Recentemente, fiz um relato no Twitter sobre a importância da pedagogia crítica na formação de professores da Universidade de Oxford, e o tema despertou tanto o interesse de professores quanto raiva de haters, me chamando de mentirosa. Achei prudente, então, contar um pouco mais aqui da minha experiência.
É claro que uma grande parte do público mais engajado de Bolsonaro acha que o jornal norte-americano The New York Times ou as universidades de Oxford ou Harvard estão minadas pelo “marxismo cultural” – e ter Paulo Freire na formação de professores seria apenas a prova cabal disso. Só que ainda existe uma grande parte das elites brasileiras que, mesmo sendo bolsonarista e adepta ao projeto Escola Sem Partido, sonha que seus filhos estudem nas melhores universidades norte-americanas ou europeias. Ou seja, em universidades cuja a formação dos professores se dá em grande parte por meio da pedagogia crítica.
Infelizmente, ainda prevalece no Brasil uma profunda ignorância e uma obsessão quase fantasmagórica sobre a obra Paulo Freire – o suposto guru da doutrina satânica gayzista, feminista e marxista que reina em nosso sistema educacional. Quando era candidato à Presidência, Bolsonaro prometeu “entrar com um lança-chamas no MEC e tirar Paulo Freire lá de dentro”. Sobre tal doutrinação, no entanto, não há qualquer evidência empírica.
Paulo Freire é muito mais celebrado lá fora do que no próprio país de origem: ele é terceiro autor mais citado no mundo na área de ciências humanas, superando Karl Marx e Michel Foucault. O livro A Pedagogia do Oprimido (1968) tem 75 mil citações no Google Scholar e é a única obra brasileira que está entre as cem mais lidas nas disciplinas de países de língua inglesa.
Dito isso, é possível que cientistas sociais no Brasil – como eu – passem sua formação inteira sem serem confrontados como a obra de Paulo Freire. O mesmo dificilmente irá acontecer nos principais centros de excelência acadêmica no mundo. Ou seja, o problema da educação no Brasil, ao contrário da fantasia que assombra as mentes bolsonaristas, é justamente a falta de uma educação que incentive a autonomia e o pensamento crítico.
Os 12 anos do PT certamente fizeram muito pela educação brasileira, especialmente no que se refere ao acesso ao ensino superior. Mas ao contrário do que muitos acreditam, não houve (por falta de vontade ou de tempo) a tão necessária transformação da estrutura pedagógica do sistema educacional, capaz de fomentar o espírito democrático de sujeitos críticos. As eleições de 2018, aliás, comprovam isso.
Formação de professores na Universidade de OxfordQuando assinei meu contrato para trabalhar na Pós-Graduação em Desenvolvimento Internacional, o Oxford Learning Institute começou imediatamente a me contatar para que eu me inscrevesse no curso de um ano de formação de professores – o que era “altamente recomendado”.
Matriculei-me, então, no curso, cujo resultado final era a elaboração de um portfólio de ensino que, se aprovado, nos daria o título de membro vitalício (fellow) da Academia de Ensino Superior, cujo diploma certifica que você é um professor universitário que segue os principais padrões de excelência de ensino no Reino Unido.
Na minha turma estava toda uma leva de novos professores na área de humanidades e ciências sociais (as ciências exatas tinham uma turma separada, mas o programa era o mesmo).
Mas o que, exatamente, eles chamavam de excelência de ensino?
No primeiro dia de aula, o professor nos alertou: “Se vocês estão em busca de dicas de técnicas didáticas, aqui é o lugar errado. Cada professor tem seu estilo. Um bom professor é o que consegue ser claro e sabe refletir sobre o seu entorno e, ao mesmo tempo, é capaz de estimular a reflexão ao seu entorno”.
O curso tinha uma metodologia tão simples como profunda. Líamos textos diversos, mas fundamentalmente os de pedagogia crítica sobre a importância de os professores refletirem sobre as relações de poder em sala de aula. A principal obra do curso era o famoso livro de Stephen Brookfield, Becoming a critically reflective teacher, que tem influências de Paulo Freire e Antonio Gramsci.
O curso não doutrinou ninguém.Fazíamos debates profundos em pequenos grupos sobre o papel dos professores, exercícios autobiográficos críticos (quais relações de opressão e ou emancipação que tínhamos experimentado no passado e que estávamos reproduzindo como professores?), reflexão crítica de nossas avaliações por alunos. Observamos e fomos observados em sala de aula por nossos pares (o que é muito desafiador!) e, por fim, formulamos nossos valores enquanto professores.
O curso não doutrinou ninguém. Eu era uma das únicas pessoas de esquerda na turma. Meus colegas liberais, de centro ou de direita, continuaram liberais, de centro e de direita. Mas todos nós entendemos e discutimos com seriedade as formas de opressão que existem em uma sala de aula, bem como sobre nossa atuação e clareza em sala de aula.
Observei a aula de meu colega liberal, que era professor do curso de Políticas Públicas. Ele também assistiu minhas aulas e me ajudou a ser mais clara em minha comunicação (eu tendo a ter um pensamento circular que pode prejudicar a atenção de alunos, especialmente em língua estrangeira). Foi ele que me alertou para o fato de que eu deixava que a discussão fosse dominada pelos dois únicos homens na sala de aula, em contraposição a 16 alunas mulheres.
Eu também aproveitei o método crítico reflexivo para refazer meus questionários de avaliação, possibilitando e encorajando meus estudantes a serem mais críticos. Descobri, por meio das avaliações dos alunos, que eu poderia ser mais direta nas minhas aulas, o que confirmava a observação de meu colega. Na avaliação seguinte (monitorada pelos meus pares e pelos tutores do curso), os estudantes apontaram que havia tido um salto qualitativo na qualidade de minhas aulas.
Todo o grupo de novos professores refletiu criticamente sobre sua própria postura em sala de aula, seja como técnica didática, seja como relação de poder. Após um ano de encontros do curso, nos foi colocada a seguinte pergunta: “qual o papel do professor?”
Apenas uma parte da turma escolheu “mudar o mundo”, e a outra metade disse que era fornecer instrumentos técnicos para os estudantes resolverem problemas. Estava tudo bem. Não havia uma resposta correta: o correta era o próprio diálogo entre os pares.
O curso também ajudou a desconstruir o mito da genialidade, de que existiriam alunos “fracos” e “fodas”.Eu, particularmente, aprendi a me colocar como professora mulher, jovem e latina e a detectar e desarmar o machismo implícito e inconsciente de alunos.
Não sei se eu me tornei uma professora melhor desde então. Mas espero que sim. Aprendi a dar mais atenção ao estudante quieto, às mulheres e minorias em sala de aula. Aprendi a me colocar em uma posição de quem erra em sala de aula, mas está aberta mudar e ouvir críticas. Aprendi a falar menos e ouvir mais e, principalmente, desenvolvi minhas habilidades de ensinar via métodos dialógicos de conversa e debates.
O curso também me ajudou a desconstruir o mito da genialidade, de que existiriam alunos “fracos” e “fodas” (e isso até gerou meu texto mais lido até hoje, O Precisamos Falar sobre Vaidade na Vida Acadêmica). Com o método da pedagogia crítica e da “autocrítica reflexiva” eu apenas me tornei mais sensível a minha própria postura e ao meu entorno.
A única coisa que eu, infelizmente, não aprendi a fazer neste um ano de curso foi revolução. Também não foi me dado o super poder da doutrinação. Qualquer pessoa que encara uma sala de aula sabe que esse não é um dom que temos: nossa realidade é muito mais burocrática do que deveria ser. Se tivéssemos o dom de mudar as pessoas, é bem provável que teríamos um outro cenário político – e não este afundado na mediocridade, nas notícias falsas e no obscurantismo.
The post Oxford e Harvard amam Paulo Freire, o pedagogo que Bolsonaro quer tirar do MEC com um lança-chamas appeared first on The Intercept.
“Hoje é no amor!” A cena do miliciano Major Rocha felizão em um churrasco, em que ele comemora com tiros para o alto os quatro anos do centro comunitário em “Rio das Rochas”, no filme Tropa de Elite 2, é um bom retrato da realidade das milícias no Rio de Janeiro. “É tudo nosso!”, ele grita. Mas um dia a casa cai. E foi o que aconteceu hoje, quando o Ministério Público e a Polícia Civil anunciaram a prisão de cinco milicianos acusados de grilagem de terras na zona oeste do Rio de Janeiro. Não era a intenção – mas, por tabela, a operação, batizada de Intocáveis, também esbarrou em dois suspeitos da execução de Marielle Franco e Anderson Gomes.
Um deles, preso na operação, é o major da PM Ronald Paulo Alves Pereira. Segundo a polícia, ele é grileiro nos bairros de Vargem Grande e Vargem Pequena e chefe da milícia de Muzema, no bairro do Itanhangá – de onde o carro usado no assassinato de Marielle partiu. O outro é Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, chefe da milícia de Rio das Pedras e ex-policial do Batalhão de Operações Especiais, o Bope, que está foragido. Expulso da PM por envolvimento com um dos principais clãs da máfia do jogo do bicho no Rio, o ex-capitão investiu na carreira de mercenário, trabalhando para bicheiros, políticos e para quem mais pagasse bem.
O envolvimento do ex-caveira com o assassinato da vereadora e seu motorista foi revelado pelo Intercept na semana passada. Ao menos seis testemunhas citam o policial como o assassino. A escolha da arma, o uso de munição de uso restrito e a competência técnica na execução do crime apontaram para o Bope ainda em maio de 2018.
Diga-me com quem andas e eu te direi quem ésDevido ao ótimo “perfil técnico”, em 2005 Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega recebeu a medalha Tiradentes, a mais alta honraria do Legislativo fluminense, por indicação do então deputado estadual, hoje senador eleito, Flávio Bolsonaro, do PSL, o filho 02 de Jair Bolsonaro. O ex-caveira também recebeu outras duas honrarias, de louvor e congratulações por serviços prestados à corporação, por atuar “direta e indiretamente em ações promotoras de segurança e tranquilidade para a sociedade”.
Flávio Bolsonaro também condecorou o major da PM Ronald Paulo Alves Pereira, que recebeu moção honrosa quando já era investigado como um dos autores de uma chacina de cinco jovens na antiga boate Via Show, em 2003, na Baixada Fluminense.
Quando estourou o escândalo do Coaf, Queiroz – velho amigo da família Bolsonaro – se escondeu em Rio das Pedras, reduto miliciano.Os dois são suspeitos de integrar o “Escritório do Crime”, um grupo de extermínio apontado como responsável pelo assassinato da vereadora Marielle Franco. Quatro PMs ligados ao grupo já foram presos. Pereira será julgado em 10 de abril deste ano. O grupo é acusado ainda de extorsão de moradores e comerciantes, agiotagem e pagamento de propina.
Segundo o MP, o grupo de milicianos presos na operação Intocáveis agia na região das comunidades de Rio das Pedras, na Zona Oeste do Rio de Janeiro. Foi justamente para lá que Fabrício Queiroz, o ex-PM e ex-assessor do senador eleito do PSL Flávio Bolsonaro foi se esconder depois que estourou o escândalo sobre sua movimentação financeira suspeita.
O Coaf detectou uma movimentação de R$ 7 milhões, incompatível com a renda do ex-assessor. O dinheiro era depositado por outros assessores de Flávio Bolsonaro e de seu pai, Jair Bolsonaro. A primeira-dama Michelle Bolsonaro chegou a receber um cheque de R$ 24 mil de Queiroz. Já Flávio Bolsonaro recebeu 48 depósitos suspeitos no valor de R$ 2 mil cada.
Família, a sagrada base de tudoA preocupação de Flávio Bolsonaro com a família é tocante. Além de arranjar emprego para a esposa e filhas de Fabrício Queiroz – uma delas como assessora fantasma de seu pai –, ele empregou também a mãe e a esposa do ex-Bope Adriano Nóbrega. Sim, o mesmo que é apontado como um dos assassinos de Marielle Franco.
A mãe do ex-policial, Raimunda Veras Magalhães, também é sócia de um restaurante que fica longe da Assembléia Legislativa do Rio de Janeiro, mas em frente à do Banco Itaú onde foram feitos 17 depósitos em dinheiro vivo na conta de Queiroz. Ela é citada nas movimentações suspeitas detectadas pelo Coaf.
Flávio Bolsonaro segue a cartilha de dizer que “não sabia de nada”. Nem do que faziam seus próprios funcionários.Assim como “certos petistas”, Flávio Bolsonaro disse em nota que não sabia de nada e que, devido às últimas notícias, se sente perseguido. “Quanto ao parentesco constatado da funcionária, que é mãe de um foragido, já condenado pela Justiça, reafirmo que é mais uma ilação irresponsável daqueles que pretendem me difamar”. O senador eleito jogou no colo do ex-assessor Queiroz a responsabilidade pelas indicações de seus assessores. Seu ex-funcionário aceitou de bom grado, enviando até uma nota à imprensa esclarecendo que, de fato, conhecida o ex-caveira Adriano e foi o responsável por indicar suas parentes para trabalhar para Bolsonaro.
Flávio ostenta no próprio Instagram sua foto com o pai, Jair Bolsonaro, e com os PMs Alan e Alex, presos na operação Quarto Elemento.
Divulgação.
É possível que Flávio Bolsonaro também não soubesse a ficha técnica de outros dois policiais que participaram de sua campanha e foram presos na Operação Quarto Elemento, também desencadeada pelo Ministério Público, que investigava uma quadrilha de policiais especializada em extorsões. Pode ser que ele também não soubesse que, de acordo com o MP, a milícia de São Gonçalo organizou um ato de campanha em favor do Coronel Salema, seu colega de partido, eleito deputado estadual com quase 100 mil votos.
Ah, essa última é difícil de negar: além dos dois terem feito campanha juntos, Flávio Bolsonaro chegou a anunciar: “mais um guerreiro ao nosso lado!”. Parece que agora está ficando claro a qual lado ele estava se referindo.
O MecanismoOrgulhosa de ser militarista, a dinastia Bolsonaro nunca escondeu seu apreço pela milícia, grupos de paramilitares formados por ex-policiais, PMs, bombeiros e agentes penitenciários que torturam, roubam, traficam e dominam economicamente, grande parte do Rio de Janeiro.
Flávio Bolsonaro já propôs inclusive a legalização desses grupos paramilitares. No início de seu segundo mandato na Assembléia Legislativa do Rio, em 2007, ele votou contra a instalação da CPI das milícias, que entrou em pauta após um grupo de milicianos torturar por horas a fio uma equipe de jornalistas do jornal O Dia. A justificativa? Milícias não eram tão ruins assim e as pessoas são muito felizes em áreas dominadas por paramilitares.
“Sempre que ouço relatos de pessoas que residem nessas comunidades, supostamente dominadas por milicianos, não raro é constatada a felicidade dessas pessoas que antes tinham que se submeter à escravidão, a uma imposição hedionda por parte dos traficantes e que agora pelo menos dispõem dessa garantia, desse direito constitucional, que é a segurança pública”, disse à época, na Alerj.
Em casa a banda toca nesse ritmo. Em 27 anos de discursos como deputado na Câmara, o pai Jair Bolsonaro defendeu milicianos “do bem” e grupos de extermínio pelo menos quatro vezes. A primeira, em 2003, ao defender grupos de extermínio:
“Enquanto o Estado não tiver coragem de adotar a pena de morte, o crime de extermínio, no meu entender, será muito bem-vindo. Se não houver espaço para ele na Bahia, pode ir para o Rio de Janeiro. Se depender de mim, terão todo o meu apoio, porque no meu Estado só as pessoas inocentes são dizimadas.”
Em 2008, ao criticar o relatório final da CPI das Milícias, Bolsonaro disse que “não se pode generalizar” ao falar de milicianos. Na época, a CPI pediu o indiciamento de 266 pessoas, entre elas sete políticos, suspeitas de ligação com grupos paramilitares no Rio.
“Querem atacar o miliciano, que passou a ser o símbolo da maldade e pior do que os traficantes. Existe miliciano que não tem nada a ver com ‘gatonet’, com venda de gás. Como ele ganha 850 reais por mês, que é quanto ganha um soldado da PM ou do bombeiro, e tem a sua própria arma, ele organiza a segurança na sua comunidade. Nada a ver com milícia ou exploração de ‘gatonet’, venda de gás ou transporte alternativo. Então, Sr. Presidente, não podemos generalizar.”
