The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-27)

BY RON CHARLES

Claire Vaye Watkins has written a
novel about the most frightening
creature in America: a bad mother. “I
Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness” is
an audaciously candid story about the
crush of conflicted feelings that a baby
inspires — particularly for a woman
who regards the nursery as a place
where ambition, freedom and sex die.
This late in the history of feminism,
that theme may sound too familiar,
but Watkins’s book sparks the same
electric jolt that “The Awakening”
must have sent juicing through Kate
Chopin’s readers in 1899. Here is a
novel to hate and to love, to make you
feel simultaneously disgusted and un-
loosed.
The plot of “I Love You but I’ve
Chosen Darkness” is surreal but per-
haps no more surreal than pregnancy
itself. In t hat sense, Watkins has mere-
ly given full voice to the sudden disori-
entation of motherhood, which is so
often muffled beneath a crocheted
bunny blanket of sentimentality. “She
was a new person now,” Watkins
writes, “which so many American
women aspired to be — remade! She
herself had often wished it. But now
that she had been made anew she
found it frightening. She did not know
anything about this new person who
was her.”
The novel opens with a mother
confronting the Edinburgh Postnatal
Depression Scale. The test asks her to
consider a series of statements — e.g.
“I have looked forward with enjoy-
ment to things” — and then pick from
four multiple-choice responses. It’s
exactly the kind of illusive choice that
this mother revolts against. So instead
of picking A, B, C or D, she provides
little essay responses, like this: “I am a
SEE BOOK WORLD ON C3

BOOK WORLD

A new mother

hasn’t enough

care to give

I LOVE YOU BUT

I’VE CHOSEN

DARKNESS

By Claire Vaye

Watkins

Riverhead.

290 pp. $27

KLMNO

Style

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27 , 2021. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ RE C

one is so happy — and, well, “lucid.”

“Where I’m from, we’re still VP! Easiest gig in

the world,” Sudeikis’s Biden says. “We’re like

America’s wacky neighbor, you know. You just

pop in with an ice cream cone, some aviator

shades, just finger guns. You know, shake a few

hands, rub a few shoulders.”

“What happened to us?” he adds. “We used to

be fun!”

Soon after, Biden No. 3 appears, this one

portrayed by current repertory player Alex Mof-

fat, whose time as the president was extremely

short-lived.

“Who the hell are you?” Sudeikis asks.

“I’m Joe Biden,” Moffat responds.

“From when?” Sudeikis asks.

“Hmmm, March 2021,” Moffat says.

The sketch, one of the more clever cold opens

in recent memory, underscored SNL’s troubles

with parodying Biden: They can’t decide who

should portray him — or more importantly, how.

Thus far, seven actors have taken shots to varying

effect at impersonating the politician over the

course of his long career.

SEE SNL ON C2

WILL HEATH/NBC

MEMO

a chief conundrum

‘Saturday Night Live’ wrestles with how best to satirize President Biden

BOOK WORLD

“One Fr iday in April”: A portrait

of the pain of mental illness. C3

CONSORTIUM

Facebook leak reflects change

in investigative journalism. C4

CAROLYN HAX

Exclusion from a family group

chat is hurtful for a reader. C4

KIDSPOST

This year’s top toys list includes

stellar puzzles and games. C8

BY SARAH ELLISON

Stewart Bainum was a novice to the
news business when his name first
emerged earlier this year as a would-
be savior.
The Maryland hotel magnate made
a bold bid to buy the Baltimore Sun
and its parent, Tribune Publishing, in
what he described as a mission to
restore local ownership and keep the
newspapers out of the hands of a
hedge fund with a history of stringent
cost-cutting at its media properties.
Bainum’s months-long effort fell
short — but he ended it, he said at the
time, with a renewed conviction “that
a better model for local news is both
possible and necessary.”
Now he’s putting that belief to the
test. Bainum has hired Kimi Yoshino,
a top editor from the Los Angeles
Times, to help him launch the Balti-
more Banner, a nonprofit digital up-
start dedicated to local coverage of
the city, a nd committed $50 million of
his own fortune to get it started.
The plan, Bainum said, is not to
compete with the Sun but to cover the
news in a city that he said has more
than enough for one outlet. “Those
reporters have their hands tied be-
hind their back, and they’re still doing
a good job,” he said, noting the Sun
won a Pulitzer in 2020 for investigat-
ing corruption in the mayor’s office.
“There’s a lot of damn talent there.
And we just want to add to it.”
Yoshino, a California native who
has spent 21 years at the Times and is
currently one of its managing editors,
told The Washington Post it took
“something very special to make me
SEE BALTIMORE ON C2

Bainum plans

news website

for Baltimore

From left, A lex Moffat,

Jason Sudeikis and

James Austin Johnson

impersonate President

Biden during the cold

open of la st weekend’s

“Saturday Night Live.”

I

t was the best of Bidens. It was the worst of

Bidens.

For years, “Saturday Night Live” has

struggled to find an impersonator for the

senator turned vice president turned presi-

dent. During this past weekend’s cold open,

several Bidens of SNLs past gathered in the Oval

Office — and in doing so, showcased the particu-

lar struggles the show has faced in attempting to

lampoon this particular politician.

The sketch opens with White House press

secretary Jen Psaki (Chloe Fineman) giving some

bad news about unwatched t own halls a nd plum-

meting approval ratings to President Biden (fea-

ture player James Austin Johnson).

“I don’t understand,” Johnson’s Biden says.

“People used to like me. The press would call me

Uncle Joe. I miss the old me. Where the hell did

that guy go?”

On cue, guest host and former SNL cast

member Jason Sudeikis bursts into the office

through a plume of smoke.

“I’m you from eight years ago, man! The ghost

of Biden past,” Sudeikis’s Biden says. “Boom!”

The current Biden wonders aloud why the past

BY TRAVIS M. ANDREWS

BY SARAH ELLISON

AND ELAHE IZADI

In November 2018, the staff of

Facebook’s fledgling Civic Integrity

department got a look at some eye-

opening internal research — present-

ed under an image of two goats

locking horns.

The report examined articles

shared on Facebook from the New

York Times, BuzzFeed, Fox News and

a dozen other media outlets and

found that the more negative-slant-

ing comments a story drew, the more

likely Facebook’s algorithms were to

promote it widely.

“Outrage gets attention,” surmised

the researchers. They ruefully com-

pared the strategy to “feeding users

fast food,” an irresistibly effective

tactic for hooking an audience that

would surely prove harmful down the

road.

“Definitely not the results we

want,” bemoaned one Civic Integrity

team member in a comment posted

under the report. Another wrote that

“this is why I answer ‘neutral,’ ” when

FACEBOOK UNDER FIRE

Integrity t eam lamented ‘perverse incentives’ for media

WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION; FACEBOOK SCREEN IMAGES; ISTOCK

asked on workplace surveys if Face-

book was a force for good in the

world. “I really hope we can change

the incentives.”

Yet, even as Facebook staffers ago-

nized over whether the company was

nudging news organizations to pro-

duce “darker, more divisive content,”

according to communications con-

tained within just-released internal

documents, the company had already

made changes that would further

boost some of the most extreme

ideological websites over moderate

and neutral news sources.

The seismic impact of Facebook’s

algorithms on the news industry —

which, struggling for a digital busi-

ness model, had come to rely heavily

on Facebook for readers — has been

widely reported. But while this new

cache of documents does not capture

the totality of the decision-making

process within Facebook, it offers a

vivid glimpse inside the company,

including how some crucial algorith-

mic changes were studied and

viewed within certain corners of the

SEE FACEBOOK ON C4