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Every so often, storytellers land on the same idea at the same time in a way that rattles the zeitgeist like an earthquake.

That's how it felt, sifting through the well-crafted, emotionally exhausting scenes that fill HBO's version of The Normal Heart. Created as a searing, tragic look at the early days of the AIDS crisis in New York City, this TV movie joins the Oscar-winning film Dallas Buyer's Club and Peabody-winning documentary How to Survive a Plague as a trio of excellent works documenting this country's shameful first reaction to the spread of a mysterious disease that ravaged marginalized communities across America.

When I asked How to Survive a Plague director David France why right now felt like a good time to peel back 30 years of history, he talked about time.

Specifically, he said the storytellers who lived through those times needed some distance before they could handle talking about what they experienced; when the director first tried to talk with activists for his film, many of them still couldn't speak easily. Even France, an openly gay journalist who covered the emerging AIDS crisis before it had a name, admitted he initially had trouble pushing himself to relive the days when too many friends died too soon and the world didn't seem to care.

One look at HBO's The Normal Heart shows why. The story centers on Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), a writer and gay activist with a reputation for heated passion and baldfaced commentary; a not-so-thinly veiled version of the gay author and activist who created the play and wrote this film's screenplay, Larry Kramer.

We meet Weeks in 1981 as the goofy, undersexed man out during a wild weekend at Fire Island, the Long Island area vacation destination for gay men. He's already drawn ire for writing that the promiscuity of gay men makes love impossible; we see Weeks wander through the unbridled hedonism of the Island like a tourist too scared to jump into a cold stream.

Ironically, that reserve may have saved his life. Cute-as-a-button Glee alum Jonathan Groff plays the first among Weeks' friends to get sick; within months, cases are piling up at the offices of Dr. Emma Brookner, seemingly the only physician in New York who takes this epidemic seriously.

Played with a decided lack of glamour by Julia Roberts, Brookner is passionate and blunt as Weeks, unable to use her legs after a childhood bout with polio. But the pair's efforts to rally support in the gay community initially falls on deaf ears, as men who seem to define their political identity by their promiscuity resist any suggestion that they should stop having sex.

"If having sex can kill you, doesn't anyone with half a brain stop f—-ing?" Roberts-as-Brookner barks in exasperation. Apparently, she's not familiar with smokers, who keep puffing even though they absolutely know what they're doing will shorten their lives.

The movie becomes a sorrowful documentation of all the horrors packed into the first three years of the AIDS crisis. Brookner and Weeks tour a gruesome hospital ward, where uncertainty over how the disease is transmitted leads workers to shun patients as they lay dying.

City officials turn a blind eye even as emergency rooms refuse to treat people with full blown AIDS, amid rumors that Mayor Ed Koch is a closeted gay man. News reports initially call it "gay cancer" then GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency); the sense that the world isn't concerned with a disease killing gay men and intravenous drug users is palpable.

The film enlists a cast of beloved, well-known actors keep the audience engaged through such wrenching scenes, including Ruffalo, Roberts, Matt Bomer (White Collar), Jim Parsons (Big Bang Theory), Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) and B.D. Wong (Law & Order: SVU). Director Ryan Murphy, who deserves a cheer just for bringing Kramer's play to the small screen after many others failed, scores in every casting choice.

Bomer reportedly lost 40 pounds to play Felix Turner, the closeted New York Times reporter who falls for Weeks and eventually contracts AIDS. And Ruffalo's rumpled charm is key in making a likable figure of Weeks, a cantankerous agitator who seemed to anger everyone in his quest to end the deadly silence surrounding this epidemic. Just like Kramer.

It is hard to remember, at a time when HIV-positive celebrities like Magic Johnson have lived nearly 25 years, that there was a long period of widespread disagreement over how AIDS was transmitted and how to treat it. And in an age where a kid falling down a skateboard ramp can become national news, it's also hard to imagine how an emerging disease could kill over 1,000 Americans and get little attention from journalists, lawmakers or public health institutions.

That is the greatest value of movies like The Normal Heart, which takes us back to a time before gay weddings were featured on popular sitcoms and cable news conflicts made the politics of confrontation commonplace.

In the film, Weeks' insistence on passionate, public anger earns enemies among some gay activists, who feared exposure and political pressure.

But if there is any criticism of The Normal Heart that resonates, it's that the story stops before events proved that the Weeks/Kramer style of activism actually works.