Quando foi relembrado sobre este apreço pelas milícias durante a campanha eleitoral de 2018, Bolsonaro fez a egípcia e se disse desinteressado no tema. “Hoje em dia ninguém apoia milícia mais não. Mas não me interessa mais discutir isso”, disse.
Jair Bolsonaro, vale lembrar, foi o único presidenciável a não se manifestar sobre a execução de Marielle Franco e Anderson Gomes. E Flávio Bolsonaro foi o único deputado que votou contra a vereadora assassinada receber a medalha Tiradentes como uma homenagem póstuma.
No fim das contas, o brasileiro parece ter eleito o Major Rocha achando que estava votando no Coronel Nascimento. Talvez seus eleitores precisem assistir à Tropa de Elite de novo.
Correção: 22 de janeiro de 2018, às 20h46
Este texto inicialmente afirmou que a mãe e a esposa do ex-PM Adriano Nóbrega fizeram depósitos na conta do Fabrício Queiroz. Na verdade, foi apenas Raimunda, a mãe do ex-policial. O texto foi atualizado para refletir a mudança.
The post As ligações dos Bolsonaro com as milícias appeared first on The Intercept.
President Donald Trump’s new offer to open the federal government in exchange for funding for his wall on the southern U.S. border includes a major change to immigration policy that was not included as part of his public announcement.
The Trump administration had claimed that it would support legislation known as the BRIDGE Act — which includes protections for Dreamers — in exchange for concessions by Democrats. Upon closer investigation, that turned out to be a lie.
Trump’s offer to Democrats, revealed Monday night, actually gives him even more of what he has wanted in immigration policy, which is an end to the legal process that allows people to present themselves at a U.S. port of entry and apply for asylum. Trump’s new policy would ban such asylum-seeking for Central American minors and require those fleeing violence or persecution to apply in their own country instead.
The Trump administration, however, has also made that process effectively impossible. The appropriations bill that’s currently on the negotiating table creates the “Central American Minors Protection Act,” which would allow minors from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras with a “qualified parent or guardian” in the United States to apply for asylum in their home countries. (The bill does not define “qualified” parent, and it’s unclear whether the program would be limited to the children of U.S. citizens and permanent residents.) But far from treating would-be asylum-seekers’ claims with urgency, the bill gives 240 days (about eight months) for the establishment of eight processing centers that would deal with these claims — even though the ban on requesting asylum at the border would go into effect immediately.
“There is no way to square the way the administration has described this plan with what it actually is.”“There is no way to square the way the administration has described this plan with what it actually is,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst at the American Immigration Council, describing the proposal as a “de facto asylum ban” for the vast majority of cases. Central American minors who don’t have a qualified parent would no longer have a route to asylum, though they could ostensibly come to the border and request lesser protections with no route to citizenship, like withholding of removal or protections under the Convention Against Torture, Reichlin-Melnick noted.
The bill also caps the number of applications that can be processed at 50,000 per year, and says no more than 15,000 people can be granted asylum under the program annually. The Department of Homeland Security’s decision would not be subject to judicial review. If the legislation is passed, people who are eligible for the program will could be sent back to their home countries — without regard for their fear of persecution — if they trek to the U.S. and ask for asylum here.
The notion that asylum-seekers should apply back in their own countries is often presented with a veneer of humanitarian concern. Trump said in a speech on Saturday that the “heartbreaking realities that are hurting innocent, precious human beings every single day on both sides of the border” must end.
Indeed, even former President Barack Obama agreed to some extent that applying to emigrate while in one’s home country was better than asking for asylum at the U.S. border. And so, in 2014, as thousands of unaccompanied Central American minors were showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border, the Obama administration created the little-known Central American Minors program to encourage people to do just that.
CAM allowed children who were fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — and who had family members legally in the United States — to be considered for refugee resettlement while they were still in their home countries. Those who didn’t meet the eligibility criteria for refugee admission could be granted humanitarian parole, a temporary designation that would allow them to spend two years in the United States. (Notably, the Obama-era program was a supplement to existing asylum protections. Unlike the current GOP proposal, it didn’t impact the process of requesting asylum at the border.)
CAM was created for the children of people like Carmen Polanco, who is in the United States under Temporary Protected Status and has not seen her 13-year-old son since she fled El Salvador in 2011. Shortly after she left, her son witnessed a gruesome gang murder, a traumatizing experience that’s been followed by years of intimidation and bullying by local gangs, said Polanco, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym to protect her family. In 2015, she applied to be reunited with her son under CAM. His refugee application was rejected, but in late 2016, Polanco’s son was conditionally approved for parole, and he was set to undergo a medical examination in early 2017.
Then Trump entered office, and Polanco’s son’s exam was inexplicably canceled. The government’s website continued to broadcast word of the program, yet applicants at various stages throughout the process began to notice that their applications were not moving. In August of that year, DHS finally announced that it was canceling the program. DHS also rescinded parole for about 2,700 people who, like Polanco’s son, had been conditionally approved for parole but had not yet traveled to the United States.
We now know, thanks to a lawsuit filed by the International Refugee Assistance Project, that the Trump administration shut down the CAM program — canceling interviews and blocking travel to the United States — in January 2017, without notifying the public.
“The sudden, unexplained shutdown of the CAM parole program, which was carried out in secret immediately after President Trump’s inauguration, can only be explained by the president’s animus toward Latinos and Central Americans,” said Linda Evarts, an attorney at IRAP.
Last month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler found that the administration’s mass rescission of conditional approvals of parole was illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act, which deals with the way federal administrative agencies propose and establish regulations. Beeler’s decision was narrow, but it represents yet another instance of the courts rejecting rash policy changes by the Trump administration that have the intended, if unspoken, effect of keeping Latin American migrants out of the United States, regardless of how they try to get here.
IRAP brought the lawsuit on behalf of 12 applicants and beneficiaries of the CAM program, charging that the abrupt termination of the program moving forward was also illegal under the APA, and that the Trump administration’s actions were unconstitutional. Beeler rejected those claims, and she has not yet ruled on IRAP’s motion for a preliminary injunction that would force the Trump administration to reverse its rescission.
Still, Evarts described Beeler’s ruling as “a very important first step,” because the judge’s finding that the government violated the APA could set the stage for how she will rule on the preliminary injunction.
“The proposed legislation…would create a second-class asylum system for Central American children that is irrational and cruel.”The Trump administration’s new proposal for Central American minors does nothing for those impacted by the 2017 rescission of conditional parole, Evarts said. “The proposed legislation would eviscerate the humanitarian protection system for asylum seekers that has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. It would create a second-class asylum system for Central American children that is irrational and cruel, requiring them to apply from their home countries or be denied asylum.”
Wendy Mejia, 16, hugs her aunt after her arrival from El Salvador at Baltimore-Washington International Airport on Nov. 12, 2015. After 15 years apart, Wendy and her brother Brian reunited with their parents, becoming among the first teenagers to be granted refugee status and permission to travel legally to the United States through the State Department’s Central American Minor program.
Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP
By creating the CAM program, the Obama administration acknowledged that the threat posed by gangs and state security forces in the Northern Triangle countries could amount to persecution or a fear of persecution, one of the elements of a refugee claim. Typically, refugee resettlement is an option only available to individuals who’ve already fled their home countries, but the U.S. government wanted to discourage minors from making the perilous journey through Central America.
Within the first week of Trump’s presidency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is housed in DHS, canceled more than 2,000 CAM interviews that were scheduled in the first three months of 2017, according to court documents. The government also stopped issuing decisions to people who’d been interviewed under the program, stopped scheduling medical exams for people who had been conditionally approved for parole, and blocked travel for people who had cleared their medical exams. As all this was happening, “at least five webpages controlled by USCIS, the State Department, and the U.S. embassies in El Salvador and Honduras represented that the CAM program continued to be in operation,” Beeler wrote in her order.
The program was initially halted in anticipation of Trump’s January 27, 2017, executive order that is best known for containing the first iteration of the travel ban. Then-Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly issued a memo about implementing the executive order, in which he stressed that parole should be granted only “sparingly.”
In August 2017, the government said publicly for the first time that it had terminated the program and rescinded conditional offers of parole to 2,700 Central American minors. Those individuals were later told that they had 90 days to file a request for review of the denial of refugee status, in which they could present evidence that the officer who rejected their applications made a significant error, or that there are new facts that warrant a reconsideration of the officer’s decision. (There is no appeal process for such rejections, and it’s entirely within USCIS’s discretion whether to grant a review of an application.) “Many of those who filed [requests for review] in 2017 or early 2018 have not yet received decisions” on those requests, Beeler wrote.
Polanco filed a request for review in her son’s case in December 2017, and she has not yet heard back from USCIS, she said. She’s so desperate to be reunited with him that she’s “even thought about leaving and going there and bringing him back with me, walking,” Polanco said, speaking through an interpreter. Her son left Polanco’s parent’s home and is now living with her sister, due to his fear of gang activity in his family’s neighborhood. “He cannot go to church anymore. He cannot go to the stores. He cannot get out of the house,” Polanco said.
In a December 2016 report, outgoing USCIS Ombudsman Maria Odom called CAM “one of the most important programs DHS has developed in the last four years,” though she cautioned that it formed just “one piece of a comprehensive regional response needed to address the Northern Triangle refugee crisis.”
The program, as important as it was, was also flawed. Odom identified eight issues of concern in her report, including lengthy processing times, narrow eligibility criteria, and high costs. Another shortcoming of the program identified by advocates, as The Intercept previously reported, is that already fearful Central Americans put themselves at risk merely by applying for protections under the program — by repeatedly traveling to capital cities for interviews, people risked being tracked and hunted down by gangs.
A 2016 report prepared by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and grassroots groups in Central America and the United States found that “few minors (according to our survey, 2.5%) who take the traditional migration route through Mexico to seek asylum in the United States are aware of the CAM program. And even fewer (according to our survey, 1%) feel CAM is a legitimate alternative for them. Most could not wait a year to flee or did not fit the eligibility criteria.”
The report authors recommended an expansion of the program. Instead, Trump got rid of it.
During its short run, CAM provided a “lifeline” for many families, said Katie Shepherd, national advocacy counsel at the American Immigration Council. “It certainly wasn’t a perfect solution to a very systemic and difficult problem — that problem being pervasive gangs, domestic violence, and regional instability — but it did provide some avenue to some small portion of people, right? So it wasn’t a solution to the problem, but it did remedy the problem in some regards.”
The post Trump’s Shutdown Offer Creates a De Facto Asylum Ban for Central American Minors appeared first on The Intercept.
ISTANBUL—Pelin Ünker thought she had the scoop of a lifetime when Cumhuriyet, one of Turkey’s oldest newspapers, published her bombshell report that the family of Binali Yıldırım, then the country’s prime minister, owned vast offshore holdings. Yıldırım promptly admitted that the revelations were true—though he denied wrongdoing—and even invited an investigation into his two sons, who were named in the 2017 report.
That inquiry never materialized, and the authorities instead pursued Ünker, making her the first journalist in the world to be prosecuted for covering the Paradise Papers, a trove of some 13 million leaked documents that divulged tax loopholes used by the rich and powerful. A couple weeks ago, she was sentenced to more than 13 months in prison and fined $1,600 for insulting and defaming Yıldırım.
Ünker’s case exposes the perils of reporting in Turkey, where a sweeping crackdown has blunted civil society and turned the country into the world’s biggest jailer of journalists. Scores of media outlets that ran afoul of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government have been banned or forced to find new, more compliant owners. And even as Erdoğan grabs global headlines for denouncing Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist killed in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate in October, journalists in his own country labor under the threat of censorship, dismissal, or arrest.
[Read: The irony of Turkey’s crusade for a missing journalist]
Ünker was part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a global network that spent months sifting through the mass leak from a Bermuda law firm to lay bare the shadowy workings of the offshore financial industry. In her reporting, she found that Yıldırım’s sons had established shipping companies in Malta, which has a far lower corporate tax rate than Turkey, and had won a government contract back home. She also discovered that Serhat Albayrak—whose brother, Berat, is married to Erdoğan’s daughter—concealed offshore companies linked to the Turkish conglomerate the two Albayraks ran.
“My stories contained no slander, because the claims are not disputed, and not a single word of insult,” Ünker, 34, told me in a telephone interview after the verdict. “This sentence isn’t just about me. It’s punishing the act of journalism to intimidate others who might report this kind of news.”
Ünker can still count herself lucky. Should the appeals court uphold the verdict, Ünker is unlikely to serve more than a few days in jail, benefiting from a good behavior credit, her lawyer said. The judge ruled out a reprieve that would have eventually expunged her record, however, citing her propensity to commit the same “crime” again, Ünker and her lawyer said. Next time, she could wind up behind bars.
At least 68 of her peers, or more than a quarter of journalists jailed worldwide, are languishing in Turkish prisons, the Committee to Protect Journalists said last month. Other groups say that the figure is far higher; Human Rights Watch counts more than 175 journalists and media workers. The Turkish government says that it locks up those journalists who moonlight as terrorists or criminals. “It would never occur to us to discriminate by profession in these cases,” Erdoğan said last month. And to be sure, he has put away tens of thousands of people, including rights activists, politicians, and civil servants, most of them in a clampdown following a 2016 coup attempt against him. With a muzzled media and a cowed opposition, his drive to consolidate power has been largely unfettered. In June, Erdoğan—who first came to power in 2003—won election to a new supercharged presidency that puts most organs of the state under his control.
[Read: How did things get so bad for Turkey’s journalists?]
Almost 90 percent of Turkey’s news channels and papers are run by the government or businessmen close to it, according to Reporters Without Borders, which ranks Turkey 157th out of 180 nations in its World Press Freedom Index. Opposition voices have retreated to the web, but the long arm of the state extends there, too.
Necla Demir, the 29-year-old publisher of Gazete Karınca, faces up to 13 years in prison after prosecutors in Istanbul this month charged her with creating “terrorist propaganda” for the website’s coverage of a Turkish military offensive against Syrian Kurdish rebels in 2018. The indictment comes as Erdoğan threatens another incursion against the Kurdish militia, which has fought the Islamic State alongside U.S. soldiers, after President Donald Trump said that he’s withdrawing from Syria.
Turkey’s press has always worked within constraints, but enjoyed a brief heyday a decade ago, when Erdoğan needed its support to fight off the country’s secular old guard and champion a quixotic European Union membership bid.
Today, a trickle of mass-circulation newspapers still questions his authoritarian style of rule, but most outlets subscribe to an ardently nationalist view, giving short shrift to taboo topics such as Turkey’s conflict with the Kurds or human-rights abuses.
“There’s a suffocating climate of fear,” says Ahmet Şık, who spent 15 months in detention during his trial on terrorism charges, along with a dozen staff members from Cumhuriyet. “Cases are brought to stifle the handful of outlets writing critically of the administration, and the courts operate on government orders.”
Şık was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison in April for his coverage of alleged coup plotters and militant groups, but he remains free pending his appeal. A few months after his release, he quit journalism to run for parliament and won a seat with a left-wing opposition party. Nearly 30 of his colleagues at Cumhuriyet were sacked or resigned in September after a legal battle over management at the paper culminated in the appointment of a new chairman who had testified in court against Şık and his co-defendants.
Under its previous editors, Cumhuriyet was the sole Turkish outlet to collaborate on the Paradise Papers. When Ünker began working on the project, she would rush to the office in the middle of the night when a new batch of documents arrived, unable to contain her curiosity until morning. In the weeks after her son was born, she brought him to the newsroom so she could work on the story.
The disclosures about how global elites used offshore assets to reduce their tax burden led to a smattering of resignations around the world and calls for reform, at least outside of Turkey. Here, access to Ünker’s stories in Cumhuriyet’s online archives are blocked because of a court order.
“If our government officials and their relatives are hiding their wealth, the public ought to know,” Ünker said. “I never thought anyone would resign over this, but I did think the law, which calls for the disclosure and taxation of offshore accounts, would be applied—that just as regular citizens pay their taxes, the same would be expected of the rich.”
Her report had the opposite effect. When Yıldırım acknowledged that the companies existed and faced no repercussions, he normalized the practice. He became speaker of parliament after his post of prime minister was abolished, and is now running for mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city. Erdoğan named his son-in-law Berat Albayrak economy czar last year.
