Is the Mueller investigation in its waning days? After nearly two years and dozens of indictments, some of the lawyers on the team are being reassigned to other positions in the Justice Department. If the investigation is indeed wrapping up, it’s still not quite clear what comes next and what it will portend for the president. The White House doesn’t yet seem to have a full plan on how to deal with the report once it drops, not including President Trump doing what Trump does best—tweeting up a storm.
It’s no shock that wherever you live could be significantly warmer in the coming years. But a new study tries to pinpoint what the conditions in various cities will look like relative to other places today—in other words, their “climate twins.” The effects are drastic, with the average American city moving more than 500 miles away from its current location, making Philadelphia resemble Memphis, New York City into Arkansas, and Minnesota into Kansas.
Last week, Apple delivered a warning that some apps might surreptitiously be recording users’ screens. The app developers in question had consulted with the analytics firm Glassbox to keep track of every button pressed and keyboard stroke entered while inside the app. The company claims that it uses machine learning to troubleshoot bugs and improve the user experience, though the technology could also be a tool to nudge customers into spending more time—and money—on the app.
Evening Reads
(Illustration: Matthew Shipley)
For all those who are getting divorced but can’t afford a divorce lawyer to help wade through the morass of division of assets and debt, child custody and support, and legal paperwork, Deborah Copaken documented her DIY divorce, for which she served as her own representation:
“Suddenly, what should have been an easy day in court became anything but. I quickly Googled 50/50 custody under the table. With precise, down-to-the hour 50/50 custody in New York State, I learned, the higher earner would be responsible for paying child support to the lower earner. Never mind that both of us knew precise 50/50 custody was impossible: I was, had been, and would always be our children’s primary caregiver. This was one of the many issues that tore us apart, the inequity in our domestic responsibilities. My smugness was gone. I longed for a lawyer.”
(Illustration: Getty / Life on White)
Do animals have feelings? Scientists in the West have only recently started to consider that possibility, but in India, that idea is deeply ingrained in the ideology of one religion:
“The bird hospital is one of several built by devotees of Jainism, an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals. A series of paintings in the hospital’s lobby illustrates the extremes to which some Jains take this prohibition. In them, a medieval king in blue robes gazes through a palace window at an approaching pigeon, its wing bloodied by the talons of a brown hawk still in pursuit. The king pulls the smaller bird into the palace, infuriating the hawk, which demands replacement for its lost meal, so he slices off his own arm and foot to feed it.”
Urban Developments
(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)
Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing urban dwellers around the world. Claire Tran shares today’s top stories:
The Green New Deal, CityLab’s Brentin Mock writes, must empower the people who face the most harm from climate change to help craft local solutions—all while challenging historical legacies of injustice.
The number of unsheltered homeless Americans living in their car is growing. Some cities have started Safe Parking programs to help them, offering bathrooms, security, and other social services.
Historic preservation is usually categorized in a binary way: Either buildings are historically significant, or they are not. That’s too limited, argues Patrice Frey.
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It’s Tuesday, February 12.
Lawmakers announced late Monday night that they had reached a deal to prevent another partial government shutdown. The final agreement includes $1.375 billion for a 55-mile physical barrier on the border, a far cry from the $5.7 billion for a concrete wall that President Donald Trump demanded before the last shutdown. And the president isn’t thrilled: During a Cabinet meeting today, he told reporters that he was “not happy” with the deal and didn’t confirm whether he would sign the new compromise before Friday. But he also said he doesn’t think another shutdown will happen.
A funeral for Representative John Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress in American history, was held today in Michigan. Former Vice President Joe Biden delivered a speech at the funeral. A second memorial will be held for the former lawmaker later this week in Washington, D.C.
Noticeably Absent: Not one, but two efforts are under way to reach peace in Afghanistan, one of which is being facilitated by the United States. But the Afghan government isn’t at the negotiating table in either of them, reports Krishnadev Calamur.
Twin Cities: A new study found that by 2080, global warming will make American cities feel as if they’ve moved more than 500 miles toward the south or interior of the country. Imagine if New York City felt like Jonesboro, Arkansas. What will your home city’s 2080 climate-change twin be?
The Last Impeachment: It’s the 20th anniversary of former President Bill Clinton’s acquittal in the Senate. The biggest players of the moment recounted their memories of the impeachment, and the scandalous events leading up to it, for The Atlantic’s December issue.
— Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal
Snapshot
Teachers walk a picket line outside South High School early Monday, in Denver, Colorado. (AP Photo / David Zalubowski)
Ideas From The AtlanticThe Much-Heralded End of the Mueller Investigation (Mikhaila Fogel and Benjamin Wittes)
“But there’s actually a bigger problem than the possibility that all this eager Mueller-is-wrapping-up chatter may be wrong, just the latest instance of overly hasty anticipation of the Muellerpocalypse: No one knows what Mueller’s ‘wrapping up’ actually means.” → Read on.
A Reading List for Ralph Northam (Ibram X. Kendi)
“This list is for people beginning their anti-racist journey after a lifetime of defensively saying, ‘I’m not a racist’ or ‘I can’t be a racist.’ Beginning after a lifetime of assuring themselves only bad people can be racist.” → Read on.
The U.S. Doesn’t Deserve the World Bank Presidency (Annie Lowrey)
“American control over the bank is an unjustifiable tradition that harms the institution. Self-determination and a truly meritocratic process for choosing its leadership would be good for the bank, and for the world. It is not a case the Trump administration seems to have any interest in entertaining.” → Read on.
One Cheer for Maine’s Task Force on Police Killings (Conor Friedersdorf)
“A task force with more investigatory resources, a broader mandate, and more members willing to ask tough questions about police tactics could do useful work, if elected officials in Maine ever see fit to underwrite one. Meanwhile, many states are doing even less to study the problem than Maine.” → Read on.
◆ It’s Christian Politics, Not AIPAC Money, That Explains American Support for Israel (Sam Goldman, The Washington Post)
◆ The Complicated, Always Racist History of Blackface (Sean Illing, Vox)
◆ Border Report: The U.S. Is Sending Asylum-Seekers Back to Uncertainty in Mexico (Maya Srikrishnan, Voice of San Diego)
◆ Federal Shutdowns Cut Deep in Indian Country (Keerthi Vedantham, High Country News)
◆ San Francisco’s Accidental Surveillance State and the Future of Privacy (J. D. Tuccille, Reason)
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In January, The Atlantic published an investigation into several allegations of sexual misconduct against the filmmaker Bryan Singer, who’s directed many blockbusters in his long career, including the recent box-office sensation Bohemian Rhapsody. The news reverberated throughout Hollywood. But one producer who seemed untroubled was Avi Lerner. As the CEO of Millennium Films, Lerner was responsible for high-budget shlock such as the Expendables series, Olympus Has Fallen and its sequels, and an upcoming remake of Red Sonja, which had just hired Singer for a reported $10 million. This week, Deadline reported that the film was being moved to the “back burner” and taken off Millennium’s development slate.
Singer has dismissed the Atlantic’s story as a “homophobic smear piece,” calling the accusations “bogus.” Lerner backed him up in a January 24 statement, saying, “I know the difference between agenda-driven fake news and reality, and I am very comfortable with this decision. In America people are innocent until proven otherwise.” Less than three weeks later, things have changed: On Monday, Deadline reported that Red Sonja is being taken out of active development by its studio, which had been planning to start production in Europe later this year. Perhaps Singer’s reputation in Hollywood has now become too toxic even for Millennium Films. (Lerner was not immediately available for comment.)
For years, rumors had swirled in the industry about alleged sexual misconduct by Singer (fueled by several lawsuits, many of them dismissed for various reasons) and about his on-set behavior, with reports of clashes with other actors and persistent lateness. According to The Hollywood Reporter, before Singer was approved by Fox to direct Bohemian Rhapsody, the studio head Stacey Snider warned him not to break the law and to show up to work every day—an extraordinary demand to make of a person in charge of a $55 million project. But according to Fox, Singer failed to comply, and the studio fired him before production was complete (Directors Guild rules mandate that Singer retain the director credit).
[Read: ‘Nobody is going to believe you’]
Why would anyone be in line for a $10 million paycheck after such an experience? Lerner’s initial defense was that the movie Singer got fired from was still a commercial hit. “The over $800 million Bohemian Rhapsody has grossed, making it the highest-grossing drama in film history, is testament to his remarkable vision and acumen,” Lerner said in a statement. It’s worth noting that while Singer has directed many hits, he’s also overseen financial disappointments: 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer was a notorious bomb, losing a reported $140 million for its studio, while his Superman Returns performed worse than expected, failing to produce a sequel and burdened by a staggering $200 million-plus budget.
Singer certainly doesn’t deserve sole credit for Bohemian Rhapsody’s success; the high grosses are at least partly thanks to the enduring popularity of the band Queen, one of the best-selling musical acts of all time. On the other hand, Red Sonja, a reboot of a Brigitte Nielsen–starring action drama that made $6.9 million in 1985, is a much more marginal property. Lerner and Millennium Films had not even secured financing for the project yet, and the company was looking to attract investors this month at the European Film Market, an annual gathering of movie-business operatives attached to the Berlin Film Festival. At the best of times, a Red Sonja revival might not be the hottest title at EFM; with Singer’s name attached, arguably no sage investor would jump on board.
Hence the apparent step back. Singer hasn’t been officially removed from the movie, but without any funding, cast announcements, or immediate plans to begin filming, the project essentially doesn’t exist. Lerner, for his part, has only somewhat backtracked on his original statement in defense of Singer, telling Deadline that his comments “came out the wrong way,” and that “I think victims should be heard and this allegation should be taken very, very seriously … I just don’t agree to judge by Twitter. I want [the accused] to be judged by the court.”
Lerner has his own experience with high-profile misconduct allegations. The actor Terry Crews told a Senate panel last year that Lerner had threatened to fire him from the fourth Expendables movie if Crews didn’t drop a sexual-harassment case against the Hollywood agent Adam Venit. (Lerner told The Hollywood Reporter that he was simply asking for “some kind of peace.”) In 2017, Lerner was sued by a former employee who alleged sexual harassment by the CEO and other top-level employees, gender discrimination, and the fostering of a hostile work environment. (Lerner called the suit “all lies” and “a joke.”) “Abusers protect abusers,” Crews told senators, recounting Lerner’s alleged intervention on behalf of Venit. But despite Lerner’s initial efforts to defend Singer, the shelving of Red Sonja suggests that the director’s reputation could finally be a meaningful roadblock for his career in Hollywood.
This year’s 143rd annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is hosting 2,800 dogs, consisting of more than 200 different breeds or varieties. Below are images from the two-day competition and preliminary activities held in New York City at Piers 92/94 and Madison Square Garden. And, for a closer look at the road to Westminster and the life of a show-dog breeder, please read “Backstage at the Westminster Dog Show,” by Ashley Fetters.
Sarah Krebs is used to corpses going missing. As a detective who works in the missing-persons unit in Detroit, she has solved dozens of cases by matching up disappeared people to unidentified bodies left in state custody. But for older cases in which the county was supposed to have buried the body, Krebs says it’s common for her to order an exhumation from the local cemetery and discover that the body she’s looking for is not there.
Anywhere from a few days to a few years later, those bones might turn up in a separate burial plot, or in a box on a medical examiner’s shelf, or in a law-enforcement evidence room, or in a county employee’s house. “I have multiple, multiple cases where we thought the body was buried and we found a couple days later that someone had it at home,” Krebs says.
The reason for this morbid confusion is that the United States is enduring a cadaver pileup. Medical examiners around the country are being overrun with bodies that no one comes to pick up, a trend that many coroners attribute to the nation’s opioid epidemic. Drug-overdose deaths increased by 10 percent from 2016 to 2017, largely driven by fentanyls and similar drugs, according to the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention. Now medical examiners in cities such as Detroit process dozens of new remains each day. And as Krebs has encountered, some of those bodies can slip under the radar.
[Read: What happens to a dead body no one can name?]
The bodies that remain accounted for, meanwhile, float in and out of state custody. No one is quite sure what to do with them. The United States has no uniform system for managing the unclaimed. There is no federal law outlining what steps to take, and many states do not have clear procedures, leaving individual medical examiners to make decisions about how to best deal with the bodies. As a result, examiners without money to simply bury or cremate the remains are resorting to inventive—and strange—solutions.
Among the unclaimed bodies processed in the United States, some are the unidentified remains from missing-persons cases like the ones Krebs works on, but the majority belong to people who were estranged from their family while they were alive, according to Kenna Quinet, an associate professor at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis who co-wrote one of the only academic articles on unclaimed bodies. In most of these cases, the identity of the victim is known, but coroners or funeral directors can’t contact the next of kin, or the next of kin was reached and either doesn’t want the body or can’t afford to bury it. The unclaimed population skews poor and homeless.
Policy makers have rarely backed programs that would set clear terms for the management of the unclaimed, which has left coroners to cycle through a grab bag of disposition methods once a body enters their custody. Coroners often opt to cremate unclaimed remains to save money—burials cost at least twice as much—but some states don’t allow coroners to request a cremation for fear that it could infringe on the deceased’s religious values. In smaller counties that have fewer unclaimed bodies, bodies are kept in coolers; those that are cremated are left in boxes or in a coroner’s closet.
Los Angeles County has one of the more organized systems. There, unclaimed bodies are cremated if no one comes to retrieve them within a month of death, after which the cremains are kept in the county coroner’s office for another three years, according to the Los Angeles Times. If by that point no family has reached out, the cremains are buried alongside more than a thousand others in an annual interfaith funeral.
But because of a lack of funding, counties cannot always afford to pay funeral directors to cremate or bury unclaimed bodies. Only 14 states devote money to funeral costs for unclaimed bodies, and it rarely covers the actual volume of bodies that coroners and funeral directors face. West Virginia, which has the highest rate of opioid deaths in the United States, has run out of funds two years in a row, the state’s Funeral Directors Association told me. And while some counties and towns provide funds in addition to the state’s contribution, many don’t.
That has left cash-poor cities like Detroit to scatter remains in haphazard ways. Shortly after the financial crisis, according to Krebs, the county medical examiner stashed unclaimed bodies in a refrigerated semitrailer in a back parking lot, a last resort usually reserved for disasters like Hurricane Maria. Two funeral homes the City contracted with are currently under investigation after some bodies were found unburied. When unclaimed bodies are in fact buried, Krebs says, the process is cheap and unglamorous: In some cases, cemetery workers have “dug a trench and lined up body bags.”
Other cities have similarly drawn ire over their burial of the unclaimed. In 2015, Washington, D.C., discovered that, in some cases, the funeral home that the City paid to bury its unclaimed bodies had simply dumped the remains in unmarked graves beside trash cans. (The funeral home claimed that it followed the terms of its contract.)
Placing even more strain on medical examiners is the fact that a centuries-old method for clearing out unclaimed bodies—donating them to medical schools—is often no longer viable. Many states have long relied on donations, a tradition that surfaced in the 19th century following a series of riots against the then-common practice of robbing graves to supply bodies for anatomy research. The resulting Anatomy Acts, which passed in many U.S. states in 1831 and 1832, allowed medical schools to dissect “unclaimed bodies.” But as the historian Michael Sappol has written, many of these bodies were simply people who couldn’t afford burials. New York banned unclaimed-body donations in 2016 after an outcry, and even in states where handing over unclaimed bodies is legal, many medical schools now refuse to take them.
All this means that solutions for managing the dead are getting weirder and more controversial—though not necessarily worse. While Tennessee gives some unclaimed cadavers to “body farms” where researchers study decomposition, New York has buried more than 1 million unclaimed bodies on its inaccessible Hart Island, a 100-acre strip of land north of Manhattan. States such as North Carolina cremate unclaimed remains and scatter them at sea. Dallas, which is also overrun with unclaimed bodies, briefly debated liquefying remains through an environmentally friendly process known as alkaline hydrolysis. That initiative failed after lawmakers expressed revulsion for the technique, which reduces human bodies to a brownish liquid and a set of bones.
[Read: How to be eco-friendly when you’re dead]
In the meantime, some people are attempting to limit the number of bodies that go unclaimed in the first place. NamUs, a federal missing-persons database that has recently expanded to include unclaimed bodies, for instance, is attempting to make it easier for medical examiners to match unclaimed remains to missing persons. According to NamUs’s communication and case-management director, J. Todd Matthews, unclaimed bodies are often reported missing in a state other than where they actually died, but medical examiners don’t have direct access to the National Crime Information Center’s missing-person database. NamUs hopes its own database can provide an alternative search tool when medical examiners wind up with bodies whose family they can’t locate.
Still, many medical examiners don’t know NamUs exists, according to Matthews. Until any sort of procedure is standardized, unclaimed bodies in cities that see a high number of dead will continue to float from office to office, home to home, refrigerated truck to refrigerated truck. When Krebs needs to test the DNA of an unclaimed body for a missing-persons case, she will have to keep racing from building to building in search of the transient dead. And she won’t be surprised to find the bones she has been looking for in a glass display at a local university. She’s solved cold cases that way.
Sixty years from now, climate change could transform the East Coast into the Gulf Coast. It will move Minnesota to Kansas, turn Tulsa into Texas, and hoist Houston into Mexico. Even Oregonians might ooze out of their damp, chilly corner and find themselves carried to the central valley of California.
These changes won’t happen literally, of course—but that doesn’t make them any less real. A new paper tries to find the climate-change twin city for hundreds of places across the United States: the city whose modern-day weather gives the best clue to what conditions will feel like in 2080. It finds that the effects of global warming will be like relocating American cities more than 500 miles away from their current location, on average, mostly to the south and toward the country’s interior.
[Read: The American South will bear the worst of climate change’s costs]
For instance, the Philadelphia of the 2080s will resemble the historical climate of Memphis. By the time kids today near retirement age, Philadelphia’s average summer will be about 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is now. Winters in Philly will be nearly 10 degrees more temperate. Memphis’s scorching, sticky weather provides the best guide to how those climatic changes will feel day after day.
Meanwhile, Memphis’s climate will come to resemble that of modern-day College Station, Texas, by 2080.
A screenshot of the new tool from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. (Fitzpatrick et al. / UMCES)The paper was accompanied by the release of a new tool that lets Americans find their city’s climate-change twin.
“Everything gets warmer,” says Matthew Fitzpatrick, an author of the paper and a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “I don’t think I’ve seen a place that doesn’t.” In the West and Midwest, cities also tend to get drier as the Great Plains shift east. So Chicago comes to Kansas, Denver drifts to Texas, and San Francisco starts to feel like Los Angeles.
Read: [The three most chilling conclusions from the climate report]
Fitzpatrick cautions that no city will perfectly match its climate twin, especially when it comes to rainfall. Many cities in the South simply do not have a good twin: “The climate of many urban areas could become unlike anything present” in North America, the paper says.
In the Northeast, you can envision the future as one big Arkansas-ification. The paper finds that if the world meets its goals under the Paris Agreement, then Washington, D.C., will enter the 2080s feeling a lot like Paragould, Arkansas. But if the world follows a worst-case scenario, then D.C. will more closely resemble northern Mississippi—and New York City will feel like Jonesboro, Arkansas.
That worries Virginie Rolland, a resident of Jonesboro and a professor of ecology at Arkansas State University. “That’s in line with what I know, that the eastern U.S. will become hotter and wetter, while the [Midwest] will become drier and hotter,” she told me. Her own research focuses on eastern bluebirds, which have historically spent the summer in New York before migrating south for the winter. But “they’ve started staying in New York” for the winter, she said, “so I know it’s getting warmer there.”
She also warned future New Yorkers about what Jonesboro has in store: “Summer-wise, it’s like Florida here. And I cannot imagine New York like Florida … it’s hard to think about how humid it will be.”
Read: [The new politics of climate change]
“I wouldn’t wish the hot and humid summer climate of Arkansas on anyone,” agreed David Stahle, a climate scientist at the University of Arkansas, in an email.
“I was shocked, to be honest,” at how southerly many cities would soon feel, Fitzpatrick told me. The research spun out of his own weather worries: “I really like snow, and I thought, Is that still going to happen up here?” he said. But when he looked up his current home in Cumberland, Maryland, he found that it would soon feel like southern Kentucky. He groaned. “I lived in Knoxville for several years, in central Tennessee, when I was doing my Ph.D., and I couldn’t wait to get out of there because it was so hot and humid. I thought, Ugh, the climate’s following me up here.”
Even though Fitzpatrick works with climate data all the time—and knew, as he put it, that “it’s gonna get warmer, whatever”—he had never thought about it like this. “If I have grandkids and they lived in the same place I do,” he said, “they might not recognize this climate that we’re living in now.”
The romantic comedy has been in a state of moderate crisis for the better part of a decade. After spending the early aughts making easy money with pairings of largely interchangeable stars—Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, Katherine Heigl, Hugh Grant, Drew Barrymore, Adam Sandler, Jennifer Lopez … —rom-coms saw their box-office wave dry up abruptly around 2012. As the producer Lynda Obst, a doyenne of the genre, told Vulture that year, “It is the hardest time of my 30 years in the business.”
