Kobe Bryant: Sheen of self-perfectionism

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If you want to watch something moving, if you want to see him play basketball but don’t know where to start, try the last three minutes of his last ever game – you can find them on YouTube. Bryant, ageing, tiring, balding, sweating, sucking air, is determined to score as many points as he can, and somehow, against the odds, starts winning – total focus, total exhaustion on his face, while the crowds chant KOBE KOBE KOBE, with his wife and two of his daughters in the front row. It’s a happy scene, almost implausibly celebratory, people are laughing in the stands as each ridiculous shot goes in, though you also get the sense that for them it’s only a game, and that nobody else is taking it quite as seriously.

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Benjamin Markovits — TLS

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The crime of being black

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This troubled modern history comes under careful examination in two powerful books, Chokehold: Policing black men by Paul Butler and I Can’t Breathe: The killing that started a movement by Matt Taibbi, the former deeply informed from a legal standpoint and yet in some ways still highly personal, and the latter closely reported by a veteran journalist, and yet historically informed and full of pathos. The two reach consonant conclusions. For both authors, a Supreme Court decision in the late 1960s, and revolutionary changes in the theory and practice of policing that followed a decade and a half later, combined to create a prison industrial complex in the US, whose cornerstone is the hair-trigger search and seizure of black men. This has led to a nearly weekly spectacle in which black men die in street encounters with the police. As this article was being written the latest of these incidents was playing out on American television screens, as black residents of Sacramento buried Stephon Clark amid angry street protests. Clark had been shot by police – who were following up on reports of someone in the neighbourhood breaking windows – in his grandmother’s back yard. He was unarmed.

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HOWARD W. FRENCH — TLS

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In praise of narcissism

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In today’s modern world where selfies and self-help books are in abundance, this needull looks at the moral dimension of narcissism.

Ours is a self-obsessed age. Modern life is an obstacle course littered with people snapping selfies at every corner. Bookshop shelves heave with self-help books. And yet we publicly chastise the apparently vain and egotistical, outing them for their inability to conceal the self-concern of which we are all secretly guilty. We prize modesty, humility and self-effacement. But don’t those qualities also betray a certain discomfort with who we are, an instinct to downplay aspects of ourselves that we might otherwise cherish and seek to share? The more images we take, the harder it seems to see ourselves as we really are. And yet, isn’t there also something to be won in the endeavour to attend to ourselves more thoughtfully, making ourselves the subject of our probing enquiry?

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Shahida Bari — TLS

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Which is better – movie adaptation or book?

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It is a general belief that books are better than their movie adaptations. Today’s needull discusses adaptations which are as good if not better than the books they were adapted from.

Perhaps these won’t be considered sufficiently major or demanding works to have suffered in translation from page to screen, from a verbal reality to a mainly visual one. But I can’t be the only one to have felt a kind of longing for something like that medieval moment; for an excuse not to discuss a film or a play in terms of what was missing or ways in which it was unfaithful to a literary original. Vladimir Nabokov likened the film of Lolita by Stanley Kubrick (1962) to “The swerves of a scenic drive as perceived by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance” – before he had actually seen it. (How would he have described the later, 1997 version by Adrian Lyne? Discuss.) It seems to be inevitable that the better we know a literary work, or the more we love it, the more an adaptation will be found wanting in the very things we value.

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Alan Jenkins — TLS

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