Ünker, meanwhile, quit Cumhuriyet after a decade at the paper to protest the new management. She now works as a freelance reporter for a German news organization, and is due back in court next month on defamation charges, this time against the Albayrak brothers. Another prison sentence looms.
City and teachers’ union officials in Los Angeles appear to have reached a tentative agreement to end a week-long strike, but the L.A. strike is just the latest flashpoint in an unprecedented wave of recent teacher activism. Over the past year, at least 409,000 educators have staged walkouts, nearly four times the number who did so in the major spate of strikes a half-century ago. What makes these recent strikes so stunning is that they come amid a decades-long slump in the influence of, and public support for, unions and labor activism.
The Academy Awards released its shortlist of 2019 Oscar nominees, in a year with no clear Best Picture front-runner. The 10 nominations for Roma are significant for the “firsts” that they mark: the film is the first produced by Netflix to get a Best Picture nod, and if it goes on to win the award, it would be first foreign-language film to do so. Yet even as the Academy attempts to grapple with its own relevance and blindspots, its nods this year largely ignored female filmmakers and several younger black directors. See the full list here.
Kamala Harris officially joins a crowded field of candidates vying to unseat President Donald Trump. In her campaign announcement, the California senator gestured at how she’ll differentiate herself from the rest of the pack—by eschewing a singular focus and trying to cobble together a broad coalition of support. Harris and other 2020 Democratic contenders will face some pressure to support impeaching Trump, as one prominent California billionaire looks to spend tens of millions of dollars to make the topic a major campaign issue.
Evening Reads
(A nudibranch. Image: Little Dinosaur / Getty)
There’s a whole ecosystem living at the ocean’s surface, and it may be at risk—from what seems to be a well-meaning but misguided attempt to clean up plastic.
→ Read the full story here
(David Sacks / Getty)
Do you have violent fantasies—of hurting a boss, or a bully, or a sworn enemy? While indulging in these thoughts might feel like a cathartic process, there’s research to suggest doing so really has the opposite effect.
→ Read the full story here
Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares their top stories:
The “Marie Kondo effect” is coming at a weird time for thrift shops: Netflix’s hit show has everyone tidying up, but that’s not the only reason second-hand stores are being flooded with donations.
There’s a growing consensus that our cities are becoming “childless.” But that’s not entirely true, Richard Florida writes. (Paris even has a plan to make life a little easier for its kids and families.)
Alabama’s Heritage Preservation Act forbade any city in the state from removing or altering Confederate monuments. Last week, circuit court Judge Michael Graffeo ruled that the law was unconstitutional, then retired the next day.
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It’s Tuesday, January 22. This is the 32nd day of the partial government shutdown. The Donald Trump administration said it is exploring ways to keep providing assistance to the nearly 40 million Americans receiving SNAP benefits if the current stalemate continues into March.
In 2020 News: California Senator Kamala Harris announced on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that she’s running for president—and she’s positioned herself as the candidate who can put together the winning coalition Democrats have been obsessed with since their loss in 2016. Meanwhile, Tom Steyer, the billionaire Democratic activist and fundraiser, is launching a campaign to pressure 2020 candidates to support impeaching President Donald Trump. “If you’re against impeachment, don’t bother running,” Steyer said recently. “Save your time. Drive an Uber.”
Rebellion: The Los Angeles teachers’ strike, which saw some 30,000 educators on strike since the beginning of last week, is slated to end after union and city officials reached a tentative agreement on Tuesday. Since early 2018, the total number of teachers and other school staffers who have participated in labor strikes in the U.S. has reached at least 409,000. This wave of teacher activism is completely unprecedented, reports Alia Wong.
On the Docket: The Supreme Court ruled to temporarily allow the Trump administration’s ban on transgender people from serving in the military go into effect. The justices also agreed to take up a major gun case for the first time in almost a decade.
Also Read: This 2017 account from a transgender CIA officer, shortly after Trump tweeted a transgender military-service ban.
Snapshot
A furloughed EPA worker, Jeff Herrema, holds a sign outside the offices of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, in Park Hills, Kentucky. Bryan Woolston / AP
Ideas From The AtlanticWhat the Camp Fire Revealed (Annie Lowrey)
“People with very low incomes, the disabled, and the elderly are less likely to have technologies that might alert them to a fire speeding their way or a hurricane about to bear down. In part for this reason, the average age of those who died in the Camp Fire was estimated at 71.” → Read on.
Trump’s Hostage Attempt Is Going Miserably Wrong (David Frum)
“The shutdown was a demand for unconditional surrender. Unfortunately for him, the president lacks the political realism to recognize that he doesn’t have the clout to impose that surrender.” → Read on.
Stop Trusting Viral Videos (Ian Bogost)
“Film and photography purport to capture events as they really took place in the world, so it’s always tempting to take them at their word. But when multiple videos present multiple possible truths, which one is to be believed?” → Read on.
The Coast Guard During the Shutdown
“The problem is we don't actually have a shutdown. It's a semi-shutdown … a faux shutdown. The vast majority of the American public has no clue except maybe they've heard there's drama in Wash DC., or maybe they were on vacation but couldn't get in to see the Grand Canyon.” A reader who is part of a Coast Guard family shares a few thoughts with James Fallows.→ Read on.
◆ Iowa Prepares for the Mother of All Caucuses (Natasha Korecki, Politico)
◆ Covington Catholic Is the Terrible Sequel to the Kavanaugh Case (David French, National Review)
◆ Trump Preparing Two State of the Union Speeches for Different Audiences (Katherine Faulders, Jonathan Karl, and John Santucci, ABC News)
◆ The Young Left’s Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Clare Malone, FiveThirtyEight)
◆ Trump’s Lawyer Said There Were ‘No Plans’ for Trump Tower Moscow. Here They Are. (Azeen Ghorayshi, BuzzFeed News)
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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Beijing Daxing International Airport is a massive complex built on the outskirts of Beijing, China, from more than 220,000 tons of steel, with a price tag nearing 14 billion U.S. dollars, and is set for completion in September 2019. The new facility—billed as the world’s largest single-terminal airport—will be Beijing’s second international airport, and developers hope it will relieve pressure on overtaxed existing travel options. By 2025, planners say Daxing will be able to carry as many as 72 million passengers a year.
“Dear Noortje: Why, I sometimes wonder, do so many love letters start with ‘I meant to write sooner,’ or ‘I should write to you more often,’ or a more fanciful variation of the same?” reads a young man in Tara Fallaux’s short film. “Maybe because people are lazy and, in their daily lives, easily find an excuse for that laziness,” the man ventures, “while it’s harder to justify on paper. Maybe the reason is deeper.”
Those reasons and more are explored in the exquisite documentary Love Letters, from the Amsterdam-based production company HALAL Films. Fallaux trains the camera on various couples as they read each other heartfelt letters and openly discuss their relationship. We also hear from single people, who read letters they wrote to ex-lovers while reflecting on the trials and tribulations of these life-changing relationships. Love Letters is an intimate rumination on the project of love—and, ultimately, the virtues of vulnerability.
Fallaux got the idea for the film after receiving an unexpected love letter from a longtime friend. After considering it, the filmmaker decided to store the note in a box full of other important letters she’d previously received. “I realized what a treasure box it was,” Fallaux told The Atlantic. “It was a lifetime of stories, shared thoughts, feelings, and events I had forgotten about. While reading them, the letters brought me right back, almost like time-traveling.”
She began research on the film, only to quickly realize that finding subjects would be more difficult than she had anticipated. “Most of the people I spoke to loved the idea, and were happy to share their stories with me,” Fallaux said. “However, hardly anyone dared to participate in the film. Too intimate, too painful, too naked.” Eventually, the filmmaker found participants who were willing to step out of their comfort zone and appear on camera. According to Fallaux, the subjects that appear in the film “strongly believe in encouraging people to be more open in expressing their feelings and insecurities.”
“I was afraid my heart would be broken,” a young woman in the film offers her boyfriend, by way of explanation for her initial reticence about the relationship. “I was afraid that someone would get to know everything I don’t accept about myself.”
Another man reads a letter in which he struggles to find words to encompass his feelings for his ex-girlfriend. “Where did it go wrong?” the letter to the ex reads. “I don’t know. I’m unable to write to you because I still don’t know what to say. I’m afraid I won’t do justice to you, or to myself. To our time together.”
To illustrate how she feels about love letters herself, Fallaux quotes one of the young men from the documentary, who says that writing a love letter is akin to sharing a diary. “It’s something extremely personal,” Fallaux said. “Something that leaves you exposed. I think everyone has a need to be heard and noticed, so receiving a letter feels very precious. And it appeals to the senses. You can feel the paper, smell the ink, enjoy someone’s handwriting. And you can save it. The letter becomes an extension of the writer, capturing a particular moment in time that the receiver can keep forever.”
“Making this film,” she added, “is my ode to the strength of vulnerability.”
In Los Angeles, more than 30,000 teachers remain on strike; it took union and city officials more than a week to eke out a tentative agreement that, they announced Tuesday morning, will likely bring them back to their classrooms this week. Last Friday, teachers from a handful of public schools in Oakland, California, staged a one-day walkout, too, and they’re planning for another demonstration this Wednesday. Meanwhile, a citywide strike is brewing a few states over in Denver, as could soon be the case in Virginia, where teachers are gearing up for a one-day rally in Richmond later this month. An educator uprising is even percolating in Chicago, where the collective-bargaining process is just getting started: “We intend to bargain hard,” the teachers’ union’s president told the Chicago Tribune last week.
These protests follow many others around the country. Last February, roughly 20,000 teachers in all of West Virginia’s 55 counties walked out. A month or so later, teachers in Oklahoma boycotted their classrooms; Kentucky’s educators staged their own strike that same day in early April, as did their counterparts in Arizona a few weeks later, picketing for a week. Later, a one-day rally by teachers in North Carolina forced numerous school districts to cancel classes. And last month, unionized educators in one of Chicago’s largest charter networks walked off the job—the first strike of its kind in the country’s history.
Taken together, these strikes amount to an unprecedented wave of teacher activism. For several decades, teachers’ unions generally shied away from striking. While strikes occasionally cropped up due to frustrations over demanding requirements and stagnant pay, they typically did so as isolated blips, generating little attention beyond the affected locale. A similarly significant period of teacher strikes arguably hasn’t happened since 1968, when large-scale walkouts occurred in Florida, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and New York City, along with smaller-scale ones in cities such as Cincinnati and Albuquerque.
Even that wave pales in comparison with today’s. Inconsistencies in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data-collection methods make it tricky to compare the two periods in quantitative terms. What’s clear, though, is that the eight major 2018 strikes—including the four high-profile statewide walkouts—involved a total of more than 379,000 teachers and school staff. Taking into account the current L.A. strike—which is poised to end after Tuesday, pending teachers’ ratification of their union’s newly inked agreement with the district—brings the tally to at least 409,000. The four major teachers’ strikes of 1968, by contrast, involved some 107,000 educators total, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis.
If nothing else, education-policy scholars, legal analysts, and labor experts tell me this wave is unprecedented in the terms that matter most: the stakes, the sentiments, the long-term implications. The walkout in Los Angeles is distinct from its red-state predecessors of 2018 in many regards—its participants are effectively facing off against a Democratic-controlled school district and state, for example, and a plurality of them are Latino, including many whose activist roots run deep. Still, the impact of this strike, which has shut down the country’s second-largest school district for more than a week, amounts to much more than a disruption to classes for nearly 500,000 students. It could go as far as helping to solidify this sequence of strikes as a pivotal moment in a 21st-century labor movement that is characterized by its radicalism and sense of collective action, suggests Charlotte Garden, a professor at Seattle University School of Law who studies labor.
[Read: The unique racial dynamics of the L.A. teachers’ strike]
Back when teachers’ unions first rose to prominence in the early 20th century, the organizations were seen as white-collar guilds tasked with serving educators’ professional needs, Garden says. They were conceived as distinct from, say, the steelworker and coal-miner unions, which were known for their activist bent and narrative of class struggle. But in recent years, many teachers’ unions have been modifying their brand and their explicit mission, placing emphasis on issues beyond educators’ own pocketbooks. In last year’s West Virginia strike, for example, teachers decried students’ limited access to quality instruction; in Oklahoma, their targets were outdated textbooks and dilapidated facilities; in Los Angeles, they condemned the paucity of counselors and classrooms packed like sardines.
These issues “get at the heart of public education,” says Kent Wong, the director of UCLA’s Labor Center, meaning that, in a sense, teachers’ unions aren’t fighting just for teachers anymore, but also for students themselves. By expanding their demands beyond their own compensation, teachers’ unions are transforming into some of the most significant advocacy groups striving for socioeconomic equality in America today. As part of the tentative agreement announced Tuesday, the Los Angeles school district will shrink class sizes and better incorporate the real world into curricula on top of increasing teachers’ salaries by 6 percent.
This broader, more public-minded approach has its roots in 2012, and in a city well versed in teachers’ strikes: Chicago. The timing was hardly auspicious for an uprising: American taxpayers, whose support for unions in general had been declining, had started to see public-sector unions as incompatible with their interests as taxpayers; politicians from both parties were starting to place restrictions on such organizations. The impulse for many political leaders in the Windy City was thus to dismiss the walkout as unnecessary and superficial.
Yet, as Erik Loomis writes in his recent book on the history of strikes in the United States, money was an afterthought for Chicago’s teachers. Instead, echoing a landmark report their union had published earlier that year outlining the changes the students needed to thrive, teachers demanded more and better training for serving specific populations, as well as fair evaluations designed with kids’ success in mind; they called for air conditioning in their sweltering classrooms and lower limits on how many students could be placed into those classrooms.
The teachers wanted, Loomis writes, “to work and live with human dignity,” an objective the teachers’ union framed as inseparable from a similar sense of dignity among children both in and outside of school. After a week of boycotting their classrooms, the teachers secured some concessions from the district—including a carefully crafted evaluation system that relies partly on student test scores, textbooks for all kids on the first day of school, and a more holistic curriculum with a greater investment in extracurriculars such as art.
Since then, teachers’ strikes have continued to focus even more on these beyond-the-pocketbook issues. One reason is simply that the quality of the country’s public schools is, in certain places, terrible. The Great Recession ushered in an era of austerity measures that significantly hamstrung public schools across the country; in a handful of red states, school spending never returned to pre-2008 levels. Additionally, schools have been resegregating, contributing to growing race- and income-based disparities in achievement, and standardized testing, which proliferated following the No Child Left Behind Act signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002, continues to dictate the way many schools are measured and run.
At the same time, the American public maintains tepid attitudes toward unions in general and wariness of their political influence specifically; since the mid-20th century, there has been a general decline in union membership. These trends came into sharp focus last summer with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which deemed it unconstitutional for public-sector unions to collect membership dues from workers who don’t support the union, a tactic on which they’d relied for decades. In light of this, teachers’ unions have sought to rebrand themselves as activist organizations charged with fighting for children’s needs in the name of the collective interest, an overhauled identity that has resulted in both more striking and more results.
Even so, critics suggest that self-interest is nevertheless what’s driving teachers’ unions to the picket lines. Jeanne Allen, the founder and director of the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter-school organization, says that following Janus, “teachers are desperately afraid that if they have to go out and recruit members and convince them that [the unions] are worthwhile,” the unions won’t be able to collect the fees needed to sustain themselves.
As evidence, Allen cites the collective-bargaining proposal submitted by the L.A. teachers’ union earlier this month: It stipulated that the district would have to provide the union with the contact information of every LAUSD employee, for example, and restrict the number of activities for which schools can request teachers’ participation rather than leaving that up to individual campuses. In other words, the union may be attempting to keep a tight rein on staff who in a post-Janus world may choose to distance themselves from the union. The union is seeking to “micromanage the district,” Allen argues, by gaining more control over decisions that individual schools should have the power to make.
[Read: Is this the end of public-sector unions in America?]
