideration”; she told me that his improvisatory approach provided performers “such a freedom,” even if he once turned down her idea to have her character in “Best in Show” “relax” a dog backstage. Most recently, she was a recurring presence on Apple TV’s ensemble workplace comedy “The Studio,” playing against type as a hard-nosed movie executive freshly out of a job: “Don’t just stand there like a fucking Doordasher,” she barks at her anxious successor, played by Seth Rogen. “Come in!”

O’Hara was the sixth of seven siblings, and her father, a pragmatic man who worked for the Canadian railroad, encouraged her early on to look into secretarial work. (“You can make good money typing,” she recalled him saying.) O’Hara did theatre in high school but didn’t necessarily have her sights set on comedy; she wasn’t even aware that comedic actresses existed until her older brother Marcus, also an aspiring performer, began dating Gilda Radner, whom he’d met while working at a small Toronto theatre. O’Hara instantly revered her. “It was all Gilda as far as opening up my world,” O’Hara told me. Through Radner, O’Hara learned about Second City—a Toronto offshoot of an improv theatre originally founded in Chicago. She bombed her initial audition but remained undeterred; after waitressing for a while at Second City, she became Radner’s understudy, and after Radner departed became one of the two main women in the theatre’s core sketch troupe, along with Andrea Martin. (O’Hara would later grouse that some men in the group would lump her and Martin together. “If one of the guys was writing a scene that was basically about men, they’d say, ‘And then the women come in!’ as if we shared one hip,” she told one interviewer.) There were frustrating aspects to “SCTV,” too—O’Hara was, for a time, paid less than many of her male peers, and filming took place in Edmonton, a four-hour flight from Toronto, on a gruelling schedule that left O’Hara feeling both ragged and homesick—but she flourished creatively, writing most of her own material, for which she earned her first Emmy, in 1982.

In 1981, O’Hara decamped for “S.N.L.,” but left the show before she appeared in even one episode. She’d found out that “SCTV,” which had briefly gone off the air, was set to return to NBC, and she felt called, as she once put it, to “go back to my family.” There was a sadness to many of her characters, who were too socially inept or unself-aware to bring their dreams to fruition. But there was also a resilience there, a devotion to following one’s own intuition at any cost. In “Waiting for Guffman,” O’Hara has the daunting task of playing a bad actress in a small-town Midwestern musical-theatre production, who, try as she might, cannot get in touch with her inner voice. She says, of her blowhard husband turned de-facto acting coach (Fred Willard), that “he’s teaching me to change my instincts, or at least ignore them.” It was a line made all the funnier by the fact that O’Hara herself took exactly the opposite approach as a performer. Her instincts, she knew, were her greatest tool, and she relied on them, hilariously, until the end. ♦

From the first seconds of “Melania,” we know we’re watching a commercial: the camera swoops and glides over the luxury waterfront estate Mar-a-Lago, and then, back on the ground, a snakeskin stiletto emerges from an S.U.V. Visually, it’s slick but exceedingly mid. The director Brett Ratner cozied up to the Trumps after spending years in movie-biz exile amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault. (He has denied wrongdoing.) For his comeback, he has summoned all the artistic ambition of a local Realtor who just got a drone. Backed by the familiar chords of “Gimme Shelter,” the opening scene proposes a documentarian’s corollary to the rule about restaurants with a view: the spendier the soundtrack, the flatter the film. Throughout the hundred-and-four-minute run time, the shoe motif continues: Melania watching television in heels alone; Melania meeting a former hostage in heels alone; Melania sitting on a couch alone and, at the end of a long day, removing her heels. After a while, “Melania” starts to feel like an OnlyFans account crossed with that meme of Kim Jong Un visiting factories. You can’t exactly blame Ratner for relying on a veneer of glamour. How do you capture a subject whose feet are more expressive than her personality?

