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For more than a decade, the singer-songwriter Mitski has been a totem for yearners. The artist has described herself as a black hole where people can dump their feelings, but her music moves beyond ugly emotions toward catharsis. “Still, nobody wants me / And I know no one will save me, I’m just asking for a kiss / Give me one good movie kiss and I’ll be all right,” she sings on her 2018 nu-disco single “Nobody,” her voice at once covetous and wistful. There is a heightened intensity to her songs, even at their most muted—a simmering cauldron of woe in near-constant threat of bubbling over.

Photograph by Lexie Alley

From her 2016 hit “Puberty 2” to her 2023 album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” Mitski has carved out one of the more spellbinding and successful careers in indie music. Alongside her producer and longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland, she has drifted from dream-pop to folk rock to dance music, webbing genre tatters together into a kind of understated yet snug comforter. Her voice is capable of imbuing any canvas with melancholy, but it would be reductive to label her a mere singer of sad songs. Her lyrics crackle with a desire to be made whole, as evidenced by her most recent single, “I’ll Change for You”: “How do I let our love die / When you’re the only other keeper of my most precious memories?” she appeals. Mitski’s new album, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” is out Feb. 27; on the heels of its release, she will play a six-show residency at the Shed (March 2-4, 6-7, 9), opening the spiritual void once more.—Sheldon Pearce

Trisha Brown Dance Company in “Set and Reset.”Photograph by Ben McKeown / Courtesy the American Dance Festival

The New York downtown scene of the sixties and seventies was a place of overlapping friendships and studio space, and the artist Robert Rauschenberg was at the center of it. Rauschenberg’s designs brought a witty, even Surrealist edge to the works of the choreographer Merce Cunningham; later, Rauschenberg worked with the younger Trisha Brown. Almost nine years after her death, Brown’s Trisha Brown Dance Company performs her silvery, fluid “Set and Reset” (1983), to a memorable score by Laurie Anderson, paired with Cunningham’s “Travelogue” (1977), for which Rauschenberg created a performance arena that included bicycle wheels, flags, and tin cans—everything but the kitchen sink.—Marina Harss (BAM; Feb. 26-28.)

In much the same way that youngsters might dig their parents’ Beatles records, the pianist and composer Amy Williams had a formative relationship with the music of the minimalist composer Morton Feldman. Her father, Jan, a percussionist who taught alongside Feldman at the University of Buffalo, also participated in the premières of several of Feldman’s major works, giving Williams a head start in understanding the logic of his elongated tones and weighty silences, which are now the signatures of compositions such as “For Philip Guston” and “Rothko Chapel.” In a nod to Feldman during the year of his centenary, Williams performs his sprawling, evergreen piano piece “Triadic Memories”; its repetitions and ghost harmonics were once described by Feldman as the “biggest butterfly in captivity.”—K. Leander Williams (Miller Theatre; March 3.)

In 1979, the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld affixed strips of white fabric across the dotted traffic lines of a street in Santiago, turning legible marks into symbols with more open-ended meanings—plus signs or perhaps crosses—and reclaiming the landscape from the regime of Augusto Pinochet. It was the first of many actions Rosenfeld would take, and art works she would make, that disturbed the order of public space as a way of protesting Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. Alongside her more public, often collaborative, projects, she also made collage films whose emotional impact is built on unexpected juxtapositions—another kind of disruption. “Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces” gathers an eye-opening range of material for her first retrospective in the U.S.—Jillian Steinhauer (Wallach Art Gallery; through March 15.)

The rapper turned pop star Lizzo felt like a lodestar of the twenty-tens Zeitgeist. She transitioned from new-age sensation to feel-good success story: a lyricist with pipes, a twerking flautist, and a high-energy sex- and body-positive entertainer, whose skills and charisma culminated in the 2017 mega-hit “Truth Hurts.” Her 2019 album, “Cuz I Love You,” remains a time capsule of all that felt distinctive about Lizzo as an artist—the duality of her songcraft, its sonic malleability, and her effervescence as a performer. She has since faced allegations of misconduct from former dancers, but her comeback mixtape, “My Face Hurts from Smiling,” which dropped last June, is a reminder of an enduring dexterity.—Sheldon Pearce (Blue Note; Feb. 27-28, March 1.)

Aigner Mizzelle as Lil and Okieriete Onaodowan as Big in “The Monsters,” written and directed by Ngozi Anyanwu.Photograph by T. Charles Erickson

The playwright and director Ngozi Anyanwu’s “The Monsters,” for Manhattan Theatre Club, is a tender two-hander about estranged half siblings. It’s also an unusual athletic performance, which opens with Big (Okieriete Onaodowan), a mixed-martial-arts champion, pummelling an invisible nemesis, like Jacob subduing the Angel. His muscled arms slam the mat, and the audience can smell the sweat. The play isn’t subtle; the final sequence leans hard on truisms about addiction and trauma, which are affecting but overly explicit. But both Onaodowan and the terrific Aigner Mizzelle, as Big’s messy, openhearted younger sister, Lil, are utterly electric and connected. In the most thrilling, soul-filling sequence, Big trains Lil, and then they become their younger selves, play-wrestling with the joy that only children get to feel before the world’s judgments set in.—Emily Nussbaum (City Center Stage II; through March 22.)

