A Nike lançou seu primeiro hijab esportivo em dezembro de 2017, anunciado com elegantes fotos preto e branco de atletas muçulmanas bem-sucedidas vestindo o Pro Hijab decorado com o icônico swoosh (nome do logotipo famoso da marca). No mesmo mês, o TSA (Transport Security Administration) selecionou 14 mulheres que vestiam hijabs para uma revista no aeroporto Newark; elas foram, então, apalpadas, revistadas e detidas por duas horas.
Entre fevereiro e março do ano passado, Gucci, Versace e outras marcas de luxo em suas respectivas semanas de moda outono/inverno trouxeram às passarelas basicamente só mulheres brancas vestindo véus semelhantes a hijabs. Naquela mesma época, duas mulheres entraram com um processo de direitos humanos contra a cidade de Nova York por um incidente que em a polícia nova-iorquina as forçou a remover seus hijabs para fotos de fichamento policial.
A Gap, marca de roupas famosa por seu ethos totalmente americano, mostrou em suas propagandas de volta às aulas do ano passado uma menina sorridente vestindo um hijab. Enquanto isso, crianças eram forçadas a sair de uma piscina pública em Delaware; foi dito a elas que seus hijabs poderiam entupir o sistema de filtragem da água.
Ao vender roupas recatadas ou colocando em foco as hijabis (mulheres que vestem o véu) em propagandas, a indústria de roupas dos Estados Unidos está convocando mulheres muçulmanas para se tornaram o seu mais novo nicho consumidor. Para acessar o potencial multibilionário do mercado consumidor muçulmano nos EUA, grandes varejistas se posicionaram como refúgios conscientes socialmente para muçulmanos, operando a partir da motivação de lucro ao invés do imperativo moral.
Muitas mulheres muçulmanas, principalmente aquelas que cresceram após o 11 de setembro, podem achar a inclusão delas enquanto consumidoras um alívio da islamofobia diária. No entanto, as representações difundidas por empresas varejistas são redutoras da identidade dos muçulmanos americanos. A algumas muçulmanas que se conformam com as expectativas de patriotismo e consumismo é garantida a visibilidade, enquanto outras, como mulheres muçulmanas negras, são apagadas da narrativa do islã nos EUA. No meio disso, muçulmanos cujo trabalho é explorado fora do país desaparecem da consciência corporativa.
O mercado consumidor muçulmanoEm fevereiro, a Macy’s se tornou a primeira loja de departamentos americana a vender uma linha de roupas recatadas, chamada Coleção Verona. A loja foi amplamente elogiada como “inclusiva” e que estaria “levando a diversidade a sério”. O site Refinery29 disse que “É ótimo ver a Macy’s realmente dando passos em direção a advogar as causas que diz acreditar”.
Coleção Verona da loja Macy’s.
Fotos: Lisa Vogl/Cortesia de Lisa Vogl
A Macy’s divulgou a Coleção Verona logo após anunciarem que diversas lojas fechariam em 2018 (mais de 120 lojas fecharam as portas desde 2015). Uma semana antes do lançamento, as ações da varejista bateram seu menor valor de 2018. Mas, após a divulgação, as coisas pareciam estar melhorando para a empresa. “Nesse momento, para investidores, a nova linha de roupas deve ser tratada com cautelosa empolgação pelo que pode significar para a empresa de agora em diante”, disse um analista de negócios.
A instabilidade financeira da Macy’s ao começar a vender hijabs e roupas recatadas coloca em questão o motivo por trás da repentina preocupação em suprir o mercado de consumidoras muçulmanas. Por que agora?
“Parece uma forma de gerar publicidade colocando uma imagem inclusiva, tentando fazê-los parecer mais relevantes”, disse ao Intercept Sylvia Chan-Malik, autora de “Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam” (“Ser muçulmana: Uma história cultural das mulheres de cor no Islã Americano”, em tradução livre). “Mas talvez isso seja cínico, porque eu conheço muitas mulheres muçulmanas que ficaram muito felizes [com a propaganda]. Eu só não sei quais são as intenções.”
Além da Nike, Gap e designers famosos, há diversos exemplos recentes da indústria de varejo e de moda nos EUA “flertando” com mulheres muçulmanas que se vestem de modo mais recatado. Em 2016, a semana de moda de Nova York apresentou o seu primeiro desfile completamente com hijabs da designer indonésia Anniesa Hasibuan. Na mesma época, a marca CoverGirl trouxe a blogueira de beleza Nura Afia como sua mais nova embaixadora da marca. Em maio do ano passado, a rede H&M lançou uma linha de roupas recatadas próximas ao período do Ramadã.
Desde o início dos anos 2010, empresas multinacionais ocidentais supriram as necessidades de consumidores muçulmanos após consultores de marketing os identificarem como um grupo de influência demográfica com crescente poder de compra. De acordo com o último Thomson Reuters State of the Global Islamic Economy Report, muçulmanos ao redor do mundo gastaram cerca de 254 bilhões de dólares em 2016, o que estaria previsto para aumentar para 373 bilhões em 2022.
Varejistas ocidentais concentraram a maior parte de seu alcance muçulmano em consumidores estrangeiros. Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger e DKNY estão entre as marcas que venderam coleções-cápsula (coleção composta por itens de vestuário fora das grandes coleções de estação) ou roupas recatadas já estocadas exclusivamente em suas lojas do Oriente Médio. No último verão, a MAC Cosmetics lançou um glamouroso tutorial de maquiagem para o suhoor, a refeição antes do amanhecer durante o Ramadã, tendo como alvo mulheres na região do Golfo.
Pesquisas de consumo no mercado americano revelaram uma oportunidade similar de lucro. Em 2013, Ogilvy Noor, a “divisão islâmica de marca” da empresa de propaganda Ogilvy, estimou que o poder de compra de americanos muçulmanos seria de 170 bilhões de dólares. DinarStandard e o American Muslim Consumer Consortium reportaram que muçulmanos americanos gastaram 5,4 bilhões em vestuário naquele mesmo ano.
Fotos: Cortesia de Rawan Al Sadi
A Ogilvy Noor determinou que millenials muçulmanos estão levando o consumismo adiante com sua crença coletiva de que “fé e modernidade caminham juntas”.
“Se eu fosse escolher uma pessoa que represente a vanguarda dos muçulmanos do futuro, seria uma mulher: com boa educação, entendida em tecnologia, cosmopolita, determinada a definir seu próprio futuro, leal à marca e consciente que seu consumo diz algo importante sobre quem ela é e como ela escolhe viver sua vida”, explicou Shelina Janmohamed, vice-presidente da Ogilvy Noor, que é muçulmana. “As consumidoras que são alvo dessas marcas são jovens, estilosas e estão prontas para gastar seu dinheiro”.
A abordagem da Ogilvy Noor busca resumir quem essas jovens muçulmanas são, o que pode ser, então, monetizado por empresas. O poder econômico surpreendente do mercado muçulmano é o fator determinante dos esforços do varejo em explorá-lo – sendo algo menor como as muçulmanas podem de fato se beneficiar disso. Mas, para muitas jovens muçulmanas, visibilidade de consumo pode demonstrar um reconhecimento daquilo que é convencional assim como a sensação de pertencimento, não importando as intenções corporativas.
“Talvez eu me sinta mais segura”Enquanto varejistas são, no fim das contas, incentivados pelo lucro, marcas de roupas e cosméticos também estão fornecendo mais opções para mulheres que escolhem se cobrir, assim como satisfazendo os desejos delas por representação, disse Elizabeth Bucar, autora de “Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress” (“Moda devota: Como as muçulmanas se vestem”, em tradução livre).
“Muçulmanos são uma grande parte da população americana hoje – eles são visíveis”, disse Bucar, professora associada à Universidade Northeastern, ao Intercept. “Eles estão se candidatando a cargos políticos, são nossos colegas de trabalho, nossos vizinhos e, do ponto de vista do varejo, eles também são consumidores.”
Muitas muçulmanas celebram, e ativamente participam, dos esforços para reconhecê-las como consumidoras. Blogueiras muçulmanas de moda e beleza no Instagram e no YouTube promovem marcas para centenas de milhares de seguidores. A designer da Coleção Verona, Lisa Vogl, e a modelo Mariah Idrissi, estão dentre aquelas que tiveram sucesso comercial em parceria com grandes marcas.
Em setembro, o Museu Memorial M. H. de Young em São Francisco abriu a primeira grande exibição em moda muçulmana contemporânea, mostrando que o vestuário feminino muçulmano é um tópico legítimo de interesse nos EUA. “Nós queríamos compartilhar com o restante do mundo o que temos visto na moda muçulmana de forma a criar um entendimento melhor sobre ela”, disse o antigo diretor do museu, Max Hollein, ao New York Times.
Foto: Cortesia dos Museus de Belas Artes de São Francisco
Visibilidade de consumo também pode demonstrar um passo adiante na inclusão de muçulmanos como americanos em tempos politicamente hostis, principalmente para a geração que cresceu durante a guerra ao terror, quando a maior parte das representações mostravam muçulmanos como terroristas estrangeiros e uma ameaça à segurança nacional.
“Isso é uma validação muito grande em um nível pessoal para mulheres muçulmanas que usam véu, que sofrem com comentários, críticas duras e a violência que elas encontram todos os dias”, disse Chan-Malik, professora associada na Universidade Rutgers. “É quase um senso prático de alívio, algo como ‘Ah, se isso se tornar normal, talvez eu me sinta mais segura’”.
Que a representação crescente é significativa para algumas muçulmanas é algo que não pode ser ignorado. No entanto, quem é visto e como é visto é algo que expõe as lógicas subjacentes do capitalismo que nivelam a falsa visibilidade de que as mulheres muçulmanas são as mais comercializáveis.
O “fetiche pelo hijab”O mercado homogeniza as muçulmanas, transformando diversidade em um produto que pode ser facilmente digerido. “Certos tipos de representação e visibilidade são privilegiados, enquanto outros são tidos como indesejáveis”, escrevem Ellen McLarney, professora associada da Universidade Duke e Banu Gökariksel, da Universidade da Carolina do Norte. “Identidades muçulmanas desagradáveis às sensibilidades do mercado são excluídas, frequentemente levando a maiores marginalizações nas interseções de classe, raça e etnicidade.”
Isso fica evidente em como as indústrias da moda e da beleza garantem visibilidade a certas mulheres muçulmanas. Ao escrever sobre o “fetiche pelo hijab” na cultura de consumo, a colunista do jornal The Guardian, Nesrine Malik, descreveu como as representações de mulheres muçulmanas em propagandas se enquadram em “uma imagem, com a luz perfeita, de uma mulher vestindo hijab cheia de filtros, bonita, burguesa e de pele clara”.
Na verdade, a maior parte das muçulmanas nos Estados Unidos nem sempre usa o véu em público; um quinto dos americanos muçulmanos são negros; quase metade dos americanos muçulmanos declararam renda de menos de 30 mil dólares no ano passado; e muitos americanos muçulmanos se identificam como queer, transgênero ou pessoas com não-conformidade de gênero.
Apesar do fato de que mulheres muçulmanas negras são amplamente ausentes da cultura de consumo comum, diz Kayla Wheeler, professora assistente na Universidade Grand Valley State, as mulheres da Nação do Islã e do Moorish Science Temple of America alicerçaram as fundações para a moda muçulmana nos EUA décadas atrás.
“A Nação do Islã tentou usar roupas para dar a mulheres negras uma nova identidade respeitável que lhes foi negada pela supremacia branca, para que elas pudessem … ir contra os estereótipos de mulheres negras como promíscuas, assexuadas ou nem mesmo mulheres ou humanos reais”, diz Wheeler, que pesquisa a moda muçulmana negra.
A modelo somali-americana Halima Aden e a esgrimista olímpica Ibtihaj Muhammad, junto das designers Nzinga Knight, Eman Idil e Lubna Muhammad, estão entre as poucas mulheres negras muçulmanas que ganharam visibilidade na indústria da moda.
“Mulheres negras muçulmanas são triplamente mais vulneráveis nos EUA a ataques racistas, misóginos e islamofóbicos.”Wheeler disse que os véus de mulheres negras muçulmanas podem ser racialmente distintos em estilos de dobrar e ainda em tecidos – nuances que são obscuras nas imagens comerciais com a predominância de mulheres do Oriente Médio e do sul da Ásia. Em meio a isso, mulheres negras muçulmanas são triplamente mais vulneráveis nos EUA a ataques racistas, misóginos e islamofóbicos (no mês passado, um homem branco apontou uma arma para um grupo de adolescentes negros muçulmanos, incluindo meninas que usavam véu, em um McDonald’s em Minnesota).
“Negros muçulmanos não são vistos com tanta simpatia como os muçulmanos pardos,” disse Wheeler ao Intercept. “Todos enfrentam a islamofobia, mas quando se adiciona a anti-negritude e suspeitas do islã negro não ser o islã real, eles se tornam não apenas uma ameaça estrangeira, mas uma ameaça local.”
A postura corporativa em relação a grupos marginalizados – o que a professora de direito Nancy Leond, da Universidade de Denver, descreve como capitalismo racial – é, há muito tempo, uma prática de negócios para persuadir grupos minoritários a se tornaram leais às marcas e consumidores liberais a comprar produtos como uma afirmação política.
Uma imagem de uma propaganda da L’Oréal Paris com Amena Khan.
Em janeiro, a L’Oréal Paris anunciou sua “única e revolucionária” campanha de produtos para cabelos com a modelo e influenciadora digital Amena Khan. No anúncio, ela vestia um hijab rosa claro, com um blazer rosa, em frente a um fundo também rosa. Em uma semana, Khan deixou de participar da campanha após seus tuítes criticando Israel pelos ataques em Gaza em 2014 virem a público. Em declaração, a L’Oréal Paris concordou com a decisão de Khan de se retirar, dizendo que a empresa está “comprometida com a tolerância e o respeito a todas as pessoas.”
Marcas “querem o rosto, mas não querem a política complexa, a identidade ou a voz por trás dele”, disse Hoda Katebi, blogueira de moda política e organizadora comunitária, ao Intercept, referindo-se às suas próprias experiências com marcas que a convidaram para trabalhar com ou ser modelo de suas roupas. “Uma vez que uma mulher muçulmana se impõe, eles acabam com isso.”
A fetichização do hijab descende de décadas de imagens estereotípicas que foram usadas para fortificar projetos imperialistas no Oriente Médio e políticas islamofóbicas e atitudes em solo americano. A interferência americana em países de maioria muçulmana e na guerra ao terror foi o contexto político em que varejistas e publicitários transformaram mulheres muçulmanas e suas roupas em commodities.
Foto: Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images
A representação das mulheres muçulmanas e do véu na cultura de consumo norte-americana mudou ao longo da história, junto com os interesses do império americano. O véu, que contempla uma miríade de formas de cobrir a cabeça, já recebeu vários significados, muitas vezes contraditórios: empoderador, opressivo, ameaçador, elegante, subversivo.
Por décadas, o mito da benevolência imperial informou a política externa dos EUA, ao lado de uma falsa preocupação com as mulheres muçulmanas e suas condições culturais, que serviram para promover os interesses em benefício da elite política e econômica.
O véu virou fetiche nos EUA durante o movimento feminino do Irã após a revolução de 1979, disse Chan-Malik ao Intercept. As mulheres se mobilizaram em uma semana de protestos após o aiatolá Khomeini, que substituiu o xá apoiado pelos Estados Unidos, Reza Pahlavi, estabelecer o uso compulsório do véu, impedindo-as de escolher se queriam ou não cobrir a cabeça.
Mulheres muçulmanas reunidas perto de uma placa com a imagem do aiatolá Komeini, durante uma manifestação no início de fevereiro de 1979, em Teerã, no Irã.
Foto: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
A mídia norte-americana focou no xador (véu que cobre todo o corpo, com exceção do rosto) como o símbolo da opressão a que as “pobres mulheres muçulmanas” eram submetidas sob o governo do aiatolá, escreve Chan-Malik em seu livro. “Os direitos das mulheres se tornaram um grito de guerra que podia ser utilizado pelos Estados Unidos para explicar o mal do Oriente Médio e o ‘terror’ do Islã.”
As imagens criadas e difundidas durante essa época estabeleceram um orientalismo americano que continua a formar uma ideia das mulheres muçulmanas como reprimidas e precisando de um salvador norte-americano.
Em seu livro “The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture” (“O Véu Revelado: o Hijab na Cultura Moderna”, em tradução livre), a professora Faegheh Shirazi, da Universidade do Texas em Austin, lista uma série de estratégias de marketing anteriores ao 11 de setembro de 2001, baseadas em estereótipos orientalistas, que eram utilizadas para vender carros, computadores, perfume e até mesmo sopa: “a mulher misteriosa escondida atrás de seu véu, esperando para ser conquistada por um homem americano; a mulher submissa, forçada a se esconder atrás do véu; e a mulher genérica encoberta pelo véu, representando todos os povos e culturas do Oriente Médio.”
Após o 11 de setembro, a burca virou o símbolo mais visível da Guerra do Afeganistão, transformada em uma arma a mais para servir aos interesses imperiais do governo Bush. Em uma famigerada fala no rádio, a primeira-dama Laura Bush alegou que o Talibã “ameaçava arrancar as unhas de mulheres que usassem esmalte”, um detalhe sórdido sugerindo que inclusive produtos de beleza estavam sujeitos a um policiamento tirânico. Tirar o véu das mulheres afegãs representaria sua “liberdade”, bem como sua transformação em consumidoras.
Após a queda do Talibã, a indústria de beleza dos EUA agiu como um braço do império e aproveitou a oportunidade para exportar produtos e técnicas ocidentais ao Afeganistão. As revistas Marie Claire e Vogue, acompanhadas por empresas de cosméticos como Paul Mitchell e Estée Lauder, financiaram o “Beleza Sem Fronteiras”, uma escola em Cabul dedicada a ensinar mulheres como trabalhar em um salão de beleza, ignorando o fato de que esses salões já existiam no país. Xampus e maquiagens americanos se tornaram ferramentas para liberar mulheres muçulmanas.