Certainly, one would expect the film to offer a Melania-friendly take, given that Melania, an executive producer, had creative control, and that Amazon paid a record-breaking forty million dollars—twenty-eight of which Melania reportedly pocketed—in a rights deal that might have been brokered by Boss Tweed. (The second-highest bid, from Disney, came in at about twenty-six million dollars lower.) Before long, we’ve left advertising behind for pure propaganda. We’re treated to a long, sombre scene of the First Couple at Arlington National Cemetery, knowing all the while that Trump views the war dead as “losers” and “suckers.” Then there’s a set piece of Melania presiding over a fitting for her Inauguration outfit—a big-screen “get ready with me,” in which she fusses over hat-brim angles and collar shapes as pin-cushion-bearing attendants applaud her taste. “No more turtleneck!” she decrees, eyes narrowing, as Ratner strains to make a “Rush Hour” out of rush alterations. Melania is an immigrant, from Slovenia. So are her French-born stylist, Hervé Pierre, and Tham Kannalikham, an interior designer who arrived in the U.S. from Laos at the age of two, and who is seen reciting a putatively spontaneous ode to Trump’s Presidency and the American Dream. Her placid cameo would beggar belief at a moment when Melania’s husband is leading a violent mass-deportation campaign, if it didn’t constitute precisely the kind of taunting mindfuck at which Trumpworld excels.

The timing couldn’t be more infelicitous for “Melania,” which showed at a private White House screening just hours after ICE agents murdered Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street. A notably patchy crowd including Amazon bosses, Queen Rania of Jordan, and Mike Tyson enjoyed a spread of dichromatic snacks such as hurricane lamps filled with white gumballs and macarons that looked as though they were made of toothpaste and coal. The documentary’s unheard-of marketing budget of thirty-five million dollars has provided for personalized popcorn tubs in theatres and those ubiquitous posters whose fancy-lady graphic design brings to mind a boob-tape kit. As Jeff Bezos trashed the Washington Post and cut sixteen thousand jobs at Amazon, people who worked on the film made themselves conspicuously scarce; according to Rolling Stone, two-thirds of them asked to be removed from the credits. Then, the same day the movie opened, Ratner turned up in photographs from the latest batch of Epstein files, sharing a couch with the sex offender and two female companions.

Yet, as hagiography, “Melania” is strangely self-defeating. We are told, for instance, that Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs, is an avid videographer, but the film is devoid of baby pictures, family mementos, or any of the other low-hanging archival materials that typically serve to humanize a distant subject. She is a woman without a past, effacing biography just as her husband erases national history. (As I noted in 2016, their four hundred and fifty person wedding included all of three guests from Melania’s homeland: her mother, her father, and her sister.) Melania says that everything she does is for “the children,” but no actual children appear in “Melania.” Nor do pets, friends, hobbies, or music, except in a sad little scene in which she struggles to sing along to “Billie Jean,” supposedly her favorite song. You almost wince when her towering adult son, Barron, brushes her off without so much as a peck on the cheek.

We can only conclude that “Melania” portrays Melania in exactly the way she wants to be seen: as rigid, formal, solitary, dourly materialistic; surrounded by lackeys drafted into the closest thing to intimacy that she seems able to access; grinding through bot-like voice-overs filled with awkward gerunds and stilted exposition. Aviva Siegel, a former Hamas hostage, visits Trump Tower to lobby for her spouse’s liberation, only to become a prop in Melania’s vanity project. The encounter begs for gravity, but Melania turns it into another fashion moment, complimenting Siegel’s T-shirt, which features her captive husband’s image, and telling her that he’s “beautiful.” In another scene, we catch glimpses of the Los Angeles fires on TV—another world event passing by like so much B-roll between wardrobe changes.

The life is barren, the glory borrowed. When Melania attends Jimmy Carter’s funeral, the camera lingers on the crowds, as though they’d come out for her. “The love my parents shared for fifty-seven years was the foundation of our home,” Melania says, in a rare sentimental aside, conjuring marital devotion by proxy. The most genuine bits of the film involve her grief for her mother, Amalija Knavs, who died in 2024. “My beloved mother was the richest thread in my life,” Melania says, as she walks down the aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which seems to have been privatized so that she can light a candle. As with any scene that relies on Melania for emotional impact, it requires some juicing, this time with Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The choice seems vaguely trolly, given the song’s associations with the civil-rights movement and, more recently, Barack Obama. Call it spiritual appropriation, simulating the soul that is so conspicuously lacking onscreen.

