O ex-deputado Beto O’Rourke, candidato democrata ao Senado dos EUA, discursa em um comício em Austin, no Texas, que contou com a participação do cantor Willie Nelson, no dia 29 de setembro de 2018.
Foto: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP
Pouco antes da virada de ano, Steve Phillips, especialista do think tank progressista Center for American Progress (CAP), decidiu lançar um “Super PAC” (comitê de arrecadação de campanha) para apoiar a candidatura antecipada do senador Cory Booker à presidência dos EUA em 2020. O anúncio gerou preocupação no campo progressista em um momento de desconfiança do eleitorado com relação a grandes doações de campanha. E isso parece indicar que a ideologia está deixando de ser uma prioridade para os políticos democratas, o que é ainda mais grave.
Vou explicar.
O olhar de Phillips sobre a política é predominantemente identitário. Ele é o autor do livro “Brown is the New White” (“O Pardo é o Novo Branco”, em tradução livre), um best-seller sobre a importância de uma crescente população não branca para o sucesso do Partido Democrata. Phillips acredita que os democratas deveriam priorizar a mobilização de americanos não brancos que não costumam comparecer às urnas (o que também é importante fazer). Mas ele também diz que os progressistas não deveriam “desperdiçar dinheiro” com campanhas voltadas para aquela parte eleitorado branco sem uma tendência fixa de voto, desprezando a “ideia convencional” de que seria preciso “empatia com a angústia dos eleitores brancos moderados”. Segundo Phillips, o apoio do eleitorado branco teria um “teto”, e, por conta disso, tentar atrair essa parcela da sociedade seria um investimento com retornos decrescentes.
Como já sabemos, a estratégia identitária não deu certo nas eleições presidenciais de 2016. Se havia um “teto” de votos do eleitorado branco, estabelecido por Obama, Hillary não o alcançou – apenas 75% dos brancos que votaram no ex-presidente votaram nela. Se tivesse tido o mesmo sucesso de Obama junto ao eleitorado branco, Clinton teria vencido. Portanto, não faz sentido classificar de “desperdício” o fortalecimento da chamada “coalizão de Obama” (mobilização de eleitores brancos e não brancos que levou o democrata à presidência).
Embora se fale muito da “pardização” dos Estados Unidos, o país ainda é 70% branco, e adotar qualquer estratégia eleitoral que ignore essa população é colocar a si mesmo em desvantagem, e sem necessidade. A “pardização” dos EUA é atribuída em grande parte aos latinos, o grupo étnico que mais cresce no país. Mas a maioria dos latinos se identifica como branca, e um terço continua apoiando Donald Trump, apesar de sua retórica nacionalista e anti-imigração.
Os americanos precisam de uma motivação para comparecer às urnas. Eles querem sentir que seu voto faz diferença. Não basta ser anti-Trump. É preciso mobilizá-los com ideias.E, mesmo se os latinos não se considerassem brancos, a melanina não é garantia de voto democrata. Dos 4,3 milhões de eleitores de Obama que ficaram em casa ou votaram em outros candidatos em 2016, um terço eram negros. Portanto, não basta garantir o acesso de todos às listas de votação. Os americanos precisam de uma motivação para comparecer às urnas. Eles querem sentir que seu voto faz diferença. Não basta ser anti-Trump. É preciso mobilizá-los com ideias.
Apesar disso, depois de 2016, muitos democratas influentes se recusaram a compreender que a inércia ideológica de seu partido foi uma das causas da vitória de Trump. Boa parte deles, talvez por instinto de defesa, limitam-se a culpar a retórica intolerante do republicano e à interferência russa pela derrota. E essa tendência chegou a níveis absurdos recentemente.
No mês passado, três artigos foram publicados com críticas à atividade parlamentar do ex-deputado democrata Beto O’Rourke. Esse “ataque” dos grupos mais à esquerda do campo progressista, representada pelo senador Bernie Sanders, foi considerado injusto por muitos ativistas nas redes sociais, como a blogueira feminista Amanda Marcotte. Para ela, a popularidade daquele senador franco e reservado se deve a seu carisma, e não a suas ideias políticas. “Tudo indica que Sanders foi bem nas primárias não por causa de suas posições progressistas, mas porque os eleitores se sentiram atraídos por sua figura carismática de homem branco e outsider”, tuitou. Segundo Marcotte, já que ser carismático e branco bastou para Sanders conquistar o eleitorado, O’Rourke seria uma opção ainda melhor e mais jovem. “Beto tem muito mais chances do que Bernie em 2020”, escreveu.
O jornalista Jamil Smith também deixou as ideias de lado para explicar de forma simplista a popularidade de Sanders. “Boa parte do apoio de Bernie vem de homens brancos que não querem votar em uma mulher”, escreveu. Segundo ele, O’Rourke poderia ser o novo candidato desses eleitores.
Mas a verdade é que o eleitorado de Sanders é o menos preconceituoso contra negros, segundo uma pesquisa que comparou as tendências racistas dos eleitores em 2016 – fato que foi ignorado por grande parte da imprensa, apesar da ampla difusão da pesquisa na mídia. Sanders também conta com a maior taxa de aprovação entre não brancos de todos os possíveis candidatos à presidência em 2020. Ignorando o longo histórico de Sanders de combate ao racismo – de sua participação nos protestos pelos direitos dos negros nos anos 1960 ao seu projeto de reforma do sistema de fiança dos EUA –, Jamil Smith se baseia no fato de que 10% dos eleitores de Sanders votaram em Trump para associar sua popularidade ao racismo. Porém, em 2008, os eleitores de Hillary Clinton tinham 2,5 mais chances de votar em John McCain – um político que disse odiar gooks (termo pejorativo para asiáticos) – do que no primeiro presidente negro. Mas isso não costuma ser usado para acusar os partidários de Clinton de racismo.
Tanto o argumento de Smith quanto o de Marcotte – tão maliciosos que cheiram a manipulação – são um exemplo da tendência atual de dissociar as preferências do eleitorado da ideologia de seus candidatos. Proposital ou não, o resultado é o enfraquecimento do poder evidente que as ideias têm. Se a popularidade de Sanders for reduzida ao seu carisma pessoal, ele poderá ser facilmente substituído por um candidato mais jovem e cativante, porém mais favorável aos interesses do grande capital. Se o seu sucesso eleitoral for associado ao racismo e ao machismo, sua posição política poderá ser desconsiderada por não passar do fruto da árvore venenosa do preconceito, e outros candidatos com uma maior diversidade de seguidores poderão virar símbolos da luta contra o racismo – embora tenham uma atuação contrária aos interesses dos americanos de cor.
Como observou Peter Beinart em um artigo publicado recentemente na revista The Atlantic, “a melhor chance dos democratas que não querem purgar as grandes corporações do partido pode ser um candidato com ideias econômicas menos radicais e com amplo apoio do eleitorado negro e latino. Booker pode ser essa pessoa. Ou então Kamala Harris ou O’Rourke. É por isso que conflitos como o de Neera Tanden, do Center for American Progress, contra os partidários de Bernie Sanders devem se intensificar nos próximos 18 meses”, escreveu.
Os americanos concordam que o sistema está viciado, que as instituições não estão fazendo o que se espera delas, e que o sonho americano, já inacessível para muitos devido ao preconceito estrutural, está ficando cada vez mais inalcançável.Mas existe um porém: a maioria dos americanos quer de fato limitar a influência das grandes corporações.
Em um país cada vez mais polarizado, os americanos concordam que o sistema está viciado, que as instituições não estão fazendo o que se espera delas, e que o sonho americano, já inacessível para muitos devido ao preconceito estrutural, está ficando cada vez mais inalcançável – inclusive para homens brancos, o segmento da população mais beneficiado historicamente.
Eu diria que a grande divisão dos EUA nas eleições de 2020 não será entre vermelho e azul, Norte e Sul ou litoral e interior, e sim entre insider e outsider – ou, nas palavras da deputada democrata Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, entre os “de baixo” e os “de cima”. A popularidade de Trump e Sanders – e talvez a de Obama em 2008 – indica que a verdadeira maioria silenciosa do eleitorado americano é essa população aflita. Se os democratas a ignorarem, Trump vai continuar alimentando seus anseios com mais nacionalismo e intolerância. O Partido Democrata precisa falar mais claramente dos problemas desses americanos. A resposta para “eles estão tomando os nossos empregos” é o New Deal Verde, e não “os Estados Unidos já são grandes”.
Mas isso vai de encontro aos interesses de muitos militantes de ambos os partidos.
Organizações como a Third Way, um think tank centrista fundado em 2005 que defende políticas econômicas de centro-direita e políticas sociais de centro-esquerda, estão na vanguarda do combate às ideias como ferramenta de organização política. Em 2017, o grupo organizou uma viagem de ônibus através de 23 cidades – um verdadeiro safári pelo interior dos EUA – para coletar dados empíricos sobre as razões da vitória de Trump. A conclusão da Third Way foi que os eleitores queriam moderação e pragmatismo na política. Contudo, segundo Molly Ball, uma jornalista da The Atlantic que cobriu a iniciativa, não foi bem isso que as pessoas entrevistadas disseram. “Essas ideias centristas apenas perpetuam um sistema falido”, afirmou o dono de uma cafeteria do Wisconsin.
Recentemente, a Third Way afirmou no Twitter que as “ideias [de Sanders] foram esmagadas nas eleições de meio mandato”, que “os democratas devem dizer não” a critérios ideológicos na escolha de seus candidatos. Mais importante do que isso seria pertencer ou não ao Partido Democrata.
Na quinta-feira passada, a campanha anti-ideologia continuou com um editorial do “Washington Post” assinado por Terry McAuliffe, ex-governador da Virgínia, presidente do Comitê Nacional Democrata e ligado aos Clintons. Segundo ele, seguir o caminho do “populismo ideológico” é “jogar o jogo de Trump” enquanto os eleitores querem “soluções realistas”. Uma política federal de garantia de emprego, diz o ex-governador, “é boa demais para ser verdade”, assim como o acesso universal ao ensino superior gratuito. O “Medicare para Todos” de Sanders não foi sequer mencionado no artigo. McAuliffe preferiu falar em ampliar o Affordable Care Act, conhecido como Obamacare, e reduzir os preços dos medicamentos. Apesar disso, 70% dos americanos – inclusive pouco mais da metade dos eleitores republicanos – são a favor do “Medicare para Todos”, e 60% também apoiam a gratuidade do ensino universitário. Por fim, segundo uma pesquisa publicada em abril de 2018, quase metade dos americanos concorda com uma garantia federal de emprego.
O verdadeiro pragmatismo está nas ideias progressistas.Esses números indicam que o verdadeiro pragmatismo está nas ideias progressistas, e é isso que explica – muito mais do que o “carisma” de Sanders – por que tantos presidenciáveis como Cory Booker, Kamala Harris e a senadora Kirsten Gillibrand deram uma guinada à esquerda nos últimos anos. Os eleitores também têm consciência de que projetos políticos podem ser prejudicados por interesses econômicos, e talvez seja por isso que esses pré-candidatos se comprometeram a não receber doações de grandes empresas.
A ala de centro-esquerda do Partido Democrata também se recusa a enxergar essa realidade. Quando O’Rourke foi criticado por descumprir sua promessa de não receber doações de empresas do ramo de combustíveis fósseis e por votar com a maioria conservadora em pautas favoráveis aos interesses do setor –, esses questionamentos foram vistos como uma tentativa de preservar o lugar privilegiado de Sanders na vanguarda do campo progressista. Em vez de refletir sobre quais deveriam ser os valores do Partido Democrata, prefere-se a ideia míope de que a ambiguidade ideológica seria um trunfo eleitoral.
Mas são precisamente as ideias claras e ousadas que mobilizam os americanos. Vejamos o exemplo de Ocasio-Cortez, uma socialista cuja popularidade nas redes sociais é de fazer inveja a qualquer político. Durante as férias de fim de ano, O’Rourke, Gillibrand, Harris e a senadora Elizabeth Warren tentaram copiar o sucesso das live streams noturnas de Ocasio-Cortez, nas quais ela fala sobre política enquanto prepara o jantar. Mas nenhum deles conseguiu. O que esses políticos não entendem é que o segredo de Ocasio-Cortez não é o meio, e sim a mensagem.
Ocasio-Cortez sabe – mais do que muitos especialistas – que sua vitória e subsequente popularidade não podem ser atribuídas apenas ao seu carisma e a segmentos específicos da população. Em uma indireta no Twitter, ela deu a dica: “Algumas sugestões de temas para gerar audiência nas redes sociais: ‘Medicare para Todos’, ‘Wall Street deve pagar por seus erros’, ‘Salário mínimo digno’ (…), ‘Garantia federal de emprego’, ‘Perdão da dívida estudantil’, ‘Legalização da maconha’, ‘Compensação pela escravidão’, ‘Transferência de renda’”.
Ocasio-Cortez é uma verdadeira fábrica de bandeiras progressistas.Enquanto a Third Way critica o compromisso com causas ideológicas, Ocasio-Cortez é uma verdadeira fábrica de bandeiras progressistas. Ao falar abertamente sobre suas ideias no Instagram ou no Twitter, ela mostra transparência para um eleitorado habituado à prudência conservadora dos políticos tradicionais. Ela não está brincando de cozinhar na internet. Ela está mobilizando as pessoas.
Infelizmente, o Partido Democrata ainda não se deu conta disso.
Para muitos democratas, há pouca diferença entre Sanders e outros presidenciáveis como O’Rourke. Em uma entrevista recente para a NBC, Jon Favreau, ex-redator de discursos de Obama, descreveu O’Rourke, Sanders, Harris e outros candidatos em potencial como igualmente “progressistas”. A presidente do Center for American Progress, Neera Tanden, franze o cenho quando ouve que a ala ligada a Sanders representa uma corrente ideológica diferente da sua. “O que você está dizendo? Não é você que define quem é ou não progressista”, tuitou ela em resposta a um jornalista que afirmara que o CAP empurra o Partido Democrata para a direita.
Embora seja verdade que ninguém tem autoridade para determinar quem é progressista, essa palavra perde o sentido quando aplicada indiscriminadamente a um grupo de pessoas ideologicamente diverso – como fazem Tanden e Favreau.
Tanden, por exemplo, considera Hillary Clinton e Justin Trudeau como progressistas, apesar das políticas centristas do primeiro-ministro canadense e da relutância de Clinton em apoiar medidas como um sistema público de saúde e o salário mínimo de 15 dólares por hora. O CAP se identifica como “progressista”, mas nem a organização em si nem o presidente do conselho da instituição, o ex-líder da maioria democrata Tom Daschle, manifestaram apoio ao “Medicare para Todos” – embora Daschle tenha dito no passado que o financiamento público da saúde era “inevitável”. Daschle é lobista do setor de planos de saúde e pode ser nomeado para liderar uma campanha bipartidária financiada pela indústria farmacêutica contra o “Medicare para Todos”. Será essa a cara do progressismo?
Adam Serwer, jornalista da The Atlantic, tuitou recentemente, em referência a Beto O’Rourke: “Não é irracional nem superficial procurar um candidato cuja maior força não esteja nas suas ideias.”
Não, apoiar um candidato por motivos outros que não suas ideias – seus projetos políticos declarados – é superficial por definição. E também não é nada lógico, visto os benefícios eleitorais de ser autêntico e transparente. Esta é uma lição que temos que aprender logo. Já estamos em 2019, afinal.
Tradução: Bernardo Tonasse
The post Nos EUA, ideias perdem espaço para o personalismo no Partido Democrata appeared first on The Intercept.
Resolvi fazer um experimento. Com um navegador recém instalado, abri o YouTube e cliquei em um vídeo sobre as máquinas de forjamento de martelo mais rápidas e pesadas que existem. Deixei o sistema rodar mais 13 vídeos na sequência, assistindo aos vídeos, sem deixar likes ou fazer login. A ideia era ver quais eram as sugestões que o YouTube recomendava depois do primeiro.
Após passar por vídeos de halterofilismo, corte de árvores e muitos anúncios de ferramentas pesadas, equipamentos e carne para churrasco e outros, o YouTube me recomendou um vídeo sobre como fazer munição para uma arma semi-automática.
As recomendações e os anúncios, voltados para quem exalta o estilo de vida do Rambo, mostram que os algoritmos entenderam que, porque eu cliquei em um único vídeo de máquinas pesadas, eu sou homem e gosto de armas e churrasco.
Essas conexões que os algoritmos fizeram vêm dos dados que o YouTube analisou sobre meu comportamento no site e sobre os vídeos com os quais interagi, seja clicando sobre o vídeo, pausando, aumentando o volume ou até mexendo o mouse sobre as recomendações. Tudo é monitorado. As métricas que escolhem quais vídeos serão recomendados são baseadas, principalmente, na possibilidade de um vídeo ser assistido pelo usuário. Ela faz parte de um mecanismo sofisticado de inteligência que tem um objetivo principal: fazer com que você passe o máximo de tempo possível no YouTube.
Como conteúdos extremistas naturalmente chamam mais atenção, a plataforma cria uma bolha conectando vídeos bizarros. Assim, usuários mergulham cada vez mais fundo num assunto. Não por acaso, da fabricação de martelos eu fui levada pelo algoritmo para um vídeo sobre munição e armas em apenas 13 passos. A mesma coisa acontece com vídeos relacionados à política.
