"The Horror of Dolores Roach" is thoroughly entertaining eat-or-be-eaten tale about the plight of the last few brown folks left in a gentrifying New York neighborhood, where“ Sweeney Todd” darkness meets a spot-on comedy about class, race and displacement.
The television critics for the Los Angeles Times, Lorraine Ali and Robert Lloyd, weigh in on the series they enjoyed the most in 2023, including some that ended, some that were new and some that were international, but all worth watching. Lorraine Ali: 10 top shows that remind us it's about the people
Remember early spring of this year, when praise and recommendations for new and returning TV shows were arriving at a dizzying pace? “The Last of Us”! “Beef”! The final seasons of “Ted Lasso,” “Succession” and Bill Hader’s superbly dark hit man comedy, “Barry.” While the bounty of content didn’t stop the perennial conversations about the death of prestige TV and the alarming contraction of streamers, it did fuel our ongoing anxiety about never catching up with all the suggestions in our viewing queue. When will I ever find the time to watch all this!? Well, your answer has arrived and it’s called 2024.
The great programming drought is upon us, turning the last decade of too much content into something that appears closer to manageable, and you can thank the writers’ and actors’ strikes for this moment of relief. Studios went dark, halting production on returning shows like Apple TV+’s “Severance,” causing many series premiere dates to be delayed by months if not years.
Expect more reality programming and game shows to fill the gap, at least in the first half of 2024. Which brings me back to this top 10 list.
More so than any other year-end list I’ve done over my career as a TV critic, this one should be used to remind you that television is a font of colorful, poignant dramas and ridiculously creative comedies when the medium’s talent are taken care of as they should be. Take them out of the picture, and there’s nothing. So here are 10 shows from 2023 to remind us that it’s people, not brand names or companies, who drive the most vital form of entertainment in American culture right now.
‘The Horror of Dolores Roach’ (Prime Video)
A thoroughly entertaining eat-or-be-eaten tale about the plight of the last few brown folks left in a gentrifying New York neighborhood, where “Sweeney Todd” darkness meets a spot-on comedy about class, race and displacement. Dynamo Justina Machado (“Six Feet Under,” “One Day at a Time”) plays Dolores, fresh out of prison after taking the rap for her ex on a drug-dealing charge. She returns to her old Washington Heights neighborhood after 16 years in the pen only to find rent has quadrupled, yoga studios have replaced bodegas, and pet spas are now a thing. She’s alone until she runs into an old neighborhood acquaintance, Luis (Alejandro Hernandez) who’s running his late father’s restaurant, Empanada Loca. He offers Dolores a rent-free apartment in the basement, where she sets up a masseuse business. And just as customers begin disappearing, the diner offers up a new empanada recipe that becomes a hit among the area’s Instagramming foodies. Based on a Gimlet podcast and a play of the same name, the brisk and morbidly hilarious “Dolores Roach” flew under the radar when it arrived on Prime Video in July, and the streamer did not renew the series for a second season, which is criminal. Luckily you still have the chance to consume Season 1 of this macabre masterpiece.
‘Reservation Dogs,’ Season 3 (FX on Hulu)
The final season of FX on Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs” was a beautifully constructed goodbye to a wonderfully quirky series that challenged every previous TV and film narrative about Native Americans. The half-hour comedy co-created and executive produced by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi followed a quartet of close-knit teenagers — Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) and Cheese (Lane Factor) — as they grappled with whether to stay or leave their fictional Oklahoma reservation. The gang’s journey brought us through the mundane churn of junk food meals and high school crushes, as well as the pain of absent parents and the magical realism of smart-ass spirit guides such as William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth). But the third and final season was the most poignant of them all thanks to unforgettable narratives like “Deer Lady,” an episode that explored the brutality and humiliation of Indian boarding schools and the government’s push over the last two centuries to force assimilation and flatten Indigenous culture. If you watch nothing else, watch this haunting episode. “Reservation Dogs” ended as it began, with an open question about where the friends fit in, and why ultimately it doesn’t matter because they have each other, their elders and the community to catch them when they fall.
‘The Last of Us’ (HBO)
Did I want to watch a drama about a plague that caused lockdowns, supply-chain shortages and the potential destruction of the human race? Not really, but HBO’s “The Last of Us” is such a cinematic masterpiece — from its emotive storytelling to its character development to its attention to detail (it’s adapted from a video game of the same name) — it won me over with a dynamic 90-minute premiere episode starring Pedro Pascal as Joel, a postapocalyptic bounty hunter. Once Ellie (Bella Ramsey) entered the picture, there was no turning back from this intense survivalist series about a gruff killer who vows to protect a teenager from a dangerous world filled with swarms of “infected.” There were many questions from the outset about how this TV adaptation from Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl”) of a video game would work, but it managed to stay true to the story, and re-create many of the battles, while adding deeply moving subplots. “Long, Long Time,” an episode starring Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman as survivors who found love in the rubble of post-civilization, produced one of the best moments on television in 2023. That alone made up for an underwhelming finale, and ensured I could never hear that song performed by Linda Ronstadt again without tearing up.