Cameras followed Melania in the twenty days leading up to Trump’s second Inauguration. About nineteen of them seem to have been devoted to planning Melania’s big event, a candlelit dinner for MAGA backers and bagmen, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Chef Chris’s menu opens with a “golden egg and caviar,” an event planner says. At this point, you think that “Melania” has broken the fourth wall, that the far-too-obvious symbolism is about to be acknowledged and then punctured or dismissed. But, no, the gilded hors d’œuvres are for real, even if, as a metaphor, they are at best incomplete. With “Melania,” you get the brittle shell, but none of the rich internal goo that makes for a compelling portrait.

The First Couple’s marriage, never outwardly loving, comes across as particularly arid on the rare occasions when they interact. “That’s a good one, congrats,” Melania says, over the phone on Election Night, as Trump crows about his victory. “I will see it on the news.” Her husband may as well have won a bowling tournament. One wonders whether she’s exacting payback for the time, in 2018, when, in a tweet welcoming her home from the hospital after a minor procedure, he accidentally called her Melanie. As for the dinner, Melania asserts that the theme is “white and gold.” To her credit, that’s a fairly apt encapsulation of the entire Trumpist project.

“It’s . . . cinematic,” Melania declared, struggling, at a press call, to come up with three words to describe “Melania.” This is like calling food “culinary,” or sports “athletic,” but, in addition to being redundant, it reflects the film’s failure to decide what genre it’s working in. Tracking shots of S.U.V. convoys and grainy faux-camcorder effects—not to mention a lugubrious theme song called “Melania’s Waltz”—seem copped from “Succession.” (Except in “Succession” you get acid banter during the rides; Melania says so little that she might rival Charlie Chaplin for achievement in silent film.) The rote voice-overs bring to mind reality shows, as does an “Apprentice”-lite sequence of Melania interviewing candidates for a job on her staff:“Hayley, you could bring Gabrielle in, please?”

You wonder if Melania, as part of some sort of marital bargain, simply demanded a show of her own—it was not all that long ago, after all, that the personal section of her website boasted of her “numerous television commercials,” most recently alongside “one of America’s top icons, the Aflac duck.” Despite legendarily low ticket sales in some regions, the film managed to earn a respectable seven million dollars or so domestically on opening weekend, not that it’s anywhere close to being profitable for Amazon in the strictly economic sense. Whatever “Melania” is, and whatever numbers it ends up doing, it will never be able to compete, for sheer reach, with the sickening scenes that the Trump regime’s ICE is starring in day after day. Coming soon, to a street corner near you. ♦

It wasn’t exactly a house or, I guess, it was less than a house. Specifically, it was half of a house, three stories, divided top to bottom, clapboarded, on a corner lot in Somerville. There was a house on the left, where whoever lived there fought all the time—you could hear them through the wall, horsehair plaster and lath—and then there was the house on the right, where we, the loopy semi-vegetarians, lived in, I admit it, squalor, two thousand square feet of it, much of the time smelling of sex, salty and oil-and-vinegary. One night, everyone stood together in the second-floor hallway, listening to the shrieking on the other side of the wall—louder and wilder than the noises you hear at night in the woods, fox and vixen, courting, mating—trying to decide whether to call the cops. Tracy Chapman, who’d huddled in the hallway that night, wrote “Behind the Wall”: Last night I heard the screaming. I didn’t live there then, but later I heard that screaming, too.

I think Tracy found the house her junior year at Tufts. I was a year behind her. Don’t get your hopes up. We never met. I can’t tell you anything about Tracy Chapman, because I don’t know anything about Tracy Chapman, and probably, if I knew anything, I wouldn’t tell you. I moved in only after she’d moved out, but people would still call on the phone, asking for her. Fans, reporters, fans. Did we know where she was? Did we know how to reach her? Could we get a message to her? No. Wasn’t she amazing, the best thing ever in the whole wide, wonderful, cocked-up world? Yes.

This isn’t a story about Tracy Chapman. It’s a story about the house. There were six bedrooms, but sometimes there were eight or nine or ten or even a dozen people living there, because it was cheaper if you shared and the place was such a mess—what was one more sweaty body compared with two more hands to do chores and another person to split the rent? There was also a dog named Takisha and a cat named Buddha and another cat named Misha that S., who became a soil scientist, had inherited from his grandmother, who’d named him after Mikhail Baryshnikov, because of how high the cat could leap. When S. moved out—I think he went to Japan?—he gave Misha to a very nice old lady named Donna, who lived in a vinyl-sided yellow house next door. That cat strode down the street like a lion, king of the pride. Once, he won a battle with a pit bull. Man, that cat could fight.