Raymond Depardon, who launched his career as a teen-aged photographer in the nineteen-fifties, turned to filmmaking in the seventies and became one of the era’s most artistically distinctive and politically probing documentarians. A retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center (through March 1) includes a remarkable set of films made behind the scenes of the French judicial system. In “Caught in the Acts” (1994), Depardon spotlights a peculiar practice: prosecutors interrogating suspects without a defense lawyer present. Keeping the camera still in a courthouse’s small, windowless chambers, Depardon depicts these face-to-face showdowns as litanies of misery, as the officials make suspects confront the grim circumstances leading to their arrests. With radical austerity, he evokes the burden of hard lives and the crushing force of governmental power.—Richard Brody

Illustration by Patricia Bolaños

Think back, if you can, to your initial foray into cocktails—the revelation in discovering the foaminess of egg whites or, perhaps, the horror of your first dirty Martini. Oddball, a new bar in Alphabet City aimed at “bringing out-there flavors down to earth,” intends to deliver similar thrills to even the most experienced barflies. On a recent icy weekend, two first-timers passed under the scarlet orb affixed above the fogged-up glass entrance, and sat beneath a vintage Japanese jazz poster, as the flickering of their table candle cast shadows on the wall. Soothing R. & B. played as they eyed the menu and its three categories (Easygoing, Energetic, and Explorative). Unwilling to appear faint of heart—“Easygoing is for chumps!”—they opted to start in the middle, with the Lightspeed Drifter, a blueberry-and-whey-based Daiquiri featuring a strong horseradish taste, which took more than a few sips to get accustomed to. Luckily, the Far Side, with its refreshing notes of cilantro, dill, pineapple, and tomatillo, allowed the duo to regroup, taking solace in what tasted like a tropical salsa. There’s no rest for the thirsty, however—the waiter returned, and the guests, after some brief recon, ventured into the Explorative section. The Infinite Loop (“a Vesper Martini goes on vacation,” as the menu put it) was met with grimaces galore, its sharp, dry mix of guava and brandy far too harsh for their taste buds. The explorers, in over their heads, ran for cover to an old reliable, and arrived at the house’s whiskey sour: a sweet, frothy delicacy topped with exquisitely marbled foam. Tongues tested, palates finally pleased, the adventurers decided that this was as good a place to stop as any. When it comes to cocktails, they realized, the well-trodden path trumps the road less travelled.

This week, I’m still thinking about Braden (Clavicular) Peters and the “looksmaxxers,” a subculture of young men obsessed with extreme physical self-improvement and baroque slang who seem to have achieved a new level of public awareness in recent weeks. The looksmaxxers are surely the subject for which several generations of gender-studies Ph.D.s have been training; I can only hope, given the embattled state of the academic humanities, that the experts are here for us when we need them most.

This week, I loved “Anno’s Counting Book.” My mother-in-law was a longtime preschool teacher, and she gives my almost three-year-old son unexpected and excellent books. Recently, she found a thrift-store copy of this wordless 1977 picture book by the Japanese illustrator Mitsumasa Anno. I am not someone who’s inclined to gas up math, but these drawings make the subject feel somehow . . . intuitive, beautiful, and fun?

This week, I cringed at “The Pitt.” I won’t quit “The Pitt,” no matter how clunkingly didactic or saccharine it gets. I’m just going to sit back and let lines like “Most people who think they have a penicillin allergy actually don’t” wash over me. I do, however, wish that the show would stop insisting there is some kind of interesting chemistry between Noah Wyle and the new attending played by Sepideh Moafi; there is not.

Sepideh Moafi and Noah Wyle in “The Pitt.”Photograph by Warrick Page / HBO Max

This week, I’m consuming waffles. I am generally skeptical of single-use kitchen gadgets, but I recently made an exception for a waffle-maker and won’t look back. I get neurotic making pancakes but waffles are gratifyingly foolproof. Invite people over, promise them waffles. Who says no to waffles?

Next week, I’m looking forward to Playreaders. A few months back, a friend who lives in my neighborhood and is a genius started a semi-regular gathering called Playreaders. It’s like a book club, but for reading plays. There is no homework (preparation is actively discouraged); we just eat dinner, drink some wine, read the play aloud, then talk about what we’ve read. For the next installment, we’re doing “Dance Nation,” by Clare Barron.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Robyn’s A.M.A.
• Sheila Heti on tripping for her mental health
• What does Obama know?

Jake Reiss got into bookselling for the money and the girls. Now that he’s ninety years old, he cares less about both, but he still gets up seven days a week and goes to work at what might be the strangest bookstore in America.

Outside, the Alabama Booksmith is so unassuming it’s as if Reiss had forgotten that he was running a retail business: a two-story, nearly windowless structure, surrounded by office parks and parking lots, on a dead-end street in a suburb of Birmingham. Inside, the vibe is half 1970, half 1870, with wood panelling, rattan chairs, and a drop-tile ceiling—but also patterned tablecloths, cozy curtains, a functioning fireplace, and an oversized hourglass. As for the books, they sit on uncrowded shelves along the outer walls, almost all facing out so that customers can, indeed, judge them by their covers. Collectively, they are what make Reiss’s store the only one of its kind in this country: the books are all hardcovers, virtually all first printings, all signed, and, except for a handful set aside on a small shelf, all for sale at the regular retail price. “Our books don’t cost more,” Reiss likes to say, “but they are worth more.”

Reiss has a roster of such slogans, some of which he’s put on little placards around the store. Boosterism comes naturally to him: he has been working in retail since he was six years old, although it took him half a century to find his way into the book trade. He’d never been much of a reader, even after he opened the Booksmith, but somewhere along the way he became one—a salesman so good that he sold himself on the books he was selling.

Reiss is the third Jacob Reiss to call Alabama home. The first was a native of Budapest, born in 1861, the year the American Civil War started. Twenty years after the war ended, he made his way to the reunited States, eventually becoming one of the biggest men in Mobile: an Elk, a Mason, a Shriner, a Rotarian, a trustee of his synagogue, a member of the local lodge of B’nai B’rith, and the owner of a sprawling shop on Dauphin Street. Despite the Ashkenazi custom of not naming children after a living relative, he gave one of his sons his name—oddly, the youngest of his three boys, who became the second Jacob Reiss. Junior inherited the family’s business sense, running his own clothing shop, and its substantial Southern pride, leading Mobile’s Mardi Gras celebrations and passing on the patronym once more.

But Jacob Reiss III rarely uses his Roman numerals, and he prefers to be called Jake. The nonagenarian has an unlikely ponytail and an ornery smile, which he flashed throughout a recent visit. While I signed books, he told me that his role model was not anyone on his father’s side of the family but rather his maternal grandfather, Isadore Prince, who was born in Romania and immigrated to America as a teen-ager. “He came on a boat to Canada, then walked from Canada, pushing a handcart all the way to Mobile. Can you imagine?”