Teachers concede that the walkout had been in the works for some time, but their motives, they argue, go beyond self-interest and beyond strengthening the union for the union’s sake. “People are pissed about the conditions in L.A.” says Pedro Noguera, a distinguished professor of education at UCLA whose research as a sociologist focuses on the impact of race and class on schools. By “conditions” he means the class sizes (some are as large as 46 students, exceeding the 39-pupil limit stipulated by teachers’ last contract), the lack of support staff (each high-school counselor in the district has an average caseload of nearly 400 students), and the rapid growth of charter schools (at 224, Los Angeles has more such institutions than any other U.S. city, and a number of studies, at least one of them union-funded, have found that the charter-school sector siphons hundreds of millions of dollars out of the union every year). “All those things come together to make people very angry,” Noguera said.
Beyond that, the six educators I spoke with in recent days all alluded to their growing realization that change won’t happen without major disruption. (Five of the teachers are in L.A., while one spearheaded the one-day walkout in Oakland, where the teachers’ demands placed a similar emphasis on charter schools and sorely deficient classroom conditions.) They’re not criticizing the growth of the charter sector—which in L.A. now enroll nearly 140,000 students—because such institutions operate beyond the union’s purview, they argue, but because they fear the sector is depleting the city’s public-education system at the hands of private, sometimes for-profit, entities. Public per-pupil funding follows students who transfer into charters out of the public schools, where enrollment has plummeted in recent years. The teachers contend that this trend has contributed to public schools’ deterioration in both the city and the state—largely attributable to a property-tax amendment passed in the 1970s commonly known as “Prop 13”— which once boasted one of the country’s best education systems.
“We’ve been in this fight since before Janus … We believe in this stuff,” says Arlene Inouye, one of the union’s chief negotiators and a former public-school educator, pointing to the overall decline in classroom conditions and highlighting the union’s leadership overhaul four years ago. In an interview, John Rogers, an education-policy professor at UCLA,suggested that more teachers in L.A.—and across the country—are starting to see themselves as “guardians of democracy.” While the legislative results of last year’s strikes have been mixed, various polls showed rising support nationally for teacher-salary hikes, strikes, and school-funding increases.
Still, even if L.A.’s teachers have broad support from the public, it remains unclear how their demands will be funded; as of Tuesday morning local time, details on the tentative agreement hadn’t been released. While union officials and some analysts pointed to the district’s nearly $2 billion in reserves, LAUSD maintained that the remaining money it has is already being spent or has been committed to critical expenditures, including pay raises and staffing increases that partly heed teachers’ demands. When we spoke last week, UCLA’s Noguera emphasized that he sympathizes with the teachers’ concerns and their impulse to walk out—but that he recognizes the district’s fiscal dilemma, too. Because the school district receives its per-pupil funding from the state, every day of the strike—with the declining rates of kids showing up to school—comes with an immense deduction in those public dollars. As of Friday, according to district data, LAUSD had lost close to $125 million in gross revenue. “If you’re really trying to fund public education, and the strike weakens the system,” Noguera suggests, “then you’re actually going to be weakening public education.”
The irony of it all is that the recent strikes transpired in a moment marked by waning public support for unions and widespread skepticism about their political influence, a Supreme Court decision that appears to side with a majority of Americans by restricting unions’ fundraising capabilities, and overly stretched state budgets that make many of teachers’ demands all but impossible to fulfill. Teachers are attempting to leverage these adverse realities to their advantage—and based on the public’s response, this unlikely strategy appears to be working.
The fifth episode of Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, Netflix’s effervescent new reality series, deals with Frank and Matt, a couple living in West Hollywood, California. Both writers, they have a touching love story involving Tinder, a too-small apartment filled with detritus from past roommates, and a burning desire to prove their adulting bona fides. They are, in short, the archetypal Millennial couple. The dramatic hook of the episode is that Frank’s parents are coming to visit for the first time, and Frank wants to impress them, to make them see “that the life we’ve created together is something to be admired.”
Frank and Matt, in other words, want their home to reflect their identities and sense of self (as opposed to the cutlery preferences of the people Matt lived with after college). They’ve internalized the idea that the signifiers of success are primarily visual. “I don’t know that I’ve given [my parents] any reason to respect me as an adult,” Frank agonizes at one point, which is absurd, given his apparently successful career and adorable relationship. “I’m organized in some aspects of my life. Like, professionally, my email inbox is organized, I’m great. And I just get frustrated with myself that I haven’t translated that into my home life. It feels like I give it all at work and then I come home and am like, pmph.” He makes a gesture like a deflated balloon.
If the viral success of Tidying Up With Marie Kondo is anything to go by, Frank and Matt—their exhaustion, and their understanding that an adult existence is an optimized one—aren’t anomalous in their anxieties. Kondo, a Japanese organizational consultant, has sold more than 11 million books in 40 countries since the publication of her magnum opus, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Compared to the interest in her television series, though, Kondo’s previous achievements are a relative blip. Netflix didn’t respond to queries about how many people had viewed Tidying Up, but in the U.S. at least, the show’s release has sparked a feverish curiosity about Kondo and her practices.
More than 192,000 Instagram pictures of color-coded sock drawers and neatly labeled mesh containers now bear the #KonMari hashtag. Thrift stores around the U.S. have reported record donation hauls as inspired Americans streamline their possessions. In barely three weeks, Kondo has gone from a best-selling author to a cultural juggernaut. In part, this is due to Netflix’s prodigious reach, particularly among young Millennials, who are five times more likely to watch a show on the streaming service than access it via any other provider. But the success of Tidying Up also speaks to how neatly some episodes of the show sync with its cultural moment, a time in which identity and achievements are visual metrics to be publicly displayed and curated, and a happy home is a perfected, optimized one.
[Read: ‘Tidying Up With Marie Kondo’ isn’t really a makeover show]
For Millennials like me, people born roughly between 1981 and 1996, the desire to flaunt our tidying prowess isn’t just about showing off. A 2017 study by the British researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill found that Millennials display higher rates of perfectionism than previous generations, in part because we’ve been raised with the idea that our future success hinges on being exceptional. But, as Frank suggests, we’re also struggling with what it means to really grow up. The aspirational markers of adulthood used to be relatively straightforward: graduation, marriage, children, homeownership, a 401(k). But now that Millennials are so overloaded with student debt that we struggle to buy places to live, adulthood is more complicated. It’s more performative. It’s #KonMari.
Four days after Netflix released Tidying Up, BuzzFeed News’s Anne Helen Petersen published what feels like a seminal analysis of a connected phenomenon. “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” elegantly and systematically documents how the malaise Frank complains about—putting so much effort into his work that he has nothing left for himself—is symptomatic of a much larger generational disorder. Millennials, Petersen argues, have been raised with the belief that they have to be exceptional, or they won’t succeed in an economy that since the early 2000s has seemed to dance perpetually on the edge of an abyss. “I never thought the system was equitable,” she writes. “I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them.”
This conviction is why Tidying Up With Marie Kondo has drawn so many fans in such a short time, and why your feeds might suddenly be bloated with soaring piles of clothes and arguments about whether to Kondo your books. Millennials have come to believe, Petersen writes, that “personal spaces should be optimized just as much as one’s self and career.” But the conspicuous nature of #KonMari also suggests a larger vacuum. Millennials don’t just gravitate to Marie Kondo because they don’t have apartments big enough to own things. What Tidying Up offers is both a counterpoint to the way they’ve been raised (less is more, versus more is always better) and an endorsement: The promise, at least as Millennial culture seems to have interpreted it, is that if people work to organize their lives to look just right, the rest will follow. The performance of the self has become more important than the reality. Even TV has noticed.
If Marie Kondo is the high priestess of burned-out Millennials, Fyre Festival was their summer solstice. In 2017, a large adult grifter named Billy McFarland partnered with the rapper Ja Rule to sell tickets to a festival in the Bahamas that promised to be the apotheosis of an Instagram-worthy event: megastars (Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid); spectacular food; luxe but eco-friendly accommodations; music by Major Lazer, Migos, and Blink-182. McFarland partnered with a marketing company called Jerry Media that paid supermodels to promote the event on their social-media accounts, cultivating the sense that Fyre Festival would be the exclusive gathering for stars that any schmo could also buy a ticket to.
The seeds of Fyre Festival’s success were also its downfall: When attendees finally arrived at what turned out to be the gravelly parking lot near a Sandals resort, they documented everything they found on social media. Like the fact that the only places for people to sleep were unassigned FEMA tents with pallet mattresses. And that instead of luxurious communal bathrooms with showers, there were porta-potties. The most iconic post from Fyre Festival, in the end, was a picture of a sandwich: plain bread with two slices of slimy American cheese, accompanied by the hashtags #fyrefraud and #dumpsterfyre.
A car crash in slow motion, Fyre Festival was a catastrophe on such a colossal scale that two documentaries, released within days of each other, are trying to make sense of it. Netflix’s Fyre, as my colleague David Sims has written, takes a relatively straightforward approach to excavating the whole fiasco, accounting for not only McFarland’s crimes and the public spectacle of the festival’s monumental collapse, but also the Bahamian workers who still haven’t been paid for their efforts.
[Read: Why people paid thousands of dollars to attend a doomed music festival]
Fyre Fraud, surprise-dropped by Hulu last Monday, takes a different approach. Directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, it mines the sociological implications of Fyre Fest, and what it says about a generation of Americans that they’re so susceptible to a scammer with an Instagram account. Fyre Fraud includes parts of a taped interview with McFarland himself (who was supposedly paid for his participation), but they’re the least revealing moments in the documentary. More interesting is how Fyre Fraud uses the selling of the festival to consider the ways some Millennials understand identity, including their anxieties about affirming their existences online—literally, Pics or it didn’t happen.
Fyre Fraud posits that, for all the sloppiness of his grift, McFarland actually has a surprisingly intuitive sense of what Millennials want, and how to market it to them. Having been raised with the sense that being exceptional is the only way to thrive, Millennials can be hyperaware of their own status relative to others, and ferociously invested in elevating themselves above the pack. As preposterous as the Fyre Festival promotional video might seem now, it pings all the right dopamine receptors in an ongoing loop of stick (the acute FOMO of knowing everyone important is somewhere doing something fabulous without you) and carrot (countless Instagram opportunities for personal branding and self-curation). Influencers, the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino says in Fyre Fraud, are people who have refined and monetized the art of this “performance of an attractive life.”
Which brings us back to the perfectionism study. Millennials, born during the Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton presidencies, are the first real babies spawned by neoliberalism and its overarching message of competitive individualism. Curran and Hill wanted to establish whether growing up amid these ideologies made Millennials more likely to be perfectionists, and therefore more likely to be depressed, anxious, unhappy, and dissatisfied with themselves. They concluded not only that perfectionism rates have risen, but also that Millennials’ identities have been fractured by shifting cultural values.
Even as they’re poorer, Millennials are more materialistic: 81 percent of Americans born during the 1980s say that accruing wealth is among their significant life goals, more than 20 percent higher than previous generations. As a national belief in the collective has given way to an emphasis on the individual, Millennials have had to become less inhibited about the pursuit of self-gain, and more shrewd about how they define themselves. Amplified by social media, such perfectionism urges the posting of absurdly idealized images, which, transmitted, reinforce the cycle of unrealistic physical ideals and a sense of alienation. “Neoliberalism,” Curran and Hill conclude, “has succeeded in shifting cultural values … to now emphasize competitiveness, individualism, and irrational ideals of the perfectible self.”
The messages that Millennials in the Western world were raised with, in other words, have taught them to work harder and better than ever before, in all aspects of their lives. And that work is making a generation miserable, as Petersen documents, as they strive to attain success and avoid failure, and are permanently attuned to the perceived expectations of others. They’ve constructed flimsy charades of identities based on what they think other people will want. They want to prove that their lives, as Frank says in Tidying Up, are things to be admired, and that their homes, vacations, children, closets all function as projections of their best selves: organized, attractive, authentic. Unattainable.
Roma and The Favourite led the Oscar nominations with 10 apiece as the Academy Awards unfurled their shortlist Tuesday morning, with Best Picture recognition for A Star Is Born, BlacKkKlansman, Green Book, Black Panther, Vice, and Bohemian Rhapsody. Some surprising snubs abounded in a race that never quite settled on an obvious front-runner: Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born) and Peter Farrelly (Green Book) missed out on crucial Best Director nods, and stars such as Emily Blunt, Timothée Chalamet, and Ethan Hawke were overlooked in the expected acting categories. But there were multiple industry milestones, including Roma becoming the first Netflix film to get a Best Picture nomination and Black Panther becoming the first comic-book movie to do so.
An unsettled and politically charged awards season has, for the past few years, been the name of the game at the Oscars. But even by those standards, the 2019 nominee list is the product of a tumultuous campaign that often seemed to reckon with the future of Hollywood, be it the disruptive power of Netflix, the enduring but increasingly out-of-date appeal of “prestige” films like Green Book, and the Academy’s own anxieties about its declining influence. A misguided attempt at establishing a “popular film” award has been set aside for now; the question of who, if anyone, will host the February 24 ceremony remains unanswered after Kevin Hart was hired and then stepped down over a history of homophobic tweets.
Early on, the Best Picture conversation was dominated by A Star Is Born, Cooper’s Lady Gaga–starring remake of the Hollywood classic, which connected with both audiences and critics, grossing more than $400 million worldwide despite being an R-rated drama. Though the film got many nods (including for Cooper, Gaga, and Sam Elliott in the acting categories), it missed the pivotal directing and editing shortlists, suggesting a lack of enthusiasm across all the Academy’s branches, something reinforced by the film’s failure to win major prizes at precursors like the Golden Globes.
Green Book, which won a Best Picture trophy at the Globes as well as the coveted Producers Guild award, had recently pulled ahead despite its mediocre box-office takings and more mixed critical reception. A heartwarming tale of friendship between the black musician Don Shirley and his white bodyguard, Tony Vallelonga, in the early 1960s, the film has been dogged by controversy, including complaints from Shirley’s family over perceived inaccuracies, the reemergence of old stories about the director Farrelly’s inappropriate behavior in the past, and the unearthing of an anti-Muslim tweet by the screenwriter Nick Vallelonga (Tony’s son). Green Book still seems like a viable competitor, especially for Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali), but its lack of a Best Director nod will hurt its chances for the biggest prize.
The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos’s arch period tale of scandal and intrigue in the court of England’s Queen Anne, received an expected slew of technical nominations along with recognition for Lanthimos and the entire leading cast (Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone), bumping the film to the top of the nomination tally. BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee’s rendering of Ron Stallworth’s autobiography about his infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1970s Colorado, was a hugely successful comeback for the celebrated filmmaker, earning him his first competitive directing nomination (along with a screenplay nod) and six nominations in total. Bohemian Rhapsody, the other big Golden Globes winner, was shortlisted for Best Picture, Best Actor, and three technical awards, but its director, Bryan Singer (who was fired during production), was ignored.
Perhaps the biggest story of the nominations, though, is the dominance of Roma, a Mexican film from Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity), which has a significant chance to be the first foreign-language feature to win Best Picture in the Academy’s 91-year history (the movie’s dialogue is in Spanish and Mixtec). Netflix has thrown a tremendous publicity budget behind the film’s campaign machine, partly to overcome a perceived bias against the streaming company for mostly keeping its movies out of cinemas. The company also broke its long-standing rules and released Roma in theaters first to get ahead of that criticism. Netflix’s efforts seem to have worked: Roma was recognized not just in technical categories but also for Best Actress (newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) and Supporting Actress (Marina de Tavira), the latter of which was a massive surprise. As other potential front-runners founder, Roma might end up as the consensus pick.
Still, this season held plenty of missed opportunities for the Academy, which has been working to modernize its membership and stay ahead of the zeitgeist. Though Black Panther was recognized, Michael B. Jordan’s iconic work as the film’s villain never got awards traction, and Ryan Coogler (the movie’s director and writer) was overlooked, as the Best Picture nomination goes to the film’s producer, the Marvel honcho Kevin Feige. Lee’s long-awaited recognition in the directing category was a serious achievement, but other younger black filmmakers with lauded films missed out, including Barry Jenkins (though he was nominated in Best Adapted Screenplay for If Beale Street Could Talk), Steve McQueen (whose Widows was ignored), and Boots Riley (same for his Sorry to Bother You).
Meanwhile, female filmmakers were entirely neglected. Though Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? got three nominations, she and Debra Granik (who directed Leave No Trace and the 2011 Oscar nominee Winter’s Bone) never got into the awards conversation despite critical acclaim, perhaps because their films were quieter and less showy than other Oscar hits like Vice. The complexities of award season, and where studios decide to put their advertising money, mean it’s hard to place blame on any one voting body. But even as the Oscars’ membership is updated, what amounts to Academy consensus still feels far from radical.
