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"content": "\u003cp>Not long ago Yvonne Strahovski, who plays beautiful, ruthless, deeply complicated \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/103806/hindsight-is-20-20-for-the-us-the-uk-and-mrs-waterford-of-handmaids-tale\">Serena\u003c/a> on \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/tag/the-handmaids-tale\">\u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, was forced to watch early scenes of her character’s cruelty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, Serena was being cruel to long-suffering heroine June (\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13956944/the-veil-fx-hulu-review-elisabeth-moss-spy-thriller-tv-series\">Elisabeth Moss\u003c/a>). It wasn’t a nice experience to relive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was dying. I wanted to vomit! It was horrible,” Strahovski said in an interview, of footage played at a panel event. “To go back and look at that was insanely jarring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To which longtime \u003cem>Handmaid’s\u003c/em> fans would likely reply: Tell us about it, Serena! We’ve gone through hell and back ourselves, for 56 episodes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rapes. Mass hangings. Shootings. Torture. Kids torn from mothers, tongues from mouths. And more. The searing Hulu drama about a totalitarian state that treats women as property, based on the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/margaret-atwood\">Margaret Atwood\u003c/a> novel, may have been brilliant. But the brilliance came from abject darkness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So praise be, loyal fans: Creators of the show felt your pain. They want you to know that this, the sixth and final season, will be different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It will still be Gilead, to be sure. As Bradley Whitford’s ever-quotable Commander Lawrence would say: “Gilead’s gonna Gilead.” But it will be faster-paced, and more satisfying. There will be catharsis and redemption — rewards for all that fan loyalty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBBRUdLBsFI\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>There may even be … levity?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Yes. Don’t take it from us (though we’ve previewed the first eight episodes). Take it from June herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moss, who not only stars but directs four episodes this season, says it was around season 4 or 5 when creators realized they wanted to move away “from too much in-your-face darkness.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, the show’s hardly turned into a sitcom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13963879']“We wouldn’t be \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> if we didn’t have those dark moments,” she says. “It would be dishonest.” But, she says, “We did want to bring in more lightness and levity.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Helpful in that regard: Whitford’s whipsmart characterization of Commander Lawrence, who tosses off memorable one-liners like “Serena, are you suffering from an irony deficiency?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whitford confirms a reporter’s suspicions that he’d come up with that one himself. “I’ve been telling that joke for years,” he says. “I pitched it … and I’m very proud of it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The series will move faster, too\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Eric Tuchman, showrunner with Yahlin Chang, recognizes people had started to find the show “a hard watch … and that was honestly a way we as writers were beginning to feel.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, along with shunning the most extreme cruelty, the show has abandoned what he calls the “more languid pacing” of the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We had a lot of stories we wanted to tell in 10 episodes,” Tuchman says. “We wanted the season to have a feeling of momentum and to be propulsive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adds Chang: “It was a now-or-never thing — this is the last chance we get to tell these stories with these characters.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can likely expect fewer endless gazes into June’s tearful eyes. There’s stuff to get done.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>It’s decision time: Are you good or evil?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A number of characters have flirted with the other side, morally, in the show — good people doing terrible things, terrible people occasionally doing good. Well, it’s time for everyone to take a stand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People don’t stay the same,” Moss says. “Someone’s gonna go to the dark side, someone’s gonna go to the light. But … you can’t just plod along, avoiding choosing a side. At a certain point, you have to choose.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13926190']Of course we’ve always known where June stood, as the show’s moral compass — even if many viewers were stunned/perplexed/annoyed each time she returned to Gilead of her own accord.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But June’s gonna June, as Lawrence might say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When we left her in season 5, June had just escaped Toronto, where the tide was turning against refugees from Gilead. She boarded a train headed westward, along with baby Nichole. Then she heard another baby’s cry, and it turned out Serena, her former tormentor from Gilead, was there too, with her own baby. “Got a diaper?” Serena asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the upshot of this train ride is one of many forbidden spoilers, it’s safe to say June and Serena’s relationship remains … thorny.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Is everyone redeemable — even Lydia?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Strahovski herself isn’t sure Serena is redeemable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She has softened. She’s made redeemable choices. And if there’s ever going to be a bigger redeemable moment, it may occur this season,” Strahovski teases. But she adds: “I don’t know if any of it is entirely forgivable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there’s Aunt Lydia. The very name strikes terror for those who remember the horrid things she did to those handmaids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Lydia is already showing signs of change. (She’s also going to be central in an upcoming sequel, \u003cem>The Testaments\u003c/em>, based on a later Atwood novel.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ann Dowd says it’s all about love — for Janine, her favorite handmaid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Love changes everything,” Dowd says. “It’s the most powerful thing in the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ actors have changed, too\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“This role has really pushed me to corners I never imagined,” Strahovski says. “It’s made me a better actress for it, 100%.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Moss, she says her “whole professional life has changed on this show.” Not only as actor, but as director and producer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For me, that’s been massive,” she says. “I love acting so much, but I did need something more to sink my teeth into … I wanted be more involved in all sides of what we do, and I have learned so much.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Current events have seeped into the script\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> premiered in 2017, six months before the #MeToo movement erupted. In 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='pop_97826']“As a woman, I have fewer rights now than when I started on the show,” says showrunner Chang. “I never thought that we would lose Roe v. Wade, even working on the show … And that does start to get infused into our writing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whitford brings up the plight of pregnant rape victims “who do not have access to contraception or abortion care, or the healthcare that they need.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s certainly been in our consciousness,” he says, “It’s a reason why you need a show like this, about resistance.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Moss, she prefers to cite the continuing relevance of Atwood’s story, 40 years on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Of course it had a relevancy that you couldn’t ignore in 2017,” she says. “But I don’t know when this book and this material has ever not been relevant … You look at the show and go, ‘God, are they trying to make that connection?’ No, I think we’re just trying to be honest and tell the story of these people in this place, and it happens to be something that is incredibly relevant and present.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The sixth and final season of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ begins streaming on Hulu on April 8, 2025.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Of course we’ve always known where June stood, as the show’s moral compass — even if many viewers were stunned/perplexed/annoyed each time she returned to Gilead of her own accord.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But June’s gonna June, as Lawrence might say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When we left her in season 5, June had just escaped Toronto, where the tide was turning against refugees from Gilead. She boarded a train headed westward, along with baby Nichole. Then she heard another baby’s cry, and it turned out Serena, her former tormentor from Gilead, was there too, with her own baby. “Got a diaper?” Serena asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the upshot of this train ride is one of many forbidden spoilers, it’s safe to say June and Serena’s relationship remains … thorny.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Is everyone redeemable — even Lydia?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Strahovski herself isn’t sure Serena is redeemable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She has softened. She’s made redeemable choices. And if there’s ever going to be a bigger redeemable moment, it may occur this season,” Strahovski teases. But she adds: “I don’t know if any of it is entirely forgivable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there’s Aunt Lydia. The very name strikes terror for those who remember the horrid things she did to those handmaids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Lydia is already showing signs of change. (She’s also going to be central in an upcoming sequel, \u003cem>The Testaments\u003c/em>, based on a later Atwood novel.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ann Dowd says it’s all about love — for Janine, her favorite handmaid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Love changes everything,” Dowd says. “It’s the most powerful thing in the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ actors have changed, too\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“This role has really pushed me to corners I never imagined,” Strahovski says. “It’s made me a better actress for it, 100%.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Moss, she says her “whole professional life has changed on this show.” Not only as actor, but as director and producer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For me, that’s been massive,” she says. “I love acting so much, but I did need something more to sink my teeth into … I wanted be more involved in all sides of what we do, and I have learned so much.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Current events have seeped into the script\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> premiered in 2017, six months before the #MeToo movement erupted. In 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“As a woman, I have fewer rights now than when I started on the show,” says showrunner Chang. “I never thought that we would lose Roe v. Wade, even working on the show … And that does start to get infused into our writing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whitford brings up the plight of pregnant rape victims “who do not have access to contraception or abortion care, or the healthcare that they need.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s certainly been in our consciousness,” he says, “It’s a reason why you need a show like this, about resistance.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Moss, she prefers to cite the continuing relevance of Atwood’s story, 40 years on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Of course it had a relevancy that you couldn’t ignore in 2017,” she says. “But I don’t know when this book and this material has ever not been relevant … You look at the show and go, ‘God, are they trying to make that connection?’ No, I think we’re just trying to be honest and tell the story of these people in this place, and it happens to be something that is incredibly relevant and present.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The sixth and final season of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ begins streaming on Hulu on April 8, 2025.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Opera Is Ferociously Faithful to Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia",
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"content": "\u003cp>The lights have just gone up for intermission at the opening night of San Francisco Opera’s long-awaited production of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>. As people begin to rise and excitedly chatter about what we’ve just witnessed, the woman next to me turns to her companion and sighs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Well,” she says, “this is unrelentingly bleak.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13963021']Anyone familiar with \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> will tell you that is certainly a fair assessment. This is, after all, the story of a woman violently torn from her family and forced into a life of sexual servitude by a theocratic regime. America is no more, replaced by the Republic of Gilead, whose leaders attempt to solve an infertility crisis by forcing fertile women to reproduce with the commanding elite. These “handmaids,” living with their assigned commanders’ families, are considered disposable vessels, unworthy of even retaining their own names. The woman at the center of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> is known only as Offred — literally “of Fred,” the commander she’s been assigned to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13963881\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13963881\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt.jpg\" alt=\"A stage set featuring a backdrop decorated with a large triangle and eye. On stage are 18 women all dressed in long red cloaks.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-1920x1281.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ at San Francisco Opera. \u003ccite>(Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Running through Oct. 1 at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, composer Poul Ruders’ and librettist Paul Bentley’s interpretation of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/margaret-atwood\">Margaret Atwood\u003c/a>’s 1985 novel is a faithful yet incredibly innovative rendering of the original story. For opera attendees stepping into this patriarchal dystopia for the first time, however, the shock may be significant. (The “unrelentingly bleak” lady couldn’t possibly have known how much darker things were going to get in the second act.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Consider, for example, the scene in which two women have hoods thrown over their heads and are hung by their necks from the rafters. Or the one in which a man is beaten to death \u003cem>in slow motion\u003c/em> by a group of handmaids. Or the two in which Offred is ritually raped by Commander Fred while a shocking refrain of “Amazing Grace” plays in the background. Another, depicting the violent breakup of Offred’s family, made the man in front of me jump out of his seat. Directed by John Fulljames, \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> opera — like the book and enormously popular \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/tag/the-handmaids-tale\">Hulu series\u003c/a> — is not for the faint of heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13964252\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13964252\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred.jpg\" alt=\"A perturbed looking woman wearing a red cloak and white bonnet sits on a twin bed.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-1920x1281.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Irene Roberts as Offred in San Francisco Opera’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ \u003ccite>(Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The lifeblood of this particular production is Irene Roberts as Offred. The mezzo-soprano’s heartrending vocal delivery is matched by a grueling physical performance in which Roberts must endure physical groping by several male cast members, dressing and undressing repeatedly (including the removal of underwear), as well as running, crouching and falling to the floor. Roberts’ performance here is consistently astonishing — the reason all eyes stayed glued to the stage throughout, even during the most harrowing of scenes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The other wonderful aspect of this particular \u003cem>Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> is the on-stage juxtaposition of Offred’s current reality in Gilead with the life she lived before. Pre-Gilead Offred is played with a compelling naïveté by Simone McIntosh. This Offred, in her regular clothes, free to watch TV and read magazines and make love to her husband, is a shadow lurking in the background throughout the opera, as Offred mentally hangs onto the shreds of her previous life. It’s a staging quirk that could easily have failed with the wrong casting, but that’s an incredibly effective device in this production.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13962857']Truthfully, nothing about \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> opera slouches. Sarah Cambidge’s purposefully piercing vocals make her the perfect Aunt Lydia, the dominating woman who does her best to indoctrinate the handmaids. Caroline Corrales as Offred’s best friend Moira provides a true sense of liberty and rebellion, audaciously delivering much-needed zingers throughout. And Commander Fred’s presence is all the more intimidating because of John Relyea’s deep bass delivery. This strong cast is upheld by the baton of Karen Kamensek, conducting the orchestra.