Prince married a Jewish woman whose family had fled the Pale of Settlement, and the two raised nine children above a modest Army-Navy store that he had opened in downtown Mobile. Reiss started working in that store when most children start school and learned just about everything he needed for a lifetime in sales. When it came to a traditional education, though, he was less interested; he did eventually give college a try but soon dropped out and came home to his father’s clothing store, where he worked for nearly a decade before opening his own tailoring shop in Mobile: J. Reiss, Gentlemen’s Attire.

Reiss loved custom tailoring, and he became known as the Tailor to the Pros when he developed a specialty in outfitting professional athletes, making suits for the likes of Jack Kemp, Tommie Agee, and Lee Roy Jordan, a Dallas Cowboy who later served as the featured model in the advertising for a short-lived venture that Reiss branded “the world’s largest turtleneck store.” Turtlenecks turned out to be a fad of the sixties, though, and however fun it was to pal around with sports legends, taking measurements in locker rooms around the county did not pay as much as Reiss thought it might, so he tried expanding his custom tailoring to other cities in the South. “Sadly,” he said, “I discovered custom-tailoring stores do not franchise as well as hamburger stores.”

By then, Reiss had a daughter and two sons, but he and his wife had separated, and soon she and their children moved to Atlanta to be with her family. One of his sons, Jacob Reiss IV, followed him into custom tailoring; the other, Frank, wanted to be a writer, and left Georgia for San Francisco, where he collected rejection letters and paid rent with a job at an antiquarian bookstore. “My brother and my dad came out to visit me,” Frank told me. “And, you have to understand, my dad was the least literary person on the planet—he didn’t even like reading. They only came out West to go skiing and to go gambling. But he came into the store, and he saw all these leather-bound books that were hundreds of years old, and they were selling for thousands of dollars, and he started quizzing me about how it all worked.” Reiss was struck by the economics of the secondhand-book business: “It seemed to me like these people were buying books for pennies and selling them for dollars, and I thought, I could do that.”

Eventually, Frank Reiss moved back to Atlanta and opened A Cappella Books, a shoebox of a store in Little Five Points, and Reiss watched his son’s success with admiration and even some envy. “I followed Frank to library sales to buy books,” he told me, “and then I asked him for a list of the top one hundred writers, and I started going to garage sales on my own, looking for those hundred writers, spending ten cents or a quarter buying each book, filing up my spare closet and then the whole spare bedroom. And once I had done that, I started looking for a location.”

Reiss brought the same flair to bookselling that he’d used elsewhere: the shelf labels were made with the tailor shop’s monogram machine; bolts of paisley tie silk were made into deluxe shopping bags. But he found the actual selling of used books to be a little boring, so another form of arbitrage he exploited was the surfeit of literati who felt that getting to spend their days in a bookstore was practically paycheck enough: in those early years, the employees he hired all knew more about books than he did and almost ran the place themselves. He mostly amused himself playing softball, tennis, and touch football.

Like the Jacob Reisses who’d come before, he seemed to know everyone in town, so it wasn’t surprising when he finally figured out a way to make his bookstore into its own kind of civic institution. That began in 1995, when Reiss learned that the local radio personality Don Keith was about to publish a novel and was hoping to do an event for it. “We said we’d do a book signing, whatever that is,” Reiss remembered. What it was was successful: “We sold a bunch of books and we had a good time, so we thought, Let’s do that again, and that was the start of our signed books.”

For most people, signed first editions conjure images of white gloves and Plexiglas-protected display cases, but Reiss doesn’t generally deal in rare or even old books. Some of his biggest sellers over the years include Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Be Useful,” Debbie Harry’s “Face It,” Joe Namath’s “All the Way,” and, as of this month, Governor Gavin Newsom’s “Young Man in a Hurry.” Like those books, most of his inventory was recently published, and most of his authors are still with us. The Booksmith’s shelves feature an eclectic mix of poetry and literary fiction, plus local and regional titles, along with whatever other nonfiction Reiss has a mind to sell. It might be the only bookstore in Alabama where you can’t find a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and the only one in the world where you cannot buy a Bible, not to mention anything by J. K. Rowling.

How Reiss manages to acquire enough autographed books from actors, athletes, and best-selling authors to stock an entire store involves a mix of courtship, logistics, and luck. He won’t sell anything signed that isn’t a book, and the books are all first editions—almost no reprints, and never any paperbacks. He has long-standing relationships with publishers and small presses, so he’s often first in line for the signed copies that they distribute around the publication of big titles, though those are slightly less collectible since they generally feature “tip-in” signatures: pages, signed by authors at home or wherever they want, that are then bound into the book later. Because Reiss guarantees sales of several hundred copies, he can sometimes convince publicists to add a book-tour stop in Birmingham, even if it’s just for a lightning signing during which he and his team serve as a kind of human conveyor belt, shuffling signature-ready books by so speedily that the author can make it to a nearby city for another event that same night. When that strategy doesn’t work, he’s not above begging authors directly.

Sometimes it seems like authors are the only people who visit the Booksmith these days. The majority of Reiss’s customers are remote, and it is not a sign that the business is suffering when he says “nobody calls and nobody ever comes by.” That’s just the reality of being online, where the Booksmith is open “24/7” with a bare-bones website but with thorough entries for every book, including a photograph of the author’s signature and a description of where they signed it. The day I visited, just one person called, but it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Bragg, one of Reiss’s closest friends, and one person walked through the door, but he bought the most expensive book in the shop, a signed copy of Paul McCartney’s “1964: Eyes of the Storm,” one of the few books selling for more than the retail price—in this case, north of seven thousand dollars.