Best Picture
BlacKkKlansman (Focus Features)
Black Panther (Disney)
Bohemian Rhapsody (20th Century Fox)
The Favourite (Fox Searchlight)
Green Book (Universal)
Roma (Netflix)
A Star Is Born (Warner Bros.)
Vice (Annapurna)
Best Director
Alfonso Cuarón, Roma
Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite
Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman
Adam McKay, Vice
Paweł Pawlikowski, Cold War
Best Actor
Christian Bale, Vice
Bradley Cooper, A Star Is Born
Willem Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate
Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
Viggo Mortensen, Green Book
Best Actress
Yalitza Aparicio, Roma
Glenn Close, The Wife
Olivia Colman, The Favourite
Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Best Supporting Actor
Mahershala Ali, Green Book
Adam Driver, BlacKkKlansman
Sam Elliott, A Star Is Born
Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Sam Rockwell, Vice
Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, Vice
Marina de Tavira, Roma
Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Emma Stone, The Favourite
Rachel Weisz, The Favourite
Best Original Screenplay
Alfonso Cuarón, Roma
Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga, Green Book
Deborah Davis, Tony McNamara, The Favourite
Adam McKay, Vice
Paul Schrader, First Reformed
Best Adapted Screenplay
Bradley Cooper, Will Fetters, Eric Roth, A Star Is Born
Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk
Spike Lee, David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel, Kevin Willmott, BlacKkKlansman
Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Nicole Holofcener, Jeff Whitty, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Best Animated Film
Incredibles 2
Isle of Dogs
Mirai
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Best Foreign Language Film
Capernaum, Lebanon
Cold War, Poland
Never Look Away, Germany
Roma, Mexico
Shoplifters, Japan
Best Documentary Film
Free Solo
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Minding the Gap
Of Fathers and Sons
RBG
Best Original Score
BlacKkKlansman
Black Panther
If Beale Street Could Talk
Isle of Dogs
Mary Poppins Returns
Best Original Song
“All the Stars,” Black Panther
“I’ll Fight,” RBG
“The Place Where Lost Things Go,” Mary Poppins Returns
“Shallow,” A Star Is Born
“When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings,” The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Best Cinematography
Cold War, Lukasz Zal
The Favourite, Robbie Ryan
Never Look Away, Caleb Deschanel
Roma, Alfonso Cuarón
A Star Is Born, Matthew Libatique
Best Film Editing
BlacKkKlansman
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
Vice
Best Production Design
Black Panther
The Favourite
First Man
Mary Poppins Returns
Roma
Best Costume Design
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Black Panther
The Favourite
Mary Poppins Returns
Mary Queen of Scots
Best Sound Editing
Black Panther
Bohemian Rhapsody
First Man
A Quiet Place
Roma
Best Sound Mixing
Black Panther
Bohemian Rhapsody
First Man
Roma
A Star Is Born
Best Visual Effects
Avengers: Infinity War
Christopher Robin
First Man
Ready Player One
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Border
Mary Queen of Scots
Vice
Best Animated Short
Animal Behavior
Bao
Late Afternoon
One Small Step
Weekends
Best Live-Action Short
Detainment
Fauve
Marguerite
Mother
Skin
Best Documentary Short
Black Sheep
End Game
Lifeboat
A Night at the Garden
Period. End of Sentence.
Imagine you’re on a small boat in the middle of the open ocean, surrounded by what looks like a raft of plastic. Now flip the whole world upside down. You remain comfortably attached to your seat—the abyss towers above you, and all around, stretching up from the water’s surface, is an electric-blue meadow of life. What you thought was plastic is actually a living island. This meadow is made up of a diverse collection of animals. The most abundant are blue buttons and by-the-wind sailors, with bright-blue bodies that dot the sky like suns, and deep-purple snails found in patches so dense one scientist described collecting more than 1,000 in 20 minutes.
This is the neuston, a whole ecosystem living at the ocean’s surface. I once stumbled upon a raft of neuston when a storm blew it ashore in California. Many neustonic animals are vibrant highlighter colors, and the sand was saturated in bright blues and pale pinks. Together, these small creatures may function like upside-down coral reefs: an oasis of shelter and life far out to sea. As far back as the Cold War era, scientists were describing these colorful and important ecosystems, yet they still remain all but unknown. But now, as efforts to clean the ocean of plastic start up, our ignorance is putting this ecosystem at risk.
The neuston is home to more than blue buttons and bright snails. Erupting through the lawn of blue are crackling purple, red, gold, and yellow strands. These are Portuguese man o’ wars, whose tentacles stretch like lightning from the meadows of blue and pink. And among them, dragons roam.
Small nudibranchs, known as blue sea dragons, feast on blue buttons and man o’ wars, using their winglike cerata to grab and hold onto their tentacled prey. There are sea anemones, barnacles, copepods, color-changing crabs, specialized bacteria, even bugs, all living in this inverted reef in the middle of the open ocean. (Organisms that live exclusively by floating at the surface of the water are called pleuston, while neuston is a broader term, referring generally to the sea-surface ecosystem, which is why I chose to use it here.)
[Read: When a killer climate catastrophe struck the world’s oceans]
Just like reefs on the seafloor, this ecosystem does not stand apart from the open ocean around it. The neuston is a nursery for multiple species of larval fish and a hunting ground for paper nautilus octopuses. It supports sunfish, leatherback turtles, and diverse ocean grazers, which frequent these islands, relying on them as a food source. At night, soft-bodied jellies rise up to join the neuston, sparkling like fireflies. But all of this, from the blue sea dragons to the by-the-wind sailors, is in peril.
When I learned about the Ocean Cleanup project’s 600-meter-long barrier with a three-meter-deep net, a wall being placed in the open ocean, ostensibly to collect plastic passively as the currents push water through the net, I thought immediately of the neuston. How will it be impacted? But in the 146 pages of the Ocean Cleanup’s environmental-impact assessment, this ecosystem isn’t mentioned once.
I was disturbed by this omission. Though the neuston isn’t known to many people, it is certainly known to marine biologists. Evidence that the Ocean Cleanup knows about the neuston is clear from a table reporting animals in the vicinity of the Ocean Cleanup deployment area, where both blue buttons and by-the-wind sailors are listed. But the ecosystem itself is never discussed. By omitting the neuston from its assessment, the project is overlooking the habitat it could be impacting most, and there is no sense of what the damage might be. Because the impact report didn’t provide any answers, I went looking for my own.
There are few contemporary reviews of whole-ocean neuston ecosystems. I started with smaller studies on specific animals and worked my way through their references. One reference, in Russian Cyrillic, came up again and again. This made sense. I knew the United States and the U.S.S.R. had both developed extensive oceanographic-research programs after World War II, but each region published in its own language, making overlap difficult. I sat with a librarian for nearly an hour, hunting this study down. Finally, we found it: a 1956 study published in the U.S.S.R., in Russian, by an oceanographer named A. I. Savilov. This led us to another study of his from 1968, mercifully translated into English. Savilov spent his career studying the neuston by conducting extensive surveys all across the Pacific and synthesizing this work into a map of the open-ocean surface ecosystems.
Savilov described seven unique neuston meadows in the open ocean, each with its own unique composition of animals. Just as rainforests differ from temperate forests, these neustonic ecosystems are unique. And one of them, Neuston Ecosystem 2, is in exactly the same spots as the “garbage patches” where the Ocean Cleanup plans to operate. This makes sense: The neuston ecosystem is entirely passive—floating just like plastic—and evolved over millions of years to thrive within these regions, where surface-bound objects collect. But these ocean gyres are precisely where the Ocean Cleanup project intends to operate, and where it is currently testing its first system.
Rebecca Helm / National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationThe Ocean Cleanup was founded with the vision of clearing the world’s ocean of plastic. The project’s goals are ambitious, and it plans to launch approximately 60 systems to reduce “the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans by at least 90% by 2040.” It is starting with what’s known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but is already scoping out other targets, too.
Even without an environmental-impact assessment, it’s easy to imagine what will happen if the Ocean Cleanup succeeds. Neuston and plastic co-occur: They’re in the exact same spots. Cleaning up 90 percent of the plastic using the current method means potentially destroying 90 percent of the neuston.
[Read: When conservation backfires]
This reality is built into the project’s design. Plastics mimic the neuston world—it’s buoyant, surface bound, and rubbery. When wind and ocean currents sweep neuston through the project’s barrier, animals such as blue sea dragons will be corralled and confined in a huge trap, their fragile bodies colliding with hard and jagged surfaces. They cannot sink below or swim around. They will be suffocated, crushed, and hauled to landfills.
The fact that we don’t have a solid understanding of the neuston ecosystem is even more worrying: We will have very little “before” data to compare the Ocean Cleanup’s impact against. By deploying its system right now, the project could rob the world of an entire ecosystem that we don’t understand and may never get back.
The Ocean Cleanup says it wants to protect animals at the ocean’s surface from plastic, but neuston is the ecosystem of the ocean’s surface. There is a reason turtles and sunfish eat floating surface plastic: It looks like neuston. Using these wall-like barriers to collect plastic in spite of the neuston is like clear-cutting a canopy in the name of helping a forest. There is no point in collecting plastic if by the end there is nothing left to conserve.
I believe that the founders of the Ocean Cleanup mean well and that the engineers involved are passionate about protecting the ocean. When I shared my concerns about the neuston, the organization was responsive, but said that its assessment had already estimated impacts to relevant groups of animals based on the best data it could find. That’s far from reassuring. We cannot monitor this ecosystem with our current technology, and millions of animals may die and dissolve before the scale of destruction is fully understood.
Here is one alternative solution: Place a modified design closer to plastic sources—river mouths and bays—to catch plastic before it enters the open ocean. Choose a place where it can be monitored and corrected for environmental impact. It seems too great a risk to disrupt the whole surface ocean ecosystem so severely, when it is also one we barely know. The neuston is an alien world, as bizarre as it is beautiful. It’s still possible to avoid destroying this strange ecosystem, wedged between sea and sky.
Has the internet afforded humans more freedom, or less?
That’s a question I’m pondering anew thanks to the University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson, who provoked the thought while being interviewed by Nathan Heller for a recent profile in The New Yorker.
After Europe’s religious wars, Anderson mused, as centuries of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants gave way to a liberal, live-and-let-live order that tolerated freedom of religion, something remarkable happened:
People now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains. At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains? That is what it is to be free.
That’s a bold claim! Yet one needn’t accept Anderson’s definition of freedom to appreciate her insight. Here’s a more modest version: The ability to slip into a domain and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining identities in other domains is something most Americans value, both to live in peace amid difference and for personal reasons.
[Read: Stop trusting viral videos]
A 28-year-old woman might attend a march of radical feminists on Saturday, be a deferential caregiver to her ailing conservative grandfather on Sunday, teach high-school sophomores virtue ethics on Monday, perform open-mic comedy that no 15-year-old should hear on Tuesday, indulge a guilty pleasure for Disney musical numbers in the privacy of her car on the way to work on Wednesday morning, and meet up on Thursday night with the pierced, tattooed punk rocker she is dating. And if she interviews on Friday for a new job in a typical field of employment? Most of that will be none of the interviewer’s business.
If humans lost something when most of us ceased to live our whole lives in small tribes, if American life is no longer organized around small towns with all that they offer their residents, at the very least we made these countervailing gains. And this freedom to be different things in different spaces was enhanced by the early internet. Every subculture had its chat rooms. Far-flung people with niche interests could find one another. And no one knew if you were a dog.
Today’s internet is different. One powerful illustration of the phenomenon is Facebook’s People You May Know feature, plumbed most thoughtfully by Kashmir Hill.
In reporting on it for Gizmodo, she found:
A man who years ago donated sperm to a couple, secretly, so they could have a child—only to have Facebook recommend the child as a person he should know. He still knows the couple but is not friends with them on Facebook. A social worker whose client called her by her nickname on their second visit, because she’d shown up in his People You May Know, despite their not having exchanged contact information. A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later. An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”For most Americans, no matter if they were raised online or have never used a computer, I could conjure a scenario where they would feel a loss from worlds colliding in a particular way they didn’t want. And at some point, technology started making that harder to avoid.
[Julie Irwin Zimmerman: I failed the Covington Catholic test]
In fact, I wonder whether ongoing debates about matters as varied as Facebook user-data practices, “the right to be forgotten,” NSA data collection, and any number of public-shaming controversies are usefully considered under the umbrella framework of How is new technology affecting our ability to keep our various worlds from colliding when we don’t want them to, and what, if anything, should we do about that?
In edge cases, almost all Americans will see the implications for freedom, as with China’s push toward an Orwellian society of surveillance cameras, facial-recognition technology, machine learning, and a state-assigned score for every citizen to rate their merits.
Thornier cases will implicate norms and manners that evolve as a society adapts to relatively new modes of non-state, non-coercive interaction.
For example: I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this. Imagine that a man sitting at a nearby table spilled his coffee, got a phone call just afterward, and simply left, so that staff had to clean up his mess, a scene that culminated in a haggard-looking barista drooping her shoulders in frustration. Was the call a true emergency? We don’t know. But if not, almost everyone would agree that the man behaved badly.
Yet almost all of you would react with discomfort or opprobrium if I followed the man back to his office, learned his name, spent a half hour waiting to see his boss, adopted an outraged tone, explained his transgression, felt righteous, then commenced a week-long mission to alert his extended network of friends, family, and professional contacts to his behavior, all the while telling masses of strangers about it, too.
On the other hand, if that man spilled his coffee, leaving that same haggard barista to clean it up, and if I captured the whole thing on my phone camera and posted it to Twitter with a snarky comment about the need to better respect service workers, some nontrivial percentage of the public would help make the clip go viral, join in the shaming, and expend effort to “snitch-tag” various people in the man’s personal life. Some would quietly raise an eyebrow at my role in that public shaming, but I mostly wouldn’t be treated as a transgressor.
One cannot help but wonder whether there are better norms. The internet isn’t restoring what was lost when we left the village, but today’s version is eroding the compensating benefit of getting to live fluidly across domains, in part because digital norms seem uninterested in protecting it.
So a thought experiment: What would the implications be of adopting the norm that it is often wrong, or only rarely appropriate, to rob an individual of the ability to slip into a given domain and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining their identities in other domains?
What would be the worst consequences? How might we shift the cultural equilibrium to value domain-slipping more highly while recognizing its practical and moral limits? What tradeoffs are involved? Any thoughts on this subject are appreciated––write conor@theatlantic.com, especially if you have an example of why you personally value the ability to maintain different identities in different domains.
In 2016, a small group of doctors gathered in a Seattle conference room to find a better way to help people die. They included physicians at the forefront of medical aid in dying—the practice of providing terminal patients with a way to end their own life. And they were there because the aid-in-dying movement had recently run into a problem. The two lethal medications used by most patients for decades had suddenly become either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. When doctors briefly tried a substitute, some patients had rare but troubling experiences.
The Seattle group hoped to discover a different drug. But the practicalities of aid in dying, a controversial policy still illegal in most of the United States, are not like those in other medical fields. “There’s lots of data on stuff that helps people live longer, but there’s very little data on how to kill people,” says Terry Law, a participant at the meeting and one of the most frequently used aid-in-dying doctors in the U.S.
Seven states—including Hawaii, where a law took effect on January 1—and the District of Columbia now allow doctors to write lethal prescriptions for qualifying, mentally capable adults who have a terminal illness. And support for the practice has gained new national momentum after the widely publicized death of Brittany Maynard, a young cancer patient who moved to Oregon in 2014 to take advantage of that state’s aid-in-dying law.
[Read: Brittany Maynard and the challenge of dying with dignity]
But the public remains deeply conflicted about the laws—as does the medical community itself. No medical association oversees aid in dying, and no government committee helps fund the research. In states where the practice is legal, state governments provide guidance about which patients qualify, but say nothing about which drugs to prescribe. “Nowhere in the laws is there any sort of guidance for how to do it. There is no oversight to make sure that it’s happening in a safe way, apart from annual reports and kind of a face-value annual hearing,” says Laura Petrillo, a palliative-care physician who opposes legalized aid in dying.