Recomendação ao extremoEm 2015, os usuários do YouTube subiam 400 horas de vídeo por minuto. A maior parte desse conteúdo é criada de forma amadora. No site, usuários de todo o mundo gastam mais de um bilhão de horas assistindo a vídeos todos os dias.
Apesar de ter um serviço de assinaturas, o YouTube Premium, o serviço ganha dinheiro mesmo é com anúncios. Para sustentar a infraestrutura necessária – e garantir que o modelo continue crescendo – o site precisa ser gigante. Como na velha TV aberta, quanto mais pessoas assistindo a um programa, mais gente vê os comerciais durante os intervalos.
Para manter o interesse das pessoas nos canais – e garantir que elas sejam expostas a mais e mais anúncios –, a plataforma usa algoritmos para organizar o conteúdo e circular vídeos novos, gerando uma demanda diária por novo material. Esses algoritmos usam uma combinação de dados para recomendar vídeos que visam, literalmente, prender e viciar as pessoas.
Quando o sistema de recomendações foi lançado, em 2010, ele deu resultados imediatos: começou a ser responsável por 60% dos cliques dos usuários, segundo artigo científico escrito pelos cientistas do Google no mesmo ano.
Em 2015, com a liderança do time Google Brain, a empresa começou usar aprendizado de máquina – conhecido em inglês como machine learning – para melhorar o sistema de recomendações. Em 2017, o YouTube começou a rodar tudo sobre uma sofisticada plataforma de inteligência artificial, o Tensorflow.
Estava completa a transição para um sistema que aprende sem ser “supervisionado” por humanos – tecnologia também chamada de unsupervised deep learning, ou aprendizado profundo sem supervisão. Esses algoritmos escolhem quais vídeos vão para a barra de recomendados, quais aparecem na busca, qual vídeo toca a seguir quando no modo reprodução automática (o autoplay) e também montam a homepage dos usuários no YouTube. Sim, cada vez que você abre sua home ela está diferente. Ela foi customizada pelas máquinas para que você assista mais e mais vídeos.
Para tomar as decisões por você, os algoritmos associam significados que eles mesmos aprendem em etapas, de modo a filtrar e combinar categorias para chegar em um conjunto de vídeos ou anúncios para recomendar. Primeiro, dão um significado para um vídeo segundo suas características. Depois, combinam esse significado com mais dados, como por exemplo a quantidade de horas que um usuário gasta assistindo determinados vídeos com significados semelhantes. As categorias vão sendo combinadas pelos algoritmos para encontrar as recomendações que o usuário tem mais possibilidade de clicar e assistir:
O site gera essas recomendações a partir das suas interações, nas informações dos vídeos e nos dados dos usuários. Isso engloba tudo que você faz no navegador: parar o vídeo, colocar o mouse por cima de determinada imagem, aumentar ou diminuir o volume, quais abas você está navegando quando está vendo vídeos, com quem você interage nos comentários e que tipo de comentários faz, se deu like ou dislike e até mesmo a taxa de cliques em recomendações etc.
Gráficos mostram a arquitetura do sistema de recomendação demonstra o ‘funil’ que classifica os vídeos para o usuário.
Como a interação não é só baseada em likes, o YouTube valoriza também os comentários, atribuindo valores de positivo e negativo às conversas. Por causa disso, o feedback do usuário sobre o vídeo é avaliado e pesa na fórmula que calcula a possibilidade da pessoa assistir aos outros vídeos. Mesmo sem dar like, você entrega os seus dados e tem sua interação monitorada o tempo todo.
Os autores dos vídeos sabem muito bem como funciona essa lógica. Os anunciantes também. Os youtubers têm à sua disposição a plataforma para criadores do YouTube, o YouTube Studio, que fornece métricas e informações sobre a audiência. Assim, existe um incentivo para os produtores fazerem vídeos cada vez mais extremos e bizarros para prender a audiência o máximo possível. Isso explica um pouco a obsessão da internet pela banheira de Nutella, e também ajuda a entender como se elegeram tantos youtubers interconectados nas últimas eleições.
Como conteúdo radical dá dinheiro, por conta dos anúncios, extremistas usam também outras ferramentas para incentivar a formação de bolhas e atrair cada vez mais gente. No Brasil, donos de canais de conteúdo extremo e conspiratório, como a Joice Hasselmann, por exemplo, costumam divulgar seu número do WhatsApp, viciando as pessoas em seus conteúdos com base na exploração dessa relação de proximidade ou intimidade.
Redes de extrema-direitaEnquanto o Google terminava a transição da sua tecnologia no YouTube, surgiram denúncias sobre como vídeos de conteúdo extremo começaram a ganhar audiência na plataforma – muitos deles, inclusive, recomendados a crianças. Em 2017, pesquisadores descobriram uma rede de produtores de conteúdo que fazia vídeos com conteúdo bizarro para crianças: afogamentos, pessoas enterradas vivas e outros tipos de violência eram empacotados com música e personagens infantis.
Alguns pesquisadores, como a americana Zeynep Tufekci, escreveram sobre como o YouTube estava lhe recomendando conteúdos da extrema direita americana após ela ter visto um único vídeo de Donald Trump. No Brasil não é diferente. Basta assistir a um vídeo de extrema direita que as recomendações vão garantir que você se aprofunde cada vez mais no ódio:
Vídeo de Kim Kataguri “puxando” o fio de outros vídeos extremistas, com direito a anúncio do Trump e tudo.
Foto: Reprodução/YouTube
A radicalização acontece muito mais à direita do que à esquerda. Primeiro porque os produtores de conteúdo conservadores souberam bem agregar pautas polêmicas e teorias conspiratórias que já faziam sucesso na internet, como o criacionismo. Além disso, há uma coerência em suas pautas – os assuntos em comum ajudam a alavancar a audiência de forma mútua. Já a esquerda, além de ter uma pauta mais fragmentada que nem sempre se conversa – há o feminismo, a luta antirracista, os marxistas etc –, não conseguiu surfar a onda das polêmicas de internet.
Guillaume Chaslot, que é ex-funcionário do Google e hoje trabalha em uma fundação para a transparência de algoritmos, tem argumentado desde 2016 que a plataforma de recomendações do YouTube foi decisiva nas eleições de Trump, espalhando notícias falsas e teorias da conspiração. Segundo ele, o algoritmo vendido como neutro pelo Google ajudou a garantir audiência para vários vídeos conspiratórios, como um em que Yoko Ono supostamente admitiria ter tido um caso com Hillary Clinton nos anos 1970 e outro sobre uma falsa rede de pedofilia operada pelos Clinton.
O impacto desse tipo de conteúdo, porém, não é fácil de ser medido – a fórmula dos algoritmos é mantida em segredo pela empresa, ou seja, não dá para saber exatamente quais são os critérios que determinam o peso de cada característica no processo de decisão sobre qual vídeo indicar.
Esse sistema cria uma rede interligada – que, em conjunto, fica mais poderosa. Analisando mais de 13 mil canais de extrema direita no YouTube, Jonas Kaiser, pesquisador do Berkman Klein Center de Harvard, percebeu que elas estão conectadas internacionalmente dentro do YouTube, especialmente por conta do compartilhamento de vídeos com idéias extremistas. É uma rede fértil para circular a ideia de que políticas afirmativas para negros são parte de uma conspiração para acabar com a raça branca ocidental, por exemplo, o delírio de que vacinas são parte de um plano para acabar com determinadas populações em um experimento ou até a história de que as eleições brasileiras estariam em risco por uma suposta fraude nas urnas eletrônicas.
Os dados levantados por Kaiser mostram que o esquema de recomendação do YouTube “conecta diversos canais que poderiam estar mais isolados sem a influência do algoritmo, ajudando a unir a extrema direita”, ele escreve.
‘A plataforma de recomendações do YouTube foi decisiva nas eleições de Trump, espalhando notícias falsas e teorias da conspiração.’Não é por acaso que o teor conspiratório dos vídeos dos EUA é bem parecido com as redes de outros países: quase sempre envolve vacinas, terraplanismo, pedofilia e uma suposta organização internacional de esquerda sedenta por tomar o poder.
No Brasil, o cenário não é muito diferente. Temos a nossa própria rede de influenciadores de extrema direita, catapultados para a fama com a ajuda do algoritmo do YouTube. Nando Moura, com quase três milhões de seguidores, já fez vídeos defendendo a existência da cura gay. Outro influenciador, Diego Rox, defende para seus quase um milhão de seguidores a existência da Ursal. Todos recomendados por Jair Bolsonaro, que se beneficia da popularização de teorias conspiratórias de extrema direita.
Recentemente o Google reconheceu o problema. A empresa disse que passaria a sinalizar vídeos que espalhassem desinformação e exibiria, junto com eles, conteúdo da Wikipedia, em uma medida que pareceu um pouco desesperada. E não ataca a raiz do problema: seu modelo exploratório de negócios, uma herança da televisão.
A verdade é que o YouTube é um grande laboratório de machine learning, onde os seres humanos são as cobaias. Resta saber qual é o real impacto do experimento no exercício da liberdade de escolha e expressão. O problema é que eu desconfio que algo não está dando muito certo.
The post Como o YouTube se tornou um celeiro da nova direita radical appeared first on The Intercept.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, right. and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer pose for photographs after delivering a televised response to President Donald Trump’s national address about border security at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 8, 2019.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Pool/AP
Last night was yet another example of the Democratic Party’s glistening ineptitude.
President Donald Trump’s border wall speech, once he’d backed off the “national emergency” idea, was anticipated to be little more than a concentrated primetime dose of xenophobic hysteria. He didn’t disappoint.
In under 10 minutes, he set up a clear, if familiar, argument: There is a crisis at the border. It threatens American security and depresses wages. The drugs brought across the border kill hundreds of Americans each week, and the immigrants themselves have committed thousands of crimes. All are equally guilty — children are merely “pawns,” not people. The wall will stop this tragedy, and the only thing preventing the wall from going up is Democrats, who opportunistically supported a barrier prior to Trump’s presidency, but object to it now in bad faith.
Trump’s spiel, as is typical of the president, was a jumble of half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies. And anticipating that, the Democratic leadership, in the form of Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, made Trump’s dishonesty and hatefulness the theme of their response.
“Much of what we have heard from President Trump throughout this senseless shutdown has been full of misinformation and even malice,” opened Pelosi, awkwardly standing next to a glaring Schumer.
Pelosi seems to have thought more about alliteration than what pitch would effectively challenge the inaccurate but narratively satisfying story the president had just told.But Pelosi seems to have thought more about alliteration than what pitch would effectively challenge the inaccurate but narratively satisfying story the president had just told.
The emphasis through both leaders’ remarks circled around a central theme: The crisis isn’t real. It’s manufactured. Trump is like a child throwing a “temper tantrum,” and he’s failing to respond to a “humanitarian crisis.”
But that message rang somewhat hollow after Trump’s visceral Boschian portrait. Trump’s speech was filled with lies, but it also identified real problems: Public resources are strained — not because of immigrants, but because of the austere policies of political leaders whose primary purpose is to shrink the size of government and the social welfare programs it supports. Resources are scarce — not because of immigrants, but because historically high wealth disparities mean less profit is reaching the workers who created it. Wages are being driven down — not because of immigrants, but because Republicans, occasionally joined by Democrats, launched a decades-long battle against unions, driving membership down from a high of 35 percent in the mid-1950s, to just under 11 percent today. And what Trump said about who is hurting most is true: “Among the hardest hit are African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans.”
Where Pelosi argued that the families crossing the border “are not a security threat,” but “a humanitarian challenge,” Trump had already pre-empted the attempt to paint him as an cold-hearted tyrant by admitting in his opening line that “there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.”
Democrats, focused on “fact-checking” Trump’s many lies and inaccuracies, failed to acknowledge the truths that resonate more with some Americans than bloviating about barriers on the border. (H/T Pelosi). An opioid crisis does kill thousands of Americans each year. More Americans did die from drugs last year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.
And Democrats have supported barriers at the border in the past, which does make it easy to cast today’s resistance as a cynical political ploy.
Trump’s rhetoric, if not his stilted delivery, was successful at animating the harms he attributes to immigrants. He spoke of “ruthless gangs” and “the cycle of human suffering” and the “tragic reality of illegal immigration.” He repeatedly evoked a “crisis,” and his speech put a face on the victims: “America’s heart broke the day after Christmas when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien, who just came across the border. The life of an American hero was stolen by someone who had no right to be in our country,” he said.
Of course, immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans, and Trump’s fear-mongering is baseless and cruel. But the response from Democratic leadership? One mention of “800,000 innocent workers across the nation — many of them veterans.”
If it seems like I’m being unfair, consider this: Between Pelosi and Schumer, Democrats made only one mention of those who should have been the protagonists of their story — the workers who are being hurt by the government shutdown. And the mention made was antiseptic.
The only color — an unsubtle pander to veterans — failed to make vivid the reality of hundreds of thousands of families going without a paycheck this winter.
“The president has chosen fear. We want to start with the facts,” intoned Pelosi, leaning again on alliteration over substance.
As underwhelming as the Democratic Party’s official response was, it was hardly a failure. Trump has backed himself into such a corner that it would be difficult to do real harm to the party’s position. But what ended up a non-event could have advanced the political ball in the Democrats’ favor, as evidenced by the responses of Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Sanders’s opening salvo? “As we speak, some 800,000 federal employees, people who are our neighbors, friends, and family members are going without pay. As working people, many of them are wondering how they will pay their mortgages, how they will feed their kids, and how they’ll be able to go to the doctor. These are people in the FBI, in the TSA, in the State Department, in the Treasury Department, and other agencies who have, in some cases, worked for the government for years.” He went on to quote a federal employee — giving literal voice to real-world concerns in the context of what has become an attenuated political battle: “I am a single mom and a federal employee, I have $100 to last me — and my vehicle payments will not be made this month. I live paycheck to paycheck, and I can’t get a side job because I still have to go to my unpaid federal job.”
Sanders packed more visceral humanity in the first minute or so of his remarks than in the entirety of Pelosi and Schumer’s response.“Our federal employees deserve to be treated with respect,” elaborated Sanders, “not held hostage as political pawns.”
Sanders packed more visceral humanity in the first minute or so of his remarks than in the entirety of Pelosi and Schumer’s response. In Sanders’s world, those affected aren’t just “federal employees.” They are our intimates — the people who comprise our families and communities.
In fairness to Pelosi, whose net worth is nearly $30 million, framing government employees this way likely required more of an imaginative leap than it did for Sanders, one of the poorer members of Congress. But there is no excuse for impotently resorting to right-wing virtue-signaling about “veterans,” when many of the women and men affected by the government shutdown are literally charged with protecting this country — something they continue to do despite not being paid — something which, ostensibly, is Trump’s goal in securing funding for the border wall. In one sentence, Sanders not only humanized the victims, he revealed the hypocrisy of Trump’s actions.
And perhaps most importantly, he validated that there is, in fact, a crisis afoot: one created by Trump, as well as several produced by structural forces the political class has long ignored.
And perhaps most importantly, he validated that there is, in fact, a crisis afoot: one created by Trump, as well as several produced by structural forces the political class has long ignored.“President Trump, you want to talk about crises? At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, tens of millions of workers in our country are earning starvation wages and are unable to adequately provide for their families. You want a national emergency? Thirty million Americans have no health insurance and many more are underinsured.”
“Millions of Americans including the disabled, the children, and the elderly may not be able to get the food stamps they need to eat. Pregnant mothers and their babies may go without the nutrition assistance they need to stay healthy, as the WIC program is on the verge of running out of money. Small businesses and farmers will not be able to receive the financial assistance they need — and some may go out of business. Security at our nation’s airports could be threatened if TSA employees and air traffic controllers are not getting paid. People who are buying or selling their homes may see significant delay because the Federal Housing Administration is unable to process and approve mortgage applications.”
Rather than spend too much time picking apart factual inaccuracies, Sanders challenged Trump’s narrative with a more powerful one: Yes, Americans are in trouble, but there’s only one person to blame for the current impasse.
“Let me be as clear as I can be,” said Sanders, “this shutdown should never have happened.”
In their remarks, Pelosi and Schumer delved into the politics that preceded the shutdown, but in a way that read as opaque and jargony. “On the very first day of this Congress, House Democrats passed Senate Republican legislation to reopen government and fund smart, effective border security solutions. But the president is rejecting these bipartisan bills which would reopen government.” Did you follow that? Because I didn’t when listening live. “Democrats passed Senate Republican legislation?” It’s a classic writing mistake: In an effort to be concise, Pelosi sacrificed clarity.
Sanders, meanwhile, was an effective communicator: “As many of you will recall, on December 18, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to keep the government open. Unanimously. No Democrat or Republican opposed the bill that passed the Senate.” The explanation was plain, and the takeaway repeated for emphasis: “unanimously.”
And most importantly, Sanders used Trump’s admission that the shutdown was his own fault against him: “President Trump has made it very clear who is responsible. As you will all recall in a very public meeting he held in the Oval Office, he said, and I quote, “I am proud to shut down the government … I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you [Chuck Schumer] for it.”
That both Schumer and Pelosi got through their remarks — the eyes of millions of Americans on them — without once quoting that language back to the president is in and of itself an act of mind-blowing political negligence.