‘Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story’ (Netflix)
Losing oneself in the fantasy of the “Bridgerton” series from Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland once meant escaping into the frivolity of England’s Regency-era aristocracy, replete with the snooty frivolity of the Ton. The show paired the expected scuttlebutt around marriage matches, clandestine rendezvous and heartbreak with a modernist take on the elite set of 19th century England. It was no big deal that the queen was Black, the king was white, and the will-they-or-won’t-they romance at the heart of each season was between a mixed-race couple. Diversity just is in this world, which was as baffling as it was refreshing.
But the prequel “Queen Charlotte” goes there, explaining how a Black woman ascended to the throne in a society built atop a lily-white class system, and it does so with heart, humor and intricately woven bits of social commentary. Golda Rosheuvel plays the adult royal, while India Ria Amarteifio plays a younger version of the queen, who’s 17 and a German princess when she’s betrothed to a young King George III (Corey Mylchreest). Between her struggles to be accepted and his battles with mental health, the story is riveting and playful (her towering wigs should have their own show), but it’s also painful, and those moments are handled with more depth and compassion than the other two installations of this franchise. The Ton is still as cold and insufferable as ever, which makes the finale of “Queen Charlotte” — a work of love and empathy — all the more remarkable.
‘Poker Face’ (Peacock)
Clouds of cigarette smoke emanate from this case-of-the-week murder-mystery series inspired by the cigar-chomping 1970s detective “Columbo.” But this time around, he’s a she. Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is a human BS detector, which is both a blessing and a curse for a girl trying to outrun mobsters and the law. There’s a hard-nosed charm to this series, which is an ode to network detective shows of yore but is also a manifestation of something that’s clearly been fighting its way out of Lyonne since she hit the screen as a teenager in films like “The Slums of Beverly Hills.” The tough, call-it-like-it-is character she created for “Russian Doll” encapsulated some of this swaggering persona, but “Poker Face” introduces a new gravelly-voiced character who is as cunning as she is fallible. Created by Rian Johnson (“Knives Out,” “Glass Onion”), the series features new guest stars with each episode — among them Nick Nolte, Ellen Barkin, Jameela Jamil and Chloë Sevigny — taking viewers on the run, across the country in a 1969 Plymouth Barracuda.
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (Netflix)
Based loosely on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a riveting mixture of Gothic horror, eat-the-rich commentary and whodunit mystery. For those not into scary storytelling, this eight-part miniseries is much more than a fright fest. It’s a high-level drama from horror master Mike Flanagan, and it’s his best series offering to date, even next to “The Haunting of Hill House.”
Big Pharma billionaire Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) has left a trail of broken souls and bodies on his way up the corporate ladder to the position of owner and CEO of an empire specializing in highly addictive pain medication. But he rules with no apparent successor, despite the fact that he has six adult children from multiple mothers. The siblings are a pampered, morally challenged bunch who fight among themselves for the throne. But this is not “Succession.” There’s a mystery to solve: Why are they dying one by one, in cruel and gruesome ways? It’s a gripping tale of greed and regret.
‘Beef’ (Netflix)
The first episode of this Netflix series from Lee Sung Jin was so angry and full of road rage, it made one question why you’d want to sit through the rest of a series that simulates the unpleasantness of a daily commute in L.A. Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) accidentally cuts off the car of Amy Lau (Ali Wong) while backing out of a parking space. She flips him off. The small incident balloons into a chase, then builds into an obsession for each party to get back at the other: the out-of-work handyman and his late-model Toyota Tacoma versus the wealthy entrepreneur in her shiny new Mercedes SUV. But from there, “Beef” skillfully pivots from a vendetta drama into a character-driven series about the events and life circumstances behind all that anger. Both parties contend with dashed hopes, unfulfilled expectations and family tensions. And it turns out their internal struggles are far more compelling than a high-speed car chase through the San Fernando Valley.
‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ (Hulu)
I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for anything featuring Kathryn Hahn in a prominent role (“WandaVision,” “The Shrink Next Door”), so when “Tiny Beautiful Things” premiered last spring with her in the lead, I was predisposed to fall for this drama. And Hahn does not disappoint as Clare Pierce, the anonymous writer behind the advice column “Dear Sugar.” Clare helps readers pull their lives together as hers is falling apart. Based on Cheryl Strayed’s book of the same name, the series follows Clare as she grapples with her failures as a daughter and a mother. Hahn takes the role to complex emotional heights, infusing the character with a wicked sense of humor and incapacitating vulnerability. If this eight-part miniseries sounds super heavy, it is. You will cry. But there is also something incredibly cathartic about watching a stellar performer like Hahn work though boatloads of grief and self-loathing onscreen. She turns emotional burden into a moving art.
‘Love & Death’ (Max)
There was a lot of confusion around the miniseries “Love & Death” when it premiered on the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max earlier this year. Hadn’t we already seen a drama based on the true case of Candy Montgomery, a Texas housewife who killed friend and neighbor Betty Gore with an ax in 1980 after having a torrid affair with Gore’s husband? Yes, we had. It was called “Candy,” it was on Hulu in 2022 and it starred Jessica Biel. It was unfortunate that this series, written by David E. Kelley, landed so close to that other murderous offering because it meant that many folks missed a compelling, addictive, high-quality true-crime drama. Elizabeth Olsen (“WandaVision”) plays Montgomery, the perfect Southern mom and church lady who harbors a horrible secret between all those soccer matches and Bible school sessions: She’s sleeping with her best friend’s spouse (Jesse Plemons). Although she cuts off the affair, it still leads to a bloody ax attack in Betty’s kitchen. In this version of the tale, it’s hard to take your eyes off Olsen, who portrays Candy as an unflappable woman of faith. Or is she an unfeeling sociopath? You decide.