Some rom-coms began experimenting with out-there premises (the “She’s a woman, he’s a zombie” setup of Warm Bodies), while others presented themselves as another genre altogether (Silver Linings Playbook, for instance, or Moonrise Kingdom). Lately, many of the more successful entrants in the genre have been films that de-emphasized Hollywood movie stars and featured racially diverse casts (The Big Sick, Crazy Rich Asians, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before). But I think it’s safe to say that we are at a moment when no one has a particularly good sense of precisely where the rom-com is headed.
Into this cinematic breach steps Isn’t It Romantic, a would-be high-concept Rebel Wilson film that intends to revivify the romantic comedy by satirizing it. I am sorry (though unsurprised) to report that it does not succeed.
The movie opens to the song “Oh, Pretty Woman” and, moments later, to the movie Pretty Woman, which a slightly chubby Australian girl named Natalie is watching on TV. Her mother (a vastly underutilized Jennifer Saunders) warns the blissed-out child to “forget about love.” No one will ever make movies about “girls like us,” she explains, adding, “Someone might marry you for a visa, but that’s about it.”
Flash forward, and the now grown Natalie (Wilson) is an architect at a Manhattan firm. Sadly, her mother’s warnings about how no one will be interested in her appear to have come true, both romantically and professionally. Despite her career success, everyone in the office treats Natalie like a coffee girl. Even her best friend, Josh (Adam DeVine, Wilson’s co-star and eventual squeeze in the Pitch Perfect movies), seems to spend his days looking out the window at a billboard of a bathing-suited supermodel. Gone are the romantic fantasies of Natalie’s girlhood. She even berates her assistant, Whitney (Betty Gilpin), for enjoying rom-coms, and proceeds to enumerate all the tedious tropes thereof: the adorably clumsy lead, her gay best friend, her female nemesis, the cheesy pop songs, the interruption of a marriage to the Wrong Person. (Take notes. As you’ve probably surmised, these will be important later on.)
In the subway, a man seems to flirt with Natalie. But no! He’s only trying to get close enough to punch her in the stomach in order to steal her purse. (This is one of those movies with the message “What matters is what’s on the inside” that nonetheless tries to get as much early comic mileage as possible by making fun of how its protagonist looks on the outside.) In the fracas, Natalie bangs her head against a steel beam and passes out. When she awakens, she finds herself in a romantic comedy. All of the aforementioned tropes are in evidence; every good-looking guy is now more interested in her person than in her purse; etc., etc. Even New York “doesn’t smell like shit anymore!,” Natalie enthuses.
If this sounds an awful lot like last year’s Amy Schumer vehicle, I Feel Pretty (in which Schumer bangs her head and comes to believe that she is the most beautiful woman in the world), well, that’s because it is. Yes, it appears we now have an official subgenre of pseudo-feminist movies in which a woman is initially presented as completely unattractive; is concussed into a fantasy in which she becomes impossibly desirable; and from the experience gleans important, affirmative lessons about believing in herself.
[Read: When beauty is a troll]
Sigh. At least Isn’t It Romantic is not as sour and self-negating as Schumer’s film (which was already an improvement on its genre cousin, Shallow Hal). The new movie, directed by the comedy journeyman Todd Strauss-Schulson, offers flashes of charm here and there, and a couple of modestly fun musical numbers. But its moral messages are frequently confused or contradictory, and the movie is neither particularly funny nor particularly clever in its dissection of the rom-com genre.
Natalie stumbles (literally stumbles) into the Perfect Guy, a handsomely bearded billionaire played by the youngest Hemsworth brother, Liam. Likewise, Natalie’s sweet-natured friend Josh ends up dating the very same supermodel and “yoga ambassador” (Priyanka Chopra) from the swimsuit billboard. Will these two mismatched couples find enduring love? If you don’t already know the answer to that question, then you clearly have not seen enough rom-coms. Isn’t It Romantic ends precisely the way you assume it will by the movie’s second scene.
Along the way, there are plenty of references to Pretty Woman, as well as nods—some better than others—to The Wedding Singer, When Harry Met Sally, Jerry Maguire, Notting Hill, Sweet Home Alabama, She’s All That, and doubtless others that I’m forgetting. And Natalie of course acquires a gay friend (Brandon Scott Jones), who is written as swishily as any 1980s-movie caricature. The filmmakers evidently believe that if an unpleasant comic stereotype is presented with a touch of irony, it will somehow be rendered no longer unpleasant.
This is of a piece with the movie itself, which consistently wants to have it both ways. It’s true that it is no easy feat to succeed as both a romantic comedy and a send-up of romantic comedies. Alas, Isn’t It Romantic fails on both counts.
NEW YORK, N.Y.— On ordinary days, Mara Flood and her 18-year-old daughter, Becca Flood, interact like any other mother and daughter might, but on days like today, they’re more like colleagues—and rivals. The Floods, who breed and handle smooth collies together, have brought their dogs Cherry (whose full name is SugarNSpice Cherry On Top), Poe (Travler SugarNSpice Witches Do Come Blue), and Tiger (SugarNSpice Hear Me Roar) from Orange County, New York, to Manhattan to compete in Monday’s events at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
Becca and Mara came to Pier 94, on the west side of the city, on Sunday afternoon to set up their dogs’ grooming tables and then have dinner out together in the city (their annual pre-Westminster tradition). Monday’s workday started at 5:30 a.m., when Mara began bathing the dogs and then woke up Becca to ask her to start blow-drying them. And then at noon, the two Floods faced off against each other (and seven other handlers, one of whom was showing Cherry) in the Best of Breed competition, five-year-old Tiger at the end of Mara’s lead and two-year-old Poe at the end of Becca’s.
Mara, whose female dog Gretel won Best of Breed in 2016 at Westminster, wanted to win it again. This time, though, she says, Poe was a little squirrelly in the ring, and Tiger faced stiff competition from the other females. In the end, Tiger and Poe took home the Best of Opposite Sex and Select Dog titles, respectively; in other words, they placed second and third behind the dog who eventually went on to compete in the Herding Group round at Madison Square Garden.
“You’re always hoping to win Best, and you never, until you walk into that ring and get a ribbon, know how it’s gonna go,” Mara said later. “But we’re thrilled with what we got. Our dogs went in there and they showed well, and you can’t ask for more than that.”
Owners and handlers groom their dogs in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show “benching area” at Pier 94 in Manhattan. A “benched” dog show is one in which each dog is required to be in its designated berth on the grounds for the entirety of the event unless it is showing, being groomed to show, or out for a brief walk, so that visitors and other exhibitors can stop by and observe them.
Two Old English sheepdogs relax in their section of the benching area. On a normal show day, it takes two hours to groom each one. Today, each dog requires four.
Becca and Mara’s dog-show tack box is divided into two sections—one for the humans’ grooming supplies, and one for the dogs’. Of course, when they’re in a hurry, Becca says, every now and again she and her dogs end up sharing hair mousse or a brush. “I just try to pull out all the dog hair I can before I use it,” she laughs.
On show days, the Floods bring along seasoned chicken, hot dogs, and steak to use as “bait,” or treats to reward their dogs’ good behavior—and hold their attention—in the ring.
Becca shares a piece of a pretzel (her “stress eating” snack between ring times, she says) with Tiger.
After changing into her suit, Becca puts on her armband, which helps judges and record-keepers identify her in the ring. Handlers often coordinate what they wear in the ring to complement and contrast with the coat color of the dog they’re showing; it’s important, Mara explains, that the silhouette of the dog always be distinct from the human’s as they run around the ring together.
Mara and Becca groom Tiger, taking special care to fluff up the fur around her neck. “It just gives the dogs more presence,” Becca says. Later, as the two waited for their dogs’ turn in the ring, they sprayed down the dogs’ backs with water to keep their fur from drying out and flattening under the hot indoor lights.
Left: Every year before they show their dogs at Westminster, the Floods get manicures together. Usually they do some variation on the official colors of Westminster, purple and gold. Right: A handler discreetly carries a brush into the ring to facilitate any necessary last-minute grooming.
Becca participates in her last-ever junior showmanship competition. In general, competitors age out of juniors when they turn 18, but Becca qualified for this year’s Westminster juniors event before her birthday.
Left: A rough collie—a longer-haired collie variety, so closely related to the smooth collie that sometimes rough and smooth collies are born in the same litter—gets groomed in the benching area. Right: A handler wears a collie tie clip.
A Neapolitan mastiff hangs out in the Westminster benching area.
A Pomeranian gets groomed in the benching area.
The Floods’ dogs—from left to right, Cherry, Poe, and Tiger—took home Winners Bitch, Select Dog, and Best of Opposite Sex titles within the smooth collie breed, respectively.In Maine, police officers who use deadly force on the job are always justified in doing so—or at least that’s apparently the official position of the state attorney general’s office, where every deadly police shooting for the past 28 years has been dutifully reviewed, and the cops have always been found justified in their killings. Does that seem plausible?
Last year, after a spike in police killings, the Bangor Daily News editorialized that “this 100 percent justification rate rightly raises a lot of eyebrows,” and commended Maine Attorney General Janet Mills for announcing that she would convene a task force to look into “these deadly encounters.”
The task force’s report, released late last month, encompasses just 10 deadly force incidents. The final product isn’t as thorough in scope or as detailed in what it documents as criminal-justice reformers might wish. Law enforcement is arguably overrepresented among the members of the review team. And its heavy reliance on official records and lack of attempts to interview witnesses rendered it unable to discover any flaws in bygone reviews. But the report is still better than nothing. It attempts to identify and record “common elements or characteristics in these use-of-deadly-force incidents,” something that wasn’t previously done at all.
All of the 10 people killed were armed—seven with guns, two with knives, one with a weapon “consisting of railroad spikes attached to one end of a rope.”
The most striking findings:
“Of the ten cases reviewed … eight of the individuals were living with mental health challenges. In seven of those individuals, family and friends noted signs of depression or depression formally diagnosed. In only two cases was there evidence to suggest that the individuals were receiving treatment for their mental health challenges. In those cases, the individuals were receiving intensive services and supervision of their mental health concerns, including counseling, case management, and community supervision.” “In seven of the cases reviewed, the involved individuals had made statements indicating they were having suicidal ideation at the time, or prior to, the incident. In two cases, individuals had a history of actual suicide attempts.” “In seven of the incidents, involved individuals had either alcohol or drugs in their system at the time of the incident. More specifically, the average Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) of the individuals involved was 0.241%, with three individuals having a BAC of 0.30% or higher, and one having a BAC of 0.43%.” “... six of the individuals had been involved in domestic violence-related incidents.”The report’s conclusion underscored a flaw in the way that most jurisdictions in America respond to police killings: with inadequate efforts to collect information that might help to diagnose root causes or reduce the likelihood of future incidents. Or, as the task force diplomatically put it, “Because of the narrow scope of the Attorney General’s criminal investigation focusing on criminal liability, as well as the narrow scope of the Medical Examiner’s investigation, focusing on determining cause and manner of death, the task force did not have enough information to determine whether the individuals, or their family or friends had attempted to seek treatment for mental health or substance use issues.”
The task force ought to have been charged with gathering that information. Given a sample size of 10 killings, the work hardly seems like too much to reasonably undertake.
Most of the report’s 10 recommendations touched on mental health. The task force urged “access to mental health services, particularly the availability of forensic, crisis and crisis stabilization beds,” more frequent use of “multidisciplinary teams that provide intensive support and supervision of individuals with serious and persistent mental illness,” more collaborative work between police departments and the families of individuals with a serious mental illness, better training for cops “responding to calls for service where there is evidence a person is living with a mental health or substance use disorder,” better training for police dispatchers “in mental health, substance use, developmental disabilities, other vulnerable populations, and crisis response,” and the permanent addition of a “licensed mental health or substance use clinician” to the state’s Use of Deadly Force Internal Review Panel.
The task force’s focus on mental illness is defensible—at least in the popular imagination, it is an undervalued factor in police killings in the United States. Still, fixing the problem will require going much further than the task force did.
Maine’s population is roughly 1.3 million. In the two-year period that the task force says it reviewed, deadly force was used in the state about as often as it was over the same period in Germany, where there are 82.8 million people, including its share of knife-wielders, alcohol abusers, and the mentally ill. Germany differs in the proportion of its residents with guns and the attitudes and approaches of its cops. Both factors must loom larger in any realistic analysis of why U.S. police officers kill so many people, compared with police in other democracies.
A task force with more investigatory resources, a broader mandate, and more members willing to ask tough questions about police tactics could do useful work, if elected officials in Maine ever see fit to underwrite one. Meanwhile, many states are doing even less to study the problem than Maine.
Everyone is saying it: The Mueller investigation is winding down. The acting attorney general declared the investigation “close to completion” during a press conference. His wife, Marci Whitaker, has also insisted that the special counsel’s investigation is “wrapping up.” President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, William Barr, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that, given his public actions, Mueller is “well along” in his investigation.
The press is buying it. NBC says we could be looking at “mid-February” for a delivery of the so-called Mueller report; that would be, well, now. Yahoo! News reported that the probe could be “coming to its climax potentially within a few weeks”—a few weeks ago.
There have also been reports that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has been overseeing the investigation, will likely step down soon, but only after the completion of the Mueller probe.
Other sheep entrails and tea leaves are signaling the end as well. Certain investigators in the special counsel’s office are being reassigned to other offices within the Justice Department. There are now only 12, as the president has said, “angry Democrats” (translation: lawyers) working on the Mueller team. (Peter Carr, a spokesman for Robert Mueller, listed the 12 lawyers on Mueller’s staff in an email this morning, along with two attorneys who are still representing the special counsel’s office on specific matters, despite having been reassigned to other Justice Department components.) We are also seeing a migration of investigations into the president’s conduct from the special counsel’s office to other Department of Justice offices, most notably the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, and the proliferation of new investigations entirely outside the special counsel’s domain.
[Quinta Jurecic: A confederacy of grift]
Yes, some of the sheep guts are pointing in other directions, too. In January, Mueller extended the grand jury investigating l’affaire russe for an additional six months. The prosecutors are dealing with pending litigation, most notably the Andrew Miller and the mysterious Sealed v. Sealed grand-jury cases, not to mention ongoing prosecutions such as the newly filed Roger Stone case. And there are likely outstanding, yet-to-be-filed criminal matters in the Mueller probe as well; Jerome Corsi—who, by his own admission, was offered a plea agreement by the special counsel in November and proceeded to disclose that agreement to the press—has not yet been charged. Of course, remember that Mueller was going to be finished “shortly after Thanksgiving”—that is, Thanksgiving 2017—before he was going to be finished by or around January 1, 2018, before he was going to be finished by June 2018, before he was going to be finished by mid-February.
But there’s actually a bigger problem than the possibility that all this eager Mueller-is-wrapping-up chatter may be wrong, just the latest instance of overly hasty anticipation of the Muellerpocalypse: No one knows what Mueller’s “wrapping up” actually means.
Consider your own reaction to the news: When you learned that Mueller was wrapping up, did you immediately assume that meant things were coming to a confrontation, or did you assume it meant the president was getting away with everything? Did you assume it meant that Mueller’s investigation was petering out and that he would file some kind of report? That he would “clear” the president? That he would produce a dramatic spree of final indictments? Or did you assume it meant that Mueller was getting ready to issue some kind of devastating written work product that ends up driving an impeachment? All of these are consistent with “wrapping up,” but they are radically different outcomes.
It seems a bit weird to speculate breathlessly that we are careening toward some kind of finality without actually knowing either whether the endpoint is near or what we mean when we say that we are reaching it. But for what it’s worth, here are a few possibilities of what it could mean that Mueller is winding down—assuming that he is, in fact, winding down.
First, there’s a kind of commonsense understanding of the term, under which the scope of the work is nearly complete, with the exception of a few investigative loose ends that will take a little bit of time to tie up. The scope of the investigation, as stated in the appointment order issued by Rosenstein on May 17, 2017, includes:
(i) any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and
(ii) any matter that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and
(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a) [which governs the jurisdiction of special counsels]
Rosenstein issued a second memorandum, a partially redacted version of which has become public, that clarified that Mueller’s mandate includes allowing him to investigate and prosecute certain activities of the former Trump-campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
[Read: The White House has no plan for confronting the Mueller report]
So if you imagine that “wrapping up” means this first option, then Mueller and his team have largely finished probing the story of the links and coordination between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government. They have largely finished investigating efforts to obstruct the probe. And they are probably spinning off the matters that arose in the course of investigating these core things. Yes, there are still issues to be resolved, but those issues are squarely within the realm of what can be gleaned from filed documents. Some of these might include examining newly seized evidence from Roger Stone; waiting to see whether investigators will learn anything truly significant from Andrew Miller, a matter that is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; and resolving the mystery grand-jury case, which pertains to some foreign-government-owned institution. In this iteration of “wrapping up,” the team largely knows where it is heading, and it’s just a question of getting there. Think of James Comey’s comments about the Hillary Clinton email investigation; by the time the FBI sat down to interview her, he has said, it was quite clear there wouldn’t be a case unless she lied. But the interview had to happen anyway. The FBI was wrapping up.
The problem is that this explanation doesn’t answer the question of how significant those loose ends are to the investigation or how long they will take to tie off—putting aside the fact that it is now mid-February and the investigation still shows no signs of ending. The famed biographer Robert Caro has been wrapping up the fifth volume of his five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson—the first volume of which was published in 1982—for years. The scope of work is known. He presumably knows what he’s going to say. And yet, as Caro has said, he is “still—at the age of 83—several years from finishing it.” Countless Game of Thrones fans have been waiting since 2011 for George R. R. Martin to wrap up The Winds of Winter, the next volume in his “Song of Fire and Ice” series.
There’s another plausible way to understand Mueller’s “wrap-up” phase. It could mean that the investigative phase of the probe is nearly complete—with or without significant loose ends—but that major decisions are still to come. In other words, if the Mueller team has all or almost all the information it needs, it may still have to decide exactly what to do with that information. Will there be more indictments when the investigation “wraps up,” or will prosecutors ride off into the sunset, leaving a report on Bill Barr’s doorstep?
To say that the investigation is done, in other words, doesn’t answer the question of investigative outcome. If you’re one of those people who have invested a great deal in the Mueller investigation, you might—quite plausibly—see in this decision point the great cataclysm, the moment in which Mueller reveals all in a set of climactic charges. Conversely, if you’re one of those people who think the premise is wildly overstated and the whole thing is a “witch hunt,” you’re waiting for the emperor to be revealed as naked. But the point either way in this iteration is that “wrapping up” is not necessarily the end; it’s merely the end of the investigation.
[Joshua Zoffer and Niall Ferguson: Mueller and a blue House could bring down Trump]
There’s a third possible explanation: Perhaps both the investigative and prosecutorial decision-making dimensions of the probe are nearly complete, and “wrapping up” means that the special counsel’s office is in the process of drafting a report. In this version, there will be no more indictment fireworks, no more Friday news surprises—or perhaps just a few more. The wrap-up is the writing of some kind of accounting.
But again, that leaves the question of what that accounting will say. It’s rather different if it contains explosive allegations of presidential misconduct that the prosecutor contends would be indictable if committed by someone other than the president than if Mueller slinks off into history with a report that simply says he found insufficient evidence of any crime to bring a case. Assuming this third explanation is accurate, we also don’t know what form such a report would take or how much the public or Congress would see of it. Will it be made public, as congressional Democrats have advocated? Will Congress even be sent the unredacted version of the report? Or will Mueller submit a document directly to Congress, as Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski did with his Road Map? So to say that Mueller is wrapping up in this sense says very little about the outcome of his work.
But consider a final possibility: All three of these processes could be taking place simultaneously. Mueller could be on an investigative downslope that will take a bit more time; he will then have decisions to make; and he is in the meantime completing his report.
To sum up, we don’t know how long Mueller will be working; we don’t know whether or how many indictments are left to come, or for what; we don’t know what any report will say; and we don’t know when any of this will happen.
It’s a good thing we know that Mueller is wrapping up.
As the Grammys dragged into its fourth hour on Sunday night, the storied producer Jimmy Jam told the audience that it was time to pay tribute to yet another titan of music. Dolly Parton had already presided over her own medley and Diana Ross had thrown herself a birthday bash; Aretha Franklin’s memorial was still to come. The recipient of the next fete, rather, would be Neil Portnow, the bespectacled, white-bearded 71-year-old who has routinely bored Grammys audiences since he became the Recording Academy’s president in 2002.
It’s Portnow’s last year in his run as the longest-acting chief in Grammys history. So after a montage about the Recording Academy’s good works—museums, charities, concerts, opportunities for Portnow to pose with Barbra Streisand—another montage had musicians rave about Portnow’s tenure. Celine Dion bid bon voyage. Chick Corea said, “You’ve helped us keep the music fires burning bright” and played a piano riff. Then it was Portnow’s turn to talk, which he did for longer than any musician’s acceptance speech.
It was a lot of time devoted to a bureaucrat, and Slate, helpfully, has put together a gallery of more Portnow content for the precisely zero people who were left asking for it. This was not just any insider indulgence though; it was an attempt to polish a damaged image. More and more, when it comes to the well-publicized flaws of the Grammys—and really, of gatekeeping institutions of all sorts—public scrutiny is turning toward the behind-the-scenes types who’ve called the shots for extreme lengths of time.