None of the rest of us had anything like Misha’s self-possession, or not when I lived there. No one was who they meant to be, not yet, anyway. We were embryos, stem cells, brain stems of our future selves, wet behind the ears, wet all over. We lived in muddled, uncertain, thrilling, and dizzying chaos, slamming doors, crying into pillows, pondering the possibilities of turnips and menstrual cups and macrobiotics and Audre Lorde. One chapter of our lives had ended, but the next chapter hadn’t begun, and none of us were sure what we wanted, only that we wanted it, longed for it, were desperate for it. I’ve been told that it’s the work of young adulthood to learn that you are in charge of your own life. Easier said than done, but for sure wackier and more fun in a house with a bunch of other misfits, especially if at least one person knows how to make a decent frittata, though it can be a little tricky figuring out how to take charge of your life if you’re trying to do it in the shadow of Tracy Chapman.

How much yearning can one roof shelter? In the bathroom on the second floor, there was a spiral-bound lined notebook, the bathroom book, or, really, many books, a succession of notebooks, each with a pencil attached by a string, fishing lure to a rod. The idea for the bathroom book was, possibly, L.’s (she’s a book editor now). It was like a journal except not, because it was collective, something made together, like stone soup. You could write hostile, scolding notes (“Please stop fucking with the thermostat”) or issue pronouncements (“I have begun to study C. Wright Mills”) or scribble or doodle or write poetry or draft stories (me, I did this, compulsively, unstoppably). R., who’s now not only a clinical psychologist but also something of an amateur archivist, kept three of those bathroom books, a record of our past selves, traces of our naked, aching hunger, and he says there’s a lot of daffy roommate stuff in there, like this little riff on taking a shower.

R.: Gets into shower fully clothed, becomes drenched and knows what it is like to take a shower.

L.: Asks if hot water costs more than cold water.

Tracy: Goes to Somerville Lumber, brings home materials, draws up a blueprint, builds a shower, takes a shower.

Buddha: We don’t take showers, we’re cats.

I’ve sometimes wondered if, in one of those bathroom books, Tracy first composed the pierce-your-soul-with-an-icepick lyrics to “Fast Car.” I had a feeling that I belonged. I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone.

All I know I read in the newspaper. “I, Tracy Chapman, own six albums,” she told the Tufts Daily in 1982, when she was a freshman and played left wing on the soccer team. She won first prize at a Tufts talent show; she told the Daily she loved Joan Armatrading. The next year, when she was sophomore co-captain of the Lady Jumbos, she took out an ad in the back of the paper: “Wanted: FOLK/BLUES Musician looking for GUITARIST VOCALIST and PERCUSSIONIST to play mostly originals. Call Tracy Chapman 776-6318 evenings.”

Tracy and L. and R. lived on campus in the Tufts Crafts House, artsy, lefty, a place for the sort of students who staged sit-ins to protest tenure decisions and to call for divestment from South Africa. At Tufts, I lived in the dorms. I was an Air Force R.O.T.C. cadet. The Crafts House kids were the kinds of kids who hated the R.O.T.C. kids. “We would have shunned you,” R. admitted. Shunning was the least of it. I’d walk across campus in uniform, and kids sitting on the quad would throw shoes at me.

I didn’t entirely blame them. I was crazy proud of being in the Air Force, but I wasn’t so excited about Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the vow you had to take, one by one, in front of a whole auditorium of R.O.T.C. students from M.I.T., Harvard, Tufts, and Wellesley, that you were not now nor had you ever been a homosexual. I, embryo, stem cell, brain stem, couldn’t look straight. I couldn’t think straight. I was a wreck. I don’t remember much, but I do remember watching Tracy play her guitar on the roof of the library. She was unbelievably beautiful and handsome and cool, Crafts House cool, an anthropology major, an ethnomusicologist, and I’d have been too intimidated even to try to look her in the eye. I barely looked anyone in the eye, except my commanding officer, and that was because you had to. I was a math major, I was a biology major, I was an English major, I was . . . minor. Best stored in a petri dish, an incubator. I went to talk to my creative-writing professor and found myself unable to speak, able only to weep, wordlessly.