The temptation to fact-check is understandable. And a certain amount of fact-checking is necessary to keep Trump accountable. But poking holes in Trump’s narrative, by itself, is not enough.Sanders addressed Mitch McConnell directly, asking that the Senate majority leader respect the bipartisan consensus coming out of the House and bring the Democrats’ identical Senate bill to a vote; and he deftly used the statements of Trump’s own agencies against him — appealing to the authority of “Trump’s own State Department” and “Trump’s own Drug Enforcement Administration” to undermine some of the president’s lies about the connection between border crossings and terrorism or the drug crisis.
And he wisely emphasized those immigration-related policies that draw substantial bipartisan consensus — like the DACA program, which Trump has threatened, and Trump’s policy of separating children at the border. (It goes without saying that Schumer and Pelosi mentioned neither. They never even mentioned the appalling cost of the wall: $70 billion. Sanders did).
But perhaps more stunning than Sanders’s performance was that of Ocasio-Cortez, who in a few short minutes on Rachel Maddow’s show was able to undermine Trump’s narrative by appealing not just to the humanity of native-born Americans, but by speaking to the inherent dignity and value of immigrants themselves.
“[Trump] talked about what happened the day after Christmas? The day of Christmas, a child died in ICE custody,” she emphasized with a level of authentic passion that feels strangely out of place on the evening news (but shouldn’t). It wasn’t the fact-checking that went viral. It was this simple claim to human decency.
And this is an important point: The temptation to fact-check is understandable. And a certain amount of fact-checking is necessary to keep Trump accountable. But poking holes in Trump’s narrative, by itself, is not enough.
There is enough truth in Trump’s description of the struggles Americans face that it can’t be refuted with claims that he didn’t get the story exactly right. The narrative threads that represent accurate claims about the problems of everyday Americans need to be spun into something more authentic than what Trump is offering — a story that respects the victims, but points to an enemy with actual teeth. A compelling counter-narrative: Immigrants didn’t cause the opioid epidemic, the pharmaceutical industry did. Immigrants didn’t depress wages — politicians doing the bidding of concentrated corporate power did.
Trump cannot be allowed to make himself the face of compassion for average Americans — not even Republicans. To prevent that from happening, the Democratic Party needs representatives who bear some relationship to ordinary people — not the well-preserved totems to the anti-aging powers of wealth that spawned a thousand memes last night.
Both Trump on the one hand, and Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders on the other, identified several crises, but perhaps the most exigent is the crisis of leadership. It’s either time for Democrats to learn, or it’s time for them to change the guard.
The post What’s The Matter With the Democratic Party? Just Watch Pelosi and Schumer Respond to Trump’s Wall Speech. appeared first on The Intercept.
Cyntoia Brown sits between council during her clemency hearing at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville, Tenn., May 23, 2018.
Photo: Lacy Atkins/The Tennessean/AP
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam this week granted clemency to Cyntoia Brown. After serving 15 years of a 51-year murder sentence for killing a man in self-defense, Brown, now 30, will be released to parole supervision in August. Haslam’s decision offers necessary relief, but this should not be confused with justice.
In 2004, 16-year-old Brown was in an abusive relationship with a man who forced her to sell sex. On an August night, she was picked up by a john who took her to his home, assaulted her, and threatened her life, while showing her his multiple guns. In self-defense, Brown shot the 43-year-old white man and fled with money and two guns. She was tried as an adult, convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated robbery, and sentenced to life.
Brown’s case, even her clemency, reminds us of who gets to stand their ground — and who does not.Following tireless work by Black Lives Matter and other activists in Nashville, Brown’s case made headlines in 2017 after it garnered the attention and advocacy of celebrities, including Rihanna and Kim Kardashian West. As such, Brown’s release is a testament to the importance of mass public pressure. But much of the support for Brown, and the framing of the clemency itself, focused on her position as a child victim of sex trafficking. While understandable as a narrative that earns public sympathy, it misses the possibility that Brown’s alleged offenses be seen as justified acts of self-defense and survival, which needn’t be predicated on her position as a teenager or a victim of coerced sex trade. Her acts of self-defense would have been valid had she been an adult and engaged in the sex trade consensually. Brown’s case, even her clemency, reminds us of who gets to stand their ground — and who does not.
Haslam’s welcome commutation announcement recognized that Brown’s case is “tragic and complex,” but in no way gave credence to the possibility that she acted in justifiable self-defense. “Cyntoia Brown committed, by her own admission, a horrific crime at the age of 16,” the Republican governor said on Monday. “Yet, imposing a life sentence on a juvenile that would require her to serve at least 51 years before even being eligible for parole consideration is too harsh, especially in light of the extraordinary steps Ms. Brown has taken to rebuild her life.” The suggestion, then, is not that the conviction was wrong, but the sentence too harsh given Brown’s age at the time and that while incarcerated, Brown has proven herself worthy.
Rallying for her freedom, Brown’s supporters argued that she has been a model for incarcerated people: She has earned an associate’s degree, is working toward her bachelor’s degree, and works with a program to counsel at-risk young people in Tennessee. All of that is impressive, but none of it would need to be relevant had a life like Brown’s been considered worthy of self-defense in the first place. Tennessee is a “stand-your-ground” state, in which under law a person does not have to retreat in order to use force to defend themselves. Yet the de facto application of self-defense legislation nationwide consistently fails to protect people of color, especially those in the sex trade (whether coerced, as in Brown’s case, or not).
The travesty is not (only) that Brown was so young, but that lives like hers are systematically treated as unworthy of defense.A 2013 paper from the Urban Institute that analyzed FBI data found that in stand-your-ground states, the use of the defense by white people in the shooting of a black person is found to be justifiable 17 percent of the time, while the defense when used by a black person in the shooting of a white person is successful 1 percent of the time. These are infirm laws, which serve to legitimize racist fear; just look at George Zimmerman’s successful defense of his execution of the black teenager Trayvon Martin. Stand-your-ground defenses are also denied if the allegedly defensive force is used in the context of committing a crime; as such, there is no hope that such laws will ever fairly deliver the right to self-defense for women in the sex trade, forced by coercion or the need for survival, into illegal work. The travesty is not (only) that Brown was so young, but that lives like hers are systematically treated as unworthy of defense.
“If you look at Cyntoia’s original transcripts, they are peppered with the phrase ‘teen prostitute,’” Derri Smith, founder and CEO of nonprofit End Slavery Tennessee, told CNN. “Well we know today there’s no such thing as a teen prostitute.” As a point of law, Smith is right: All underage sex workers are defined as trafficking victims. But, once again, we shouldn’t hypothetically re-litigate Brown’s right to self-defense on the condition that she was a child trafficking victim rather than an adult prostitute; the former position should not be the only grounds for justified survival.
As social justice organizers and educators Mariame Kaba and Brit Schulte wrote of Brown’s case for The Appeal in 2017, we shouldn’t need to narrativize survivors as “perfect victims” in order to demand justice. “She has her own story to tell, but by portraying her as a victim without agency, some of Cyntoia’s advocates make it more difficult for her story of self-defense, her fight to survive, and her resistance to violence to be respected,” Kaba and Schulte wrote. “We need to find a way to describe all of her realities — both as a survivor of violence with the right to defend herself, and as a young woman who was doing her best to survive.”
In their excellent new book, “Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights,” writers and sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith highlight numerous cases in which both coerced and consenting individuals in the sex trade have faced harsh sentences for defending themselves against abusive clients. They highlight the cases of consenting sex workers like GiGi Thomas, a black transgender woman, and Alisha Walker, a black cisgender woman, who have each been “brutally punished for desperate, panicked acts of self-defense, for the preservation of their own lives.” Walker is serving 15 years for killing a client who came at her with a knife; Thomas currently faces murder charges in an ongoing case. As Smith and Mac note, “The criminalization of prostitution robbed them of their right to safety, and the treatment of black and trans women in the US ‘criminal justice’ system — a system never built to deliver justice for women like GiGi and Alisha — robbed them of their right to self defense and their right to freedom.”
I’m not attempting to equate Brown’s case with that of Walker’s or Thomas’s or any other survivor. Nor am I diminishing the difference between consensual and coerced sex work, as anti-trafficking narratives are wont to do. I have written elsewhere, alongside numerous sex workers and activists, that criminalization of the sex industry only furthers the likelihood that sex workers — working to survive — will end up in dangerous, exploited, coerced, and potentially deadly circumstances. The injustice of Brown’s incarceration was not solely located in the fact of harshly punishing a child who had been forced into sex work. Brown’s life was per se worthy of defense and preservation, and so too are those of Walker and Thomas and so many others deemed marginal and disposable by our carceral state. If a victim and survivor like Brown must ask for mercy in the absence of justice, we have a long way to go.
The post Cyntoia Brown’s Freedom Is a Reminder That All Sex Workers Have a Right to Self-Defense appeared first on The Intercept.
The Defense Department has quietly halted its practice of issuing detailed “strike releases,” periodic reports that provided information about bombings targeting Islamic State fighters, buildings, and equipment in Iraq and Syria.
The change comes as the U.S. military has ramped up its bombing offensive against ISIS in eastern Syria following President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement of a troop withdrawal last month. While many of the U.S.-led coalition’s actions against ISIS were shrouded in secrecy, the strike releases, which the military has been issuing since the start of the campaign against ISIS in 2014, were valuable tools for watchdogs that work to corroborate reports of civilian casualties.
“The only claim I’ve seen publicly made is that with ISIS almost beat, there’s less need for detailed releases,” said Chris Woods, the founder of Airwars, a London-based nonprofit that monitors and assesses civilian harm from bombing campaigns in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. “Yet both strikes and civilian harm are at their highest levels since Raqqa. Reducing transparency is entirely counterproductive in our view.”
In a note appended to the top of its January 4 strike release, the Defense Department announced that strike releases would be cut from weekly to biweekly. The subtext of the announcement is that even with biweekly releases, transparency about the bombings, including the dates of specific strikes and the buildings or groups targeted, has become the latest collateral damage.
Between December 16 and December 29, 2018, the coalition against ISIS “conducted 469 strikes consisting of 1,001 engagements in Syria, and conducted nine strikes consisting of 14 engagements in Iraq,” the strike release read. No dates were provided and targets were so vaguely described (“fighting positions,” “seven buildings”) that researching specific bombings is nearly impossible.
Previous strike releases, such as this one from December 19, 2018, provided specific information, including dates, cities, and towns affected, and specific targets.
In announcing the policy change, the U.S. military said frequent strike releases were not necessary due to “the degradation of ISIS” and “decreased kinetic activities against the terrorist organization.”
But this explanation doesn’t match the reality on the ground; though ISIS has lost much of its territory, the group continues to fight back in the sliver of Syria that remains under its control. On Tuesday, a suicide bombing by ISIS killed nine of the group’s militants and 23 members of the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led group leading the charge against ISIS on the ground.
The military’s rationale for curbing strike releases also contradicts statements by its own officials. In a January 3 statement provided to The Intercept, the Defense Department acknowledged an “increase in strikes in late December” targeting ISIS in eastern Syria. The Defense Department did not respond to questions about changes to strike releases. Instead, Defense Department officials on Tuesday provided a statement that again acknowledged the increased strikes in December against ISIS. “We will continue in our mission until we and our partners have achieved an enduring defeat of ISIS,” the statement read.
Before and after Trump’s announcement to withdraw 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria — which will now apparently be a slow exit — the Defense Department quickly escalated its bombing campaigns in the country. In a report released last week, Airwars found that coalition bombings in November 2018 led to the highest civilian death toll since ISIS lost control of its former de facto capital, Raqqa, in October 2017. At least 221 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed in the November 2018 bombings, according to Airwars. Reports indicated that 30 children were killed in the village of Al Shafah, an incident that the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund condemned. Since August 2014, at least 7,000 civilians in Syria and Iraq have been killed in U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, according to Airwars.
The ferocity of the bombings in Syria appears to have increased further in December, particularly in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, where ISIS fighters have clustered in a string of towns and villages along the Euphrates River, near the border with Iraq. Those December airstrikes targeted civilian buildings, including a hospital and a prison, as The Intercept and Al Jazeera reported last month.
In the final week of 2018, the bombing campaign relentlessly attacked Al Kashmah, leaving the village leveled by New Year’s Day, according to sources on the ground. The extent of the bombing campaign in Al Kashmash and nearby ISIS-controlled villages — now crowded with civilians who have fled bombed-out towns and villages farther north along the Euphrates — is unclear due to the new lack of detail in the U.S. military’s strike releases.
Strike releases have been critical for monitoring groups tracking U.S.-led coalition bombings in Syria and Iraq, allowing these groups to match official information about bombings with civilian reports on the ground. Airwars described the change to strike releases as “a major blow for public accountability.”
“Since August 2014, the U.S.-led coalition has made public the date, near location, and targets of more than 30,000 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria. That information has been vital for cross-referencing against public claims of civilian harm — and has contributed to more than 1,100 civilian fatalities being conceded to date by the coalition,” said Woods of Airwars. “Abandoning transparency of location and date even at this late stage of the war means Iraqis and Syrians are now far less likely to know whether the U.S. and its allies have potentially harmed their loved ones.”
As strike releases become increasingly thin, the bombings in Deir al-Zour are ongoing, with ISIS fighters being pushed south toward the Iraq border.
U.S. planes this week dropped leaflets into the remaining ISIS-controlled villages, encouraging surrender. The Intercept obtained a photo of one such leaflet, which shows the black ISIS flag in flames. On one side, it reads in Arabic: “Your war is nearing the end, and your organization’s loss is certain. Surrender yourselves to the liberating forces and don’t fight. Your cooperation with these forces is the best outcome for you and your families.”
On the other side, it says in English, using a pejorative term for ISIS: “You are trapped in the your (sic) areas. There is no safe way out for you. Daesh is finished and do you trust your Syrian brothers?”
The post Defense Department Abruptly Stopped Releasing Key Details on Strikes in War Against ISIS appeared first on The Intercept.
BERLIN—On the Wednesday before Christmas, Christoph Scheuermann apprehensively called up a 99-year-old former member of the anti-Nazi resistance who had been imprisoned during World War II. The Washington bureau chief of Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, needed to ask her a question no journalist wants to reckon with: Did his colleague, a now-disgraced star reporter, invent an interview with her?
“It was the most excruciating call,” Scheuermann told me. “I had to call this heroine in Germany after the war and ask her, you know, do you know this man, have you ever met him?”
Spiegel—and the German media world writ large—is still reeling from German journalism’s biggest scandal in its modern history: Claas Relotius, a 33-year-old Spiegel writer who was long the envy of his peers, fabricated part or all of many of his biggest stories. His perfectly crafted articles from the United States and elsewhere were, it has become clear, literally too good to be true.
[Jamie Kirchik: Germany’s leading magazine published falsehoods about American life]
The Relotius incident has prompted self-reflection among German journalists: Spiegel is considered the gold standard among media organizations here, with a prestige that extends far beyond Germany and a supposedly airtight fact-checking department. One of Europe’s leading news magazines and known for its investigative journalism, Spiegel also translates many of its articles into English to reach a broader international audience.
So if a scandal like this can happen at Spiegel, many have wondered, what does that mean for everyone else? And what kinds of questions does Relotius—whose evocative prose was so admired that Spiegel editors called it the “Relotius sound”—raise about the merits and pitfalls of narrative journalism and foreign correspondence more broadly?
Spiegel isn’t the first high-profile news organization with a staffer who partially or fully made up stories: Over the past two decades, The New York Times, The New Republic, and USA Today, among others, have faced similar challenges to their credibility. But Spiegel’s reckoning comes at a time when trust in media is perilously low—and it presents a case study for how a news organization attempts the tall task of regaining reader trust in the age of so-called fake news.
The German outlet broke the news of the scandal itself on December 19. In a more than 6,000-word exposé, the since-suspended editor in chief, Ullrich Fichtner, outlined the scope and range of Relotius’s fabrications as well as how a colleague had discovered them. “These revelations come as a deep shock to everyone at Der Spiegel—the editorial staff, the research and fact-checking department, the business side and everyone who works here,” he wrote. “We are all deeply shaken.”
The next day, Scheuermann found himself on a plane to Fergus Falls, Minnesota, the setting for some of Relotius’s most elaborate lies. Relotius had spent more than five weeks living there for a feature story on a small town in Donald Trump’s America; in the wake of the scandal, two local activists, Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, offered a point-by-point rebuttal of Relotius’s inaccuracies.
Many of the Spiegel journalist’s falsehoods, including those from Fergus Falls, exploited stereotypes of Trump voters as backwards, provincial, and ignorant. His dispatch from Minnesota included characters and details such as a gun-toting city administrator who had never seen the ocean, a sign in town reading Mexicans Keep Out, and a local movie theater that continued to play the movie American Sniper years after its release. (None of these things turned out to be true.)
[Read: Why Europeans turned against Trump]
Fergus Falls was “one of the places where you can really see, hear, and smell what impact a lie and fabrication can have on a small community,” Scheuermann told me.