Foto: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
No início desta década, o véu ainda era visto com suspeita quando vestido por mulheres muçulmanas, mas em geral havia se transformado em uma commodity provocativa e frequentemente sexualizada. A “burca chique” aparecia em revistas de moda e passarelas e jogava com o choque gerado pelo véu, escreve McLarney. A marca de jeans Diesel lançou uma peça publicitária em 2013 com uma mulher branca tatuada, fazendo topless e usando um niqab, enquanto celebridades não-muçulmanas, incluindo Rihanna, Madonna e Lady Gaga, brincavam de vestir véus como se eles fossem fantasias. A manipulação capitalista, escreve McLarney, havia transformado o véu “de um emblema de profunda desumanização em uma expressão de moda, protesto e mesmo liberdade individual.”
As roupas das mulheres muçulmanas adquiriram um novo significado no governo Trump, que endossa tacitamente a exclusão, criminalização e ódio aos muçulmanos. O pedido de campanha de Trump por um registro de muçulmanos e uma “paralisação total e completa da entrada de muçulmanos nos Estados Unidos”, que se manifestou na prática com o banimento à entrada de viajantes muçulmanos no país, deu o tom da sua abordagem a muçulmanos nascidos nos EUA.
Em resposta, os progressistas transformaram a mulher muçulmana em um ícone feminista. A imagem estilizada de uma mulher usando uma bandeira americana como hijab, criada pelo artista de rua Shepard Fairey, apareceu sobre a multidão na Marcha das Mulheres como um símbolo de inclusão multicultural e resistência política. No entanto, como muitos já assinalaram, a imagem distorce a história de violência estatal e injustiça contra muçulmanos nos EUA e no exterior — e a cumplicidade do movimento feminista americano nisso tudo. A óbvia presença do poster em manifestações anti-Trump também evocava como muçulmanas-americanas são representadas de formas que podem ser danosas à comunidade.
A política da visibilidadeA visibilidade seletiva das hijabis reforça um falso binarismo entre muçulmanas “boas” e “más”, apoiando muçulmanas progressistas e militantes como toleráveis e benignas sem corrigir as percepções profundamente consolidadas de muçulmanos como terroristas e fanáticos. Embora a maioria dos americanos não conheça pessoalmente um muçulmano, o Pew Research Center destaca que eles são o grupo religioso visto da forma mais negativa. Um estudo recente também demonstrou que ataques terroristas perpetrados por alguém suspeito de ser muçulmano recebem uma cobertura 357% maior no noticiário.
“As pessoas amam muçulmanos bons e patriotas, que não ameaçam a branquitude, que não desafiam a violência histórica e sistemática sobre a qual o país foi construído”, diz Aqdas Aftab, que escreveu sobre hijab e capitalismo como membro da Bitch Media.
Enquanto mulheres muçulmanas são cada vez mais acolhidas na cultura de consumo, homens muçulmanos ainda são vistos como “figuras sexualmente frustradas, violentas, inerentemente patriarcais”, diz Nazia Kazi, autora do livro “Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics” (“Islamofobia, Raça e Política Global”, em tradução livre) — esses estereótipos se materializam na continuada criminalização dos homens muçulmanos.
Os muçulmanos nos EUA vêm sendo monitorados por policiamento e vigilância patrocinados pelo Estado, escreve Kazi, e também pela “curiosidade, preocupação e observação cotidianos”. Quando se trata de mulheres muçulmanas, ela escreve, a observação se torna uma “fascinação voyeurista”.
“Mulheres muçulmanas, especificamente aquelas que usam o hijab, são uma fonte única de curiosidade e compaixão e preconceito e suposições islamofóbicas”, disse Kazi, que é professora na Universidade Stockton, ao Intercept.
Esse preconceito aumentou na era Trump, um momento em que retórica e política flagrantemente islamofóbicas coincidiram com um aumento na discriminação e abusos contra muçulmanos. O Conselho para Relações Americano-Islâmicas reportou um aumento de 17% em incidentes contra muçulmanos entre 2016 e 2017, uma tendência que continuava em 2018. Apenas neste ano, houve numerosos relatos de hijabis sendo assediadas, verbalmente abusadas, empurradas no metrô e atacadas, tendo seus hijabs arrancados.
Para Kazi, a abordagem das empresas de varejo diante da islamofobia “alavancou a hipervisibilidade”, ou aproveitou o exame minucioso dos muçulmanos para destacar os mais exemplares. Isso teve o efeito de tornar invisível “quão devastador a islamofobia é para as mais marginalizadas dentre as mulheres muçulmanas ao redor do mundo”, diz Kazi.
A indústria do vestuário, por exemplo, aumenta a visibilidade de algumas mulheres muçulmanas, enquanto esconde outras do público — aquelas cujo trabalho é explorado em fábricas de roupas em outros países.
Foto: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
A produção global da moda rápida depende de empregos escravizantes para trazer as últimas tendências das passarelas aos cabides do mundo. Gap e H&M usam fábricas em países de maioria muçulmana e foram acusados de violência baseada no gênero e abusos trabalhistas. A Nike, notória por depender há décadas de trabalhadores explorados, também utiliza fábricas em países predominantemente muçulmanos.
“Quem vai cobrar sua responsabilidade por pagar mal, exigir trabalho excessivo, e assediar seus empregados vulneráveis quando essas mesmas empresas são saudadas como inclusivas e progressistas?”, diz Aftab.
Muçulmanos que aplaudem a comercialização do hijab devem estarcientes da exploração dos trabalhadores muçulmanos do setor de vestuário, e também de como as grandes corporações estão tirando oportunidades de negócios pequenos e mantidos por muçulmanos, como Katebi, que organiza uma cooperativa de costura para mulheres refugiadas em Chicago. Isso inclui empresas como a Haute Hikab e a Sukoon Active, que vêm fazendo roupas recatadas e roupas esportivas há anos.
Ilhan Omar celebra com suas apoiadoras após sua vitória no 5º Distrito Congressional em Minneapolis, Minnesota, em 6 de novembro de 2018.
Foto: Karem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images
Aumentar a representação muçulmana não é apenas uma estratégia pouco efetiva para combater a islamofobia, mas também é perigosa, diz Kazi, pois confunde a islamofobia como uma visão individual, ao invés de um aparato estrutural.
“A hipervisibilidade de muçulmanos está inegavelmente ligada ao clima político”, ela diz. “Então, enquanto o público lança esse olhar sobre muçulmanos nos EUA, o que sai da conversa são as histórias políticas, a desigualdade regional, as histórias de supremacia branca e raça”.
Mulheres muçulmanas encabeçam a vinda dessas questões para o discurso político de massa, particularmente na política eleitoral e nas organizações de base. Rashida Tlaib, do Michigan, e Omar Ilhan, de Minnesota, que em 3 de janeiro se tornaram as primeiras mulheres muçulmanas no Congresso dos EUA, concorreram com plataformas progressivas que incluíam um salário mínimo de 15 dólares por hora, “Seguro-saúde para todos”, e a abolição da Agência de Imigração e Alfândega dos Estados Unidos.
Katebi descreveu sua visão para uma mudança sistêmica: aqueles que fazem arte e aqueles que fazem política fazendo parcerias com as comunidades para garantir ganhos materiais. “Nossa liberação”, ela diz, “não virá de corporações capitalistas e multibilionárias encabeçadas por gente branca”.
Liberdade e justiça, para muçulmanos e não-muçulmanos, serão conquistadas nas urnas e no chão — e não no caixa de uma loja.
Tradução: Maíra Santos
The post Vendendo a mulher muçulmana: Hijabs e moda recatada são a nova tendência na era Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
Em 11 de dezembro de 1981, em El Salvador, uma unidade militar salvadorenha criada e treinada pelo Exército dos EUA começou a abater todas as pessoas que encontrou em um vilarejo remoto chamado El Mozote. Antes de assassinar as mulheres e as meninas, os soldados as estupravam repetidamente, incluindo algumas de apenas 10 anos de idade, brincando que suas preferidas eram as de 12 anos. Uma testemunha descreveu um soldado atirando uma criança de 3 anos para o alto e a empalando com sua baioneta. O número final de mortos foi de mais de 800 pessoas.
O dia seguinte, 12 de dezembro, foi o primeiro dia de trabalho para Elliott Abrams como secretário de Estado adjunto para os direitos humanos e assuntos humanitários no governo Reagan. Abrams entrou em ação, ajudando a encobrir o massacre. Em depoimento ao Senado, Abrams disse que notícias a respeito do que havia acontecido “não tinham credibilidade” e que tudo estava sendo “significativamente mal utilizado” como propaganda por guerrilheiros antigovernamentais.
Na sexta-feira passada, o secretário de Estado Mike Pompeo nomeou Abrams como enviado especial dos Estados Unidos para a Venezuela. Segundo Pompeo, Abrams “será responsável por todas as coisas relacionadas aos nossos esforços para restaurar a democracia” na nação rica em petróleo.
A escolha de Abrams envia uma mensagem clara à Venezuela e ao mundo: o governo Trump pretende brutalizar a Venezuela, ao mesmo tempo em que produz um fluxo de discursos obsequiosos sobre o amor dos Estados Unidos pela democracia e os direitos humanos. Combinar esses dois fatores – a brutalidade e a magnanimidade – é a principal competência de Abrams.
Anteriormente, Abrams serviu em uma infinidade de funções nos governos de Ronald Reagan e George W. Bush, muitas vezes com títulos declarando foco na moralidade. Primeiro, foi secretário de Estado adjunto para assuntos de organização internacional (em 1981); depois, o cargo de “direitos humanos” do departamento de Estado mencionado acima (de 1981 a 1985); secretário de Estado adjunto para assuntos interamericanos (de 1985 a 1989); diretor-sênior de democracia, direitos humanos e operações internacionais do Conselho de Segurança Nacional (de 2001 a 2005); e, finalmente, consultor adjunto de segurança nacional de Bush para a estratégia da democracia global (de 2005 a 2009).
Nessas posições, Abrams participou de muitos dos atos mais sinistros da política externa norte-americana dos últimos 40 anos, sempre proclamando o quanto se importava com os estrangeiros que ele e seus amigos estavam assassinando. Em retrospecto, é inquietante ver como Abrams quase sempre esteve presente quando as ações dos EUA eram mais sórdidas.
Abrams, graduado do Harvard College e da Harvard Law School, juntou-se à administração Reagan em 1981, aos 33 anos. Logo recebeu uma promoção devido a um golpe de sorte: Reagan queria nomear Ernest Lefever como secretário de Estado adjunto para os direitos humanos e assuntos humanitários, mas a nomeação de Lefever encalhou quando dois de seus irmãos revelaram que ele acreditava que os afro-americanos eram “inferiores, intelectualmente falando”. Um Reagan decepcionado foi forçado a recorrer a Abrams como segunda opção.
Uma preocupação central da administração Reagan na época era a América Central – em particular, as quatro nações adjacentes de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras e Nicarágua. Todas haviam sido dominadas desde a sua fundação por minúsculas elites brancas e cruéis, com um século de ajuda das intervenções dos EUA. Em cada um desses países, as famílias dominantes viam os outros habitantes de sua sociedade como animais de forma humana, que podiam ser usados ou mortos, conforme necessário.
Porém, pouco antes da posse de Reagan, Anastasio Somoza, o ditador da Nicarágua e aliado dos EUA, foi derrubado por uma revolução socialista. Os reaganistas viram isso racionalmente como uma ameaça aos governos dos vizinhos da Nicarágua. Todos os países tinham grandes populações que, da mesma forma, não gostavam de trabalhar nas plantações de café ou de ver os filhos morrerem de doenças facilmente tratáveis. Alguns pegariam em armas e alguns simplesmente tentariam manter a cabeça baixa, mas todos, do ponto de vista dos guerreiros frios da Casa Branca, eram provavelmente “comunistas” recebendo ordens de Moscou. Eles precisavam aprender uma lição.
Foto: Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images
O extermínio de El Mozote foi apenas uma gota no rio do que aconteceu em El Salvador durante os anos 1980. Cerca de 75 mil salvadorenhos morreram durante o que é chamado de “guerra civil”, embora quase todos os assassinatos tenham sido perpetrados pelo governo e seus esquadrões da morte.
Os números por si só não contam a história toda. El Salvador é um país pequeno, do tamanho do estado norte-americano de Nova Jersey. O número equivalente de mortes nos EUA seria de quase 5 milhões. Além disso, o regime salvadorenho continuamente se engajou em atos de barbárie tão hediondos que não há equivalente contemporâneo, exceto talvez o ISIS. Em uma ocasião, um padre católico relatou que uma camponesa deixou brevemente seus três filhos pequenos aos cuidados de suas mãe e irmã. Quando voltou, descobriu que todos os cinco haviam sido decapitados pela guarda nacional salvadorenha. Seus corpos estavam sentados ao redor de uma mesa, com as mãos postas nas cabeças diante deles, “como se cada corpo estivesse acariciando a própria cabeça”. A mão de um, uma criança pequena, aparentemente continuava escorregando da cabecinha, de modo que havia sido pregada nela. No centro da mesa, havia uma grande tigela cheia de sangue.
A crítica da política dos EUA na época não estava confinada à esquerda. Durante esse período, Charles Maechling Jr., que havia liderado o planejamento do departamento de contra-insurgência durante a década de 1960, escreveu no Los Angeles Times que os EUA estavam apoiando “oligarquias semelhantes à máfia” em El Salvador e em outros lugares e eram diretamente cúmplices em “métodos dos esquadrões de extermínio de Heinrich Himmler”.
Abrams foi um dos arquitetos da política do governo Reagan de apoio total ao governo salvadorenho. Ele não tinha escrúpulos em relação a nada disso nem piedade de quem escapasse do matadouro salvadorenho. Em 1984, soando exatamente como os funcionários de Trump hoje, Abrams explicou que os salvadorenhos que estavam nos EUA ilegalmente não deveriam receber nenhum tipo de status especial. “Alguns grupos argumentam que imigrantes ilegais que são enviados de volta a El Salvador enfrentam perseguição e muitas vezes a morte”, ele disse à Câmara dos Deputados. “Obviamente, não acreditamos nessas alegações, ou não deportaríamos essas pessoas.”
Mesmo fora do cargo, 10 anos após o massacre de El Mozote, Abrams expressou dúvidas de que algo desagradável houvesse ocorrido lá. Em 1993, quando uma comissão da verdade das Nações Unidas descobriu que 95% dos atos de violência ocorridos em El Salvador desde 1980 haviam sido cometidos por amigos de Abrams no governo salvadorenho, ele chamou o que ele e seus colegas no governo Reagan haviam feito de uma “realização fabulosa”.
A Fundação de Antropologia Forense da Guatemala examina sacolas de fotografias soltas dos arquivos da polícia nacional em 27 de julho de 2006, estudando as atrocidades cometidas pela polícia e os assassinatos cometidos durante os 30 anos de guerra civil na Guatemala.
Foto: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post/Getty Images
A situação na Guatemala durante os anos 1980 era praticamente a mesma, assim como as ações de Abrams. Depois que os EUA arquitetaram a derrubada do presidente democraticamente eleito da Guatemala em 1954, o país havia sucumbido a um pesadelo em torno de ditaduras militares. Entre 1960 e 1996, em outra “guerra civil”, 200 mil guatemaltecos foram mortos – o equivalente a talvez 8 milhões de pessoas nos Estados Unidos. Uma comissão da ONU descobriu depois que o estado guatemalteco foi responsável por 93% das violações dos direitos humanos.
Efraín Ríos Montt, que serviu como presidente da Guatemala no início dos anos 1980, foi considerado culpado em 2013 pelo sistema de justiça da própria Guatemala de cometer genocídio contra os indígenas maias do país. Durante a administração de Ríos Montt, Abrams pediu o levantamento de um embargo às remessas de armas dos EUA para a Guatemala, alegando que Ríos Montt havia “trazido progresso considerável”. Os EUA tiveram de apoiar o governo guatemalteco, argumentou Abrams, porque “se assumirmos a atitude de ‘não nos procurem até estarem perfeitos, vamos nos afastar desse problema até que a Guatemala tenha um registro de direitos humanos perfeito’, e deixaremos na mão as pessoas que estão tentando progredir”. Um exemplo das pessoas que estavam fazendo um esforço honesto, segundo Abrams, era Ríos Montt. Graças a Ríos Montt, “houve uma tremenda mudança, especialmente na atitude do governo em relação à população indiana”. (A condenação de Ríos Montt foi mais tarde anulada pela mais alta corte civil da Guatemala, e ele morreu antes que um novo julgamento pudesse terminar.)
NicaráguaAbrams se tornaria mais conhecido por seu envolvimento entusiasmado com o esforço do governo Reagan para derrubar o revolucionário governo sandinista da Nicarágua. Ele defendeu a invasão total da Nicarágua em 1983, imediatamente após o bem-sucedido ataque dos Estados Unidos à pequena nação insular de Granada. Quando o Congresso cortou fundos para os Contras, força guerrilheira antissandinista criada pelos Estados Unidos, Abrams conseguiu persuadir o sultão de Brunei a desembolsar US$ 10 milhões pela causa. Infelizmente, Abrams, agindo sob o codinome “Kenilworth”, forneceu ao sultão o número errado da conta bancária na Suíça, de modo que o dinheiro foi transferido para um beneficiário sortudo aleatório.
Abrams foi questionado pelo Congresso sobre suas atividades relacionadas aos contras e mentiu abundantemente. Mais tarde, ele se declarou culpado de duas acusações de retenção de informações. Uma era sobre o sultão e seu dinheiro, e outra, sobre o conhecimento de Abrams de um avião C-123 de reabastecimento dos contras que havia sido abatido em 1986. Em uma bela rima histórica com sua nova função na administração Trump, Abrams já havia tentado obter dois C-123 para os contras dos militares da Venezuela.
Abrams recebeu uma sentença de 100 horas de prestação de serviço comunitário e considerou todo o caso como uma injustiça de proporções cósmicas. Logo escreveu um livro em que descreveu seu monólogo interior sobre seus acusadores, que dizia: “Seus desgraçados miseráveis e imundos, seus sanguessugas!” Mais tarde, ele foi perdoado pelo presidente George H. W. Bush na saída dele após perder a eleição de 1992.
