"I Don't Do Assignments Anymore." - by Elif Batuman

Over the holidays, I made it a few times to an actual movie theater, and even though I saw some cool feature-length films, the thing I saw that made me feel the most excited and inspired was the trailer for “Origin”—Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction book, Caste: The Origin of our Discontents. The moment I almost started to cry is when Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is approached by a suave editor (Blair Underwood) who asks her, in a suave editor voice, “Are you interested in writing something for us?”—and then she replies, against a rippling piano and orchestral score, “I don’t do assignments anymore”—and then you see a soaring montage of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, and the Taj Mahal, and more Nazis, and I think a cricket match? I couldn’t believe I was seeing this on a big screen: a writer turning down an assignment, being framed as the first step in a thrilling intellectual journey. A few weeks later, I managed to see “Origin” in a theate

Over the holidays, I made it a few times to an actual movie theater, and even though I saw some cool feature-length films, the thing I saw that made me feel the most excited and inspired was the trailer for “Origin”—Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction book, Caste: The Origin of our Discontents. The moment I almost started to cry is when Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is approached by a suave editor (Blair Underwood) who asks her, in a suave editor voice, “Are you interested in writing something for us?”—and then she replies, against a rippling piano and or