That sale aside, most of Reiss’s business appears in the store’s inbox, and most of it is more on the scale of thirty-five dollars plus tax and shipping. He maintains an e-mail list with five thousand or so devoted customers from around the world. “We do not solicit,” Reiss explained. “The only way to get on it is to make a purchase and request inclusion.” Almost every Monday afternoon, Reiss e-mails the list about that week’s select titles, and since roughly a thousand of the recipients are regular buyers, many of them respond right away, and Reiss stays at the store until nine or ten at night handling their orders. It’s a convention of the publishing industry that new books come out on Tuesdays, so that’s one of his busiest days, with anywhere from twenty to two hundred orders; a smaller number trickle in throughout the week, though Reiss always knows whenever an author dies or wins a major award because, whatever the day, his inbox fills up with orders or queries about what he might be hiding in the climate-controlled warehouse that takes up around half the store’s square footage.

Aptly enough, the former custom tailor now runs what might be best described as a bespoke bookstore. Those who love and admire Reiss’s business model, and they are legion, are ongoingly baffled by how well it works. One of the store’s “best friends” is the novelist Ann Patchett, who always signs for Reiss, and considers him one of the most interesting booksellers in America. Carla Diebold, who runs Armadillo Alley Books out of her home in Carrollton, Texas, reselling signed and first-edition books online, discovered the Booksmith several years ago, and was stunned that all its books were both signed and regularly priced. “We thought they were insane,” she told me. “Obviously not, since they’re still around, but I have no idea how they do this.”

It helps that Reiss has a small staff, just three employees. These days, he personally chooses all the books that the store sells. That transformation was inspired by marquee events with Southern giants like Bragg, Fannie Flagg, and Pat Conroy, events so well attended that Reiss wondered what all the fuss was about. Soon the former nonreader was devouring two hundred books a year. No one is more surprised by that literary transformation than Frank, who still runs A Cappella Books, in Atlanta. “Like son, like father” is how he likes to describe their business relationship.

The novelist Joshilyn Jackson got to see how carefully Reiss considers his choices when she sold her first book, more than two decades ago, and walked into the Booksmith to talk about it. “Alabama Booksmith was my parents’ bookstore, and my editor had said it was important to meet with independent bookstores, so I decided to practice on Jake,” she told me. It was so early in the publication process that Jackson printed the manuscript of “Gods in Alabama” herself on computer paper, but Reiss talked with her about what she liked to read and said that he’d look at her stack of papers. He liked the novel and started telling other bookstore owners in the South how much they’d like it, too. “If Jake loves a book, he goes to war for it,” Jackson said. “He’s just such a champion of writers, especially new voices.”

Plenty of new voices are featured in the Booksmith’s signed-first-editions club, which costs about five hundred dollars a year: subscribers get a signed book every month, a curated collection of famous and, as Reiss says, “soon to be famous” authors. (He borrowed the idea from his friends at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.) Reiss’s children joke that he has a bit of P. T. Barnum in him, and there is a certain ringmaster energy in the way that Reiss does business: the certificates of authenticity he places in every book he sells; the special rate he negotiated at a nearby hotel for out-of-town customers; the roadside banners he has made for every author who signs at the store, which he likes calling his “showroom.”

My most recent visit to the showroom was on a Friday, so things were slow, except for Reiss, who can still race up and down the stairs to his office. He and Lauren Skinner, one of his sales associates, were planning to spend the afternoon packing up books for that day’s shipment—sealing them in plastic and wrapping them in bubble paper before fitting them into boxes. Because collectors have always been a big part of the Booksmith’s business, careful packaging is essential; when the coronavirus pandemic began, Reiss was better prepared than most bookstore owners because he already had hay-bale-size stacks of bubble wrap and forty different kinds of boxes for shipping.

Not as many customers request personalized inscriptions anymore, but some do, with the date or maybe birthday wishes or someone’s name who is graduating or celebrating some other special occasion. Gifts are a big part of the Booksmith’s business, and I did half my Christmas shopping there last year. Even before he learned to love to read, Reiss the retail genius recognized what every real reader knows: a book is not just its contents but also, and inseparably, a special kind of object, a portal of sorts between people and places and ideas.

Every independent bookstore survives by nurturing that connection between audiences and art, and the Booksmith has thrived by making those invisible connections between writers and readers visible. “I’m a fan and a believer in Charles Darwin,” Reiss told me. I was asking how he had weathered the storms of Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and what he thought about the future of bookselling. “I think bookstores have to evolve,” he said. “We did, and that’s why we’re still here. A lot of people lose their butts in a bookstore, but the successful bookstores are becoming more successful. Darwin said the strong will survive, and that’s true of bookstores, too.” ♦

It fell to Doug Burgum, once the governor of North Dakota and now the Secretary of the Interior, to offer something resembling a scientific explanation for the Trump Administration’s decision to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” which states that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide pose a risk to the planet’s health. “CO₂ was never a pollutant,” Burgum said. “When we breathe, we emit CO₂. Plants need CO₂ to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO₂.”

If you are the type of Oscars obsessive who sets an early alarm on nominations morning (guilty!), you may have noticed something curious last month: before the announcement began on the Academy’s Instagram Live, the comments were already filling up with Brazilian-flag emojis. And for good reason. “The Secret Agent,” the acclaimed film by the director Kleber Mendonça Filho, walked away with four nominations—not just Best International Feature, for which it was Brazil’s official submission, but also Best Picture, Best Actor (Wagner Moura), and a brand-new category, Best Casting. (Adolpho Veloso also became the first Brazilian nominated for Best Cinematography, for his work on “Train Dreams.”) This came a year after “I’m Still Here,” Walter Salles’s elegant political drama, was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress (Fernanda Torres) and brought home the country’s first win in the international category—a breakthrough that inspired euphoria in the streets of Brazil, where Carnaval was in full swing.

Brazil’s cannonball into the Oscars race isn’t an anomaly. After the #OscarsSoWhite scandal, a decade ago, the Academy brought in thousands of new members, becoming not just more racially diverse but more geographically sprawling. More than a fifth of Oscar voters are now outside of the United States. Perhaps as a result, foreign films have been breaking out of the international category and competing all over the Oscar map, from the Korean thriller “Parasite,” which, in 2020, became the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture, to India’s “RRR,” which, in 2023, won Best Original Song, for the ecstatic earworm “Naatu Naatu.” Global entries now consistently bust into the Best Picture race, among them “Drive My Car” (Japan), “All Quiet on the Western Front” (Germany), “Anatomy of a Fall” (France), and last year’s problem child “Emilia Pérez,” a Spanish-language French musical set in Mexico. This year, “KPop Demon Hunters” is poised to win Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, and Norway’s “Sentimental Value” received nine nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director (Joachim Trier). The Oscars, once a Hollywood-centric industry function, are now closer to the Olympics.