Portnow found himself in pop-culture controversy in 2016, when Kanye West requested a meeting about making the Grammys more “relevant,” which is partly to say, more inclusive of hip-hop, a genre that hasn’t won an Album of the Year award since 2004. Portnow said he was game to collaborate, but he also gave interviews in which he made statements such as, “No, I don’t think there’s a race problem at all” with the Grammys. West hasn’t attended the ceremony since then, and not until 2019—the first show after long-overdue expansions were made to the Academy’s voting body—did a rapper (Childish Gambino) win Song of the Year or Record of the Year.
But Portnow only became a true celebrity bête noire when, after the 2018 Grammys telecast gave out just one trophy to a female artist, he said women needed to “step up” in the music industry. Rebuking female artists and execs who’d long spoken about the structural obstacles facing them, the comment displayed breathtaking ignorance or insensitivity from someone with so much ostensible power in the industry. The ensuing backlash was fierce. Sheryl Crow and Pink tweeted complaints. Fiona Apple played a concert in a Kneel, Portnow tee. Vanessa Carlton campaigned for him to step down. Portnow apologized quickly, and after another scandal—accusations that the Grammys show siphoned money away from charity—announced that he would retire soon.
The brouhaha wasn’t forgotten Sunday so much as loudly atoned for. There was lots of celebrating women in music from the host, Alicia Keys, who started the show by summoning the team of Michelle Obama, Lady Gaga, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Jennifer Lopez. The female artists Kacey Musgraves, Cardi B, H.E.R., and Dua Lipa took televised prizes, though the latter did so with a dig at Portnow’s “step up” rhetoric. Then there was Portnow’s speech, which advocated inclusivity in parodically mealymouthed fashion. An actual quote that is not from a seventh grader’s civics essay: “The need for social change has been a hallmark of the American experience from the founding of our country to the complex times we live in today.”
The reaction shots from women in the audience during Portnow’s speech didn’t exactly radiate approval. The length and dreariness of his talk, in fact, asked frustrating questions of the viewer. Who wanted this combined display of contrition and self-celebration from Portnow? What could he say to cover up the fact that he had run the Recording Academy for more than 15 years and was still able to suggest in 2018, at the height of the #MeToo wave, that women are just not trying hard enough? How much denial did he have to be in about the resentment facing the Academy to say, “Please know that my commitment to all the good that we do will carry on as we turn the page on the next chapter of the storied history of this phenomenal institution”?
The Grammys—ever tepidly reviewed and rated—is, of course, not just Portnow’s mess. Which is why it was fitting that days before the show, another backstage figure made headlines for unhappy reasons. Ariana Grande had been advertised as a performer at the Grammys, but ended up pulling out. Ken Ehrlich, the telecast’s producer, told the Associated Press that it was just a logistical issue. “When we finally got the point where we thought maybe it would work, she felt it was too late for her to pull something together for sure,” he said.
But Grande, on Twitter, called Ehrlich a liar: “I can pull together a performance over night and you know that, Ken. It was when my creativity & self-expression was stifled by you, that I decided not to attend.” Grande said she’d offered three songs, presumably from her new album, to play at the show—but was encouraged to do something else in the interest of political game-playing and favor trading. It’s a flap that recalls reports from 2018 that Lorde, the only woman nominated for Album of the Year, didn’t play because the Grammys’ producers had only offered collaborative, not solo, performing slots, including in a Tom Petty tribute.
You know that, Ken has quickly become a catchphrase among Grande fans, one that—as with the Portnow controversies—brings new attention to a power player who’s been in plain sight for a very long time. The 76-year-old Ehrlich has been producing the Grammys since 1980, which is more than one and a half the amount of time Grande has been alive. He understandably has pointed to that epic tenure when defending himself. “The thing that probably bothered me more than whatever else she said about me is when she said I’m not collaborative,” Ehrlich told Rolling Stone.
“You can ask Christina Aguilera, who I asked to do ‘It’s a Man’s World’ for James Brown,” he continued. “You can ask Melissa Etheridge, who finished her cancer treatment and I put her out on stage, bald, doing Janis Joplin. You can ask Ricky Martin, who overnight became the creator of the Latin-music revolution. Ask Mary J. Blige, who was scared shitless to go out there and do ‘No More Drama.’ I basically worked with her to mold it.”
That litany indeed includes some of the highlight moments from Erhlich’s reign. Producing an event like the Grammys is an enormous task involving an overwhelming number of elements—personnel, equipment, creative concepts—and that he’s met that challenge for so long is a real feat. But Ehrlich’s 39-year stint has also seen perennial grumbles from viewers about strange performance choices and overlong, tribute-packed, gimmick-obsessed mediocrity, all of which was well on display Sunday night (one top-of-the-head example: J. Lo, of all people, doing the Motown medley).
It’s also seen, in recent years, mounting outcry from not just Grande and Lorde, but also other huge artists such as Frank Ocean and Justin Bieber who for one reason or another have been alienated from what’s supposedly “music’s biggest night.” After Sunday’s show, Nicki Minaj joined their ranks by blasting Ehrlich by name. “I pissed off the same man Ariana just called out for lying,” she tweeted. “Grammy producer KEN. I was bullied into staying quiet for 7 years out of fear.” The full details of their spat would be revealed soon, Minaj promised, building suspense in much the same fashion she has when beefing with rappers. Ehrlich has yet to respond.
Identity-based theories for why two white male Baby Boomers with incredible job security are in this position may be easy to come up with. But whatever the reasons, Ehrlich and Portnow have been very publicly faltering in the crucial superstar-relations department. Take last night’s viral moment when Drake popped up in a rare Grammys appearance to accept the Best Rap Song win. His speech mildly dissed the entire concept of giving awards for art: a classic gripe that he simply put in new terms. But when the show seemed to cut him off to go to commercial, it gave the appearance of producers with thin skin. Later, Grammys sources told The Hollywood Reporter that Drake actually finished his speech and was given a chance to return to stage. That they’re having to make such clarifications at all, though, hints at something amiss in the control room.
Ehrlich has one year left in his production contract, and has said he’s unsure about what comes next. Portnow has given his last Grammys speech, and the Recording Academy has not determined its next president. The latter leaves behind laudable things: legislative victories, philanthropic work, many supporters in the industry, and, as of this year, reforms in voting and awards giving to address widespread criticisms about representation and relevance. But the fact that such critiques were being made so fiercely for so long is explained, surely on some level, by the fact that the people in charge have been so long-serving. With new blood, maybe this show can be saved after all.
Accidents happen during home-improvement projects, even in space.
The mishap unfolded on the International Space Station, which orbits about 250 miles above Earth, circling the planet every hour and a half. Earlier this month, NASA astronauts had gathered in the bathroom to install a pair of stalls for an extra enclosure that would provide some more privacy. As they worked, they twisted off a metal bit that connects a water unit to a hose that astronauts use for toothbrushing, bathing, and other hygiene routines. And that’s when two and a half gallons of water came bursting out.
The crew responded as they would on Earth: They grabbed a bunch of towels and scrambled to mop up the water. They attached a new bit to the unit and completed their work.
The incident was detailed in one of NASA’s daily dispatches that describe events on the ISS. History has treated astronauts as nearly mythical figures, but their day-to-day activities are usually quite tedious. The thought of them frantically trying to stop a leak in the bathroom makes them wonderfully relatable.
[Read: How to brush your teeth on the International Space Station]
But a plumbing accident in space has little in common with one on the ground.
For starters, there’s the feeling of weightlessness. (Technically, astronauts are subject to 90 percent of the gravity that we feel here on Earth, but the station’s brisk traveling speed of 17,500 miles per hour keeps everything on board in a constant free fall that resembles zero gravity.) The ISS is equipped with handrails and footrests so that astronauts can push themselves around the station or stay in one place while they’re working on something. Tools can drift away and out of reach.
So can water. Unleashed in weightlessness, water behaves like soap bubbles blown from a wand. Water molecules are more attracted to one another than molecules of another substance. They like sticking together. On the ISS, that means water molecules pull themselves together into a shape with the least amount of surface area: a sphere. But unlike its soapy counterpart on Earth, this kind of bubble doesn’t pop and vanish.
There is no photographic evidence of the leak, according to a NASA spokesperson. To imagine how it may have transpired, I reached out to Tom Jones, a former NASA astronaut and the author of Ask the Astronaut: A Galaxy of Astonishing Answers to Your Questions on Spaceflight. Jones flew on the Space Shuttle three times before the program ended in 2011. He hasn’t spent any time on the ISS—he helped assemble the station during his last mission in 2001—but he has experienced firsthand the strange phenomena of water in microgravity.
“If it was a slow leak, it would have built up into a big, undulating blob that would have drifted off or crept along the wall with surface tension,” Jones says. “If it was under a higher pressure and it was coming out at a fast rate, it would spray and make droplets go flying across the cabin.”
Jones says the first scenario is preferable. It would be easier to chase after fat globs of water than tiny beads.
Water, like most earthly comforts, is a precious resource on the ISS. The loss of two and a half milk jugs’ worth of water seems concerning. But none of the liquid was actually wasted. The crew left the soaked towels out to dry, and the water eventually evaporated. The systems that control the station’s temperature and humidity sucked up the moisture and dumped it back into a mechanism that produces potable water.
It is thanks to water’s unpredictability in space that there are no faucets or showerheads on the ISS. Astronauts use squirt-gun–like hoses to dispense and carefully distribute water onto washcloths and toothbrushes. Showers are a distant daydream. There’s no toilet flushing, either. Contrary to some news reports about a leaky toilet, the toilet system on the ISS doesn’t use water.
Astronauts urinate into a hose with a special funnel on top. (Don’t worry, everyone gets a personal funnel.) They flip a switch to activate a fan in the tube, and the liquid is suctioned away. For solid waste, astronauts stick their feet into stirrups and sit down on a typical toilet bowl. Urine is recycled in the station’s life-support systems and converted into drinkable water. The rest takes a rather dramatic journey: Solid waste is sealed in plastic bags or metal containers. Astronauts eventually transfer the waste, along with other trash, to departing cargo ships. The ships undock from the station and fall back to Earth, where they burn up in the atmosphere like a meteor shower.
Astronauts upgraded the bathroom area this month as they wait for a brand-new toilet to arrive in 2020. Their current commode is a Russian-designed system that the United States bought from its partner on the ISS for $19 million in 2007. NASA promises that the new toilet, designed by an American company, is “simpler to use” and “provides increased crew comfort and performance.” The agency also wants the model to work in other, future space habitats.
[Read: What should we do about the International Space Station?]
Using the new toilet will likely require some preparation. Astronauts throughout history have received extensive training on the myriad spaceflight systems, the lavatory included. In the Space Shuttle days, astronauts had to practice using the toilet before they launched. The simulator came with a video camera at the bottom of the bowl, pointing up. Astronauts plunked down on the bowl, peered at a television monitor in front of them, and watched themselves, in real time, wiggle around and rehearse the proper placement.
“You had to be serious about it, because if you didn’t get those fundamentals down, then you’re going to make a mess for you and your crewmates up in space,” Jones says.
But it was still awkward. “The constant fear we all joked about was that that screen of your bottom being displayed on the simulator was also being piped over to mission control,” he says.
As far as leaks go, the recent watery fiasco is pretty tame. Last summer, crew members discovered a small hole in the Russian section of the ISS that had leaked air out into space, temporarily causing the air pressure inside the station to drop slightly. The incident drew considerable interest from the public, especially when the head of Russia’s space agency suggested that the hole may have been drilled deliberately, before or after that segment launched to space. NASA dismissed the sabotage rumors. Officials have yet to provide an explanation.
The crew wasn’t in any danger. The Russian cosmonauts patched up the opening soon after it was found, using sealant and gauze on board—just another instance of some DIY in space.
The potential judgment of students can lead a teacher to do strange things. For Monique Mongeon, an arts educator in Toronto, starting a job teaching adults sparked a small crisis of confidence. “I was in my mid-20s, and I was looking at things I could do to make myself feel like a person who had authority to stand in front of a bunch of other 20-somethings,” she says. After ruling out fancy bags and shoes as too extravagant, Mongeon settled on a sleek $45 water bottle. “I was scrolling through websites thinking, Which of these S’well bottles looks like the kind of person I want to be?”
Nine years ago, there was only one S’well, and it was blue. Now you can get the curvy, steel-capped bottles in more than 200 size-and-color combinations, including some that look like marble or teakwood. Many are customizable with your initials. The big ones will hold an entire bottle of wine, and smaller versions are made for cocktails or coffee. Teens offer S’well bottles to propose to prospective prom dates. They’re a common sight in Instagram photos of artfully stuffed vacation carry-ons and aesthetically pleasing desk tableaux.
S’well’s success is impressive, but the brand has a host of competitors nipping at its heels in what has become an enormous market for high-end, reusable beverage containers. If nothing in S’well’s inventory calls out to you, maybe you’ll like a Yeti, Sigg, Hydro Flask, Contigo, or bkr. A limited-edition Soma bottle, created in collaboration with the Louis Vuitton designer Virgil Abloh and Evian (itself a legend of designer water), was recently feted at New York Fashion Week. VitaJuwel bottles, which can cost more than $100, promise to “restructure” your tap water using the power of interchangeable crystal pods.
[Read: The art of woke wellness]
On the surface, water bottles as totems of consumer aspiration sound absurd: If you have access to water, you can drink it out of so many things that already exist in your home. But if you dig a little deeper, you find that these bottles sit at a crossroads of cultural and economic forces that shape Americans’ lives far beyond beverage choices. If you can understand why so many people would spend 50 bucks on a water bottle, you can understand a lot about America in 2019.
The first time I coveted a water bottle was in 2004. When I arrived as a freshman at the University of Georgia, I found that I was somehow the last person alive who didn’t own a Nalgene. The brand’s distinctive, lightweight plastic bottles had long been a cult-favorite camping accessory, but in the mid-2000s, they exploded in popularity beyond just outdoorsmen. A version with the school’s logo on it cost $16 in the bookstore, which was a little steep for me, an unemployed 18-year-old, but I bought one anyway. I wanted to be the kind of person all my new peers apparently were. Plus, it’s hot in Georgia. A nice water bottle seemed like a justifiable extravagance.
Around the same time, I remember noticing the first flares of another trend intimately related to the marketability of water bottles: athleisure. All around me, stylish young women wore colorful Nike running shorts and carried bright plastic Nalgenes to class. “With Millennials, fitness and health are themselves signals,” says Tülin Erdem, a marketing professor at NYU. “They drink more water and carry it with them, so it’s an item that becomes part of them and their self-expression.”
[Read: Everything you wear is athleisure]
Now, across Instagram, you can find high-end water bottles lurking around the edges of stylized gym photos posted by exercisers and fitness instructors. Usually these people aren’t being rewarded for the placement with anything but likes. Sarah Kauss, S’well’s founder and CEO, says people have been photographing her water bottles since the company began in 2010. “I’d receive hundreds of pictures a week from customers,” she says. “I wasn’t giving them anything for it. There wasn’t a free bottle or a coupon code or anything other than customers just wanting to show their own experience.”
Kauss says she always knew the bottle’s appearance would be important, even though positioning something as simple as a water bottle as a luxury product was a bit of a gamble. “As I moved up in my career, I was upgrading my wardrobe, and the bottle that looked like a camping accessory really didn’t serve my purpose anymore,” she says. When she noticed fashionable New Yorkers were carrying luxe disposable plastic bottles from brands such as Evian and Fiji, she realized reusable bottles could use a makeover, too.
Kauss and her contemporaries struck at the right time. The importance of fitness and wellness were starting to gain a foothold in fashionable crowds, and concerns over consumer waste and plastic’s potential to leach chemicals into food and water were gaining wider attention. People wanted cute workout gear, and they wanted to drink water out of materials other than plastic. Researchers have found that the chance to be conspicuously sustainability-conscious motivates consumers, especially when the product being purchased costs more than its less-green counterparts.
Nearly a decade on, the water-bottle trend shows no signs of slowing, and people just seem to like their fancy bottles a lot. The insulated metal variety, the most popular, does a far better job than plastic of keeping beverages at ideal temperatures. They’re durable and useful. When I put out a call for opinions on Twitter, I heard from hundreds of people about how much they loved theirs. Rebecca Thomas, a 28-year-old in Atlanta who owns three S’wells, says she once paid a ransom to an Uber driver after she left one behind in the car. (“That’s when I decided I’d never put wine in one again,” she says.) Others were similarly dedicated. “I will be buried with all of my different sizes of Hydro Flask,” says Elizabeth Sile, an editor in New York City. “Maybe by then Hydro Flask will come out with a coffin, so I can be buried in that, too.”
The trend’s Instagram visibility might make it seem like high-end water bottles are the sole province of women. Indeed, brands such as bkr, whose bottles are pastel glass and can come with a special top meant to hold lip gloss, are explicitly marketed as products of feminine beauty. (Drinking water, after all, is often lauded as the ultimate skin-care product.) But the category’s origins in camping gear mean that it started out with a strong foothold among male Millennials as well, and brands such as Yeti and Hydro Flask have continued to court a more masculine audience. Mike Ferguson, a 37-year-old in Los Angeles, has four Yetis of various sizes that he usually uses for iced coffee and water. “I have very few vices, but this is one,” he says. “Am I a brand loyalist? I don’t think so, but the evidence suggests otherwise.”
Ferguson, like many other people I spoke with, got his first Yeti as a gift. Kauss says that’s a trend she sees with S’well’s customers, too: People will buy one or two, presumably for themselves, and then come back to the website around the holidays and buy six. Most brands also customize orders for large corporate clients, meaning your employer might hand you a logo bottle at the end of the year. Even if spending 40 or 50 bucks on a water bottle sounds bad, getting one for free can turn reluctant consumers into evangelists.
When those factors are taken together, it’s hard to be surprised that so many $50 water bottles exist, or that people have snapped them up in droves. On a certain level, a nice water bottle fulfills its promise in the way few things do. They hold water. They stay cold. They look nice on your desk. They don’t leave an unsightly sweat ring on your nightstand. For people such as Mongeon, the art teacher, they look like things that are owned by people who know what they’re doing. For a lot of people, they spark a little bit of joy in the otherwise mundane routine of work, exercise, and personal hygiene. For a generation with less expendable income than its parents’, a nice bottle pays for itself with a month of consistent use and lets you feel like you’re being proactive about your health and the environment.
A container of any kind, whether it’s a rented storage unit or a decorative basket, promises order and control. Marie Kondo’s Netflix show about organizing American homes in disarray was a hit for a reason: There’s a small amount of serenity in finding the right vessel and filling it with the right thing. Consumer choices might not be an effective solution to structural problems such as pollution, but it’s nice to feel like you’re making ethical choices. If nothing else, Millennials can buy the best water bottle they can afford and try their best to stay hydrated.
Apple issued a warning to developers last week after a TechCrunch report revealed that a number of banking and travel companies had contracted with an analytics firm, Glassbox, to record customers’ screens as they used their apps. Apple’s App Store requires developers to obtain consent and inform users if they’re being recorded. Glassbox never required its customers to alert users to screen recordings.
“We have notified the developers that are in violation of these strict privacy terms and guidelines, and will take immediate action if necessary,” an Apple spokesperson said via email.
Glassbox’s software records video of users’ screens as they use apps, then compresses and plays back the footage for analysis. This “session replay” becomes a record of every keyboard press, everything they type, the error messages they see, the amount of time they spend on each page, and so on. Session replays are versatile documents. Glassbox claims that companies could use them in legal disputes, for example, as proof that a litigious user signed a contract. But the replays also risk capturing sensitive information such as credit-card or passport numbers. Glassbox touts them as providing extremely valuable perspective on consumer behavior.
“Imagine what you could do with the insight you would get from being able to follow every customer around your store,” a Glassbox white paper reads, “knowing not only what they bought, but also the exact route around the aisles they took, what they stopped to look at and for how long, what they picked up and put down again, etc.”
Glassbox has contracts with major U.S. banking companies, including Bank of America and Wells Fargo, according to its site, in addition to major retailers and travel sites such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Hotels.com, Air Canada, and Singapore Airlines. Because banks are so large, a single banking customer can generate as many as 3 billion recorded sessions a month, Glassbox’s marketing vice president, Audelia Boker, claims in a promotional video. Other analytics firms using session replays include Appsee, FullStory, and UXCam. After a 2017 Wired report, Walgreens promised to end its contracts with FullStory.
[Read: Now your groceries see you, too]
Glassbox CEO Yaron Morgenstern explained over the phone that session replays can, in addition to offering consumer insight, identify difficult-to-spot problems in apps.
“We’re using machine-learning capabilities that look at abnormal activity so they can identify where something is wrong,” Morgenstern said. “A system process or [user’s behavior] is not behaving as expected, and based on that we identify struggles. What we do is we help our customers to find those struggles.”
