Columbia’s Campus in Crisis

In today’s newsletter, the police and the protesters, and then:
•Can a hedge fund finance the news?
•Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt get explosive
•Coming back to life at the Venice Biennale

The photographer Nina Berman, who teaches at the Columbia Journalism School, has spent decades documenting occasions of dissent: labor strikes, Black Lives Matter protests, reproductive-rights rallies. In the past weeks, such scenes broke out within the gates of the campus where she works—and she was there, positioned inconspicuously in the crowd, with her camera. Introducingthis collection of Berman’s photographs, Jelani Cobb, aNew Yorkerstaff writer and the dean of the Journalism School, describes the moments of activism, reflection, and conflict that the images contain, and the vital role they currently play, and will play in the future, in helping to make sense of what is happening, and why. Berman is capturing history “one five-hundredth of a second at a time.”

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Plus:Can’t make it to Venice? Our critic Jackson Arn has written recently about some art that can be explored right at home. He reviews anew biography of Keith Haring, an artist whose “pictures are justthere, and everywhere.” Arn also offers some movie recommendations, including the lean but indeliblefilmography of the actor John Cazaleand the early-nineties heist-thriller “Point Break.”

P.S. Trump is hardlythe first to allegedly pay for someone’s silence. Before him came other American politicians—Hamilton, Jefferson, Harding (who was protecting his friend Jerry the Penis)—and actors and entertainers, not to mention Epstein and Weinstein and so on. Last year, Zach Helfand offeredan abridged and sordid history of hush money. “For about as long as people have been saying stuff,” he notes, “others have been paying them not to.”