But there’s something different about Brazil: a nationwide Oscars fever that is exuberant, competitive, and extremely online. Brazilians are notably active on social media—it’s the third-biggest country on TikTok, after the U.S. and Indonesia—and the country is home to a vocal stan culture. In 2024, when X was temporarily blocked there, amid a legal dispute between Elon Musk and the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, countless fan accounts for celebrities such as Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift evaporated, many signing off with the hashtag #MeuUltimoTweet. Moura, who is from the state of Bahia and came up in Brazilian telenovelas, has an unofficial theme song that pulses over his fans’ adoring posts: O Kannalha’s “O Baiano Tem o Molho,” which means “The Bahian Has the Sauce.” “Brazilians on the internet are very mischievous,” Beatriz Izumino, who covers culture at the daily paper Folha de São Paulo, told me. “Nobody really talks like us. Nobody really writes like us. So whatever happens, it’s kind of an internal joke just for us.”

That humor can become vengeful if provoked. Last year, the Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón, of “Emilia Pérez,” was nominated for Best Actress against Fernanda Torres, one of Brazil’s most beloved movie stars. In an interview with a Brazilian outlet, Gascón speculated that Torres’s team was trying to tear her down; Brazilian fans swiftly rallied against her. After a Canadian journalist resurfaced offensive tweets from Gascón’s past, Brazilians amplified the scandal online, turning the 2025 Oscar race into something like a Brazil-vs.-Spain soccer rivalry. “The Oscars became the World Cup for us,” Rodrigo Teixeira, a producer of “I’m Still Here,” told me. After Torres won the Golden Globe, Teixeira took a LATAM flight from L.A. back to São Paulo, and the plane’s crew greeted him with applause. “It was like I won a gold medal. I thought, Jesus, what’s happening?” An Uber driver congratulated him; restaurants comped his meals. Two months later, after the Oscar win, the pilot on his flight back made an announcement that the “I’m Still Here” crew was onboard, and the entire plane erupted in cheers. At Carnaval, he and his collaborators were welcomed home “like the Kardashians.”

Because Oscar season overlaps with Carnaval, Brazil’s cinematic triumphs inspire splashy celebrations IRL. Last year, people dressed up as Oscar statuettes and as Fernanda Torres. The ceremony was projected onto building walls, and the drag queen Pabllo Vittar interrupted his concert to show Salles’s acceptance speech. This year’s Carnaval featured a multitude of Wagner Mouras and even some Kleber Mendonça Filhos. (“It’s a normal tuxedo, and you put in gray hair—and you talk calmly, very educated,” Teixeira said.) Fabio Andrade, who teaches film at Vassar College, pointed me toward a video of one woman dressing up as a hairy leg protruding from a shark, a surreal image from “The Secret Agent.” Ilda Santiago, the executive director of the Festival do Rio, told me that her art-house-theatre chain is sponsoring a “Secret Agent” look-alike contest during Oscar weekend, a sequel to last year’s “I’m Still Here” contest, which drew “lines going around the neighborhood.” The Academy has reciprocated the attention; last fall, it held its first-ever event at Santiago’s festival, along with a dinner attended by the Academy’s C.E.O., Bill Kramer, and global luminaries such as Juliette Binoche.

If you’re not seeing this level of Oscar mania from, say, Norway, there are several reasons for it, among them Brazil’s recent political history, its prolific online fans, and other distinctions of national temperament. “We are very passionate people,” Aianne Amado, a film critic and an academic from Aracaju, told me. “We like to declare love.” Amado recently completed a Ph.D. studying Brazilian fan culture, which stems from the country’s glorious soccer history but has since latched onto international pop stars. Witness the proliferation of the catchphrase “Come to Brazil,” which took off in 2009 as an earnest plea to artists—Madonna, Justin Bieber—who might otherwise skip over the country on world tours. The phrase evolved into a self-aware social-media in-joke (the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” star Alaska Thunderfuck used it as a song title in 2017), and now plenty of musicians do go to Brazil, knowing that they’ll attract humongous crowds. This past May, Lady Gaga drew more than two million people to her free concert on Copacabana Beach.

Fandoms proliferated online in the two-thousands in Brazil, Amado said, when the country adopted the Google-owned social network Orkut, allowing even remote parts of the country to connect through pop culture; Amado herself was big in the Jonas Brothers community. Because Orkut was mostly confined to Brazil, it wasn’t particularly useful for contacting celebrities, but its insularity bred a spirited fan culture that exploded onto Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. Users there are now well versed in mobilizing a social-media mob: in 2020, Brazil’s version of “Big Brother” broke the world record for votes received by a TV show, at one and a half billion. “People really learned to use the digital tools to boost the participants,” Amado said. “So we already know how to cancel one of the participants and to boost one, and we are using the same tactics at the Oscars right now.”

The Gascón saga was just the start. Last month, Oliver Laxe, the French Galician director of “Sirāt,” blasted the Brazilian “ultra-nationalists” in the Academy, saying, “If the Brazilians submitted a shoe, they would all vote for it.” Brazilians flooded Laxe’s Instagram page with shoe emojis. But Amado thought that this response was relatively muted: “We can tell when people just want engagement using us. His movie is not that big, and he wants to use the Brazilian online power to create some moment for him.” Timothée Chalamet, who is competing against Moura for Best Actor, has wisely avoided a scuffle; in December, he promoted “Marty Supreme” at the C.C.X.P. convention, in São Paolo, and wrapped himself in a fan-made Brazilian flag with his face on it.