Morgenstern discussed the example of an application form in a banking mobile app. The bank may notice, for example, that customers get to page eight of a 12-page application, then suddenly stop. Or, conversely, that page eight takes the longest to fill out. Glassbox could flag this for the bank and view a session replay to find the issue: an undiscovered software bug or poorly worded question.
“It’s not only that we know that at some point or on some page or some area within the app customers are failing; we actually point them to the reason the customers were struggling: a problem with the app, something with the way the application was designed, a problem with the query or UX, etc.,” Morgenstern said. “All this is embedded within our … machine-learning capabilities, which point to the very specific elements that cause the struggles.”
Glassbox uses machine-learning analysis and real-time session replays to suggest changes to its customers and improve apps. These suggestions aren’t only useful for solving user-experience problems, but can also be exploited to calibrate site layouts so customers spend more time and money while using an app. The industry term for this is journey management, maximizing revenue by analyzing how customers make their way through an app. This is better known as the “nudge,” and it’s a very old concept. A grocery store may “nudge” shopper behavior by rearranging its store so that healthier foods are prominently displayed in the front while snacks and junk food are farther toward the back. It isn’t a regulatory change or even a direct announcement, but it still affects consumer behavior.
[Read: Why “nudges” hardly help]
Since Apple’s warning, Morgenstern said Glassbox is working with customers to ensure compliance, advising its clients to only record screens if they have each user’s permission first. “We’ve taken a proactive approach and are increasing our team that is working under our director of compliance, and expanding the services we offer to our customers to make sure they’re getting all the support they require,” Morgenstern said.
While developers are moving to ensure that they aren’t booted from the App Store, session replays are still built on the idea of observing customers in their “natural” state, unaware of the suite of tools analysts use to quantify their every move. Consent is essential, but inherent to the session replay is the idea that customers are most valuable when they don’t know they’re being watched.
I belong to a private Facebook group of middle-aged women who share stories of age discrimination, infidelity, sexual dysfunction, depression, hot flashes, melanomas, empty nests, ailing parents, and other baubles of midlife mirth. Every so often, a new post will appear, announcing the rupture of a decades-long marriage, the wound of it so new and gaping you can practically taste the blood dripping off the words. This is a caring group, though most of us are strangers in real life, so the comments below include heartfelt nuggets of empathy (“I’m so sorry. It gets better, I promise ...”). But it is also a proactive group, and tends to advise a take-no-prisoners practicality. “Lawyer up!” each future divorcée is exhorted, by those who’ve been there. The call to arms is a directive, not a suggestion.
But what if the future divorcée—like me, like so many—cannot afford a lawyer? What if, even if she had the means, the built-in antagonisms and financial excesses of the American divorce industrial complex leave her longing for a less corrosive option, one that might put a more reasonable punctuation mark at the end of a failed marriage than an ellipsis made of tiny grenades?
Divorce in the U.S. is a multibillion-dollar industry, pitting spouse against spouse in a potentially endless arms race of fees. “Make no mistake,” my former therapist, a man not prone to hyperbole, once warned me, “divorce is a war.”
When I first made the painful decision to end my marriage, after years of dysfunction and thwarted attempts at reparation, I was told I’d have to pay a lawyer something like a $30,000 retainer just to get the process started. Granted, those were New York City prices, but that’s only slightly higher than the average cost of a divorce in the U.S., where estimates run from $15,000 to $25,000, depending on whose inexact data you’re looking at, whether children and excessive conflict are involved, and whether the case goes to trial. My ex and I had only debt between us, no assets, so we decided to ask a mutual friend to be our mediator, at a friends and family rate.
Big mistake. Though we both had a stated desire to keep things civil, the nature of our particular dysfunction—control issues, if I may be both coy and precise—was evident within the first two sessions, torpedoing mediation as a viable alternative. It also left us $1,400 in further debt. Why were we in debt? For the same boring reason so many middle-class Americans are in debt: Our basic living expenses (child care, health care, student loans, rising rents, college tuition, food, clothing, etc.) were greater than our joint income.
More specifically, we were still in debt from the exorbitant hospital fees from our first two children, born in 1995 and 1997, as well as the unpaid maternity leaves I’d taken back then as the main breadwinner in our family. By the time our third and final child was born, in 2006, those hospital fees had only increased, so I freelanced throughout the first months of his life to keep us afloat, even as my industry, magazines and publishing, contracted, buckling under the strain of free content and lost advertising. In 2013, the rent on my home, for which we were paying $3,500 a month, suddenly shot up to $5,000 a month when new landlords took over at the same time as my marriage collapsed, and my ex moved across the country. I took in boarders to stanch the flow but ultimately had to move to smaller, cheaper digs, which was itself another financial setback. Several serious and unexpected illnesses and their resulting chaos—including losing my executive-editor job at a health magazine and suddenly having to pay exorbitant COBRA fees—were the final nail in my financial coffin.
Suffice it to say, like 40 percent of Americans in a 2018 study by the U.S. Federal Reserve, I would have been hard-pressed, after the separation, to deal with a $400 emergency—let alone $30,000 in lawyers’ fees. Some weeks, there was not enough money for food.
So for two and a half years post-separation, my not-yet-ex and I did nothing on the divorce front. I felt hopeless. Trapped. Paralyzed by our lack of options. But the system in place—hire lawyers, go to court—held nothing for those of us living hand to mouth but not poor enough to qualify for free representation. As we moved on from the marriage, I didn’t even know what to call him. “My ex” wasn’t exactly accurate, but neither was “my husband.” A friend suggested “was-band,” but no. Whoever he was to me, he was no longer physically present or available to parent, so in one sense I was lucky: I didn’t have to petition the court for custody, because I was the de facto parent 24/7 for two and a half years. I considered going to court to ask for child support, but when I factored in what it would cost me in lawyers’ fees to do so—not to mention the logistical issues of getting us both in the same courtroom, because my ex was living in California, and I was in New York—it didn’t seem like a good use of my time, energy, or money. I was in survival mode, trying to make it from one day to the next.
Then I sold a TV pilot, which finally gave my kids and me access to affordable health insurance through the Writers Guild for 18 months. I put my still-husband on my plan, too, because as his still-wife, I would be still-liable for his bills were he to get sick. My ex and I thus patched together our individual post-marital lives, a continent between us. I paid down our shared debt, tried to put money aside, and prayed for a day when we would have enough to call it quits officially.
At one point, in pursuit of this goal, I had five jobs, a stress-related skin rash, and a brand-new heart condition that had me occasionally passing out at work: a direct result, some physicians suggest, of intense emotional turmoil. Meanwhile, life was inching forward. My ex moved in with a new girlfriend. I was occasionally dipping my toe into the dating-app pool, with its attendant joys and degradations, when I could afford a babysitter. Maybe, I thought, my ex and I could simply officially stay married until we could afford to split up while simultaneously pursuing lives with new partners. That could work, right? I actually know a couple who did just that.
But then came thousands of dollars in unexpected taxes, which I was suddenly mutually responsible for, because we were still married. I paid it in full, wiping out all my savings. My ex returned to New York, during our third year post-separation, and found an apartment near us. Our two older children were already out of the house, at college, so we only had to work out a custody agreement for our youngest, then 9. We did so relatively quickly, based on a suggestion from my divorced friends: Sunday through Tuesday night at Mom’s, Wednesday and Thursday night at Dad’s, plus every other weekend. Holidays would alternate year to year. Having easily agreed to a shared-custody schedule without rancor, maybe, I thought, we could figure out a frictionless way to get divorced in the eyes of the law, too, if only to disentangle our finances. But how?
That’s when, at a Yom Kippur break fast three years after our separation, I learned something I had not known was possible in the U.S. “You know, you can just represent yourself,” said Antoinette Delruelle, a lawyer with the New York Legal Assistance Group, who was also attending the gathering.
In all my forays into divorce blogs, message boards, and government portals of New York matrimonial law, not once had I come across anyone advocating for pro se divorce—pro se meaning “for oneself” in Latin. Yet here was this highly competent lawyer standing next to the lox and bagels, telling me otherwise.
“You’re educated, you speak English, you’re rational, you’re not fighting over custody, and you’ll be civil to one another in front of a judge,” she said, in my recollection of the conversation. “Already you’re way ahead of the game. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. You just have to do everything in a highly specific, counterintuitive order.”
“Meaning what?” I said.
“Meaning, first you file for custody, then child support, and then, only once you have those two rulings firmly in place, you can file for divorce.” This seemingly reverse order is important, she explained. Normally one spouse files for divorce first, then both spouses hire lawyers who begin the battle over custody, alimony, and child support. But once a judge sees that a couple is in agreement on what’s usually a key sticking point—the material and custodial care of the kids—then the divorce can usually proceed smoothly from there. Especially if the parties are willing to forgo maintenance (a.k.a. alimony) and the equitable distribution of marital assets and debt, which was the case for me and my ex-husband.
While it was nice to have Delruelle’s advice to go it alone, for those who want a bit more of a leg up, any divorce lawyer in any state can kick-start the pro se process at minimal cost (an hour or two of their time), provided the client is willing to do all the filing, legwork, and self-representation in court, as well as bone up on state-specific laws. This is called “limited-scope representation,” meaning the lawyer is there only to give you advice and help you weed through the paperwork by yourself, nothing more. With legal fees being what they are, more and more couples are opting to do so, but you can also do all this without ever speaking with a lawyer. All the information you would ever need to get divorced yourself is available online, as long as you’re willing to dig for it. In some states, courts offer nighttime seminars for those seeking pro se divorces, with the hours of the classes posted on fliers they hand out with the reams of paperwork. The fact that New York, my state, finally has no-fault divorce—the last of all 50 states to have enacted it, in 2010 (California went first, in 1970)—was key. That meant I could check off the “irreconcilable differences” box and not have to accuse my ex of cruelty, infidelity, or abandonment.
I emailed my still-husband: Would he be game to try the lawyer-free route? I would do all the legal legwork; he’d just have to show up in court on the appointed days. He was hesitant, but Delruelle told me I did not need his consent or permission to start the process by filing for custody, just as one does not need permission to file for divorce. Filing for custody, just like filing for divorce or child support, is judicially identical to filing a lawsuit. I am embarrassed to say I did not know this. Then again, having never attended law school, why would I?
MATTHEW SHIPLEYI went to family court on April 20, 2017, and filed the paperwork for custody, on which I scribbled down the exact shared arrangement we’d already had in place for more than a year that had been working well. Only later, as I was walking through Washington Square Park, would it occur to me with one whiff that today was not just special for cannabis enthusiasts, but that 4/20 was also the 27th anniversary of our first date.
My ex, in a flurry of emails, expressed fear that this would now cost him $30,000 in lawyer’s fees. I assured him, once again, that it would not cost him a penny. More emails followed, which I either ignored or responded to by saying we shouldn’t get into it over email: that’s why we have a judge. Had we actually had lawyers, all those emails would have been read and processed by both lawyers, at an hourly rate.
On the day of the hearing at family court, we arrived separately at the appointed hour. Then we waited. And waited. We were the only couple in family court actually sitting together on the same bench. Everyone else had lawyers and was scattered as far away from their former spouses as the space in the room allowed. By doing it pro se, we were being forced into something resembling civility. I suddenly felt slightly smug about how well this was going. Then my ex began to lose patience as the first hour of waiting stretched into a second, and I was worried he would leave. Now I was feeling much less smug. I Googled What happens if you don’t show up in court for a custody hearing? while my ex left to use the restroom, which was, of course, the exact moment we were called into court.
“All rise,” said the Honorable Douglas E. Hoffman. My ex stood alone at his table, I stood alone at mine, the width of a wedding aisle between us. My heart was racing. Doubt crept in once more: representing myself in family court? What was I thinking? I kept forgetting to say, “Your Honor.” The judge asked whether the custody arrangement I’d stated on the filed papers was the arrangement we wanted to keep in place, and I said, “Yes.” Pause. “I mean, yes, Your Honor.”
He turned to my ex and asked the same. Had he answered, “Yes, Your Honor,” we would have been done.
But he said, “No, Your Honor. I want 50–50 custody.” Our current arrangement was almost exactly 50–50, minus a few hours of Sunday-night sleep. To make it perfectly equitable, we’d have to alternate Sunday nights. I was confused. Not only had our custody arrangement been working well for more than a year, our son, who’d just turned 10, had told us he wanted to keep it as it was, because it allowed him to know where he’d be on any given school morning.
Suddenly, what should have been an easy day in court became anything but. I quickly Googled 50–50 custody under the table. With precise, down-to-the-hour 50–50 custody in New York State, I learned, the higher earner would be responsible for paying child support to the lower earner. Never mind that both of us knew precise 50–50 custody was impossible: I was, had been, and would always be our children’s primary caregiver. This was one of the many issues that tore us apart, the inequity in our domestic responsibilities. My smugness was gone. I longed for a lawyer. The only way this custody hearing would work without representation is if we presented a united front.
The judge asked whether I would be amenable to a strict 50–50 schedule, which would add every other Sunday night and two afternoons a week at his father’s apartment to the existing schedule. I explained that since my ex’s return to the East Coast after a two-and-a-half-year absence, I’d relinquished as close to half of physical custody as an odd-day week and his professional schedule allowed. Be that as it may, said the judge, he could not “so order” a custody agreement upon which we did not agree. He asked us to meet in his private chambers with his clerk, who would help us draft a temporary agreement. But for now—down came the gavel—our hearing was over.
I cried in those private chambers. My great experiment in self-representation felt as if it had failed. Our new hearing was scheduled for three weeks later, exactly one week after I was scheduled to have major surgery to remove my cervix. I begged my ex, with the clerk sitting between us, to just keep the arrangement we had in place. He refused. The clerk, a woman, reached out and squeezed my hand. Fearing losing momentum, I said yes to the new court date and agreed to a temporary order of custody, acquiescing to everything my still-husband now wanted until a permanent agreement could be reached.
“But you promised!” my son accused me through tears, when I told him about the new custody arrangement. “You said we’d keep the same schedule we have!”
“The judge thought this was a better plan,” I said, presenting it in as sunny a light as possible.
“It’s not,” he said. “Why didn’t you fight for me?”
Of all the reasons I kept putting off divorce for years, this was by far the most heartbreaking: the pain of a young child caught in its cogs.
Then, the next morning, a miracle. My ex sent an email, saying he’d been thinking about it all morning, and we should keep the schedule as is, so long as the Sunday night return time could be flexible. Of course it could, I said. In fact, it felt as if we had turned a corner, one I’m nearly certain would not have been turned overnight, if at all, had lawyers been involved.
I showed up in family court three weeks later, fresh from having my cervix yanked. Judge Hoffman saw us in his courtroom, we said we were in agreement this time, we mapped out what that agreement was, the judge wrote it up, we signed the paperwork, and voilà, custody was done, after which I immediately took myself to the nearest emergency room to deal with an infected incision from the surgery.
The rest of the pro se proceedings went fairly smoothly, after I lost several weeks to further complications from the surgery, when the stitches holding me together came undone. (I bled out, which required a second emergency surgery three weeks after the first.) Child-support payments were decided in a single hearing in family court by a support magistrate, who is not a judge but who has legal authority to decide issues of child support. She used a standard formula to come up with a $309 amount for my ex to pay every two weeks, based on our combined income from 2016.
Would a lawyer have argued for more support money on my behalf? Probably. That’s their job. Friends afterward told me I was cheating myself and my kids, going it alone. But though a lawyer might have been able to increase my child-support payments by a small fraction, our combined income back then was modest and finite. Would that tiny margin of more support really outweigh the cost of the legal fees it took to achieve?
In pro se divorce, as in life, it pays to practice a basic level of nonattachment—even when you’re arguing over the family home, if you’re lucky enough to own one. Either one spouse will have to buy out the other, or the home will have to be sold so that the proceeds can be split evenly. I understand why many of my divorced friends wanted to keep the family home, so the kids could have some stability amidst the chaos. But for my part, I can’t say either my kids or I were unhappy to leave behind our old apartment, when I could no longer afford its high rent alone, and begin a new life in a new space. In fact, a clean slate felt better, liberating.
When the child-support hearing was over, my ex and I reached across the aisle and spontaneously hugged. As if we’d just been pronounced man and wife, not man-who-now-owes-child-support and ex-wife-who-was-glad-to-finally-have-it. “We did it!” I said, high-fiving him. The hardest parts were done, the only money I’d spent so far was $57 to have the papers served, and the process had felt fair to both of us. The judge smiled. “Well, now,” she said, “we’ve never seen that in this courtroom before.”
A month and a half later, on October 11, 2017, I went to the New York State Supreme Court and formally filed for divorce. I paid $210 for an index number, the number each divorce is assigned, and they want that in exact change, ma’am, so I had to purchase a bottle of water downstairs to break a large bill. The final filing of the papers, once both parties had signed, I was told, would cost an extra $125, plus a second $57 to have the papers served. So a divorce without lawyers in New York costs, at a bare minimum, $449. If you want to change your name, as I did, a new driver’s license costs $12.50, and a passport costs $145. Retrieving the final judgment months later would cost $20 for three copies. When all was said and done, I spent $626.50 to dissolve my marriage.
At the end of December 2017, I finally had what I thought were all the signed papers, rulings, and affidavits in hand. But then, after the winter holidays, I hit a mental roadblock: I couldn’t figure out the next step. Or was it steps? I panicked. Felt paralyzed once more. The handout at the courthouse listed 20 documents I needed to file to be done with my divorce, in a specific order, and looking over that list, I had no idea what most of them were.
I emailed Delruelle and apologized for bothering her again, but I needed help navigating the final leg of this journey. She reassured me that what needed to be done to compile all 20 divorce documents in the right order shouldn’t take too long, and she would be happy to help me with the final push, because most of the documents listed on the court handout were standard.
The night before my meeting, however, my ex emailed to say he would not get a new affidavit I’d asked him to sign and notarize on time. With knee surgery for a torn meniscus scheduled days later, I begged him: Please, I was heading into another six-to-eight-week recovery. I really wanted to file the final papers prior. Sorry, he said. It could not be helped. I’d have to wait until after my surgery.
In the end, a week after my newest surgery, I compiled the papers with Delruelle and hobbled on crutches up the massive flight of stone steps of New York’s supreme court to file them pro se. Halfway up the stairs, I started to laugh. It all felt too symbolically on point, the lady on crutches struggling up the stairs, the massive Corinthian colonnade of justice, the inscription carved into granite: The True Administration of Justice is the Firmest Pillar of Good Government.
Yes, I thought. All couples should have access to a legal expert who can help them through a divorce, step by step, as well as fair judges, such as the ones we were lucky enough to get, to dispense justice. But maybe the true administration of justice is, at a minimum, an ability for two people to amicably get divorced without breaking the bank or going to war.
“This all looks good. Nice job!” said the affable court clerk specialist in the matrimonial-support office, glancing through all 20 documents, the final one of which is a self-addressed stamped postcard, upon which one literally has to use scissors and tape to cut and paste a portion of one of the forms. The school-project-looking postcard would, I was told, arrive at my home when the divorce had finally gone through, approximately four months after the date of filing. “So you did this all yourself?”
I did. With a little backstage guidance from a lawyer acquaintance. It only took a year and three months from start to finish. Plus four years of paralysis before I started the process. But yeah.
As it turns out, “Lawyer up!” is advice that only the most privileged in our country can afford to take. And it isn’t necessary. Pro se divorce might not work for everyone, especially those who can’t agree on a custody arrangement, or whose finances are more complicated than ours. But my divorce from my ex was hardly an amicable parting, and we still got through it on our own. It can be done.
Four months later, my cut-and-pasted postcard arrived in the mail, rubber-stamped with the following: A CERTIFIED COPY OF THE JUDGMENT OF DIVORCE ($8.00 PER CERTIFIED COPY PLUS 25¢ PER PAGE) MAY BE OBTAINED IN ROOM… The room number was smeared and illegible. Of course.
I had the papers picked up and, three weeks later, I took my last trip to family court to file one last copy of the finalized papers with a friendly clerk, who smiled warmly as I choked back tears. “It’s done,” she said. “You never have to see any of us ever again.”
A week later, after co-signing a new lease with my new boyfriend, I met up with my now officially ex-husband at the aptly named House of Yes in Bushwick to start planning our son’s bar mitzvah. We will still struggle to afford the party, but it would not be possible at all had we spent $60,000 on our divorce. Snow was falling heavily outside, the first of the season. But inside, we laughed warmly with each other, for the first time in years.
In the years before he became Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam apparently chose not to read books in which blackface was present. “I used just a little bit of shoe polish to put under my—or on my—cheeks,” he said about the day he impersonated Michael Jackson in blackface. “I look back now and regret that I did not understand the harmful legacy of an action like that.”
Now, as governor, Northam is choosing not to heed calls for his resignation. He is denying he’s pictured on his medical-school yearbook page in blackface or in a Ku Klux Klan outfit above the notation of his alma mater, his interests in pediatrics, and his quote advocating having “another beer.”
Is Northam, then and now, two sides of the same blackfaced white man affronting African Americans? He wants to be seen another way.
“Now that he knows better, he is going to do better,” a Northam adviser told BuzzFeed.
He is being presented as another white American awakening to the pervasiveness of racism and his role in sustaining it. His advisers are giving him a reading list that includes Roots by Alex Haley and “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. And they say he has started reading.