‘Top Boy,’ Season 5 (Netflix)
Often described as Britain’s answer to “The Wire,” “Top Boy” premiered its fifth and final season on Netflix this fall, answering the question posed in the show’s title: Who would make it to top boy in the drug dealing in and around Hackney’s Summerhouse estate? Childhood friends Dushane (Ashley Walters) and Sully (Kane Robinson) have become kingpins, and only one would be left standing by the series’ end. “Top Boy” stands on its own as a drama that deftly portrays the ugly realities of institutional racism, drug addiction, crime and corrupt law enforcement. There’s five seasons of this series to catch up on, which should help you get through 2024’s initial shortage of new and returning shows. But brace yourself, the finale is a stunner.
A confiança de Vladimir Putin parece não ter limites. Impulsionado pela contraofensiva fracassada da Ucrânia e pelo enfraquecimento do apoio ocidental a seu governo, o presidente da Rússia afirma que os objetivos de guerra russos não mudaram.
Ao se dirigir aos seus generais na terça-feira (19), ele se vangloriou de que a Ucrânia estava tão sitiada que as tropas invasoras da Rússia estavam fazendo "o que queriam". "Não vamos desistir do que é nosso", prometeu ele, acrescentando com desdém: "Se eles querem negociar, que negociem".
Mas, em uma recente tentativa de diplomacia nos bastidores, Putin tem enviado uma mensagem diferente: ele está pronto para fazer um acordo.
Putin tem sinalizado por meio de intermediários, desde setembro, que está aberto a um cessar-fogo que congele o combate na situação atual, muito aquém de suas ambições de dominar a Ucrânia, afirmam dois ex-funcionários do alto escalão russo próximos ao Kremlin e autoridades dos EUA e internacionais que receberam a mensagem dos enviados do líder russo.
Na verdade, Putin também sondou um acordo de cessar-fogo um ano antes, no outono de 2022, segundo autoridades dos EUA. Essa abordagem discreta, não relatada anteriormente, ocorreu depois que a Ucrânia derrotou o Exército russo no nordeste do país. O presidente russo indicou que estava satisfeito com o território capturado pela Rússia e pronto para um armistício, disseram eles.
O interesse repetido de Putin em um cessar-fogo é um exemplo de como o oportunismo e a improvisação têm definido sua abordagem à guerra a portas fechadas. Dezenas de entrevistas com russos que o conhecem há muito tempo e com autoridades internacionais com conhecimento sobre o funcionamento interno do Kremlin mostram um líder manobrando para reduzir riscos e manter suas opções abertas em uma guerra que durou mais do que ele esperava.
"Eles dizem: 'Estamos prontos para negociar um cessar-fogo'", afirmou um funcionário internacional que se reuniu com oficiais de alto escalão da Rússia há poucos meses. "Eles querem permanecer onde estão no campo de batalha."
Não há evidências de que os líderes da Ucrânia, que prometeram retomar todo o seu território, aceitarão tal acordo. Alguns oficiais dos EUA dizem que isso pode ser uma tentativa familiar do Kremlin de desviar a atenção e não reflete uma disposição genuína de Putin para fazer concessões.
Nos últimos 16 meses, Putin engoliu várias humilhações —recuos embaraçosos, motins de um líder mercenário antes amigável— até chegar ao seu atual estado de confiança tranquila. Ao longo do caminho, ele travou uma guerra que matou ou mutilou centenas de milhares, ao mesmo tempo que exibiu contradições que se tornaram marcas registradas de seu governo.
Enquanto está obcecado pelo desempenho de seu Exército no campo de batalha e pelo que ele vê como sua missão histórica de retomar as "terras russas originais", Putin tem se esforçado para que a maioria dos russos continue com a vida normal.
Enquanto prepara a Rússia para anos de guerra, ele silenciosamente tenta deixar claro que está pronto para encerrá-la. "Ele realmente está disposto a parar nas posições atuais", disse um dos ex-funcionários russos de alto escalão ao The New York Times, transmitindo uma mensagem que ele disse que o Kremlin enviava discretamente. "Ele não está disposto a recuar um metro."
Putin, segundo os atuais e ex-oficiais, vê uma confluência de fatores criando um momento oportuno para um acordo: um campo de batalha que parece estar em um impasse, as consequências da ofensiva decepcionante da Ucrânia, seu apoio enfraquecido no Ocidente e, desde outubro, a distração da guerra entre Israel e o Hamas.
As autoridades falaram sob condição de anonimato, como outros entrevistados desta reportagem, devido à natureza sensível das abordagens nos bastidores.
Respondendo a perguntas por escrito após recusar um pedido de entrevista, o porta-voz de Putin, Dmitri Peskov, afirmou em uma mensagem de voz que "conceitualmente, essas teses que você apresentou estão incorretas". Questionado se a Rússia estava pronta para um cessar-fogo, ele apontou os comentários recentes do presidente; Putin disse neste mês que os objetivos de guerra da Rússia não haviam mudado.