The meeting of the 2016 group set in motion research that would lead the recipe for one of the most widely used aid-in-dying drugs in the United States. But the doctors’ work has taken place on the margins of traditional science. Despite their principled intentions, it’s a part of medicine that’s still practiced in the shadows.
On the surface, figuring out protocols for hastening death doesn’t seem complicated. Lonny Shavelson, a California physician who specializes in aid in dying, says that when he explains to patients it might take an hour or more for them to die, they’re often shocked. They tell him, “When I put down my dog, it took 10 minutes,” he says.
But veterinarians can use lethal injections on pets. In the U.S., aid-in-dying drugs must be ingested by the patient. The first proposed aid-in-dying law in Washington State would have allowed physicians to inject medications, but that legislation failed to pass. In 2008, a modified law was voted in, with an added requirement that patients self-ingest to help protect them from the possibility of family coercion.
For years, the two barbiturates widely considered the best drugs for hastening death in terminally ill patients were secobarbital and pentobarbital. These medications were painless, fast-acting, and relatively affordable. But since 2015, they’ve been largely unavailable. U.S. pharmacies stopped carrying pentobarbital approved for human use, and the price of secobarbital doubled from an already historic high after Valeant Pharmaceuticals (today known as Bausch Health) bought the manufacturing rights. A few years ago, a lethal dose cost about $200 or $300; now it can cost $3,500 or more.
[Read: Doctors’ secret language for assisted suicide]
To help patients who could no longer afford the drug, aid-in-dying groups sought a fix. In Washington, an advocacy organization called End of Life Washington briefly advised prescribing a drug mixture with the sedative chloral hydrate to about 70 patients. “We know this is going to put you to sleep, and we’re pretty sure it’s going to kill you,” Robert Wood, a medical director at the organization, says they told the patients. It worked, but with a tragic catch: In a few cases, the chloral hydrate burned people’s throats, causing severe pain just at the time they expected relief.
The End of Life gathering was born out of the need for a better solution. Wood enlisted three others affiliated with End of Life Washington: Law, its president; Tom Preston, a former medical director; and Carol Parrot, a retired anesthesiologist who, like Law, is one of the most experienced aid-in-dying doctors in the U.S. Others joined that meeting or later ones by telephone: a toxicologist in Iowa, a veterinarian, a pharmacologist, another anesthesiologist. The group had three main criteria, Parrot says: They wanted “a drug that would: number one, put a patient to sleep and keep them asleep; and, number two, make sure there was no pain involved; and number three, ensure that they would die, and, hopefully, die relatively quickly.” Plus, it had to be cheap. They aimed for $500 a dose.
The doctors considered a malaria medicine known to be lethal in large doses, but read that it caused severe muscle spasms in some patients. They discussed the synthetic opioid fentanyl, but were deterred by the drug’s newness and dangerous reputation. So the group decided to use a combination of medications, and eventually settled on high doses of three: morphine, diazepam—also known by its early brand name, Valium—and propranolol, a beta-blocker that slows the heart. They called the mixture DMP.
Next, the group had to test the drug. But they still didn’t have a way to follow standard procedure: There would be no government-approved clinical drug trial, and no Institutional Review Board oversight when they prescribed the concoction to patients. The doctors took what precautions they could. Patients could opt in or out, and for the first 10 deaths, either Parrot or Law would stay by the bedside and record patients’ and families’ responses.
The first two deaths went smoothly. But the third patient, an 81-year-old with prostate cancer, took 18 hours to die, Parrot says. In Oregon, where aid in dying has been legal for 20 years, the median time from taking the medication until death is 25 minutes. Patients themselves typically become unconscious in five or 10 minutes, so they are not affected by protracted times, Parrot, Wood, and Law all emphasize. But longer waiting periods can be nerve-racking for families and other caregivers, especially in the exceptional cases where these have persisted for a day or more.
[Read: What people say before they die]
Parrot and Law halted the DMP trial. The informal research group met again, this time by teleconference, and Law dug through the literature and found an article about people who purposely overdosed on digoxin, a cardiac drug. The group added it to the prescription, and the drug became DDMP.
At first, Parrot gave patients latitude in how they took this new drug combination. “One guy chugged a half a cup of Bailey’s Irish Cream, his favorite thing, after he had his medicine,” she says. “He probably took five or six hours to die.” She suspects that the fat particles in the Bailey’s slowed his gastric emptying. So the researchers checked in with each other again, and decided to increase the doses to what Parrot calls “blue-whale-sized doses.” They dubbed the modified formula DDMP2.
The drug is not a perfect aid-in-dying solution. Secobarbital is faster-acting and remains the drug of choice when patients can afford it, Wood says. Just as in the case of the barbiturates, a few outlier patients on DDMP2 take hours longer to die. And the mixture tastes extremely bitter. “Imagine taking two bottles of aspirin, crushing it up, and mixing it in less than half a cup of water or juice,” Parrot says.
Still, DDMP2 has become the low-cost solution the Seattle group set out to discover. In 2017, secobarbital was still the most commonly prescribed drug in Washington and Oregon, but in Colorado, DDMP2 was more commonly prescribed. The drug consistently accomplishes its purpose in hastening death, Parrot says: “It always works. It always, always works.”
Parrot and Wood keep track of patient data, and they continue to make discoveries. By examining medical histories of the patients who took longer to die, they’ve learned about certain risk factors for longer deaths: being on extremely high doses of painkillers such as fentanyl or morphine; being very athletic; having a compromised digestive tract. For patients who are especially risky, Parrot or Wood will sometimes offer the choice of chloral hydrate, the drug that burned some patients’ throats, although they say they carefully discuss potential problems with patients and families.
Together, Parrot and Law have written perhaps 300 lethal prescriptions over the years and observed the effects of medications on numerous patients. Neither set out to be an aid-in-dying advocate; they turned to End of Life Washington after witnessing the suffering of some dying patients. About eight years ago, Law says she was asked to prescribe lethal medications for a dying woman whose regular doctors had refused. She agreed to see the woman, and realized how difficult it was for some aid-in-dying patients to find doctors. Parrot says she was profoundly affected by the deaths of two close friends who asked her to help hasten their dying, but who lived in states where the practice was illegal. She was unable to help them, and began volunteering as an aid-in-dying doctor soon after she retired.
Most medical professionals don’t participate in aid in dying. Some physicians are concerned that their Hippocratic oath prohibits intentionally helping someone die, or that aid-in-dying requests originate from treatable pain or depression. Some worry about the broader repercussions for a society that accepts medically aiding the deaths of the terminally ill. The American Medical Association remains officially opposed.
Without the support of the rest of the profession and much of society, aid-in-dying research methods don’t fit the model of good medical research, says Matthew Wynia, the director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado. There’s no standard protocol, no standardized data collection or independent group that monitors data and safety—all of which are intended to protect patients and help ensure the quality of the research.
The Belmont Report, which guides federal recommendations for research on human subjects, recognizes that sometimes, no satisfactory options exist for some patients, Wynia points out. In those rare cases, a doctor may want to try an innovative treatment, something for which there’s no approved research protocol. While that’s legal, clinicians are supposed to avoid turning that innovation into established practice, or doing unapproved research on numerous patients, according to Wynia. Some of the same issues exist with medical marijuana, which is legal in several states but still illegal federally. “There’s no way to fix this at the individual level,” Wynia says. “There’s no immediate answer.”
That leaves researchers like Law and Parrot in a bind. They don’t have good ways to do research and communicate what they learn. But they’ve witnessed the suffering some dying people experience, and contrast that with many peaceful deaths of patients who choose aid in dying. “These are not hard deaths,” argues Shavelson, the California physician. “These are lovely deaths.”
Shavelson says he tries to be at the bedside on the day of his aid-in-dying patients’ death. “It’s a lighter atmosphere than you think,” he says. The patient takes the first drug, which Shavelson separates out from the rest of the mixture, and then Shavelson sits down at the bedside and reads aloud questions from the state’s required report. After about 30 minutes, he asks: “Are you ready to take the medications?” He mixes the drug cocktail and the patient drinks it.
“Usually, they go silent after taking the medication,” he says. “They’ve said what they’re going to say by that time.” For a few minutes, patients usually continue to sit silently, their eyes open. “And then, very, very slowly, they’ll close their eyes.”
Shavelson asks intermittently, “Are you still there?” At first, patients usually say yes, or nod. Within five or 10 minutes, they stop responding to the question. Then Shavelson will gently touch their eyelids. “When people aren’t deeply unconscious, they’ll sort of have a twitching response,” he explains. Within 10 or 15 minutes, the twitching response disappears, and patients enter a deep coma.
Using a heart monitor, Shavelson tells caregivers as a patient’s pulse slows and oxygen levels drop. “We wait a little while, and then I say, ‘Ah, the patient’s now dead.’”
This is the first generation of patients who have consciously hastened their death with medications in this way, Shavelson says. He tells them they’re pioneers. “What a different thing, to be able to say, ‘This is the day I die,’” he says.
Have you ever thought about killing someone? Not plotted it out, necessarily, but fantasized about offing a bully or boss or boyfriend in a desperate search for catharsis?
I wouldn’t encourage you to spend too much time dwelling on all the rejections and confrontations that might have led to such an angry moment, but I do need you to think about those things briefly. I also won’t ask you to name all the definitely valid reasons you might have for wanting to murder—or maybe just punch!—the other person involved, but I suspect that for most people, it has crossed their minds.
What I will say, though, is that you should stop yourself now, and go no further. You wouldn’t want to ruminate.
Colloquially, rumination has a benign meaning: to contemplate deeply. In psychology, rumination isn’t so harmless. It’s marked by intrusive, even obsessive thoughts that return a person to a particular stressor or negative experience, which the American Psychological Association says is strongly linked with the development of major depression. Typically, rumination is spurred by things like past trauma, chronic stress, or neurotic personality traits. Based on new research, there might be another way to spark rumination: to fantasize about killing someone you absolutely hate.
Kai-Tak Poon, an assistant psychology professor at the Education University of Hong Kong, led a team that asked a group of 138 American adults to pick the person they hate the most. Half were asked to fantasize about doing something violent to that person (which could involve murder, but could also just be an angry slap). The other participants were asked to fantasize about taking any neutral action. The results suggested that those who fantasized about aggression were more likely to ruminate, which then lowered their perception of their own well-being. Thinking about hurting a sworn enemy bums people out, even if, on a certain level, the idea is really appealing.
Dennis Reidy, a professor involved with Georgia State University’s Center for Research on Interpersonal Violence, says there’s much scientific evidence for the link. “People who have aggressive fantasies are more likely to be aggressive, whether it’s physically or just a sense of irritability or hostile personality,” he says. “They are more negative people, and are more likely to have negative affect and lower subjective well-being.”
Poon’s study asserts that violent fantasies themselves cause a person to feel worse, but Reidy wouldn’t go that far, because of what he sees as weaknesses in the study’s approach. No measure of the participants’ subjective well-being was taken before they were asked to fantasize, for instance, and more than a dozen participants were excluded from the study’s results because they either couldn’t name a nemesis or couldn’t conjure up a violent fantasy. (Those people sound great.)
Another issue, Reidy says, is that violent fantasy itself is a form of rumination. As Poon’s study notes, rumination can be difficult to stop once it starts. So prompting someone to do it would usually cause the rumination—and its attendant negative effects—to continue. “Anybody who you asked to fantasize [violence] about someone they hate … is going [to] have more negative affect in the moments afterward,” Reidy says. (Poon did not respond to requests for comment.)
Even though a link between graphic fantasies of violence and feeling not so great might sound logical, for much of modern psychology’s history, that link wasn’t assumed. Instead, psychologists preferred catharsis theory, which suggests that venting anger—or pursuing ruminative thought—could help a person let go of negative feelings by working through them. In the past couple decades, though, catharsis theory has been unmoored from the foundation of how psychologists understand aggression. In one discrediting study, participants were provoked with criticism and then asked to hit a punching bag while thinking of the person who criticized them. Relative to a control group who just sat quietly, the punchers felt even more upset after they finished letting it out. If your cup runneth over with anger, you can’t just pour a little off.
Rumination not only appears to fail as a coping strategy for rage and trigger depression, but as Reidy points out, the type of violent rumination considered in Poon’s study is linked to elevated levels of actual violence. Patients receiving mental-health treatment who imagine violence are more likely to behave aggressively, and researchers recommend that treatment to help them focus on dissuading ruminative thinking. And while it’s not easy to divert a person away from intrusive or traumatic thoughts, it can often be achieved through a distracting, peaceful activity or a relaxing technique, like meditation. Going to a kickboxing class might not make you want to punch your sister-in-law any less, but going for a run might.
When testing the parameters of a psychological reaction, one can easily disconnect that thing from the vagaries of human experience and look at it in a vacuum. The participants in Poon’s study were prompted to drum up a murderous rage, but who are the people who have regular violent fantasies in the first place, and why do they have them? Reidy thinks that these fantasies, like rumination and physical aggression, might be more a symptom of a problem than a cause.
“I don’t know that the angry fantasy is what’s driving all the other stuff,” Reidy says. “It’s possible that those are all outcomes of some underlying personality or exposure to violence in youth. I think they’re consequences of something else.”
Kamala Harris is a half-Jamaican, half-Indian woman from Oakland, California, the daughter of two UC Berkeley grad students. She went to high school in Montreal. She married a wealthy, white, Jewish lawyer later in life, and didn’t have kids of her own. When she’s not in Washington, she splits her time between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Her first name is Sanskrit and gets mispronounced all the time. She was being mentioned as a front-runner presidential candidate before she’d even headed over to her Senate victory party, all of two years and two months ago.
She is not, by biographical measures, representative of what most would see as the typical American experience. But Harris launched her presidential campaign Monday with a challenge to the rest of the field that—as she put it to me at the press conference she held in the afternoon in the lobby of the Interdisciplinary Research Building at her alma mater, Howard University—candidates who want to win have to speak to “the complexities of each of our lives, and pay equal attention to their needs.”
Elizabeth Warren attacks every issue by diagnosing an economy warped by decades of bad policy. Washington Governor Jay Inslee centers his pitch on the climate-change emergency. For Harris, such a singular focus feels too narrow.
“On the issue of climate change: Every parent wants to know that their child can drink clean water and breathe clean air. And that same parent wants to know that they’re able to bring home enough money with one job to pay their bills and pay their rent and put food on the table, instead of having to work two or three jobs,” she said. “Every person wants to know that there will be a criminal-justice system that is fair to all people, regardless of their race. Every person wants that a mother and father should not have to sit down with their teenage son and have the talk, and tell that child about how they will be stopped or arrested, or profiled and potentially shot because of their race.”
[Read: Kamala Harris’s anti-Trump tour]
She wouldn’t say that the other candidates are doing it wrong—at least, not directly. “Nobody is living their life through the lens of one issue,” Harris said. “Let’s not put people in a box, and as they make their decisions, let’s give them credit for being smarter than that.”
Martin Luther King Jr. Day gave the country its first real taste of what the 2020 presidential campaign is going to be like. Harris kicked off the action by launching her campaign with an early-morning appearance on Good Morning America from New York. Mike Bloomberg and Joe Biden sat next to each other at a table on the first floor of the Mayflower Hotel at Al Sharpton’s breakfast in Washington, each taking different tacks in addressing records littered with potential problems in appealing to African American voters, if they decide to run. Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders were in South Carolina, at a church where King was supposed to appear before changing plans and heading to a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was assassinated. Kirsten Gillibrand appeared at another Sharpton event in New York. And Warren, Julián Castro, and Sherrod Brown all appeared at smaller Martin Luther King Jr. events in their hometowns.
Bloomberg captured the must-beat-Trump mood that is defining the party, looking at the other potential candidate in the room whose decision would likely do the most to shape the dynamics of the race.
[Read: Kamala Harris’s political memoir is an uneasy fit for the digital era]
“Whatever the next year brings for Joe and me, I know we’ll both keep our eyes on the real prize, which is a Democrat winning the White House in 2020 and getting our country back on track,” he said.
Harris and her staff knew for weeks that she was going to announce over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, and they built a crescendo around that. Her book tour at the beginning of the month served as a buffer to introduce her to more and more people. While the chattering classes have already anointed her a juggernaut, many ordinary Americans have never heard of her. And the book tour had the added benefit of allowing her to weather initial attacks on her record as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general before she was technically even a candidate.