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13964256\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13964256\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632.jpg\" alt=\"A woman kneels dejected on the floor as she is goaded and mocked by a group of other women. All but one are wearing red dresses and white bonnets.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-1920x1281.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Irene Roberts as Offred and Sarah Cambidge (in the green uniform) as Aunt Lydia in San Francisco Opera’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ \u003ccite>(Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Then there are the sets. Chloe Lamford’s designs evoke the prison state of Gilead via a series of stark and striking walls. A symbolic wall with an ever-watchful eye. The corrugated walls of the handmaid’s training compound. The stark white wall where traitors are hung. The layered, somehow infinite walls of the Commander’s house. The automated “Soul Scrolls” prayer wall, dinging away like Las Vegas slots. The sense of ceaseless confinement persists throughout, as it did in Atwood’s novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The only place where this \u003cem>Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> goes wrong is in a pandering (and a little confusing) tableau that gets plopped onto the stage in the last minute of the opera. This moment features a self-conscious attempt to leave things on an optimistic note. They shouldn’t have bothered. \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> is always, in all formats, at its most powerful when it’s, well, unrelentingly bleak.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ runs through Oct. 1, 2024, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfopera.com/operas/handmaids-tale/\">Details and tickets here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The opera will be livestreamed on Sept. 20 at 7:30 p.m. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfopera.com/tickets/seated-reserve-page/?performanceId=7729\">Livestream tickets here.\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The lights have just gone up for intermission at the opening night of San Francisco Opera’s long-awaited production of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>. As people begin to rise and excitedly chatter about what we’ve just witnessed, the woman next to me turns to her companion and sighs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Well,” she says, “this is unrelentingly bleak.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Anyone familiar with \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> will tell you that is certainly a fair assessment. This is, after all, the story of a woman violently torn from her family and forced into a life of sexual servitude by a theocratic regime. America is no more, replaced by the Republic of Gilead, whose leaders attempt to solve an infertility crisis by forcing fertile women to reproduce with the commanding elite. These “handmaids,” living with their assigned commanders’ families, are considered disposable vessels, unworthy of even retaining their own names. The woman at the center of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> is known only as Offred — literally “of Fred,” the commander she’s been assigned to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13963881\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13963881\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt.jpg\" alt=\"A stage set featuring a backdrop decorated with a large triangle and eye. On stage are 18 women all dressed in long red cloaks.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/hmt-1920x1281.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ at San Francisco Opera. \u003ccite>(Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Running through Oct. 1 at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, composer Poul Ruders’ and librettist Paul Bentley’s interpretation of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/margaret-atwood\">Margaret Atwood\u003c/a>’s 1985 novel is a faithful yet incredibly innovative rendering of the original story. For opera attendees stepping into this patriarchal dystopia for the first time, however, the shock may be significant. (The “unrelentingly bleak” lady couldn’t possibly have known how much darker things were going to get in the second act.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Consider, for example, the scene in which two women have hoods thrown over their heads and are hung by their necks from the rafters. Or the one in which a man is beaten to death \u003cem>in slow motion\u003c/em> by a group of handmaids. Or the two in which Offred is ritually raped by Commander Fred while a shocking refrain of “Amazing Grace” plays in the background. Another, depicting the violent breakup of Offred’s family, made the man in front of me jump out of his seat. Directed by John Fulljames, \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> opera — like the book and enormously popular \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/tag/the-handmaids-tale\">Hulu series\u003c/a> — is not for the faint of heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13964252\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13964252\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred.jpg\" alt=\"A perturbed looking woman wearing a red cloak and white bonnet sits on a twin bed.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/offred-1920x1281.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Irene Roberts as Offred in San Francisco Opera’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ \u003ccite>(Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The lifeblood of this particular production is Irene Roberts as Offred. The mezzo-soprano’s heartrending vocal delivery is matched by a grueling physical performance in which Roberts must endure physical groping by several male cast members, dressing and undressing repeatedly (including the removal of underwear), as well as running, crouching and falling to the floor. Roberts’ performance here is consistently astonishing — the reason all eyes stayed glued to the stage throughout, even during the most harrowing of scenes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The other wonderful aspect of this particular \u003cem>Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> is the on-stage juxtaposition of Offred’s current reality in Gilead with the life she lived before. Pre-Gilead Offred is played with a compelling naïveté by Simone McIntosh. This Offred, in her regular clothes, free to watch TV and read magazines and make love to her husband, is a shadow lurking in the background throughout the opera, as Offred mentally hangs onto the shreds of her previous life. It’s a staging quirk that could easily have failed with the wrong casting, but that’s an incredibly effective device in this production.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Truthfully, nothing about \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> opera slouches. Sarah Cambidge’s purposefully piercing vocals make her the perfect Aunt Lydia, the dominating woman who does her best to indoctrinate the handmaids. Caroline Corrales as Offred’s best friend Moira provides a true sense of liberty and rebellion, audaciously delivering much-needed zingers throughout. And Commander Fred’s presence is all the more intimidating because of John Relyea’s deep bass delivery. This strong cast is upheld by the baton of Karen Kamensek, conducting the orchestra.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13964256\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13964256\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632.jpg\" alt=\"A woman kneels dejected on the floor as she is goaded and mocked by a group of other women. All but one are wearing red dresses and white bonnets.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/75A0632-1920x1281.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Irene Roberts as Offred and Sarah Cambidge (in the green uniform) as Aunt Lydia in San Francisco Opera’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ \u003ccite>(Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Then there are the sets. Chloe Lamford’s designs evoke the prison state of Gilead via a series of stark and striking walls. A symbolic wall with an ever-watchful eye. The corrugated walls of the handmaid’s training compound. The stark white wall where traitors are hung. The layered, somehow infinite walls of the Commander’s house. The automated “Soul Scrolls” prayer wall, dinging away like Las Vegas slots. The sense of ceaseless confinement persists throughout, as it did in Atwood’s novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The only place where this \u003cem>Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> goes wrong is in a pandering (and a little confusing) tableau that gets plopped onto the stage in the last minute of the opera. This moment features a self-conscious attempt to leave things on an optimistic note. They shouldn’t have bothered. \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> is always, in all formats, at its most powerful when it’s, well, unrelentingly bleak.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ runs through Oct. 1, 2024, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfopera.com/operas/handmaids-tale/\">Details and tickets here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The opera will be livestreamed on Sept. 20 at 7:30 p.m. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfopera.com/tickets/seated-reserve-page/?performanceId=7729\">Livestream tickets here.\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Margaret Atwood’s ‘Old Babes in the Wood’ Tackles What It Means to Be Human",
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"content": "\u003cp>Margaret Atwood, without a doubt one of the greatest living writers, is best known for her incredibly successful and award-winning novels \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> and, more recently, \u003cem>The Testaments\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, she is also an extraordinary short story writer — and \u003cem>Old Babes in the Wood\u003c/em>, her first collection in almost a decade, is a dazzling mixture of stories that explore what it means to be human while also showcasing Atwood’s gifted imagination and great sense of humor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13865676']\u003cem>Old Babes in the Wood\u003c/em> contains 15 stories, some of which have previously appeared in \u003cem>The New Yorker\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The New York Times Magazine\u003c/em>. The collection is divided into three parts. The first and last, titled “Tig & Nell” and “Nell & Tig,” revolve around a married couple and look, more or less, at their entire lives — what they’ve done and felt, the people that left a mark on them, their thoughts. These stories, which taken together feel like a mosaic novella more than literary bookends for a collection, offer a deep, heartfelt, engrossing look at the minutiae of life. The middle part, titled “My Evil Mother,” is perhaps the crowning jewel in this collection and brings together eight unique tales that vary wildly in terms of tone, voice, theme, and format. From imagined interviews and stories told by aliens to the circle of life and a snail trapped in the body of a woman, these tales show Atwood’s characteristic insight and intellect while also putting on full display her ability to make us laugh, her chronicler’s eye for detail, and her unparalleled imagination.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are no throwaway stories in this collection, but several demand their time in the spotlight. “Morte de Smudgie,” about the death of a cat, is a perfect portrait of the unique kind of grief that follows the loss of a beloved pet. “My Evil Mother” follows a mother-daughter relationship through the years and shows how, and why, many people eventually become just like their parents. In “The Dead Interview,” Atwood “interviews” author George Orwell through a medium in a trance. Part tribute and part celebratory deconstruction of Orwell’s oeuvre and persona, this one becomes unexpectedly funny and shows just how on top of everything Atwood is as she tries to explain things like the internet, getting “cancelled,” anti-vaxxers, and even the January 6 coup attempt to Orwell. “Impatient Griselda” explores, through the translated voice of an alien that looks like an octopus and doesn’t have all the words it needs to communicate perfectly, estrangement and miscommunication. “Bad Teeth” is a fun vignette about friendship that follows two old friends as one of them insists on asking why the other had an affair with a man with bad teeth, but the affair never happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13926191\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13926191\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-800x1207.jpg\" alt=\"The cover of ‘Old Babes in the Wood’ by Margaret Atwood shows a simple illustration of a cat’s face in close-up.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1207\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-800x1207.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-1020x1539.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-160x241.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-768x1159.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-1018x1536.jpg 1018w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-1358x2048.jpg 1358w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7.jpg 1693w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Old Babes in the Wood’ by Margaret Atwood. \u003ccite>(Doubleday)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In “Death by Clamshell,” Hypatia of Alexandria narrates her own murder and offers her thoughts on how she’s morphed into different things to different groups of people in the centuries since her death. And she does so with great energy and a good sense of humor about it: “I try to look on the bright side: I did not have to endure the indignities of extreme old age.” In “Metempsychosis: or, The Journey of the Soul,” the narrator is a snail whose soul “jumped directly from snail to human” after it got sprayed with a homemade, environmentally friendly pesticide. The snail’s desire to return to its previous form, and its understandable shock at human behavior and practices, quickly morph into a truly eye-opening, heartfelt read about yearning and feeling out of place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Old Babes in the Wood\u003c/em> is touching, smart, funny, and unique in equal measure. Atwood, who’s always had her finger on the pulse of modern society, tackles everything from love and the afterlife to the importance of language and the pandemic (fans of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> will love “Freeforall,” which is a return to themes of motherhood with a political angle and plenty of social commentary). Throughout all these stories, Atwood’s usual wit is always present, and she offers plenty of memorable characters and lines. “That is what it is to be human, I suppose: to question the terms of existence,” says the snail trapped inside a woman in “Metempsychosis.” That line echoes throughout the collection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_10990325']It’s been almost a decade since Atwood’s previous short story collection, \u003cem>Stone Mattress\u003c/em>, was published. Not surprisingly, the wait was worth it. \u003cem>Old Babes in the Wood\u003c/em> showcases Atwood’s imagination and her perennial obsession with getting to the core of what makes us human while dishing out plenty of entertainment and eye-opening revelations along the way. At this point, Atwood has nothing left to prove. But she writes like she wants the world to notice her work — and that fire makes it easy to react every time she publishes something: We know we must sit down, read, and be in awe of her talent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Gabino_Iglesias\">@Gabino_Iglesias\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Margaret+Atwood%27s+%27Old+Babes+in+the+Wood%27+tackles+what+it+means+to+be+human&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Margaret Atwood, without a doubt one of the greatest living writers, is best known for her incredibly successful and award-winning novels \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> and, more recently, \u003cem>The Testaments\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, she is also an extraordinary short story writer — and \u003cem>Old Babes in the Wood\u003c/em>, her first collection in almost a decade, is a dazzling mixture of stories that explore what it means to be human while also showcasing Atwood’s gifted imagination and great sense of humor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cem>Old Babes in the Wood\u003c/em> contains 15 stories, some of which have previously appeared in \u003cem>The New Yorker\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The New York Times Magazine\u003c/em>. The collection is divided into three parts. The first and last, titled “Tig & Nell” and “Nell & Tig,” revolve around a married couple and look, more or less, at their entire lives — what they’ve done and felt, the people that left a mark on them, their thoughts. These stories, which taken together feel like a mosaic novella more than literary bookends for a collection, offer a deep, heartfelt, engrossing look at the minutiae of life. The middle part, titled “My Evil Mother,” is perhaps the crowning jewel in this collection and brings together eight unique tales that vary wildly in terms of tone, voice, theme, and format. From imagined interviews and stories told by aliens to the circle of life and a snail trapped in the body of a woman, these tales show Atwood’s characteristic insight and intellect while also putting on full display her ability to make us laugh, her chronicler’s eye for detail, and her unparalleled imagination.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are no throwaway stories in this collection, but several demand their time in the spotlight. “Morte de Smudgie,” about the death of a cat, is a perfect portrait of the unique kind of grief that follows the loss of a beloved pet. “My Evil Mother” follows a mother-daughter relationship through the years and shows how, and why, many people eventually become just like their parents. In “The Dead Interview,” Atwood “interviews” author George Orwell through a medium in a trance. Part tribute and part celebratory deconstruction of Orwell’s oeuvre and persona, this one becomes unexpectedly funny and shows just how on top of everything Atwood is as she tries to explain things like the internet, getting “cancelled,” anti-vaxxers, and even the January 6 coup attempt to Orwell. “Impatient Griselda” explores, through the translated voice of an alien that looks like an octopus and doesn’t have all the words it needs to communicate perfectly, estrangement and miscommunication. “Bad Teeth” is a fun vignette about friendship that follows two old friends as one of them insists on asking why the other had an affair with a man with bad teeth, but the affair never happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13926191\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13926191\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-800x1207.jpg\" alt=\"The cover of ‘Old Babes in the Wood’ by Margaret Atwood shows a simple illustration of a cat’s face in close-up.