As David France's How to Survive a Plague documents, New York's gay activists eventually helped push public officials and pharmaceutical companies to provide effective treatments to AIDS. They educated themselves about the disease enough to serve as consultants to drug makers and public policy types

But none of those victories are shown in The Normal Heart, which ends in 1984. Weeks is awkwardly attending another event where gay men are pairing up – a gay dance at Yale University — alone and an outsider. He's been kicked out of the Gay Men's Health Crisis group he helped found and the deaths keep piling up.

As the struggle to legalize gay marriage continues and some complain of a "gay agenda" in public life, films like The Normal Heart have arrived to remind us when the fight for gay rights was even more directly a matter of life and death.

And perhaps only now, as we pat ourselves on the back for the mainstreaming of gay life and culture in today's America, are we ready to look back with open eyes on a time when our lack of acceptance killed far too many people.

Judged by that timetable, looks like The Normal Heart has arrived just in time.

The Normal Heart airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO.

The time has come for us all to take a long, step-back look at this thing we call the Tea Party.

The results from Republican primaries in a dozen states so far this year strongly suggest that the party, such as it was, is over.

It may not have made sense to use the term "party" at any time in this movement's brief history. This year, that fact has become increasingly obvious.

The Tea Party was not so much an organized force in itself as an outburst that others tried to harness. The name was shorthand for an energy that suddenly coursed through the conservative community in the first months of the Obama presidency.

The sources of that energy were and are highly diverse. The effects were undeniable in down-ballot races in most of the country in 2010 and 2012. But the energy never really assumed the form of a conventional political party, and it did not build the machinery that could produce reliable candidates and campaigns.

Yet the handle of "Tea Party" remains irresistible for admakers, activists, journalists and a boundless world of commentators in the social media space.

That is why it surprises a lot of people to see this Tea Party suddenly looking so impotent, even as President Obama and his party look increasingly vulnerable. One would think the most anti-Obama elements of the right would be on the march.

Yet Republican incumbents and other candidates backed by the party's business and political elites have won the nominations for November nearly everywhere anyone was noticing. Where insurgents arose with a clear claim to being Tea Party favorites, they have lost. In many cases, they have flat-lined weeks before the primary.

There are consensus explanations for this. Most important: incumbents caught in the cross-hairs have been far better prepared and funded than they were in 2010 and 2012. They have adjusted their behavior in office — especially in the U.S. Senate — and their behavior back home as well. They have raised huge early money and taken the fight to their challengers.

As a result, the challengers often saw their support decline as the primary neared. Some of their wounds were self-inflicted, the kind of controversies that engulfed their predecessors of 2010 and 2012 only after their nominations were secured.

Moreover, the formal campaign structures of the GOP have mobilized against the various independent groups that have been driving what we have loosely labeled the Tea Party – including FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, the Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Americans for Limited Government.

All have trophies on the wall from backing anti-Establishment or populist campaigns around the country. But they have yet to back a winner this year at the statewide level, with the exception of Ben Sasse in Nebraska, whose win was a split decision (some Tea Party affiliates backed his main opponent).

The upshot, at least at this stage of the primary season, is the full reinstatement of the Old Guard in every region. There could still be a stunner in Mississippi or elsewhere this summer but the opportunities are dwindling fast.

So is the Tea Party finished? Yes, if you insist on calling it the Tea Party. Because that phrase implies the phenomenon is some sort of organized unit in the usual sense. And the Tea Party never really was one.

Better to think of it as an expression of frustration on the part of conservative activists and true believers who blamed the GOP hierarchy for Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress. These often angry populists thought the2008 GOP candidate and campaign had lacked the fire and fervor they themselves still felt for the cause.

And they feared the Republicans in Congress would lie down and let the Obama regime do whatever it wanted.

The Tea Party pushback organized early in 2009, first around taxes ("Taxed Enough Already?") and then around the new health care law – derisively dubbed Obamacare.

In 2010 and 2012 the loose-knit band beneath the Tea Party banner disrupted the Republican nominating process around the country. Most notably, it derailed Republican incumbents or party-anointed candidates for the U.S. Senate in Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Florida and Delaware. All 10 seats had been (or were expected to go) Republican, but the Tea Party nominees wound up winning only four.