“Please take this time to silence your cellphones, unless you’re my wife, in which case, Barbara, please pick up. I miss you and I’m sorry.”

Cartoon by Asher Perlman

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Eventually, I quit R.O.T.C., but then I had to work ten thousand hours a day to pay for school, or else I’d have had to drop out. Maybe secretly I had always wanted to be more of a Crafts House kid? I took a photography class and rode a bike I’d painted with polka dots all over Somerville and Medford, taking pictures of religious statuary—Mary in the half shell behind a chain-link fence—as if I were amused and detached, when, really, I missed Mass, holy water, the grace of God, confession, absolution. I borrowed a shoulder-mounted video camera from the library and walked around campus asking people, “Are you a feminist?” In an internship at a cable-access TV station, I made a dreadful documentary about battered women. I had spiky hair and spectacles, and I wore a giant men’s woollen overcoat that I’d got at a thrift place called Dollar-A-Pound, which is how much the stuff there cost—you picked ratty clothes up off piles on the floor and put them on an industrial scale—and I played field hockey, left wing, and was, very briefly, a sports reporter for the Daily, though I seem to have also once written about U.S. foreign policy, to which I strenuously if vaguely objected, for the Tufts Observer. I wished I were edgy but knew I had no edges at all, like an amoeba, a protozoan. I was a blur.

I’m pretty sure the first time I heard Tracy play was on campus in November, 1984, but I didn’t go out to see live music much. I was either drilling or at field-hockey practice or at work or in the library or, if all else failed, in my dorm room, knitting and listening to bootleg cassettes of Joan Armatrading and Jane Siberry and Kate Bush on a shitty boom box my mother won at bingo. Mainly, homesick, I was trying to ignore my assigned roommate, who was very rich and very bulimic; she ate all day, and all night rode a stationary bike that took up all the floor space and sounded like a bird with a broken wing attempting liftoff—ffftt, ffftt, ffftt, ffftt.

In 1985, house lore has it, Tracy found the place in Davis Square—Davis Square being the Paris of the eighties, people liked to say—between Tufts and Harvard but about a mile away from each, and therefore cheap. R. told me that Tracy rented it sight half seen; she hadn’t been able to go inside, so she’d had to stand on a milk crate to look in a window. Tracy, L., R., and three friends moved in. R. said they wanted to start their own crafts house—an artsy coöperative—and that Tracy had the idea that they should build a six-sided table, each making a sixth of it, like a pie slice, like a potluck. R. was in a band called Planned Obsolescence. Tracy listened to Robert Johnson. For Halloween, they’d hold a raucous party, part masked ball, part avant-garde performance art. A. dressed up as an Englishman named Nigel and talked with a Cockney accent (she ended up becoming a fashion designer). Out in the back yard, they hoisted a globe that was meant to sway in the wind but mostly just dangled there, a world not turning.

The Daily ran a profile, “Tufts Junior Sings Her Way to Fame.” “Oh, God, it was crazy. I was hanging out with a friend of mine, and almost everybody else in the house we lived in had gone home for Thanksgiving,” Tracy once said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “We didn’t have anything to do, and we didn’t have any money. I was playing my guitar, and she said, ‘Why not go in the square and play?’ ” That night, during Thanksgiving break, was the first time she busked on the streets of Harvard Square. When everyone else in the house was gone for the holiday. That house, her house, the house. My house?

Afterward—after “Tracy Chapman,” her début album, came out in 1988 and reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts and all but swept the Grammys the next year—everyone who had been at Tufts when Tracy was there said they knew Tracy or had known Tracy or had at least once talked with Tracy. Not me.