The worldwide success of “The Secret Agent” began last May, when it premièred at Cannes. Both Moura and Mendonça won prizes, and Neon picked up the film for North American distribution. “For the most part, Latin American filmmakers have to go to Europe and North America to get validation, in order to be imported back home,” Carlos Gutiérrez, who runs Cinema Tropical, a New York-based presenter of Latin American films, told me. “There’s a whole system with festivals that’s part of a geopolitical system that’s traditionally very Eurocentric. That’s why I think Brazilians are celebrating it so much, because it’s not very common that you have back-to-back films that are being celebrated both at European festivals and at the Oscars.”

That yearning for international acclaim has deep roots. In 1950, after Brazil suffered a traumatic loss to Uruguay in the World Cup (known as the Maracanã Smash), the Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues coined the term complexo de vira-lata, or “mongrel complex,” to explain the country’s nagging post-colonial sense of inferiority. That self-image as a nation of stray mutts (vira-lata literally means “can-flipper”), Amado told me, has led to a hunger for validation from abroad: “We always look up to the U.S. and to Europe, and we devalue ourselves.” In 2014, the shock of the Maracanã Smash seemed to repeat itself, when Brazil lost a semifinal to Germany, 7–1—on Brazilian turf, no less. “That killed Brazilian self-esteem,” Teixeira, the producer, told me. The country went into a funk. The soccer humiliation coincided with an economic crisis that halted years of growth, and with a political crisis that resulted in the impeachment of Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016.

When Jair Bolsonaro subsequently won the Presidency, in 2018, on a MAGA-esque right-wing populist message, one of his targets was the arts, including cinema. “It was a big crisis, the first year that Bolsonaro was in power,” Ilda Santiago, of the Festival do Rio, recalled. “We basically had to do crowdfunding.” Before he was elected, Brazilian filmmaking had been gaining international traction. In 1999, Salles’s “Central Station” was nominated for Oscars in the foreign-film category and for Best Actress (for Fernanda Montenegro, who is Fernanda Torres’s mother). Five years later, Fernando Meirelles’s “City of God” received four nominations, including Best Director. Under Bolsonaro, state funding dried up, and the government painted artists as freeloaders wasting taxpayer money.

In 2022, Bolsonaro lost his reëlection bid to the former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party; Bolsonaro has since been imprisoned for attempting a coup. Both “I’m Still Here” and “The Secret Agent,” which came on the heels of that welcome political upheaval, are set primarily in the nineteen-seventies and dramatize life under Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985—a period that chimed with the Bolsonaro era, and whose horrors Bolsonaro glossed over in his stump speeches. “There was a tendency to paint the military dictatorship in a much more positive light, suggesting that the country was economically successful, that things were more organized, that there was progress, when the data shows completely otherwise,” Bruno Guaraná, a Recife-born film-and-television lecturer at Boston University, said. “And these films contest that.”

In Brazil, filmgoers tend to stick to Hollywood fare—“Lilo & Stitch” and “A Minecraft Movie” topped last year’s box-office—but “I’m Still Here” and “The Secret Agent” became homegrown hits that could remind Brazilians of their more recent brush with authoritarianism. (It’s no coincidence that both films have resonated in the U.S., where we have our own authoritarian menace to worry about.) An attempted conservative boycott of “I’m Still Here” fizzled. “Even people from the right wing came to see the film and loved it,” Teixeira, the producer, claimed. In 2019, Bolsonaro had censored Moura’s directorial début, “Marighella,” about a leftist revolutionary; last month, after Moura won the Golden Globe for “The Secret Agent,” Lula called to congratulate him, telling the actor that he was “a source of pride for this country, man.” “The Secret Agent,” like “I’m Still Here,” spotlights the endurance of the dictatorship’s victims, even after death. “The strength of these films is really connected to that feeling of survival,” Andrade, the Vassar professor, said.

Brazil’s once legendary soccer prowess, meanwhile, has seen better days. Teixeira—one of several people I spoke to who brought up that 2014 loss to Germany—theorized that the nationwide enthusiasm for the Oscars has filled the gap left by the World Cup. “Cinema is replacing soccer in the soul of the Brazilians, and that’s beautiful,” he said, beaming. “It’s a proud moment. Brazil is good in something. We are not bad anymore. We are good in films. We are good in art, and we are winning!” ♦

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In March of 2025, the Trump Administration was widely criticized for sending more than two hundred Venezuelans to CECOT, a notoriously brutal mega-prison in El Salvador. Yet, over the past eleven months, the Administration has continued the practice of deporting large numbers of noncitizens to so-called third countries, or countries to which the deportee typically has no connection. This is often because many immigrants living in America have judicial orders that prevent the government from sending them to their home country owing to the risk of persecution. This third-country practice has continued, however, despite the fact that a number of deportees have been sent back to their home countries after arriving in the third country. (Others remain stuck in prisons.) Recently, the Administration sent nine people of various nationalities to Cameroon, where most of them are now being held in detention until they agree to return to their home countries.

I recently spoke by phone with Ahilan Arulanantham, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and the faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy there. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how judges have tried to limit the Trump Administration’s use of this third-country loophole by demanding that it bring wrongly deported immigrants home, the legal process that allows this type of deportation, and how the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to rein in the Trump Administration has strained federal courts.

Early in Trump’s second term, there was a lot of concern about the degree to which immigration authorities would start removing people from America and sending them to third countries. A year later, how prevalent is this?

I think it’s important to distinguish between third-country arrangements that result in the deportees being imprisoned in a foreign country, and other kinds of third-country arrangements, where, for example, Mexico has agreed to take in people who are not from Mexico and then, in some way or another, encourage those people to go back to their home countries. I would say that, in the case of the latter, the deportations to countries where people are just left at sea have happened on a massive, really unprecedented scale.

The former, which are these deportation-to-prison arrangements, obviously happened with El Salvador, and then in other places like Ghana, and they’re also very troubling. But the total number of them is small. It’s probably less than a hundred, if you leave out the ones to El Salvador.