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1207\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-800x1207.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-1020x1539.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-160x241.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-768x1159.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-1018x1536.jpg 1018w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7-1358x2048.jpg 1358w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/atwood_custom-a75ef77733840206d3f50df508697628504c97d7.jpg 1693w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Old Babes in the Wood’ by Margaret Atwood. \u003ccite>(Doubleday)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In “Death by Clamshell,” Hypatia of Alexandria narrates her own murder and offers her thoughts on how she’s morphed into different things to different groups of people in the centuries since her death. And she does so with great energy and a good sense of humor about it: “I try to look on the bright side: I did not have to endure the indignities of extreme old age.” In “Metempsychosis: or, The Journey of the Soul,” the narrator is a snail whose soul “jumped directly from snail to human” after it got sprayed with a homemade, environmentally friendly pesticide. The snail’s desire to return to its previous form, and its understandable shock at human behavior and practices, quickly morph into a truly eye-opening, heartfelt read about yearning and feeling out of place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>It’s been almost a decade since Atwood’s previous short story collection, \u003cem>Stone Mattress\u003c/em>, was published. Not surprisingly, the wait was worth it. \u003cem>Old Babes in the Wood\u003c/em> showcases Atwood’s imagination and her perennial obsession with getting to the core of what makes us human while dishing out plenty of entertainment and eye-opening revelations along the way. At this point, Atwood has nothing left to prove. But she writes like she wants the world to notice her work — and that fire makes it easy to react every time she publishes something: We know we must sit down, read, and be in awe of her talent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Gabino_Iglesias\">@Gabino_Iglesias\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Margaret+Atwood%27s+%27Old+Babes+in+the+Wood%27+tackles+what+it+means+to+be+human&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Climate activist Greta Thunberg who, at age 15, led school strikes every Friday in her home country of Sweden — a practice that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/09/20/761916356/global-youth-climate-strike-expected-to-draw-large-crowds\">caught on globally\u003c/a> — has now, at 20, managed to bring together more than 100 scientists, environmental activists, journalists and writers to lay out exactly how and why it’s clear that the climate crisis is happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Impressively, in \u003cem>The Climate Book, \u003c/em>Thunberg and team — which includes well-known names like Margaret Atwood, George Monbiot, Bill McKibben and Robin Wall Kimmerer — explain and offer action items in 84 compelling, bite-size chapters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13921311']Most critically, they — and Thunberg herself in numerous brief essays of her own — explain what steps need to be taken without delay if the world is to have a reasonable chance of limiting global temperature rise as stated in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The document aims to keep the temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius (and better yet below 1.5 degrees Celsius).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The essays also explain why climate justice must be at the center of these efforts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading\u003cem> The Climate Book\u003c/em> at a deliberate pace over some weeks (it’s a lot to absorb), the cumulative impact on my understanding of the crisis through its data, cross-cultural reflections, and paths for step-by-step change became mesmerizing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you think the rich nations of the world are making real progress towards achieving limits on global warming, think again. In one essay, Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester, Uppsala and Bergen, puts it this way: “Wealthy nations must eliminate their use of fossils fuels by around 2030 for a likely chance of 1.5C, extending only around 2035 to 2040 for 2C … We are where we are precisely because for thirty years we’ve favored make-believe over real mitigation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What does Anderson mean by “make-believe”? In her own chapter, journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto describes her investigation into Swedish climate policy, specifically its net zero target for 2045. She discovered a discrepancy between the official number of greenhouse gases emitted each year — 50 million tons — and the real figure, 150 million tons. That lower, official figure leaves out “emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass,” which means the target is way off, she writes. If all countries were off by that much, the world would be heading straight for a catastrophic increase of 2.5 to 3C.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13910883']What does that mean, emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass? John Barrett, professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Leeds, and Alice Garvey, sustainability researcher at the same university, explain that “emissions from consumption” means emissions are allocated to the country of the consumer, not the producer. Because industrial production is often outsourced to developing economies, in a world where climate justice were front and center, the consumer country (in this example, Sweden) would take the burden of lessening the emissions from consumption.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for biomass, that refers to burning wood for energy, and sometimes other materials like kelp. Burning wood for energy causes more emissions per unit of energy than fossil fuels, explain Karl-Heinz Erb and Simone Gingrich, both social ecology professors at Vienna’s University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13924914\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13924914\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-800x1220.jpg\" alt=\"The cover of a book. It's black with large multicolored letters on the front reading THE CLIMATE BOOK, GRETA THUNBERG.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1220\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-800x1220.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-1020x1555.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-160x244.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-768x1171.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-1007x1536.jpg 1007w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-1343x2048.jpg 1343w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7.jpg 1679w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Climate Book’ by Greta Thunberg. \u003ccite>(Penguin Press)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Alice Larkin, professor of climate science and energy policy at the University of Manchester, adds “a highly significant complication” to this disturbing picture: international aviation and shipping aren’t typically accounted for in national emission targets, policies, and carbon budgets, either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This under-reporting situation, I would wager, isn’t known even by many climate-literate citizens. It certainly wasn’t to me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One urgent goal, then, is transparency in climate-emission figures. Beyond that, Thunberg says, distribution of climate budgets fairly across countries of the world must be a priority. Without climate justice, policies are unlikely to succeed. An especially effective subsection of the book, “We are not all in the same boat,” brings this point to life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13901163']Saleemul Huq, director of a Bangladeshi international center for climate change, puts the point squarely: The communities most devastated by climate change “are overwhelmingly poor people of colour.” But Bangladeshi citizens shouldn’t be thought of as passive victims, Huq emphasizes. Communities work together to prepare for the effects of climate disasters in ways not often seen in the global north. For example, “An elderly widow living alone will have two children from the high school assigned to go and pick her up” in case of hurricane or other emergency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Globally, then, what to do? First, we can hold industrial and corporate interests accountable and push back on their messages placing the burden solely on the individual, a tactic that allows the worst of the status quo carbon-emissions activities to continue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond this, it’s not enough “to become vegetarian for one day a week, offset our holiday trips to Thailand or switch our diesel SUV for an electric car,” as Thunberg puts it. Participating in recycling may lead to feel-good moments, but in fact, in the words of Greenpeace activist Nina Schrank, it’s “perhaps the greatest example of greenwashing on the planet today.” Even the 9% of plastic that does get recycled ends up (after one or two cycles) dumped or burned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thunberg herself has given up flying. In the book she writes, “Frequent flying is by far the most climate-destructive individual activity you can engage in.” Though she writes that lowering her personal carbon footprint isn’t her specific goal in sailing (instead of flying) across the Atlantic — she hopes to convey the need for urgent, collective behavioral change. “If we do not see anyone else behaving as if we are in a crisis, then very few will understand that we actually are in a crisis,” she writes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13885195']We can join Thunberg in giving up — or at least reducing — a flying habit if we have one. Three further steps, out of many offered in the book, are these: Switch to plant-based diets. Support natural climate solutions, by protecting forests, salt marshes, mangroves, the oceans, and all the animal and plant life in these habitats. Pressure the media to go beyond the latest story on a heat wave or collapsing glacier to focus on root causes, time urgency, and solutions. Thunberg writes that “No entity other than the media has the opportunity to create the necessary transformation of our global society.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Social norms can and do change, Thunberg emphasizes. That’s our greatest source of hope — but only if we keep climate justice front and center at every step.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist emerita at William & Mary. ‘Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity’ is her seventh book. Find her on Twitter \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/twitter.com/bjkingape__;!!Iwwt!BAeIwfAGCiX__cFRtM8--3vc8UpSgpcexxGLIloDXMFDIMH1cw4OiwUJuWGhfQ%24\">@bjkingape\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Greta+Thunberg%27s+%27The+Climate+Book%27+urges+world+to+keep+climate+justice+out+front+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Climate activist Greta Thunberg who, at age 15, led school strikes every Friday in her home country of Sweden — a practice that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/09/20/761916356/global-youth-climate-strike-expected-to-draw-large-crowds\">caught on globally\u003c/a> — has now, at 20, managed to bring together more than 100 scientists, environmental activists, journalists and writers to lay out exactly how and why it’s clear that the climate crisis is happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Impressively, in \u003cem>The Climate Book, \u003c/em>Thunberg and team — which includes well-known names like Margaret Atwood, George Monbiot, Bill McKibben and Robin Wall Kimmerer — explain and offer action items in 84 compelling, bite-size chapters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Most critically, they — and Thunberg herself in numerous brief essays of her own — explain what steps need to be taken without delay if the world is to have a reasonable chance of limiting global temperature rise as stated in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The document aims to keep the temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius (and better yet below 1.5 degrees Celsius).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The essays also explain why climate justice must be at the center of these efforts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading\u003cem> The Climate Book\u003c/em> at a deliberate pace over some weeks (it’s a lot to absorb), the cumulative impact on my understanding of the crisis through its data, cross-cultural reflections, and paths for step-by-step change became mesmerizing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you think the rich nations of the world are making real progress towards achieving limits on global warming, think again. In one essay, Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester, Uppsala and Bergen, puts it this way: “Wealthy nations must eliminate their use of fossils fuels by around 2030 for a likely chance of 1.5C, extending only around 2035 to 2040 for 2C … We are where we are precisely because for thirty years we’ve favored make-believe over real mitigation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What does Anderson mean by “make-believe”? In her own chapter, journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto describes her investigation into Swedish climate policy, specifically its net zero target for 2045. She discovered a discrepancy between the official number of greenhouse gases emitted each year — 50 million tons — and the real figure, 150 million tons. That lower, official figure leaves out “emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass,” which means the target is way off, she writes. If all countries were off by that much, the world would be heading straight for a catastrophic increase of 2.5 to 3C.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>What does that mean, emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass? John Barrett, professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Leeds, and Alice Garvey, sustainability researcher at the same university, explain that “emissions from consumption” means emissions are allocated to the country of the consumer, not the producer. Because industrial production is often outsourced to developing economies, in a world where climate justice were front and center, the consumer country (in this example, Sweden) would take the burden of lessening the emissions from consumption.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for biomass, that refers to burning wood for energy, and sometimes other materials like kelp. Burning wood for energy causes more emissions per unit of energy than fossil fuels, explain Karl-Heinz Erb and Simone Gingrich, both social ecology professors at Vienna’s University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13924914\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13924914\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-800x1220.jpg\" alt=\"The cover of a book. It's black with large multicolored letters on the front reading THE CLIMATE BOOK, GRETA THUNBERG.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1220\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-800x1220.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-1020x1555.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-160x244.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-768x1171.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-1007x1536.jpg 1007w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7-1343x2048.jpg 1343w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/climate_custom-4c299e0360f86c2a4cf5648d23a69dfea2d47fc7.jpg 1679w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Climate Book’ by Greta Thunberg. \u003ccite>(Penguin Press)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Alice Larkin, professor of climate science and energy policy at the University of Manchester, adds “a highly significant complication” to this disturbing picture: international aviation and shipping aren’t typically accounted for in national emission targets, policies, and carbon budgets, either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This under-reporting situation, I would wager, isn’t known even by many climate-literate citizens. It certainly wasn’t to me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One urgent goal, then, is transparency in climate-emission figures. Beyond that, Thunberg says, distribution of climate budgets fairly across countries of the world must be a priority. Without climate justice, policies are unlikely to succeed. An especially effective subsection of the book, “We are not all in the same boat,” brings this point to life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Saleemul Huq, director of a Bangladeshi international center for climate change, puts the point squarely: The communities most devastated by climate change “are overwhelmingly poor people of colour.” But Bangladeshi citizens shouldn’t be thought of as passive victims, Huq emphasizes. Communities work together to prepare for the effects of climate disasters in ways not often seen in the global north. For example, “An elderly widow living alone will have two children from the high school assigned to go and pick her up” in case of hurricane or other emergency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Globally, then, what to do? First, we can hold industrial and corporate interests accountable and push back on their messages placing the burden solely on the individual, a tactic that allows the worst of the status quo carbon-emissions activities to continue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond this, it’s not enough “to become vegetarian for one day a week, offset our holiday trips to Thailand or switch our diesel SUV for an electric car,” as Thunberg puts it. Participating in recycling may lead to feel-good moments, but in fact, in the words of Greenpeace activist Nina Schrank, it’s “perhaps the greatest example of greenwashing on the planet today.” Even the 9% of plastic that does get recycled ends up (after one or two cycles) dumped or burned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thunberg herself has given up flying. In the book she writes, “Frequent flying is by far the most climate-destructive individual activity you can engage in.” Though she writes that lowering her personal carbon footprint isn’t her specific goal in sailing (instead of flying) across the Atlantic — she hopes to convey the need for urgent, collective behavioral change. “If we do not see anyone else behaving as if we are in a crisis, then very few will understand that we actually are in a crisis,” she writes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>We can join Thunberg in giving up — or at least reducing — a flying habit if we have one. Three further steps, out of many offered in the book, are these: Switch to plant-based diets. Support natural climate solutions, by protecting forests, salt marshes, mangroves, the oceans, and all the animal and plant life in these habitats. Pressure the media to go beyond the latest story on a heat wave or collapsing glacier to focus on root causes, time urgency, and solutions. Thunberg writes that “No entity other than the media has the opportunity to create the necessary transformation of our global society.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Social norms can and do change, Thunberg emphasizes. That’s our greatest source of hope — but only if we keep climate justice front and center at every step.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist emerita at William & Mary. ‘Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity’ is her seventh book. Find her on Twitter \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/twitter.com/bjkingape__;!!Iwwt!BAeIwfAGCiX__cFRtM8--3vc8UpSgpcexxGLIloDXMFDIMH1cw4OiwUJuWGhfQ%24\">@bjkingape\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Greta+Thunberg%27s+%27The+Climate+Book%27+urges+world+to+keep+climate+justice+out+front+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Afghan Women Raise Their Voices in Two New Anthologies",