PanamáEmbora isso esteja esquecido agora, antes dos Estados Unidos invadirem o Panamá para derrubar Manuel Noriega em 1989, este era um aliado próximo dos EUA – apesar de a administração Reagan saber que ele era um traficante de drogas em larga escala.
Em 1985, Hugo Spadafora, uma figura popular no Panamá e seu ex-vice-ministro da saúde, acreditava ter obtido provas do envolvimento de Noriega no tráfico de cocaína. Ele estava em um ônibus a caminho da Cidade do Panamá para torná-las públicas quando foi capturado por capangas de Noriega.
De acordo com o livro “Overthrow” (Derrubada), do ex-correspondente do New York Times, Stephen Kinzer, a inteligência dos EUA pegou Noriega dando aos seus subalternos a permissão para derrubar Spadafora como “um cão raivoso”. Spadafora foi torturado durante uma longa noite e teve a cabeça serrada enquanto ainda estava vivo. Quando o corpo foi encontrado, o estômago de Spadafora estava cheio de sangue que ele engoliu.
Foi algo tão terrível que chamou a atenção das pessoas. Mas Abrams saltou em defesa de Noriega, impedindo o embaixador dos EUA no Panamá de aumentar a pressão sobre o líder panamenho. Quando o irmão de Spadafora convenceu o hiperconservador senador do Partido Republicano da Carolina do Norte, Jesse Helms, a realizar audiências no Panamá, Abrams disse a Helms que Noriega estava “sendo realmente útil para nós” e “não era um problema tão grande assim. … Os panamenhos prometeram que vão nos ajudar com os contras. Se você fizer as audiências, isso os alienará”.
… E isso não é tudoAbrams também se envolveu em conduta ilegal por nenhuma razão discernível, talvez apenas para ficar em forma. Em 1986, uma jornalista colombiana chamada Patricia Lara foi convidada aos EUA para participar de um jantar de homenagem a escritores que haviam promovido “o entendimento interamericano e a liberdade de informação”. Quando Lara chegou ao aeroporto Kennedy, em Nova York, foi levada sob custódia e depois colocada em um avião de volta para casa. Logo depois, Abrams apareceu no programa “60 minutos” para alegar que Lara era membro dos “comitês dirigentes” do M-19, um movimento guerrilheiro colombiano. Ainda segundo Abrams, ela era também “uma ligação ativa” entre o M-19 “e a polícia secreta cubana”.
Dada a frequente violência paramilitar de direita contra os repórteres colombianos, isso representou um alvo marcado nas costas de Lara. Não houve evidência de que as afirmações de Abrams fossem verdadeiras – o próprio governo conservador da Colômbia as negou – e nenhuma apareceu desde então.
Os enganos sem fim e desavergonhados de Abrams desgastaram repórteres americanos. “Eles diziam que preto era branco”, explicou mais tarde Joanne Omang, do Washington Post, sobre Abrams e seu colega na Casa Branca, Robert McFarlane. “Embora tivesse usado todos os meus recursos profissionais, enganei meus leitores.” Omang ficou tão exausta com a experiência, que largou o emprego tentando descrever o mundo real para tentar escrever ficção.
Após a condenação, Abrams passou a ser visto como um problema que não podia retornar ao governo. Isso o subestimou. O almirante William J. Crowe Jr., ex-comandante dos chefes de estado maior conjunto, envolveu-se ferozmente com Abrams em 1989 sobre a política dos EUA quanto a Noriega, depois que ficou claro que ele era mais problemático do que era possível aceitar. Crowe se opôs fortemente à brilhante ideia que Abrams havia apresentado: de que os Estados Unidos deveriam estabelecer um governo no exílio em solo panamenho, o que exigiria a guarda de milhares de soldados norte-americanos. Foi algo profundamente estúpido, Crowe disse, mas isso não importava. Prescientemente, Crowe emitiu um aviso sobre Abrams: “Esta cobra é difícil de matar”.
Foto: Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images
Para a surpresa dos iniciados mais ingênuos de Washington, Abrams estava de volta à ativa logo depois de George W. Bush entrar na Casa Branca. Como poderia ser difícil obter aprovação do Senado para alguém que havia enganado o Congresso, Bush o colocou em um cargo no Conselho de Segurança Nacional – onde não era necessária qualquer aprovação do Legislativo. Assim como ocorrera 20 anos antes, Abrams recebeu um portfólio envolvendo “democracia” e “direitos humanos”.
VenezuelaNo início de 2002, o presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, havia se tornado profundamente irritante à Casa Branca de Bush, que estava repleta de veteranos das batalhas dos anos 1980. Naquele mês de abril, de repente, do nada, Chávez foi expulso do poder em um golpe. Se e como os EUA estavam envolvidos ainda não é conhecido, e provavelmente não será por décadas até que os documentos relevantes sejam desclassificados. Mas, com base nos cem anos anteriores, seria surpreendente que os Estados Unidos não tenham desempenhado nenhum papel nos bastidores. Pelo que se sabe, na época, o London Observer relatou que “a figura crucial em torno do golpe foi Abrams”, e ele “deu um aceno” aos conspiradores. De qualquer modo, Chávez teve apoio popular suficiente para conseguir se reagrupar e voltar ao cargo em questão de dias.
IrãAparentemente, Abrams desempenhou um papel importante no silenciamento de uma proposta de paz do Irã em 2003, logo após a invasão do Iraque pelos EUA. O plano chegou por fax, e deveria ter ido para Abrams e depois para Condoleezza Rice, na época conselheira de segurança nacional de Bush. Em vez disso, de alguma forma, a proposta nunca chegou à mesa de Rice. Quando perguntado a respeito disso mais tarde, o porta-voz de Abrams respondeu que ele “não tinha lembrança de qualquer fax do tipo”. (Abrams, como tantas pessoas que prosperam no nível mais alto da política, tem uma memória terrível para qualquer coisa política. Em 1984, ele disse a Ted Koppel que não conseguia se lembrar se os EUA haviam investigado relatos de massacres em El Salvador. Em 1986, quando perguntado pelo comitê de inteligência do Senado se havia discutido a arrecadação de fundos para os contras com qualquer pessoa da equipe do Conselho de Segurança Nacional, também não conseguiu se lembrar.)
Israel e PalestinaAbrams também esteve no centro de outra tentativa de frustrar o resultado de uma eleição democrática, em 2006. Bush havia pressionado por eleições legislativas na Cisjordânia e em Gaza para dar à Fatah, a organização palestina altamente corrupta liderada pelo sucessor de Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, uma legitimidade muito necessária. Para surpresa de todos, o rival do Fatah, o Hamas, ganhou, dando-lhe o direito de formar um governo.
Esse desagradável surto de democracia não foi aceitável para o governo Bush, em especial para Rice e Abrams. Eles elaboraram um plano para formar uma milícia da Fatah para assumir a Faixa de Gaza e esmagar o Hamas em seu território. Como relatado pela Vanity Fair, isso envolveu muita tortura e execuções. Mas o Hamas combateu o Fatah com sua própria ultraviolência. David Wurmser, neoconservador que trabalhava para Dick Cheney na época, disse à Vanity Fair: “Parece-me que o que aconteceu não foi tanto um golpe do Hamas, mas uma tentativa de golpe do Fatah que foi esvaziada antes que pudesse acontecer”. No entanto, desde então, esses eventos foram virados de cabeça para baixo pela mídia dos EUA, com o Hamas sendo apresentado como o agressor.
Embora o plano dos EUA não tenha sido um sucesso total, também não foi um fracasso total da perspectiva dos Estados Unidos e de Israel. A guerra civil palestina dividiu a Cisjordânia e Gaza em duas entidades, com governos rivais em ambos. Nos últimos 13 anos, houve poucos sinais da unidade política necessária para que os palestinos tivessem uma vida digna para si mesmos.
Abrams então deixou o cargo com a saída de Bush. Mas agora está de volta para uma terceira rodada pelos corredores do poder – com os mesmos tipos de esquemas que executou nas duas primeiras vezes.
Recapitulando a vida de mentiras e crueldade de Abrams, é difícil imaginar o que ele poderia dizer para justificá-la. Mas ele tem uma defesa para tudo o que fez – e é uma boa defesa.
The year was 1995. A young Elliott Abrams taught us how to laugh. Maniacally. When Allan Nairn brought up his involvement in the mass murder and torture of indigenous people in Guatemala. pic.twitter.com/N2nfDQAUrf
— Allen Haim (@senor_pez) 25 de janeiro de 2019
O ano era 1995. Um jovem Elliott Abrams nos ensinou como rir. Como um maníaco. Quando Allan Nairn falou de seu envolvimento no assassinato e tortura massivas dos povos indígenas na Guatemala.
Em 1995, Abrams apareceu no “The Charlie Rose Show” com Allan Nairn, um dos repórteres americanos mais versados sobre a política externa dos EUA. Nairn observou que George H. W. Bush já havia discutido colocar Saddam Hussein em julgamento por crimes contra a humanidade. Essa era uma boa ideia, disse Nairn, mas “se você é sério, precisa ser imparcial” – o que significaria também processar funcionários como Abrams.
Abrams riu diante do absurdo de tal conceito. Isso exigiria, disse ele, “colocar todos os funcionários americanos que venceram a Guerra Fria no banco dos réus”.
Abrams estava em grande parte certo. A realidade angustiante é que Abrams não é um bandido isolado, mas um respeitado e honrado membro da centro-direita do establishment da política externa dos EUA. Seus primeiros empregos antes de ingressar no governo Reagan foram trabalhar para dois senadores democratas, Henry Jackson e Daniel Moynihan. Ele era um membro sênior do conselho centrista de relações exteriores. Ele é membro da comissão dos EUA sobre liberdade religiosa internacional e agora está no conselho do National Endowment for Democracy. Ele deu aulas à próxima geração de funcionários de política externa na Escola de Serviço Exterior da Universidade de Georgetown. Ele não enganou Reagan e George W. Bush de alguma forma – eles queriam exatamente o que Abrams fornecia.
Portanto, não importam os detalhes macabros da carreira de Abrams, o importante a ser lembrado – conforme a águia americana aperta suas garras afiadas em torno de outro país da América Latina – é que Abrams não é tão excepcional assim. Ele é sobretudo uma engrenagem em uma máquina. É a máquina que é o problema, não suas partes mal intencionadas.
Tradução: Cássia Zanon
The post Escolhido de Trump para levar “democracia” à Venezuela passou a vida esmagando a democracia appeared first on The Intercept.
Eight years ago this month, the wave of pro-democracy protests that came to be known as the Arab Spring reached Bahrain, where a brief flowering of dissent against the Gulf monarchy that hosts the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet was stifled in a bloody crackdown, backed by troops from neighboring Saudi Arabia.
Dozens of protesters, drawn largely from the country’s Shiite Muslim majority, were gunned down in broad daylight by security forces, including marchers with their hands in the air, chanting, “Peaceful! Peaceful!” Thousands of political prisoners have been detained and tortured — among them, stars of the national soccer team — and the country’s leading human rights activist has been jailed repeatedly for tweeting.
Despite such outrages, Bahrain’s royal family, bolstered by the presence of the U.S. Navy — and subjected only to mild criticism by the Obama Administration, and none by the Trump Administration — has been able to act against pro-democracy activists with relative impunity, in part by framing dissent against the Sunni Muslim monarchy as some kind of plot by Iran, the Shiite-led power across the Persian Gulf.
One of the few times Bahrain’s rights record has proven costly to the ruling al-Khalifa family was in 2016, when a leading member, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, failed to win an election to be the head of the world soccer governing body, FIFA, following a campaign by dissidents to draw attention to his failure to protect Bahraini soccer players who were arrested and tortured for taking part in the demonstrations.
Among those who voiced public criticism of Sheikh Salman ahead of the FIFA election was Hakeem al-Araibi, a former player on Bahrain’s national soccer team who said that he had been threatened and tortured for speaking out, and was forced to flee the country for Australia after being accused of taking part in an attack on a police station. Araibi called that charge absurd, since he had been on the soccer field at the time, playing in a nationally televised match, but he was convicted in absentia nonetheless and sentenced to 10 years in prison. That sentence seemed to confirm that his fears of persecution by Bahrain’s government were legitimate, and he was granted asylum by the authorities in Australia, where he signed with a semiprofessional team in Melbourne and set about rebuilding his life.
Asked in 2016 to comment on Sheikh Salman’s candidacy to lead FIFA, Araibi told the New York Times that the royal had failed to respond to a request from his sister to intervene or stop his torture. “They blindfolded me,” he recalled. “They held me really tight, and one started to beat my legs really hard, saying: ‘You will not play soccer again. We will destroy your future.'”
In November, Araibi discovered the doggedness with which Bahrain continues to pursue dissidents when he flew from Australia to Thailand with his wife for a delayed honeymoon, and, despite having been assured by Australian authorities that his status as a refugee would protect him, he was detained on arrival by Thai police acting on an Interpol red notice issued at Bahrain’s request. He has been in jail in Bangkok, fighting extradition to Bahrain, ever since.
“If Hakeem is extradited to #Bahrain, he is at great risk of facing torture & unlawful imprisonment. His extradition would constitute to refoulement and therefore would be a clear breach of international law.” @BirdBahrain_ https://t.co/11d7a410ck pic.twitter.com/rUVUBrpN1y
— Sayed Ahmed AlWadaei (@SAlwadaei) December 3, 2018
On Friday, Thailand’s attorney general ignored requests from Australia — and pleas from the secretary general of FIFA, as well as senior officials at the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee — to stop the extradition process and referred the matter to court.
The fact that the arrest warrant for Araibi was sent to Thai authorities only after the soccer player had purchased his plane tickets suggests that Bahrain was keeping close tabs on him. In an interview with The Guardian last week, Araibi said that he was convinced that his arrest was nothing more than revenge for his criticism of Sheikh Salman, who is currently standing for re-election as the head of the Asian Football Confederation. “Bahrain wants me back to punish me because I talked to the media in 2016 about the terrible human rights and about how Sheikh Salman is a very bad man who discriminates against Shia Muslims,” Araibi said from Bangkok Remand Prison. “I am so scared of being sent back to Bahrain, so scared because 100 percent they will arrest me, they will torture me again, possibly they will kill me.”
Nadthasiri Bergman, Araibi’s lawyer, promised to appeal an extradition decision and urged the player’s supporters to raise public awareness of his plight.
“For 7 years, not a day went by that I did not hear my wife's voice. Now I'm in jail for a crime I didn't commit. She is out there. Alone. It breaks my heart not to know when I will get to see her or hear her voice again. Please fight for me.” A message from Hakeem. #SaveHakeeem pic.twitter.com/uhYkGdiqnC
— Nadthasiri Bergman (@Nat_Bergman) January 29, 2019
The post Eight Years Later, America’s Ally Bahrain Is Still Hunting Down Arab Spring Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.
Backed by millions in spending by a handful of billionaires, the charter school movement has been on the march for years, nowhere more so than in California. As its momentum has grown, traditional public education has been on the retreat throughout the state, resulting in school closures, overburdened teachers, and fiscal crises for school districts.
Then came the Los Angeles teachers strike.
This week, the Los Angeles Board of Education passed a resolution asking the state to impose an eight- to 10-month moratorium on new charter schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The measure, which was among the demands on the bargaining table during the strike, was unprecedented for the school district and even more surprising given the school board’s pro-charter slant. The vote demonstrated the breadth of the victory achieved by the strike, which halted the charter school movement’s relentless advance in the second-biggest school district in the country.
Now, the front line of the fight over public schools is shifting to Oakland, where today, teachers are casting ballots on whether to strike as soon as mid-February. As in LA, the issues on the bargaining table in Oakland include higher teacher salaries, smaller class sizes, and more support staff in schools. And, also as in LA, looming in the background is a years-long fight between billionaires who aim to eliminate traditional, democratically controlled public schools and teachers who wish to preserve them.
Billionaires vs. TeachersThe Oakland Unified School District is in a fiscal crisis. The school board has halted construction projects and is planning to cut over 100 central administrative jobs, impose across-the-board cuts to all of its schools, and close two dozen schools over five years in a desperate scramble to forestall a $30 million budget deficit for the 2019-20 school year.
The impact of the deficit at the classroom level is most apparent in the Oakland school district’s sky-high teacher turnover rate. Oakland teachers are among the lowest-paid in the Bay Area, and 1 in 5 of them leave the district annually, compared to just over 1 in 10 statewide. “We’re grinding them out,” said Ismael Armendariz, a 32-year-old special education instructor, of the churn rate for teachers in the district. Armendariz, who is currently on leave to do union work but is still employed by the school district, makes $57,000 a year in one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the world. “I live paycheck to paycheck,” he said.
A major contributor to the crisis is the rapid and uncontrolled expansion of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.
In recent years, the charter school industry and its supporters have dumped huge sums of money into elections in California in an aggressive bid to expand its presence in public school districts throughout the state. Last year, a record $50 million was spent in the race for state superintendent of public instruction, two-thirds of it on behalf of the pro-charter candidate. A state legislative race in the East Bay drew $1.4 million in spending from outside groups, much of it from the charter school industry. In 2017, the Los Angeles school board race became the most expensive in U.S. history, at a combined $15 million, with close to $10 million of it coming from the charter side.
But Oakland in particular seems to hold special significance for charter school boosters. The city has drawn a deluge of money from pro-charter billionaires that is rare to see in municipal elections. Last year, Michael Bloomberg donated $120,000 to an independent expenditure committee connected with GO Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that organizes and advocates on behalf of charter school expansion, which went on to drop more than $150,000 on a single 2018 Oakland school board race.
The investments have paid dividends. Out of the seven seats on the Oakland school district’s board, five are occupied by GO Public Schools-endorsed candidates. “Oakland is one of the cities where the charter school industry thinks maybe they can flip the whole district,” said University of Oregon political economist Gordon Lafer. GO Public Schools did not return a request for comment.