In January, the Trump Administration secretly deported nine people to Cameroon, where none of them are from, according to the Times. It seems like when the Administration is legally prohibited from deporting people to a country where they may be persecuted, they send people to a third country, and then essentially throw up their hands and say, “Well, if the third country is going to send them to the country that they’re not supposed to be sent to, we can’t do anything.” Some legal observers argue that this workaround is just as illegal. How do you see it?

I think it’s clearly illegal for two different reasons. The Administration’s recent arrangement with Cameroon resulted in the imprisonment of these nine people in Cameroon, and, at least in the reporting that I’ve read, most of them will be imprisoned unless they agree to go back to their home country. So that’s punishment. When you send somebody to a place to be imprisoned, that is imprisonment without trial. And so that, I think, is unquestionably illegal.

Separate from that, even in cases where they’re being sent to these places, and it’s not necessarily resulting in imprisonment, but it’s resulting in a follow-on deportation, that is illegal—absent the person having had an opportunity to challenge that arrangement in the United States in immigration court. The law requires deportees to receive notice of the country to which they are going to be removed, and then an opportunity to raise any claims against that decision in court. This was challenged in Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. last year, a class-action lawsuit challenging the government’s practice of sending people to third countries without providing any notice or opportunity to challenge the legality of that arrangement. A lower court held a hearing, took evidence, and issued a ruling declaring that procedure unlawful and requiring the government to provide notice in such situations. But the Supreme Court then stayed that order in mid-April without real explanation. They didn’t say that the lower court was wrong. They just said that the government can keep doing third-country deportations while the case is pending.

Is the Court going to come back and provide an explanation for why it stayed the order at some point?

The way the Supreme Court handles stay orders requires that the case come back to the Supreme Court, and then the Court has to either agree to take it or not. And if they decide not to take it, then the stay expires at that point. So you’re right that every time the Supreme Court stays an order in these cases, it means that the case will return to the Supreme Court, but it’s not like that happens immediately. That can take months and months, and there is, in my view, a direct line from the Supreme Court’s stay order in the D.V.D. case to the months of third-country removals that we’ve been seeing without people having any opportunity to contest the legality of that practice.

So is the lack of any opportunity for the deportees to have the Supreme Court rule on the challenge to third-country removal before they were flown away the reason that you think this was illegal?

The law on this is that a noncitizen gets to elect the country to which they will be deported in the event of an order of removal after a deportation hearing. The immigration judge asks the person to elect which country they wish to be removed to. In that case, the government has to try to send the person to their requested country. But if they can’t, for whatever reason—and one reason might be because the immigration judge has said, “You’ll be tortured there,” and barred it—then the government has to go through a whole list of other possible places to which they can send the person, like places where the person transited through or any other place where the person held any residency status. If none of those places agree to take them, they can be deported to any other country that accepts the person. But in that case they have to tell the person, We’re going to send you to this country. And because that wasn’t the subject of the original removal proceeding, they have to be given the opportunity to challenge the removal to that country.

Take an example of Venezuelans being deported to Mexico. The deportees might say, I don’t believe that the Mexican government has a problem with me. The Mexican government isn’t in league with the Maduro regime. But here’s the evidence that when you send me to Mexico what’s going to happen is the Mexican government is going to then deport me to Venezuela, and so I will face harm from being sent to Mexico because it will inevitably result in my return to Venezuela where I am going to be persecuted or tortured as you’ve already found, Your Honor. So that argument should be available to the people being sent to Cameroon.

“I don’t want to go to my home country of Zimbabwe, and Cameroon’s going to send me to Zimbabwe,” basically.

Exactly, exactly. Because I have a reasonable fear that they will send me to Zimbabwe, I also have a persecution claim against Cameroon directly.

So, just to be clear, if there is no overlap between the countries that the person wants to go to and the places that will take them, then what?

Then the government has the right to try to send you to any other country that will accept you as long as that country consents.

And then you get a chance to challenge that. And then if you lose the challenge, you go.

Correct. So you could imagine a situation where there was a hearing about this, and the government said, “No, actually, you’re wrong. In fact, you will not be forcibly sent to Zimbabwe,” or “That’s not the nature of the arrangement with Cameroon” and “Here’s the evidence from the Cameroonian government that says they’ll allow people like in your situation to stay and live and work in their country, and there isn’t a reasonable probability that you’ll be sent anywhere else.” And if they win that argument, then it’s fine.

My understanding is that the Administration’s reply to court orders concerning people who have already been deported to a third country is “What do you want us to do? They’re in a third country now.”

Yes, I think that is what the government has said in a few of these cases. They said this in the El Salvador situation, saying, “What could we do in El Salvador? It’s not up to us.” If they had allowed a hearing in advance, as they are legally obligated to do, and as the district court in the D.V.D. decision found that they had to do, then this would not have been an issue. Because the probability that Cameroon is going to send you to Zimbabwe or that Mexico is going to send you to Venezuela should be litigated when you’re still in U.S. custody on U.S. soil.

But if the issue only arises after the person has already been sent there, then it presents a more complicated question. This was a question in the Kilmar Ábrego García case, an immigrant who had been living in the United States and was deported to El Salvador last March, as well as in some other cases where the government is now obligated, as the Supreme Court has said, to “facilitate” their return to the U.S., but exactly what that entails depends very much on the nature of the arrangement between the two countries.

That leads us to Judge James Boasberg, a district-court judge in Washington. Last week, he said that the government needs to bring back more than a hundred Venezuelans who were wrongly deported under the Alien Enemies Act. What did you make of his order?

That order is limited to people who were sent to third countries and not Venezuelans who were sent to Venezuela. So that’s an important distinction: it doesn’t order the return of the Venezuelans who ended up, via El Salvador, in Venezuela.

What’s the importance of that?

Because it means that even this forceful order is not going to provide any measure of justice to the large number of people whose due-process rights were violated in the original incident that gave rise to litigation.

The Supreme Court order in the case, Trump v. J.G.G., is from early April and says due process requires that these Venezuelan nationals being deported be given notice, and they weren’t given notice. So although they ruled that all of these deportations were illegal, for all the people who ended up in Venezuela, this order isn’t going to provide them any justice. What the Boasberg order does is say that, for those who ended up in third countries, the government is obligated to “facilitate” their return. And that’s the language of the Supreme Court in the Ábrego García case, where he was deported in violation of an already existing court order that prohibited his removal.