His job there was twofold, as the resulting article demonstrated: to tell the real story of a town that had been completely mischaracterized and felt wronged in the eyes of the international community, yes, but also to apologize for the damage his organization had done. When he sat down with Anderson and Krohn, Scheuermann said, “I soon realized that it’s just not enough to do what I always do and just ask questions, try to write a story that’s as close to reality as possible—but also that there is a need to apologize.”
Since Scheuermann’s trip, Spiegel has continued tracking and writing about the scandal, with many of the pieces also translated into English for its audiences beyond Germany. The organization published an open letter to readers from its top editors, posted lists of all Relotius’s published articles, and interviewed the Spiegel staffer who first uncovered the fabrications. The magazine’s first issue after the story broke devoted significant space to the scandal, with the cover reading, “Sagen, was ist,” or “Tell it like it is.” And when it came out that Relotius had reportedly embezzled donations he had asked for on behalf of a Syrian family—a charge Relotius has since denied—Spiegel filed a criminal complaint against him.
In today’s political environment, it’s of course easy to see why Relotius is so harmful: Lawmakers from the far-right Alternative for Germany party, whose supporters have long decried the so-called Lügenpresse (“lying press”), immediately pointed to the incident as proof that Spiegel was untrustworthy. And Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, accused Spiegel of anti-American bias in a letter to its new editor in chief, Steffen Klusmann (a charge the magazine and its editors have emphatically denied).
[Read: Europeans are obsessed with the U.S. midterms]
“It couldn’t happen at a worse time,” said Lucas Graves, the director of research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. “Trust in the press is much easier to tear down than to build up.”
With Spiegel still conducting an internal investigation into Relotius’s work, it could be months before the full effects of the scandal become clear. The organization has appointed three journalists—two Spiegel staffers and one outside expert—to document the full extent of his deceptions, how they were allowed to happen, and what Spiegel needs to do differently going forward.
After The New York Times’ Jayson Blair was fired for making up stories in 2003, the newspaper published a similarly in-depth explanation of the case; it also installed the paper’s first-ever public editor, a role intended to listen to reader feedback and take a critical look at the organization’s coverage. In addition to Blair, the paper’s then–executive editor, Howell Raines, was ousted.. Such a departure is unlikely at Spiegel, mainly because a new crop of senior editors—who had been appointed before the scandal broke—took the helm on January 1. Still, Fichtner and another senior editor, Matthias Geyer, have been suspended until the Relotius investigation is complete.
As Spiegel and other organizations ponder changes to fact-checking and editing, the difficulty is that fabrication cases are (to news organizations’ knowledge, at least) exceedingly rare: It doesn’t make sense to overhaul an entire system to weed out people like Relotius, said Josef Joffe, a member of the editorial council for the German newspaper Die Zeit.
“We could not put together a paper or magazine unless we trusted our colleagues,” Joffe told me. “If we had a Stasi or KGB wandering through every line we wrote, we couldn’t do what we do.”
At the same time, making sure readers understand how Spiegel’s journalists do their job could give them greater confidence that the organization is doing its due diligence. “Most members of the general public do not know how journalists know what they know; they don’t know much about journalistic process or journalistic methods,” said Ruth Palmer, a communications professor at IE University in Madrid. As a result, Spiegel needs to “be as transparent as possible about their processes, and more proactively try to educate the public about how they know what they know and how they go about vetting information.”
On that day in December, Traute Lafrenz, the last survivor of the Nazi-resistance group the Weiße Rose, or “White Rose,” told Scheuermann that she had indeed met with Relotius at her home in North Carolina last year. Relotius’s story resulting from their interaction, however, was riddled with fake quotes and mischaracterizations.
“This was incredibly embarrassing, and already a sign there was much more to come,” Scheuermann said. The image of Spiegel has been shaken even for those who work there, he added. “We’re not this know-it-all, authoritative magazine that we sometimes pretend to be.”
Welcome to day 19 of the government shutdown. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are about to miss a paycheck. Some are furloughed, while others—from TSA agents to prison guards—are required to show up for work anyway. Federal government workers technically aren’t allowed to strike due to a 1947 law, and with the prospect of the shutdown dragging on for weeks or months, some unions representing them are turning to the courts for relief, filing a lawsuit alleging that forcing the employees to work without pay is a violation of minimum-wage laws.
American college students are going hungry. For many, college may evoke the “freshman 15”—but for millions of students, it’s a time of hunger. A new report from the Government Accountability Office shows that while some of these students could get food-stamp benefits, they often don’t know that they’re eligible. And hungry students are at a heightened risk of dropping out of college, which undermines the billions of dollars that the federal government spends on financial aid.
People are apprehensive about putting their vulnerabilities on display, thinking that it makes them appear weak, inadequate, or just plain flawed. But others might perceive your vulnerabilities differently than you do: as something that’s alluring. A number of studies showcase how the so-called beautiful-mess effect can manifest in dating and in the workplace, which is evidence that “when we think about our own vulnerability, it’s more concrete and real, because we are so close to it.”
Snapshot
Sophie Gilbert picks the most anticipated television shows—on streaming services or elsewhere—of 2019. See her full list. (Illustration by Katie Martin)The Masthead Reporting ResidencyThe Atlantic is launching a program to help cultivate a new generation of public-service journalists. We are looking for emerging writers who are interested in working with Atlantic editors to report and write a portfolio piece or series. Read more about the residency, which lasts three months and comes with a $15,000 stipend. Pitches are due by January 27.
Evening ReadAn archaeologist found precious lapis lazuli preserved in a medieval woman’s 1,000-year-old dental plaque. The discovery unlocked an entire forgotten history:
The team considered a number of alternative ways lapis lazuli could have gotten into the woman’s dental plaque. Could the particles have come from repeated kissing of an illuminated manuscript? This practice didn’t become popular until three centuries after this woman likely died. Could it have come from lapis ingested as medicine, as suggested in Greek and Islamic medical texts? There’s little evidence that prescription was followed in 12th-century Germany. The lapis lazuli particles were also especially fine, which requires a laborious grinding process. This detail in particular suggests that the stones were purposefully made into pigment.
The team concluded that two scenarios are most likely ...
What Do You Know … About Science, Technology, and Health?1. Netflix pulled an episode of Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj from streaming in this country, after receiving a takedown request from the country’s Communications and Information Technology Commission.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. In late 2016, American diplomats living in Cuba started hearing a strange noise in their homes; diplomats reported experiencing dizziness, insomnia, hearing loss, and other troubling symptoms. Two scientists recently found those sounds to be nearly identical to the sounds of this insect.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. U.S. carbon emissions are down from their historic peak in this year, but they still leaped 3.4 percent in 2018, the second-largest rise sine 1996.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Saudi Arabia / The Indies Short-Tailed Cricket / 2005
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Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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On Monday I mentioned what the prolonged government shutdown is doing to the nation’s air-travel system: namely, slowing it down.
The whole system is based on built-in safety buffers. Everyone within it knows that air traffic controllers and TSA screeners, whose jobs are stressful enough at best, have new personal worries. Therefore controllers, dispatchers, TSA supervisors, and others who keep the traffic moving are building in extra protection, mainly by giving themselves more time.
This means more separation for aircraft in what William Langewiesche called the “slam and jam” approach patterns to airports; more time for a screener to take another look at a bag; more caution about everything, since—shutdown or no—the consequences of a hasty mistake could be so grave. People running the system would be irresponsible to do anything else. (Yes, before you point it out: I realize how odd it sounds even to discuss “responsibility” in current circumstances.)
Now Jirs Meuris, of the University of Wisconsin Business School, explains why this cautious approach is even more important than it may seem. In a research paper last fall, he discussed studies showing that the more worried employees were about their personal finances, the more accident- and error-prone they were in their work.
For instance:
[We collaborated] with a national transportation company to collect survey data from over 1,000 short-haul truck drivers and track their accident rates for the subsequent eight months.
Analysis of this data revealed that financial worry was associated with a higher probability of a preventable accident by decreasing drivers’ available cognitive capacity at work….
Based upon the average cost of a commercial truck accident, we estimated that financial worry was associated with $1.3 million per year in company costs due to the higher rates of preventable accidents.
And:
To replicate our findings, we subsequently moved to a laboratory setting. As part of these lab sessions, participants imagined that their car had a break down with an attached price tag of $150 or $1,500 and were asked to write about how this expense would affect their life. Afterward, they completed two cognitive tests and a driving simulation.
After being asked to imagine the consequences of a minor repair bill, or a major one, the subjects took cognitive tests and did a driving simulation. Randomly chosen subjects who were thinking about a $1,500 bill did worse than those thinking they’d have to cover $150.
How would this apply in current shutdown circumstances? Through the university, Jirs Meuris (more of his research here) put out this statement today:
Based on my research, we should be worried about the impact of the current shutdown on our national security and health as thousands of government workers including those at the FBI, DEA, FDA, Border Patrol, and TSA work to protect us from threats while going without a paycheck and living in a state of financial uncertainty.
As their financial insecurity grows, we can be sure that our own security falters along with it. We need to recognize that a shutdown over border security may actually do more harm to it than what there may be to gain from it.
Mitch McConnell could end this insanity tomorrow, by scheduling another vote on the “clean resolution” that passed the Senate on unanimous voice vote three weeks ago, and would clearly pass again now. (The nitty-gritty is discussed at the end of this post.) Donald Trump could end it by returning to his position as of December 19, which was after he’d signaled to the Congress that he would sign that resolution—but before he was scared off by mockery for this “cave in” from Ann Coulter, Steve Doocy, and Rush Limbaugh. And of course, if it really had been of such existential importance, he could worked toward it over the past two years, when his party controlled the Senate and the House.
Meanwhile, we rely on the willingness of hundreds of thousands of public employees to keep showing up for work, keep figuring out how they’ll pay their bills, and meanwhile try to give full mind-share to the next airplane on final approach, and the next bag through the X-ray machine.
It’s Wednesday, January 9. President Donald Trump had lunch with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill today to talk about the government shutdown, now in its 19th day. Members said the president urged the caucus to stay strong, and described him as “resolute.” Later in the day, Trump reportedly walked out of a meeting with Democratic leaders because they wouldn’t agree to funding a border wall.
Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy, a total waste of time. I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2019
The Shutdown Continues: A federal-employee union has now filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging that it’s violating the law by requiring hundreds of thousands of public employees to work without pay, reports Russell Berman. Unpaid staff deemed essential legally aren’t allowed to go on strike—and not showing up for work could mean getting fired.
In Case You Missed It: President Trump made his case for more spending on border security during his address from the Oval Office Tuesday night, but he didn’t offer any new arguments—nor did he declare a national emergency. Notably, his remarks had the typical stylistic flair of his speechwriter Stephen Miller: blood, gore, and provocation. He also invoked the country’s opioid epidemic—an issue that has become integral to his border-wall rhetoric, but doesn’t seem to be an urgent part of his policy agenda.
Yikes: Paul Manafort’s lawyers accidentally revealed sensitive information about his contacts on Tuesday. It’s the latest in a series of missteps for his legal team, writes Natasha Bertrand.
Going Without: The federal government spends billions of dollars on higher education each year, but millions of college students struggle to afford food: A review by the Government Accountability Office found that at least two dozen recent studies estimate that around 30 percent of college students lack access to nutritious, affordable food.
— Elaine Godfrey, Olivia Paschal, and Madeleine Carlisle
Snapshot
Senator Susan Collins of Maine speaks with reporters as she arrives at the Capitol building in Washington on Wednesday. (Andrew Harnik / AP)
Ideas From The AtlanticWhy Conservatives Can’t Stop Talking About Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Adam Serwer)
“The focus on undeserving minorities receiving unearned benefits at white expense is not an incidental element of modern Republican politics; it is crucial to the GOP’s electoral strategy of dividing working-class voters along racial lines.” → Read on.
Trump’s Oval Office Speech Was Never Going to Succeed (Conor Friedersdorf)
“But Trump is an undignified, popular-vote loser with underwater approval ratings. After decades of tawdry tabloid headlines, flagrant greed, and countless lies, he is last among us in moral authority. And he makes daily demands on our attention like no president before.” → Read on.
Why Trump Is Trying to Create a Crisis (Peter Beinart)
“The real purpose of Trump’s speech wasn’t to persuade Americans to support a wall. It was to convince them that America faces an immigration “crisis.” He used the word in his first sentence, and then an additional five times. And most of his speech was a catalog of horrors, a collection of reasons that, because of illegal immigration, Americans should lock themselves inside their houses and pray to make it through the night.” → Read on.
What Tucker Carlson Gets Right (W. Bradford Wilcox and Samuel Hammond)
“Just as Carlson suggested in his monologue, conservatives need to think more seriously about the role that contemporary capitalism, public policy, and culture have played in eroding the strength and stability of working-class family life.” → Read on.
Conservative Evangelicals Attempt to Disentangle Their Faith from Trumpism (Eliza Griswold, The New Yorker)
Amendment 4: ‘A Day of Celebration’ in Florida as 1.4 Million Ex-felons Have Voting Rights Restored (Steven Lemongello and Skyler Swisher, Orlando Sentinel)
Elizabeth Warren Knows Something Other Presidential Hopefuls Don’t (Ruby Cramer, BuzzFeed News)
Cutting Carbon Requires Both Innovation and Regulation (Jonathan Thompson, High Country News)
Telling the Story of Small-Town America, Without Donald Trump (John W. Miller, 100 Days in Appalachia)
Denied: How Some Tennessee Doctors Earn Big Money Denying Disability Claims (Anita Wadhwani and Mike Reicher, Nashville Tennessean)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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Donald Trump hasn’t talked about the opioid epidemic much recently. So when he used the peerless pulpit of the Oval Office to discuss it on Tuesday night, it could have been an opportunity to rally the public and to provide meaningful solutions.
His words framed the urgency of the situation, which for many Americans may have been out of sight in the past few months. “Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs, including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl,” he said. “Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border. More Americans will die from drugs this year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.”
The president isn’t wrong about the yearly death toll. Opioids like heroin and fentanyl killed more than 70,000 people in 2017, higher than the more than 50,000 Americans who died in Vietnam. If the 2018 and 2019 numbers are similar, the total number of Americans killed by opioids since 2014 will rival the number killed in World War II. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently confirmed that opioid deaths have become such a burden, they’ve reduced the overall American life expectancy.
But Trump presented the same fix for the crisis as for every other problem in his speech: the border wall that he’d gone on TV to pitch. The epidemic, in that way, was only a convenient means to an end, fuel for an argument the president has been making for years. The wall is the only proposal that Trump has genuinely fought to enact as president, but it’s the one that will almost surely do the least to halt the epidemic.
The Trump administration has already admitted as much. A 2018 assessment from the Drug Enforcement Administration noted that most of the heroin flowing into the country comes through “legal ports of entry, followed by tractor-trailers, where the heroin is co-mingled with legal goods.” Only a “small percentage” comes through areas of the border between ports of entry—the places a border wall could theoretically cover. When it comes to fentanyl, the other major driver of the opioid epidemic, the DEA says it’s not certain that Mexico is the main front, though large quantities of the drug are seized at the border. Fentanyl can be ordered through the mail from China, and it is typically much purer, and thus more potent and deadly, than Mexican-sourced fentanyl.
[Read: It’s too soon to celebrate the end of the opioid epidemic]
The DEA’s conclusions make sense: Opioids are a big business. Their production is industrialized and sophisticated. Sending ad hoc groups over the border with fentanyl and heroin, in the no-man’s-land between ports of entry, is likely not efficient enough to meet intense American demand. No wall could help stop the flow, in other words, no matter how well it’s funded and no matter what it’s made with.
The White House knows that. Yet, as on Tuesday, the occasions when Trump has mentioned the opioid crisis have usually been connected to the wall. In a major anti-opioid campaign announced last year, he falsely blamed undocumented immigration and so-called sanctuary cities for sparking the epidemic. Even in October 2017, when the president declared a national public-health emergency to confront opioids head on, the wall was part of his argument. Though he proposed measures championed by the public-health community—such as tightening prescription guidelines and qualifications, and helping states with substance-abuse programs—his standard bluster on the wall and immigration followed quickly behind. “For too long, dangerous criminal cartels have been allowed to infiltrate and spread throughout our nation,” Trump said during that declaration. “An astonishing 90 percent comes from across the border, [for] which we are building a wall which will help in this problem.”
According to federal reports, even Trump’s public-health emergency hasn’t amounted to much. A Government Accountability Office audit of the response found that the Department of Health and Human Services activated just three of the 14 authorities made available by the declaration. While those three measures have accelerated substance-use treatment and research and have promoted medication-assisted treatment—all items recommended by a federal opioids commission—they amount to minor bureaucratic tinkering in the face of a titanic problem. In all, between White House initiatives and Republican-passed legislation over the past few years, the federal response to opioids has acted mostly on the margins. The most recent moves have involved legislation to make it more difficult to ship fentanyl by mail. But there is no massive mobilization.
Facing the biggest drug crisis any American president has ever faced, Trump has not publicly fought for that mobilization. He has gone to the mat on the issue of the border wall, grinding the gears of government to a halt for what might be the longest shutdown ever in hopes of receiving $5 billion for the wall’s construction. This is the president’s big idea, the one he is clearly willing to expend political capital on to force Congress’s hand. It’s a fight that he might yet win. But it’s also one that he likely knows—as his own administration has made plain—will not save many lives from overdoses.
