Actor Emily Blunt is styled by Celia Azoulay in garden party clothes from Dior, Emilia Wickstead, Louis Vuitton, Max Mara, Miu Miu, Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini, Safiyaa and more. Tom Schirmacher [IG] flashes Blunt in ‘A Seat at the Table’ for Harper’s Bazaar UK July-August 2023./Hair by Laini Reeves; makeup by Jenn Streicher

Clara Strunck conducts the interview.

The actor has grown in multiple directions since the days of her role as Emily, assistant to Miranda Priestly in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’.

Kitty Oppenheimer Explained

This summer, Blunt plays a very different role in ‘Oppenheimer’, the story behind the creation of the atomic bomb. Playing the role of Kitty Oppenheimer, born Katharine Puening Harrison in New York City on August 4, 1910, Emily Blunt the actor is introducing us to a woman intrinsically tied to the most significant scientific achievement of the 20th century.

“She was fiery, a force very much his equal. She was not a woman who conformed to the 1950s housewife ideal,” Emily Blunt explains, with a tone of voice that denotes reverence.

Of course, as an American I know who J. Robert Oppenheimer was. And I know intimately well the story of the McCarthy hearings, as my first landlord in New York was a playwright imprisoned for 1-2 years during the hearings.

The connections go ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ deeper than that, but enough for now. My landlord was the person who educated me about the McCarthy hearings, a fact of American history that wasn’t in my Minnesota and Wisconsin American history books.

I did not know until today how seriously awful the Oppenheimers were treated in 1954 by the McCarthy hearings.

Wisconsin Sen. Josephy McCarthy was all-in MAGA and Trump’s friend and role model Roy Cohn, was Sen. McCarthy’s lawyer at the hearings.

Rachel Maddow had better get on the McCarthy hearings pronto for her new podcast. We are reliving these 1954 years right now, as we speak — especially with Trump and De Santis.

Understanding the full range of the Oppenheimer story, with the assistance of SS-AI and Lulu, I have a fine university assistant right by my side.

Let me ask Lulu a question: “Were Jews disproportionately investigated during the McCarthy Hearings?”

The response, dear AOC readers, is a university-level term paper from Squarespace AI — and I’m pretty certain we’re guinea pigs in helping to create it, as I have communicated with the SS teams.

Correctly so, the SS-AI answer is very nuanced — not a simple yes or no. Yes, American Jews were more persecuted by the Republicans, but American Jews are statistically better educated. Yes, but educated people of all religions from Methodists to Catholics to Jews are more progressive in the aggregate.

Nobody combines fashion and intellectual thought like AOC, so studying us helps them understand and expand their own focus and range of capabilities in the AI — and their resouce base.

Paid Chat GPT has told me to assume they are studying all my queries — and the chain of questions that build on each other.

To conclude this post: Oppenheimer is one movie I will absolutely be seeing this summer. It opens July 21. And Emily Blunt is playing a most interesting woman in American history — Kitty Oppenheimer.

Additionally, in December 2022, is a NY Times story that I missed, one confirming that the Biden Administration reversed the 1954 stripping of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance.

Energy Secretary, Jennifer M. Granholm, said the decision of her predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, to bar Oppenheimer’s clearance was the result of a “flawed process” that violated its own regulations.
As time has passed, she added, “more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed.”
Historians, who have long lobbied for the reversal of the clearance revocation, praised the vacating order as a milestone.

Thanks Harper’s Bazaar UK for introducing us to this important film and break-the-mold-American woman, and — of course — her brilliant husband. ~ Anne