"headTitle": "Afghan Women Raise Their Voices in Two New Anthologies | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>This week marks a year since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, a bitter anniversary for many Afghans and foreigners, like me, who lived and worked there. We watch in anguish as its leaders reestablish their punitive, hyper-conservative emirate that forces Afghan women and girls out of sight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the Taliban hasn’t succeeded in silencing the female half of Afghan society, whose voices at home and abroad ring out in two new and powerful anthologies: \u003ca href=\"https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/we-are-still-here-nahid-shahalimi/1141419867\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>We Are Still Here: Afghan Women on Courage, Freedom and the Fight to Be Heard \u003c/em>\u003c/a>and\u003ca href=\"https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/my-pen-is-the-wing-of-a-bird-18-afghan-women/1141516096\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem> My Pen is the Wing of a Bird\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. Both projects were launched with great difficulty before Kabul fell, as generations of misogyny and war have stifled female expression. The return of the Taliban only increased the obstacles and the danger for the contributors, many of whom have fled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13902072']\u003cem>We Are Still Here\u003c/em>, a compilation of essays publishing this week—edited by Afghan-Canadian activist, author and filmmaker Nahid Shahalimi—is a crucial collection of first-hand accounts. In a forward, author Margaret Atwood recounts how her construction of women’s roles in \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> was influenced by her trip to Afghanistan in 1978.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is only by telling you about the past that you can truly comprehend what we once had and what we have repeatedly lost,” Shahalimi writes in in the introduction. “As of August 15, 2021, there is no longer any hope.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The stories and interviews in the collection involve 13 Afghan women, young and old, who’ve excelled in their various professions. They include a computer programmer, a parliamentarian, a filmmaker, a businesswoman, a peace negotiator, a singer, a former government minister and a journalist. All are educated and benefitted from relatives who empowered girls in their families.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of the women have experienced life as refugees. One is Razia Barakzai, who launched the first women’s protests in Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban. “Our groups are now much larger than the five women we started out with,” she writes. “Over six hundred activists from all over the world have come together in support of us and our goal is to continue to grow that support.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Barakzai ultimately fled her homeland because of growing death threats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s clear from the women featured in this collection is something I’d been told by a friend who played a prominent role in the previous Afghan government: There are many disparate opinions among Afghan women on how to deal with the Taliban, making it difficult to unite against their common enemy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shahalimi argues a similar point in the anthology conclusion: “We are still here, and we will continue to raise our voices. But we will only see the change we need when everyone—women, men, Afghans and the international community—stand shoulder to shoulder in true solidarity.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='news_11922463']A literary agent told me once that it’s important for writers to offer readers hope. It isn’t something easily found in the pages of this book. The collection does, however, provide important detail and fascinating personal narratives that highlight how Afghan women and girls embraced the opportunities afforded them over the past 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I did find hope, though, in the other anthology, \u003cem>My Pen is the Wing of a Bird—\u003c/em>publishing in the U.S. in October. It includes 23 gut-wrenching stories translated into English from Dari or Pashto.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The collection’s 18 contributors were selected from among some 100 entrants to the \u003ca href=\"http://untold-stories.org/\">Untold—Write Afghanistan\u003c/a> project. The project was started in 2019 for women writers marginalized by community or conflict. Project founder Lucy Hannah writes that it isn’t safe at the moment to reveal detailed identities of the book’s female wordsmiths—some of whom use pen names.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She adds that after the Taliban takeover last year, the 18 women “looked to each other for reassurance. They shared how they couldn’t sleep, how they had dyed their clothes black, how they had soaked away the ink from pages of writing that was now a risk to possess as hard copy. Some took to the streets, others went into hiding; and six crossed borders and are now living in Germany, Italy, Iran, Sweden, Tajikistan, and the USA.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That heightened awareness is evident in their storytelling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We smell onions frying in kitchens. We hear the jingle of an ice cream cart. We hold a purple handbag,” explains BBC journalist Lyse Doucet in the collection foreword: We sit on the ‘soft chocolate-covered seats’ of a luxury car which could only be afforded by someone else. These are the details we recognized in our own lives.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there are many details we can’t identify with and, like Doucet, I had to occasionally look away from the page.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Most Beautiful Lips in the World,” an exquisitely written piece by Elahe Hosseini, proved especially difficult to read. It is told from the perspective of an impoverished child who is coaxed into becoming a suicide bomber so she can reunite with her dead mother. The story draws from a real attack three years ago at a wedding hall in the Afghan capital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13901335']Some of the stories are told from the male perspective, including “D for Daud” by Anahita Gharib Nawaz about a teacher’s Dickensian sacrifice for a young student. But most of the anthology focuses on the extreme challenges Afghan women face and not just from the Taliban during this past year. Like “Daughter Number Eight” by Freshta Ghani, the story of a woman who fasts with tragic consequences, in hopes that her eighth child will be a boy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The anthology also delves into sexual identity and unrequited love, dangerous themes in Afghanistan even before last August.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As tragic as it is, this intense collection does inspire hope that Afghan women and girls will persevere. One of my favorite stories is “Blossom” by Zainab Akhlaqi, about two school friends and their dreams that draws from a devastating terror attack last year on a school in an impoverished Kabul neighborhood called Dasht-e-Barchi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a familiar story to me, as I spent years reporting on young girls and women defying incredible odds to attend school across Afghanistan, even if it meant sitting in the dirt in dangerous spots like Kandahar and Helmand provinces or Dasht-e-Barchi. I remain in awe of their resilience, just as I do of the women in both anthologies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson opened NPR’s first Kabul bureau in 2006 and was bureau chief there until 2010. She is currently based in Germany where she hosts the podcast “Common Ground Berlin” and is working on a book about female Afghan mountain climbers who fled to Europe.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Afghan+women+raise+their+voices+in+two+new+anthologies&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>This week marks a year since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, a bitter anniversary for many Afghans and foreigners, like me, who lived and worked there. We watch in anguish as its leaders reestablish their punitive, hyper-conservative emirate that forces Afghan women and girls out of sight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the Taliban hasn’t succeeded in silencing the female half of Afghan society, whose voices at home and abroad ring out in two new and powerful anthologies: \u003ca href=\"https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/we-are-still-here-nahid-shahalimi/1141419867\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>We Are Still Here: Afghan Women on Courage, Freedom and the Fight to Be Heard \u003c/em>\u003c/a>and\u003ca href=\"https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/my-pen-is-the-wing-of-a-bird-18-afghan-women/1141516096\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem> My Pen is the Wing of a Bird\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. Both projects were launched with great difficulty before Kabul fell, as generations of misogyny and war have stifled female expression. The return of the Taliban only increased the obstacles and the danger for the contributors, many of whom have fled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cem>We Are Still Here\u003c/em>, a compilation of essays publishing this week—edited by Afghan-Canadian activist, author and filmmaker Nahid Shahalimi—is a crucial collection of first-hand accounts. In a forward, author Margaret Atwood recounts how her construction of women’s roles in \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> was influenced by her trip to Afghanistan in 1978.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is only by telling you about the past that you can truly comprehend what we once had and what we have repeatedly lost,” Shahalimi writes in in the introduction. “As of August 15, 2021, there is no longer any hope.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The stories and interviews in the collection involve 13 Afghan women, young and old, who’ve excelled in their various professions. They include a computer programmer, a parliamentarian, a filmmaker, a businesswoman, a peace negotiator, a singer, a former government minister and a journalist. All are educated and benefitted from relatives who empowered girls in their families.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of the women have experienced life as refugees. One is Razia Barakzai, who launched the first women’s protests in Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban. “Our groups are now much larger than the five women we started out with,” she writes. “Over six hundred activists from all over the world have come together in support of us and our goal is to continue to grow that support.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Barakzai ultimately fled her homeland because of growing death threats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s clear from the women featured in this collection is something I’d been told by a friend who played a prominent role in the previous Afghan government: There are many disparate opinions among Afghan women on how to deal with the Taliban, making it difficult to unite against their common enemy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shahalimi argues a similar point in the anthology conclusion: “We are still here, and we will continue to raise our voices. But we will only see the change we need when everyone—women, men, Afghans and the international community—stand shoulder to shoulder in true solidarity.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>A literary agent told me once that it’s important for writers to offer readers hope. It isn’t something easily found in the pages of this book. The collection does, however, provide important detail and fascinating personal narratives that highlight how Afghan women and girls embraced the opportunities afforded them over the past 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I did find hope, though, in the other anthology, \u003cem>My Pen is the Wing of a Bird—\u003c/em>publishing in the U.S. in October. It includes 23 gut-wrenching stories translated into English from Dari or Pashto.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The collection’s 18 contributors were selected from among some 100 entrants to the \u003ca href=\"http://untold-stories.org/\">Untold—Write Afghanistan\u003c/a> project. The project was started in 2019 for women writers marginalized by community or conflict. Project founder Lucy Hannah writes that it isn’t safe at the moment to reveal detailed identities of the book’s female wordsmiths—some of whom use pen names.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She adds that after the Taliban takeover last year, the 18 women “looked to each other for reassurance. They shared how they couldn’t sleep, how they had dyed their clothes black, how they had soaked away the ink from pages of writing that was now a risk to possess as hard copy. Some took to the streets, others went into hiding; and six crossed borders and are now living in Germany, Italy, Iran, Sweden, Tajikistan, and the USA.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That heightened awareness is evident in their storytelling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We smell onions frying in kitchens. We hear the jingle of an ice cream cart. We hold a purple handbag,” explains BBC journalist Lyse Doucet in the collection foreword: We sit on the ‘soft chocolate-covered seats’ of a luxury car which could only be afforded by someone else. These are the details we recognized in our own lives.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there are many details we can’t identify with and, like Doucet, I had to occasionally look away from the page.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Most Beautiful Lips in the World,” an exquisitely written piece by Elahe Hosseini, proved especially difficult to read. It is told from the perspective of an impoverished child who is coaxed into becoming a suicide bomber so she can reunite with her dead mother. The story draws from a real attack three years ago at a wedding hall in the Afghan capital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Some of the stories are told from the male perspective, including “D for Daud” by Anahita Gharib Nawaz about a teacher’s Dickensian sacrifice for a young student. But most of the anthology focuses on the extreme challenges Afghan women face and not just from the Taliban during this past year. Like “Daughter Number Eight” by Freshta Ghani, the story of a woman who fasts with tragic consequences, in hopes that her eighth child will be a boy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The anthology also delves into sexual identity and unrequited love, dangerous themes in Afghanistan even before last August.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As tragic as it is, this intense collection does inspire hope that Afghan women and girls will persevere. One of my favorite stories is “Blossom” by Zainab Akhlaqi, about two school friends and their dreams that draws from a devastating terror attack last year on a school in an impoverished Kabul neighborhood called Dasht-e-Barchi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a familiar story to me, as I spent years reporting on young girls and women defying incredible odds to attend school across Afghanistan, even if it meant sitting in the dirt in dangerous spots like Kandahar and Helmand provinces or Dasht-e-Barchi. I remain in awe of their resilience, just as I do of the women in both anthologies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson opened NPR’s first Kabul bureau in 2006 and was bureau chief there until 2010. She is currently based in Germany where she hosts the podcast “Common Ground Berlin” and is working on a book about female Afghan mountain climbers who fled to Europe.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Afghan+women+raise+their+voices+in+two+new+anthologies&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Hear Margaret Atwood Read From Her Sequel to 'The Handmaid's Tale'",