It’s extraordinarily easy to open a charter school in California. “Anybody minimally legally and financially compliant cannot be stopped from opening a school,” said Lafer, who has studied the growth of charters in the state. By law, school districts cannot deny a petition to open a charter school unless its educational program is unsound or it is “demonstrably likely” to fail at its educational mission.
According to Lafer’s research, the proliferation of charter schools in Oakland costs the school district $57.3 million per year, yet the district cannot take into account the impact a new charter will have on the finances of existing schools when deciding on an application.
Charter schools directly compete with traditional public schools; they fill their classrooms by drawing students away from district-run schools. In California, schools are funded on a per-pupil basis. That means that when a student leaves a school, her apportionment of funding goes with her, costing the school district money. The district also saves the expense of educating that student, but given the fixed costs of running a school, Lafer’s research shows, the amount of money lost to the school district always outpaces the amount saved.
Compounding this dynamic is the requirement that traditional schools take in all students who come their way, while charters have no such obligation. Through the enrollment process, charters often filter out students whose education would require more resources, including special needs students, homeless youth, students learning English as a second language, and those who recently arrived as refugees. “They recruit kids and they say, ‘We want you to write an essay; we want your parents to write an essay; we want your parents to volunteer in school,’” Lafer said, which has the effect of pushing away less self-motivated students and children of parents who are, by habit or circumstance, less focused on their children’s education. “You have a system where the neediest and most expensive kids to educate are concentrated in traditional public schools.”
The disparity is particularly pronounced with special needs students. In California, funding for special education is based on the overall student population, not on the percentage of special needs students a school enrolls. By enrolling fewer special needs students, charter schools are able to receive funding for services they do not provide, while public schools’ efforts are underfunded.
As a special education instructor, Armendariz experienced the consequences of this shortfall. “We wouldn’t get the support we needed,” he said. “When we reached out [to the district], we were at the bottom of the list. Mental health support, slots with counselors — it was hard to get people with experience working with kids with disabilities.”
“All of those burdens fall on our district, because we have a moral and a legal obligation to serve them,” Armendariz said. The system, he added, seems “designed to fail.”
At a meeting for parents about a possible upcoming strike, the Oakland Education Association distributed signs to community members to show their support for public school teachers.
Photo: Leighton Akio Woodhouse for The Intercept
The growth of Oakland charter schools has been so explosive it has led to a fear among charter school operators that in their competition to recruit new students, charters are cannibalizing not just traditional schools, but each other. That concern is one impetus for an effort by charter school advocates to establish a new model of overseeing the district, called the “portfolio model,” under which the school board is transformed from a governmental oversight body into something more like an investment portfolio manager. Rather than determine rules and regulations and allocate budgets based on need, under the portfolio model, the board evaluates school performance and invests and divests from them accordingly, like publicly traded stocks.
The model could rationalize and streamline the explosion of charter schools in Oakland and bring a measure of order to a largely unregulated market. It could also lead to further expansion of the charter school sector at the expense of traditional public schools, weaken the city’s teachers union, and undermine democratic control of the city’s schools.
That’s what happened in New Orleans, where after Hurricane Katrina, the state took over the public school system and converted it almost entirely into nonunion charter schools. Last year, control was handed back to a locally elected school board, but unelected staffs of charter management organizations maintained power over financing, personnel, and pedagogy.
In 2014, when the district was still under state control, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings attributed what he believed to be the success of New Orleans charter schools to the fact that “they don’t have an elected school board.” He described school boards as an impediment to long-term education planning and charter schools as a vehicle to “evolve America” beyond them.
Elected school boards — where advocates for district schools, including teachers unions, can exercise political power — have traditionally resisted the expansion of charter school chains, whose growth can benefit tech industry moguls like Hastings. Charter management organizations such as the Knowledge is Power Program, whose board Hastings sits on, are known for “blended learning,” an approach to teaching that puts a heavy emphasis on integrating screens and internet into classroom instruction. This pedagogical method has helped fuel a booming $43 billion market in educational technology, which tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft have battled to dominate, and in which Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, has invested heavily, with mixed results.
Hastings has spent eye-popping amounts to move California school boards in his direction, including $7 million on LA’s 2017 school board race, which resulted in the city’s first ever pro-charter majority. The portfolio model would solidify these gains by permanently transferring school boards’ power over key areas of decision making to privately held, nonprofit charter management organizations — essentially deregulating charter schools. It is the vision behind GO Public Schools’s Oakland initiative, which has proven divisive even among charter school advocates and has been excoriated by defenders of district schools. Keith Brown, the president of Oakland’s teachers union, said the plan would “put the nail in the coffin for democratic control of our public schools.”
Even without the portfolio model, Oakland public school teachers are faced with a school board that largely favors the partial privatization of public education, which has put their district in chronic fiscal crisis, bled their schools of resources, and overburdened them with the most expensive students to teach. With the conventional political process effectively controlled by pro-charter billionaires, teachers are turning to their most direct and foundational source of power: the ability to withhold their labor.
“We have exhausted all of our options,” said Armendariz. “Teachers feel that the only way we’re going to make any change is to take the fight to the privatizers.”
Correction: February 1, 2019, 3:05 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated the size of the Los Angeles Unified School District and misstated Ismael Armendariz’s employment status and salary. It has been corrected.
The post “We Have Exhausted All Our Options”: Oakland Teachers May Be the Next to Strike appeared first on The Intercept.
A new website exposes the extent to which Apple cooperates with Chinese government internet censorship, blocking access to Western news sources, information about human rights and religious freedoms, and privacy-enhancing apps that would circumvent the country’s pervasive online surveillance regime.
The new site, AppleCensorship.com, allows users to check which apps are not accessible to people in China through Apple’s app store, indicating those that have been banned. It was created by researchers at GreatFire.org, an organization that monitors Chinese government internet censorship.
In late 2017, Apple admitted to U.S. senators that it had removed from its app store in China more than 600 “virtual private network” apps that allow users to evade censorship and online spying. But the company never disclosed which specific apps it removed — nor did it reveal other services it had pulled from its app store at the behest of China’s authoritarian government.
In addition to the hundreds of VPN apps, Apple is currently preventing its users in China from downloading apps from news organizations, including the New York Times, Radio Free Asia, Tibetan News, and Voice of Tibet. It is also blocking censorship circumvention tools like Tor and Psiphon; Google’s search app and Google Earth; an app called Bitter Winter, which provides information about human rights and religious freedoms in China; and an app operated by the Central Tibetan Authority, which provides information about Tibetan human rights and social issues.
Some bans – such as those of certain VPN apps and the Times – have received media coverage in the past, but many never generate news headlines. Charlie Smith, a co-founder of GreatFire.org, told The Intercept that the group was motivated to launch the website because “Apple provides little transparency into what it censors in its app store. Most developers find out their app has been censored after they see a drop in China traffic and try to figure out if there is a problem. We wanted to bring transparency to what they are censoring.”
“We wanted to bring transparency to what they are censoring.”
Smith, who said that the website was still in a beta phase of early development, added that until now, it was not easy to check exactly which apps Apple had removed from its app stores in different parts of the world. For example, he said, “now we can see that the top 100 VPN apps in the U.S. app store are all not available in the China app store.”
The site is not able to distinguish between apps taken down due to requests from the Chinese government because they violate legal limits on free expression versus those removed because they violate other laws, such as those regulating gambling. However, it is possible to determine from the content of each app – and whether it continues to be available in the U.S. or elsewhere – the likely reason for its removal.
Radio Free Asia, for instance, has been subject to censorship for decades in China. The Washington, D.C.-based organization, which is funded by the U.S. government, regularly reports on human rights abuses in China and has had its broadcasts jammed and blocked in the country since the late 1990s. That censorship has also extended to the internet – now with the support of Apple.
Rohit Mahajan, a spokesman for Radio Free Asia, told The Intercept that Apple had informed the organization in December last year that one of its apps was removed from the app store in China because it did not meet “legal requirements” there. “There was no option to appeal, as far as we could discern,” said Mahajan.
Libby Liu, Radio Free Asia’s president, added that “shutting down avenues for credible, outside news organizations is a loss – not just for us, but for the millions who rely on our reports and updates for a different picture than what’s presented in state-controlled media. I would hope that Western companies would be committed to Western values when it comes to making decisions that could impact that access.”
An Apple spokesperson declined to address removals of specific apps from China, but pointed to the company’s app store review guidelines, which state: “Apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where you make them available.” The spokesperson said that Apple, in its next transparency report, is planning to release information on government requests to remove apps from its app store.
The Chinese government expects Western companies to make concessions before it permits them to gain access to the country’s lucrative market of more than 800 million internet users. The concessions include compliance with the ruling Communist Party’s sweeping censorship and surveillance regime. In recent years, the Chinese state has beefed up its repressive powers. It has introduced a new “data localization” law, for instance, which forces all internet and communication companies to store Chinese users’ data on the country’s mainland — making it more accessible to Chinese authorities.
In accordance with the data localization law, Apple agreed to a deal with state-owned China Telecom to control and store Chinese users’ iCloud data. Apple claims that it retains control of the encryption keys to the data, ensuring that people’s photographs and other private information cannot be accessed by the Chinese state. However, human rights groups remain concerned. Amnesty International has previously stated, “By handing over its China iCloud service to a local company without sufficient safeguards, the Chinese authorities now have potentially unfettered access to all Apple’s Chinese customers’ iCloud data. Apple knows it, yet has not warned its customers in China of the risks.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook has presented himself as a defender of users’ privacy. During a speech in October last year, Cook declared, “We at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.” It is unclear how Cook reconciles that sentiment with Apple’s removal of privacy-enhancing software from its app store in China, which helps ensure that the country’s government can continue to monitor its citizens and crack down on opponents. Cook appears to have viewed compliance with Chinese censorship and surveillance as worthwhile compromises. “We would obviously rather not remove the apps,” he said in 2017, “but like we do in other countries we follow the law wherever we do business. … We’re hopeful that over time the restrictions we’re seeing are lessened, because innovation really requires freedom to collaborate and communicate.”
The post New Site Exposes How Apple Censors Apps in China appeared first on The Intercept.
House Energy and Commerce Democrats weren’t thrilled about the suggestion of a new select House committee on climate change, worried that its power would creep into their expansive jurisdiction. Committee leaders flexed what internal muscle they had to make sure that the committee, established at the behest of progressives behind the “Green New Deal,” was defanged, withholding subpoena power and the authority to approve new legislation.
Rep. Bobby Rush, the No. 2 Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, told The Intercept that he was pleased to see the end of a “smash and grab” that’s pushed the committee to cede “too much of our jurisdiction over the years.”
“The grab is over, as far as I’m concerned, in terms of Energy and Commerce, this smash and grab that’s been going on for too long in this Congress,” he told The Intercept in an interview.
“We’re gonna return to regular order as we have exercised it in the past, and we stand on it now. You know, we’re not ceding any of the Energy and Commerce jurisdiction. I’m not in favor of not one measure, not one iota of Energy and Commerce’s jurisdiction to be ceded to other committees.”
Asked what he planned to do with that power, Rush said, “We’re gonna do what we’ve always done. Legislate, deliberate, legislate, move bills to the floor. And we’re going to continue to work hard on behalf of the American people.”
But while Chair Frank Pallone said he understands and shares concerns “about the need for transformational action” laid out in the Green New Deal, he added in a statement to The Intercept that he wants to prioritize “actions we can take this year that will make a difference now.”
That doesn’t square with the Green New Deal’s 10-year plan to get to 100 percent renewable energy, which foresees drafting and organizing around transformative legislation in the next two years, and then enacting it in the beginning of a new Democratic administration. To pull that off, the advocates of the select committee argued that none of its members should take money from fossil fuel companies.
Stephen Hanlon, communications director for the Sunrise Movement, which led the occupation in the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told The Intercept that walking and chewing gum was preferable. “With Trump in the White House, we’re focusing on building the public and political support to elect a Congress and president in 2020 that can make the Green New Deal law in 2021,” Hanlon said. “We certainly should take what action we can in the interim, but that is no substitute for putting forward a plan in line with the ambition the latest science says is necessary.”
Pallone argued that the fossil fuel industry dollars flowing through the committee won’t have any impact on the agenda.
The committee’s first hearing will assess the environmental and economic impacts of climate change, Pallone said, and it will be “the first of many hearings on the subject.” He pointed out the “stark difference from past Republican House majorities, which refused to hold hearings on climate change and denied that it even existed.” Asked if oil and gas executives would be called before the committee, a spokesperson told The Intercept that no decisions have been made about specific hearings or who would testify.
Pallone plans to prioritize investing in green energy infrastructure, energy efficiency, and other programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and reversing a long list of environmental rollbacks under the Trump administration, he said, which included lifting restrictions on coal plant greenhouse gas emissions and opening parts of the Arctic to oil and gas drilling.
But when asked whether the committee would reconsider how it addresses contributions to members from the fossil fuel industry, Pallone — who does not take oil and gas money — noted his longstanding support of public campaign finance and said he believes that lawmakers should be judged instead by their record and agenda.
Asked if he thought the pledge by incoming Reps. Nanette Barragán and Darren Soto to refuse fossil fuel money would spread to other members of the committee, Rush — who receives the second least oil and gas money of the eight committee members who take it — told The Intercept that he wasn’t sure. “And that’s an individual decision among members of the committee. I would not dare try to dictate their fundraising strategies or techniques,” he said. Neither Barragán nor Soto responded to requests for comment.
Rep. Kurt Schrader, former chair of the conservative Blue Dog caucus, took the most money from the oil and gas industry last cycle at $77,500, with $75,500 coming from PACs and $2,000 from individuals. Next is incoming committee member Rep. Marc Veasey, who took a total of $63,050, including $40,500 from PACs and $22,550 from individuals. Rep. Gene Green took $24,000 from the industry, including $23,500 from PACs and $500 from individuals. Rep. Paul Tonko took $24,000 in PAC money. Rep. Mike Doyle took $18,000 from oil and gas PACs, and Rep. Peter Welch took $18,000. Rush took $13,000 in oil and gas PAC money, and Rep. G. K. Butterfield took $11,500.
Of 31 Democrats on the committee, those who signed the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge, in addition to Barragán and Soto, are Reps. Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois.
Asked if Veasey would continue taking oil and gas money, his office did not answer the question but directed The Intercept to a tweet from his account announcing his support for public campaign financing, as laid out in H.R. 1. Schrader did not respond to a request for comment.
Vice Chair Yvette Clarke of New York, who has not signed the pledge but does not take oil and gas money, told The Intercept that she didn’t have a position on the issue. “I think that if that is a determination about how you vote or how you shape policy, that it’s definitely a conflict,” she said, but added that during her time in the committee minority, Democrats were unified in pushing back against bad actors. “I haven’t seen that as a major factor, as a factor at all,” she said.
Rep. Eliot Engel, also of New York, said he doesn’t take money from the industry. Asked if he thought his colleagues should join the pledge, he said he thought it was an independent decision. “I don’t take the money because I don’t agree with the philosophy, but I’m not gonna point the finger at anybody else,” he told The Intercept. He said he doesn’t think that taking oil and gas money presents a conflict of interest but that he “would love to see money get out of politics,” referencing New York City’s public campaign finance program as a model.
“Politicians making climate policy should not be taking money from the lobbyists and executives who have spent the past decades deceiving the public about the science and doing everything they can to protect their bottom lines, even when that means imperiling the entire planet,” said Hanlon, the Sunrise Movement spokesperson. “Any politician who wants the votes of young people in 2020 needs to sign the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge and back a Green New Deal. If Frank Pallone is serious about taking action on climate, he will use his chairmanship to put forward a vision for a Green New Deal in line with what science and justice demands.”
The post With Green New Deal Committee Neutered, Energy and Commerce Democrat Says “Smash and Grab” Is Over appeared first on The Intercept.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman arrives to meet with British Prime Minister Theresa May in London, England, on March 7, 2018.
Photo: Dan Kitwood /Getty Images
Last week, Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority announced 2019 as the “Year of Entertainment” in the kingdom. With a $64 billion budget granted by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the plan comes complete with a social media platform and an app — Enjoy_Saudi — and aims to “transform the Kingdom into one of the top ten international entertainment destinations.” The authority said it is negotiating contracts to bring international stars, such as Mariah Carey, Jay-Z, Trevor Noah, Chris Rock, and Seth Rogen, among others, to the kingdom.
The same week, Amnesty International published new reports of systematic torture and sexual abuse of numerous female activists currently being held in Saudi prisons. Most of the women are now in their ninth month of detention, where they’ve been held without charges or legal representation. Evidence linked the women’s mistreatment to Saud al-Qahtani, a former top adviser to bin Salman who has been implicated in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “Not only have they been depriving them of their liberty for months now, simply for peacefully expressing their views, they are also subjecting them to horrendous physical suffering,” said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty’s Middle East research director. The Saudi Ministry of Media has rejected the claims of torture as “baseless,” and has denied human rights observers any access to the prisoners.
“Not only have they been depriving them of their liberty for months now, simply for peacefully expressing their views, they are also subjecting them to horrendous physical suffering.”It should come as no surprise that the Saudi regime has little to say on the matter. Such dismissiveness is to be expected from a monarch who, far from being deposed by the Khashoggi scandal, now has the confidence of a man who has gotten away with murder. Unleashed and unrepentant, bin Salman’s campaign against dissent continues unabated — and, as the Amnesty report shows, has targeted the women he promised to liberate in unprecedented ways.
The coinciding reports from the General Entertainment Authority and Amnesty represent more than dark irony: They are also a re-enactment of one of bin Salman’s earliest tactics. Such aggressively enthusiastic, Western-centric campaigns were a prominent feature of the early years of bin Salman’s reign, when the ascendant prince wowed the world by re-introducing movie theaters and live concerts to the kingdom. At the time, many Saudis and non-Saudis alike were so struck with the spectacle of Saudi’s sudden embrace of Hollywood films and Cirque du Soleils that the crown prince’s emerging authoritarianism went largely unnoticed. Busy remarking on superficial social reforms, Western media neglected — or declined — to press bin Salman on his crackdowns on free speech, his censorship of the local press, the ongoing carnage in Yemen, or his failure to address the country’s legalized gender discrimination.