A Ucrânia tem buscado apoio para sua própria fórmula de paz, que exige que Moscou entregue todo o território ucraniano capturado e pague indenizações. O presidente Volodimir Zelenski disse na terça-feira (18) que não via nenhum sinal de que a Rússia quisesse negociar. "Vemos apenas uma vontade descarada de matar", afirmou.
Putin cogitou pela primeira vez a possibilidade de negociações de paz nas semanas iniciais da guerra, mas elas fracassaram depois que as atrocidades da Rússia na Ucrânia vieram à tona. Em seguida, no outono de 2022, após a retirada embaraçosa da Rússia do nordeste da Ucrânia, o Kremlin enviou novamente mensagens para Kiev e o Ocidente de que estaria aberto a um acordo para congelar os combates, segundo autoridades dos EUA.
Alguns dos apoiadores da Ucrânia, como o general Mark Milley, então chefe do Estado-Maior Conjunto dos EUA, encorajaram Kiev a negociar porque o país havia alcançado tanto no campo de batalha quanto poderia razoavelmente esperar. Mas outros funcionários dos EUA acreditavam que era cedo demais para negociações. E Zelenski prometeu lutar até que todo o país fosse libertado do domínio russo.
À medida que a Ucrânia lançou sua aguardada contraofensiva em junho, Putin parecia tenso, ansioso por atualizações do campo de batalha, informaram pessoas próximas ao Kremlin. Em público, Putin se tornou um comentarista ao vivo da luta, ávido por reivindicar novos sucessos.
"O inimigo está tentando atacar", disse Putin no palco de seu prestigioso Fórum Econômico Internacional de São Petersburgo, em 16 de junho, descrevendo uma batalha acontecendo "agora mesmo". "Acredito que as forças armadas da Ucrânia não têm chance."
No mesmo dia, uma delegação de líderes africanos chegou a Kiev, capital da Ucrânia, na esperança de intermediar a paz. Em certo momento, autoridades ucranianas os levaram às pressas para um abrigo, alertando sobre um ataque.
No dia seguinte, em São Petersburgo, na Rússia, o presidente Cyril Ramaphosa, da África do Sul, perguntou a Putin se ele realmente havia bombardeado a capital ucraniana enquanto os líderes africanos estavam lá. "Sim, eu fiz", respondeu Putin, segundo duas pessoas próximas a Ramaphosa, "mas garanti que fosse muito longe de onde vocês estavam".
Uma semana depois, o líder mercenário Ievguêni Prigojin lançou sua rebelião fracassada. No final do verão no hemisfério norte, os eventos se voltavam a favor de Putin. A morte de Prigojin em um acidente de avião, amplamente vista como obra do Kremlin, eliminou seu inimigo doméstico mais perigoso. No campo de batalha, a Rússia já parecia ter sucesso em repelir a contraofensiva da Ucrânia.
Em um sábado de outubro, Putin comemorou seu 71º aniversário com os líderes do Uzbequistão e do Cazaquistão, dois países da Ásia Central que tentaram adotar uma postura neutra na guerra. Quando eles chegaram à sua residência nos arredores de Moscou, Putin assumiu o volante de uma nova limusine russa, mostrando uma das maneiras pelas quais, segundo o Kremlin, a Rússia está se tornando mais autossuficiente.
Uma vez dentro de casa, os três líderes discutiram um plano para vender gás russo ao Uzbequistão. Uma pessoa presente lembrou-se da confiança calma de Putin e de sua postura relaxada. Segundo o informante, ele não parece um homem que está travando uma guerra. Somente após um almoço de aniversário eles compreenderam a plena importância dos eventos em outros lugares.
Era 7 de outubro. O ataque terrorista do Hamas naquele dia —e a feroz resposta militar de Israel— provaram ser uma vantagem de marketing para a Rússia, ao desviar a atenção da Ucrânia e permitir que Putin se alinhasse com grande parte do mundo ao condenar o bombardeio da Faixa de Gaza e o apoio americano a Israel.
"Ele vê que a atenção do Ocidente está se afastando", disse Balazs Orban, assessor do primeiro-ministro Viktor Orbán, que participou da reunião do líder húngaro com Putin em outubro.
Desde pelo menos setembro, autoridades ocidentais têm captado sinais renovados de que Putin está interessado em um cessar-fogo. As mensagens chegam por meio de vários canais, incluindo governos estrangeiros com laços tanto com os EUA quanto com a Rússia. Emissários russos não oficiais falaram com interlocutores sobre os contornos de um possível acordo que Putin aceitaria, disseram autoridades americanas e outros.
Segundo um oficial internacional que se reuniu com altos funcionários russos há poucos meses, Putin e o Exército russo não querem esticar ainda mais sua capacidade. O líder russo também fez comentários públicos vagos sobre estar aberto a negociações.
Muitos no Ocidente são céticos em relação a um cessar-fogo porque afirmam que Putin se rearmaria para um futuro ataque. O presidente Edgars Rinkevics, da Letônia, argumentou em uma entrevista que Putin estava comprometido com a guerra porque sonha em "restabelecer o império".
"Eles nunca honraram nenhum acordo", disse Rinkevics sobre os russos, "e os violaram imediatamente quando viram que era conveniente".