"headTitle": "Hear Margaret Atwood Read From Her Sequel to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian novel \u003c/em>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003cem> ended on a cliffhanger: The rebellious handmaid Offred stepping into a mysterious black van, on her way to freedom—or to arrest.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Handmaids are in the public eye again thanks to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/525755370/handmaids-tale-wants-you-to-feel-like-this-could-happen-here\">hit TV series\u003c/a>—and the frequent appearance of silent, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/79915/the-frightening-realism-of-the-handmaids-tale-is-inspiring-costumed-protests-and-a-lot-of-freaking-out\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">red-robed protesters\u003c/a> at political events. Now, Atwood is returning to the world of Gilead, the repressive theocracy she created out of the ruins of present-day America. \u003c/em>The Testaments \u003cem>opens 15 years after the events of the first book, and follows an old familiar character as well as introducing some new voices. As for what happens to Offred… well, no spoilers here.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>We’re excited to bring you a pre-publication excerpt of \u003c/em>The Testaments\u003cem>, and an exclusive recording of Atwood herself reading these first three chapters. You can also hear her in conversation with \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/programs/weekend-edition-saturday/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Weekend Edition\u003c/a>‘s Scott Simon on Saturday, Sept. 8, and the book will be released on Sept. 10th.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/754859270/756030381\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>The Ardua Hall Holograph\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This statue was a small token of appreciation for my many contributions, said the citation, which was read out by Aunt Vidala. She’d been assigned the task by our superiors, and was far from appreciative. I thanked her with as much modesty as I could summon, then pulled the rope that released the cloth drape shrouding me; it billowed to the ground, and there I stood. We don’t do cheering here at Ardua Hall, but there was some discreet clapping. I inclined my head in a nod.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My statue is larger than life, as statues tend to be, and shows me as younger, slimmer, and in better shape than I’ve been for some time. I am standing straight, shoulders back, my lips curved into a firm but benevolent smile. My eyes are fixed on some cosmic point of reference understood to represent my idealism, my unflinching commitment to duty, my determination to move forward despite all obstacles. Not that anything in the sky would be visible to my statue, placed as it is in a morose cluster of trees and shrubs beside the footpath running in front of Ardua Hall. We Aunts must not be too presumptuous, even in stone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clutching my left hand is a girl of seven or eight, gazing up at me with trusting eyes. My right hand rests on the head of a woman crouched at my side, her hair veiled, her eyes upturned in an expression that could be read as either craven or grateful—one of our Handmaids—and behind me is one of my Pearl Girls, ready to set out on her missionary work. Hanging from a belt around my waist is my Taser. This weapon reminds me of my failings: had I been more effective, I would not have needed such an implement. The persuasion in my voice would have been enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a group of statuary it’s not a great success: too crowded. I would have preferred more emphasis on myself. But at least I look sane. It could well have been otherwise, as the elderly sculptress—a true believer since deceased—had a tendency to confer bulging eyes on her subjects as a sign of their pious fervour. Her bust of Aunt Helena looks rabid, that of Aunt Vidala is hyperthyroid, and that of Aunt Elizabeth appears ready to explode.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the unveiling the sculptress was nervous. Was her rendition of me sufficiently flattering? Did I approve of it? Would I be seen to approve? I toyed with the idea of frowning as the sheet came off, but thought better of it: I am not without compassion. “Very lifelike,” I said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That was nine years ago. Since then my statue has weathered: pigeons have decorated me, moss has sprouted in my damper crevices. Votaries have taken to leaving offerings at my feet: eggs for fertility, oranges to suggest the fullness of pregnancy, croissants to reference the moon. I ignore the breadstuffs—usually they have been rained on—but pocket the oranges. Oranges are so refreshing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I write these words in my private sanctum within the library of Ardua Hall—one of the few libraries remaining after the enthusiastic bookburnings that have been going on across our land. The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But among these bloody fingerprints are those made by ourselves, and these can’t be wiped away so easily. Over the years I’ve buried a lot of bones; now I’m inclined to dig them up again—if only for your edification, my unknown reader. If you are reading, this manuscript at least will have survived. Though perhaps I’m fantasizing: perhaps I will never have a reader. Perhaps I’ll only be talking to the wall, in more ways than one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s enough inscribing for today. My hand hurts, my back aches, and my nightly cup of hot milk awaits me. I’ll stash this screed in its hiding place, avoiding the surveillance cameras—I know where they are, having placed them myself. Despite such precautions, I’m aware of the risk I’m running: writing can be dangerous. What betrayals, and then what denunciations, might lie in store for me? There are several within Ardua Hall who would love to get their hands on these pages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wait, I counsel them silently: it will get worse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>* * *\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You have asked me to tell you what it was like for me when I was growing up within Gilead. You say it will be helpful, and I do wish to be helpful. I imagine you expect nothing but horrors, but the reality is that many children were loved and cherished, in Gilead as elsewhere, and many adults were kind though fallible, in Gilead as elsewhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope you will remember, too, that we all have some nostalgia for whatever kindness we have known as children, however bizarre the conditions of that childhood may seem to others. I agree with you that Gilead ought to fade away—there is too much of wrong in it, too much that is false, and too much that is surely contrary to what God intended—but you must permit me some space to mourn the good that will be lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At our school, pink was for spring and summer, plum was for fall and winter, white was for special days: Sundays and celebrations. Arms covered, hair covered, skirts down to the knee before you were five and no more than two inches above the ankle after that, because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us—of our shapely or skinny or fat legs, of our graceful or knobbly or sausage arms, of our peachy or blotchy skins, of our entwining curls of shining hair or our coarse unruly pelts or our straw-like wispy braids, it did not matter. Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they’d stagger and lurch and topple over the verge—The verge of what? we wondered. Was it like a cliff?—and go plunging down in flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God. We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us; we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That was the kind of thing runny-nosed Aunt Vidala would tell us at school while we were doing petit-point embroidery for handkerchiefs and footstools and framed pictures: flowers in a vase, fruit in a bowl were the favoured patterns. But Aunt Estée, the teacher we liked the best, would say Aunt Vidala was overdoing it and there was no point in frightening us out of our wits, since to instill such an aversion might have a negative influence on the happiness of our future married lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All men are not like that, girls,” she would say soothingly. “The better kind have superior characters. Some of them have decent self-restraint. And once you are married it will seem quite different to you, and not very fearsome at all.” Not that she would know anything about it, since the Aunts were not married; they were not allowed to be. That was why they could have writing and books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We and your fathers and mothers will choose your husbands wisely for you when the time comes,” Aunt Estée would say. “So you don’t need to be afraid. Just learn your lessons and trust your elders to do what is best, and everything will unfold as it should. I will pray for it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But despite Aunt Estée’s dimples and friendly smile, it was Aunt Vidala’s version that prevailed. It turned up in my nightmares: the shattering of the glass house, then the rending and tearing and the trampling of hooves, with pink and white and plum fragments of myself scattered over the ground. I dreaded the thought of growing older—older enough for a wedding. I had no faith in the wise choices of the Aunts: I feared that I would end up married to a goat on fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The pink, the white, and the plum dresses were the rule for special girls like us. Ordinary girls from Econofamilies wore the same thing all the time—those ugly multicoloured stripes and grey cloaks, like the clothes of their mothers. They did not even learn petit-point embroidery or crochet work, just plain sewing and the making of paper flowers and other such chores. They were not pre-chosen to be married to the very best men—to the Sons of Jacob and the other Commanders or their sons—not like us; although they might get to be chosen once they were older if they were pretty enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nobody said that. You were not supposed to preen yourself on your good looks, it was not modest, or take any notice of the good looks of other people. Though we girls knew the truth: that it was better to be pretty than ugly. Even the Aunts paid more attention to the pretty ones. But if you were already pre-chosen, pretty didn’t matter so much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I didn’t have a squint like Huldah or a pinchy built-in frown like Shunammite, and I didn’t have barely-there eyebrows like Becka, but I was unfinished. I had a dough face, like the cookies my favourite Martha, Zilla, made for me as a treat, with raisin eyes and pumpkinseed teeth. But though I was not especially pretty, I was very, very chosen. Doubly chosen: not only pre-chosen to marry a Commander but chosen in the first place by Tabitha, who was my mother.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is what Tabitha used to tell me: “I went for a walk in the forest,” she would say, “and then I came to an enchanted castle, and there were a lot of little girls locked inside, and none of them had any mothers, and they were under the spell of the wicked witches. I had a magic ring that unlocked the castle, but I could only rescue one little girl. So I looked at them all very carefully, and then, out of the whole crowd, I chose you!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What happened to the others?” I would ask. “The other little girls?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Different mothers rescued them,” she would say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Did they have magic rings too?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Of course, my darling. In order to be a mother, you need to have a magic ring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Where’s the magic ring?” I would ask. “Where is it now?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s right here on my finger,” she would say, indicating the third finger of her left hand. The heart finger, she said it was. “But my ring had only one wish in it, and I used that one up on you. So now it’s an ordinary, everyday mother ring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this point I was allowed to try on the ring, which was gold, with three diamonds in it: a big one, and a smaller one on either side. It did look as if it might have been magic once.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Did you lift me up and carry me?” I would ask. “Out of the forest?” I knew the story off by heart, but I liked to hear it repeated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No, my dearest, you were already too big for that. If I had carried you I would have coughed, and then the witches would have heard us.” I could see this was true: she did cough quite a lot. “So I took you by the hand, and we crept out of the castle so the witches wouldn’t hear us. We both said Shh, shh”—here she would hold her finger up to her lips, and I would hold my finger up too and say Shh, shh delightedly—”and then we had to run very fast through the forest, to get away from the wicked witches, because one of them had seen us going out the door. We ran, and then we hid in a hollow tree. It was very dangerous!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I did have a hazy memory of running through a forest with someone holding my hand. Had I hidden in a hollow tree? It seemed to me that I had hidden somewhere. So maybe it was true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And then what happened?” I would ask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And then I brought you to this beautiful house. Aren’t you happy here? You are so cherished, by all of us! Aren’t we both lucky that I chose you?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I would be nestled close to her, with her arm around me and my head against her thin body, through which I could feel her bumpy ribs. My ear would be pressed to her chest, and I could hear her heart hammering away inside her—faster and faster, it seemed to me, as she waited for me to say something. I knew my answer had power: I could make her smile, or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What could I say but yes and yes? Yes, I was happy. Yes, I was lucky. Anyway it was true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>* * *\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Transcript of Witness Testimony 369B\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They say I will always have the scar, but I’m almost better; so yes, I think I’m strong enough to do this now. You’ve said that you’d like me to tell you how I got involved in this whole story, so I’ll try; though it’s hard to know where to begin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ll start just before my birthday, or what I used to believe was my birthday. Neil and Melanie lied to me about that: they’d done it for the best of reasons and they’d meant really well, but when I first found out about it I was very angry at them. Keeping up my anger was difficult, though, because by that time they were dead. You can be angry at dead people, but you can never have a conversation about what they did; or you can only have one side of it. And I felt guilty as well as angry, because they’d been murdered, and I believed then that their murder was my fault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was supposed to be turning sixteen. What I was most looking forward to was getting my driver’s licence. I felt too old for a birthday party, though Melanie always got me a cake and ice cream and sang “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true,” an old song I’d loved as a child and was now finding embarrassing. I did get the cake, later—chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream, my favourites—but by then I couldn’t eat it. By that time Melanie was no longer there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose. I was so young at that moment—just a split second ago, it seems—but I’m not young anymore. How little time it takes to change a face: carve it like wood, harden it. No more of that wide-eyed daydream gazing I used to do. I’ve become sharper, more focused. I’ve become narrowed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neil and Melanie were my parents; they ran a store called The Clothes Hound. It was basically used clothing: Melanie called it “previously loved” because she said “used” meant “exploited.” The sign outside showed a smiling pink poodle in a fluffy skirt with a pink bow on its head, carrying a shopping bag. Underneath was a slogan in italics and quotation marks: \u003cem>“You’d Never Know!” \u003c/em>That meant the used clothes were so good you’d never know they were used, but that wasn’t true at all because most of the clothes were crappy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melanie said she’d inherited The Clothes Hound from her grandmother. She also said she knew the sign was old-fashioned, but people were familiar with it and it would be disrespectful to change it now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our store was on Queen West, in a stretch of blocks that had once all been like that, said Melanie—textiles, buttons and trims, cheap linens, dollar stores. But now it was going upmarket: cafés with fair trade and organic were moving in, big-brand outlets, name boutiques. In response, Melanie hung a sign in the window: \u003cem>Wearable Art\u003c/em>. But inside, the store was crowded with all kinds of clothes you would never call wearable art. There was one corner that was kind of designer, though anything really pricey wouldn’t be in The Clothes Hound in the first place. The rest was just everything. And all sorts of people came and went: young, old, looking for bargains or finds, or just looking. Or selling: even street people would try to get a few dollars for T-shirts they’d picked up at garage sales.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melanie worked on the main floor. She wore bright colours, like orange and hot pink, because she said they created a positive and energetic atmosphere, and anyway she was part gypsy at heart. She was always brisk and smiling, though on the lookout for shoplifting. After closing, she sorted and packed: this for charity, this for rags, this for Wearable Art. While doing the sorting she’d sing tunes from musicals—old ones from long ago. “Oh what a beautiful morning” was one of her favourites, and “When you walk through a storm.” I would get irritated by her singing; I’m sorry about that now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed: there was too much fabric, it was like the ocean, waves of cloth coming in and threatening to drown her. Cashmere! Who was going to buy thirty-year-old cashmere? It didn’t improve with age, she would say—not like her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neil had a beard that was going grey and wasn’t always trimmed, and he didn’t have much hair. He didn’t look like a businessman, but he handled what they called “the money end”: the invoices, the accounting, the taxes. He had his office on the second floor, up a flight of rubber-treaded stairs. He had a computer and a filing cabinet and a safe, but otherwise that room wasn’t much like an office: it was just as crowded and cluttered as the store because Neil liked to collect things. Wind-up music boxes, he had a number of those. Clocks, a lot of different clocks. Old adding machines that worked with a handle. Plastic toys that walked or hopped across the floor, such as bears and frogs and sets of false teeth. A slide projector for the kind of coloured slides that nobody had anymore. Cameras—he liked ancient cameras. Some of them could take better pictures than anything nowadays, he’d say. He had one whole shelf with nothing on it but cameras.