When Paul Manafort’s lawyers accidentally revealed sensitive information about his contacts with a suspected Russian spy on Tuesday because of a redacting snafu, it wasn’t merely a blip. Rather, it was the latest in a series of apparent missteps the legal team for President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman has made in the nearly two years that it’s been defending the 69-year-old operative in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
From publicly attacking the government’s charges and opting for two trials instead of one to bizarrely maintaining a joint defense agreement with the president even after entering into a cooperation deal with the government, legal experts say Manafort’s lawyers appear to have dug their client into a deep hole. “From the beginning to the end, they pursued unconventional strategies that did not follow the usual playbook and appeared to prejudice their client,” Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Illinois, told me.
On Tuesday, their mistake was careless. The redaction error showed that prosecutors apparently believe that Manafort shared internal Trump polling data with the suspected spy Konstantin Kilimnik during the campaign.
That error aside, Manafort’s alleged lies to Mueller during the time he spent cooperating—which his lawyers don’t want to challenge with a hearing, they revealed in Tuesday’s court filings—have likely damaged his chances of getting a light sentence. (Manafort’s lawyers said in Tuesday’s court filings that he did not intentionally lie to prosecutors. “These occurrences happened during a period when Mr. Manafort was managing a U.S. presidential campaign,” they wrote. “It is not surprising at all that Mr. Manafort was unable to recall specific details prior to having his recollection refreshed.”)
Manafort may be banking on a presidential pardon, which Trump has not ruled out. But the missteps of his attorneys appear to have done Manafort more harm than good.
Mariotti pointed to the public attack on the government by Kevin Downing, Manafort’s lead lawyer and a tax-law specialist, following a hearing in November 2017. He described the charges against Manafort—which included money laundering, bank fraud, and tax evasion—as “ridiculous” to reporters outside the courthouse, adding that there was “no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government.” His comments led to a scolding from the judge and a court-imposed gag order. “There is no good reason to attack the prosecutors from the very beginning,” Mariotti said. Downing did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Manafort declined to comment.
The unorthodox lawyering did not end there: Instead of having Manafort plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors in exchange, potentially, for a more lenient sentence, Manafort’s lawyers effectively forced Mueller’s charges into two separate courts, putting Manafort at risk of having to sit for two trials instead of one. Legal experts scratched their head at that decision; Politico described it as “akin to choosing to play Russian Roulette with two bullets in the gun instead of one.” It was only after being convicted in Virginia on eight counts of financial fraud that Manafort decided to sign a plea agreement and forego a separate, impending trial in Washington, D.C., related to his unregistered foreign lobbying.
More than two months after Manafort agreed to cooperate, however, it was revealed that his legal team had never pulled out of its joint defense agreement with Trump’s lawyers—and had been providing valuable insights about the Mueller inquiry to them. Legal experts called the arrangement “extremely unusual”—and potentially unethical depending on what was discussed between Manafort’s lawyers and Trump’s team.
Barbara McQuade, who served as the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan until 2017, said the arrangement raised questions “as to whether Manafort has simply been feeding information to, or lying for, Trump. Either scenario could amount to obstruction of justice by the subjects and even their lawyers if their intent is to interfere with the investigation.” A veteran Washington lawyer, who declined to be named because he represents an individual involved in the Mueller probe, told me at the time that he had “never in my life” heard of a defendant staying in a joint defense agreement after signing a plea agreement with prosecutors. “He had to have known how dangerous this was,” he said.
Prosecutors alleged in a subsequent court filing that Manafort had breached the plea agreement “by lying” to the FBI and special counsel “on a variety of subject matters.” Manafort, who faces up to 10 years in prison from his conviction in Virginia, is set to be sentenced on March 5.
To be fair, the former federal prosecutor Elie Honig said, Manafort has not been the easiest client to handle. After being indicted by Mueller in October 2017, Manafort continued to play with fire: In December, just two months later, he allegedly helped write an op-ed in violation of a court gag order, and he later repeatedly tried to contact witnesses in the case against him despite around-the-clock electronic surveillance. The latter offense took him from house arrest to jail. But his legal team hasn’t done him any favors, Honig said. “Over the course of less than a year, their client got caught obstructing justice, got convicted at trial, and then got caught lying during his cooperation,” Honig said, adding that Manafort’s lawyers don’t appear to have stuck to “one definable strategy.”
Another defense attorney based in Washington, D.C., who requested anonymity because he represented a client involved in the Russia probe, put it bluntly: “It is definitely worth asking whether Manafort would’ve been better off with a public defender.” Manafort hired his current legal team, led by Downing, just after the FBI raided his northern-Virginia home in July 2017. Three months later, Manafort was indicted and Downing was attacking Mueller’s charges. “That clearly antagonized the government,” the defense lawyer said.
The term dinosaur comes from the ancient Greek root words deinos, or “terrible,” and sauros, or “lizard.” As our understanding of these prehistoric creatures has become more refined over time, attempts to create life-size models of them have, more or less, increased in accuracy and lifelike quality. Of course, many of the thousands of dinosaur statues in the world have been made with an eye more toward entertainment than accuracy. For your viewing enjoyment, a collection of photographs from the past century of large-scale mock dinosaurs, constructed to varying degrees of accuracy and based on what was known at the time.
Over the past year, visitors to the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City have been revealing their deepest fears and wishes. As part of a special exhibit, museum-goers were invited to write down their secrets on small pieces of vellum paper and hang the entries on a wall for everyone to see. On one side, people posted their anxieties; on the other side, their hopes. Thousands of visitors contributed lines like, “I’m anxious because I’m afraid I’ll die alone,” “I’m anxious because I might miss my chance to become a mom,” and “I’m hopeful because life is beautiful and I will feel happy soon.”
This exhibit, A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful, which was on view from February 2018 until earlier this week, was a catalog of anonymous confessions, a place where people willingly exposed their weaknesses and flaws: “I’m anxious because I don’t have a home for my boys”; “I’ve relapsed three times since trying to become sober”; “I feel like I disappoint everyone in my life.” These more than 50,000 entries expressed thoughts that many people wouldn’t otherwise share publicly due to fear of rejection and shame.
But psychological research suggests that such fear can be overblown in people’s minds. Often, there’s a mismatch between how people perceive their vulnerabilities and how others interpret them. We tend to think showing vulnerability makes us seem weak, inadequate, and flawed—a mess. But when others see our vulnerability, they might perceive something quite different, something alluring. A recent set of studies calls this phenomenon “the beautiful mess effect.” It suggests that everyone should be less afraid of opening up—at least in certain cases.
[Read: The club where you bare your soul to strangers]
The researchers—Anna Bruk, Sabine G. Scholl, and Herbert Bless of the University of Mannheim in Germany—found evidence for the beautiful mess effect across six studies involving hundreds of participants. Inspired by the work of Brené Brown, a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work who popularized the importance of vulnerability in her books and TED Talks, Bruk and her colleagues define vulnerability as the willingness to expose yourself emotionally to another person despite being afraid and despite the risks. In their studies, the team asked participants to imagine themselves in a variety of vulnerable situations—such as confessing romantic feelings to your best friend, being the first to apologize to your romantic partner after a big fight, and admitting that you made a serious mistake to your team at work. When people imagined themselves in those situations, they tended to believe that showing vulnerability would make them appear weak and inadequate. But when people imagined someone else in those situations, they were more likely to describe showing vulnerability as “desirable” and “good.”
The results, which were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, lined up with Brown’s findings in her qualitative research that vulnerability is humanizing. “We love seeing raw truth and openness in other people,” Brown writes in her book Daring Greatly, “but we’re afraid to let them see it in us.”
In another study, Bruk and her team invited students into the lab and broke them into two groups. Those in one group were asked (vulnerability alert!) to sing an improvised song in front of a jury, while those in the other were asked to serve as members of that jury. It was a bluff; in the end, no one sang or judged. But before the participants realized that they were being had, they answered some questions about vulnerability. Those in the singing group saw their anticipated vulnerability more negatively, endorsing statements such as “When I show my vulnerability, other people find it repellant” and “I should avoid showing my vulnerability.” The judges were far more generous when they evaluated the vulnerability of the singers, saying that their singing would be a sign of “strength” and “courage.”
To find out why this gap exists, Bruk and her team tested a theory about how the human mind processes information. They found that when we think about our own vulnerability, it’s more concrete and real, because we are so close to it. Under that magnified perspective, our imperfections are clearer, and it’s easier to identify everything that might go wrong. But when we think about another person’s vulnerability, it’s more distant and abstract. We can take a wider perspective that allows us to see not just the bad, but the good as well.
Research beyond Bruk’s and Brown’s generally supports the notion that people tend to admire vulnerability in others. When people show vulnerability at school or work, such as by asking for advice and help, they appear more competent to their advisers and supervisors—and opening up in personal relationships can even make people fall in love with each other. But there are times when being vulnerable can backfire—when it comes across less as beauty and more as straight-up mess.
A classic example is a 1966 experiment led by the psychologist Elliot Aronson. Aronson and his colleagues had students listen to recordings of candidates interviewing to be part of a quiz-bowl team. Two of the candidates appeared smart by answering most of the questions right, while the other two answered only 30 percent correctly. Then, one group of students heard an eruption of noise and clanging dishes, followed by one of the smart candidates saying, “Oh my goodness—I’ve spilled coffee all over my new suit.” Another group of students heard the same clamor, but then heard one of the mediocre candidates saying he spilled the coffee. Afterward, the students said they liked the smart candidate even more after he embarrassed himself. But the opposite was true of the mediocre candidate. The students said they liked him even less after seeing him in a vulnerable situation.
[Read: The dark side of emotional intelligence]
In psychology, this is known as the “pratfall effect.” Responses to someone’s vulnerability largely seem to depend on how others perceive that person beforehand. If she appears strong and capable before showing vulnerability, people are sympathetic; the vulnerability is humanizing, like that time Jennifer Lawrence tripped on her way to accept the Best Actress award at the 2013 Oscars. But if the person doesn’t seem competent, people are repelled; she really does seem like a mess, nothing beautiful about it.
The pratfall effect can be especially pronounced in the workplace, where, in America at least, there’s been an overall push for people to open up and be “authentic.” But if you haven’t established your competence first, showing vulnerability can damage your credibility, says Lisa Rosh, a management professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York. For example, at one company Rosh studied, a woman introduced herself to her colleagues not by mentioning her credentials and education, but by talking about how she’d been awake the previous night caring for her sick baby. It took her months to reestablish her credibility. Being overly familiar at work, Rosh says, can overwhelm others and make the vulnerable person appear needy and unstable.
Whether at work or on a date, it seems safest to show vulnerability within a relationship that has some history—in which there is reciprocal sharing and the connection between two people grows in tandem with the disclosures. And yet, the truth is there’s nothing really ever safe about being vulnerable—and that’s precisely what allows for a special connection in the first place. When someone shares his hopes and anxieties on vellum paper, or admits to a mistake, or professes love to a friend at a café, that person is doing something risky, but the possibility of being hurt helps open the door to a more genuine, intimate interaction. Things might not work out in the person’s favor, but there’s still something rare and, indeed, beautiful about the gesture.
“Many of us feel like we’re barely keeping it together,” says Candy Chang, the artist who created A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful with her partner, James A. Reeves. “But seeing some private corner of your psyche reflected in somebody else’s handwriting on a wall can be incredibly reassuring. It’s a reminder of the humanity in the faces around us.”
What Anita Radini noticed under the microscope was the blue—a brilliant blue that seemed so unnatural, so out of place in the 1,000-year-old dental tartar she was gently dissolving in weak acid.
It was ultramarine, she would later learn, a pigment that a millennium ago could only have come from lapis lazuli originating in a single region of Afghanistan. This blue was once worth its weight in gold. It was used, most notably, to give the Virgin Mary’s robes their striking color in centuries of artwork. And the teeth that were embedded with this blue likely belonged to a scribe or painter of medieval manuscripts.
Who was that person? A woman, first of all. According to radiocarbon dating, she lived around 997 to 1162, and she was buried at a women’s monastery in Dalheim, Germany. And so these embedded blue particles in her teeth illuminate a forgotten history of medieval manuscripts: Not just monks made them. In the medieval ages, nuns also produced the famously laborious and beautiful books. And some of these women must have been very good, if they were using pigment as precious and rare as ultramarine.
[Read: ]Sampling DNA from a 1,000-year-old illuminated manuscript
If pigments can be preserved in tartar—the gunky yellow stuff on teeth that dental plaque hardens into—that means that fibers, metals, and other dyes could be, too. “This is genuinely a big deal,” says Mark Clarke, a technical art historian at Nova University Lisbon who was not involved in the new study. You could imagine identifying metalworkers, carpenters, and other artisans from the particles embedded in tartar, Clarke says. “It’s opening up a new avenue in archaeology.”
Radini and her co-author, Christina Warinner, did not set out to study the production of illuminated manuscripts. Radini, now at the University of York, was initially interested in starch granules in tartar as a proxy for diet, and Warinner, a microbiome researcher at the Max Planck Institute, wanted to study the DNA of ancient oral bacteria. But the blue particles were too striking to ignore.
The semiprecious rock lapis lazuli is ground up to create a pigment called ultramarine, tiny particles of which can be found in dental tartar. (Christina Warinner)“Can you imagine the kind of cold calls we had to make in the beginning?” says Warinner. “‘Hi, I’m working with this thing on teeth, and it’s about 1,000 years old, and it has blue stuff in it. Can you help me?’ People thought we were crazy. We tried reaching out to physicists, and they were like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ We tried reaching out to people working in art restoration, and they were like, ‘Why are you working with plaque?’” She eventually reached physicists at the University of York who helped confirm the blue did indeed come from the mineral lazurite, derived from lapis lazuli.
But art experts were still skeptical. Some dismissed the idea that a woman could have been a painter skilled enough to work with ultramarine. One suggested to Warinner that this woman came into contact with ultramarine because she was simply the cleaning lady.
Warinner eventually reached out to Alison Beach, a historian at Ohio State University who studies female scribes in 12th-century Germany. Over the past couple of decades, Beach and other scholars have cataloged the overlooked contributions of women to medieval book production. The challenge, Beach says, is that while most manuscripts with signatures are signed by men, the vast majority of manuscripts are unsigned. But a small number of surviving manuscripts are signed by women, and scholars have found correspondence between monks and nuns about book production.
Beach even came across a letter dated to the year 1168, in which a bookkeeper of a men’s monastery commissions sister “N” to produce a deluxe manuscript using luxury materials such as parchment, leather, and silk. The monastery where sister “N” lived is only 40 miles from Dalheim, where the teeth with lapis lazuli were found. Beach also identified a book using lapis lazuli that was written by a female scribe in Germany around a.d. 1200. The pigment would have traveled nearly 4,000 miles from Afghanistan to Europe via the Silk Road. All the evidence suggests that female scribes were indeed making books that used lapis lazuli pigment in the same area and around the same time this woman was alive.
An illuminated page from the Scivias, a 12th-century book written by the nun Hildegard of Bingen and painted by two anonymous artists. The blue pigment comes from lapis lazuli (Heidelberg University Library / Cod. Sal. X,16 / page 2r)The team considered a number of alternative ways lapis lazuli could have gotten into the woman’s dental plaque. Could the particles have come from repeated kissing of an illuminated manuscript? This practice didn’t become popular until three centuries after this woman likely died. Could it have come from lapis ingested as medicine, as suggested in Greek and Islamic medical texts? There’s little evidence that prescription was followed in 12th-century Germany. The lapis lazuli particles were also especially fine, which requires a laborious grinding process. This detail in particular suggests that the stones were purposefully made into pigment.
The team concluded that two scenarios are most likely: The woman was a painter who could have ingested ultramarine paint while licking her brush to a point, or she breathed in the powder while preparing pigment for herself or someone else. You can almost begin to picture her, Beach says, sitting by herself laboring over a manuscript day after day. “For a medieval historian,” she adds, “this kind of clear material evidence of something from the life of an individual person is so extraordinary.”
Read: Neanderthal dental plaque shows what a paleo diet looks like
Cynthia Cyrus, a professor at Vanderbilt who has also studied medieval scribes, told me that reading the paper was “the highlight of my day.” Like many monasteries, she noted, the one where this woman was buried was eventually destroyed in a medieval fire. There’s little evidence of what life was like there. But the woman’s teeth suggest that it could have been a site of highly skilled book production.
Warinner is continuing to study the particles embedded in old tartar. She and others have found everything from insect parts and the pollen of exotic ornamental flowers to opium, bits of wool, and milk proteins—all of which tell stories about what people ate and how they lived. The detritus of everyday life accumulates in the gunk that modern dentists are so vigilant about scrubbing off. “They aren’t thinking of future archaeologists,” Warinner jokes.
The mysterious signals come from all directions in the sky.
No one knows exactly what they are, or what causes them, but astronomers have detected dozens over the past decade. The signals, known as fast radio bursts, originate from deep within the cosmos, well beyond the Milky Way galaxy. The radio waves travel across space for billions of years, moving at the speed of light. When they reach Earth’s telescopes, they make a brief and powerful appearance. For a few milliseconds, the bursts shine with the intensity of an entire galaxy. And then they’re gone.