This reckless silence extended even as the crown prince’s abuses grew more brazen. In May, bin Salman, who is often known by his initials, MBS, began his crackdown on peaceful women’s rights advocates. The women included internationally recognized activists, such as Loujain al-Hathloul and Eman al-Nafjan, as well as Samar Badawi, a recipient of the State Department’s International Women of Courage award. Renowned academics, such as Hatoon al-Fassi, were also rolled up in the crackdown.
The arrest of these women demonstrated bin Salman’s expanding practice of jailing and intimidating even the most moderate of his critics — or those who he feared might eventually undermine his messaging. Many of the women had voiced their willingness to work alongside the government to accomplish reform, including an end to the country’s notorious male guardianship law. Several of them, after being warned by the Royal Court to abandon their activism, had already fallen virtually silent. Yet the Saudi government followed their arrests with a series of smear campaigns, alleging without evidence that several of the women had been involved in a foreign plot against the government.
Even after the arrests, the world persisted in lauding bin Salman as a pioneer of reform. Meanwhile, he was quietly bringing Saudi’s human rights record to new lows. According to human rights organizations, the women detainees suffered floggings and electric shocks at the hands of their captors. At least one woman was reported as being hung from the ceiling. Another had a water hose forced into her mouth, while two other women were made to kiss one another while leering guards looked on. Other methods of sexual and psychological abuse were also reported.
Such mistreatment is not only an egregious violation of international law, but also a dramatic departure in the context of patriarchal codes of decency in the kingdom.Such mistreatment is not only an egregious violation of international law, but also a dramatic departure in the context of patriarchal codes of decency in the kingdom. These social conventions can frequently be covers for gender violence and oppression, yet they also generally constrain what is acceptable in the public sector. The tabloidesque defamation of al-Hathloul and others, as well as the blatantly sexual nature of their abuse, transgresses them all.
As one regional human rights observer told me, women political prisoners were rare before bin Salman, and such public smear campaigns and physical violence “would have been unheard of just a few years before.” In keeping with this grim trend, Saudi Arabia announced in August that it would seek the death penalty for Israa al-Ghomgham, an activist from Saudi Arabia’s repressed Shia minority and the first female rights advocate to face capital punishment.
Such shocking new tactics should have been taken as a warning, but the women’s arrests in the summer of 2018 generated little more than a murmur from the foreign press. At the time, too many were still enamored with bin Salman and distracted by the long-awaited end to the ban on women drivers. While some noted the irony that many of the women who had championed the cause of women drivers for years or decades would be behind bars on that historic day, most found the narrative allure of women “taking the wheel” too poetic to resist. On the ground in Riyadh and Jeddah last summer, I watched the international press corps, herded by Saudi handlers, flock from photo-op to photo-op, gleefully reaching cameras and pencils in the direction of smiling women in driving simulators and luxury cars. On the morning when the ban was official lifted, they sent home dispatches published with glowing headlines touting a new day for gender empowerment in Saudi Arabia.
Since then, the global scandal of Khashoggi’s murder forced a much-belated reckoning with the true nature of bin Salman’s rule. For a moment, international outrage seemed to approach proportionality with the regime’s ongoing crimes, perhaps strong enough to diminish bin Salman’s influence for good.
Yet the reckoning was fleeting. As the weeks passed and the kingdom’s key allies and trading partners — most notably the U.S. but also many European nations — failed to meaningfully sanction the crown prince, bin Salman began to maneuver back into the global political landscape. With U.S. President Donald Trump’s early, frequent, and vociferous defenses ringing in his ear — as well as the ongoing trade and diplomatic relations with countries like the U.K. and France — the message bin Salman received was not one of censure, but of tacit absolution.
The crown prince has not only maintained his power, but intends push forward his unilateral “Vision 2030” agenda, complete with self-congratulatory fanfare. Since Khashoggi’s death, bin Salman has continued to court global capital. He held his own “Davos in the Desert” — hosted at the same Riyadh Ritz-Carlton where bin Salman imprisoned hundreds of his own citizens in 2017 — and attended the G-20 summit, where he was warmly greeted by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Inside the kingdom, many ordinary Saudi citizens now avoid any type of social or political speech, even on anonymous Twitter accounts, fearing that they’ll somehow trigger one of the kingdom’s expanding, and increasingly enforced, anti-terrorism and “anti-cybercrime” laws. Others, while enjoying the occasional movie or concert, worry more often about rising costs of living and wonder when, if ever, bin Salman’s lofty promises for economic prosperity will trickle down to them. Women, even those who benefit from the ability to drive, still face a myriad of legal and cultural obstacles to equality, most notably the male guardianship laws.
While the Saudi government under bin Salman pursues American entertainers, opens wax museums, and rolls out hashtags, untold numbers of political prisoners remain in detention, inaccessible to international observers, lawyers, and family members alike. As with Khashoggi, the Saudi regime has only deigned to issue scant, unpersuasive denials in the face of mounting evidence of their abuse of the female prisoners and its ongoing violations of international law.
It is hard to imagine what, if not the global scandals of Jamal Khashoggi and Rahaf al-Qanun, will prompt enough meaningful action to censure bin Salman. As bin Salman resumes his efforts to distract and entertain his way back into popular acclaim, it is incumbent on the watching world to refuse, anymore, to blink.
The post Mohammed bin Salman Is Running Saudi Arabia Like a Man Who Got Away With Murder appeared first on The Intercept.
After many years of treating the developing world as its environmental dumping ground, the U.S. is finally getting a taste of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of another country’s dangerous garbage. DuPont-spinoff Chemours is sending industrial waste from the Netherlands to North Carolina. The waste in question comes from the production of the toxic chemical GenX, DuPont’s replacement for the surfactant PFOA, which was long used in the production of Teflon and many other products.
Unlike the Netherlands, the U.S. has so far declined to regulate GenX waste, so disposing of the material is comparatively easy.
Chemours has been transporting the GenX waste from its plant in Dordrecht, Netherlands, to Fayetteville, North Carolina, according to documents that surfaced last week and were first reported in NC Policy Watch. In December, the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to a representative of the Dutch Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate, temporarily objecting to the import and asking for clarification about where exactly the waste was being sent.
According to the EPA letter, citing a “letter of intent,” some of Chemours’s GenX waste from the Netherlands was supposedly destined for an incinerator in El Dorado, Arkansas, which is run by a company called Clean Harbors. But Phillip Retallick, senior vice president of Clean Harbors, said that his company is not receiving the material. “We are not in any way shape or form involved with the reclamation of the waste from the Fayetteville facility,” said Retallick.
As The Intercept reported this week, the incineration of PFAS compounds, the class to which GenX belongs, may raise safety concerns.
The EPA letter also indicated that the Fayetteville plant was sending waste to a deep well injection plant run by Texas Molecular in Deer Park, Texas. Deep well injection, a technique pioneered by DuPont in the 1950s, involves storing toxic waste far below ground. Deep wells have repeatedly leaked, resulting in contamination of both groundwater and drinking water.
When asked whether his company was receiving the GenX waste, Texas Molecular’s president, Frank Marine, declined to comment. According to its website, Texas Molecular, whose motto is “deep commitment,” provides “responsible and safe treatment and disposal solutions for even those most challenging industrial hazardous aqueous waste and wastewaters.”
DuPont developed GenX and introduced it in 2009 to replace PFOA, which persists indefinitely in the environment and is linked to cancer and other illnesses. GenX presents many of the same health and environmental problems, and causes cancer in lab animals, as The Intercept reported in 2016.
From 2014 until at least 2017, Chemours had been sending at least some of its GenX waste from the Netherlands to Miteni SpA, a chemical company in the Veneto region of Italy. Last year, tests revealed GenX in groundwater and wells near the Italian plant, contamination that has already led to health effects. Regional authorities then suspended some of the company’s operations. Miteni SpA, which was already under fire for causing massive PFOA contamination, filed for bankruptcy in October and ceased operation.
Chemours did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story or answer questions from The Intercept about how much of the waste it is importing to the U.S. and other places around the world. But a company spokesperson told NC PolicyWatch that the bankruptcy of a European company that had been recycling its waste from The Netherlands “requires us to take responsible actions to ensure we continue to recycle the vast majority of the GenX.”
According to a document obtained by The Intercept that a spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality confirmed was notes from a call about the waste between the DEQ and the EPA, Chemours is “reporting an upper limit of 90 metric tons in about 20 shipments of unknown concentration for 2019.” The document states that the GenX arrives at the Fayetteville plant as a “sludgy liquid” from which the company removes “GenX salts,” but doesn’t say what happens to those compounds.
The North Carolina DEQ document raises several concerns about the waste, including that the material might be discharged into the river near the Fayetteville facility, and that Chemours might be importing it “to circumvent European regulations.”
Linda Culpepper of the North Carolina DEQ sent a letter to Chemours on January 18 asking for more information about the waste. Chemours responded the following week and stated that the substance it is importing is not hazardous according to the law “and that Chemours (and DuPont before it) has notified the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) of these reclamation activities on multiple occasions.” The Chemours letter said the company planned to send both the EPA and the state agency more information on February 5.
Growing Outrage Over PFAS InactionWhile much remains to be learned about how Chemours has been importing this waste and what exactly has been happening to it, there is little question as to why the company would send its dangerous chemicals to North Carolina instead of disposing of them at its Dutch plant. While PFAS waste is regulated in Europe under the Basel Convention, it is not regulated in the U.S., which has declined to sign the treaty.
And because GenX itself has not been declared hazardous by federal environmental authorities, the only restrictions on the compound in the U.S. come from a 2009 consent order with the EPA, which The Intercept obtained via FOIA in 2016. “There’s a gaping hole in the consent order because it doesn’t limit how GenX is disposed of or recycled,” said Eve Gartner, an attorney at Earthjustice. In addition, the agreement applies only to Chemours. “So Chemours can enter a contract with an incinerator company,” Gartner pointed out, “but there’s no guarantee that the incineration is going to destroy it.” While the consent order with the EPA remains in effect, the state of North Carolina is in the process of negotiating its own consent order with the company.
The EPA had been considering using the Safe Drinking Water Act to put safety standards in place for PFOA and PFOS, the two best-known PFAS compounds, but is now expected to shelve those plans, according to a report in Politico. The story sparked outrage from environmentalists and senators, who have questioned Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler about the EPA’s inaction on the chemicals as part of the process of confirming him to lead the agency.
“It’s frankly shameful that this is still where things are in the U.S. some 18 to 19 years after the research started on the regulatory level on these chemicals,” said Rob Bilott, the attorney who first brought PFOA to light in a class-action suit against DuPont. Bilott, who represented residents of West Virginia and Ohio whose water contained PFOA, said that without regulation, others will continue to be exposed to PFAS chemicals at dangerous levels.
Several states have begun to regulate these chemicals on their own. “What worries me are the folks living in states that have refused to take any action, because they’re waiting for the federal government to act,” said Bilott.
In a statement provided to The Intercept, the EPA denied that a decision had been made about the regulation of PFOA and PFOS. “Despite what is being reported, EPA has not finalized or publicly issued its PFAS management plan, and any information that speculates what is included in the plan is premature. The agency is committed to following the Safe Drinking Water Act process for evaluating new drinking water standards, which is just one of the many components of the draft plan that is currently undergoing interagency review.”
But the U.S. is already trailing behind Europe in the regulation of PFAS chemicals. And that lag makes this country a natural choice to dispose of PFAS waste. “There’s an irony here,” said Kevin Hannon, an attorney whose firm has filed class-action claims against DuPont and Chemours over GenX in North Carolina. “We’ve been sending our waste to third-world countries and poisoning kids because it was cheaper to send it there,” said Hannon. “And now we’re being treated by Chemours like those third-world countries.”
In Europe, outrage has been mounting over the disposal of GenX and related compounds. In June, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management released an investigation into Chemours’s disposal process, determining that “Chemours takes no measurements to determine whether [GenX-related] substances are in the waste,” and that the “substances are consequently emitted into the environment at various places in the chain.” The report also noted that only incineration in a kiln at “a sufficiently high temperature” can destroy the material, but that not all of the GenX-related waste streams were disposed of by incineration.
Dordrecht residents, who have had to contend with both PFOA and GenX contamination of their water, have repeatedly expressed frustration with the company. In September, Chemours said it would invest 75 million euros to reduce GenX emissions from the Dordrecht plant.
Meanwhile, the Italian government declared a state of emergency over the PFAS contamination last year and an investigation into Miteni SpA resulted in criminal charges. The recent discovery that the Dutch had been sending them their GenX waste sparked angry protests and a second investigation, which is ongoing.
The transport of the GenX waste from the Netherlands to the United States may be a violation of international law. The Basel Convention, an international treaty that governs the transboundary movement of hazardous waste, allows recycling but not disposal. And according to the EPA letter, some 55 percent of the Chemours waste was destined for disposal, which would make it illegal. “I would say that this is not a legitimate recycling process,” said Jim Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network, which monitors the international movement of toxic chemicals. “This really looks like somebody’s trying to avoid disposing of it in the Netherlands.”
This not the first time the PFAS industry has exploited the weak spots in international environmental protections. After eight companies agreed to phase out PFOA and PFOS in the United States in 2006, China became the global headquarters for the production and use of these dangerous chemicals.
Nor is it the first time that the U.S. has fallen behind in chemical regulation. The U.S. still permits the use of atrazine, recombinant bovine growth hormone, brominated vegetable oil, dangerous hormones used in pig production, carcinogenic food additives, and more than 1,000 chemicals used in cosmetics — to name a few of the products that Europe has banned.
Update: February 1, 2019, 1:43 p.m. EST
After the publication of this article, the EPA responded to questions posed by The Intercept and revealed that the agency has known about the import of GenX waste from the Netherlands since 2014. GenX is also known as FRD-902.
The post Chemours Is Using the U.S. as an Unregulated Dump for Europe’s Toxic GenX Waste appeared first on The Intercept.
Snopes has pulled out of its fact-checking partnership with Facebook. The storied myth-debunking site was one of dozens of groups the social network enlisted to help combat misinformation after the 2016 election. According to Snopes, Facebook paid it $100,000 in 2017 for this work.
Snopes is not the only factchecking group to pull out, either. An AP spokesperson confirmed to The Atlantic that the “AP is not currently doing fact-checking work for Facebook,” although they remain in “ongoing conversations with Facebook.”
Facebook includes 51 fact-checking organizations (including Snopes) in what must be an outdated list on its website. The contracts are signed on an annual basis, however, and a Facebook spokesperson told me there are now 34 organizations doing this work.
The note the Snopes team posted announcing the end of the partnership was circumspect about why the organization had pulled out, explicitly leaving open the possibility of working with Facebook again: “At this time we are evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services, and we want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff,” the note says. “To be clear, we have not ruled out working with Facebook or any other platforms in the future.”
Facebook struck a conciliatory tone about Snopes leaving the fold. “We value the work that Snopes has done, and respect their decision as an independent business,” a spokesperson emailed me. “Fighting misinformation takes a multi-pronged approach from across the industry. We are committed to fighting this through many tactics, and the work that third-party fact-checkers do is a valued and important piece of this effort.”
Step back from the immediate news, though, and consider the broader question. What is fact-checking actually worth to Facebook?
Poynter has reported that other organizations received $100,000 like Snopes did. A more in-depth report from Columbia Journalism Review found that some organizations turned down the money.
The amount that Facebook has paid out has increased, but also become more variable. Fact-checkers get paid per factcheck, but only up to a certain amount per month. The amount of money that’s flowing to all of Facebook’s 34 fact-checkers probably remains in the single-digit millions.
For perspective, Facebook generated $16.9 billion in revenue just last quarter. That same quarter, the company’s average revenue per user reached $7.37, so the money coming in from a million or two users over the course of just three months would be enough to cover the global factchecking costs for the year.
Perhaps the fact-checking organizations like Snopes, the AP, and others have parted ways with Facebook for a variety of reasons, but it’s not hard to imagine that paying them substantially more might keep a larger number in the fold and engaged in making a dent in the problem of misinformation on Facebook.
Which is to say: Facebook is willing to spend more than nothing on fact-checking, but not much more than nothing.
While millions will tune in for the Super Bowl on Sunday, youth football in the U.S. is undergoing a crisis, as study after study shows the risks that the sport poses for developing brains and bodies. The number of high-school football players has been on the decline for a decade, leaving some schools in disproportionately rural areas with no option but to shut down their football program—sometimes even mid-season. But the exodus from the sport is exacerbating a racial gap: Well-to-do white kids are leaving football behind, while lower-income black kids are sticking with it. The schism paints a grim picture of how economic opportunity—or lack thereof—factors into whether families let their kids put their bodies on the line.
Infrastructure across the U.S. is notoriously dilapidated. This week provided yet another reminder of that fact when a 22-year-old mother died after falling down a flight of stars in a New York City subway station with her stroller-tucked infant daughter. The tragic incident has ignited outrage over all the ways that the city’s transit system is inaccessible for parents and the disabled. One recent video of rail tracks in Chicago engulfed in flames seemed like a near-apocalyptic manifestation of the country’s infrastructure woes—but lighting tracks on fire is actually a fairly standard way that rail systems deal with cold weather. The fires are used to thaw switches that determine which track a train goes down—and which are highly prone to freezing.
In the U.K., Brexit has become a never-ending quagmire. Prime Minister Theresa May is tasked with figuring out the specifics of how the country will leave the European Union, and endless division nearly ended her tenure as the country’s leader as she narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence. But Alison McGovern, a member of Parliament, suggests another way out of the maelstrom: holding another Brexit vote. The lack of clarity on where Brexit goes from here means that the public should have a say in the way forward—and public-opinion polls suggest that most Brits want another referendum.