The perils of searching for feminist heroes in antiquity
by Mary Beard
Hovering in the background of ancient history’s headlines is King Juba II—writer, explorer, and ruler of Mauretania, the Roman satellite kingdom in North Africa, for almost 50 years until his death in the early 20s A.D. His skin color is debated (was he light brown? or black?). All we know is that his father was a Berber king in North Africa who supported the wrong side in the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, forged a suicide pact with an ally, and left his infant son to be carted back to Rome and displayed in Caesar’s triumphal victory parade in 46 B.C. The child was then brought up within Rome’s ruling family as something between honored guest, lodger, and prisoner. When he was about 25, the emperor, Augustus, sent him back to North Africa to be king of Mauretania, which extended from modern Algeria west to the Atlantic coast, a buffer state between the Roman empire and the peoples to the south. The new king seems to have divided his time among the battlefield (there was plenty of “buffering” to be done), the library, and research trips to investigate the flora and fauna of the region. Juba had started writing in Rome (including a history of the city and at least eight volumes on the subject of painting), and in North Africa he produced weighty studies of the region’s geography, history, and culture. He argued, no doubt with a degree of local pride, that the source of the Nile lay in Mauretania, and gave detailed descriptions of the North African elephant. None of his work survives complete, but we have more than 100 extracts quoted by later writers. Juba’s scientific contributions are his greatest legacy to the modern world. He is not only our best witness to that now-extinct elephant; drawing on his doctor’s name (Antonius Euphorbus), he christened the group of plants still known as Euphorbia (the red-leaved poinsettia is the most easily recognized of these), which was discovered on one of his expeditions into the Atlas Mountains. Chances are he’s behind the name of the Canary Islands too, taken from the big dogs (canes, in Latin) found on one of his expeditions there. More generally, Juba opens our eyes to all kinds of different perspectives on how Roman power worked. In Rome itself, for example, the royal residences served as a boardinghouse and school for foreign royalty (several other princes and princesses also lodged there). Juba’s Mauretania was one of many “friendly” border kingdoms, where Rome could exert sway from a distance and establish a broad, easily defensible frontier zone—quite unlike the single line usually marked on our modern maps of the empire. Juba also raises big questions about cultural and ethnic diversity in the Roman world. He was brought to Rome as a baby and reared there. Did he think of himself as Roman or as foreign? Or did he combine those different identities, and adapt them to different circumstances? Is his treatise on North Africa, Libyka, an attempt to define a specifically African history and culture, of which he was a part? Or was it a weapon of Roman imperial control? Most modern empires have used knowledge as a form of power. Systems of geography, history, and even the classification of plants and animals have been imposed as a subtle means of domination. In the ancient world as well, to map meant to own. The 40 or so extracts or paraphrases from Libyka that have come down to us, many of them very brief, were quoted for the scientific “facts” they contain, and give no clue to the underlying ideology. But in recent years, interest in Juba has been overshadowed by interest in his wife, who went with him from Rome to be queen of Mauretania, and to set up a court in what is now Cherchell, in modern Algeria, a town they called Caesarea. Unlike her husband, she still has an instantly recognizable name: Cleopatra Selene (“the moon”), the only daughter of one of the most notorious, glamorized, and in the end spectacularly unsuccessful couples in Western history: Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, and the Roman Mark Antony. She raises just as many questions as Juba does. How did Cleopatra junior, the daughter of the most famous female enemy Rome ever had, become the wife of a Roman vassal king? How did she negotiate her relationship between the Egypt of her mother and the Rome of her father? And what were her political and cultural ambitions? How did you see yourself if your mother was Cleopatra? A string of contemporary novels and several careful historical analyses (notably by Duane W. Roller) have tried to tell her story from her point of view. The same goal drives a new full-length biography, Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen, by Jane Draycott, a lecturer in ancient history at the University of Glasgow.