Yet even when it was strongest, the Tea Party movement never coalesced as a political organization. By comparison, Ross Perot's quixotic bid for the White House in 1992 had more characteristics of actual party organization, and so too did the fading echoes of it in the United We Stand movement and the Reform Party that followed.

The Tea Party has always been a label in search of something to stick to. It has never had even a symbolic national leader or a central committee — or even a national meeting. Some of the organizations that use Tea Party in their name raise far more money than they convey to any candidates, seeming to exist primarily to raise money so that they can exist.

The senators who represent the movement at its most successful — Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz – differ profoundly on such issues as immigration, foreign intervention, voting rights and fiscal policy.

At this point, the phrase Tea Party has nearly lost all meaning. It can still be used as a catch-all descriptor for any candidate, commentator or activist who wishes to be further to the right than some real or imagined opponent.

And unless a dramatic reversal of fortune comes soon, it will soon have one other connotation: futility.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

NASA has put out a free, fascinating e-book exploring the possibility of human/extraterrestrial communication. The 300-page book, which has chapters written by more than a dozen different scholars, looks to archeology and anthropology for clues in how to decode extraterrestrial messages, should they ever arrive. In his introduction to the volume, editor Douglas A. Vakoch explains, "Like archaeologists who reconstruct temporally distant civilizations from fragmentary evidence, SETI [search for extra-terrestrial intelligence] researchers will be expected to reconstruct distant civilizations separated from us by vast expanses of space as well as time. And like anthropologists, who attempt to understand other cultures despite differences in language and social customs, as we attempt to decode and interpret extraterrestrial messages, we will be required to comprehend the mindset of a species that is radically Other."

The fight between Amazon and Hachette has escalated as Amazon has removed the option to preorder a number of the publisher's big books, Sarah Weinman of Publishers Lunch reports [subscription required]. Titles affected by the freeze include J.K. Rowling's new Robert Galbraith novel. Earlier this month, in what looks like an attempt to put pressure on the publisher during a contract dispute, Amazon delayed shipping on a number of titles and placed banner ads over others, suggesting "similar items at a lower price." Amazon did not respond to NPR's request for comment.

Hassan Blasim's short story collection The Iraqi Christ, translated into English by Jonathan Wright, has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, an award for fiction in translation that gives 5,000 (about $8,420) to both author and translator. Judge Boyd Tonkin said in a press release, "A decade after the Western invasion and occupation of Iraq, that country's writers are exploring the brutal and chaotic aftermath of war and tyranny with ever-growing confidence. ... The 14 stories of The Iraqi Christ, often surreal in style but always rooted in heart-breaking truth, depict this pitiless era with deep compassion, pitch-black humour and a visionary yearning for another, better life. Jonathan Wright's translation from the Arabic captures all of their passion, their desperation and their soaring imaginative energy. The Iraqi Christ is not only the first Arabic book to win the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, but a classic work of post-war witness, mourning and revolt."

In The New Yorker, John P. Henderson explains why he writes under a pseudonym: "John Wray isn't so different from poor, nebbishy John P. Henderson from Buffalo, New York. He's just slightly better company — at least when the work is going well. When it isn't, needless to say, he's insufferable; but that's when I remind myself, with a physical rush of relief, that John Wray doesn't actually exist."

A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., explores the tumultuous, passionate, artistic relationship between the two artists.

"In many ways, [it] is a romance of two like minds who admired one another greatly; and who I believe completely relied on one another for artistic and emotional help," Oliveira says. "Their relationship is a sort of an elevated, intellectual love affair that tied them to one another for the rest of their lives after they met."

They left behind no diaries, no letters. National Gallery curator Kimberly A. Jones says it was a passionate but platonic aesthetic attraction. "There's no indication that there was anything romantic between the two of them," Jones says.

So what was the relationship between this American in Paris, and a Frenchman, 10 years her senior, who was known and respected in artistic circles?

"It was all about the art, and that kind of laser focus and 100 percent dedication to the art that they really shared," Jones says.

They met in 1877. At 33, Cassatt was studying painting in Paris. At 43, Degas' work was on view around town. "Even before she actually met him she recounts how she had seen one of his pastels in a storefront window and she pressed her nose up against it and was just dazzled by what he was able to do," Jones says. "She knew his art and was thinking this is the direction I should be going in. So he really did change her path."

Oliveira — who did a tremendous amount of research for her novel — says before the Degas dazzle, Cassatt had been trying to master a more traditional approach.

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