[Conor Friedersdorf: What Ralph Northam’s defenders get right—and wrong]
Here’s my own anti-racist reading list for Northam and my fellow Americans who are truly awakening after their own blackface moment. It is for people realizing they were taught by their relatives and friends and the media how to be racist. How to paint on blackface as if it were nothing. How to look down on black faces like they were nothing. How to support racist policies like they harm nothing.
This anti-racist syllabus is for people realizing they were never taught how to be anti-racist. How to treat all the racial groups as equals. How to look at the racial inequity all around and look for the racist policies producing it, and the racist ideas veiling it. This list is for people beginning their anti-racist journey after a lifetime of defensively saying, “I’m not a racist” or “I can’t be a racist.” Beginning after a lifetime of assuring themselves only bad people can be racist.
This list of nonfiction books on antiblack racism is introductory, for minds beginning to open to the ubiquity of racism in the 21st century and its history. The list includes the books I would read if I were beginning my journey today. Recent or enduring books. Books accessible to anyone. Books that primarily expose racist policies and ideas. Books that are ambitious and sweeping, mostly covering a long period or wide scope, or a specific space or time from the eyes of the nation, from the ears of history. The kinds of books that send us searching and learning and changing more and more. It is 38 books for two 19-week introductory courses. But please add to it.
[Amanda Mull: Ralph Northam’s yearbook page speaks for itself]
We should begin by developing clarity and direction that can come only from definitions.
Definitions of race: Dorothy Roberts’s Fatal Invention.
Definitions of racist and anti-racist, which I seek to explain in my books: Stamped From the Beginning and the forthcoming How to Be an Antiracist.
If you are white and feeling on edge already, then read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. If you are a person of color and think this syllabus isn’t for you, then read James Forman’s Locking Up Our Own.
Once definitions and feelings are clear, it may be prudent to be carefully led into racism and anti-racism through political memoirs of the past—Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Autobiography of Malcolm X—and then of the present, with Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy.
From memoirs, proceed to essays: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Jesmyn Ward’s anthology, The Fire This Time.
From the essays, move to the nonfiction monographs:
Slavery: Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. Daina Ramey Berry’s The Price for Their Pound of Flesh.
The North: Leon Litwack’s North of Slavery.
Reconstruction: Eric Foner’s Reconstruction.
Convict leasing: Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name.
Jim Crow: James D. Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis.
The Great Migration: Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns.
Civil and human rights: Jeanne Theoharis’s A More Beautiful and Terrible History. Mary L. Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights. Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy a Load. Paula J. Giddings’s When and Where I Enter.
Mass incarceration: Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.
Police violence: Wesley Lowery’s They Can’t Kill Us All. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.
Health and housing: Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted.
Voting: Ari Berman’s Give Us the Ballot. Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote.
From each book, move to a lifetime of anti-racist action.
Northam is apparently moving toward a legislative life of anti-racist action in Virginia. His team is reportedly fashioning a racial-equality platform of putting more funds into affordable housing and public education, instituting equitable standards for small-business procurement, and expanding economic opportunity for entrepreneurs. These plans will help, in the same way a nice raise helps a low-income worker, even as these plans will do nothing to address why homes are unaffordable, why certain public schools are underfunded, or why black entrepreneurs face restrictions.
[Vann R. Newkirk II: Ralph Northam’s mistake]
From afar, I want to believe Northam’s sincerity and commitment. But too often, feigned ignorance buys racial innocence. When people do not deny their racism, they claim their ignorance of racism. And they are believed because people commonly believe the fundamental villain in America’s racist saga is ignorance.
Racist power is the fundamental villain in America’s racial saga. But in order to challenge or overtake racist power, we must know racist power and its policies and ideas and blackfaced and hooded and badged and suited soldiers of violence.
This anti-racist syllabus is a first step. It is for people beginning their anti-racist journey after a lifetime of not truly knowing themselves or their country. It is for people opening to knowledge now, to changing themselves now, to changing the world now.
During his time in office, President Donald Trump has named a climate-change skeptic and an energy lobbyist as the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, a foreclosure profiteer to head Treasury, a low-wage employer to run the Labor Department, and a critic of public schools to manage the Department of Education. His energy secretary once argued that the department should be abolished, and his onetime leader of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has argued that the bureau should not exist.
It came as little surprise, then, that last week Trump put forward another potential fox in the henhouse, naming the Treasury official David Malpass to lead the World Bank. Malpass, a former Wall Street economist, once criticized institutions such as the bank as “intrusive” and argued that multilateralism “has gone substantially too far—to the point where it is hurting U.S. and global growth.” As of yet, there is little appetite from foreign countries or the bank’s board to fight the nomination. But it is a missed opportunity for the institution and its client countries. And this whole sorry episode makes it even clearer that the United States should lose, or relinquish, its leadership of the bank.
A gentleman’s agreement dating to just after World War II holds that the United States chooses the head of the World Bank, and chooses an American. (Europe chooses the head of its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, and chooses a European.) This arrangement made good sense at first: Back in the Cold War era, the United States wanted to help spur capitalist development in poor countries and provided the bulk of the bank’s financing to make that happen.
[Annie Lowrey: The Ivanka fund]
But the gentleman’s agreement is no longer justifiable. Washington is a major funder of the bank, but not a dominant funder. And it damages the institution to limit the talent pool to Americans. Leaders from a number of lower- and middle-income countries have argued forcefully that the search process should be truly meritocratic by being truly open, that they deserve a bigger say at the institution, and that the current management structure is outdated and imperialistic.
Democrats and Republicans in Washington, however, are united in their desire to keep things as they are. For them, heading the institution is an important lever of global power and, as a practical matter, ensures that American dollars keep flowing to the bank. “The Americans need to keep the World Bank presidency. It’s powerful, it’s influential, and it’s meaningful,” said Daniel Runde of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It works within a larger global system of distributed power,” he added, pointing to European control of the IMF and Japanese control of the Asian Development Bank.
Perhaps, but that is no argument for Malpass. Contrast his résumé with that of, say, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former finance minister of Nigeria and longtime World Bank executive, who lobbied for the job when it came up during the Obama administration. Unlike her—or any number of other reasonable candidates—Malpass is not a development expert, nor has he ever managed an international financial institution, nor does he have deep relationships with the governments of lower-income countries where the bank does much of its work. His main achievement is that he was the chief economist at Bear Stearns, the investment bank that failed in 2008 under the weight of its subprime lending.
Nor does Malpass represent a strong or reassuring policy vision for the world’s most important anti-poverty institution. “I care deeply about the mission and about breaking out of poverty and achieving growth, and I am sure the World Bank can succeed,” Malpass assured reporters last week, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. But in congressional testimony, he said institutions such as the bank are “not very efficient” and are “often corrupt in their lending practices, and they don’t get the benefit to the actual people in the countries.” He has argued that the institution should do less and be less, and he looks likely to nudge it to do less and be less.
As a result, development experts and global economists have broadly criticized the pick. “I frankly view him as a bad candidate,” said Scott Morris of the Center on Global Development, the influential Washington think tank. “He has a track record, both in views that he’s expressed and policy as [Treasury] undersecretary, which is pretty clearly hostile to ambition in the World Bank.”
Yet bank board members and foreign officials have mostly remained silent—and the Malpass nomination seems certain to go through. For that, thank realpolitik. The Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese: All are engaged in trade negotiations with the United States and want to avoid provoking a backlash from Trump by wresting control of the bank away from the White House. “The folks sitting in finance ministries in Europe—they’re desperate not to have to oppose a pick here because all they really care about is the IMF,” said Morris. “They look at this guy and say, ‘Well, you know, I guess we’re comfortable with it.’”
Within the bank, there’s considerable anger not at the Trump administration, but at Jim Yong Kim, the Obama appointee who suddenly and unexpectedly stepped down this winter, leaving the vacancy for Trump to fill. Indeed, there was far more pressure on the Obama administration to consider foreign candidates or allow a non-American to run the bank, because there were higher policy expectations of that administration, and a sense that the Obama administration would not retaliate against other countries for pressing for the bank to change.
It should change. The United States is no longer the major donor to the bank, nor is the bank a more important priority for the United States than it is for the countries it offers loans and advice. American control over the bank is an unjustifiable tradition that harms the institution. Self-determination and a truly meritocratic process for choosing its leadership would be good for the bank, and for the world. It is not a case the Trump administration seems to have any interest in entertaining. But it is one the world should keep pressing, when Malpass’s years are up.
In April 2018, the artist Wendy MacNaughton posted a picture titled Dispatch From DC on Instagram. It was a clever ink-and-watercolor drawing showing Rhonda, a security guard at the National Portrait Gallery, next to the newly unveiled portrait of Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley. In a hand-printed caption, Rhonda is quoted recounting how an elderly lady had gotten on her knees and prayed in front of the portrait in the company of other visitors: “No other painting gets the same kind of reactions. Ever.”
The image made the rounds online, which was not entirely surprising, because immediately after the unveiling of the Obama portraits, the museum’s attendance had tripled. A month before MacNaughton posted her drawing, 2-year-old Parker Curry had been captured on a smartphone gazing in awe at Michelle Obama’s portrait, painted by Amy Sherald. The resulting media sensation had led the girl’s mother to hire a publicist to manage all the requests for interviews. Mrs. Obama, Parker told Ellen DeGeneres in front of a live national audience, was probably a “queen.”
As the director of the National Portrait Gallery, I had a front-row seat to this “Obama effect,” and was trying to manage my dream scenario of watching thousands of visitors pouring through the doors. MacNaughton’s illustration confirmed what I had begun to suspect: Viewing these paintings was turning into a form of secular pilgrimage, and the museum was becoming even more popular as a communal gathering place. The question I asked myself, given that we had hundreds of portraits of notable Americans from George Washington to Beyoncé, was Why? What was really happening?
Pilgrimage has been described as one of the oldest forms of tourism, undertaken by the faithful of all the world’s major religions to restore a sense of order and meaning to their everyday lives. Anthropologists have suggested that such a journey involves people leaving the familiarity of home and undergoing a liminal experience, a disorienting voyage—to Mecca since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, or Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, for example—that brings them to the threshold of spiritual change. In their heightened psychological awareness, pilgrims develop a sense of communitas, in which strangers on the same journey feel a sense of kinship with one another, allowing cultures to cross paths both real and symbolic. They return home with a renewed sense of hope.
At first, pilgrimage was understood as religious, but later scholars allowed for the idea of a secular journey that was just as powerful. Elvis Presley’s home, Graceland, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, for example, have been called sites of contemporary pilgrimage.
The National Portrait Gallery’s building, where the Obama portraits are on view, was in many ways made for transformative change. Designed in the 19th-century Greek Revival style of architecture to house the U.S. Patent Office, it was modeled on the Parthenon in Athens and intended to symbolize the highest ideals of Athenian democracy, whereby power is in the hands of the people, and the rule of law allows industrious individuals the freedom to acquire wealth by their own means. Originally meant to house a “church of the Republic,” in the words of the city planner Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the Patent Office was envisioned as a temple of industry and national pride honoring America’s technological superiority. In 1958, Congress gave it to the Smithsonian Institution to become, in part, the home of the National Portrait Gallery. In many ways, it is apropos, because at the museum we like to say that America’s greatest invention has been its people.
Long before America signed the Declaration of Independence and formally broke with Britain, portraiture was an elite art form reserved for royalty and European aristocracy. Considered an investment in advertising a family’s influence, likenesses by fashionable artists were housed within palaces and family estates to be seen by only a privileged few. The founding of the National Portrait Gallery in Britain in 1856, however, marked a shift. One of its founders, the Earl of Stanhope, advocated private elitism as a vehicle for public pride; a celebration of British worthies, he believed, would make the museum a destination for secular enlightenment.
That idea of artistic patronage for national benefit crossed the Atlantic when the American industrialist Andrew Mellon stipulated in his will that his collection of fine portraits should be gifted to the nation and form the basis of a portrait gallery in Washington. The museum was founded in 1962 and nested within the Smithsonian. Congress endowed the National Portrait Gallery with the additional “serious national purpose” of answering the question, What is an American?
The museum tried to answer this question, accompanying its public opening with a book titled The American: This New Man. In it, the historian Oscar Handlin, quoting the French-American writer St. John de Crèvecoeur, defined an American as someone who had heroically left behind the “ancient prejudices and manners” of the Old World—this, despite the fact that the ideas of European racial superiority had transferred themselves to the New World and been used to justify Native American genocide and slavery. Portraiture as an elitist art form had also crossed the Atlantic, but just like the European credo of noblesse oblige, American portraiture favored white men who owned land.
The result was that the museum’s collection itself was largely pale and male, with the stories of first contact, immigration, and bondage hard to come by or altogether absent. While Mellon had donated a rare portrait of Pocahontas, and the Harmon Foundation a posthumous painting of Harriet Tubman, it would take another few years to add Frederick Douglass and a decade to add Sojourner Truth. Restricted in no small measure by policies that prohibited photography or portraits of anyone who had not been dead for at least a decade, the museum’s presentation of E pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”), was more like E pluribus lecti (“Out of many, some”).
Today’s National Portrait Gallery includes Jimi Hendrix and Marilyn Monroe along with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Free admission allows visitors to decide for themselves whom they want to admire, and creates a community that might share a cultural discourse tilted more toward Hollywood than toward holy scripture. Where once religious pilgrims carried guidebooks along with devotional texts to direct their journey, visitors today carry museum guides along with mobile phones. Leaving the familiarities of their daily lives, they travel into these templelike spaces to experience something emotional, bigger than themselves. Echoing the prescribed routes of religious pilgrimage, visitors to the National Portrait Gallery might find a connection with communitas.
The date of the Obama portraits’ unveiling, deliberately chosen by Barack Obama, was February 12, Lincoln’s birthday. The 44th president had made no secret that he admired the 16th, having launched his presidential campaign in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois; held the Lincoln Bible at his swearing-in; and often remarked that Lincoln’s abolition of slavery had made his presidency possible. Like Lincoln, the first president to savvily use photography of himself to connect with the American people, Obama’s presidency had been marked by an understanding of the power of portraiture.
Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, the artists the Obamas had chosen, were the first African Americans to paint the portraits of a president or first lady for the National Portrait Gallery, and from the moment of the unveiling, it was clear that both had borrowed from, and broken with, the canon of traditional portraiture. Wiley chose to seat the president in a chair, wearing a suit but no tie, looking directly out of the canvas. The pose is similar to that of George Peter Alexander Healy’s Abraham Lincoln, Elaine de Kooning’s John F. Kennedy, and Robert Anderson’s George W. Bush, all portraits that Wiley had seen on walks through the galleries. But it was the background of rampant foliage and flowers symbolizing periods of the president’s life—chrysanthemums for Chicago, jasmine for Hawaii and Indonesia, African lilies for Kenya, and rosebuds for love—that was so extraordinary, making Obama appear at once timeless and contemporary.
Paul Morigi / National Portrait GalleryThe portrait of Michelle Obama elicited more commentary. Attired in a geometric-patterned dress by the designer Michelle Smith, which reminded the artist of modernist art and Gee’s Bend quilts created by the descendants of slaves, the former first lady was presented as both modern and historical. The rendering of her skin as gray, as the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote, “introduces the notion of double consciousness, the phrase coined by W. E. B. DuBois to describe the condition of anyone living with social and economic inequality.” Or, as the critic Antwaun Sargent noted more succinctly in W magazine, what viewers were witnessing were “visions of black power [shaking] up a gallery of white history.”
Watching viewers in front of the portraits, it’s clear that the celebrity of the Obamas cannot be underestimated. As Michael Dyson of Georgetown University has remarked, Barack Obama, as the first African American president, “shocked the symbol system of American politics.” In the gallery, his black body palpably ruptured America’s white ruling class and served as a poignant expansion of what blackness and presidential power could be in America—and maybe, in the eyes of the museum’s new pilgrims, what America could be, too.
Michelle Obama’s portrait, meanwhile, shares resonance with the former first lady’s instant best seller of an autobiography, which, as the writer Emily Lordi noted in The New Yorker, “draws on the literature of black women’s self-making.” In her depiction of Obama, Sherald turned traditional portraiture on its head; for both women, being “seen” via portraiture appears to be an important step in claiming their space. Certainly when Parker and another little girl called Raegan last Halloween dressed as Michelle Obama and Amy Sherald, respectively, and posted their costumes on Instagram, the elitist tradition of portraiture was transformed by their joyful faith that they, too, could grow up to become such strong women. (Never doubt that portraiture can change the world!)
Today, the lines to the museum continue, with people of all types queuing up to take a selfie in front of the portraits and buy merchandise in the store—tripling sales last year. The portraits have become a pop-culture reference, replicated in Peeps dioramas, lunch bags, children’s clothes, and a host of online memes. It was with some hilarity that I saw myself portrayed on an episode of Scandal enabling Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington, to walk through a faux National Portrait Gallery to see her picture being gazed at by two little girls, à la Parker and Raegan.
There is something fitting in the fact that portraits of the first black president and the first black first lady have rekindled a sense of pilgrimage within a space originally intended to elevate secular America. Visitors to the paintings take for themselves a special moment in our galleries that is not only about transition but also about potentiality—a pilgrimage from the past and into the future, with a brief moment to reflect. As Savannah, one of our visitors, said, “To me they are period icons, and it remains to be seen if they are documents of a fleeting moment, or a new century.”
An expanded version of this essay will appear in The Obama Portraits, a forthcoming National Portrait Gallery publication.
PORTLAND, Maine—A less icy Arctic is coming, and generally speaking, that’s not a good thing. Climate change is warming this region twice as fast as the global average, threatening wildlife and indigenous communities. Melting permafrost in Greenland and the Arctic tundra is releasing vast amounts of methane, a potent climate-altering gas.
But some see an Arctic with navigable seas in the summer and newly accessible fossil fuels as an irresistible opportunity. Cargo shipping, cruising, mining, oil drilling, fishing—all these industrial activities could expand to the Arctic, one of the last remaining wild places, and with potentially devastating consequences.
The people of Maine want in. Public and private interests in the state are working to build trading relationships with other Arctic (and Arctic-ish) nations and communities. Though there is not a tremendous appetite for Arctic mining and fossil-fuel exploration in Maine, these commercial connections could serve to establish the state as an Arctic player for decades to come.
Maine is not, strictly speaking, in the Arctic, but a few things have happened to reorient the state’s compass north. First, in 2013, the state successfully persuaded Eimskip, a major Icelandic shipping company, to move its North American headquarters to Portland from Norfolk, Virginia. Within four years, Eimskip went from biweekly journeys between Portland; Reykjavik, Iceland; and parts of Canada to making them every week, taking Maine cranberries, wood pulp, candles, and more abroad and bringing back goods like frozen fish and sparkling water. From Reykjavik, Maine goods can head to any of the ports that Eimskip services in Norway, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and elsewhere.
Next, Angus King, the junior senator from Maine, made some significant moves. With Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, he founded and co-chairs the Senate’s Arctic Caucus. And, in 2016, when the United States took its turn as the rotating chair of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum for Arctic governance made up of the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia as members and indigenous groups as permanent participants, Senator King successfully lobbied for Portland to host the Senior Arctic Officials meeting, the first time the United States had hosted outside Alaska or Washington, D.C. Senator King seems especially keen on the long-term possibilities of an Arctic connection, which he likened to discovering the Mediterranean. After learning about the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice in the past few decades, “it didn’t take me long to realize that if you’re bringing a shipment of goods from Asia to the U.S., it’s a lot shorter to go [through the Northwest Passage, an Arctic route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans passing through the Canadian Arctic archipelago] and end up in Maine,” he said, adding that he is also a passionate advocate for climate-change mitigation. According to Jon Nass, the CEO of the Maine Port Authority, Portland (and Maine’s two other ports, Eastport and Searsport) will likely stay “niche ports,” and not destinations for mega cargo ships, such as the ones China might send to New York or Long Beach, California.
[Read: The U.S. is not ready for a melting Arctic]
In response to these changes, state colleges and universities have created Arctic or North Atlantic institutes and exchanges. The Maine Maritime Academy has begun a polar-operations course with federal funding; in 2017, the Crystal Serenity, a luxury cruise ship, made a stop in Bar Harbor during a journey that traveled the Northwest Passage.
Almost everyone I spoke with in Maine who’s involved with the Arctic told me that Mainers have more in common with people from Iceland and Norway than they do with people from New York or California—they all live in relatively small communities with fairly extreme weather, and mainly depend on the ocean and other natural resources. People spoke glowingly with me about their trips to Iceland, how popular Maine craft beer is in the North Atlantic, and how this connection gives the state the chance to be at the beginning of something, rather than the last stop on a line that trails off as it stretches from New York to Boston.
But Arctic sea ice, at least in the summer, has to melt before any of the major industrial developments are realized: before the Northwest Passage sees major cargo-ship or cruise traffic; before Greenland is churned up by mining; before Russia, China, the United States, and others attempt to exploit the massive fossil-fuel reserves up there; before Arctic cod or other species are industrially fished. To be fair, those industrial and commercial developments don’t have much to do with Maine, but when dealing with the Arctic, the impacts of industry and commerce don’t stay in the Arctic.