In some ways, Cleopatra’s career mirrors her husband’s. She was born in Alexandria around 40 B.C. Antony was a largely absent father, but when his daughter was about 6, he made the extravagant, though mostly empty, gesture of declaring her queen of Crete and Cyrenaica (on the North African coast), territories that he had no authority to give away. When she was 10 or so, her parents—defeated in their war against Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus—both killed themselves, and she and her brothers, like Juba before them, were taken to Rome, where they appeared in a triumphal procession staged by her parents’ enemies in 29 B.C. According to one ancient account, she and her twin brother, Alexander Helios (“the sun”), walked in the parade next to an effigy of their dead mother. Draycott evokes the experience of being put on show this way by comparing it to the scene of Princes William and Harry walking in procession through London next to their mother’s coffin. The young Cleopatra grew up in the residence of the imperial family in Rome, before marrying (or being married off to) Juba and moving with him to Mauretania. There she had at least one son, Ptolemaios, who followed his father onto the throne, but came to a nasty end under the Roman Emperor Caligula in 40 A.D. Cleopatra Selene’s own death, commemorated in a surviving poem, has usually been dated to 5 A.D. thanks to an allusion to a lunar eclipse known to have happened that year. That is the sum of what we know about Cleopatra Selene from ancient written accounts. With scrupulous honesty, Draycott assembles all the references to her in a short appendix, fewer than five full pages long. She hints that we might know more about her if she had been a rebel against the power of Rome, like Boudicca or Zenobia; Cleopatra Selene, Draycott writes, “succeeded quietly rather than failed loudly.” But as it is, decades of her life—most of her adult years, in fact—go completely unrecorded. All we know for sure of her time in Mauretania is that she had a son. Even less information exists about other key characters in her story. Her twin, for example, simply disappears from view after his arrival in Rome. Did he get lucky and find a nice place for a comfortable exile, out of the public eye? Or did he simply die? Draycott enigmatically writes that he “failed to adapt to his change in circumstances.” Others have suspected murder. The result is a wonderful vacuum for fiction writers to fill. Cleopatra Selene has been given a steamy, star-crossed love affair with Juba in Rome, before the two head off to build a new life in Mauretania. Elsewhere we can read high-stakes political drama. In a trilogy by Stephanie Dray, for example, the young princess is some kind of proto–Egyptian nationalist, battling to recapture the status of her mother, married to Juba against her will, and raped by Emperor Augustus with the active connivance of his wife Livia (echoing the report in one ancient biography that Livia used to groom virgins for her husband). But telling her story in nonfiction, vividly or not, is harder. Draycott, too, wants to see Cleopatra Selene as a “powerful ruler in her own right,” trying to “fuse her past and present” in a multicultural monarchy that was “new and distinctive in the Roman Empire.” In the absence of any written evidence for that, she turns to archaeology and the material remains from Mauretania and elsewhere. There have been many attempts over the past few decades to find the face of young Cleopatra on cameos and silver dishes. She has even (implausibly) been identified as one of the figures, along with her son, in the procession sculpted on one side of Augustus’s famous Altar of Peace, in Rome. But only on Mauretanian coins do we have images of her that are actually named. One coin depicts Juba on one side, with the title (in Latin) “King Juba, son of King Juba,” and on the other Cleopatra Selene, with the title (in Greek) “Queen Cleopatra, daughter of Cleopatra.” Another coin does not feature Juba at all, but has her head on one side and a crocodile on the other, with the title “Queen Cleopatra” written on both. For Draycott, these are among the most clinching pieces of evidence for her view of the commanding queen: They show Cleopatra Selene as, at the least, an equal co-ruler alongside her husband, with the authority to mint coins. And they show her using her ancestry and symbols of Egypt as a mark of power. Draycott also imagines her having a hand in Juba’s Libyka and in the royal couple’s “project of laying claim to the entire continent,” which is how she boldly interprets that work. All of that is possible. But a skeptic might object that having your head on a coin does not indicate that you had the authority to mint (plenty of Roman empresses with no such authority appeared on coins); that queen can just as well mean “wife of the king” as “regnant ruler”; and that every ancient account treats Juba as having sole power. To be sure, that might be because the writers could not accept that a woman was in joint command—but they might also have known what they were talking about. Besides, giving your new capital the aggressively Roman name of Caesarea (“Emperorville”) is an odd choice for a couple with multicultural, almost Pan-African aspirations. The interpretive debates about what scant evidence there is can go round and round. The fact that I am skeptical does not mean Draycott is wrong. But the arguments point beyond the story of Cleopatra Selene and Juba to the more general problems inherent in undertaking modern biographies of ancient subjects, and raise the question of why we are writing such books. The young Cleopatra may be an extreme case, but there is no character in antiquity (with the possible exception of Cicero, the first-century-B.C. Roman orator, theorist, wit, and letter-writer) for whom we have enough information to create a biography that satisfies the expectations of modern readers and publishers. To turn written evidence that fills fewer than five pages into a 256-page account, Draycott uses well-established tactics. She offers a lot of fascinating context and background to add bulk. Her chapters on the culture of Alexandria and on Egyptomania in Rome are excellent and accessible, but they help us relatively little with Cleopatra Selene herself. She projects a few familiar modern anxieties onto her ancient characters: She wonders at one point about Juba’s “midlife crisis.” And to bolster what is necessarily a fragile narrative, she liberally sprinkles would have s and must have s through her text, occasionally up to five or six times on a single page (she “would have been highly educated,” “it would have been terrifying,” and so on). Most modern biographies of ancient Romans, when they don’t simply assume that we know things we do not, adopt this “would have” brand of storytelling. It makes for an awkward narrative. Draycott is well aware of these issues. She starts the book by asking, “How does one dare to attempt to write a biography of any ancient historical figure?” But she has powerful reasons for trying to reconstruct Cleopatra Selene’s life story. As she explains, she wants young women of color to be able to identify with the queen, whom she sees as an inspiring model for them and for the rest of us—a figure who “successfully wielded power … when women were marginalised,” and when she herself was an outsider in so many ways. I hope that I am as keen as Draycott that classics as a discipline should find ways of engaging with diverse communities and also being enriched by them. And she is admirably judicious on the controversial question of whether Cleopatra, mother or daughter, was in our terms Black (answer: We don’t know). But I am suspicious in general of finding exemplary figures for our own times in the distant past. After all, one of the things that we now rightly find problematic about the 19th-century study of classics was that elite white men did claim to see themselves in the ancient world, and they presented antiquity in their own image, not as a strange and different place. It doesn’t help us understand either the ancient world or ourselves to supplant one set of such role models with another. More than that, to hold up as an ideal for today’s young people a woman about whom we know next to nothing is to promote fantasy over fact.