Brian Koppelman knew her. He was a year behind me and he was a leader of the Tufts student divestment movement, and someone told him he should get her to play at an anti-apartheid rally, and he went to see her perform at Cappuccino’s, the coffeehouse in the student union, and left in tears. At the rally, she sang “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.” And it sounds like a whisper. The way I remember it, people all but fainted. Simon & Garfunkel in Central Park singing “Homeward Bound” had nothing on Tracy Chapman at that rally. Brian’s father was a music executive; he helped get Tracy a record deal. She moved out of the house. It was as if a giant bird high up in the sky, some kind of wayward stork, swooped down, landed on the asphalt roof, pecked a hole in it, tipped its broad school-bus-yellow bill down into her room, plucked her up, and flapped away.

“I love how teacup Yorkies fit perfectly in the skulls of our vanquished enemies.”

Cartoon by Amanda Chung

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I graduated, answered a housemate-wanted ad in the paper, and went for an interview that ended with my being asked to clean the kitchen, a trial run. As a kid, I’d gotten a fake work permit to take a job as a chambermaid at a trashy motel where truckers stopped to meet prostitutes. I knew how to clean.

At the house, I got the smallest room, a nook on the third floor, like Anne of Green Gables, and there I hunkered, under the eaves, on a mattress I’d found on the street, reading William Faulkner and bell hooks by the light of a lamp I’d found in a dumpster outside a Harvard dorm. Home. I don’t remember who the landlords were, and I never met them, and they never came by, so we did whatever work on the house that it needed or, to be fair, didn’t need. Someone pasted a paper moonscape on a wall of the dining room, or maybe it was a view of the Earth from the moon, blue marble, and in the living room N., who became a pediatrician, painted a mural, and I can almost picture it—the sea? a field?—but in the end I can’t. E. and I once painted the kitchen walls rose, and E. slopped paint all over the windowpanes, and D. said that was because he came from money and didn’t know how to do things like paint a window, but I loved it anyway, and I loved E., and after that whatever light came into our kitchen had a beatific pink tint, like a winter sunset. I learned how to cane chairs and fixed all the broken ones. I stitched a tablecloth out of old jeans. D., a structural engineer, could teach anyone how to do and make and fix things, anything; she even had her own loom. Someone was always plucking at a guitar. Maybe there was a banjo? We baked bread and dried herbs and cooked stews and brewed beer and held cantankerous house meetings and wondered about Reagan and the fate of the nation and the world. The Cold War was ending, apartheid was collapsing, the global war on terror hadn’t yet begun—an American interregnum. Were we talking about a revolution? Don’t ya know you better run, run, run, run, run? ’Cause finally the tables are starting to turn. Make art, not bombs. Make love, not war. Make art, make love, make art. And it sounds like a whisper. Unfortunately, the tables did not turn.

There were phone cords everywhere, stapled up and down doorframes and duct-taped to baseboards along the hallways. There was only one phone number, but all of us wanted an extension in our rooms. S. had a modem; no one else really knew what that thing was for except tying up the line. R. got a tape recorder and named it Posterity, and when people were sitting around, just blathering, musing, jamming, he would say, “Let’s record this for Posterity.”

I have one photograph of myself from those years, a self-portrait, my camera perched on a tripod in front of a mirror. I’m wearing Tufts athletic-department sweats and, inexplicably, a bowler hat. Hanging on the wall behind me is a quilt I’d made, featuring, ironically or maybe not ironically, Bert and Ernie reading books on a couch. In the foreground, taped to the mirror, is a copy of Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Layers.” I have walked through many lives, / some of them my own, / and I am not who I was, / though some principle of being / abides, from which I struggle / not to stray. My anthem. Autobiography of a blur.

Mostly we ate beans and rice and tofu, and the food was horrible, honestly, but it cost hardly anything, and, as for drugs, there must have been a lot of pot and mushrooms, but I, abstemious and naïve, would not have noticed. Anything that got infested with grain flies D. boiled and fed to Takisha, the dog. I lived there for two years while I worked as a secretary at Harvard, perfecting the art of finding excuses to go to Widener Library. Nights, I had a job at a bookstore in Davis Square, until I got fired because the manager thought I was stealing from the cash register. (The real thief was the assistant manager, but I figured he must’ve really needed the money.) E. worked at the Somerville Theatre and got us in for free. We watched a lot of movies from the balcony. Every movie. Mostly, I tried to write a novel, outlining plots in the bathroom book. A. says a lot of the stuff in that book, when she lived there, was dumb or nasty—dirty pictures, feeble attempts to be shocking. “We were trying so hard not to be normal,” she said, a little wearily, a little wistfully. Some of us did not have to try very hard.