Susan Kaplan, an anthropology professor and the director of the Arctic Studies Center at Bowdoin College, says, “We have a long history of Westerners going up to the Arctic and exploiting resources and leaving, having damaged the environment and having negatively affected the local population.” She adds, “We know better, and it’s time for that to stop. What I keep asking is that people think about that legacy, because we should be doing things differently.”
But others, even those who deal with resilience and adaptation, are more optimistic about the pros, such as Joel Clement, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and former top climate-policy expert at the Department of the Interior (reassigned to the accounting office by former Secretary Ryan S. Zinke, he became an early whistleblower in the Donald Trump administration), who also happens to be from Maine. When he first heard about Maine’s Arctic ambitions, Clement says, “I thought it was a little bit surreal.” But in the years since, he’s come around: “They’re not so much taking advantage of climate change as adapting to coming change that they see.”
Maine might also need to explore fishing in the Arctic Ocean, given both the ongoing decline of several species (cod, shrimp, and herring) and the catastrophic warming of the Gulf of Maine, which has warmed faster than 99 percent of the global ocean. The lobster fishery has boomed in the past few years, but it might not last, because warming waters will likely affect the lobsters’ habitat and ability to reproduce. (In the meantime, the lobster and fishing industries contribute $1–2 billion to the state’s economy annually, according to the Maine International Trade Center.)
Warming and overfishing hit Maine’s fish-processing industry hard, so some companies, such as Bristol Seafood, turned north and began importing Norwegian haddock in 1994, when the Georges Bank fishing moratorium took effect. Having Eimskip next door has improved the company’s supply chain and brings in more fish, says Peter Handy, Bristol Seafood’s president and CEO, who also used the North Atlantic connection to learn about and install Icelandic processing machinery. “The North Atlantic, Iceland, [and] Norway’s connection with Maine is the only reason this company still exists,” Handy said, adding that sustainable fishing is very important to the company.
[Read: Sea ice retreat could lead to rapid overfishing in the Arctic]
But no one knows exactly what will happen to Arctic fish populations, regardless of management. (Currently, there is an international moratorium on commercial fishing in the central Arctic Ocean.) A study that projected migrations for 686 North American fish species under various emissions scenarios anticipates that most species will move poleward, looking for cooler water, confounding management strategies and making sustainable fishing even more difficult. Essentially, Norwegian haddock could leave Norway, leaving Maine without a reliable fishery to source from. Plus, it could be shortsighted or climate-unaware to connect Maine, whose people and economy have suffered from the effects of overfishing, to a similar dynamic in another part of the world. But is it fair, especially for outside observers, to say they shouldn’t benefit from this opportunity, even if climate change does make it possible?
Handy thinks those mistakes can be avoided. “I don’t view our business in the Arctic as harmful,” he says. “We buy and process more haddock from Norway than we get from the entire state of Maine, and in Norway, no one could eat all of the haddock they catch.”
“Anything left unmanaged goes to hell,” Handy says, “and whether fisheries in the Arctic are growing or shrinking, both those scenarios can result in horrible social and environmental impacts.”
To suggest they are doing something wrong now may be unfair, but it’s worth noting the risks of Arctic development. If the Arctic becomes an essential part of Maine’s economy now, some degree of industrial development (and environmental catastrophe) may be unavoidable later on.
Arctic cruising is one area where that kind of development—with potentially serious environmental consequences—may already be unavoidable. From 2005 to 2015, the number of ships going through the Canadian Arctic alone more than tripled. Over the next two or three years, Arctic cruise companies will build 26 new ships to meet the demand, according to Edda Falk, a spokesperson for the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators.
The Maine Port Authority and Soli DG, a Portland consulting company, have been trying to encourage Arctic cruise lines —“adventure” cruises with only a few hundred passengers—to call on Maine ports. They have also recruited Hurtigruten, a Norwegian cruise company, to bring some of its North American cruise trips to Maine’s most valuable asset, its coast. Hurtigruten’s cruises through the Northwest Passage can accommodate somewhere between 300 and 500 passengers; typically boast gyms, saunas, and outdoor hot tubs; and range in cost from about $13,000 per passenger to $26,000, depending on the length of the journey.
[Read: The world comes to a tiny town: Eastport’s lesson in globalization]
If cruising in the Arctic is to continue (and it likely will, especially as navigation becomes easier), Greenland and the Canadian Arctic will need more infrastructure—ports, plumbing, buildings—to accommodate the tourists and the ships themselves. Maine businesses are hoping to build some of that infrastructure: Colby Company, a civil-engineering firm, is working with the Maine North Atlantic Development Office to create relationships in Greenland, while Hancock Lumber has expressed interest in providing building materials for the housing stock that may be needed when the ice sheet melts even more.
That infrastructure could be good for local communities, helping meet the needs of tourists who want to see the Arctic before it’s gone. But Kaplan warns that without the adequate involvement of indigenous groups, the arrival of cruise ships in remote communities could destroy their character, reducing them to souvenir-shop versions of themselves: “This is not an exotic playground; this is people’s home,” she says. “What the rest of the world needs to do is respect them and listen to them.” The new infrastructure could also come to support the extractive industries that might arrive and accelerate massive changes in Greenland.
Scientists and environmental advocates also expressed underlying fears for the environment and the survival of Arctic communities. Increased ship activity in the region could disrupt the mating and migration patterns of whales and other marine mammals that still find refuge in the Arctic, and on which indigenous communities depend. Search-and-rescue capabilities are a constant concern: There are no deep-water ports in the Canadian or American Arctic, not to mention that the United States only has one heavy polar-class icebreaker. If there were a disaster in the Northwest Passage or elsewhere in the North American Arctic, such as an oil spill or ship grounding, it could take about four or five days for any kind of cleanup or rescue operation to arrive, some experts say. According to Malte Humpert, the founder of the Arctic Institute, “For a major environmental disaster in the Arctic, it’s a question of when, not if,” a forecast repeated to me several times.
An environmental disaster in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic: What happens in the Arctic affects everyone, and it affects the Northern Hemisphere directly. The problem for Maine is that establishing trade relationships and developing commercial opportunities in the Arctic and Arctic-adjacent regions aren’t necessarily just about Maine and the Arctic. It smacks of elitism to say that Maine shouldn’t get to explore this new opportunity—especially because it has a higher poverty rate than any other state in the Northeast except New York—if changes to the Arctic will happen anyway. At the same time, protecting and preserving the Arctic is crucial for planetary survival. Figuring out how best to do that will be a global effort. Maybe if Maine has a say now, that could be good for all of us, so long as those with concerns for the environment and indigenous communities lead the way.
Or, as Joel Clement says, putting a twist on an old saying about Maine, “As goes the Arctic, so goes … a lot of other things.”
Can a peace process work if it excludes the government of the country in conflict? We may be finding out.
At present, there are two distinct efforts under way to bring peace in Afghanistan: In one, Zalmay Khalilzad, the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, has held several discussions with Taliban leaders. In the other, a meeting in Moscow this month brought together influential Afghans, including former President Hamid Karzai, and Taliban leaders. Conspicuously missing from both? The Afghan government.
The absence of President Ashraf Ghani’s democratically elected, internationally recognized administration in a process that could decide the future of his country raises questions about who is deciding what about Afghanistan’s fate; whether the United States’ policy of maintaining troops in Afghanistan until the conditions are right for withdrawal can outlive the wishes of President Donald Trump, who wants to pull out; and whether the Taliban can be trusted to keep any promises it makes. (Patrick Shanahan, the acting defense secretary, was in Afghanistan on Monday on a surprise visit and met with Ghani. He denied he had orders to “step down our forces in Afghanistan.”)
For now, these peace negotiations’ prospects of success are far from clear: American forces are still carrying out targeted strikes and aerial bombardment of Taliban positions; key regional players (notably Pakistan) will have a role to play in any final settlement; and while the Taliban, in an effort to secure the withdrawal of American troops, has reportedly pledged to ensure that Afghanistan will not be a base for international terrorist groups, how the United States will enforce that agreement is an open question.
[Kori Schake: How a forever war ends]
Still, efforts to resolve similar conflicts typically involve both the government and the main rebel group—even if, at first, the two sides are talking through an intermediary. That is not happening in this case. Kabul’s absence in this process is remarkable. It would be akin to George Mitchell negotiating directly with Irish republicans while cutting the British government out of the process that resulted in peace in Northern Ireland.
And whatever its final result, Ghani is worried that the U.S.-led effort, especially, is being rushed; that Washington is cutting him out; and that the end result will be a premature withdrawal of American troops. There is good reason for his concern. The Taliban might be making assurances to Khalilzad and to its interlocutors in Moscow, but it is unclear whether those guarantees are acceptable to the Afghan government.
“We sense a lot of anxiety in the [presidential] palace,” Borhan Osman, an Afghanistan-based senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, a think tank, said in an email.
President Trump told CBS this month that he wanted “to bring our great troops home” after more than 18 years of fighting, but in both Kabul and Washington, there is concern that a precipitous withdrawal will send Afghanistan into a tailspin.
The president’s State of the Union speech last week—in which he left open the possibility that a small portion of the 11,000 American soldiers currently in Afghanistan would remain there to focus on counterterrorism—should assuage that concern somewhat, but it won’t do much for Ghani’s feeling of being cut out. In his speech, Trump specifically named the Taliban as a group the United States was talking with, while referring to Washington’s other interlocutors, presumably including the government, as “a number of Afghan groups.” (Roya Rahmani, the Afghan envoy to the United States, said at an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington last week that Kabul wasn’t interpreting the speech as official U.S. policy, but as a platform for Trump to discuss his plans.)
[Read: Talking to the Taliban while still fighting the Taliban]
There are other reasons for concern on the part of Afghanistan: The U.S. State Department’s own language about talks with the Taliban has undergone a subtle shift in the period since Khalilzad assumed his position. During the Obama years and until at least November 2018, it referred to an “Afghan-led, Afghan-owned” peace process. Those words no longer appear in briefings or statements. When asked at an event at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington think tank, why the Afghan government wasn’t a part of the process, Khalilzad said that the dialogue was not at the stage where the government could talk directly with the Taliban, and that “a formula” was still needed for the vaunted “Afghan-owned, Afghan-led [process] to really take place.” (On Sunday, Khalilzad began a two-week trip to Europe, Turkey, Qatar, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to meet his counterparts in the peace process. A State Department statement said that he will “consult with the Afghan government throughout the trip.”)
Part of the challenge is that Washington and Kabul are disclosing different aspects of their conversations with each other. A U.S. statement describing a phone call last week between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ghani said that the chief U.S. diplomat told the Afghan leader about the American commitment to facilitating an inclusive peace process. It added that Pompeo emphasized the importance of intra-Afghan dialogue that leads to a political settlement, as well as the “U.S. desire for a long-term partnership with Afghanistan.”
By contrast, Ghani said on Twitter that Pompeo had stressed that the two countries’ military partnership “will remain until a lasting and inclusive peace is achieved.” The Afghan president added that Pompeo “underscored the central importance of ensuring the centrality of the Afghan government in the peace process [and] reiterated the U.S. commitment and support to holding the upcoming presidential elections in July.”
Those elections, which were supposed to be conducted in April, have already been delayed once; Ghani does not want to postpone them again. He wants to be seen as the man who can deliver peace and stability to his country. But Afghanistan’s gains, though demonstrable, are tenuous and reversible: The government survives because of Western aid and military support; it controls a little more than half of the country’s districts; and corruption and ethnic divisions are widespread. The absence of the Afghan government in a peace process could send a message to the Afghan public about who is—and who isn’t—in charge.
[Read: What should Trump do in Afghanistan?]
When talks began in July between the United States and the Taliban in Qatar, they were expected to pave the way quickly for direct negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban. That second step hasn’t yet materialized. The Taliban insists it won’t negotiate with the government in Kabul until, among other preconditions, Washington announces a timetable for the withdrawal of its troops. Those talks, accompanied by the process in Moscow, will serve as confirmation for some Afghans that the Afghan government is either weak or a proxy for a foreign power. (Attempts by the Obama administration to talk with the Taliban during the Karzai era enraged the then–Afghan leader.)
There is also a bigger question surrounding talks with the Taliban: Will their words be matched by their actions after the American withdrawal?
The Taliban knows Trump’s goal is to withdraw U.S. forces. Washington, on the other hand, has little idea of what the militants ultimately want: To be part of the Afghan political structure? For the insurgency to continue? Will they allow women to continue to participate in public life? The militants say they want friendly relations with the West in order to keep the flow of foreign aid going, and spokespeople have said women will be allowed to work and go to school if they were in charge.
“The Taliban’s seriousness about these claims,” Osman, the International Crisis Group analyst, said, “remains to be tested.”
After Virginia Governor Ralph Northam apologized for appearing in a photograph that featured one person in blackface and another wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, I argued that he could best serve the public by resigning in a way that reaffirmed the hard-won stigma against white supremacy. Others calling for his resignation include Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Eric Holder, the NAACP, the Virginia GOP, the Virginia House Democrats, Representatives Kevin McCarthy and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Al Sharpton.
An article published in The Nation went so far as to declare, “There Is No Argument for Ralph Northam to Keep His Job.” And it may seem that way within certain filter bubbles in American life. In reality, however, the controversy has prompted the publication and broadcast of many substantive dissents from the proposition that Northam ought to resign, grounded in a belief that our culture’s punitive policing of decades-old behavior is out of control.
[Read: When a yearbook is a current event]
Some would have us dismiss those dissents. “I’m pissed off that I have to write about the soon-to-be-former Virginia governor,” Elie Mystal declares in that Nation article:
It’s 2019 and I have actual work to do. There’s no way I should have to stop what I’m doing to join the ‘national conversation’ about why dressing up in blackface disqualifies you from a leadership position in society. They don’t make astrophysicists pause their search for a unified theory of gravity to convince an idiot cat to come down from a tree. The emotional labor this society puts on black people is exhausting. Nobody should have to waste time explaining why Doctor Blackface can’t have his career anymore, and black people shouldn’t be charged with administering the final dose of morphine to put Northam out of his misery.
But a majority of black Virginians disagree. A Washington Post poll conducted last week found that Virginians are evenly divided about whether their governor ought to resign, 47 percent to 47 percent, and that “Northam counts higher support among black residents—who say he should remain in office by a margin of 58 percent to 37 percent—than among whites, who are more evenly divided.”
Evidently, the case against resignation is much more convincing to vast swaths of the country, including African Americans most directly affected by the governor, than one would expect from prevailing media coverage of the controversy. Indeed, the dissenters from the prevailing position among media elites advance many compelling arguments. Below I’ll air the best of them before explaining why, in the end, I still think Northam should resign.
Northam’s defenders all point out that whatever the truth about the photograph that ran on his medical-school yearbook page, it happened 35 years ago, and his critics have not pointed to evidence of racist behavior in the ensuing decades.
The journalist Zaid Jilani argues that those mitigating factors, coupled with the governor’s apology, would have spared him in bygone eras, as “we have all done things we’re not proud of in the past, and our most offensive and obnoxious moments do not encapsulate our lives,” but that today America’s elite is regressing “to a secular version of old puritanical norms, whereby sinners are branded for life and there are political points to be scored for casting them into hellfire.”
What’s more, he argues, progressives who insist that “an offensive gesture from 35 years ago should permanently end a man’s career in politics” are advancing an ethos in tension with the one they encourage with respect to the criminal-justice system, where they insist that the aim “should be rehabilitation, not punishment,” and often argue “that criminal behaviour is forged by social influences, rather than the result of bad choices by flawed individuals.”
In Jilani’s estimation, the public should hate the sin but love the sinner, especially because he believes that “free will is limited if not nonexistent, and therefore we should not hate or loathe people who commit antisocial or immoral behaviour. Instead, we should try to understand the natural processes that lead to that behaviour.”
[Adam Serwer: There’s more at stake than Ralph Northam’s career]
As for the politics of anti-racism, Jilani believes that voters should focus on the substantive ways that a politician’s actions affect marginalized groups. “As obnoxious, offensive, and racist as it is to dress up in a Klan hood and don blackface, these are symbolic acts,” he writes. “Northam did not promote or pursue policy decisions to harm the lives of African Americans. In fact, he has done the opposite,” pushing policies that disproportionately benefit African Americans.
Finally, he said, symbolic acts that elicit draconian punishments from opinion elites are rooted in contested norms socialized into kids raised in the upper classes, but rejected or absent in many middle-, working-, and lower-class communities, likely including the rural, working-class milieu where Northam grew up. “The Left claims to believe in compassion and rehabilitation—and purports to represent the broad working class,” he concludes. “The more it demands the personal destruction of individuals who committed offensive but symbolic acts, the more hollow these representations appear.”
In The New York Times, the columnist Jamelle Bouie adeptly locates the origins of blackface in virulent white supremacy, then goes on to express a common view: “Blackface is so thoroughly associated with the worst of American racism,” he wrote, “that we should expect immediate condemnation of politicians and public figures who have any association with it, even if it’s a decades-old offense.”
Coleman Hughes responded that “a retroactive zero-tolerance policy toward anyone who has ever worn blackface” is untenable in practice and at odds with the actual behavior of the progressive left, insofar as its members do not condemn all sorts of public figures known to have donned blackface.
His examples:
Jimmy Fallon did blackface to impersonate Chris Rock; Jimmy Kimmel did it to impersonate Karl Malone and Oprah Winfrey; SNL’s Fred Armisen did it to impersonate President Obama; Ashton Kutcher did brownface to depict a stereotypical Indian man in a Popchips commercial; Robert Downey Jr. wore blackface in Tropic Thunder; Rob McElhenney and Kaitlin Olson, who play “Mac” and “Dee” on the critically acclaimed sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, have both donned blackface in the show. And there’s no reason to stop at the living.
As demonstrated in a recent New York Times op-ed, “‘Mary Poppins’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting with Blackface,” the grave provides no protection from the professionally offended class. To that end, perhaps we should posthumously repudiate Judy Garland, Gene Wilder, and Shirley Temple, all of whom did blackface. In the sphere of music, we could start by “canceling” living artists such as Joni Mitchell, continue by denouncing deceased artists like Frank Zappa, and then finish by boycotting the Metropolitan Opera for portraying Othello in blackface until as recently as 2015. At the risk of giving the Twitter mob too many ideas, I’ll stop there. But suffice it to say that the list goes on.
He urges more nuance in media discussions of blackface, pointing out that the “umbrella term” as it is presently used “covers everything from a white adult performing a nauseatingly racist caricature of a black person, to a pair of 12-year-old girls—who had probably never heard the word ‘minstrelsy,’ much less studied the history of minstrelsy—having fun with makeup at a sleepover.”
That the word “is used in the media to describe both scenarios,” he concludes, “should not obscure the fact that, ethically speaking, they belong in separate universes,” a position shared and expounded on by my colleague John McWhorter.
For Sam Harris, the controversy surrounding Northam is one of many that illustrate the uncertainty that surrounds “the whole process of redemption for people in our society,” where there’s no settled way to gain forgiveness.
“What is the path back?” he asked.
He believes an apology should be accepted when people can show that they are intelligibly different than they were at the time they committed the transgression:
You take any of these politicians who have something in their backstory that is ugly—my feeling is all there has to be is a transparent account of how you are now different and can actually honestly look back and say, “Yeah, I’m as embarrassed by that as you think I should be. That does not represent how I view the world now.” But the spirit of the time … is to never accept any of that. There is no apology good enough, or the most cynical possible interpretation of your apology is assumed. The only reason you’re apologizing is because you want to save your job … Why is it that the apology isn’t good enough, where by all appearances it is a sincere apology? Where there is no link to real racism? There’s no link to I want to live in a society where black people have it harder than white people. If that’s who you are, if you’re a legit racist, that’s fine—we can understand why we want to boycott your business or have nothing to do with you. There should be massive social pressure against those kinds of noxious political commitments. But if someone misspeaks or it’s an off-color joke and they weren’t trying to defend anyone and they’re just, they wish they could take it back …
His interlocutor, Joe Rogan, added, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if that’s how we treated these public-shaming events … if we gave someone an opportunity to say, “That’s what I did, this is how awful I feel, I’d never do that again, I was a different person, that was 20 years ago …” And they would reply, “Hey, anyone could be you. Thank you for being honest about who you are now … for evolving … for expressing yourself in a way that maybe others who have also committed unsavory or unfortunate acts in the past can feel relieved that you’ve grown and evolved and become a better person. And that you’re different now. You are the product of all your experiences. You’re not stuck where you are when you were 16 forever. It’s not a scarlet letter that you keep for life.”
[Vann R. Newkirk II: Ralph Northam’s mistake]
On the Fifth Column podcast, Kmele Foster expressed similar concerns about the reaction to Northam: “Even in the worst-case scenario––maybe he was racist at the time, maybe he had a lot of retrograde ideas back then and was prone to say and do dastardly things—if he has a history of this, it’s consequential, but if his recent history is something else, if he has evolved on these issues, as many Americans have, and hopefully more will … isn’t that what we want?”