Historians should certainly try to uncover the forgotten women of classical antiquity, and to spot those whose strength has been overlooked. Sometimes that has been done with great success. The ancient account, for instance, of the martyrdom of Perpetua—a young Christian woman put to death in North Africa in the early third century A.D.—has been given new life in the past few decades, after centuries of being scarcely noticed by historians. The neglect was extraordinary, given that Perpetua left us her own words, preserved in her prison diaries, describing her trial and imprisonment: a rare example of a woman’s voice surviving from the Roman empire. But understanding how women in the ancient world were silenced is equally important. What social mechanisms and cultural assumptions help explain why those who may have claimed some power were overlooked—or, alternatively, demonized? Cleopatra senior is a good case of vilification, and so is Augustus’s wife Livia, who was blamed for almost every death within the palace walls. In the end, for the historian, unearthing the reasons we know so little about Cleopatra Selene—probing into who wrote her out of the story, and how—is a more instructive project than reinventing her to fit our own template of power. My question is, why do we know more about Juba’s elephants than about his wife?
O que levou o presidente a indicar Flávio Dino ao STF e o “conservador raiz” Paulo Gonet para a PGR
P O R A N D R É B A R R O C A L
ACorteé vista no Palácio do Planalto como essencial para aestabilidade do governo
Na manhã de 22 de novem- bro, o presidente do Sena- do, Rodrigo Pacheco, rece- beu em sua residência ofi- cial alguns senadores para discutir uma votação polêmica marcada para aquela tarde. Na véspera, o plenário decidira que a proposta de reduzir os po- deres individuais dos juízes do Supremo Tribunal Federal poderia ser votada sem os intervalos de tempo requeridos para mudar a Constituição. Dos 81 senadores, 48 haviam apoiado o rito especial, um a menos que o necessário para alterações constitucionais. Um dos presentes na reunião com Pacheco era o líder do gover- no no Senado, Jaques Wagner, do PT. Ele e os dois colegas de Bahia (Ângelo Coro- nel e Otto Alencar, ambos do PSD, o par- tido de Pacheco) não estavam entre os vo- tos a favor do rito especial.
Wagner fora até Pacheco com a visão de que a votação do rito mostraria que a tentativa de desidratar togados supre- mos, uma bandeira do bolsonarismo, ti- nha força para vingar. Na reunião, da qual participou Espiridião Amim, do PP, o re- lator da proposta, Wagner ouviu de Pa- checo que houve juiz do STF que tinha si- do consultado e ajudado a chegar ao re- latório final de Amim, apesar da revolta da Corte com o que o Senado preparava. Diante do quadro geral, Wagner resolveu votar a favor da proposta. Caso ela valesse em 2016, o petista poderia ter sido subs- tituído por Lula na chefia da Casa Civil de Dilma Rousseff, algo talvez capaz de frear oimpeachment. A troca havia sido proibida por Gilmar Mendes, membro do Supremo dos mais indignados com a mudança constitucional gestada no Sena- do. Entre os 52 votos a favor dela, estava o trio da Bahia (sem os três, seriam 49 vo- tos, o mínimo necessário para aprová-la).
O voto de Wagner foiisolado no PT. O senador havia conversado antes com o líder da bancada petista, Fabiano Contarato, e deixado claro: o governo não tinha posição e ele (Wagner) votaria com a própria convicção. Os petistas, prosse- guiu, deveriam fazer o mesmo, ou seja, manter a postura contrária àquela defen- dida pelo bolsonarismo. Um dia após o Se- nado tirar poderes dos magistrados, o pre- sidente do STF, Luís Roberto Barroso, foi a Lula. À noite, mais três juízes estiveram com o petista: Mendes, Alexandre de Mo- raes e Cristiano Zanin. Os dois primeiros e Barroso haviam sido as vozes publicamen- te mais duras com o Senado. Queriam sa- ber de Lula se Wagner tinha combinado o voto com o presidente. Uma autoridade do Palácio do Planalto diz: não combinou.
As tensões entre o Supremo e o go- verno precipitaram uma decisão adiada por Lula há meses. Em 27 de novembro, o presidente indicou um integrante pa- ra o tribunal e um procurador-geral da República. Foi o desfecho de um xadrez darealpolitik. Para o STF, Lula escolheu Flávio Dino, o ministro da Justiça, opção bem recebida pelo eleitorado progressis- ta, exceto pelos defensores de uma mulher para a vaga de Rosa Weber, aposentada em setembro. Para a Procuradoria, outro pos- to vago desde setembro, em razão do fim do mandato de Augusto Aras, Lula pin- çou um “conservador raiz”, Paulo Gonet Branco, atual vice-procurador-geral elei- toral. Falta saber quem herdará o lugar de Dino. “Lula indicou quem queria indicar há muito tempo. Ele ainda não resolveu a equação chamada Ministério da Justi- ça e queria ter resolvido antes de indicar”, afirma uma autoridade governamental.