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One time he left the safe open and I looked inside. Instead of the wads of money I’d been expecting, there was nothing in it but a tiny metal-and-glass thing that I thought must be another toy, like the hopping false teeth. But I couldn’t see where to wind it up, and I was afraid to touch it because it was old.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Can I play with it?” I asked Neil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Play with what?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That toy in the safe.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Not today,” he said, smiling. “Maybe when you’re older.” Then he shut the safe door, and I forgot about the strange little toy until it was time for me to remember it, and to understand what it was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neil would try to repair the various items, though often he failed because he couldn’t find the parts. Then the things would just sit there, “collecting dust,” said Melanie. Neil hated throwing anything out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the walls he had some old posters: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS, from a long-ago war; a woman in overalls flexing her biceps to show that women could make bombs—that was from the same olden-days war; and a red-and-black one showing a man and a flag that Neil said was from Russia before it was Russia. Those had belonged to his great-grandfather, who’d lived in Winnipeg. I knew nothing about Winnipeg except that it was cold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I loved The Clothes Hound when I was little: it was like a cave full of treasures. I wasn’t supposed to be in Neil’s office by myself because I might “touch things,” and then I might break them. But I could play with the wind-up toys and the music boxes and the adding machines, under supervision. Not the cameras though, because they were too valuable, said Neil, and anyway there was no film in them, so what would be the point?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We didn’t live over the store. Our house was a long distance away, in one of those residential neighbourhoods where there were some old bungalows and also some newer, bigger houses that had been built where the bungalows had been torn down. Our house was not a bungalow—it had a second floor, where the bedrooms were—but it was not a new house either. It was made of yellow brick, and it was very ordinary. There was nothing about it that would make you look at it twice. Thinking back, I’m guessing that was their idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Excerpt from \u003c/em>The Testaments by Margaret Atwood \u003cem>copyright 2019 by O. W. Toad, Ltd. Published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Hear+Margaret+Atwood+Read+From+%27The+Testaments%2C%27+Her+Sequel+To+%27The+Handmaid%27s+Tale%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian novel \u003c/em>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003cem> ended on a cliffhanger: The rebellious handmaid Offred stepping into a mysterious black van, on her way to freedom—or to arrest.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Handmaids are in the public eye again thanks to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/525755370/handmaids-tale-wants-you-to-feel-like-this-could-happen-here\">hit TV series\u003c/a>—and the frequent appearance of silent, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/79915/the-frightening-realism-of-the-handmaids-tale-is-inspiring-costumed-protests-and-a-lot-of-freaking-out\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">red-robed protesters\u003c/a> at political events. Now, Atwood is returning to the world of Gilead, the repressive theocracy she created out of the ruins of present-day America. \u003c/em>The Testaments \u003cem>opens 15 years after the events of the first book, and follows an old familiar character as well as introducing some new voices. As for what happens to Offred… well, no spoilers here.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>We’re excited to bring you a pre-publication excerpt of \u003c/em>The Testaments\u003cem>, and an exclusive recording of Atwood herself reading these first three chapters. You can also hear her in conversation with \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/programs/weekend-edition-saturday/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Weekend Edition\u003c/a>‘s Scott Simon on Saturday, Sept. 8, and the book will be released on Sept. 10th.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/754859270/756030381\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>The Ardua Hall Holograph\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This statue was a small token of appreciation for my many contributions, said the citation, which was read out by Aunt Vidala. She’d been assigned the task by our superiors, and was far from appreciative. I thanked her with as much modesty as I could summon, then pulled the rope that released the cloth drape shrouding me; it billowed to the ground, and there I stood. We don’t do cheering here at Ardua Hall, but there was some discreet clapping. I inclined my head in a nod.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My statue is larger than life, as statues tend to be, and shows me as younger, slimmer, and in better shape than I’ve been for some time. I am standing straight, shoulders back, my lips curved into a firm but benevolent smile. My eyes are fixed on some cosmic point of reference understood to represent my idealism, my unflinching commitment to duty, my determination to move forward despite all obstacles. Not that anything in the sky would be visible to my statue, placed as it is in a morose cluster of trees and shrubs beside the footpath running in front of Ardua Hall. We Aunts must not be too presumptuous, even in stone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Clutching my left hand is a girl of seven or eight, gazing up at me with trusting eyes. My right hand rests on the head of a woman crouched at my side, her hair veiled, her eyes upturned in an expression that could be read as either craven or grateful—one of our Handmaids—and behind me is one of my Pearl Girls, ready to set out on her missionary work. Hanging from a belt around my waist is my Taser. This weapon reminds me of my failings: had I been more effective, I would not have needed such an implement. The persuasion in my voice would have been enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a group of statuary it’s not a great success: too crowded. I would have preferred more emphasis on myself. But at least I look sane. It could well have been otherwise, as the elderly sculptress—a true believer since deceased—had a tendency to confer bulging eyes on her subjects as a sign of their pious fervour. Her bust of Aunt Helena looks rabid, that of Aunt Vidala is hyperthyroid, and that of Aunt Elizabeth appears ready to explode.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the unveiling the sculptress was nervous. Was her rendition of me sufficiently flattering? Did I approve of it? Would I be seen to approve? I toyed with the idea of frowning as the sheet came off, but thought better of it: I am not without compassion. “Very lifelike,” I said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That was nine years ago. Since then my statue has weathered: pigeons have decorated me, moss has sprouted in my damper crevices. Votaries have taken to leaving offerings at my feet: eggs for fertility, oranges to suggest the fullness of pregnancy, croissants to reference the moon. I ignore the breadstuffs—usually they have been rained on—but pocket the oranges. Oranges are so refreshing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I write these words in my private sanctum within the library of Ardua Hall—one of the few libraries remaining after the enthusiastic bookburnings that have been going on across our land. The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But among these bloody fingerprints are those made by ourselves, and these can’t be wiped away so easily. Over the years I’ve buried a lot of bones; now I’m inclined to dig them up again—if only for your edification, my unknown reader. If you are reading, this manuscript at least will have survived. Though perhaps I’m fantasizing: perhaps I will never have a reader. Perhaps I’ll only be talking to the wall, in more ways than one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s enough inscribing for today. My hand hurts, my back aches, and my nightly cup of hot milk awaits me. I’ll stash this screed in its hiding place, avoiding the surveillance cameras—I know where they are, having placed them myself. Despite such precautions, I’m aware of the risk I’m running: writing can be dangerous. What betrayals, and then what denunciations, might lie in store for me? There are several within Ardua Hall who would love to get their hands on these pages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wait, I counsel them silently: it will get worse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>* * *\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You have asked me to tell you what it was like for me when I was growing up within Gilead. You say it will be helpful, and I do wish to be helpful. I imagine you expect nothing but horrors, but the reality is that many children were loved and cherished, in Gilead as elsewhere, and many adults were kind though fallible, in Gilead as elsewhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope you will remember, too, that we all have some nostalgia for whatever kindness we have known as children, however bizarre the conditions of that childhood may seem to others. I agree with you that Gilead ought to fade away—there is too much of wrong in it, too much that is false, and too much that is surely contrary to what God intended—but you must permit me some space to mourn the good that will be lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At our school, pink was for spring and summer, plum was for fall and winter, white was for special days: Sundays and celebrations. Arms covered, hair covered, skirts down to the knee before you were five and no more than two inches above the ankle after that, because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us—of our shapely or skinny or fat legs, of our graceful or knobbly or sausage arms, of our peachy or blotchy skins, of our entwining curls of shining hair or our coarse unruly pelts or our straw-like wispy braids, it did not matter. Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they’d stagger and lurch and topple over the verge—The verge of what? we wondered. Was it like a cliff?—and go plunging down in flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God. We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us; we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That was the kind of thing runny-nosed Aunt Vidala would tell us at school while we were doing petit-point embroidery for handkerchiefs and footstools and framed pictures: flowers in a vase, fruit in a bowl were the favoured patterns. But Aunt Estée, the teacher we liked the best, would say Aunt Vidala was overdoing it and there was no point in frightening us out of our wits, since to instill such an aversion might have a negative influence on the happiness of our future married lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All men are not like that, girls,” she would say soothingly. “The better kind have superior characters. Some of them have decent self-restraint. And once you are married it will seem quite different to you, and not very fearsome at all.” Not that she would know anything about it, since the Aunts were not married; they were not allowed to be. That was why they could have writing and books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We and your fathers and mothers will choose your husbands wisely for you when the time comes,” Aunt Estée would say. “So you don’t need to be afraid. Just learn your lessons and trust your elders to do what is best, and everything will unfold as it should. I will pray for it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But despite Aunt Estée’s dimples and friendly smile, it was Aunt Vidala’s version that prevailed. It turned up in my nightmares: the shattering of the glass house, then the rending and tearing and the trampling of hooves, with pink and white and plum fragments of myself scattered over the ground. I dreaded the thought of growing older—older enough for a wedding. I had no faith in the wise choices of the Aunts: I feared that I would end up married to a goat on fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The pink, the white, and the plum dresses were the rule for special girls like us. Ordinary girls from Econofamilies wore the same thing all the time—those ugly multicoloured stripes and grey cloaks, like the clothes of their mothers. They did not even learn petit-point embroidery or crochet work, just plain sewing and the making of paper flowers and other such chores. They were not pre-chosen to be married to the very best men—to the Sons of Jacob and the other Commanders or their sons—not like us; although they might get to be chosen once they were older if they were pretty enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nobody said that. You were not supposed to preen yourself on your good looks, it was not modest, or take any notice of the good looks of other people. Though we girls knew the truth: that it was better to be pretty than ugly. Even the Aunts paid more attention to the pretty ones. But if you were already pre-chosen, pretty didn’t matter so much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I didn’t have a squint like Huldah or a pinchy built-in frown like Shunammite, and I didn’t have barely-there eyebrows like Becka, but I was unfinished. I had a dough face, like the cookies my favourite Martha, Zilla, made for me as a treat, with raisin eyes and pumpkinseed teeth. But though I was not especially pretty, I was very, very chosen. Doubly chosen: not only pre-chosen to marry a Commander but chosen in the first place by Tabitha, who was my mother.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is what Tabitha used to tell me: “I went for a walk in the forest,” she would say, “and then I came to an enchanted castle, and there were a lot of little girls locked inside, and none of them had any mothers, and they were under the spell of the wicked witches. I had a magic ring that unlocked the castle, but I could only rescue one little girl. So I looked at them all very carefully, and then, out of the whole crowd, I chose you!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What happened to the others?” I would ask. “The other little girls?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Different mothers rescued them,” she would say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Did they have magic rings too?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Of course, my darling. In order to be a mother, you need to have a magic ring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Where’s the magic ring?” I would ask. “Where is it now?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s right here on my finger,” she would say, indicating the third finger of her left hand. The heart finger, she said it was. “But my ring had only one wish in it, and I used that one up on you. So now it’s an ordinary, everyday mother ring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this point I was allowed to try on the ring, which was gold, with three diamonds in it: a big one, and a smaller one on either side. It did look as if it might have been magic once.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Did you lift me up and carry me?” I would ask. “Out of the forest?” I knew the story off by heart, but I liked to hear it repeated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No, my dearest, you were already too big for that. If I had carried you I would have coughed, and then the witches would have heard us.” I could see this was true: she did cough quite a lot. “So I took you by the hand, and we crept out of the castle so the witches wouldn’t hear us. We both said Shh, shh”—here she would hold her finger up to her lips, and I would hold my finger up too and say Shh, shh delightedly—”and then we had to run very fast through the forest, to get away from the wicked witches, because one of them had seen us going out the door. We ran, and then we hid in a hollow tree. It was very dangerous!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I did have a hazy memory of running through a forest with someone holding my hand. Had I hidden in a hollow tree? It seemed to me that I had hidden somewhere. So maybe it was true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And then what happened?” I would ask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And then I brought you to this beautiful house. Aren’t you happy here? You are so cherished, by all of us! Aren’t we both lucky that I chose you?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I would be nestled close to her, with her arm around me and my head against her thin body, through which I could feel her bumpy ribs. My ear would be pressed to her chest, and I could hear her heart hammering away inside her—faster and faster, it seemed to me, as she waited for me to say something. I knew my answer had power: I could make her smile, or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What could I say but yes and yes? Yes, I was happy. Yes, I was lucky. Anyway it was true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>* * *\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Transcript of Witness Testimony 369B\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They say I will always have the scar, but I’m almost better; so yes, I think I’m strong enough to do this now. You’ve said that you’d like me to tell you how I got involved in this whole story, so I’ll try; though it’s hard to know where to begin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ll start just before my birthday, or what I used to believe was my birthday. Neil and Melanie lied to me about that: they’d done it for the best of reasons and they’d meant really well, but when I first found out about it I was very angry at them. Keeping up my anger was difficult, though, because by that time they were dead. You can be angry at dead people, but you can never have a conversation about what they did; or you can only have one side of it. And I felt guilty as well as angry, because they’d been murdered, and I believed then that their murder was my fault.