Let Warren wonk out, they figured. Let Beto O’Rourke take a road trip searching for himself and journaling about his experiences on social media. Let others try to stake out corners of the field for themselves in order to stand out.
[Read: Kamala Harris’s Trump-size tax plan]
Harris is pitching herself as the one who can actually put together a winning coalition of voters, which Democrats have obsessed about ever achieving again since their 2016 shocker loss.
Harris’s logo is inspired by Shirley Chisholm, who in 1972 became the first black woman to run for president. But she is resisting attempts to pigeonhole her: On Monday afternoon, she deflected a question about her Indian heritage by saying flatly that she’s an American, and she refused to talk about how she’d make any particular appeals to black voters because, as she sees it, people have the same worries, “be it a mom in Compton, or a mom in Kentucky.”
King’s most famous speech, a Harris adviser pointed out (on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal campaign thinking) after she finished speaking with reporters in Washington, didn’t just include “I have a dream,” but “Let freedom ring.” The animating spirit of the civil-rights movement, the adviser added, was that people are “called based on our common language and our common spirit.”
The candidate who announced on Martin Luther King Day Jr., the adviser argued, is the one to do that: “The American dream’s under attack, and our American values are under attack. You have to tie those things together.”
Harris isn’t the only candidate making a bigger argument. Booker, who hasn’t announced yet but is on the verge, included a long message Sunday night to go with an Instagram picture of him with the civil-rights icon and Representative John Lewis, along with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.
“I believe we need a revival of civic grace in our country. We have so much common pain in America—from the lack of affordable health care to the opioid crisis to dignity assaulting jobs that don’t pay a living wage or offer basic security and so much more. We have a common pain, but we lack a common purpose,” Booker wrote in a clear preview of what he’ll soon be saying on the trail. “Now more than ever, we need each other to do great things; we need the limitless power that we can manifest through our collective efforts.”
Harris’s early reception was intense. For a candidate whose entry wasn’t at all a surprise, it generated buzz all day. Harris aides bragged that she’d received donations from all 50 states within 30 minutes of announcing, and that her launch video had surpassed 3 million views by the late afternoon. She passed Warren in Instagram followers, they noted, and had 300,000 engagements with her posts there on Monday alone.
By trying to speak to a broader problem, though, what Harris doesn’t have at this point is many specific solutions. Her announcement came with an email to reporters pointing to a bill she wrote that would provide a $500 monthly tax credit to families making under $100,000 per year, another that would reform the bail process, and another aimed at tackling implicit bias in health care that leaves black women three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes.
After spending most of her career as a prosecutor, the biggest early question facing Harris is whether she can convince a liberal electorate that she’s a progressive who tried to bend justice toward victims from the inside, rather than a cop who was out to put people behind bars. Her “For the People” slogan is an attempt to turn that background into a strength, a calling, and her advisers like how that her years in law enforcement stand in contrast to a president who’s facing multiple criminal investigations and has been accused of abandoning the rule of law while in office. The prosecutor for president, they like to say.
That, the Harris adviser said, is how she avoids getting mocked in the way that some went after Barack Obama in 2008, saying he was offering high-minded talk that wasn’t headed anywhere. “It’s not going to be hope and change,” the adviser said. “It’s going to be truth and justice.”
In 2014, America was reintroduced to Iran through the eyes of the bad-boy chef turned TV travel host Anthony Bourdain. As his still-nascent CNN docuseries Parts Unknown transported him, and his audience, to Iran, the world traveler was in disbelief.
“I am so confused,” Bourdain remarked as Persian music played in the background. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Of all the places, all the countries, all the years of traveling, it’s here, in Iran, that I’m greeted most warmly by total strangers.”
In that opening line, Bourdain touched on the irony of how Iran and Iranians view the United States: While many of the people share a not-so-secret infatuation with Hollywood, with McDonald’s, and with rock and hip-hop music, the government still views America as the “Great Satan.”
It’s a jarring discrepancy that brings Bourdain, and his audience, to a bright and hopeful Jason and Yeganeh Rezaian. The two foreign correspondents who appear on his show are wide-eyed—they glow like a young couple in love, who have finally, after many years, created a life for themselves. For the American-born, dual-national Jason, then the Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post, and the native Yeganeh, then a correspondent for the UAE-based The National, this life was characterized, and soon enough dominated, by the friction between their two countries of origin.
“You like it? You happy here?” Bourdain asked them bluntly.
“Look, I’m at a point now after five years where I miss certain things about home,” Jason said, referring to the U.S. “I miss my buddies, I miss burritos, I miss having certain beverages with my buddies and burritos in certain types of establishments,” he joked. Mexican food is impossibly hard to find in Iran, and alcohol is outlawed for all Muslims. “But, I love it. I love it and I hate it. It’s home … It’s become home.”
“Are you optimistic about the future?” Bourdain asked Yeganeh, who goes by Yegi.
“Yeah. Especially if this nuclear deal finally happens,” she said. “Yeah. Very much, actually.” She smiled, nodding her head repeatedly.
The narration that set in next was subtle, but infinitely darker. “Despite the hopeful nature of our conversation, six weeks after the filming of this episode, Jason and Yeganeh were mysteriously arrested and detained by the police,” Bourdain said. “Sadly, in Iran this sort of thing is not an isolated incident.” The Iranians accused Jason of being a spy at the beginning of tense negotiations with the United States over the country’s nuclear program. He was released a year and a half later once those negotiations had been wrapped up, after a sham trial in which it became clear that Iran had no evidence of any kind to back up their charge that he had been involved in espionage. Yegi was imprisoned separately for 10 weeks before she was released.
[Read: Jason Rezaian’s year of imprisonment in Iran]
In so many ways, Jason Rezaian is a very normal guy. In so many ways, he is like no one I’ve ever met before—except, maybe, for Yegi. I first met the couple in August of 2016, two years after Bourdain’s segment aired and nine months after Jason had been released from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, where he spent 544 days locked up, a pawn in the diplomatic chess match between the U.S. and Iran. Jason and Yegi were beginning fellowships at George Washington University, where I was starting my senior year of college. I was struck by how they lit up a bland conference room. Not only were they the still-vibrant couple I had seen on Parts Unknown, but they were also uncompromisingly down-to-earth, humble, and generous: rare qualities for any person, let alone two individuals who had been at the center of a highly publicized international incident.
Now, more than two years since we first met, a lot has changed in the global order and in America’s foreign policy. Since his election, President Donald Trump has boasted a hostile attitude toward journalists, withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal that President Barack Obama brokered and with which Jason’s release was entangled, and doubled down on the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia and the vilification of Iran. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s alleged role in the assassination of Jason’s Washington Post colleague, the exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has dominated press-freedom and diplomacy conversations for the past few months, as the president has sided with the crown prince over the consensus of the CIA.
Bourdain, who became a tireless advocate for Jason’s release following his arrest, died last year in an apparent suicide. The two were close—it’s no coincidence that Prisoner, Jason’s new memoir, is one of the final books published under Anthony Bourdain/Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.
[Read: Jason Rezaian’s ordeal]
Banned from returning to Iran, Jason, who still writes about Iran (among other places) for the Post’s Global Opinions section, offers in the book perhaps his final dispatch from his life there. Much of this stranger-than-fiction story takes place inside the mind of the prisoner, in solitary confinement and eventually in a shared cell, in the scarce meetings he’s allowed with Yegi and his mother, and in the courtroom of an insultingly phony trial. But Jason intersperses deeper memories: weaving in family histories (from a father born in Iran and a mother born in Illinois), his love story with Yegi, his observations from growing up in Northern California, even a story of his friendship with the late Christopher Hitchens, a professor and mentor.
In so many ways, Jason is a larger-than-life figure: a symbol of press freedom and the often tenuous position Americans put themselves in when reporting from places where journalism is, by nature, an act of resistance against the state. But his story, which at times reads like a thriller, consistently shocks the reader with the reminder that this really happened. Jason’s is a deeply American story: the son of an immigrant father who, after a long personal journey, succeeds in his ancestral land, reporting on its people for a global audience. In the end, Jason is punished for his work—for doing journalism—by a government scared beyond measure of what that means. Prisoner is a harrowing account of one man’s imprisonment, and of resilience: not only that of the prisoner himself, but of his entire family, who tirelessly campaigned for his freedom.
[Read: A reporter goes on trial in Tehran]
Jason and I sat down last Wednesday at a coffee shop in the Park View neighborhood of Washington, D.C, a day shy of the three-year anniversary of his release. What follows is our discussion of his life, his memoir, current U.S.-Iran relations, and his concerns about press freedoms in today’s world.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Scott Nover: Jason, tomorrow is the three-year anniversary of your release. Three years later, in what ways are you still trying to settle back into life here in Washington, D.C.?
Jason Rezaian: I never lived here before this, so we’re new residents in this town. And we’re just getting to know the place still. Fortunately, our reception, going back to three years ago this week, has been a really positive one across the board. People are really kind to us. The city’s been kind to us. The citizens of this city have been kind to us. The Post has been incredibly kind to us. Other people in the journalistic community and also folks in the government—in the previous administration and in the current one—and in Congress on both sides of the aisle have been extraordinarily kind to us. So, it feels like home. But it’s not a home Yegi and I ever knew. So we’re building a life here together. And I feel like we’re part of the town.
Nover: The memoir is Prisoner, which comes out Tuesday. I want to start by talking about the concept of writing this memoir about something so painful. And how difficult it is to put yourself back into that room, at times you might want to forget, in order to get your story on paper.
Rezaian: I mean, I’m not somebody that ever wants to forget anything that’s happened to me. I think I’ve always been about interrogating my experience. This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity, for publication, to write about myself in this kind of way and write about my life in this kind of way. But it’s not as though I haven’t written about my life for myself for years. So I think it was challenging figuring out how to tell this story in a way that conveyed everything that I wanted to convey: the experience of it, the painfulness of the experience, the deep love I had for Iran, for my wife, for my family. But also, what does this mean in the larger context? Why does it matter? So that was my challenge going into it and if I pulled those things off, I’m happy.
Nover: It’s kind of your last story, for now at least, from Iran.
Rezaian: I guess! Yeah, I mean I think that someday I'll go back ... under very different circumstances, I’m sure. But, yeah, this kind of closes the chapter on that era of my life. It was a really important era. Not the only era of my life, of course, but the five years that I lived there and the year and a half I lived there as a “guest” without a lot of choices … It’s a really important part of my experience in this world. And how often do you get the opportunity to share your experience with a large number of people?
Nover: While telling the story of your time in prison from 2014 to 2016, you have a chapter all about 2011, a year you call, in ways, the “hardest year” of your life: a year in which you lost your young nephew, your father, and your mentor Christopher Hitchens. What did you want the readers to get out of these two very different, but very troubling, times in your life—very upsetting for very different reasons—and how those two times in your life have defined you?
Rezaian: I don’t think that they define me, but I think that they define pain in my experience. Look, everybody goes through the trials and tribulations in their life. And it’s not for us, even our closest relations, to judge what’s difficult for somebody else. And while I was going through this experience of being in prison, as hard as it was—and as I knew it was for my wife, her family, my family, and me—I also knew that in my not-so-distant past, my family in America went through a really kind of cataclysmic set of losses and four years later, we were battered and we were scarred, but we weren’t defeated. And I wanted people to be able to see that I’ve taken a lot of kicks in my life before this, which is not something that people necessarily think. I grew up in a wealthy part of Northern California, a pretty easy upbringing from an outsider’s point of view, but as an Iranian American—a person of Iranian descent in this country—at that time, there were other challenges that, if you weren’t from that background, [you] wouldn’t think about. The other thing that I wanted to say was that this thing that happened to us, in the same prison that I was in, much worse fates were being suffered by people near me. And I never want to discount that.
Nover: This year you experienced another loss, with your friend Anthony Bourdain passing away. I know it means a lot to you that this is one of the final books printed under his imprint, Anthony Bourdain/Ecco.
Rezaian: It means everything. I got word that the [publishing] house had accepted the manuscript just three days before he died. The fact that he wanted to support me in telling this story was a kind of fuel and support that anybody would wish to have. It’s heartbreaking for Yegi and I that he’s no longer here, and it always will be. But the fact that he stood with us in our hardest times—while we had no voice, he gave us a voice. He added to those choruses of people calling for our freedom. But then afterwards, that he was there as a friend to us. We got to know him within the context of being on the show. That was our first encounter with him. We didn’t know we had this tremendous friend and advocate. And then when we got out, for him to continue [supporting us] to the point that he wanted us to get behind telling this story, I think that “rare” is probably the best way to put it.
Nover: It’s a loud statement.
Rezaian: Yeah. At a time when we were not that confident walking through this world, he gave us confidence. Who else do you want in your corner? I had Muhammad Ali, I had Anthony Bourdain, I had [the Washington Post executive editor] Marty Baron. I mean, who else do you want?
Nover: So I want to turn to one or more complex relationships in Prisoner, which is that of you and Kazem, your interrogator. Despite being foundationally cruel for psychologically torturing you, he is in some ways a jovial, likable character in a weird way. And you purposely paint him as such: He can seem friendly to you sometimes, he cracks jokes, he’s got a funny accent, he says he wants to be played by Will Smith in the movie of your life. How do you reconcile a person like that in your head?
Rezaian: When you hear a story of someone being wronged or abused, especially when there’s this power dynamic of captivity—captor and captive—our automatic instinct is to not want to sympathize in any kind of way with a captor. I don’t want you to necessarily sympathize with him, but I want you to understand that he’s a complicated character. Although you and I, and millions of people, would agree that he represents pretty evil forces, he’s still a person. I can’t get past that. It’s not something that I can wash out of his narrative. It wasn’t as though he was sitting on my shoulders with a cattle prod trying to induce me into saying things I didn’t want to say—he was trying to do that in other ways. So what I was trying to do in writing him was to paint a portrait of a relationship where it’s more than meets the eye. It’s not just that this is my captor, my punisher, my tormentor—he’s all of those things. At the same time, he’s a person. And if I just look at him as a bad guy, I’m not gonna be able to get anything out of the situation. And I’m not going to be able to tell you anything about the situation afterwards. And this is where it’s really important: If I’m gonna sit down and write a book about this experience, I want you to be able to walk away with some different understanding of the power dynamics inside Iran than when you started reading the book.
Nover: You have a powerful moment at the end of the book, and I won’t disclose exactly what happens, but you comment, “Yes it’s even possible to develop an attachment to your tormentors, and no, asshole, it’s not Stockholm syndrome. It’s called being human.”
Rezaian: Look, people accuse me all the time of having Stockholm syndrome any time I say something that’s not disparaging about Iran. And I have talked with plenty of psychologists—and not just people treating me, other ones that I went to in reporting this—about the notion of Stockholm syndrome and these relationships that grow [between captor and captive]. It becomes a symbiotic relationship in a way. My goal as a captive is to survive—to survive and get out of that situation. So, you know, I tried to do things that would make that more possible. I’m not ashamed in any way to say that over a year-and-a-half period of time, I formed relationships with people—not necessarily people that I would choose to form a relationship [with], but I was forced to. And I hope that, in reading this book, people that are interested in Iran as a subject will learn something out of that relationship. And it’s not that the Islamic Republic is good. Or the Revolutionary Guard is justified in their actions. It’s not that at all. It’s just that this is a little more complicated than good versus evil. Let’s interrogate it.
Nover: Do you have a desire to see him or talk to him?
Rezaian: Deeply. But on my terms.
Nover: If he were here, what would that conversation look like?
Rezaian: I mean, I think it would look a lot like some aspects of this in this book. I hope that he reads it someday. He’s probably waiting to get a copy of it right now.
Nover: He wanted you to write it! ... And “make that money,” as he tells you in the book.
Rezaian: Make the money! I’ll tell you this. My mom was visiting a few weeks ago. And I gave her a copy. It was the first time I gave her a chance to read anything except the part about her own upbringing, because I wanted her to fact-check it. I sent her a passage that was about 1,200 words long, and she wrote back with 7,000 words in notes. I said, “Mom, this is exactly why I didn’t let you read the whole thing.”
Nover: That’s exactly what my mom would do, too.