—Saahil Desai
Evening Read
(Glenn Harvey)
The death-cap mushroom, otherwise known as Amanita phalloides, is spreading quickly across North America and into urban and suburban areas where the seemingly innocuous-looking (and tasting) fungi can prove devastatingly fatal:
Amanita phalloides are said to be quite tasty, and a person who eats one could feel fine for a day or two before illness sets in. The poison is taken up by the liver cells, where it inhibits an enzyme responsible for protein synthesis; without protein, the cells begin to die, and the patient may start to experience nausea and diarrhea—symptoms that can easily be attributed to general food poisoning or other ailments. “If the patient doesn’t realize the connection, doesn’t see the illness as a result of eating a mushroom a day or two earlier, it’s a hard diagnosis,” said Vo.
→ Read the rest.
(Mario Anzuoni / Reuters)
Read: A new collection of short stories by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is as confounding and multifaceted as the late writer was herself—she was born in Germany but lived most of her life in India. At the End of the Century showcases Jhabvala’s blunt characterizations of being a foreigner in India—and her ability to eschew the saccharine romanticism that often traps other European writers of the subcontinent.
Watch: Maroon 5 will perform this weekend at the most watched music bonanza of the year: the Super Bowl halftime show. But even a well-liked, generally anodyne band like Maroon 5 can’t escape the morass of controversy swirling around the NFL: Supporters of Colin Kaepernick have called for a boycott of the halftime show in support of the quarterback’s campaign against institutional racism.
Listen: “Harmony Hall,” a new song by the indie band Vampire Weekend, pairs the cryptic lyrics and distinct voice of the vocalist Ezra Koenig with upbeat guitar riffs, making for “among the first great thrills of 2019 pop,” as our critic Spencer Kornhaber writes.
Poem of the Week
Here is an excerpt from “To the Animal in the Hole,” by Erica Funkhouser:
The small changes in the dirt
at your entrance,
the disappearance of grass:
I note these in your absence.
You should just stay where you are.
You and your dark house
will grow together.
→ Read the rest, from The Atlantic’s July 1999 issue.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult throughout the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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In a rare public appearance at Stanford University on Thursday, Donald Trump’s envoy to North Korea offered the most candid and detailed roadmap yet for the administration’s nuclear talks with Kim Jong Un. It was, as he acknowledged, extremely ambitious.
“I have this perfect outcome moment where the last nuclear weapon leaves North Korea, the sanctions are lifted, the flag goes up in the embassy [of the United States in Pyongyang], and the [peace] treaty is signed in the same hour,” said Stephen Biegun, just weeks before Trump is due to meet Kim for a second summit on his signature foreign-policy initiative.
Yet hours later, in Washington D.C. the president did something seemingly unrelated that nevertheless challenged Biegun’s vision. Trump announced plans to pull the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a Cold War-era pact with Russia that eliminated a whole class of nuclear weapons.
It was his second withdrawal from an arms-control or nuclear-nonproliferation agreement, following the U.S. departure last year from the nuclear deal that his predecessor negotiated with Iran and other world powers. And it was in keeping with the Trump administration’s exit from other Obama-era international pacts ranging from the Paris climate-change accord to the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement. A recent White House rundown of the president’s accomplishments during his first two years in office includes, by The Atlantic’s count, three scrapped deals, two renegotiated deals, five negotiations or renegotiations of deals that are in the works (including Trump’s threatened withdrawal from the Universal Postal Union), and no brand new deals.
If the dream of a peaceful, prosperous, denuclearized Korean peninsula is to become a reality, North Korea’s leaders, who have deeply distrusted the United States for decades, will have to believe that Trump (and whoever succeeds him) will honor the grand bargain that Biegun has in mind—a long shot that Friday’s move may make longer. And Trump himself will have to prove as accomplished a dealmaker as a dealbreaker.
The Trump administration’s stance so far on nuclear arms-control and nonproliferation agreements has been “repeal and don’t replace,” Kingston Reif of the Arms Control Association told me in October, when the president first hinted that he would ditch the INF Treaty.
On Friday, Russia and the United States blamed the other for the demise of the second-to-last treaty restricting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov asserted that U.S. officials have embarked on a new arms race, while a senior Trump administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, declared, “If there is to be an arms race, it is Russia’s actions that have undermined the global security architecture and have undermined this particular arms-control agreement.”
The American official has a point. Washington has since the Obama administration been accusing Moscow of violating the INF accord by developing and fielding a banned cruise-missile system, to no effect. That’s why NATO has backed the Trump administration’s notification of withdrawal from the pact, which grants Russia six months to come back into compliance before the U.S. exit is official. In calling out Russia’s breach of the INF, the administration could argue that it is sending a message to Pyongyang that the U.S. won’t stay in a deal it feels the other party is betraying.
But it’s also true that, as Ryabkov suggested, the Trump administration has shown contempt for international arms-control and nuclear-nonproliferation agreements. A number of the president’s advisers—most prominently National-Security Adviser John Bolton—“don’t like negotiated arms control. They see it as abridging U.S. sovereignty” and constraining freedom of action, Richard Burt, who helped negotiate the INF Treaty during the Reagan administration, told me last fall.
Trump has justified his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the INF Treaty as the necessary first step to make better deals. With Iran, for example, the administration envisions a deal that would not only prohibit Iran’s nuclear pursuits, but also its ballistic missile program and regional behavior. With the INF Treaty, the president wants both Russia and China, which possesses hundreds of shorter-range nuclear-capable missiles but is not party to the INF, to “come to us and they say, ‘Let’s really get smart and let’s none of us develop those weapons.”
In neither case, though, has that ideal deal yet materialized.
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Senator Kamala Harris has drawn criticism for beginning her 2020 campaign by pitching herself as a “progressive prosecutor” despite a more mixed record.
On Radio Atlantic, Alex Wagner sits down with two people who have thought deeply about the power of prosecutors in America: the Georgetown law professor Paul Butler and the New York Times Magazine staff writer Emily Bazelon.
What exactly is Harris’s record? How does race inform the debate about prosecutorial power? And what does it all mean for the broader conversation in 2020 about criminal justice?
Highlights include:
Professor Butler describes how, like Harris, he grew up in an activist household in a black neighborhood, yet chose to become a prosecutor. Unlike Harris, though, he had a change of heart about the criminal legal system.
Emily Bazelon shares insights from her time with the then–Senate candidate Harris in 2016, as well as from her forthcoming book, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.
Both address the balance Harris has struck in pursuing a political career that few other women of color have ever had. Professor Butler shares what, if anything, Harris should have done differently.
Voices:
Alex Wagner (@AlexWagner)
Paul Butler (@LawProfButler)
Emily Bazelon (@EmilyBazelon)
It’s Friday, February 1. As a bipartisan group of lawmakers works to reach a deal on border security before February 15, President Donald Trump told reporters that there’s a “good chance” he’ll declare a national emergency to secure funding for a border wall. The president also celebrated the U.S. economy adding 304,000 jobs in January.
Meanwhile, in foreign-affairs news, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that he’s withdrawing the U.S. from its nuclear-arms-control treaty with Russia. "For years, Russia has violated the terms of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty without remorse," he said. "Russia's violations put millions of Europeans and Americans at greater risk."
He’s Running: Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey spent Thursday night at a secret church service in Newark, where he was anointed by the church’s reverend. Twelve hours later, he announced his bid for the presidency in 2020. Edward-Isaac Dovere was there to watch it all go down. Meanwhile, as Howard Schultz, the billionaire ex-CEO of Starbucks, ponders whether he’ll launch his own presidential campaign, his many similarities to Donald Trump have become clear. The problem, argues David A. Graham, is that “neither Schultz nor any of his billionaire peers is going to be able to match Trump, because they don’t have the right views.”
The Test Is Yet to Come: In a review of The Chief, the first biography of Chief Justice John Roberts, Michael O’Donnell imagines how Roberts—who writes fierce conservative opinions, but believes strongly in the Supreme Court’s political independence—would respond to a constitutional crisis.
Snapshot
Elephant seals and their pups occupy Drakes Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore, California. Tourists unable to visit the beach during the government shutdown will be able to get an up-close view of the creatures, officials said Friday. (Eric Risberg / AP)Ideas From The AtlanticThe Covington Story Was a Collective American Nightmare (George Packer)
“It seems to act out a drama in which we’re all caught, but in grotesque exaggeration. As if we are already moving through an empty plaza where our individual identities dissolve and a tribal identity is suddenly fixed for us, whether we will it or not; where we are assigned a name that is absurd but can’t be escaped—Gad, Esau, Ephraim.” → Read on.
The White Flight From Football (Alana Semuels)
“Football at the high-school level is growing in popularity in states with the highest shares of black people, while it’s declining in majority-white states. Other recent studies suggest that more black adults support youth tackle football than white adults.” → Read on.
How Long Can the Super Bowl Be the Super Bowl? (Derek Thompson)
“Unlike concussion fears or the decline of traditional television, this might not spell the end of football as we remember it. But it would be the end of the Super Bowl as we know it.” → Read on.
◆ Kamala Harris’s Crusade Against ‘Revenge Porn’ (Nancy Scola, Politico Magazine)
◆ Booker Is Running. I’ve Watched Him for 20 Years. Here’s What I’ve Learned. (Tom Moran, nj.com)
◆ Attack of the Fanatical Centrists (Paul Krugman, The New York Times)
◆Abortion Maximalists Claim the Moral Low Ground (Jonah Goldberg, National Review)
◆The Robert Mueller Fan Club (Katherine Miller, BuzzFeed News)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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The government shutdown is finally over, but for hundreds of thousands of federal employees who went 35 days without pay—and for contractors who may not receive any back pay—the financial toll is ongoing. Families who struggled to pay the bills during the longest government shutdown in American history are still playing catch-up with college tuition, car payments, and other expenses. “For all of the merits of working for the government, it has shown me some of the disadvantages of working on something that’s at the mercy of politics,” one contractor told the Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker. And if Congress and the president can’t reach a funding deal by February 15, many families will yet again find themselves in a precarious situation.
HighlightsThirty-nine percent of working adults in the United States have saved up enough for five years of retirement, but by one measure, grandparent couples spend more than $2,000 a year supporting their grandchildren—a number that has risen considerably over the past decade. That average is undoubtedly skewed by wealthier and white Americans, who can more easily give away money. But at the same time, Robin Marantz Henig explains, the growth of intergenerational financial support in recent years could also indicate that the social safety net isn’t adequately keeping young Americans afloat—children under the age of 18 are twice as likely to be living in poverty.
Stephanie Land’s new memoir reveals what living paycheck to paycheck is like for a single mom working as a maid in the homes of wealthy Americans. In a Q&A with the Atlantic staff writer Ashley Fetters, Land talks about how she felt the need to hide her financial woes from clients, who had their own misconceptions about living in poverty. The book chronicles both the emotional and social tolls of poverty, as well as the constant bureaucratic struggles that made securing basic necessities difficult for Land.
Dear Therapist
BIANCA BAGNARELLIEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, a reader has questions about navigating her long-term relationship with a divorced father of three—and his ex-wife. She doesn’t feel like she has the space to build a relationship with her boyfriend’s children in the constant shadow of their mother.
Lori’s advice: First, recognize that your boyfriend, his kids, and their mother are a package deal. Then set boundaries while remembering that parenting sometimes requires them to be fluid.
While you absolutely should have some uninterrupted time with [your partner] and parameters set in place, it will be important for you to talk about his needs as well. Parenting requires a lot of selflessness but also has many rewards. Similarly, stepparenting requires a lot of selflessness and has the potential to come with rewards, but it also comes with a stipulation—one you have to decide whether you can live with.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
As if the horrors of the polar vortex were not already enough—temperatures that look like typos, Canada Goose robbers, and something called frost quakes—the nation’s railroad system took a turn for the apocalyptic this week, too. Rails broke in three different places between Baltimore and Washington on Thursday, causing severe delays. Amtrak canceled dozens of trains passing through Chicago, and viral videos appeared to show commuter tracks in the city on fire.
Of course, the tracks themselves were not burning—they are made out of steel, prized for its tendency to rarely go up in flames. But the sight is still dramatic. The videos of the fires in Chicago this week show flames smoldering in patches of melted snow around the tracks. Another clip, from 2017, shows a commuter train trundling through flames, like a deleted scene from a lesser Nicolas Cage action flick. Either way, it looks dangerous and certainly backwards.
In fact, it’s neither. Look through old coverage and you’ll find stories like these spanning years of cold snaps. Fires have been employed on railroads—and remained the preferred fix for many a winter hazard—for most of their roughly two-century history.
[Read: How safe are America’s passenger trains?]
While railroads have developed impressive tools for dealing with snow on the tracks, extreme temperatures remain a challenge. Though steel is flame-resistant, it’s subject to cold, which can jam up railroads’ many moving parts.
When cold weather does wreak havoc on railroads, lighting fires on train tracks can serve a couple of uses. One is to thaw the switches that determine which track a train goes down, which is what Metra, the Chicagoland commuter-rail authority, said was going on this week. Switches are moving parts, and if ice gets into them, they can freeze in place. There are various types of switch heaters, which might use electric current or gas to melt ice—or even an open gas flame, which is what’s appearing in the Metra videos. Where there aren’t switch heaters, crews might use temporary torchlike devices with a flame, the railroad equivalent of the smudge pots farmers use to keep citrus groves and apple orchards from freezing on cold nights.
“When these types of open-flame heaters are used, part of the protocol is to notify local fire departments that these heaters have been deployed,” Christopher P. L. Barkan, director of the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote in an email. “That way firefighters don’t respond to fire reports and come out and douse the fire in water, which in cold weather would produce a lot of ice that would exacerbate the problem of freezing up the switches.”
Some of the other flaming-railroad videos that have been floating around show something different—something more related to the breaks that caused commuting havoc in Maryland.
Like any other piece of metal, rails expand and contract with heat and cold. “When you weld rail and track, you’re locking the length of the rail in place,” said Allan Zarembski, director of the Railway Engineering and Safety Program at the University of Delaware. “The colder it gets, the more the rail wants to shrink, but it can’t.”
Because of that potential for swelling and shrinkage, when railroad companies lay track, they do so at a “neutral temperature”—something comfortably within the range of temperatures wherever it’s being laid. In Chicago, Zarembski guessed that might be around 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Under federal rules, railroads keep a record of the neutral temperature of each section of rail when it’s laid. Most of the time, that’s the end of the story. If, say, the temperature drops to zero, the rail can handle the change in temperature. But big drops in temperature, like 40 below zero, stress the steel.
[Read: Japan schools the East Coast on dealing with snow]
With such a 110-degree difference between the neutral temperature and the cold air, “We’re probably looking at several hundred thousand pounds of force,” Zarembski said. “A couple things can happen. If there are joints, it shears the bolts off. The joint bars fall off. You have this big gap in the track. In the worst case, you can actually break a rail”—exactly what happened in Maryland.
Why doesn’t this happen all the time in, say, Alaska, or northern Canada, or Siberia? The answer comes back to the neutral temperature, which is set lower in colder places. Having records of laying temperature for each section also means that when a big change in temperature occurs, maintenance crews know where to look for problems.
Railroads have had to grapple with preventing pull-aparts for roughly as long as railroads have existed. They use a variety of tricks to prevent the problem, many of which resemble the switch-heating strategies, but over longer stretches of track. A railroad can bring in specialized propane heaters to keep the tracks cozy. It can run an electric current through the rail. But these approaches can be expensive, and most of the time they’re unnecessary. When they’re unavailable or impractical, or just in a pinch, many crews turn to a time-tested method, such as setting a gasoline-soaked rope on fire next to the track. In the event that prevention doesn’t work, and the tracks do pull apart, crews might use a similar trick, or a specialized product like a Fire Snake, to raise the temperature of the rail for repairs.
“You have to make sure you don’t set the ties on fire, but you’re not going to metallurgically damage the rail,” Zarembski said. “The computer may tell you what to do, but when you get out on the railroad, you have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
An abandoned castle compound in Turkey, a wild leopard in an Indian village, anti-government protests in France and Honduras, damage from a tornado in Cuba, a train ride through the surf in England, love locks in South Korea, hot-pot bathing in China, a muddy “Tough Guy” event in England, and much more
Malaysia Goodson was just 22 when she died. She fell down a flight of stairs in a Midtown Manhattan subway station on Monday evening and was found unconscious and unresponsive at the scene, her 1-year-old daughter—who’d been tucked in a stroller and was still alive—beside her.
As of Thursday morning, the cause of Goodson’s death was still unknown, though a spokeswoman for the city’s medical examiner wrote in an email that a preexisting health condition appears to have contributed to her fall. Regardless, the accident has drawn attention to a problem disability-rights advocates from New York to San Francisco have fought for years to little avail: The country’s public-transportation systems provide few accommodations for those who struggle to navigate the city in which they reside, for whatever reason. Maybe someone has a musculoskeletal disease that forces him into a wheelchair, or a mental-health condition that makes getting around safely difficult; maybe a person is blind or deaf or simply feeling off. Maybe someone is a manual laborer tasked with transporting unwieldy packages, or a disoriented traveler lugging around a large suitcase. Maybe the commuter is a parent, like Goodson, who simply needs to travel from Point A to Point B with a baby in a stroller.
“My daughter [started riding the] subway when she was two days old—that’s typical, that’s normal in New York City,” says Danny Pearlstein, the policy and communications director for a New York City rider-advocacy group called Riders Alliance. “And every time, it’s a struggle for us [parents] … The crisis of inaccessibility is an invisible crisis.”
Goodson died in the crowded Seventh Avenue station, a hub that connects Midtown to the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, Pearlstein says. As with roughly three-fourths of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s nearly 500 subway stations, the Seventh Avenue stop lacks an elevator. Meanwhile, many of the elevators that do exist are dysfunctional, or otherwise suffer from conditions—from cramped spaces to inconvenient locations—that discourage people from using them, according to The New York Times. A survey conducted by NYU professors including the transportation scholar Sarah Kaufman found that each of New York City’s existing subway elevators breaks down 53 times a year on average.