Of the more than 50 recorded fast radio bursts, or FRBs, astronomers have a favorite: FRB 121102, named for the date of its discovery six years ago, on November 2, 2012. Unlike other fast radio bursts, this one repeats. Telescopes have observed blindingly bright flashes coming from the same point in the sky over and over, sometimes several times in less than a minute. The signal’s quirky nature has allowed astronomers to study it in more detail, to mine each flash for different kinds of information and even pinpoint its location in a small galaxy about 3 billion light-years from Earth.
Despite the nondescript name, FRB 121102 was one of a kind. Which raised a discouraging possibility: Could it be the only one of its kind? Each new pulse produced tantalizing data. But to really make sense of it, astronomers needed to find another—if any existed.
They began to search the sky, with focused attention and more powerful tools. And, to their relief, astronomers have now found that, no, FRB 121102 is not the lone example of this intriguing phenomenon.
[Read: A spree of signals from across the universe]
A Canadian-led team announced Wednesday the discovery of a second repeating FRB. A newly built radio telescope in British Columbia detected six flashes from the same spot in the sky last summer. This FRB, named 180814, appears to originate about 1.5 billion light-years away from Earth, half the distance of the other repeating burst.
The same team has also detected 12 more one-off FRBs, which brings the total number of known flashes to 65. The research, described in a pair of papers in Nature, will provide more clues to one of astronomy’s greatest mysteries.
The two repeating signals have more in common than just their flashy nature. When FRBs arrive at Earth, many appear smeared across a range of frequencies, a sign of their long and bumpy journeys through cosmic material across the universe. This includes FRBs 121102 and 180814. But even though the bursts came from two very different locations, and carved out two very different paths to Earth, their radio waves showed similar distortion patterns.
This particular finding stunned astronomers at a recent conference, where the researchers teased their discovery with a little trick. “They put up images of these bursts, and everyone was like, ‘Okay, that looks familiar,’ and then the person showing it said, ‘Actually, you’ve never seen this before, because they’re from a new repeating FRB,’” said Shami Chatterjee, an astrophysicist at Cornell who studies FRBs and was not involved in the new research. “It looks shockingly similar.”
The similarities suggest the two repeaters may have originated in the same kind of environment. It’s possible that repeating bursts are just one of many classes of FRBs, some yet to be discovered. But with so little information, researchers are far from any definitive conclusions.
“We don’t know what it means yet,” said Ingrid Stairs, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia and a member of the research team. “This is our second repeater. I think we need to have a much better sample.”
When the first FRB was discovered in 2007, some astronomers thought the flashes could be errant noise from telescope instruments. The bursts just didn’t seem real. “These things are billions of light-years away,” said Jason Hessels, an astronomer at the University of Amsterdam and ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, who studies FRBs. “It’s absolutely remarkable that they can still be bright enough to detect on Earth.”
The complicated twisting observed in FRBs suggests they come from extreme environments with strong magnetic fields and high temperatures. Astronomers know of several astrophysical objects that could provide these radio-wave-bending conditions: Supermassive black holes, which can belch streams of radiation in space when they eat matter. Neutron stars, the fast-spinning cores of stars, leftover from spectacular explosions. Magnetars, a certain kind of neutron star, which spin even faster.
Before the detection of 121102, FRBs were thought to be one-time events, the products of cosmic collisions or explosions that, given the power of the flashes, no astrophysical object could surely survive. The repeating nature of 121102 showed that the universe, always ready to surprise, is capable of producing objects that can erupt over and over without fizzling out.
The scattered waves of FRBs can be used to answer other intriguing but basic questions about the universe, including what it’s actually made of. “If you try to add up all the material in galaxies and stars and planets and rocks, it doesn’t come up to the right number at all. We’re short by a lot,” Chatterjee said. “So where is all this missing matter?”
Astronomers suspect that it may reside in the space between galaxies. The intergalactic medium is orders of magnitude emptier than the best vacuums in our terrestrial laboratories, but it still has some wisps of cosmic matter. The universe is so big, though, that these tiny traces could make up a substantial amount of space stuff. FRBs pass through this matter as they travel through space, and their interactions become encoded in the radio waves. “When [the FRB] arrives at Earth, we can basically read that information off the radio burst itself,” said Sarah Burke-Spolaor, an astronomer at West Virginia University who studies FRBs. The cosmic flashes can help illuminate the complicated composition of the universe, and the more FRBs astronomers detect, the more ground—er, space—they can cover.
[Read: Astronomers edge closer to solving a major cosmic conundrum]
More discoveries are likely on their way. The telescope responsible for these findings, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, promises to be the most effective FRB hunter in operation. CHIME scans the entire Northern Hemisphere every day, hopping from one spot to the next every 15 minutes. The observatory can examine 500 times as much sky as the next FRB superstar, the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, which revealed the first FRB in 2007 and has found the majority of known bursts.
You could say CHIME wasn’t even trying when it found a new batch of FRBs last summer. The data was collected before the telescope’s “first light” in September, which marked the beginning of formal operations. Over the summer, astronomers were still tinkering with the instruments. “We were calibrating it and improving it day by day,” said Cherry Ng, an astronomer at the University of Toronto and a member of the research team. “Sometimes we had to turn off the instrument just to make changes.”
Scientists estimate that FRBs occur about 10,000 times a day across the entire sky, and CHIME, at peak capacity, is poised to detect dozens every month.
As with most cosmic mysteries, the specter of an extraterrestrial explanation looms large. Some, including astrophysicists at Harvard, have suggested that FRBs are beacons from an advanced alien civilization. Hello out there! they shout, searching the vastness of space for neighbors. FRB researchers say they can’t rule out an extraterrestrial origin for the cosmic flashes. It’s one possibility of many. But it’s the least likely, they say.
“[FRBs] come from all over the sky, and from many different distances, always from different galaxies—the chances of aliens living in different parts of the universe getting together to organize, to produce these signals in this kind of way, are infinitesimally small,” Stairs said. “There’s just too many of them out there.”
On top of that, the home environments of FRBs aren’t exactly conducive to life, intelligent or not. The emissions likely torch their surroundings as they erupt into space. “If we had one go off near Earth, we might not be around anymore,” Burke-Spolaor said.
Conservatives’ obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may seem ridiculous. Ever since the 29-year-old former bartender wrested the Democratic primary nomination from the 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, right-wing media has fixated on the unapologetically left-wing representative. From her clothes to her nickname to her high school to her childhood home, conservatives seem particularly intent on proving that her working-class background is fraudulent.
Some of the frenzy is rooted in sexism—conservative pundits have referred to Ocasio-Cortez as a “little girl,” and openly fantasized about going on a “date or two” with her. Some of it has to do with her politics—she recently suggested taxing income above $10 million at 70 percent, anathema to conservatives (but hardly as radical as they wish it were). She is an effective avatar of the rising left: a young, working-class person of color who is fluent in the culture of the internet and, unusually for a Democrat with a national profile, not easily spooked by criticism from the right. It is not surprising that conservatives would oppose Ocasio-Cortez; her politics are opposed to theirs. But that fails to explain the degree of interest she has drawn from her right-wing critics since winning the primary last year.
Distinct from the mainstream press’s fact-checks of Ocasio-Cortez’s errors or exaggerations, the attempts to discredit her personal history are related to a core argument of the Donald Trump–era Republican Party. “The Democrat Party’s vision is to offer them free health care, free welfare, free education and even the right to vote,” warned Trump just before the 2018 midterms, speaking of Central American migrants seeking asylum. “You and the hardworking taxpayers of our country will be asked to pick up the entire tab.” Broad-based prosperity for white Americans, Trump contends, would be within reach, if people of color and their white liberal allies had not restructured society so that undeserving minorities succeed at their expense.
[Read: How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plain black jacket became a controversy]
Trump’s unlikely election victory in 2016 was in large part fueled by anger and nostalgia, and the fear of many white Americans that their political and cultural dominance of the United States was coming to an end, usurped by the diverse coalition that elected the first black president. Two years after Trump’s upset victory, the backlash against him elected the most diverse Congress in history. More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place. She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics. The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to. And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.
The focus on undeserving minorities receiving unearned benefits at white expense is not an incidental element of modern Republican politics; it is crucial to the GOP’s electoral strategy of dividing working-class voters along racial lines.
The idea that undeserving people of color are stealing money or recognition from the deserving predates Trump, of course. It has been a feature of American politics since the country’s founding. The poetry of the young enslaved woman Phillis Wheatley was assumed to be fraudulent because her intelligence undermined the basic assumption of chattel slavery, that black people were not truly human. After Frederick Douglass wrote his first autobiography, a critic who knew one of Douglass’s owners insisted that the famed orator was “not capable of writing the Narrative” and that “there are no such barbarities committed on their plantations.”
More recently, the election of Barack Obama provoked a fierce backlash on the right, one that manifested in one conspiracy theory after another meant to prove Obama was a fraud. Conservatives became fixated on proving that the first black president did not write his autobiography, that he was functionally illiterate absent a teleprompter, and that his admission to elite universities was the unearned result of affirmative action, despite his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law.
[Read: What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 60 Minutes interview actually reveals]
Even after Obama was elected, conservative pundits argued that Obama wasn’t “really popular” because he maintained sky-high support among black voters—who, they implied, should count less. The underlying argument behind the claim, no matter how mundane or outlandish, was that being black confers unearned benefits rather than systemic obstacles to be overcome. Obama became the living, breathing symbol of the narrative that undeserving people of color were being elevated even as hardworking white people were being left behind. In a country where most wealthy CEOs, legislators, governors, presidents, justices, and judges are white Christian men, Republicans believe whites and Christians face more discrimination than anyone else.
What this narrative is meant to obscure is the reality that American policy making has not created some nightmare inversion of power between white people and ethnic minorities, but a landscape of harrowing inequality where people are forced to beg strangers for money on the internet to pay their medical bills. Upward mobility is stagnant; those who are born rich, die rich, and those who are born poor, die poor. Real wages have risen painfully slowly for decades; housing, particularly in urban centers, is unaffordable; and young people are saddled with skyrocketing student debt for educations that did not provide the opportunities they were supposed to.
These trends are even more pronounced for people of color, who have historically been excluded from government efforts to help Americans build wealth. The entirety of the Republican Party’s response to this situation during its two years of unified control of the federal government was a failed effort to slash health-care coverage for millions and a successful effort to cut taxes on the wealthy. The GOP needs a different story to tell about what’s wrong with the country, and the one about people of color living lavishly at the expense of white people who work hard and play by the rules is an old classic.
[Derek Thompson: Why politicians are live-streaming videos on Instagram]
In America, when people of color succeed despite the limits placed on them, and use their newfound status to indict the system for holding others back, they are held up as proof that the limits do not exist, they are denounced as ingrates, or they are pilloried as frauds incapable of the successes attributed to them. The exception is if they present their success as evidence that the structural barriers are not as great as they seem, and that in truth the only thing that holds back marginalized communities is their own lack of ability or motivation. If they affirm the righteousness of the class and caste system that they defied to succeed, they are hailed as heroes by the same people who would otherwise have denounced them as frauds.
The election of the most diverse Congress in history, and the presence of outspoken women of color in a chamber that has been dominated by white men for most of its existence, was bound to provoke these responses. When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system. That poses a choice to those whose access to such cloistered communities is unquestioned: They can recognize that others might also succeed given the right circumstances, or they can defend the inequities of that system in an effort to preserve their self-image, attacking the new entrant as a charlatan or the group they belong to as backwards.
Trump is president in large part because of his ability to speak to this insecurity. The New York real-estate mogul’s embrace of the conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in America, and was therefore an illegitimate president, was crucial to his rise in the Republican Party. During the 2016 campaign, for every problem America faced, Trump found an enemy, an outsider to blame: Latino immigrants stealing jobs and lowering wages, Muslims engaging in terrorism, black men committing crimes. Then there were the white liberals, such as Elizabeth Warren, whose claim to American Indian heritage was touted as proof that the system is rigged to the advantage of undeserving people of color—so much so that even white liberals seek to get in on the scam. Part of the reason Republicans have continued to taunt Warren with the slur “Pocahontas” over the protests of Native communities is because the falsehood that Warren obtained her professorship at Harvard by claiming to be a person of color reminds the GOP base that they are being fleeced by the unworthy.
The unworthy, in this case, are not the legislators and their wealthy benefactors who have worked tirelessly for decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, at the expense of American welfare and democracy. Rather, they are marginalized communities and their white liberal allies, who maintain a corrupt spoils system for black and brown people at the expense of hardworking white Americans. As long as rank-and-file Republicans are focused on these supposed villains, they won’t realize who is being conned, and who is trying to con them. And it isn’t Ocasio-Cortez.
A notable contender this awards season, Barry Jenkins’s film If Beale Street Could Talk is an exquisite adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel about black intimacy against the backdrop of white racism. The movie also offers viewers a chance to reflect on the work of an author who is as indispensable today as he was in his own lifetime. Baldwin’s literary career spanned four decades, from 1947 to 1987—a time when the United States witnessed many seismic political and cultural shifts, and during which Baldwin’s own artistic vision evolved. If Beale Street Could Talk, which was published in 1974 and follows a young black couple whose lives are torn apart by a false criminal accusation, is a harbinger of Baldwin’s late style. In particular, the novel marked a crucial turn in how the author sought to characterize the most abiding theme and moral principle of his work: love.
If Beale Street Could Talk received mixed reviews on publication. Some praised it for its delicate mix of romance and protest fiction, while others criticized the authenticity of the narrator’s voice. But what’s clear in retrospect is how Baldwin articulates his vision of love from within black life, as the novel centers on the emotional bonds holding two African American families together. By contrast, the author had spent the previous decade instead writing and thinking about love as a collective American experience, one whose power came from the fact that it could cut across racial lines.
Americans’ idea of Baldwin is often limited to this decade—the 1960s—perhaps because no other U.S. writer embodies that period better than he does. Although he had published an impressive set of works in the ’50s, it was the release of the novel Another Country (1962) and the two essays that make up The Fire Next Time (1963) that solidified his reputation as one of America’s preeminent writers and public intellectuals. In these civil-rights-era works, Baldwin was keen on interrogating white power and championing love to realize the full promise of America.
[Read: How Barry Jenkins turned his James Baldwin obsession into his next movie]
Of Baldwin’s writings from this period, The Fire Next Time is the most representative. It offers his most trenchant critique of white supremacy—how it is contingent on black subjugation, and how that asymmetry totally warps the people, institutions, and moral character of the United States. More specifically, Baldwin identified a feeling he called “innocence” to be a constituent feature of white supremacy. As he put it, “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” To author devastation—that is, to enslave, maim, lynch, and disenfranchise a group of people—entails one type of power. And, as Baldwin delineated, it takes yet another kind to disavow those violent acts.
Innocence, Baldwin argued, masks America’s violent racial past and present record, enabling white Americans to shirk responsibility and to reproduce an idea of themselves and of the United States based on the republic’s noble ideals rather than its ignoble history. Baldwin believed that no substantive racial progress, and no fundamental transformation of the nation, could be achieved so long as innocence remained the organizing feeling of American whiteness. This is why he had championed love as a countervailing feeling. In fact, he believed it to be the only remaining force powerful enough to free whiteness from its arrested state of innocence, concluding, “If love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.”
In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin identifies three key ways for love to remake the country at a decisive time in its history. First, Baldwin saw black love as one crucial vehicle for white redemption. Addressing his 14-year-old nephew, and by extension a black collective, he writes:
Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope.
Baldwin attacks the assumption of an American keyword such as integration, which in 1963 widely meant the acceptance of African Americans by white people, institutions, and standards. Instead, he inverts that logic and insists that it’s African Americans who have to accept their white counterparts and change U.S. institutions and norms on black terms. Writing two years before the end of legal segregation, Baldwin demands black people not only to accept whites, but to do so with love, positioning black love as a vital instrument for white liberation and interracial renewal on a national scale.
Second, Baldwin considered America’s racial problem a symptom of white lovelessness. He wrote: “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” This loaded statement conveys again Baldwin’s belief in the personal and political uses of love, as he identifies white self-acceptance as the very condition for resolving America’s racial ordeal. For Baldwin, a white identity based on these self-affirming principles, rather than on supremacist power and innocence, wouldn’t require a racial “other” against whom to measure and define self-worth.
And, third, Baldwin conjured up interracial love as a national ideal. His penultimate sentence in The Fire Next Time is an oft-quoted line: “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” An American vanguard epitomized by interracial lovers was certainly evocative and provocative in 1963, when de jure segregation and anti-miscegenation still reigned. It underscored the risk, effort, and intimacy that were needed to transform the nation while providing a model of mutual self-transformation that might accomplish such a difficult endeavor.
We see these different applications of love writ large in Baldwin’s other civil-rights-era writings. White innocence and lovelessness sit at the heart of the author’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), and the difficulties of interracial love in his third novel, Another Country. There is a significant shift, however, in Baldwin’s later writings, beginning with If Beale Street Could Talk, in which erotic love between black people assumes great import.