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was supposed to be turning sixteen. What I was most looking forward to was getting my driver’s licence. I felt too old for a birthday party, though Melanie always got me a cake and ice cream and sang “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true,” an old song I’d loved as a child and was now finding embarrassing. I did get the cake, later—chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream, my favourites—but by then I couldn’t eat it. By that time Melanie was no longer there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose. I was so young at that moment—just a split second ago, it seems—but I’m not young anymore. How little time it takes to change a face: carve it like wood, harden it. No more of that wide-eyed daydream gazing I used to do. I’ve become sharper, more focused. I’ve become narrowed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neil and Melanie were my parents; they ran a store called The Clothes Hound. It was basically used clothing: Melanie called it “previously loved” because she said “used” meant “exploited.” The sign outside showed a smiling pink poodle in a fluffy skirt with a pink bow on its head, carrying a shopping bag. Underneath was a slogan in italics and quotation marks: \u003cem>“You’d Never Know!” \u003c/em>That meant the used clothes were so good you’d never know they were used, but that wasn’t true at all because most of the clothes were crappy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melanie said she’d inherited The Clothes Hound from her grandmother. She also said she knew the sign was old-fashioned, but people were familiar with it and it would be disrespectful to change it now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our store was on Queen West, in a stretch of blocks that had once all been like that, said Melanie—textiles, buttons and trims, cheap linens, dollar stores. But now it was going upmarket: cafés with fair trade and organic were moving in, big-brand outlets, name boutiques. In response, Melanie hung a sign in the window: \u003cem>Wearable Art\u003c/em>. But inside, the store was crowded with all kinds of clothes you would never call wearable art. There was one corner that was kind of designer, though anything really pricey wouldn’t be in The Clothes Hound in the first place. The rest was just everything. And all sorts of people came and went: young, old, looking for bargains or finds, or just looking. Or selling: even street people would try to get a few dollars for T-shirts they’d picked up at garage sales.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melanie worked on the main floor. She wore bright colours, like orange and hot pink, because she said they created a positive and energetic atmosphere, and anyway she was part gypsy at heart. She was always brisk and smiling, though on the lookout for shoplifting. After closing, she sorted and packed: this for charity, this for rags, this for Wearable Art. While doing the sorting she’d sing tunes from musicals—old ones from long ago. “Oh what a beautiful morning” was one of her favourites, and “When you walk through a storm.” I would get irritated by her singing; I’m sorry about that now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed: there was too much fabric, it was like the ocean, waves of cloth coming in and threatening to drown her. Cashmere! Who was going to buy thirty-year-old cashmere? It didn’t improve with age, she would say—not like her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neil had a beard that was going grey and wasn’t always trimmed, and he didn’t have much hair. He didn’t look like a businessman, but he handled what they called “the money end”: the invoices, the accounting, the taxes. He had his office on the second floor, up a flight of rubber-treaded stairs. He had a computer and a filing cabinet and a safe, but otherwise that room wasn’t much like an office: it was just as crowded and cluttered as the store because Neil liked to collect things. Wind-up music boxes, he had a number of those. Clocks, a lot of different clocks. Old adding machines that worked with a handle. Plastic toys that walked or hopped across the floor, such as bears and frogs and sets of false teeth. A slide projector for the kind of coloured slides that nobody had anymore. Cameras—he liked ancient cameras. Some of them could take better pictures than anything nowadays, he’d say. He had one whole shelf with nothing on it but cameras.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One time he left the safe open and I looked inside. Instead of the wads of money I’d been expecting, there was nothing in it but a tiny metal-and-glass thing that I thought must be another toy, like the hopping false teeth. But I couldn’t see where to wind it up, and I was afraid to touch it because it was old.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Can I play with it?” I asked Neil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Play with what?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That toy in the safe.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Not today,” he said, smiling. “Maybe when you’re older.” Then he shut the safe door, and I forgot about the strange little toy until it was time for me to remember it, and to understand what it was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neil would try to repair the various items, though often he failed because he couldn’t find the parts. Then the things would just sit there, “collecting dust,” said Melanie. Neil hated throwing anything out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the walls he had some old posters: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS, from a long-ago war; a woman in overalls flexing her biceps to show that women could make bombs—that was from the same olden-days war; and a red-and-black one showing a man and a flag that Neil said was from Russia before it was Russia. Those had belonged to his great-grandfather, who’d lived in Winnipeg. I knew nothing about Winnipeg except that it was cold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I loved The Clothes Hound when I was little: it was like a cave full of treasures. I wasn’t supposed to be in Neil’s office by myself because I might “touch things,” and then I might break them. But I could play with the wind-up toys and the music boxes and the adding machines, under supervision. Not the cameras though, because they were too valuable, said Neil, and anyway there was no film in them, so what would be the point?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We didn’t live over the store. Our house was a long distance away, in one of those residential neighbourhoods where there were some old bungalows and also some newer, bigger houses that had been built where the bungalows had been torn down. Our house was not a bungalow—it had a second floor, where the bedrooms were—but it was not a new house either. It was made of yellow brick, and it was very ordinary. There was nothing about it that would make you look at it twice. Thinking back, I’m guessing that was their idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Excerpt from \u003c/em>The Testaments by Margaret Atwood \u003cem>copyright 2019 by O. W. Toad, Ltd. Published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Hear+Margaret+Atwood+Read+From+%27The+Testaments%2C%27+Her+Sequel+To+%27The+Handmaid%27s+Tale%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Margaret Atwood Is Writing A Sequel To 'The Handmaid's Tale'",
"headTitle": "Margaret Atwood Is Writing A Sequel To ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>More than 30 years after the release of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>, author Margaret Atwood has announced there’s going to be a sequel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Penguin Random House \u003ca href=\"http://global.penguinrandomhouse.com/announcements/margaret-atwood-writing-handmaids-tale-sequel-for-publication-september-10/\">said Wednesday\u003c/a> that the new novel is set to be published on Sept. 10, 2019. It’s called \u003cem>The Testaments\u003c/em> and will take place 15 years after \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> left off. The story will be told by three female characters, according to the U.S. publisher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>, a dystopian novel set in the fictional theocratic dictatorship of Gilead, has risen again to prominence with a critically acclaimed TV series based on the book that started airing in 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”nnIMDykalEpo8j5cIjzPAtxkrHoMuFN2″]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The action in the new book will be separate from the TV series, which is gearing up for a third season. In the second season, the action went beyond where the book left off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a message to readers, Atwood said it was their questions that inspired her to return to Gilead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Dear Readers: Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything!” the Canadian writer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She added: “The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”JI6rj7b5P2DiBUbFkiSeHPNF4hRkCOwc”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the brutal world of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>, environmental catastrophe has rendered many women infertile. Those who can still conceive are forced to become “handmaids,” a role in which they are sexual captives and bear children for government officials whose own wives cannot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book has struck a political chord in recent years. At protests around the world, particularly those regarding reproductive issues, women have rallied wearing the red cloaks and white bonnets of handmaids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The press release noted that the book has gained new prominence since President Trump was elected. It said, “Handmaids became a symbol of the movement against him, representing female empowerment and resistance in the face of misogyny and the rolling back of women’s rights.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”jmB4R69bsZU2dRuxioDgmnJEIr0JyBlT”]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not clear how this new book will relate to the first. The publisher didn’t say who the three narrators would be, nor whether they were characters in the first book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since it was first published in 1985, the book has sold 8 million copies in English, according to Penguin Random House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Margaret+Atwood+Is+Writing+A+Sequel+To+%27The+Handmaid%27s+Tale%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>More than 30 years after the release of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>, author Margaret Atwood has announced there’s going to be a sequel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Penguin Random House \u003ca href=\"http://global.penguinrandomhouse.com/announcements/margaret-atwood-writing-handmaids-tale-sequel-for-publication-september-10/\">said Wednesday\u003c/a> that the new novel is set to be published on Sept. 10, 2019. It’s called \u003cem>The Testaments\u003c/em> and will take place 15 years after \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> left off. The story will be told by three female characters, according to the U.S. publisher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>, a dystopian novel set in the fictional theocratic dictatorship of Gilead, has risen again to prominence with a critically acclaimed TV series based on the book that started airing in 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The action in the new book will be separate from the TV series, which is gearing up for a third season. In the second season, the action went beyond where the book left off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a message to readers, Atwood said it was their questions that inspired her to return to Gilead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Dear Readers: Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything!” the Canadian writer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She added: “The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the brutal world of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>, environmental catastrophe has rendered many women infertile. Those who can still conceive are forced to become “handmaids,” a role in which they are sexual captives and bear children for government officials whose own wives cannot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book has struck a political chord in recent years. At protests around the world, particularly those regarding reproductive issues, women have rallied wearing the red cloaks and white bonnets of handmaids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The press release noted that the book has gained new prominence since President Trump was elected. It said, “Handmaids became a symbol of the movement against him, representing female empowerment and resistance in the face of misogyny and the rolling back of women’s rights.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not clear how this new book will relate to the first. The publisher didn’t say who the three narrators would be, nor whether they were characters in the first book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since it was first published in 1985, the book has sold 8 million copies in English, according to Penguin Random House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Margaret+Atwood+Is+Writing+A+Sequel+To+%27The+Handmaid%27s+Tale%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>I was surprised to receive an e-mail from Winston Smith: “Hey, I heard you’re interested in hearing about how this started.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winston Smith is the main character of George Orwell’s \u003cem>1984\u003c/em>. I first read \u003cem>1984\u003c/em> in high school, then I re-read it during a cold winter in Chicago. It had been some years, yet sitting at my desk, I recalled clearly the small, frail man with an itchy ulcer on his ankle. Winston Smith, I remembered, worked for The Ministry of Truth where he and others engaged in the busy work of erasing and rewriting history. Even though telescreens and Big Brother spies watched citizens at all times, Winston Smith committed a small gesture of resistance — he began to keep a diary, an act punishable by death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.instagram.com/p/BPyFy8ng-IZ/?taken-by=booksonthepark\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My Winston Smith, the one in my inbox, is the anonymous donor who started the Bay Area trend of bookstores giving copies of \u003cem>1984\u003c/em> for free. “Winston Smith” is a pseudonym, but he tells me shortly: he went to Point Reyes Books, Green Apple Books, then the Booksmith on Haight Street, bought copies of \u003cem>1984\u003c/em>, and asked the bookstores to display them prevalently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winston Smith is also an immigrant from Southern Europe, whose family members were incarcerated for belonging to left wing unions and opposing a fascist regime; that is as detailed as he wants to be. He is fearful of being identified, but in speaking of that time, he tells me he learned to measure his words at age six. When he read \u003cem>1984\u003c/em> at age fourteen, he found in that novel a government machine reminiscent of the one that affected his childhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When asked what specifically led him to buying scores of books now and donating them all across the Bay Area, Smith said, “Four words: post truth, alternative facts.” Winston Smith is a linguist and a writer and as such, he is fascinated with language, the use of language, and the power of language.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the election, \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>has risen in the national bestseller lists. As I write this, it occupies the No. 1 bestseller spot at Amazon. As a novel about the dangers of truth being co-opted for a government’s vanity and stay of power, \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>speaks to our contemporary problems like no other.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.instagram.com/p/BPqpKr3hvrO/?taken-by=pointreyesbooks\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stephen Sparks of Point Reyes Books was the first bookseller to participate in the free-books venture. I asked his opinion about the relevance of \u003cem>1984\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think \u003cem>1984\u003c/em> speaks so much to our moment because of Orwell’s ability to probe the language of authoritarianism and to demonstrate how slippery truth can be and how those in power can manipulate it (“alternative facts”) to further their ends,” Sparks says. “For many of us, the famous slogans in the novel — WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH — are keystones for understanding corruption.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sinking into the couch with this dystopian masterpiece, I noted uncomfortable parallels to our times. There is the Big Brother party slogan — \u003cem>Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, gratingly reminiscent of a fake news empire — if said fake-news empire was backed by the government and its reach dipped not only into our newspapers but into our history books. In \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>the government has the power to retroactively change truth to make it fit into a larger narrative of prosperity, happiness, and perpetual victory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKzHXelQi_A\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there is the concept of \u003cem>Doublethink\u003c/em>, one of the most important and lasting ideas in this book, which recalled \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOg1z3Z72sU\">Kellyanne Conway\u003c/a>’s tactics in speaking to the press:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>1984\u003c/em> is not the only book being given away since the election. On Jan. 20, many bookstores \u003ca href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/we-should-all-be-feminists-free_us_587e72c3e4b01cdc64c815c2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">followed the lead of Portland’s Broadway Books\u003c/a> and gave out free copies of Chimananda Ngochie Adichie’s \u003cem>We Should All Be Feminists. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And another anonymous donor has undertaken to buy and give away at different bookstores Margaret Atwood’s \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale. \u003c/em>They wrote over email, “I’ve been joking-not-joking for a while that someone needed to tell the Republicans that Atwood, Butler, Bradbury, etc, weren’t meant to be how-to manuals.