[Read: The transportation barrier]
In response to Monday’s accident, multiple city officials, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, lamented the circumstances and called for reform. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has partial authority over the MTA and controls much of its funding, also condemned the accident: “We 100 percent believe increased accessibility must be a priority, which is why the Governor has proposed a congestion pricing plan to provide billions of dollars in necessary capital funding to the MTA,” Patrick Muncie, a spokesman for Cuomo, told me in an emailed statement.
The MTA’s limited accessibility is the subject of a pending lawsuit, whose plaintiffs include a group of disability-rights organizations and the Justice Department; the suit contends that the MTA is in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA, the federal civil-rights law passed nearly three decades ago that prohibits discrimination based on a disability. The ADA requires that public facilities provide “reasonable accommodations” for individuals with a physical or mental condition that “substantially limits one or more major life activities.”
Monday’s accident, however, showed that the problem of accessibility extends beyond ADA violations. The incident sparked a flurry of visceral reactions from fellow moms and dads who, like most New Yorkers and many residents of other large U.S. cities, use public transit nearly every day. “EVERY New York City parent has experienced having to carry a stroller by themselves into the subway because of the appalling lack of elevators,” tweeted the New York Times journalist Dana Goldstein. In an email, Amanda Freeman, a sociologist at the University of Hartford who studies gender and poverty, observed that when she was a single mother of a baby passers-by often offered help to pregnant women, but they were less inclined to support those “toting crying, wiggling, screaming babies on the subway.”
Pearlstein, of Riders Alliance, recalled a recent experience when, after celebrating his daughter’s 13-month birthday with family in Brooklyn, he found himself struggling to carry his baby and her stroller up the Seventh Avenue station’s numerous flights of stairs. As one of the MTA’s relatively new stations (it opened in the early 1930s), the Seventh Avenue stop is built almost like a Jenga tower: The platform for trains heading uptown is at the lowest level, Pearlstein told me, while the level for trains heading in the opposite direction sits just above that; on top of the downtown level is the platform where riders enter via turnstiles, which connects, after another flight of stairs, to the street.
Government officials, urban planners, and disability-rights advocates all tend to agree that money—or a lack thereof—is a root source of the problem. Installing an elevator can be extremely expensive, especially in an old, massive, cavernous, and perpetually running system like New York City’s. In 2015, the MTA estimated that installing an elevator in the Seventh Avenue station in Brooklyn (not the one where Goodson fell) would cost $15 million, as DNAinfo reported at the time. While accessibility renovations aren’t cheap anywhere, the size of New York City’s system makes them an especially daunting undertaking: The MTA network comprises 472 stations total; Chicago Transit Authority, the second largest system in the United States, has 145 stations.
Limited public resources in big cities, Pearlstein says, can make inattention to accessibility issues convenient, if not inevitable. Sometimes a legal settlement is necessary to force a lasting overhaul, as was the case in Boston a little more than 10 years ago. That city’s system had suffered for decades from disinvestment, and by the early 2000s ADA violations were rampant, from dysfunctional elevators in even the busiest of stations to widespread reports of bus drivers refusing to serve riders with disabilities. Not until a high-profile class-action lawsuit did Boston’s public-transit system undergo a comprehensive makeover—including a dedication to upgrades that prevent outages as well as continual community-outreach efforts, says Laura Brelsford, who helped spearhead Boston’s transit overhaul and who today helps oversee the system’s accessibility department. But absent such pressure, loopholes in the ADA’s language enable some public-transit agencies to sidestep maintenance.
“There is zero doubt that we need to expedite delivery of an accessible subway,” Patrick Foye, the MTA’s president, said in a statement provided to The Atlantic. This goal is, Foye noted, cited in the agency’s robust modernization plan as a top priority that he intends to fund in part through increases to fares during rush hour. Over the next five years, the MTA plans to ensure that no rider is farther than two stations away from an accessible subway; the ultimate aim is to make all stations accessible within 15 years. The city also recently tapped Alex Elegudin, a wheelchair user, for its newly created accessibility-chief position.
Kaufman, the transportation scholar, suspects that a lack of accessibility may be partially a result of demographic imbalances among those in charge of designing public transit and other public-infrastructure projects. Women make up only 20 percent of licensed architects, and an even smaller portion of partners and principals at architecture firms, Allison Arieff wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. And at least historically, Kaufman says, transportation systems were designed “by and for the commuter class—people, primarily white men, working 9-to-5 jobs.”
Against this backdrop, one can’t ignore the fact that buses seldom provide sufficient room for strollers or take into account the needs of someone who struggles with hand-eye coordination, or that—decades after states first started seeking “potty parity”—women still find themselves contending with longer restroom lines than those faced by men. It’s also noteworthy that few urban-planning initiatives are explicitly geared toward kids’ needs, and that researchers have found evidence of certain housing policies in parts of the United States discouraging Millennials from starting families.
[Read: How marketers talk about mothers behind closed doors]
Both Freeman, the University of Hartford sociologist, and Kaufman lamented Goodson’s death as a sign that in cities like New York, the lack of accessible facilities may exacerbate gender and income inequality. Women—who account for a majority of public-transit riders nationwide—are still the primary caregivers of children; four in 10 U.S. families have female breadwinners, and most of those breadwinners are single mothers. More generally, women make up 60 percent of all caregivers—whether of children, the elderly, parents, or other dependents—and that job can make them particularly reliant on public transit. New York City caregivers’ commutes can be expensive, tacking on an extra $75 on average to their monthly travel costs; burdened with, say, wheelchairs and medical equipment or strollers and diaper bags, caregivers often resort to taxis or more expensive alternatives absent accessible subways or buses.
“Transportation should be viewed through a gender lens,” Kaufman says, noting that while women account for the majority of public-transit users in the United States, three in four of the females she and her research partners surveyed last year said they face harassment during their commute. “Without a true consideration of how caregivers need to travel and the accommodations that should be warranted to them, cities cannot serve the needs of their populations.”
Change is happening, especially as underrepresented groups rise to urban-planning leadership roles, Kaufman acknowledges. Women—including mothers—now occupy several key positions within the MTA. And as tragic as the Seventh Avenue–station accident is, Pearlstein, a native New Yorker, says he hopes that people continue to “seize on it” in a way that finally prompts lasting change.
Disability-rights and rider advocates acknowledge that securing the accommodations they desire will take time. But many developments that could move public transit toward being more accessible for all people are far less complex and costly than installing more elevators: measures such as louder and more conspicuous stop announcements, awareness-raising campaigns for non-English speakers and those who can’t read, and concerted efforts to solicit feedback from parents as well as from people with disabilities and workers tasked with transporting bulky items. “It’s really easy to feel overwhelmed by such a seemingly insurmountable load of work ahead,” says Brelsford, the Boston transit-accessibility official. “But the thing is: You have to start somewhere.”
To say that the practice of palliative care comes to vivid life in Sunita Puri’s pages may seem like a bad choice of words. But her memoir about tending to seriously, often incurably, sick people pulls off that feat. The driven daughter of Indian immigrants (her father is an engineer, her mother an anesthesiologist), she was in for a shock during her residency. She had been trained to equate success with patients’ survival. Now she realized that she had been taught nothing about addressing patients’ “debility, mortality, suffering.”
VikingPuri focuses on the struggle to accept limits in our mortal lives and in our medical culture—and in her own career. Allergic to sanctimony, she deals in visceral, and lyrical, details. “His body remained,” she writes about the death of a patient whose treatment she had agonized over, “but he had quietly and comfortably moved out, leaving behind his tattoo, his bruises, his clot, his cancer.”
In a high-tech world, her specialty is not cures, but questions—about pain, about fraught prospects, about what “miracle” might really mean. Her tool is language, verbal and physical. Wielding carefully measured words, can she guide but not presume to dictate? Heeding the body’s signals, not just beeping monitors, can she distinguish between a fixable malady and impending death? Puri the doctor knows that masterful control isn’t the point. For Puri the writer, her prose proves that it is.
The mysterious painter at the center of Velvet Buzzsaw is a parodic fantasy of a tortured creator. His works are vivid, frightening depictions of violence and tragedy; after the artist dies, his pieces are found stacked by the hundreds in his dank apartment, a treasure trove of torment for critics to puzzle over. The paint that the old man used is so thick, it seems to rise off the canvas, and his syphilitic-sounding sobriquet is Ventril Dease. “His name is the tinsel on the tree!” crows Rhodora Haze (played by Rene Russo), the dealer who gets her hands on the late Dease’s collection.
Velvet Buzzsaw, debuting Friday on Netflix, is the writer-director Dan Gilroy’s third film, and his latest to aim a satiric blunderbuss at a particular industry. Nightcrawler, released in 2014, was a nastily funny thriller set at a local-news station; 2017’s Roman J. Israel, Esq. was an embittered treatise on the systemic failures of the legal profession and the civil-rights movement. Gilroy’s new movie reunites the director with his Nightcrawler stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Russo. This time, they’re all making fun of the preening art scene, turning the story of Haze’s massive discovery into a bloody slasher film in which pretentious hangers-on get what’s coming to them.
Mocking the denizens of fine-art galleries is just about the easiest task available; the film’s characterization of the critics, dealers, and rival artists who stalk from exhibition to exhibition is as subtle as Zoolander’s take on the fashion world. The characters themselves feel like cartoons. Do Rhodora Haze and Ventril Dease sound like absurd names to you? Well, Gyllenhaal’s art critic is called Morf Vandewalt, while one of Haze’s employees goes by Jon Dondon (Tom Sturridge). Gilroy largely makes the movie work by amplifying the ridiculousness, and then joyfully tossing his story into a horror-fantasy blender for the gory final act.
This is a world saturated with peacocking cynics, all of them maniacally trying to sniff out the next great find. Piers (John Malkovich), a living legend and a client of Haze’s, is creatively blocked, while the up-and-comer Damrish (Daveed Diggs) appears to be the hot new thing. But once Haze and her assistant Josephina (Zawe Ashton) stumble across the stash of Dease’s life’s work, all other clients are forgotten. Gilroy plumbs the comic depths of exploiting a trendy success: An agent named Gretchen (Toni Collette) basically blackmails a museum into staging a Dease show, while Haze drives up the price on each painting by claiming she only has a few in stock.
In Velvet Buzzsaw, art and commerce aren’t merely intertwined; they’re feeding off each other in unpredictable, dismaying ways. Could it be that Gilroy has a few complaints about the state of his own industry? Swap out some of the characters’ jobs, and Velvet Buzzsaw could really be parodying any creative field, where the debut of new work made without industry interference and with unbridled passion is seen as potentially paradigm-shifting. Morf, who has grown bored of installations that feature talking robots and humming metal spheres, is inspired to investigate the primal nature of Dease’s paintings; he quickly discovers a dark history that distresses him but that only further jacks up the prices.
The latter half of Velvet Buzzsaw is little more than a series of macabre art exhibits, an arrangement of outrageous set pieces in which Dease’s canvases come to life and slaughter people. Within Gilroy’s heightened world, this turn of events hardly seems peculiar; everyone’s reverence for the paintings runs so deep that it’s unsurprising when the objects are revealed to be semi-sentient. While Nightcrawler was about an ambulance-chasing journalist with an eye for ghoulish crime scenes, Velvet Buzzsaw takes that theatrical approach to goriness much further, staging a number of hilariously original (and quite gruesome) deaths for its star-studded ensemble.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to care one iota about these characters. A challenge of writing satire is that building up any real story stakes is difficult if no one involved feels like a human being. Only Gyllenhaal wrings some pathos from his role, with the jaded Morf turning against the commercial excesses of his industry as he learns more about Dease. But everyone else exists mostly as fodder for the chopping block, and the final 30 minutes become a bit of a chore as Gilroy tries to find inventive ways for stationary canvases to kill people. In the end, Velvet Buzzsaw is a pretty soulless piece of art about the soullessness of art; but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a little fun proving its point.
On Wednesday, a polar vortex brought bitter cold to the Midwest. Overnight, Chicago reached a low of 21 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, making it slightly colder than Antarctica, Alaska, and the North Pole. Wind chills were 64 degrees below zero in Park Rapids, Minnesota, and 45 degrees below zero in Buffalo, North Dakota, according to the National Weather Service. Schools, restaurants, and businesses closed, and more than 1,000 flights have been canceled.
Even the United States Postal Service stalled mail delivery, temporarily. “Due to this arctic outbreak and concerns for the safety of USPS employees,” USPS announced Wednesday morning, “the Postal Service is suspending delivery Jan. 30 in the following 3-digit ZIP Code locations.” Twelve regions were listed as unsafe on Wednesday; on Thursday, eight remained.
As global surface temperatures increase, so does the likelihood of extreme weather. In 2018 alone, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, mudslides, and other natural disasters cost at least $49 billion in the United States. As my colleague Vann R. Newkirk II reported, Puerto Rico is still confronting economic and structural devastation and resource scarcity from 2017’s Hurricane Maria. Natural disasters can wreck a community’s infrastructure, upending systems for months or years. Some services, however, remind us that life will eventually return, in some form, to normal.
[Read: The situation in Puerto Rico is untenable]
Days after the deadly 2017 wildfires in Santa Rosa, California, a drone caught footage of a USPS worker, Trevor Smith, driving through charred homes in that customary white van, collecting mail in an affected area. The video is striking: The operation is familiar, but the scene is apocalyptic. According to Rae Ann Haight, the program manager for the national-preparedness office at USPS, Smith was fulfilling a request made by some of the evacuees to pick up any mail that was left untouched. For Smith, this was just another day on the job. “I followed my route like I normally do,” Smith told a reporter. “As I’d come across a box that was up but with no house, I checked, and there was mail—outgoing mail—in it. And so we picked those up and carried on.”
USPS has sophisticated contingency plans for natural disasters. Across the country, 285 emergency-management teams are devoted to crisis control; Pat Mendonca, the senior director of the office of postmaster general, told me that these teams are trained annually using a framework known as the three p’s: people, property, product. After a weather-necessitated service outage, the agency’s top priority is ensuring that employees are safe, after which it evaluates the health of infrastructure, such as the roads that mail carriers drive on. Finally, it decides when and how to reopen operations.
If the devastation is extreme, mail addressed to the area will get sent elsewhere. In response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, USPS preemptively diverted inbound New Orleans mail to Houston. Mail that was already processed in New Orleans facilities was moved to an upper floor so it would be protected from water damage.
But the agency aims not to keep delivery suspended for too long. “It’s our drive to get back out on the street with our carriers,” Mike Swigart, the director of national preparedness at USPS, told me in December, “because that’s our legislative responsibility.”
As soon as it’s safe enough to be outside, couriers start distributing accumulated mail on the still-navigable routes. USPS urges those without standing addresses to file change-of-address forms with their new location. After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, mail facilities were set up at the Houston Astrodome and in dozens of other locations across the country in the two weeks that USPS was unable to provide street delivery.
Every day, USPS processes, on average, 493.4 million pieces of mail—anything from postcards to Social Security checks to medicine. Spokespeople from both USPS and UPS told me all mail is important. But some mail can be extremely sensitive and timely. According to data released by ACI Worldwide and Aite Group in January 2017, 56 percent of bills are paid online, which means that just under half of payments still rely on delivery services to be completed.
[Read: How a disaster’s economic impacts are calculated]
It can be hard to identify which parcels are carrying crucial items such as Social Security checks, but USPS and UPS try their best to prioritize sensitive material. Swigart said that the benefit of being a federal agency is that USPS works “with other federal administrations, [and has] relationships with the state because we’re dealing with them every day.” They will, for example, coordinate with the Social Security Administration to make sure that Social Security checks reach the right people in a timely fashion. In the aftermaths of Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael last fall, USPS worked with state and local election boards to make sure that absentee ballots were available and received on time.
Mail companies are logistics companies, which puts them in a special position to help when disaster strikes. In a 2011 USPS case study, the agency emphasized its massive infrastructure as a “unique federal asset” to be called upon in a disaster or terrorist attack. “I think we’re unique as a federal agency,” Swigart told me, “because we’re in literally every community in this country … We’re obligated to deliver to that point on a daily basis.”
Private courier companies, which have more dollars to spend, use their expertise in logistics to help revitalize damaged areas after a disaster.
For more than a decade, FedEx has supported the American Red Cross in its effort to get emergency supplies to areas affected by disasters, both domestically and internationally. It also donates millions of dollars to support responders and victims, according to a 2012 internal report, and sponsors organizations such as the Salvation Army. This same report explains that in the 2012 fiscal year—the year of Hurricane Sandy, the Rush Fire in California, and the Kamaishi earthquake and tsunami in Japan—the company transported the equivalent of 53 planes filled with donated aid, distributed more than 1,200 MedPacks to Medical Reserve Corps groups in California, and donated space for 3.1 million pounds of charitable shipping globally. Last October, the company pledged $1 million in cash and transportation support for Hurricanes Florence and Michael.
UPS’s philanthropic arm, the UPS Foundation, uses the company’s logistics to help disaster-struck areas rebuild. “We realize that as a company with people, trucks, warehouses, we needed to play a larger role,” said Eduardo Martinez, the president of the UPS Foundation. The company employs its trucks and planes to deliver food, medicine, and water. The day before I spoke to Martinez in November, he had been touring the damage from Hurricane Michael in Florida with the American Red Cross. “We have an obligation to make sure our communities are thriving, prosperous,” he said. “Our people who live and work in these communities can be in the same circumstances.”
Rebuilding can take a long time, and even then, impressions of the disaster may still linger. “Katrina simply is our lives, whether we consciously acknowledge it or not,” Anne Gisleson, a Katrina survivor, wrote in The Atlantic in September. Returning to a sense of normalcy can be difficult, but some small routines—mail delivery being one of them—may help residents remember that their communities are still their communities.
“When they see that carrier back out on the street,” Swigart said, “that’s the first sign to them that life is starting to return to normal.”’