What bothers him is “the fact that you can’t be forgiven, that there can’t be redemption, and we will never forget,” he said. “There’s something super-creepy and insidious about that … There’s something about having a sufficient amount of grace, allowing people to evolve, that is necessary if we want to live in a better world.”
His interlocutor, the journalist Brendan O’Neill, added that what bothered him most about the controversy was what Freddie deBoer once referred to as “offense archaeology,” where “you’re constantly digging in people’s pasts for proof that they did something bad or said something bad or dressed in a particular way, which I just think is a really depressing aspect of modern culture.”
You can’t pin something on them today, “so you go digging and digging until you find a photo or a comment or a tweet, in relation to someone like Kevin Hart … I think that’s a very bitter, vindictive, nasty way of doing politics, and it’s incredibly fatalistic, because the suggestion is always that people can’t really change.”
He called it ruthless and unforgiving to maintain a culture where “if you had these views or did this thing or said that thing, that’s you forever, that’s you defined, and there’s very little you can do to make up for that, except for maybe flagellate in public and issue groveling apologies for the rest of your life. I just think it’s a complete waste of everyone’s energy to be digging for that stuff.”
On most matters, I am in agreement with the critics of outrage culture. I am loath to judge people today for behavior of 35 years ago, especially when there is evidence that their bygone transgressions are at odds with their current outlook. I favor an ethos that prioritizes rehabilitation and redemption above punishment. I believe that anti-racism focuses too much on symbols or psychology at its peril, that making every bygone instance of blackface a career-ender is every bit as untenable as Coleman Hughes persuasively shows, that apparently earnest apologies from people who can credibly show they’ve changed should be accepted, that grace toward people who previously held noxious views helps to hasten the demise of bigotry, and that “offense archaeology” is often an objectionable enterprise that leads us to waste time and energy on matters that help no one.
Indeed, I am sometimes tempted to respond to our era’s excesses by turning against every call for outrage, coerced apology, resignation under pressure, or mass vilification. And my argument that “it is not fair for Northam to tell Virginians—especially black Virginians—that he’ll stay on in the state’s most powerful job when he acknowledges that he has lost their trust” is undermined by the polling data showing that a majority of black Virginians want him to stay in the job.
[Amanda Mull: Ralph Northam’s yearbook page speaks for itself]
Still, I don’t believe that outrage at violations of social taboos is utterly worthless—just vastly, flagrantly overused. Nor do I believe that our society is capable of abandoning that mode entirely—only curtailing its frequency and excesses until it is reserved for the most superlatively appropriate controversies, where the behavior at issue is anomalously objectionable, the perpetrator is unusually deserving of scrutiny, and the sanction is ostensibly useful, not just punitive. When I review the details of Northam’s case with that in mind, it still strikes me as an appropriate occasion for a resignation, though a closer call than I thought before compiling the dissenting arguments.
These features of the controversy inform my judgment:
Ralph Northam is a politician, a job that has always warranted more scrutiny than what ought to be imposed on a typical citizen of the United States. As a sitting governor, he wields significant discretionary power over literal matters of life and death; his job effectiveness depends in part on formally representing everyone in a multiethnic polity; he is called on to discharge symbolic duties as a figurehead and leader; and he is obligated to do what best serves the public, even in instances when it may be unfair to him personally. For those reasons and more, it is orders of magnitude less problematic to call for him to resign than to demand it of someone in the vast majority of other jobs, especially when the transgression in question is symbolic in nature. One can oppose the vast majority of outrage firings while still believing that when people hold one of the highest public leadership roles in this country, they powerfully shape society’s norms, values, and taboos, and should be held to a higher standard. I think that the vast majority of symbolic fights are overvalued—but also that it is unusually valuable, as these things go, to conserve the hard-won norm that white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan are utterly toxic in American life. In fact, I would say that no symbol in American life is more deserving of harsh stigma and taboo status than the KKK, a depraved, murderous terrorist organization that understandably evokes fear and visceral revulsion from many Americans, even today. Northam is singularly positioned to uphold and conserve that taboo, while his replacement could, in principle, discharge all his other duties just as well as he does. And I am frankly baffled by commentators who seem to treat blackface as the greater offense here. Granted, the demeaning, caricatured blackface on display in the yearbook photo is the most noxious variety—this is no SNL impressionist donning makeup to play Barack Obama, and that only deepens the case against Northam, distinguishing his photo from many of the examples that Coleman Hughes marshals. Still, there is nothing worse than a murderous terrorist group synonymous with white supremacy. There’s value in conserving the stigma against it as surely as there’s value in Germans maintaining the stigma against Nazis. This isn’t an instance of judging people by current standards for behavior that wasn’t understood to be wrong at the time. The odiousness of the KKK was known in the mid-1980s as surely as it is today, whatever its resonance in the milieu of that medical school. And while wearing a KKK costume doesn’t necessarily mean that one shares the beliefs of the organization—while we would absolutely want to know, for example, whether the context was a costume party where the guests were told, “Come dressed as the most odious American you can conjure”—this is an image that was later deliberately enshrined without any such context in a medical-school yearbook, where the photo was certain to disturb many of the people who would subsequently look through it. What’s more, even now, the only ostensibly mitigating context offered is the “it wasn’t me” defense, which raises more questions than it answers.All that is why, despite acknowledging all the strong arguments on the other side, I still believe that Northam would best serve his state and his country by resigning, and that doing so need not fuel outrage culture in less extraordinary cases.
I do not suggest, imply, or believe that decades-old mistakes should be routinely dug up and aired; that he is the same person he was 35 years ago; that his bygone mistakes, whatever they are, should never be forgiven; or that he cannot ever be redeemed. In fact, if accounts of his subsequent career are accurate, I regard him as already redeemed, and I grant that it may well have been better for everyone if the photograph had never emerged in the first place.
But none of that changes the fact that the photo damaged his ability to govern well, that staying on after its emergence undermines one of the most defensibly valuable taboos in American life, and that resigning would advance the worthy end of conserving that taboo. One can call on a politician to resign as an act of symbolic contrition for a widely known transgression (or to advance the public good even if he did nothing wrong) without implying that it ought to permanently stain him or end his career, let alone set a standard that applies to folks who aren’t elected leaders.
That is the nature of my call for his resignation.
A subjetividade fascista que cresce no Brasil não mobiliza o medo de um inimigo externo, como é comum no hemisfério norte. Nosso inimigo é interno: o velho conhecido vagabundo.
Todo mundo conhece muitos vagabundos, mas ninguém se acha um. Vagabundo é sempre o “outro”. “Nós” somos humanos, do bem, inteligentes, realizadores e dotados da moral cristã. Tudo que temos é mérito do suor de nosso trabalho, e o que não temos é porque os “vagabundos” recebem privilégios e mamatas. Quando “nós” morremos, a dor é imensa porque nossas vidas importam. “Eles”, os vagabundos, são menos humanos. São lesados, preguiçosos e pervertidos. Tudo o que eles possuem vêm de vida fácil. Quando “eles” morrem não há dor e, muitas vezes, há até comemoração, pois vagabundo bom é vagabundo morto.
“Vagabundo” é um significante vazio que pode abarcar muita gente: ambulantes, desempregados, pessoas em situação de rua, pobres, nordestinos, putas, LGBTs, ativistas, bandidos. O que define o vagabundo não é o trabalho, honestidade ou esforço de um sujeito, mas relações de poder estruturadas no eixo raça, classe e ideologia. Lula é vagabundo, mesmo tendo estado à frente de um dos governos mais bem-sucedidos e respeitados internacionalmente da história do país. Bolsonaro – que é político profissional desde 1989, aprovou dois projetos de lei em sua trajetória e tem seus três filhos mamando da mesma fonte – não é vagabundo.
A linha que separa um vagabundo de um humano é muito tênue. Ainda permanece na lembrança o ano de 1997, quando jovens brancos, privilegiados e filhos de autoridades tocaram fogo em uma pessoa que dormia na rua e se espantaram que se tratava de um indígena: “achávamos que era apenas um mendigo”. Vinte e dois anos depois, assistimos a comoção do Brasil com os dez adolescentes que morreram no incêndio do Flamengo. Por estarem no alojamento do clube, aquelas vidas se dotaram de propósito e relevância. Mas, se esses mesmos jovens estivessem em suas casas nas favelas, e a polícia tivesse entrado atirando para executar a sangue frio, eles seriam apenas “vagabundos” sem verdade ou humanidade, como ocorreu há poucos dias na chacina que matou 15 pessoas do Morro do Fallet-Fogueteiro.
De marginal à terroristaAs raízes sociais do vagabundo se encontram na figura do marginal do período colonial. Nossa história sempre foi cindida entre uma parte branca e “desenvolvida” e outra parte que se quer colocar para debaixo do tapete: pobre e/ou negra, considerada atrasada e fora do desenvolvimento econômico.
Importantes autores do pensamento social brasileiro, como Sandra Pesavento, José Murilo de Carvalho e Luci Kowarick, entre muitos outros, foram essenciais para entender a construção social da marginalidade. Escravos libertos, ao ocuparem as ruas das cidades brasileiras em busca de trabalho como ambulantes ou simplesmente ocupando o espaço com formas de sociabilidade como a capoeira, causavam medo e repulsa. Na nossa mentalidade colonizada, eles não eram os corpos brancos desejados para circular ao redor dos prédios com arquitetura europeia.
Para essa parte da população que ocupara as ruas, a violência sempre foi um projeto de estado em sua aliança com a elite. Se essas pessoas são marginais – ou seja, não são parte do Brasil desenvolvido cultivado na imaginação colonizada –, a patrola estatal pode esmagar, afinal não são grupos reconhecidos como parte da sociedade.
O caminho que transformou o marginal em alguém socialmente autorizado a morrer é longo e resulta de um longo processo de produção midiática hegemônica que sempre tratou a “marginalidade” como nefasta. O marginal, assim, foi se transformando cada vez mais em um criminoso ao longo do século 20. No século 21, no Brasil distópico de Bolsonaro, conjugado com pacote do populismo penal de Sérgio Moro, o vagabundo é mais que um criminoso: agora ele é também um terrorista.
Os Bolsonaros e os vagabundosUm dos maiores problemas do Brasil é a sua identidade mal resolvida, que faz com que, muitas vezes, vagabundos não percebem que são vistos enquanto tais.
Eu em diálogo com uma camelô de Porto Alegre em 2004:
“Oi, Carmen, olha que editorial horrível desse jornal que chama os camelôs de vagabundos e pede que se instalem câmeras na cidade para vigiarem vocês”. Ela respondeu-me: “é isso aí! Tem que encher de câmera para mostrar esses ambulantes vagabundos que não gostam de trabalhar”.
Para mim, que sabia que ela vendia remédios abortivos falsificados do Paraguai, ouvir aquilo soava curioso. Esse diálogo, em que ambulantes mais velhos ou estabelecidos chamavam outros ambulantes mais jovens ou pobres de “vagabundo”, era recorrente em meu trabalho de campo. Também era comum que esses trabalhadores passassem perfume e arrumassem a banca com muito cuidado para não serem confundidos com “vagabundos”. O problema é que, na perspectiva da elite, todo camelô, sem discernimento, era vagabundo, e a polícia deveria ser rígida contra eles. A pancadaria, o cacete e as humilhações das batidas da polícia sempre foram aplaudidas com certo sadismo.
Se você acusa alguém de vagabundo, você se acha menos vagabundo.Anos depois, já em pesquisa com Lúcia Scalco sobre eleitores de Bolsonaro na periferia da zona leste de Porto Alegre, uma grande parte de nossos interlocutores (se não uma maioria, inclusive eleitores do PT) era amplamente a favor da redução da maioridade penal, de prisões mais duras e da pena de morte para “vagabundos”. Mauro, 22 anos, uma vez nos mostrou seu primo no presídio jogando futebol e assistindo Netflix com o dinheiro que chegava das facções: “vocês acham isso justo? Eu trabalhando honestamente e ele se divertindo?”
Essa é apenas uma parte da interpretação da história. Da nossa perspectiva que conhecia os dois lados, nem o primo estava se divertindo na prisão nem Mauro era tão honesto assim. Intrigava o fato de que muitas pessoas não viam que, pela lógica ideológica hegemônica, eles poderiam ser os próximos vagabundos. Havia, ali, uma necessidade de se diferenciar e de se aliar ao padrão, fazendo com que a identidade social fosse negociada com tensão e ambivalência. Se você acusa alguém de vagabundo, você se acha menos vagabundo.
Nas páginas da extrema direita, as palavras vagabundos e marginais são as que mais parecem.O mérito de Bolsonaro foi ter conseguido atiçar uma ira latente contra os vagabundos. A elite racista e classista apoia a remoção de toda a articulação de “vagabundos” – nordestinos, beneficiários do bolsa-família, minorias e ativistas. Outra parte da população, aflita por muitos medos e perdas, também. Forjando o papel da justiça e da ordem militar, Bolsonaro conseguiu tocar no âmago de uma grande parte da população que acha que a vida é injusta e que os vagabundos passam bem. Nas páginas da extrema direita, as palavras vagabundos e marginais são as que mais parecem, especialmente para designar petistas e assaltantes.
Enquanto parte da esquerda se manteve em sua redoma intelectual ou centrada em suas próprias disputas, Bolsonaro foi articulando todas as forças obscuras do país, ganhando espaço, acionando o poder advindo do pânico moral e da disputa do nós contra eles – o que faz todo o sentido em um contexto de crise econômica, política e também de segurança pública. Refiro-me à esquerda porque vídeos em que Bolsonaro falava atrocidades, associando PT a uma bandidagem, circulavam amplamente no WhatsApp do Brasil profundo, mas ninguém do campo progressista viu ou acreditou que seria possível a sua eleição.
Bolsonaro começou a aparecer sem parar depois de 2013, especialmente após polêmicas com Benedita da Silva e Maria do Rosário. Nessa época, ele criou sua página no Facebook e grande parte de suas postagens são contra vagabundos em uma campanha que começa a cada a vez mais associar petistas a “marginais vagabundos”. Em uma entrevista decisiva que recebeu os holofotes de toda a mídia (que o ajudou a crescer) em 2014, Bolsonaro usou essas palavras acusatórias sete vezes em um minuto e meio, dizendo que as cadeias não podiam ser colônia de férias. E tudo isso associando o PT e o MST a temas como o falso kit gay.
No meio do vácuo deixado pela crise, em que a narrativa do crime se enche de significado, apontando culpados e inimigos internos, Bolsonaro atiçou a nossa tradição sádica mais profunda. E ganhou.
The post No Brasil de Bolsonaro, as definições de vagabundo foram atualizadas appeared first on The Intercept.
Kerri Harris, the insurgent candidate who lost her primary challenge to Sen. Tom Carper in Delaware, will be taking a new national advocacy director position at Working Hero Action, a nonprofit organization advocating for the earned-income tax credit and other anti-poverty policies.
Harris, a 39-year-old queer woman of color and an Air Force veteran, rose to national prominence when she decided to challenge Carper, a powerful Democrat who had held his seat for three terms, from the left. While Harris, whose campaign was outspent 10-to-1 by Carper’s, ended up losing the election by a 30-point margin, the 35 percent she pulled was more than Delaware politicos had thought was possible against Carper, a local icon.
“If I just went back and got a regular 9-to-5 job, so much of the work that had been done would be halted,” Harris told The Intercept. “It would make many people who were inspired lose some of that inspiration, thinking, Well that’s it? You run a race and then it’s over? What about us, what about the movement?”
For a politician, Harris brings an unusually intimate understanding of the effects of policies she’ll be pushing for, especially the need for a cash benefit. Even during her Senate run, as she was profiled in glossy national magazines, she remained mired in poverty, cycling through the same few outfits that bore the brunt of the campaign. Growing up in poverty gives a politician an important understanding of its character, but grinding through it as an adult puts it into even sharper focus. She says that getting the new job is in and of itself a relief.
Harris told me that only recently, she had been asking her daughter, who was turning 8 years old, whether she wanted a birthday party. “She kept saying no,” Harris said. “And then she confessed a couple of weeks ago that she did want one, but she knew that I didn’t have a lot of money, so she didn’t want me to feel stressed. I felt horrible.”
“I don’t want any other kids to have to feel that way,” Harris said. “I don’t want any other parents to feel that way.”
Harris says that she’s thinking of running again in the future. But for now, she sees her role as using the platform she built from her campaign to highlight working-class issues in her new position at Working Hero Action.
Working Hero Action is an organization that advocates for ending poverty, mainly through state-level campaigns to expand the EITC and by helping low-income people claim their benefits. During the 2018 election, the organization’s founder, Joe Sanberg — a wealthy investor and co-founder of Aspiration.com, a financial company that helps direct users toward socially conscious banking and spending — created a PAC to support progressive candidates, one of whom was Harris. “Kerri speaks with passion and heart that she also marries with an intellectual mastery of the policy issues,” Sanberg said. “So to have her as our national advocacy director for the culture change we want to create, and ultimately the agenda to end poverty, is a natural fit.”
Sanberg himself grew up in a low-income household raised only by his mother, and their family ended up losing their home to foreclosure. “It sure felt like poverty, at least to her,” Sanberg said, “because she was always struggling to make ends meet, pay the bills, and also trying to shield me and my brother from all of that.” While most Americans are not currently under the official poverty line at any given time, 40 percent are one missed paycheck away from falling into poverty.
The EITC, which is touted as a policy with bipartisan support, is the country’s primary mechanism for delivering cash benefits to low-income workers through an annual tax refund. But it’s often criticized by progressives because the benefit only goes to the working poor — that is, only those who have an earned income of at least $3,000 get the full benefit. Those who have no earned income, as the name suggests, get nothing.
The EITC’s exclusion of the poorest Americans is a feature, not a bug, of the tax credit, which was massively expanded during the Bill Clinton welfare-reform era and designed to encourage working. It has drawn criticism from some on the left for playing into the idea of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor people. Clinton’s presidency also saw the decimation of what we usually think of as cash welfare for the poor. The result has been the number of households in extreme poverty, or those living on $2 a day, more than doubling in the two decades since welfare reform.
Even the two big plans put forward by Democrats over the past few years to increase the EITC — Sen. Kamala Harris’s LIFT Act and Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Ro Khanna’s GAIN Act — still exclude the nonworking poor. On the other hand, because the EITC encourages work and can act as something of a subsidy for wages, it has maintained a level of bipartisan support even in an increasingly polarized political climate. And though Harris ran as an insurgent, she talked often in her campaign about finding common ground on policies to make immediate improvements in poor people’s lives, arguing that the poor couldn’t afford to wait.
Harris says that expanding the EITC to cover those gaps is part of the policy issues that she is looking to push for in her new position, including making the benefit available to those who are excluded from the traditional definition of “work,” such as caregivers.
What constitutes “work” is often circumscribed by one’s socioeconomic circumstances. During the 2012 presidential campaign, the elite political world took great umbrage at the suggestion that Ann Romney, a stay-at-home mom, did not “work,” arguing that domestic labor should count. Yet, in order to obtain TANF benefits, poor parents must participate in what are described as “work activities” — and raising small children does not count as work.
“How many moderate- to low-income households choose for a parent to stay home because it’s cheaper than day care?” Harris asked. “If we are not providing for those people to make sure that they are doing better, then there are concerns. ”
Harris’s group will also be supporting policies like the Green New Deal and universal health care, as well as proposing a “green EITC” that would give people working in green jobs an even larger tax credit. “If we start to show people what counts as a green job and how you can benefit, it’s easier to push long-term for something like a Green New Deal because people see themselves in it,” Harris said.
Expanding the EITC is often seen by progressives as a step toward better and more comprehensive goals, such as a universal basic income or something that could work in concert with other cash benefits that would cut into deep poverty, such as a child allowance. Brown and Sen. Michael Bennett have already proposed child allowance legislation, which would give families $3,000 a year for children between the ages of 6 to 18 and $3,600 for children under 6, transferred through a monthly benefit. Such a policy is far from radical — most wealthy countries already have some type of child allowance benefit. Harris told me that they were not yet looking into universal basic income or child allowance proposals, yet stressed that “EITC is just the start.”
The politics of universal income decoupled from work are still tricky, and fraught even on the left, as the rollout of the Green New Deal showed. The office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez erroneously posted a draft version of an FAQ that said the Green New Deal would offer economic security for those “unwilling to work.” That led to several days of conflicting reactions, with Ocasio-Cortez suggesting, though not outright saying, that the document had been doctored. It culminated with her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, acknowledging that the draft was real and explaining that what the office had in mind was a policy such as pensions for coal miners who had put decades in the ground and weren’t interested in being retrained for something new.
Sanberg pointed out that while he was excited about the competing progressive ideas to combat poverty, there are still billions of dollars of EITC left unclaimed by low-income families. One of his organizations, CalEITC4Me, was founded to help low-income Californians claim the credit. “We don’t have to choose between policy advocacy, policy debate, and progressive community service,” Sanberg said. “We have to do all at the same time.” They recently launched an arm of the organization in Iowa to help people claim their EITC benefits and to raise the issue of poverty for presidential candidates coming through the state during their campaigns.