[Read: ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ and the urgency of black love]
Beale Street is the first Baldwin novel to focus exclusively on a black love story; it is also the only novel in his corpus narrated by a woman. The work revolves around the relationship between the 19-year-old Tish and her 22-year-old boyfriend, Fonny. At the outset of the book, Tish finds out she is pregnant soon after Fonny is sent to prison on a trumped-up rape charge. Told in the first person by Tish, the story follows her pregnancy and the arduous attempt to get Fonny released from prison. And, through a series of flashbacks, it recounts how the two lovebirds (and their families) have been linked since early childhood. While If Beale Street Could Talk is a prescient narrative about the American carceral state, the story line of systematic racism doesn’t overshadow the tale of the young black couple and their families.
One important reason for this shift toward black love is that Beale Street was published at the tail end of the Black Arts Movement. One of the great achievements of the movement, in addition to creating black cultural institutions—including magazines, journals, and publishing houses that were committed to raising black consciousness—is the way it tilted readers’ attention toward the intra-racial dimensions of black life. This subject had been largely eclipsed by the interracial, white-black antagonism that informed much of black literature up to that point. Authors such as Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, and several other major architects of the movement also placed the particular experiences of black women center stage.
Foregrounding the intersection of gender and race within black life opened up a new way of portraying black interior and social worlds untethered to whiteness. In Baldwin’s own work, readers see how displacing the racial binary opens up a space for him to focus on black intimacy and interiority in If Beale Street Could Talk, as well as in publications that succeeded it. For instance, Just Above My Head (1979), arguably Baldwin’s finest novel, offers a powerful characterization of black gay love and also the author’s most successfully realized black female character.
In the film version of Beale Street, Barry Jenkins does a brilliant job of translating Baldwin’s novel for the big screen, with a captivating and painterly adaptation of the plot as well as a voice-over narrative that gives fidelity to Tish’s first-person perspective. But beyond that, Jenkins has also introduced viewers to a Baldwin work that sits outside the parameters of the civil-rights era, where many people’s ideas of the writer are stuck. Instead, the director has drawn on a work that expresses a new prerogative of love that Baldwin readers seldom encounter, as well as a vision of black desire that audiences rarely glimpse in movie theaters. In his last published essay, “To Crush a Serpent,” Baldwin wrote, “Complexity is our only safety and love is the only key to our maturity.” In a country that remains in many ways emotionally infantile, and where simplemindedness can be deemed a sign of strength, Baldwin’s fierce imagination remains an invaluable resource and provides a blueprint for America’s collective welfare.
As the costs of college have climbed, some students have gone hungry. When they’ve voiced frustration, they’ve often been ridiculed: “Ramen is cheap,” or “Just eat cereal.”
But the blight of food insecurity among college students is real, and a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan congressional watchdog, highlights the breadth of those affected. There are potentially millions of students at risk of being food insecure, which means they do not have access to nutritious, affordable food, the report says. It is the first time the federal government has acknowledged food insecurity on campus in a significant way. The federal government spends billions of dollars on higher education each year, and this report finds that some students are at risk of dropping out because they cannot eat, although there aren’t good data on just how many.
Existing studies vary in how they describe the scale of the problem. “Nationally representative survey data that would support direct estimates of the prevalence of food insecurity among college students do not exist,” the report says. So the GAO conducted a review of 31 studies that met their criteria—meaning they had been conducted in the United States since 2007 and did not have severe methodological limitations. Twenty-two of those 31 studies estimate that more than 30 percent of students are food insecure.
[Read: When a college takes on American poverty]
“[The report] put it very clearly for us that we can see that especially first-time students, first-gen students, students who are raising children, single parents, face increasing obstacles to be able to complete that critical college degree,” Senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate’s education committee, told me. The report was in response to a letter sent to the GAO on behalf of Murray, Senator Debbie Stabenow, Senator Edward Markey, and Senator Elizabeth Warren last year.
One chief way that campuses have been addressing hunger is by building food pantries on campus, but Sara Goldrick-Rab, a higher-education professor at Temple University and a leading scholar on campus hunger, told me that those only scratch the surface of the issue. “When there’s a food pantry, there’s somebody who is acknowledging the problem,” she says, but advocates have been fighting for a more systemic response.
The government can address this issue systemically through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly known as food stamps), the report says, but it adds that “almost 2 million at-risk students”—defined as students who are low income or first generation, are raising children, or have another, similar risk factor—didn’t receive SNAP benefits in 2016, even though they potentially could have.
That could be because those students didn’t know they were eligible: The government restricts students who attend college at least half-time from receiving the benefits, but certain students are exempt from that restriction. The information that most schools and SNAP offices provide students about the program is shoddy, says Samuel Chu, a national organizer for Mazon, an advocacy organization focused on eradicating hunger. “There are very specific ways and accessible ways that students can access SNAP,” he says, but even local SNAP offices are often unaware. For example, students who meet the basic criteria for SNAP eligibility and are younger than 18 or older than 50, or who have children, or who work a minimum of 20 hours a week are also eligible to receive the benefit. The GAO implored the Food and Nutrition Service, which administers SNAP, to improve information about student eligibility and share that information with its local offices.
Of course, the SNAP program is dependent on government funding, which makes it subject to budget cuts or unforeseen events such as the ongoing partial government shutdown. If the shutdown continues for a couple more weeks, SNAP may run out of funds for the 38 million Americans who receive its benefits.
Naturally, the report focuses heavily on low-income students, as they are perhaps those most likely to experience food insecurity. But Goldrick-Rab notes that they aren’t the only students who are going hungry. Middle-class students, those who are “too rich for Pell and too poor to afford college,” struggle as well. And they may not be as likely to use things such as the food pantry.
[Read: Why higher education is so expensive, and what students really pay for]
Murray told me that addressing food insecurity is one of her top priorities as Congress negotiates a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the major federal law governing colleges and universities. “Often we just talk about the tuition costs and dealing with that,” she says. “It has to be broader than that—[it has to be] all of the costs that come to a student as they try to complete college, including food and housing.”
Goldrick-Rab put it more bluntly. The report shows “that food insecurity is a college-completion issue,” she says. “We’re undermining our federal investment in financial aid by not paying attention to this. We have to stop pretending like living expenses are not educational expenses.”
A spider’s web is more than a trap or a home. It is also an extension of the spider’s senses. By paying attention to vibrations traveling through the silken threads, the arachnid can learn about its surroundings. Certain vibrations might mean ensnared prey. A different frequency might reveal a nearby mate. And since spiders extrude their webs from their bodies, they can also change the stiffness, tension, and other properties of the silk to bring certain details into focus.
A spider, in other words, can actively tune its web to channel specific kinds of vibrations, just as a musician might tune an instrument.
But as Natasha Mhatre from the University of Western Ontario has found, a spider can also tune itself. Simply by changing its stance, the infamous black widow can make its sense organs more receptive to particular frequencies of vibration. It’s like a postural squint, which allows the spider to focus its attention on certain sources of information.
When Mhatre started studying black widows, she initially focused on how vibrations move through the silk. But she soon realized that “there was another problem, which was staring us in the face and which no one had considered.” Which is: How do those vibrations move through the spider itself?
[Read: What it feels like to get bitten by a black widow spider]
Together with Senthurran Sivalinghem and Andrew Mason from the University of Toronto, Mhatre allowed captive black widows to build webs on square arenas, with a pillar in each corner. These webs aren’t the elegant, vertical, circular constructions that most people might picture. Instead, they’re a chaotic mess of strands, surrounding and supporting a loose, horizontal mesh, almost like an acrobat’s safety net, from which the spider hangs upside down.
When the webs were finished, the team placed a tiny magnet on them. By holding a powerful electromagnet nearby, they could move each web and then, by bathing the animal in lasers and analyzing the reflected beams, measure how the vibrations affected different parts of the suspended spider. Through the process, the widows were remarkably chill. Despite their infamous venom, “they’re very docile,” Mhatre says.
As with most spiders, the black widow’s entire body acts as a sensor. It’s dotted with thousands of organs called slit sensilla, which appear as tiny cracks in the exoskeleton. As vibrations pass through the animal, the cracks narrow and widen, and those minuscule movements are picked up by sensitive cells inside the slits. These slits are everywhere, but they’re especially concentrated in the joints of the legs.
Scientists have been studying slit sensilla for decades, and most experiments have shown that they respond to a wide range of frequencies, without much in the way of tuning. But that’s only true if you study the sensilla in isolation, as most researchers have. Mhatre showed that in an actual spider, hanging from its web, different joints are indeed tuned to different frequencies. “While the sensors themselves aren’t particularly tuned, the body gives the joints tuning,” she says.
When the spider changes its posture, it also retunes its joints. Typically, it sits in a neutral stance with its body horizontal and its legs outstretched. But it can also “crouch” by drawing all its legs in. In this pose, almost all of its joints become more sensitive to higher frequencies. By taking up a kind of predatory power-pose, the widow alters its senses.
“Hearing organs, in animals that use vibrations, are usually thought of as passive devices,” says Damian Elias from the University of California at Berkeley, who studies spider communication. That’s especially true for the slit sensilla, “as they’re just strain gauges sitting on joints, without any obvious way to modulate their sensitivity.” But Mhatre’s study shows that there is a way—and a very simple one.
She suspects that the crouched posture allows the widow to pay closer attention to higher frequencies, such as those produced by small prey insects. Alternatively, it could be trying to ignore low frequencies, such as those produced by wind. Both explanations make sense, since widows usually crouch when they’re hungry or when their webs have been significantly disturbed. In this position, they could better detect the movements of meals. And if a spider needs to get back in touch with low-frequency vibrations, all she has to do is extend a leg.
[Read: Tiny jumping spiders can see the moon]
The widow’s abilities are part of a concept called “embodied cognition,” which argues that a creature’s ability to sense and think involves its entire body, not just its brain and sense organs. Octopus arms, for example, can grab and manipulate food without ever calling on the central brain. Female crickets can start turning toward the sound of a male using only the ears and neurons in their legs, well before their central nervous system even has a chance to process the noise. In the case of the black widow, the information provided by the sense organs in the legs depends on the position of the entire animal.
Earlier, I described this as a postural squint. That’s close, but the analogy isn’t quite right, since squinting helps us focus on particular parts of space. Here, the spider is focusing on different parts of information space. It’s as if a human could focus on red colors by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog (or downward spider).
The ability to sense vibrations that move through solid surfaces, as distinct from sounds that travel through air, is “an often overlooked aspect of animal communication,” says Beth Mortimer from the University of Oxford, who studies it in creatures from elephants to spiders. It’s likely, then, that the widow’s ability to control perception through posture “almost certainly [exists in] other spiders and web types, too, and other arthropods, including insects, that detect vibrations along surfaces through their legs.” Scientists just need to tune in.
Almost from the moment the camera blinked on in the Oval Office, it was clear that President Donald Trump was delivering a Stephen Miller special.
The 33-year-old White House speechwriter has a hand in virtually everything the president reads from a teleprompter. But as one of the most strident immigration hawks in the West Wing, Miller has been especially influential over the past two years in shaping the way Trump talks about his signature issue. Tuesday night was reportedly no exception.
While it’s impossible to say just how much of the address he wrote, all of the tics and tropes of Millerian rhetoric were on display. The scary immigrants (“vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs”). The gory anecdotes (a veteran “beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien”). The decidedly un-Trumpian flourishes (“a crisis of the heart, and a crisis of the soul.”)
In setting the stage for Trump’s prime-time address, White House officials had insisted that the president was making a good-faith effort to win over skeptics of his border-wall proposal and get the government reopened. But the speech he ended up giving was not calibrated for persuasion. It was, by and large, dark, divisive, and shot through with the kind of calculated provocation that rallies the president’s fans and riles his enemies. It was, in other words, classic Stephen Miller.
This is an approach Miller has been honing since his teenage years in Santa Monica, California, where he rebelled against the native culture of affluent liberalism by listening to Rush Limbaugh and quoting books by right-wing ideologues such as Wayne LaPierre. At Santa Monica High School—the kind of place where proto-woke students organized “racial-harmony retreats”—Miller delighted in offending his peers’ progressive sensibilities. In some ways, he has never stopped, as I reported in my profile of Miller last year.
[Read: What was the point of Trump’s Oval Office address?]
This instinct for agitation permeates every line Miller writes in the White House—even the ones Trump ends up delivering in his serious, presidential voice. Consider, for example, the most-praised bit from Tuesday night’s speech:
Some have suggested a barrier is immoral. Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences, and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside.
The National Review editor Rich Lowry, echoing other conservative commentators, hailed this riff as a triumph, and predicted that it would “land” with many Americans. He may be right. But if Trump and Miller were prioritizing persuasion and bipartisan deal making, it seems unlikely they would have punctuated their point with this next line: “The only thing that is immoral is the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized.” Throwing haymakers like that might get a good “DRAIN THE SWAMP” chant going, but it’s not going to lure congressional Democrats to the negotiating table.
The same can be said for the graphic scenes of violence that stud Trump’s speeches on immigration. Whereas wonkier restrictionists often focus their arguments on wages and labor, the president’s rhetoric gravitates toward blood and gore. He made no exception for his Oval Office address:
Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders. In California, an Air Force veteran was raped, murdered, and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history. In Georgia, an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading, and dismembering his neighbor. In Maryland, MS-13 gang members that arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors were arrested and charged last year after viciously stabbing and beating a 16-year-old girl.
This kind of fearmongering comes naturally to Trump, who famously launched his campaign by warning of Mexican rapists streaming across the border. But Miller has taken his boss’s instinct and colored it in with grim specifics. From Trump’s Republican National Convention acceptance speech to his inaugural address to his stump speeches on the midterm campaign trail, it’s “American carnage” all the way down. The speechwriter has made sure of it.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump delivered a televised Oval Office address, hoping to marshal the gravitas of the presidency to get his way on a border wall.
The gambit was doomed from the start.
Insofar as prime-time addresses from the White House have power, it is rooted in the public’s belief that there is dignity in the office, that its occupant possesses moral authority, and that he or she would ask for our attention only if the matter at hand was unusually important.
But Trump is an undignified, popular-vote loser with underwater approval ratings. After decades of tawdry tabloid headlines, flagrant greed, and countless lies, he is last among us in moral authority. And he makes daily demands on our attention like no president before.
[David Frum: Trump has defeated himself]
Of course, Trump has gone far behaving as no other politician would. If critics are appalled that he routinely violates taboos to speak his mind, if they took offense at his attacks on political rivals or adherents of Islam or undocumented immigrants or a federal judge of Mexican descent, many of his core voters revel in his transgressive edginess.
However, that path to power has consequences. In the Oval Office, Trump lacks the credibility of his predecessors. He is no more a dignified statesman than any other Twitter edgelord. Sitting at a desk that is a symbol of respectable statesmanship leaves Trump seeming diminished and confused, like King Joffrey realizing the Iron Throne does not itself confer stature.
Delivering prepared remarks exacerbates the problem. “He remains astonishingly bad at reading that specialized type of verbiage that politicians so often must handle: speechwriter prose,” observes Jonathan Bernstein, a Bloomberg columnist. “Trump’s voice fails to rise when the words demand it; he doesn’t insert dramatic pauses, and can’t seem to revel in the pageantry of the frills that speechwriters love to insert into the text.”
[Read: What was the point of Trump’s Oval Office address?]
Lots of politicians read noble-sounding passages that they don’t strictly believe, but doing so is especially difficult for a man who offers little besides the conceit that he’ll at least call it how he sees it. And substantively, much of what Trump asserted is at odds with reality. God help us should an actual emergency ever occur on his watch.
Weirdly, Trump himself reportedly intuited that the speech would not help him. The New York Times writes that “privately, Mr. Trump dismissed his own new strategy as pointless. In an off-the-record lunch with television anchors hours before the address, he made clear in blunt terms that he was not inclined to give the speech or go to Texas, but was talked into it by advisers, according to two people briefed on the discussion who asked not to be identified sharing details.”
The newspaper quotes the president as saying, “It’s not going to change a damn thing, but I’m still doing it.” As ever, he wasn’t afraid to go for broke.
The Netflix algorithm is getting stronger. Consider Sex Education, a new British dramedy patched together so perspicaciously from pieces of existing hits that you can virtually see the stitches. Like The End of the F***ing World, it’s a zany teen romance set in a mysterious Anglo-American hinterland that looks like a John Hughes movie but whose cultural references are pure Blighty (Butlin’s, Wotsits, SRE class, getting monged). Like Stranger Things, it’s a tribute to a retro aesthetic of wood paneling and earth tones. And, like Big Mouth, it’s a filthy sex comedy about lovable teenagers running amok in their witless, hormonal, priapic frenzies.
That it works so well is almost annoying. One of the assets of a TV show that’s such a grab bag of miscellaneous elements is that you’re bound to find something to appreciate, whether it’s graphic doodles of genitalia (tip o’ the cap to American Vandal), heartfelt portrayals of teen anxiety, hirsute and strangely sexy Scandinavian handymen, or the moment toward the end of the first episode when Gillian Anderson recites a litany of slangy euphemisms for semen. (Pick your own favorite; mine is “man milk,” delivered with alliterative emphasis.) Never mind that every episode is 20 minutes too long. Push aside the cultural dissonance. Here is a series that pulls off a curious trick: It’s a woke raunch comedy, replete with graphic and humiliating sexual experiences, yet bent on using them in a very sincere way.