This used to be pretty standard practice—that the government, when it made a mistake and deported people in violation of a court order, would facilitate their return. It would do that by having the embassy personnel contact the person and arrange their travel back to the U.S. Sometimes this would require the U.S. to pay for their travel, sometimes not. The Boasberg order requires the government to pay for the return travel of all the men who had been sent to El Salvador last March. Like I said, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. But, either way, the obligation of the government to correct its mistake by facilitating the return of people should be uncontroversial because it is definitely something that happened routinely before.

I assume what we’re going to hear from this Administration is that this order interferes with the President’s ability to conduct foreign affairs. I imagine previous Administrations were not objecting to facilitating the return of wrongly deported people on these grounds.

Correct.

And the danger here is that such arguments do have some sort of merit for courts that are in favor of strong executive power.

For years, it has been routine practice for the government to facilitate the return of people who are deported in violation of court orders. There are a number of cases that establish this. I’ve had clients of mine who were in this situation, and this was the outcome. And Ábrego García was obviously brought back, although they charged him with a crime and kept trying to extradite him.

What I am confused by is, if the Supreme Court decided back in April that the Administration could continue deporting Venezuelans, why were these removals illegal?

That’s not quite right. There were Venezuelans who the Trump Administration asserted were members of the Tren de Aragua gang. And there was a habeas petition, which is a particular kind of lawsuit that allows somebody to challenge the legality of their imprisonment or other deprivations of liberty. The plaintiffs said, The government is trying to deport us without any process at all, and that is a violation of the Constitution, and we’re challenging that.

The government responded by saying, Oh, what you’re actually trying to do is challenge the lawfulness of your detention and the related deprivation of liberty. That means this has to be a habeas petition, and if you file it as a habeas petition, then it can only be filed in the district where you’re actually detained. And since the plaintiffs originally filed this lawsuit in Washington, D.C., the Court said, “You filed in the wrong court, because the plaintiffs are detained all over the country, with most of them in a couple of different divisions in Texas. So the suit has to be brought there.” But the plaintiffs disagreed, and insisted they were challenging the Alien Enemies Act itself.

Initially, Boasberg and the D.C. Circuit Court agreed with the plaintiff, but then the Supreme Court reversed that. And what the Supreme Court said was, If you can file a case as a habeas petition, then you have to file it as a habeas petition. So, even though you might think that this is a broad challenge to an unlawful policy, it can’t be brought that way. This is a challenge to your unlawful imprisonment and deportation, and, therefore, it has to be brought as a habeas petition. And because it has to be brought as a habeas petition, you can’t bring one lawsuit in D.C. to challenge this whole thing everywhere around the country. You have to file in each district separately where the people who are being detained actually are.

That was the holding of J.G.G. in early April, before the D.V.D. ruling. So the Supreme Court’s ruling was effectively that the government won because the plaintiffs filed in the wrong court and filed the wrong type of case. But they went on and said, Of course, the due-process clause applies in deportation cases. So these people are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act in their cases. There is an obvious tension between this and the D.V.D. case, which allowed the government to continue removing people. And Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed this out in her dissent in D.V.D.

But J.G.G. established a rule. And that rule is that the due-process clause requires notice and an opportunity to be heard before you can deport somebody under the Alien Enemies Act, just as with all other deportation cases. So that’s why it’s both true that the result of the J.G.G. was that they filed in the wrong court, and they had to refile. But it was also true that the Court’s ruling meant that the first attempt to deport these people under the Alien Enemies Act was illegal.

And that allows Boasberg to now say that the Administration has to facilitate their return?

Right. That, coupled with the fact that they violated his own order. It’s still the law that when a court issues a ruling, people have to follow the ruling. And if they think the ruling’s wrong, then they can appeal, but it doesn’t excuse them from following the ruling. When Boasberg ordered the planes to turn around in his original order, they should have turned the planes around. And they didn’t.

I know this is not exactly what we’ve been talking about, but it’s very closely related: Did you know, since the J.G.G. ruling, there have been thousands of habeas petitions filed, swamping the federal courts? It has gotten acute in Minnesota, but it’s happening all over the country. I know of habeas petitions being filed in huge numbers in Los Angeles, in Texas, in New York, and all around. That is happening in large part because the Supreme Court said in J.G.G. that, if a claim can be filed in habeas, it has to be filed in habeas. And this is a new ruling that they created in that case. There had been no prior precedent for that idea. As a result, these unlawful detentions that are the product of about maybe four or five Trump Administration policies that many courts have already ruled are illegal—like how the government has said that every undocumented person has to be held to mandatory detention—now have to be challenged in individual habeas filings. Normally, these policies would have been challenged broadly, just like the Trump Administration’s usage of the Alien Enemies Act was first challenged through a single case. And then the Court would’ve either enjoined it, in which case the government would’ve stopped using it to detain people, or they would’ve not enjoined, in which case the government would’ve continued to use it, but nobody would’ve sued over it. There wouldn’t have been a thousand individual cases about it. The plaintiffs would’ve appealed, and then the case would have been resolved.

But now, because of what the Supreme Court did in J.G.G., it has led to this proliferation of thousands and thousands of individual cases.

Why did the Court do this?

That’s a great question. I don’t know if they foresaw all the implications of what they were doing at the time they issued that ruling. The government hadn’t yet adopted all of these broad, new draconian detention rules. They had adopted some of them, but not all of them. So maybe the Court didn’t fully anticipate what was going to happen. But I think it’s also true that, for the past several years, the Supreme Court has had two simultaneous agendas. One is a very strong opposition to class action, and the idea that people who would otherwise go unrepresented should be able to get relief by combining their claims together. And then the second is restricting the availability of habeas relief for people who have alleged that they’re unlawfully detained. You can’t get rid of habeas claims, because they are in the Constitution. But they can make them more difficult to file, as we have seen this Court do. ♦