“It is truly personal,” Harris said of fighting for issues affecting the poor and working-class. “I feel it every day.”
The post Insurgent Candidate Kerri Harris Has a New Job: Lobbyist for the Working Poor appeared first on The Intercept.
In El Paso, Texas, on Monday night, President Donald Trump responded to the March for Truth — a protest against his false claims about the city led by its most famous resident, Beto O’Rourke — by lying about it.
Participants in #MarchForTruth chant “build bridges, not walls” as they march under freeway overpass and along the border fence separating El Paso from Ciudad Juarez pic.twitter.com/1lBhGyWTde
— Rafael Carranza (@RafaelCarranza) February 12, 2019
In remarks transmitted live and uncorrected by news networks, Trump claimed that a crowd of about 13,000 supporters at his rally in the city numbered, “let’s say 35,000 people,” while the march addressed by O’Rourke had drawn, at most, “300 people.” El Paso’s police department estimated that the number of protesters was in fact between 10,000 and 15,000.
In El Paso, Pres. Trump calls out Beto O’Rourke early in remarks, calling him “a young man who’s got very little going for himself, except he’s got a great first name.” https://t.co/j14esAeUkQ pic.twitter.com/u1ldtjCRlV
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) February 12, 2019
El Paso County Coliseum officials tell me about 6,000 people watched the @realDonaldTrump rally on screens outside, on top of the 7,000 inside. So total of about 13,000.
— Bob Moore (@BobMooreNews) February 12, 2019
El Paso police estimate a crowd of 10,000 to 15,000 for the anti-Trump, anti-wall, pro-O’Rourke march and rally tonight.
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) February 12, 2019
Beto O'Rourke, staging a Trump counter-rally, says El Paso is "safe not because of walls, but in spite of walls. Securre, because we treat one another with dignity and respect. That is the way we make our communities and our country safe." Via Texas Tribune pic.twitter.com/YSdQTeKiXn
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 12, 2019
While skeptics following events online could find out the truth, networks like ABC shared Trump’s entirely false claims on social networks with no indication that they were untrue, suggesting that a core error in coverage of his 2016 campaign looks set to be repeated for 2020.
“He has long since figured out something important, and perhaps dangerous,” Ray Suarez, the veteran broadcaster, observed on Twitter about Trump’s willingness to lie. “He knows it doesn’t really matter if he tells the truth about the O’Rourke crowd, or his own. By tomorrow morning, who’s going to care beyond those who already care? He may gain little, but loses nothing.”
Video of O’Rourke’s 22-minute speech, shared by the potential candidate for the presidency, showed that thousands of marchers had indeed crowded onto a baseball diamond across from the arena where the president’s rally took place, to hear their former member of Congress call out Trump’s lies about the city’s crime rate.
Very very proud of this community. We are the example that the United States of America needs right now. pic.twitter.com/IIM5q9CTeN
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) February 12, 2019
El Paso, Texas pic.twitter.com/SsxZeNw1MJ
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) February 12, 2019
Far from being a city saved from violent crime only by the construction of a border wall in 2008, as Trump had falsely claimed during his State of the Union speech, O’Rourke stressed that El Paso’s crime rate had already plummeted before the partial barrier was constructed.
Donald Trump says El Paso was one of the nation's most violent cities — until a border fence was constructed in 2008.
That isn't true. Here's a graph about that. https://t.co/qcaASDUiwO pic.twitter.com/vcrxXchMgJ
— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) February 11, 2019
As Bob Moore and Carlos Sanchez reported for the Texas Tribune, Trump opened his speech, beneath banners reading “Finish the Wall,” with the blatant lie that construction of a border wall along the Texas-Mexico border was underway. “I don’t know if you heard, right, today we started a big, beautiful wall right on the Rio Grande, right smack on the Rio Grande,” Trump claimed, falsely. When the president’s supporters launched into the familiar chant, “Build the wall,” the former real estate developer invited them to pretend along with him: “You mean, ‘Finish the wall.'”
Trump starts his first rally of 2019 by bragging, "I don't know if you heard — today we started a big beautiful wall." (Congress has in fact appropriated 0 dollars for Trump's wall.)
He then goads the crowd into booing the assembled media. pic.twitter.com/MKf33Myyn3
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 12, 2019
Trump later continued his long-running war on observable reality by claiming, without evidence, that El Paso’s Republican mayor had manipulated the FBI statistics that showed a sharp drop in violent crime before the construction of the barrier.
"I don't care if a mayor is a Republican or a Democrat, they're full of crap when they say [the wall] hasn't made a big difference." – @realdonaldtrump #ElPasoTX pic.twitter.com/bNuVpgEqKJ
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) February 12, 2019
The president’s attempt to clear a path for his lies by attacking the media once again incited his supporters to such hostility that one even attacked a cameraperson for the BBC.
Just attended my first ?@realDonaldTrump? rally where my colleague BBC cameraman Rob Skeans was attacked by a Trump supporter. The crowd had been whipped up into a frenzy against the media by Trump and other speakers all night #TrumpElPaso pic.twitter.com/Oiw8osPms3
— Eleanor Montague (@EleanorMontague) February 12, 2019
Trump supporters, desperate to combat credible reports from journalists on the ground, and the crowd-size estimates of local fire and police officials, resorted to circulating screenshots of the protest taken nearly an hour after O’Rourke’s speech ended.
People keep posting this to photo to ”prove” Beto’s crowd was small. Truth is, all those people on stage were up there 45 mins to an hr AFTER Beto spoke and a lot of people had left by then. I have no reason to lie. That is the truth. So to compare is deceiving. pic.twitter.com/ujlgONGooH
— Ivan Pierre Aguirre (@i_p_a_1) February 12, 2019
Trump’s attempt to gaslight the nation about his popularity in El Paso relative to that of O’Rourke was clearly pre-planned, since his lie about the rival protest march drawing only a few hundred people was promoted before his speech by both his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his son, Donald Trump Jr. — who introduced his father by falsely claiming that “about 200 people” were at the “Beto rally,” and then posted a photograph of what he said was a crowd of 35,000 waiting for the president to speak.
It looks like Beto only had 900 people at his March, Tiny! @realDonaldTrump has over 35000 in attendance. 8000 inside and tens of thousands outside. Stretching into the surrounding streets. 70000+ RSVPs, hard to get everyone here. #winning
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) February 12, 2019
Beto trying to counter-program @realdonaldtrump in his hometown and only drawing a few hundred people to Trump’s 35,000 is a really bad look.
Partial pic of the Trump overflow crowd below! #AnyQuestions pic.twitter.com/PKxkbcFNFO
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 12, 2019
Even before leaving the White House for El Paso, Trump had hinted that his decision to hold his first campaign rally of the year in O’Rourke’s hometown on the Mexican border was at least partly an attempt to show up a potential rival. Hours before the rally, Trump bragged, “We have a line that is very long already. … And I understand our competitor’s got a line too, but it’s a tiny little line.”
Trump taunts Beto: "We have a line that is very long already, I'm mean you see what's going on. And I understand our competitor's got a line too, but it's a tiny little line. Of course [the media] make it sound like they have more people than we do. That's not going to happen." pic.twitter.com/puTLJXwLcU
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) February 12, 2019
The post Donald Trump Responds to Beto O’Rourke’s March for Truth in El Paso With Flagrant Lies appeared first on The Intercept.
Rep. Ilhan Omar speaks to members of the media after a news conference on Capitol Hill on Jan. 24, 2019.
Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
In 2005, Steven Rosen, then a senior official with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, sat down for dinner with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, then of the New Yorker. “You see this napkin?” Rosen asked Goldberg. “In twenty-four hours, [AIPAC] could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”
I couldn’t help but be reminded of this anecdote after Rep. Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, was slammed by Democrats and Republicans alike over her suggestion, in a pair of tweets, that U.S. politicians back the state of Israel because of financial pressure from AIPAC (“It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” she declaimed). Was the flippant way in which she phrased her tweets a problem? Did it offend a significant chunk of liberal U.S. Jewish opinion? Did it perhaps unwittingly play into anti-Semitic tropes about rich Jews controlling the world? Yes, yes, and yes — as she herself has since admitted and “unequivocally” apologized for. But was she wrong to note the power of the pro-Israel lobby, to point a finger at AIPAC, to highlight — in her apology — “the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA or the fossil fuel industry”?
No, no, and no.
Rosen, after all, wasn’t the first AIPAC official to boast about the the raw power that “America’s bipartisan pro-Israel lobby” exercises in Washington, D.C. Go back earlier, to 1992, when then-AIPAC President David Steiner was caught on tape bragging that he had “cut a deal” with the George H.W. Bush White House to provide $3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel. Steiner also claimed to be “negotiating” with the incoming Clinton administration over the appointment of pro-Israel cabinet members. AIPAC, he said, has “a dozen people in [the Clinton] campaign, in the headquarters … and they’re all going to get big jobs.”
Go back further, to 1984, when Sen. Charles Percy, a moderate Republican from Illinois, was defeated in his re-election campaign after he “incurred AIPAC’s wrath” by declining to sign onto an AIPAC-sponsored letter and daring to refer to Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat as more “moderate” than other Palestinian resistance figures. AIPAC contributors raised more than a million dollars to help defeat Percy. As Tom Dine, then-executive director of AIPAC, gloated in a speech shortly after the GOP senator’s defeat, “all the Jews, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians — those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire — got the message.”
Nearly four decades later, as members of the U.S. political and media classes pile onto Omar, are the rest of us supposed to pretend that AIPAC officials never said or did any of this? And are we also expected to forget that the New York Times’s Tom Friedman, a long-standing advocate for Israel in the American media, once described the standing ovations received by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, from members of Congress, as having been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby”? Or that Goldberg, now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and dubbed “the most influential journalist/blogger on matters related to Israel,” called AIPAC a “leviathan among lobbies, as influential in its sphere as the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired Persons are in theirs”? Or that J.J. Goldberg, former editor of the Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward, said in 2002, in reference to AIPAC, “There is this image in Congress that you don’t cross these people or they take you down”?
Are we supposed to dismiss Uri Avnery, the late Israeli peace activist and one-time member of the Zionist paramilitary, the Irgun, who once remarked that if AIPAC “were to table a resolution abolishing the Ten Commandments, 80 senators and 300 congressmen would sign it at once,” as a Jew-hater? Or label Jan Harman, a former member of Congress and devoted defender of Israel, an anti-Semite for telling CNN in 2013 that her former colleagues on Capitol Hill had struggled to back Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear diplomacy to due “big parts of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States being against it, the country of Israel being against it”?
To be clear: AIPAC is not a political action committee and does not provide donations directly to candidates. However, it does act as a “force multiplier,” to quote the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s Andrew Silow-Carroll, and “its rhetorical support for a candidate is a signal to Jewish PACs and individual donors across the country to back his or her campaign.” As Friedman explained to me in an interview in 2013: “Mehdi, if you and I were running from the same district, and I have AIPAC’s stamp of approval and you don’t, I will maybe have to make three phone calls. … I’m exaggerating, but I don’t have to make many phone calls to get all the money I need to run against you. You will have to make 50,000 phone calls.” (Is Friedman an anti-Semite too? Asking for a friend.)
What makes this whole row over Omar’s remarks so utterly bizarre is that so many leading Democrats, loudly and rightly, decry the pernicious and undeniable impact of special interests, lobbyists, and donations on a whole host of issues — from the role of Big Pharma and Big Finance; to influence-peddling by Saudi Arabia; to the “grip” that the NRA has on the debate over gun control, to quote Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal. But any mention of AIPAC and lobbying in favor of Israel? “Anti-Semitism!”
Do they have no shame? Take Donna Shalala, a new member of Congress from Florida’s 27th District (and a former cabinet member under Clinton).
There is no place in our country for anti-Semitic comments. I condemn them whatever the source. To suggest members of Congress are “bought off” to support Israel is offensive and wrong. https://t.co/vYBVkBOOxS
— Rep. Donna E. Shalala (@RepShalala) February 11, 2019
Yet here is the same Shalala boasting last month that she didn’t allow the NRA to “buy me during the campaign.”
NRA couldn’t buy me during the campaign and they sure can’t buy me now. I'm proud to cosponsor the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, which will help prevent the tragedy of gun violence that takes the lives of nearly 100 people a day across our country.
— Donna E. Shalala (@DonnaShalala) January 11, 2019
Got that? It’s “offensive and wrong” to suggest the pro-Israel lobby tries to buy off politicians. But it’s totally fine to suggest the pro-gun lobby does. (The irony is that AIPAC’s leading lights haven’t been shy about making their own analogy with the NRA. “I’m sure there are people out there who are for gun control, but because of the NRA don’t say anything,” Morris Amitay, former AIPAC executive director, once admitted. “If you’re a weak candidate to begin with,” he continued, and your record is “anti-Israel and you have a credible opponent, your opponent will be helped.”)
Today, the Palestinians continue to be bombed, besieged, and dispossessed by their Israeli occupiers — with the full military and financial support of the United States government. There are a variety of credible explanations for this support: Israel’s role as a “strategic asset” and “mighty aircraft carrier“; U.S. Christian evangelicals’ obsession with Israel and the end-times prophecy; the impact of arms sales and the U.S. military-industrial complex; not to mention the long-standing cultural and social ties between American Jews and Israeli Jews. But to pretend money doesn’t play a role — or that AIPAC doesn’t have a big impact on members of Congress and their staffers — is deeply disingenuous.
And so we should thank Omar, the freshman lawmaker, for having the guts to raise this contentious issue and break a long-standing taboo in the process — even if she maybe did so in a clumsy and problematic fashion.
But you don’t have to take her word for it. “When people ask me how they can help Israel,” former Israeli prime minister and uber-hawk Ariel Sharon once told an audience in the United States, “I tell them: Help AIPAC.”
The post There Is a Taboo Against Criticizing AIPAC — and Ilhan Omar Just Destroyed It appeared first on The Intercept.
The last year has been a whirlwind for the labor movement. There have been unexpectedly positive developments, like the forceful rise in teacher activism across the country, and negative ones, like the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which found that unions could no longer collect agency fees for bargaining from workers who do not pay membership dues. The labor movement had been grinding its teeth over that possibility for several years, bracing for its already strained coffers to further deplete.
But last weekend, when labor leaders and activists gathered at a two-day conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss their movement, the mood was overwhelmingly jubilant. With Democrats now controlling the House of Representatives, the immediate financial pain of Janus less severe than expected, and public opinion for unions standing at a 15-year high (Gallup reported recently that 62 percent of Americans approve of unions), movement activists seemed far more energized than one might have expected them to be one year ago. It almost felt like a pep rally.
Speaker after speaker at the Future of American Labor conference spoke confidently and animatedly about the progress unions have made in the United States, organizing strikes and winning some protections for contract workers — gains they expect to continue even in the wake of Janus.
Labor leaders said the losses from Janus were not as severe as they had feared, citing their proactive organizing efforts as primary reasons. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, for example, lost 100,000 agency-fee payers since Janus, Lee Saunders, president of the union, said at the conference. Yet they also managed to flip 310,000 agency-fee payers into dues-paying members through new organizing. “For every member that we lost, we gained seven,” Saunders said.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, reported similar gains. The AFT lost 84,500 agency-fee payers after Janus, but between November 2017 and November 2018, Weingarten said the union’s membership numbers actually went up by 88,000. (Some experts anticipate unions will eventually feel the financial hit from Janus, especially if the well-funded “opt-out” movement, which targets public-sector workers to disaffiliate with their union, gains traction.)
Weingarten said the Supreme Court’s ruling gave unions an opportunity to reflect on what their membership means. “The real challenge becomes six months, eight months, a year after Janus — what is the value of belonging?” she said. “What’s the community you are creating? And what are the values that people connect with — not just what’s the transaction — but what are the values? That’s what we’re learning.”
Much of the conference focused on the national teacher insurgency, which continues this week as Denver Public Schools teachers go on their first strike since 1994. Last month, teachers in Los Angeles went on strike for six days, and thousands of Virginia public school teachers also stormed the state capitol in January for a one-day demonstration of power. Oakland teachers may be next to strike.
Denver teachers and community members picket outside Abraham Lincoln High School in Denver, Colo., on Feb. 11, 2019.
Photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
The strike in Denver, which started on Monday, is seeing comparatively low levels of participation. It comes after drawn-out negotiations between teachers and the district, and it has been mired in some controversy, including about giving financial incentives to educators who work in the district’s highest-poverty schools. The union calls these “failed incentives” and prefers to raise the base pay for all teachers in the district instead. This school district, which has already offered to raise base pay for all teachers from $43,255 to $45,500, wants to keep the incentives in place to attract and retain teachers in those more challenging schools and demonstrate a commitment to equity. The teachers want the starting pay to be $45,800.
In an interview, Becky Pringle, vice president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest public-sector union, said she agreed that schools in high-poverty districts should get more support, but that it shouldn’t happen at the expense of other schools.
“Those schools absolutely should get more investment,” Pringle said. “But here’s what we’ve been forced to choose: The [district] say[s], Here’s the pie and those teachers [in high-poverty schools] should get the incentives. No, no, no. You need to redefine the pie, and that’s the false choice. Since the recession, we’ve been dealing with a smaller pie, but we’re not going to accept that narrative, that premise. A progressive agenda doesn’t start from their premise.”
Pringle did not say whether the teachers themselves should be paid more to work in those schools. “We know the equity means you give kids what they need,” she said. “So of course the kids who are coming to our schools that have suffered trauma or who don’t have food to eat have to have more, they have greater needs. Of course they do. But let’s stop having that conversation about taking [from one school] and giving to [another]. The state has the money to do what they need. The federal government has the money. So we’ve got to turn that [conversation] on its head.”
Despite the labor activists’ positive energy, the conference was short on commitments regarding what the movement would push for next and where things are headed.
“Right now there is an adrenaline high. … It took two years to get to the point where people were ready to strike,” said Mary Best, president of AFT-Oklahoma. (Oklahoma teachers went on strike in April 2018.) “We kind of have to see where the membership takes us [next].”
“We’re open to continuous learning, we don’t have all the answers,” said Pringle. “I love saying we have 3 million members, but we never have really realized the power of a 3-million member organization because we haven’t figured out how to leverage that collectively in a real way.”
Two panel sessions were dedicated to the prospect of “sectoral bargaining,” in which workers across entire industries, such as all finance workers or all retail workers, bargain together. Establishing sectoral labor standards has been an important strategy for workers in countries like France, Germany, and Brazil. The United States has laws that make it harder to establish multi-employer bargaining than elsewhere across the world, yet panelists were excited about the possibility of pushing for similar measures in this country.
Harold Meyerson, executive editor of the American Prospect and a panel moderator, asked union leaders how they plan to capitalize on the cross-union solidarity forged from mobilizing around and after Janus. Would the unions consider making a joint list of policy demands for 2020 candidates, for example?
“I think we’ll definitely do that,” Saunders answered.
“2020 is not the end in and of itself,” added Weingarten. “The work that we’re trying to do is to create coalitions for a better life.”
Whether cross-sector union solidarity actually continues in the years to come is an open question, but SEIU President Mary Kay Henry pointed to the “solidarity strikes” her members took in Los Angeles last month to support the teachers walking in the streets. “That was a huge act of courage for a worker earning $23,000 a year,” she said. (Firefighters also marched along with the striking teachers.)
“The work that we’re trying to do is to create coalitions for a better life.”Union leaders noted the high support for unions among millennials, but they paid less attention to the issue of independent contractors and the rise of the so-called gig economy, in which many millennials participate. In a small press briefing, The Intercept asked what union leaders are doing to help organize labor-supportive workers in nontraditional workplaces. Henry pointed to the 2018 California Supreme Court decision in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles that made it harder for companies to misclassify workers as independent contractors as an example of progress on that front.
“We have a history of organizing contract workers. And I think what is going to be hugely impactful is what the entire labor movement has been doing in California with the governor and state legislature in responding to the Dynamex court case and inside the SEIU,” she said. ”We have a national advisory committee to our leaders in California because we’re organizing contract workers all over the country and are listening to what the key demands are.”
She also said her union is “trying to seize opportunities to support workers, while being careful not to undermine global standards.” The European trade movement, she explained, is currently making strides organizing around labor conditions for platform and contract workers, and Henry implied that the U.S. labor movement is interested in following the EU’s lead.
Weingarten agreed. “It’s often a legal fiction between independent contractors and employees, and we worked with freelancers on the New York wage theft bill,” she said, referring to a 2016 law that penalizes employers who delay payments to freelance workers. The AFT is working with adjunct professors and school substitutes, too, Weingarten added. “We’re working in coalitions, but I would say we do not have a holistic view yet about how to actually deal with [contractors] who need the protection of unionization and collective action.”
Saunders said his union is generally eyeing other areas in public service that could potentially be organized, like emergency medical services in the nonprofit sector. He also pointed to Nevada, a state that is likely to pass a new law this year granting collective bargaining rights to state workers. “We are primed to organize 20,000 new members because of that,” he said.
The post Unions See an Opening in the Wake of a Ruling That Was Supposed to Finish Them Off appeared first on The Intercept.
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