Com Dino, Lula esperater uma espé- cie de líder do governo no Supremo. É o que diz uma fonte palaciana. O ministro possui envergadura política, ao contrário de Zanin, o primeiro indicado presiden- cial para a Corte. Pela visão progressista e a proximidade com o presidente, Dino
tende a lhe ser fiel. A Corte é vista no Palá- cio do Planalto como essencial para o fun- cionamento e a estabilidade do governo. O Congresso é direitista e dado ao estilo faca no pescoço, por exemplo.
Dino será sabatinado no Senado em 13 de dezembro. Credenciais jurídicas pa- ra exibir, tem. É bacharel em Direito, foi juiz federal de 1994 a 2006 e dirigiu a as- sociação da categoria, a Ajufe. Ao chegar em Brasília neste ano, eleito senador pe- lo Maranhão, não planejava voltar à toga – pela idade ficará no STF até 2043. So- nhava era com a Presidência. Um amigo conta que, desde o início dos rumores so- bre a ida para o STF, Dino precisou se re- programar interiormente. A propósito, em 14 de agosto, o ministro teve uma lon- ga conversa com Lula no Palácio da Alvo- rada, e o presidente não tocou no assunto “STF”. Dino contou a história a Valdemar Costa Neto, o presidente do PL de Jair Bolsonaro, em 19 de setembro. “É pro- va de que ele vai te indicar”, comentou
Costa Neto. Este, recorde-se, foi aliado de Lula nos governos anteriores.
O presidente ficou mais à vontade pa- ra escolher Dino para o STF ao indicar à Procuradoria alguém apoiado por dois poderosos togados supremos, Mendes e Moraes. Gonet, teorizava, em junho, a CartaCapitalum subprocurador-geral aposentado, seria uma escolha puramen- te “pragmática” da parte de Lula. Indica- ção que embute risco também. O procu- rador-geral é o único autorizado a proces- sar por crime comum o presidente e seus ministros. A tranquilidade de Lula nos próximos dois anos, o tempo de manda- to do “xerife”, dependerá de Gonet e, por- tanto, de Mendes e Moraes. Uma dupla togada que, por outro lado, pode ter a in- fluência reduzida por Dino no Supremo.
Gonet será fundamental também no futuro do antecessor de Lula. Com Aras, o órgão foi contra a delação do tenente-co- ronel do Exército Mauro Cesar Barbosa Cid, ex-ajudante de ordens da Presidên- cia de Bolsonaro. A delação foi selada com a Polícia Federal em setembro e validada pelo Supremo. As informações e provas fornecidas por Cid sobre milícias digitais, comércio de joias, carteira de vacinação imerecida existente em nome de Bolso- naro e a tentativa de golpe em 8 de janei- ro terão consequência apenas na hipóte- se de o “xerife” encampá-las e transfor- má-las em denúncia criminal. Idem pa- ra o relatório da CPI do 8 de Janeiro, que caracterizou o ex-presidente como “autor intelectual” do quebra-quebra.
Por ter tido apoio de Mendes e Moraes para ser procurador-geral, é de se supor que Gonet não aliviará para Bolsonaro. Todos os inquéritos delicados para o ca- pitão em curso no Supremo, sob a batuta de Moraes, têm andado por obra da PF, não da Procuradoria. Decisões judiciais e ma- nifestações públicas de Moraes e Mendes os mostram dispostos a punir o ex-presi- dente. Em nome do MP, Gonet foi a favor
de o Tribunal Superior Eleitoral cassar os direitos políticos do ex-presidente por oito anos em dois julgamentos realizados nes- te ano sob o comando de Moraes. Vale lem- brar, porém, como faz Cláudio Fonteles, procurador-geral de 2003 a 2005: “O in- dicado consentiu com a omissão de Augus- to Aras no governo Bolsonaro”.
Uma carta abertade 20 de novembro da “Coalização em Defesa da Democra- cia”, que entre outros reúne a Associa- ção Juízes pela Democracia e o MST, cri- ticava a eventual indicação de Gonet por Lula justamente pelo estado do País e do Ministério Público Federal após Bolso- naro e Aras. Para o grupo, o País preci- sava de um procurador-geral com “sóli- do histórico de defesa dos direitos hu- manos, de atuação efetiva na defesa da democracia e atividade coerentemente orientada pelo projeto constitucional”. Gonet tem mestrado em Direitos Huma- nos (pela Universidade de Essex, na In- glaterra), mas é um “conservador raiz”. A descrição foi feita pela deputada bolso- narista Bia Kicis após ela tê-lo levado ao capitão em 2019. Gonet tentava ser o es- colhido procurador-geral, contava com o apoio da ala conservadora do Ministé- rio Público. É contra o aborto e a deci- são do Supremo de equiparar homofobia a racismo. Como nome do MPF na Co- missão de Mortos e Desaparecidos nos anos 1990, votou contra (e foi derrotado) responsabilizar a ditadura por alguns as- sassinatos, casos de Carlos Lamarca e de Carlos Marighella.
Narealpolitiklulista, agora falta saber quem será o novo ministro da Justiça. No governo, há quem defenda nomear uma mulher. Na viagem ao exterior feita no dia das indicações de Dino e Gonet, Lula tem em sua comitiva Ricardo Lewandowski, na condição de conselheiro da Confede- ração Nacional da Indústria. Desde a elei- ção de Lula, o ex-juiz do Supremo sonha- va em ser ministro da Justiça. Até aposta- va que Dino não duraria no cargo.•
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