Asa Butterfield (Hugo, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) plays Otis, a teenager living in a geographically indistinct community that looks like New England but sounds like an episode of Skins (it was actually filmed in Wales). The bane of his life is that his mother (Anderson) is a sex and relationships therapist who festoons their house with phallic art and warns his school friends about marijuana use leading to early-onset impotence. Otis has a long-burning crush on Maeve (Emma Mackey), an enigmatic rebel living alone in a caravan site (British for trailer park) who wants to use Otis’s parentage for profit: She sees his potential as the school’s sex guru.
Never mind that Otis is a virgin so scarred by his family history that he can’t even masturbate. Moordale High is populated entirely with horny and hopelessly confused students in need of a counselor. Everyone, in the words of Otis’s best friend, Eric, is “either thinking about shagging, about to shag, or actually shagging,” and is also doing it 21st-century style, with mass texts and dick pics and humiliating gifs. Laurie Nunn, the playwright who created the show, employs old-school archetypes, too: Students are shoved into lockers and robbed of their lunch money, and the hierarchy of who’s cool leans on meanness and money. But Sex Education’s anxieties are modern ones, spanning porn and transphobia and erotic fiction about intergalactic alien sex.
Otis falls almost accidentally into his new hobby when he talks down a bully who’s taken too many Viagra pills and is panicking in an abandoned bathroom stall. Otis’s serene manner and empathetic advice impress Maeve, who starts hawking his time to the school’s more sexually dysfunctional students (which is all of them). Butterfield is winsome and endearingly flappable in portraying Otis’s personal life, but he exudes an odd kind of calm when he’s issuing guidance. His clients call him a “sex savant,” or a “Care Bear,” or a “mum man,” or “that weird sex kid who looks like a Victorian ghost.” But he does help them, in the end.
And, by extension, he helps viewers. Like Big Mouth, Sex Education has all kinds of advice to offer regarding the confusing and impossibly complicated realm of modern sexuality. The show is graphic, gross, and inherently earnest: No matter how mortifying Otis might find his mother, he’s internalized her refusal to judge anyone. Anderson, who most recently has embodied gravitas and aloofness on series including The Fall and War and Peace, seems to revel in the comic potential of her role as Jean, not to mention the opportunity to play a middle-aged woman with an extraordinarily healthy sex life. Jean’s story lines, although not as frequent as they could be, add still more dimensions to the ways in which Sex Education comments on desire.
Is it weird that the best, most nuanced advice about sex and intimacy these days tends to be found on gross-out Netflix shows? Maybe. But it’s also oddly cheering. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings offered all kinds of opportunities to revisit the influence that cultural products such as Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds can have when it comes to adolescent sexual behavior. Sex Education—a show that’s sensitive and sweet-natured and smutty to its core—seems to hint that no matter how bad it looks out there, there’s hope to be had after all.
Donald Trump devoted remarkably little of his Tuesday-night Oval Office address to persuading Americans to support a border wall. He discussed his beloved barrier for only a few sentences and didn’t rebut any of the criticisms commonly leveled at it. He never explained how the federal government would take possession of the land needed to build the wall, why migrants wouldn’t be able to climb over or dig under it, or even how much of the border it would actually cover.
This inattention fits a pattern. Trump has never shown much interest in actually building a wall. Last January, over cheeseburgers at the White House, Chuck Schumer agreed to fund Trump’s wall in exchange for legalizing the undocumented “dreamers” who had come to the United States as children. But Trump dashed the deal by demanding cuts in legal immigration. Then, the following month, 54 senators—including all but three Democrats—voted for a bill to provide $25 billion for border security over 10 years, including “physical barriers” and “fencing,” along with protections for the dreamers. But the White House spurned that legislation in favor of an enforcement-only bill that had no chance of passage. Nonetheless, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, recently noted that over the past two years, Congress has in fact “provided nearly $1.7 billion to build or replace fencing on the southern border.” The administration has spent only 6 percent of those funds.
[David Frum: Trump has defeated himself]
The real purpose of Trump’s speech wasn’t to persuade Americans to support a wall. It was to convince them that America faces an immigration “crisis.” He used the word in his first sentence, and then an additional five times. And most of his speech was a catalog of horrors, a collection of reasons that, because of illegal immigration, Americans should lock themselves inside their houses and pray to make it through the night.
After blaming undocumented immigrants for the fact that “more Americans will die from drugs this year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War,” Trump went on to declare that ICE officers had apprehended migrants charged with “30,000 sex crimes and 4,000 violent killings.” Later, he told his audience about the “young policeman … savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien,” the “Air Force veteran … raped, murdered, and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien,” the “illegal alien … charged with murder for killing, beheading, and dismembering his neighbor,” and the “MS-13 gang members … charged last year after viciously stabbing and beating a 16-year-old girl.” Trump punctuated these stories by demanding that the Democrats stop allowing Americans “to be so horribly victimized” and by asking, “How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?” How a border wall would stop all this carnage, he never really explained.
This is the Trump way. In 2016, he began his convention acceptance speech by declaring, “Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life.” He went on to discuss police officers “brutally executed,” the “men, women, and children viciously mowed down” by terrorists, and the various Americans “brutally murdered” by undocumented immigrants.
[Read: What was the point of Trump’s Oval Office address?]
In that speech, too, Trump said little substantive about how he would solve these problems. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that America’s crises were so grave, and the threats it faced so terrifying, that Americans had to turn away from traditional politicians and jettison their normal ways of governing. When Trump endorsed torture, proposed a ban on Muslim immigration, and demanded “extreme vetting,” and now, when he floats the idea of a national emergency, he is saying that only he can take the extreme measures necessary to answer America’s extreme threats. In a December 2017 poll, two-thirds of Trump’s strongest supporters told the Public Religion Research Institute, “Because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules.”
Trump’s strategy of depicting America as a nation on the brink of catastrophe and awash in blood is unlikely to make congressional Democrats cave on the government shutdown. But it has its advantages. It primes Trump’s base to support whatever rule-breaking, extra-constitutional behavior he decides to pursue, and thus pressures Washington Republicans to swallow his transgressions or else risk a backlash from the GOP base. Trump didn’t declare a state of national emergency on Tuesday night, but he offered a rationale for doing so.
That’s the advantage of declaring America to be in perpetual crisis. It means that when you’re not winning by the normal rules, you give yourself the option to break them. Trump may lose the shutdown fight. But two years into his presidency, nobody truly knows how many rules he will be willing to break in order to ensure that he triumphs in the end.
Eric Young is the president of the union that represents the approximately 30,000 employees of the Federal Bureau of Prisons who are working during the government shutdown.
Young’s members, scattered at 122 facilities located in largely rural areas across the country, aren’t being paid and don’t know when their next paycheck will come. Like the leaders of virtually every federal-employee union during the past three weeks, he has condemned the shutdown and its toll on innocent workers as “unconscionable.”
“My personal opinion,” Young told me over the phone from his office in Arkansas, “is that it constitutes involuntary servitude.”
Neither Young nor any of his partners in union leadership, however, will urge their members to do the one thing that would seem most natural for employees facing the same treatment in the private sector: If they don’t pay you, stay home.
“We can’t call or advocate for a strike,” Young said.
Since the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, federal employees have been legally prohibited from striking. That law was intended to prevent public-sector workers from leveraging a work stoppage that could cripple the U.S. government or major industries in negotiations for better pay, working conditions, and benefits. But it likely did not envision a scenario where the government would require its employees to work without paying them, as is the case now.
For hundreds of thousands of federal employees, the “involuntary servitude” that Young describes could continue indefinitely. President Donald Trump warned Democratic leaders last week that he could keep the government shuttered for “months or even years”—a scenario that union leaders told me they had never before contemplated. “A lot of things are possible under this president, so I think we have to start preparing,” said Randy Erwin, the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees.
Government shutdowns have only been a feature—or, more accurately, a bug—of fiscal impasses since the enactment of the modern congressional budget process in the 1970s. The current shutdown is a partial one affecting roughly 800,000 federal employees. Roughly half of them are on furlough, while the other half, whose jobs are considered essential to public health and safety, must report to work even though Congress has not appropriated the funds to pay them. This category includes the Secret Service agents who protect the president and his family, the Transportation Security Agents, pilots, and air-traffic controllers who keep the aviation system running, the corrections officers who staff federal prisons, and, yes, the Border Patrol agents who guard the southern divide with Mexico along which Trump wants to build a wall.
If they don’t show up, “they’d be considered absent without leave,” said Jacque Simon, the policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, by far the largest union representing federal employees. “When they’re told to come to work, they are required to come to work.” An AWOL designation could lead to disciplinary action, including termination. For longtime government employees, that could put in jeopardy a federal pension they’ve spent a career accruing, union leaders said.
By and large, federal employees have been reporting to work. The TSA has acknowledged, in response to a CNN report last week, that its agents have called out sick at higher rates since the shutdown began, but the TSA spokesman Michael Bilello said that the sick calls have had a “minimal impact” on air travel or wait times. The sick calls do not, as yet, appear to be widespread. Bilello said that 4.6 percent of employees had called out sick on Monday, compared with 3.8 percent of employees on the same date in 2018. “We understand that the current lapse in funding may be causing added stress for our workforce and want to continue to express that we are grateful to the more than 51,000 officers across the country who remain focused on the mission,” he tweeted.
Faced with a potentially indefinite shutdown, the unions have turned to the courts for relief. The American Federation of Government Employees has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration alleging that by requiring employees to work without pay, the government is in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, a 1938 law that mandates a minimum wage and overtime pay both to public- and private-sector workers. Another federal labor group, the National Treasury Employees Union, has filed a similar suit.
The unions are also holding rallies, highlighting the impact of the shutdown on federal workers who live paycheck to paycheck, and publicly urging Trump and congressional leaders to come to an agreement that reopens the government. That, however, is about as far as they’ll go to protest the shutdown.
Despite taking the government to court, neither union is encouraging its members to take part in any kind of work stoppage. “We encourage everyone who is being told to come to work to go to work,” Simon told me. “We are never going to advocate for something that’s illegal.”
As for reports of higher levels of sick calls by TSA agents, Simon said: “We aren’t coordinating that. We aren’t condoning that, and we don’t even really think it’s happening. We think it’s been greatly exaggerated in the press.”
Federal employees generally haven’t tested the prohibition on strikes since President Ronald Reagan famously fired more than 11,000 air-traffic controllers who refused his order to return to work during contract talks in 1981. The controllers walked out in demand of higher pay and a shorter workweek. Federal workers have never staged a mass walkout to protest the lack of pay during a shutdown. But even in that circumstance, the anti-strike law would probably hold up, said Zachary Henige, an attorney representing two federal employees in their lawsuit agains the government over the current shutdown.
The law “is going to prohibit these employees from striking,” Henige said. “And I don’t think whether they’re being paid or not paid is going to impact that.”
“The statute doesn’t make a distinction about what they’re protesting,” he added.
A federal shutdown has never lasted more than three weeks, and Congress has always promptly approved retroactive pay for both furloughed employees and those who had to work through the impasse. “Even for shutdowns this length, they’ve been through it,” Erwin said.
But Trump’s threat to keep the government closed for “months or even years” could test the willingness of federal employees to remain on the job, especially as missed paychecks mount. “In theory,” Erwin said, “you’d have to say, How long can I keep working with no paycheck? It’s kind of unrealistic. At some point, there would have to be some kind of change to the status quo if this really is an unprecedented shutdown.
“I don’t know when that would be at this point,” he said.
The burden on corrections officers is particularly acute, Young said, because they are, along with TSA agents, among the lowest-paid federal employees still required to work. Federal prisons had been suffering from staffing shortages and budget cuts even before the shutdown. Many employees, he said, learned on Christmas Eve that their leave plans had been cancelled.
“You’re going to have a lot of people starting to call in because they don’t have gas money,” Young warned. “It’s going to be a real big problem in the near future if not right now.”
“Basically, they’re between a rock and a hard stone.”
The Fox News host Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue on the market and the family last week. It quickly found a large audience, becoming a viral sensation online. It also attracted a host of critics from across the political spectrum. Some of the fiercest criticism came from conservatives, including writers such as Ben Shapiro and David French, who attacked the very argument that we believe Carlson largely got right: Contemporary capitalism, small government conservatism, and elite negligence have all played a role in the fall of the working-class family.
Let’s review the three key points Carlson made regarding the erosion of marriage and family life in America. First, he argued that “increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in America can afford.” French, a senior writer for National Review, objected to the idea that only the rich can marry, arguing that “affluence is not a prerequisite for marriage.”
But Carlson is onto something. A half century ago, there were not big differences in marriage and family life by class; the vast majority of Americans got and stayed married. Starting in the late ’60s, however, marriage eroded among the poor, and since the ’80s, it has lost considerable ground among the working class. Today, only minorities of poor adults (26 percent) and working-class adults (39 percent) ages 18 to 55 are married; by contrast, a majority (56 percent) of middle- and upper-class Americans age 18 to 55 are married.
In fact, dramatic increases in nonmarital childbearing, divorce, and family instability among the working class mean that only about 55 percent of children with working-class mothers will reach age 14 in a home headed by two biological parents. That compares to about 77 percent of children with college-educated mothers in more middle- and upper-class homes. While affluence may not be a “prerequisite for marriage,” it clearly helps to be educated and affluent if you wish to forge a strong and stable family in America today.
[Read: Educated Americans paved the way for divorce—then embraced marriage]
The question is why. Carlson fingers bad public policies, market forces, and cultural developments for eroding the economic, social, and cultural foundations of family life in working-class America. In particular, he thinks federal policies are partly to blame for the decline in manufacturing jobs and in less-educated men’s wages. Because women still seek men who earn a decent wage, these declines in turn have led to a “drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births, and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow—more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.”
Carlson’s last key argument is simply that elites are complicit in all of this. They have flourished in today’s postindustrial economy, profited from policies and corporate moves that keep them at the top of the economic order, yet seem to evince little authentic concern that the currents they have ridden to success are undercutting the fortunes of those lower down the ladder. The “very same affluent married people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the people below them get and stay married,” he said, adding, “This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the crisis in marriage.”
Carlson’s conservative critics argue that the TV host is barking up the wrong tree. While acknowledging that “a series of tectonic cultural” and economic changes—from the “mass-scale loss of religious faith” to a shift away from manufacturing—have destabilized American family life, French faults working-class and poor Americans for their own troubles. In the final analysis, “the primary responsibility for creating a life of virtue and purpose rests with families and individuals”—not government programs or elites. Shapiro adds, “If we fail to make virtuous decisions on an individual level, we can’t blame that on tariffs or payday lenders.”
Granted, no matter what obstacles you face in America, you’re more likely to overcome them if you believe that you’re in control of your own life and follow what has been called the “success sequence”—getting at least a high-school degree, working full-time, marrying, and having children, in that order.
[Caitlin Zaloom: Does the U.S. still have a “middle class”?]
Yet it’s possible to recognize the value of personal agency and nevertheless admit the extent to which the stagnation of working-class wages and increases in job instability for less-educated men have stemmed from elite policy choices. Appealing to a lack of virtue on the part of the poor or the working class is at best a category error, and at worst an all-purpose rhetorical device for neutralizing responsibility on the part of elite policy makers.
Declines in working-class marriage—and all the pathologies that have followed in their wake—cannot be divorced from policy and cultural choices that elites have made.
The work of the MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues, in particular, indicates that dramatic and sudden increases in global trade with China starting around 2000 affected both men’s earnings and their marriageability. In their words, “Trade shocks to manufacturing industries have particularly negative impacts on the labor market prospects of men and degrade their marriage-market value along multiple dimensions: diminishing their relative earnings—particularly at the lower segment of the distribution—reducing their physical availability in trade-impacted labor markets, and increasing their participation in risky and damaging behaviors.” They add that “adverse shocks to the supply of ‘marriageable’ men reduce the prevalence of marriage … but raise the fraction of children born to young and unwed mothers and living in poor single-parent households.”
[Marco Rubio: Americans need to restore dignity of work]
These intertwined problems, then, were not the fault of a spontaneous decline in personal virtue. They were the fault of Washington elites who pursued a naive path of normalized trade with China that, in a matter of years, gutted millions of moderately educated workers of their decent-paying jobs, and without support in the way of adjustment assistance or wage insurance. Our elites had too much faith in a laissez-faire ideology that sees labor markets as automatically self-correcting but, in fact, exacted a terrible toll on scores of working-class families across the United States.
Cultural institutions also factor into this story. The primary shapers of our common culture—entertainers, journalists, educators, health-care professionals, politicians, and business executives—tend to challenge, downplay, or ignore the importance of strong and stable marriages in their public roles. Schools, child-care centers, and colleges, for instance, often celebrate atypical family structures or pass over the importance of marriage in classroom settings. In private, however, well-educated elites overwhelmingly value stable marriage for themselves and their kids. Indeed, they have “[reinvented] marriage as a child-rearing machine for a … knowledge economy” for themselves, as Richard Reeves, the co-director of the Brookings Center on Children and Families, has noted, adding that the “glue for these marriages” is largely “a joint commitment to high-investment parenting.”
Just as Carlson suggested in his monologue, conservatives need to think more seriously about the role that contemporary capitalism, public policy, and culture have played in eroding the strength and stability of working-class family life. Americans share a collective responsibility for solving some of our most pressing social problems—and elites need to come to acknowledge their personal responsibility for bridging the class divide that has emerged on so many fronts.
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