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.instagram.com/p/BQQxYyhDDi1/?taken-by=booksmithsf\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> is an achingly beautiful novel in which an extreme, totalitarian Christian movement has taken power and women have lost their rights. This second anonymous donor also bought copies of Erik Larson’s \u003cem>In the Garden of Beasts\u003c/em>, a nonfiction book about the 1933 U.S. ambassador to Germany who witnesses Hitler’s rise to power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the Winston Smith behind the \u003cem>1984\u003c/em> giveaway, he has said he has no plans of slowing down. “I don’t know how many [copies] I plan to buy. As many as necessary.” A few other donors have taken up Smith’s philanthropical scheme. Scott Esposito, a book publicist, critic, and editor in Oakland, said \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>is a cornerstone of his understanding of the world and he cannot imagine not being exposed to its ideas, so he followed suit and bought and donated four copies, with plans to buy more. The count so far for \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>is 100 free books, five bookstores, and three cities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like the fictional Winston Smith, our anonymous Bay Area donor doesn’t have an ulterior motive — only a desire to spark critical thinking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\" alt=\"Spine\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-10905230\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine-400x21.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>My Winston Smith, the one in my inbox, is the anonymous donor who started the Bay Area trend of bookstores giving copies of \u003cem>1984\u003c/em> for free. “Winston Smith” is a pseudonym, but he tells me shortly: he went to Point Reyes Books, Green Apple Books, then the Booksmith on Haight Street, bought copies of \u003cem>1984\u003c/em>, and asked the bookstores to display them prevalently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winston Smith is also an immigrant from Southern Europe, whose family members were incarcerated for belonging to left wing unions and opposing a fascist regime; that is as detailed as he wants to be. He is fearful of being identified, but in speaking of that time, he tells me he learned to measure his words at age six. When he read \u003cem>1984\u003c/em> at age fourteen, he found in that novel a government machine reminiscent of the one that affected his childhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When asked what specifically led him to buying scores of books now and donating them all across the Bay Area, Smith said, “Four words: post truth, alternative facts.” Winston Smith is a linguist and a writer and as such, he is fascinated with language, the use of language, and the power of language.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the election, \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>has risen in the national bestseller lists. As I write this, it occupies the No. 1 bestseller spot at Amazon. As a novel about the dangers of truth being co-opted for a government’s vanity and stay of power, \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>speaks to our contemporary problems like no other.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Stephen Sparks of Point Reyes Books was the first bookseller to participate in the free-books venture. I asked his opinion about the relevance of \u003cem>1984\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think \u003cem>1984\u003c/em> speaks so much to our moment because of Orwell’s ability to probe the language of authoritarianism and to demonstrate how slippery truth can be and how those in power can manipulate it (“alternative facts”) to further their ends,” Sparks says. “For many of us, the famous slogans in the novel — WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH — are keystones for understanding corruption.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sinking into the couch with this dystopian masterpiece, I noted uncomfortable parallels to our times. There is the Big Brother party slogan — \u003cem>Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, gratingly reminiscent of a fake news empire — if said fake-news empire was backed by the government and its reach dipped not only into our newspapers but into our history books. In \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>the government has the power to retroactively change truth to make it fit into a larger narrative of prosperity, happiness, and perpetual victory.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/PKzHXelQi_A'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/PKzHXelQi_A'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Then there is the concept of \u003cem>Doublethink\u003c/em>, one of the most important and lasting ideas in this book, which recalled \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOg1z3Z72sU\">Kellyanne Conway\u003c/a>’s tactics in speaking to the press:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>1984\u003c/em> is not the only book being given away since the election. On Jan. 20, many bookstores \u003ca href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/we-should-all-be-feminists-free_us_587e72c3e4b01cdc64c815c2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">followed the lead of Portland’s Broadway Books\u003c/a> and gave out free copies of Chimananda Ngochie Adichie’s \u003cem>We Should All Be Feminists. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And another anonymous donor has undertaken to buy and give away at different bookstores Margaret Atwood’s \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale. \u003c/em>They wrote over email, “I’ve been joking-not-joking for a while that someone needed to tell the Republicans that Atwood, Butler, Bradbury, etc, weren’t meant to be how-to manuals.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em> is an achingly beautiful novel in which an extreme, totalitarian Christian movement has taken power and women have lost their rights. This second anonymous donor also bought copies of Erik Larson’s \u003cem>In the Garden of Beasts\u003c/em>, a nonfiction book about the 1933 U.S. ambassador to Germany who witnesses Hitler’s rise to power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the Winston Smith behind the \u003cem>1984\u003c/em> giveaway, he has said he has no plans of slowing down. “I don’t know how many [copies] I plan to buy. As many as necessary.” A few other donors have taken up Smith’s philanthropical scheme. Scott Esposito, a book publicist, critic, and editor in Oakland, said \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>is a cornerstone of his understanding of the world and he cannot imagine not being exposed to its ideas, so he followed suit and bought and donated four copies, with plans to buy more. The count so far for \u003cem>1984 \u003c/em>is 100 free books, five bookstores, and three cities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like the fictional Winston Smith, our anonymous Bay Area donor doesn’t have an ulterior motive — only a desire to spark critical thinking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg\" alt=\"Spine\" width=\"800\" height=\"42\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-10905230\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/08/Spine-400x21.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The future does not replace the present. It’s slathered on top of it, day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year. But moment by moment, we struggle with the minutia of our lives. Our visions of the future are based firmly not on where we are headed, but instead on where we have come from.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Margaret Atwood understands all too well how the past infects the present. When she writes about the future, it feels real because any future she imagines consists mostly of its own past. Which is to say, our world as it is today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-10990329\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam.jpg\" alt=\"atwood-maddaddam\" width=\"225\" height=\"331\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam.jpg 466w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam-400x588.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam-408x600.jpg 408w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\">\u003c/a>In her \u003cem>MaddAddam\u003c/em> trilogy (\u003cem>Oryx & Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam\u003c/em>), Atwood crafts a piercing, poignant portrait of our world transformed by genetic pollution and global warming. The power of her vision stems from the fact that underneath all her invention, the skeletal remains of the present are clearly visible. In these books she embraces science fiction as extrapolation. Reading them as the world’s temperature inexorably increases, it’s hard not to feel like a frog being slowly boiled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her latest novel, \u003cem>The Heart Goes Last\u003c/em>, Atwood embraces different aspects of science fiction. First and foremost, this is what in the Golden Age of sci-fi (1938-1946) was called a “fix-up” novel. Ray Bradbury’s \u003cem>The Martian Chronicles\u003c/em> and Isaac Asimov’s\u003cem> I, Robot\u003c/em> are the best known examples of the genre — classics stitched together from previously published short fiction. Parts of \u003cem>The Heart Goes Last\u003c/em> first appeared at \u003ca href=\"http://Byliner.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Byliner.com\u003c/a>. But the final product has the weird, organic feel of all pf Atwood’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This time around, Atwood is not exploring the future as much as she is rewriting the present. We meet Stan and Charmaine sleeping in their car. Had things gone farther south on the economic front in 2008, it’s a scenario that might be much closer than many of us would care to admit. The crash and burn of Atwood’s “day after tomorrow” has left most of the U.S. population homeless, desperate and vulnerable. A once-working civilization has become prey to a nasty set of unseen predators we as readers know must exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-10990328\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last.jpg\" alt=\"atwood-=the_heart_goes_last\" width=\"238\" height=\"361\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last-400x607.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last-395x600.jpg 395w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 238px) 100vw, 238px\">\u003c/a>But Stan and Charmaine are lucky: they make it in to the “Positron Project.” It turns out that all those for-profit prisons popping up around the nation in the present have engineered a post-collapse economy that offers safety in the form of a Faustian bargain. Half of the time you live in the lovely little company town of Consilience, and the other half you spend in prison as an inmate. You’re employed and safe and…in prison. And the sex robots, they can’t be bad, can they?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Atwood works the Kafkaesque foreboding with impeccable prose, tightening the screws with an invisibly terrifying precision. Charmaine starts to fall for the man who lives in her house when she’s not there. Stan finds himself in limbo. It’s no metaphor, and the waiting room for hell is just about as much fun as Atwood can have. For those who expect a tour of the ninth circle, Atwood has some funny surprises in store. Eventually the tightest screws spring loose and Atwood’s penchant for dark humor and satire take center stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those who look to Atwood for mere dread, which she does so well, \u003cem>The Heart Goes Last\u003c/em> may have more dimensions than they desire. But Atwood has always had a sense of humor, and when she decides to have fun, her prose and imagination are bolstered by the consistency of her characters. And for all her literary reputation and prowess, the author is perfectly happy to morph her economic parable into an unusual thriller.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Atwood is too canny to stop at mere thrills. She certainly makes you turn those pages, but she’s also makes them pretty damn difficult to forget. It’s hard to put down\u003cem> The Heart Goes Last\u003c/em> and not see the seeds of her unhappy but sometimes funny future sprouting between the cracks in the asphalt of the present. We can slather over the cracks with another layer of cement and hope to forget what’s underneath. But the past has seeped into the present. And the present, to our dismay, will inform and infect the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://bookotron.com/agony/audio/2013/2013-interviews/margaret_atwood-2013.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hear an interview with Margaret Atwood about her MaddAddam trilogy here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The future does not replace the present. It’s slathered on top of it, day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year. But moment by moment, we struggle with the minutia of our lives. Our visions of the future are based firmly not on where we are headed, but instead on where we have come from.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Margaret Atwood understands all too well how the past infects the present. When she writes about the future, it feels real because any future she imagines consists mostly of its own past. Which is to say, our world as it is today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-10990329\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam.jpg\" alt=\"atwood-maddaddam\" width=\"225\" height=\"331\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam.jpg 466w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam-400x588.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-maddaddam-408x600.jpg 408w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\">\u003c/a>In her \u003cem>MaddAddam\u003c/em> trilogy (\u003cem>Oryx & Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam\u003c/em>), Atwood crafts a piercing, poignant portrait of our world transformed by genetic pollution and global warming. The power of her vision stems from the fact that underneath all her invention, the skeletal remains of the present are clearly visible. In these books she embraces science fiction as extrapolation. Reading them as the world’s temperature inexorably increases, it’s hard not to feel like a frog being slowly boiled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her latest novel, \u003cem>The Heart Goes Last\u003c/em>, Atwood embraces different aspects of science fiction. First and foremost, this is what in the Golden Age of sci-fi (1938-1946) was called a “fix-up” novel. Ray Bradbury’s \u003cem>The Martian Chronicles\u003c/em> and Isaac Asimov’s\u003cem> I, Robot\u003c/em> are the best known examples of the genre — classics stitched together from previously published short fiction. Parts of \u003cem>The Heart Goes Last\u003c/em> first appeared at \u003ca href=\"http://Byliner.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Byliner.com\u003c/a>. But the final product has the weird, organic feel of all pf Atwood’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This time around, Atwood is not exploring the future as much as she is rewriting the present. We meet Stan and Charmaine sleeping in their car. Had things gone farther south on the economic front in 2008, it’s a scenario that might be much closer than many of us would care to admit. The crash and burn of Atwood’s “day after tomorrow” has left most of the U.S. population homeless, desperate and vulnerable. A once-working civilization has become prey to a nasty set of unseen predators we as readers know must exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-10990328\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last.jpg\" alt=\"atwood-=the_heart_goes_last\" width=\"238\" height=\"361\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last-400x607.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/atwood-the_heart_goes_last-395x600.jpg 395w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 238px) 100vw, 238px\">\u003c/a>But Stan and Charmaine are lucky: they make it in to the “Positron Project.” It turns out that all those for-profit prisons popping up around the nation in the present have engineered a post-collapse economy that offers safety in the form of a Faustian bargain. Half of the time you live in the lovely little company town of Consilience, and the other half you spend in prison as an inmate. You’re employed and safe and…in prison. And the sex robots, they can’t be bad, can they?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Atwood works the Kafkaesque foreboding with impeccable prose, tightening the screws with an invisibly terrifying precision. Charmaine starts to fall for the man who lives in her house when she’s not there. Stan finds himself in limbo. It’s no metaphor, and the waiting room for hell is just about as much fun as Atwood can have. For those who expect a tour of the ninth circle, Atwood has some funny surprises in store. Eventually the tightest screws spring loose and Atwood’s penchant for dark humor and satire take center stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those who look to Atwood for mere dread, which she does so well, \u003cem>The Heart Goes Last\u003c/em> may have more dimensions than they desire. But Atwood has always had a sense of humor, and when she decides to have fun, her prose and imagination are bolstered by the consistency of her characters. And for all her literary reputation and prowess, the author is perfectly happy to morph her economic parable into an unusual thriller.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Atwood is too canny to stop at mere thrills. She certainly makes you turn those pages, but she’s also makes them pretty damn difficult to forget. It’s hard to put down\u003cem> The Heart Goes Last\u003c/em> and not see the seeds of her unhappy but sometimes funny future sprouting between the cracks in the asphalt of the present. We can slather over the cracks with another layer of cement and hope to forget what’s underneath. But the past has seeped into the present. And the present, to our dismay, will inform and infect the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://bookotron.com/agony/audio/2013/2013-interviews/margaret_atwood-2013.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hear an interview with Margaret Atwood about her MaddAddam trilogy here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"masters-of-scale": {
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"mindshift": {
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"morning-edition": {
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"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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},
"pbs-newshour": {
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},
"perspectives": {
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"order": 14
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
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"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
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"politicalbreakdown": {
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"order": 5
},
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"
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},
"pri-the-world": {
"id": "pri-the-world",
"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
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