Rezaian: That’s why you and I are journalists now! So I let her read it. And she said, “You know your interrogators and [Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad] Zarif will see themselves if they read this. Good. They should see themselves. If this is a mirror for them—and I think it should be because it’s [an] honest accounting of that—from my point of view, I hope it makes them question their own actions.”
Nover: I’m glad you brought up your mom, because in addition to being your story, Prisoner is very much a family history. It’s your story, and a love story between you and Yegi, but it also gives the backstory of both sides of your family—Iranian and American. How important was this in explaining why you were there in the first place?
Rezaian: I think it was critical. And if we just wrote a story about me being in prison and my years in Iran, and it didn’t delve into the whys of how I got there, it wouldn’t have any impact whatsoever. It would just be a prison memoir, or a foreign-correspondence memoir. I hope that this book is more than that. I hope that this is a story that encompasses those things that happened to me and the same experiences in my life, but also sheds light on the complicated relationship between the two countries that call me their citizen. And I think that when Iranian Americans read it, a lot of it will resonate, especially for people who have one American parent and an Iranian one. And also, people from other mixed backgrounds. Because this is not just the story of Iranians, it’s also a story of immigrants.
Nover: In the book you write, “Barack Obama had become president. Moving to Iran, to me, felt to be the most American thing I could do.” What do you mean by that?
Rezaian: It was a moment, in 2008 and early 2009, of incredible hope about the direction that we could take as a country. Obama represented, especially in his early months, a vision of openness and a desire to engage with other countries, including Iran. And to me, that was an aspiration that I share. It was the first time in my adult life that sort of foreign policy was being actively talked about. So I think that was a moment for me, especially given all of the other challenges that I was having in my life financially and professionally—I felt like I had a green light. And if I didn’t hit the gas and hightail it to Tehran, then it was never going to happen again. And people ask me all the time, “You went through this horrible experience. Don’t you regret moving there?” It’s a question that I have a very succinct answer to: “No, I don’t regret any of it.” It’s 10 years since I moved to Iran. In this moment, there’s absolutely no way that [I] or anybody else would be picking up and moving to Iran to do these sorts of things that I did in 2009. And that’s not an indictment of the U.S. government and it’s not an indictment of the Iranian one, per se. It’s just a more treacherous situation now for people like me who are dual nationals. But also for journalists. You’ve written about Jamal [Khashoggi]: We’re living in a moment where the stakes for journalists are incredibly high. And the support structures in place, by governments of free societies, are not doing their jobs. They’re deficient. And that’s a scary set of circumstances.
Nover: In the final moments of the epilogue lies the only real mention of Donald Trump. It’s subtle, but it’s powerful foreshadowing. I want to know why you stopped short of including that era, the Trump era, in this book.
Rezaian: One, I don’t think that this book was about that. Everything that happens in this book—the bulk of what happened happened during the Obama era. And I wanted to end the narrative there. It very easily could have extended into these last couple of years. The book could have been a lot longer: Maybe it’s a second book. The period of time after our release and the inauguration of Donald Trump, [Yegi and I] spent most of that time between here and Harvard. I lived the first seven years of Obama’s presidency in Tehran and the last one here, mostly in Washington, D.C. And our experience of that was a pretty positive one. But, on the Trump presidency and how it plays into this—I didn’t write about this in the book, but I do write about the fact that I had Iranian state television available to me. And they were covering the heck out of the Trump campaign. I remember, it must have been two or three weeks before my release, there was a [Trump] campaign rally where an American Muslim woman went to the rally wearing a T-shirt that said Salaam, I come in peace, and she was booed out of the place. And Trump was actively supporting her removal. That sort of image lasts in the minds of people around the world—and their leaders. But also the people. The damage that we’ve done to our overall perception in the world is hard to quantify. I can read through a 300-page book just on that. And maybe you just gave me an idea for the next one. Thanks, Scott!
Nover: It did read like a cliff-hanger, and I think that readers might feel the same way that I did. But I think there’s a really interesting juxtaposition, even without you saying it, that you are in prison for committing acts of journalism in Iran and come home to a country that, when you left, was not this hostile toward the free press. And I want to know what coming home to that was like, and if there’s a lesson that we should internalize from your time in Iran.
Rezaian: I was pretty outspoken in the first weeks of the Trump administration, when he called us the “enemy of the people.” It should be a warning sign to all, and I think it is. But not as much as it should be. You and I are still able to do our jobs. We’re here in Washington, D.C. We both work for well-funded media organizations. We have access to the resources and people that we need to … It’s a slow dissolution. It’s not gonna be in Washington and New York City and London where the corrosion of press freedom is first visible. Yes, in the White House we see it … But if we don’t keep an eye on this stuff and we don’t keep calling it out—it’s on us. And I think that for me it’s been a really hard thing to stomach watching over the last couple years. More than that, hard to stomach the response from some aspects or some segments of our society who no longer trust the job that we’re doing. And I don’t know how we counteract that right now.
Nover: In the book, I think it’s really interesting that Yegi’s out of prison and she’s visiting you and bringing you uplifting books by Paulo Coelho and other inspirational novels, and she means well, but you ask instead for her to bring you Orwell. You ask for the dystopian warning signs. Is your book kind of a warning sign of what happens when we don’t pay attention?
Rezaian: I will let other people judge that, but I hope that there are lessons to be learned in reading this book, for Americans, for Iranians, for journalists, for people in power in both countries. But ultimately, my main message is that we need to keep the lines of communication open always. With everybody. I was cut off from those lines of communication for a year and a half. I have them back now. I hope to never lose them again. And as long as I’m able to communicate, these issues—especially around press freedom, but also, you know, the overall issues between the U.S. and Iran, and very directly the issues of Americans being detained in Iran—are the things that keep me up at night and that I’ll keep using my platforms to talk about.
Nover: You mentioned Jamal Khashoggi earlier. The major press-freedom story of the era we’re living in right now is that the Trump administration seems to be turning a blind eye to the ordered assassination of your colleague, Jamal Khashoggi, who also wrote for the Global Opinions section with you at The Washington Post. How have you grappled with that loss from the extent that you knew him personally, but also, what do you think of the diplomatic responses?
Rezaian: First of all, I’ll say I was just getting to know Jamal. We first met last summer and we had several encounters—long encounters. We sat down and had a conversation that we recorded about Saudi Arabia and Iran. And it was really interesting, I think for both of us, to see somebody across the table who had been so wronged by the governments of these countries that they care so much about. But still wanting the best for the people of those countries in the future. So I felt, in some ways, a kindredness in our interactions. Although I’m no fan of Saudi Arabia and he’s no fan of Iran.
Nover: But you both had been silenced effectively, you through imprisonment and he through exile.
Rezaian: Yeah. And so that was a common bond, and one that neither one of us wanted to see repeated on other people. So I think we had a common purpose in giving voice to people who had been denied voice. Our last encounter was during Ramadan. We were both invited to … Iftar, a breaking-of-the-fast meal, at the home of a mutual friend. He was there with his daughter, and Yegi and I were there, and just two other people: just six of us having a very nice meal together. And he was just such a thoughtful and smart person. To have somebody like that, who was really just giving voice to ideas and people that didn’t have the opportunity to express themselves, and really calling for the right of the Saudi people and other Arabs to have a better way forward, to have been murdered in such an insane, grisly way shocked us. When I say us, I mean both my colleagues and I, but also Yegi and I—really to our core. It was a very difficult time for us. And to see the way the Post sprung into action in the early hours after news that he had gone missing was also very surreal for me, but gratifying to see my news organization, the same way that they sprung into action for me, springing in for somebody else.
I think the public response has been the right one. I think the media’s response has been the right one. The government’s response has been the most appalling and wrongheaded response to just about any crime against a human being. We’re on the wrong side of this. The administration and the State Department are on the absolute wrong side of it and everybody knows it. What kind of precedent does that set? For journalists, for people living in Saudi Arabia who look to America as a beacon of human rights, and to people in other parts of the world who always thought of America as the land of opportunity, but more than that, a land where you’re safe to express yourself and be yourself? It’s inconceivable to me that, as a government of the United States, we would be standing with this policy of, “Hey, you know what? Saudi Arabia is doing their investigation and we’re satisfied with the results.” It’s mind-boggling. It’s not the first time that something like this has happened, but we live in 2019. It’s an era of some measure of transparency. It’s really hard to conceal things these days. We know what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. We know all too well what happened to Jamal Khashoggi, and the fact that the president of the United States and his various subordinates and people in the government are saying we don’t know what happened, or are questioning their own intelligence reports on it, should boggle everyone’s mind. And I think that’s a big part of why it stayed in the news this long. Because people can’t just accept it. It’s beyond time for demanding actual justice in this case, but I don’t think we’re going to see it.
Nover: In that episode of Parts Unknown, which was filmed right before your and Yegi's arrest, we, the audience, see you and Yegi express sentiments that you’re hopeful about U.S.-Iran relations. Do you still have any hope for this relationship?
Rezaian: Not in the short term. My hope for Iran has always been and remains with the good people of that country. They’re talented, they’re educated, they’re thoughtful. And they have aspirations to live in a society where they have the same opportunities as people in the rest of the world. It’s a country with incredible resources, both in terms of natural resources and wealth. But also human resources. Internal Iranian forces and external forces have been getting in the way of those aspirations for decades. I would love to see a path open for the Iranian people to just express their desires about the sort of future that they want. But for that to happen, there’s going to need to be a huge change internally inside Iran and also a big change in how the United States deals with Iran. And I don’t see that happening on this administration’s watch.
Tom Steyer is launching an effort to make every Democrat campaigning to run against President Donald Trump first come out in support of impeachment. Volunteers from Steyer’s organization, Need to Impeach, already showed up at several of Elizabeth Warren’s events earlier this month during her first swing through Iowa and tried to pin her down on impeachment.
Soon, Steyer’s team will expand that effort as other candidates swing through the early-voting states. More is in the works, as the San Francisco–based billionaire and impeachment activist promises to put in another $40 million, on top of the $50 million he invested last year, to turn the list of 7 million people who’ve signed his online petition to impeach Trump into a “force on the ground” for pressing the issue.
He’s a new, and so far unique, presence in American politics: a man with essentially unlimited resources on a single-minded mission, who believes any gripe he gets is more proof that he’s right. To some, Steyer is helping make the conversation around impeachment part of the mainstream. To others, he looks like he’s on a long, pointless ego trip.
Steyer and his staff plan to spread out over the country and on TV, canvassing nationwide and showing up at presidential-campaign events, while intensifying online outreach to his list of 7 million supporters, the largest independent political operation in the country. They’ll kick off the new phase with an “impeachment summit” scheduled for next week in Washington, D.C.
[Read: How Tom Steyer built the biggest political machine you’ve never heard of]
“If you’re against impeachment, don’t bother running. Save your time. Drive an Uber,” Steyer said while driving to New Hampshire last week for his latest town hall.
Interest appears to be spiking: With 5,000 to 6,000 people signing up each day during the midterms, Steyer aides say that Need to Impeach is averaging 25,000 new names daily.
Though most presidential candidates, and Democratic leaders overall, have been ducking any talk of impeachment, Steyer figures they won’t be able to spend the next year at events with die-hard Democrats without getting pressed to take a position.
He wants to do everything he can to speed that along.
Good luck with that, the campaigns say. An adviser to one candidate said Steyer had turned his credibility into “burnt toast,” chasing a presidential run that, like previous flirtations with running for governor and Senate in California, ended abruptly, just before he seemed ready to announce.
[Read: Why Democrats aren’t talking impeachment]
“Serious people who want to hold this president accountable for his crimes know it has to come after [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller’s findings become public,” the candidate’s adviser said.
It’s worse than that, said an adviser to another candidate: “He should save his money on this, because it’s misguided and will fail. The American people deserve the facts, and that can only happen after Mueller finishes his report. Anything before that will backfire.”
Between the shutdown and its potential to spark a broad economic downturn, every week of new revelations about Trump’s investments, and all his erratic moves, Steyer said everything comes back to the same core question: “If you’re not willing to deal with the crisis in America, which is Donald Trump, then really, why should you be president?”
The impeachment summit will end with supporters heading to Capitol Hill to deliver a prewritten impeachment resolution, modeled on the one that was written for Richard Nixon, “authorizing and directing the Committee on the Judiciary to investigate whether sufficient grounds exist for the impeachment of Donald John Trump, President of the United States.” The full House would have to pass this to start the process.
The Need to Impeach supporters will also bring a set of draft articles of impeachment, with 10 charges, according to a draft document shared with The Atlantic:
Accepting unconstitutional foreign and domestic government emoluments; conspiring to solicit and then conceal illegal foreign assistance for his presidential campaign; making and concealing unlawful secret payments to procure his office; Obstructing the administration of justice; directing law enforcement to investigate and prosecute critics and political adversaries for improper purposes; abusing the pardon power; advocating illegal violence and undermining equal protection of the laws; reckless endangerment by threatening nuclear war; undermining the freedom of the press; cruel and unconstitutional imprisonment of children and their families, misuse of the military for political purposes, and other unlawful conduct and abuses of power at the southern border.
These are meant to be a model and to spur the House into creating its own, though “if the House legislative counsel wants to make some minor tweaks, we’d be okay with that,” joked Ron Fein, the legal director of Free Speech for People, a nonpartisan group focused on constitutional issues, which prepared the documents.
Representative Brad Sherman of California, who introduced his own set of articles of impeachment on the first day of the new session of Congress, as Democrats moved into the majority, did not return requests for comment on what he thought about Steyer’s effort and the suggested focuses.
But Steyer’s focus won’t be on just the presidential candidates. After convening 300 top activists and delivering the model resolutions to the House as part of the summit, Need to Impeach plans to launch efforts in about 10 targeted Democratic districts, including those of House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.
“This summit is basically to say, ‘It’s not just one guy off in San Francisco giving his opinion; it’s millions of people around the country telling you to do your jobs’,” said Kevin Mack, the chief strategist for Need to Impeach.
But most presidential candidates, at least for now, remain reluctant to touch the topic of impeachment—including those currently in the House and Senate, who might eventually have a vote in a resolution or subsequent trial.
To date, it’s been reporters more than voters who’ve been asking.
That reached a new froth late last week after a Thursday-night BuzzFeed News report, since called “not accurate” by Mueller’s spokesman, alleged that the president had directed his former attorney to lie to Congress about a project in Moscow. In the day between the original publication of the article and the Mueller response, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro said in an interview on The View that “if it’s true, then he should be impeached.” Castro’s spokeswoman did not respond when asked what he’d say given what has come out since. Former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, meanwhile, made a similar statement in New Hampshire on Friday, saying, “If this is confirmed, then the president has obstructed justice, and then it’s appropriate for the House to push forward with impeachment.”
Others have been more circumspect. Asked after a town hall in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Friday night where she stood on impeachment in light of the BuzzFeed story and other developments, Elizabeth Warren called them “a reminder of the urgency of protecting the Mueller investigation. The Mueller investigation has already produced more than two dozen indictments or guilty pleas. It is absolutely critical that Mueller be able to finish the investigation and make a full public report to the American people. That’s how we’ll know what’s happened.”
Asked Monday in Washington, D.C., during her first press conference as a declared candidate whether she believes that Trump has committed impeachable offenses, Kamala Harris noted that being on the Senate Intelligence Committee limits what she can say publicly about investigations that are under way. But she also steered her answer back to how much Mueller has uncovered so far, and said he needs to be able to follow the indictments and evidence wherever it leads him, with “no interference with that process because the American public has a right to know what actually went on, and then we’ll make a decision.” That decision, she said, might be made by the courts or it might be made by Congress.
That’s also how Kirsten Gillibrand answered when asked by a reporter in Iowa on Friday. “We have a bipartisan piece of legislation that needs to be voted on now. I don’t know why Senator [Mitch] McConnell is unwilling to let us vote on this legislation, and what it would do is guarantee that Mueller can’t be fired for any reason other than cause.”
Meanwhile, Steyer said he doesn’t regret pulling out of the presidential race himself—though he also wouldn’t rule out possibly getting in down the road. “Life is uncertain. You have to make some choices. I thought this was the right thing to do at the right time,” he said.
For now, Steyer wants to talk only about how to make others get rid of Trump before 2020. “We are living in his personal hell. He’s bringing it to us on a daily basis,” he said. “And we’ve got to get out of it.”
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