No house can contain the messiness of those years of yearning and wanting, wanting, wanting, and I hated it and I loved it and mostly I loved it even if no small number of the constantly changing housemates drove me up a wall. P., who was older than everyone else and had the biggest room, on the second floor, just past the bathroom, practiced primal-scream therapy, meaning he was always in his room with the door shut just yowling. One woman was reading “The Courage to Heal” and had decided she’d recovered memories of sexual abuse that were somehow, mysteriously, associated with washing dishes, which meant that she skived off all kitchen chores. K., who had been horribly burned at the age of two, worked as a nurse at the Shriners burn hospital and had the biggest heart and most unfathomably bottomless gentleness of anyone I have ever known, excepting my mother, and for a long time she debated whether to order a pair of glue-on prosthetic ears, because she was very self-conscious about having no ears, and P. was lovely with her about that, so sweet, and we all forgave him for screaming all the time.

“We all thought we could do anything then,” A. says now. She moved into R.’s old room when he moved into Tracy’s old room. He left behind a drawing of a vagina. A. was not amused. You could sleep with anyone; no one needed to be in any closet. I slept with a Yale guy one block over who, with his five Yale roommates, sold semen to a sperm bank, and they pooled the profits to buy an espresso maker for six hundred dollars. “They pooled their semen?” D. asked, incredulous. “Well,” I said. “Not really. But, yeah.” No one in the house ever forgave me for that guy. Our house, we had values, principles, the “Moosewood Cookbook.” Plus a cat, fighting weight.

There were, inevitably, abortions and miscarriages and broken hearts, blood on the floor, our very guts unravelling all over the place, twining around the balusters and bannisters. I slept with only one person who lived in our house, and not until after I moved out: house rules. Group living is not for everyone, but in those years it was for me. D. taught me how to knit socks and can tomatoes. E. took me to New York. The people came and went, as if that house were a train station, a way station, or not half a house but a halfway house. One woman left for an ashram. E. went to medical school. Another guy went off to study whale song. J. graduated from law school, changed his name, and dedicated himself to abolishing male circumcision. Someone whose name nobody remembers went off to the Peace Corps in Timor. D. went on a bike trip in Europe. In Utrecht, she walked down a street lined with posters for Tracy’s first album; later, on another bike trip, in Germany, she fell in love and never came back.

The point at which stem cells begin to differentiate—to become the kinds of cells they’re going to be—is called stem-cell fate determination. In my experience, it feels like hell. When my GRE scores came in the mail, I opened them at the kitchen table, and J., cooking dinner, looked over my shoulder. “Eight hundreds?” he said. “Yeah, probably apply to graduate school, dude.” No stork was coming for me. I gave up on being a writer.

Once, years later, S. and R. went back to visit Donna, next door. Misha had died. She missed him madly.

“He looked right through you,” Donna said. “He knew what was going on.”

“His color was very pretty,” Donna’s cousin Dottie said. “It was like a bluish gray.”

“Russian blue,” S. said.

“He was the toughest cat on the street,” Donna said. But elegant.

“You could put a bow tie on that cat,” Dottie said. Or a bowler hat?

Donna told S. that she kept Misha’s ashes in an urn on the mantel. Posterity, remains, traces. S. leaned in and kissed her cheek.

Tracy would sometimes stop by the house. D. said once they sat together in the living room and talked about weaving, warp and weft. I wish I’d been there. I’d already left. ♦

Standing at the window, I watch robins clean themselves
in the cement birdbath, splashing water onto their backs
to remove dirt and parasites, before hopping to the ledge
to fluff their feathers. Like my neighbors, they are drinkers
and seem mortal but free, pointing their bills up up to the sky,
as if they were in a secluded stream instead of in my backyard.
How intensely involved with themselves they are, preening
and drinking the water I carried for them this morning
from my sink. Farewell to the dust and ants of village life.
Red robins, you make me feel such tenderness and awe.
Yes, their eyes are underneath the ground now, but look,
the sky is blue. The force of life is replenishing itself.
Hurry up, Come on, Be quick, some men say, but my revenge
is to live and sing the things I cannot say.