Last week, The Washington Post published an article with a headline that blended, as so many headlines will these days, equal amounts of accuracy and alarmism. “‘Everything Is Not Going to Be Okay’: How to Live With Constant Reminders That the Earth Is in Trouble” is a blunt summary of a subtle work of journalism—a timely and lyrical exploration of climate change not just as a physical fact, but also as a psychical one. How does it feel, the writer Dan Zak asks, to live within looming tragedy? What does it mean to run errands and pay mortgages and pick up the kids from school, to hew to the established rhythms of things, as the world gives way to entropy? What is it like to exist in a place where extinction is a matter not of speculative fiction, but of daily journalism? Every age has its own conception of apocalypse. You can tell a lot about ours by the fact that this particular vision—endings that arrive not with a bang, but through a series of preventable whimpers—ran in the Style section.
The Post story, as it explored the banality of our not-okayness, cited the poet Alice Major’s Welcome to the Anthropocene (the book’s title is a reference to the current geologic age, the one in which human activity is the dominant influence on the Earth’s physical environment). Her work, art that reckons with science, is part of a long tradition. In 1965, as the world attempted to make its rough peace with the fact that it could all be destroyed in an instant, the British literary theorist Frank Kermode delivered a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr College. “The Long Perspectives,” as he called the talks, were meditations on how literature, from antiquity to the mid–20th century, had doubled as an attempt to organize time itself. In 1967, Kermode compiled the lectures into a book, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction.
The volume, slim but bursting with erudition, caused a sensation. Its primary argument, presented to a world shaped by war and confronted by the threat of human-made apocalypse, was that endings are themselves a form of sense making. Narrative, Kermode pointed out, with its tidy beginnings and middles and conclusions, has long been humans’ way of grafting order onto the chaos of the world; “the sense of an ending,” then, with its embrace of impending crisis, has been written into the way humans understand themselves.
“Although for us the End has perhaps lost its naive imminence,” Kermode noted, referencing the Bible’s Book of Revelation, “its shadow still lies on the crises of our fictions; we may speak of it as immanent.” Imminence, or that which is inevitable, and immanence, or that which is inherent: Eschatological thinking, Kermode suggested, is inscribed into art’s present understanding of the world. Which is also to say that all fiction is, in some sense, the literature of apocalypse.
Kermode was writing before the time when pop culture would be widely considered, among academics, to be a legitimate participant in art and literature. He focused his analysis, accordingly, on what today are considered highbrow fictions—in particular, the novels and poetry of the Western canon, as that body was seen to exist in the mid-1960s. Kermode found his evidence for the intimacy of the end-times in the works of Dante and Blake and T. S. Eliot (“The Waste Land,” a response to the senseless horrors of World War I, is almost literally apocalyptic) and Yeats, whose blank verses in “The Second Coming,” with their stark warnings of centers failing to hold and things falling apart, pretty much made Kermode’s points for him. The Sense of an Ending is in many ways a dated book. But it is in even more ways an urgent book. Kermode’s decades-old insights, imminence tangling with immanence, are thoroughly infused into the American pop culture of the present moment—particularly in TV and film, forms that are preoccupied in their own ways with the encroaching sense of an ending.
Apocalypse has, of course, long been a favorite theme of American pop culture. The tradition established in Kermode’s time by works such as The Planet of the Apes and Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove has been continued, recently, by works such as Annihilation, Bird Box, Children of Men, Colony, Deep Impact, Under the Dome, The Leftovers, Terra Nova, The Walking Dead, A Quiet Place, The Happening, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, World War Z, and so many others. The threats in those stories are often familiar to the point of cliché—diseases, environmental catastrophe, nuclear winter, alien invasions, too much water, not enough water, asteroids, zombies—and so are the typical protagonists: humans, many of whom are made heroes by sad circumstance, who do their best to survive in spite of it all.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum: There is a humanitarian impulse to many of these tales of apocalypse, in part because they tend to take for granted that the ending itself is the villain to be battled and defeated. As the American president Thomas Whitmore, truly the Henry V of our times, tells the fighter pilots who are preparing to stave off an extraterrestrial invasion in Independence Day: “We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive!”
This is a seductively easy vision of heroism and villainy. In the context of a crisis in which humanity itself is the threat to survival, the “good guys, bad guys” approach to things can seem at once too complicated and too simple. (It is revealing that Bird Box, whose plot merged environmental catastrophe with the dangers of horror-movie-esque monsters, functioned more effectively as a meme than it did as a film.) And so there is another way of exploring what Kermode called the “End-feeling”: the Style section way. The way that cares less about archetypes and adventure, good guys and bad, and more about what the End-feeling actually feels like for those who are living it. This mode internalizes the anxieties of apocalypse not as tragedy, but as comedy.
The Good Place, the brilliant series that has just finished its third season on NBC, realizes Kermode’s insights in the most literal of ways: The show is set in the afterlife, meaning that, in it, death functions not as a villain to be fought, but simply as an environment to be navigated. The Good Place, though, is also a sitcom in the classic sense: Its comedic situations play out on sets with a decidedly Disney aesthetic. Its lead characters—who tend to be wacky and complicated in nearly equal measure—have the option of dining at restaurants with names such as Knish From a Rose, Cruller Intentions, and Ponzu Scheme. They make lots of jokes about Florida. The wry genius of it all is that, because of the curated kitsch, it’s extremely easy to forget that the people chatting and feasting and making fun of Jacksonville during Thursday night’s old Must-See-TV slot are, in fact, dead. The afterlife, in The Good Place, takes on its own cartoonish exuberance; death, the show is positing, is nothing more—and nothing less—than the friends we made along the way. The ultimate ending is not a foe; it is merely a fact.
It’s an idea that is similarly humanized and humorized in The Last Man on Earth, the recent Fox sitcom, which insists that there are LOLs to be mined in the rocky ravages of a postapocalyptic America. And in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, which ekes a rom-comic plot out of the prospect of mass extinction. And in Forever, the Amazon series featuring Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen—a show that, like The Good Place, is for the most part set in the afterlife. Forever, too, mingles humor and horror: As its characters’ marriage binds them even after their deaths, the promise of “forever”—a notion that many among Kermode’s roster of poets might have considered deeply romantic—takes on a sense of menace.
There is, in these ironized minglings of comedy, tragedy, and time, a sense of quiet resignation. Imminence, made immanent. “Welcome! Everything is fine,” reads the text, painted in cheerful green on a blank white wall, in The Good Place, reassuring the newly deceased that the ceasing isn’t so bad. It’s a version of the thing that Forever’s June (Rudolph), confused by her death rather than saddened by it, asks of Oscar (Armisen) when she realizes that she is now what the show terms a “former”: “So we just keep … going?” June wonders, incredulously. “I mean, how long does this go on for? I mean, what’s the point of all this?”
Oscar’s reply is both searing and blunt: “Well, what was the point of the thing before this?”
This is, in its way, precisely what Kermode was getting at when he spoke and then wrote of apocalypse: Here is the sense of an ending, absorbed, through our entertainments, into the dull mundanities of everyday life. Death as a metaphor for marriage. Death as another chance. Death as a chronic condition.
The atomized End-feeling is not limited to sitcoms. You can catch hints of it as well in “Bandersnatch,” the Choose Your Own Adventure–style Black Mirror episode that stubbornly rejects the beginning/middle/end format of the traditional narrative, and that summons, in its way, social media’s endless streams and feeds and flows—a willful end to endings. There’s some End-feeling, too, in this moment’s heady barrage of reboots and remakes and revivals—approaches to art that deal with the anxiety of imminent endings by insisting that endings are never, really, final. To be a consumer of pop culture at this point is to be constantly mourning lost things—and also to be told, constantly, that the mourning is out of place. It is never to know, for sure, whether Tony Soprano is actually dead.
But it is also to know that he has, in some sense, been dead all along. One of the first lines of dialogue in The Sopranos finds Tony, the mob boss, attempting to explain to his new psychiatrist why he’d had a panic attack. “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” Tony muses, ostensibly talking about the family business. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
Dr. Melfi’s reply, written for 1999 but all too relevant, still, for 2019: “Many Americans, I think, feel that way.”
Kermode wrote The Sense of an Ending within the psychic clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; today’s world retains the threat that terrified his, but also compounds it. Our anxieties radiate and insinuate. They have slipped the bonds of tragedy. The Good Place began as a whimsical meditation on interpersonal ethics; it has steadily tightened, over three tremendous seasons, into an indictment of the wrenching complications of goodness itself: how hard it is to act ethically at this moment when, just as the Post suggested, everything you can do will be done within a world that is losing its bearings.
The Good Place is broadcast into a world that is defined, in every sense, by fatigue: spent resources, imposing scarcities, weary people. Burnout has become a cultural diagnosis. Cli-fi, climate fiction, is the current age’s answer to the Gothic. Last year, the Doomsday Clock was moved a little closer to midnight. The recent pair of documentaries about the Fyre festival, an event that was a scam in the most classic sense, were generally interpreted not as new chapters in a tale as old as time, but rather as parables of a specifically millennial form of precarity. All our resources—attention, fame, money, the air itself—are exhaustible.
This is what it feels like not just to be aware of impending tragedies, but also to live within them. This is what it feels like to understand, intimately and collectively, that old Shakespearean lament: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” The end is nigh, and also the end is … sigh. The contemporary sense of an ending takes its form not as the dramatic fulfillment of an ancient prophecy—“Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand”—but rather as a tangle of dull and daily inevitabilities. Warming waters. Whipping winds. Things falling apart. The leader, careless and cruel, refusing to see what is plain. If every age has its version of apocalypse, the soft tragedy of our own is that it can no longer be safely situated in the future. Our end-times, instead, lurk among us, furtive and fierce and all too present-tensed, waiting, watching, lingering, biding—understanding, far better than we allow ourselves to, how little it takes to turn the good place into the bad.
Last fall was supposed to be the capstone of Braden Morris’s high-school football career. The previous year, his tiny southern Illinois school, Bunker Hill High School, which has fewer than 200 students, joined forces with a neighboring school so they’d have enough players to field a varsity team. As the starting quarterback, Morris led the combined 38-player team to a playoff berth. But heading into his senior year, he was one of only 24 boys who had signed up to play—far fewer than the 35 to 40 players that Brian Borkowski, the team’s coach, considers ideal for a school that size. Then, in the first game of the season, Morris broke his wrist, and his younger brother, Evan, the starting tailback, dislocated his hip. “They were out for the season, and that kind of started the train of injuries rolling,” Borkowski says.
By the fourth week, the team was left with just 17 players, most of whom were freshmen and sophomores. That Friday night, the game was called off during the third quarter for safety reasons—by then, the team was losing 68–0. The next week, Borkowski broke the news to his players: Their season was over.
“It was tough,” Braden Morris told me. “Part of me didn’t want to accept that this was the way I would go out.” The cancellation packed a triple punch in his household—Braden and Evan’s stepbrother, Garrett, was the team’s starting center and defensive tackle.
Similar situations played out around the country last fall as a shortage of players led teams to cancel their seasons. There are no official data on season cancellations, but Kent Johnson, a former high-school-football coach who monitors local media coverage, told me he’s aware of 61 teams that did so in 2018—nearly double the number he counted from the year before. Twenty-one of those teams made the decision midway through the season. While the cancellations happened from California to New Jersey, Johnson’s data show that about half the schools that called off their season this year were in rural areas, where the loss of football doesn’t just affect players and families, but ripples throughout the whole community.
[Read: The white flight from footbal]l
When their season was shut down, Braden and his brothers had little to do after class other than their daily chores. A teammate, Trent Bertelsmann, was able to pick up more hours at his job making pizzas in a neighboring town, but as his mother, Lisa, told me, relatively few local businesses offer teens after-school jobs. “It’s a very small rural community—there’s not much here for the kids to do,” she said.
Indeed, Bunker Hill doesn’t have a lot of other extracurricular activities or weekend events: Football was the only boys’ sport offered at the high school last fall, and the closest movie theater is about 15 miles away. Adults also felt the sting after football went away; they “were bummed because that’s what they did on Friday nights,” Evan Morris told me.
It’s no big shocker that fewer boys are playing football: According to the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS)—the main governing body for high-school sports—participation peaked at 1.1 million players in the 2008–09 school year, and has since declined by 75,000. That dip might be linked to the growing awareness of the long-term risks of playing football. It’s not just the pros who have to worry: Starting to play tackle football at an early age puts kids at a heightened risk of cognitive and behavioral problems.
A major driver behind last season’s cancellations is that having fewer football players on a team causes a pernicious cycle in which the remaining players are at greater risk of getting hurt. “We had freshmen on the line in positions they never should have been in,” says Bryan Heflin, Garrett’s father and Braden and Evan’s stepfather. That led to injuries among not only the younger players, but also the more experienced ones, such as those in Heflin’s household, because being on a small team translates to more time spent on the field. Recent research has found that from 2005 to 2017, high-school players on smaller teams were injured at twice the rate of players on larger teams.
At some point, without enough players, it’s just not feasible—or safe—to field a team. “The risk is there, no doubt,” Bob Colgate, the director of sports and sports medicine at the NFHS, told me. “At what point does that number get too low to field a team?” Colgate said the group is looking into the issue, though any decisions about minimum roster levels would have to be made by state associations.
Last summer, fewer than 10 players showed up to preseason practice at Trimble County High School, in Bedford, Kentucky, about 45 miles northeast of Louisville. “We were counting on all these players, and it just didn’t happen,” says Will Kunselman, a senior who played multiple positions on offense and defense. Even a social-media push that prompted several more kids to sign up wasn’t enough: The school held to its decision to cancel the season.
[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]
To keep playing football, five of Kunselman’s teammates made the tough choice to transfer to a rival high school. That includes Logan Rodgers, a defensive tackle, who now spends an extra hour getting to and from school in the neighboring county. “I’ve been going to Trimble County [schools] ever since I was in preschool,” Rodgers told me, “so growing up with everybody there and then leaving my senior year was kind of rough.”
As in Bunker Hill, the loss of high-school football in Bedford was keenly felt. It was “something for the community to rally around,” Brigette Kunselman, Will’s mom, told me. “Win or lose, you go.” She missed the cheerleaders and the band, she said, as well as “the opportunity to see and be seen, to catch up with your neighbors.”
That sentiment is echoed by Bedford’s former mayor, Todd Pollock, whose two sons played on the Trimble County High School football team. Home games usually draw “a heck of a crowd,” he told me. It wasn’t just the camaraderie that was lost; Pollock points out that home games brought fans from neighboring communities, who then spent money at local businesses.
For the schools, too, the loss of games came at a cost, given that ticket sales can help fund athletics and other school programs. In Bunker Hill, for example, a typical home game would bring in $1,500 for the school, the principal, Matthew Smith, told me, with concession sales netting an additional $1,500.
Homecoming football games can be a focal point each fall for students and alumni, and after season cancellations, some schools scrambled to make alternative plans. Clarenceville High School, in Livonia, Michigan, had its soccer team play that night instead. Bunker Hill also still managed to hold a homecoming—a game of flag football played by the school’s female students. Braden Morris sang the national anthem beforehand and helped his younger sister prepare for her role as freshman quarterback.
Of course, despite the spate of season cancellations, high-school football isn’t on the verge of a death spiral: More than 14,000 schools fielded teams in 2017, with more high-school boys playing football than any other sport by a substantial margin.
However, Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, told me that small, rural schools will continue to be more vulnerable to cancellations unless they embrace different models of football. One option, he said, is flag football, which surpassed tackle football in popularity among 6-to-12-year-olds for the first time in 2017. As these players enter high school, this could help set the stage for a corresponding shift to flag football.
A major hurdle to change is that “people are just stuck on the traditional idea of what football is,” Farrey said. But for small schools, adopting alternative models might help them avoid having to eliminate the sport altogether, preserving the role that it serves as a community gathering point. As noted in the Aspen Institute’s recent white paper on the future of youth football, which Farrey co-wrote, the games “are seen by many as a useful and even essential venue for students and adults to come together for a shared purpose, especially in small towns.”
Neither Bedford nor Bunker Hill has announced whether high-school football will return next year, which leaves players and adults alike pondering the future. “What can we do to fill the void?” Pollock asked. “That’s the $64,000 question.”
Next year, Braden Morris’s brothers have the option of transferring to another school if football doesn’t come back to Bunker Hill. But for Braden, the loss of his senior season still hurts. “You want to play, to get in front of the entire town and run into the end zone and hear everybody scream for you,” he told me not long after his season was canceled. “I wish I could still hear that.”
In one of the earliest issues of The Atlantic, the poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. made a direct appeal to his audience on behalf of his fellow writers: “Deal gently with us, ye who read!”
He wanted it to be known that writing isn’t an easy business: It can be frustrating, mystifying, isolating. And that’s just the beginning, if our full archive of writers’ musings on writing is to be believed. Technical writing is a battle between clarity and respectability, according to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Resonance and beauty were always chancy in the eyes of the short-story writer and novelist Eudora Welty. Critics pushed the Native Son author Richard Wright to sublimate the racism he portrayed. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Edith Wharton could never quite discover where inspiration stemmed from.
Writing the same year as Holmes, Thomas Wentworth Higginson had no lack of warnings for aspiring authors. But he urged them to write and keep writing in spite of it all. Luckily, at least one of his readers, 32-year-old Emily Dickinson, listened.
Each week in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas, and ask you for recommendations of what our list left out.
Check out past issues here. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.
What We’re Reading
John Kenneth Galbraith emphasizes the importance of straightforward facts
“The writer who seeks to be intelligible needs to be right; he must be challenged if his argument leads to an erroneous conclusion and especially if it leads to the wrong action. But he can safely dismiss the charge that he has made the subject too easy. The truth is not difficult.”
📚 THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY, by John Kenneth Galbraith
Eudora Welty considers the desire to connect
“I think we write stories in the ultimate hope of communication, but so do we make jelly in that hope. Communication and hope of it are conditions of life itself … We hope someone will taste our jelly and eat it with even more pleasure than it deserves and ask for another helping—no more can we hope for in writing our story.”
📚 THE OPTIMIST’S DAUGHTER, by Eudora Welty
Richard Wright counters criticism of his writing about race in America
“To ask a writer to deny the validity of his sensual perceptions is to ask him to be ‘expedient’ enough to commit spiritual suicide for the sake of politicians … My task is to weigh the effects of our civilization upon the personality, as it affects it here and now. If, in my weighing of those effects, I reveal rot, pus, filth, hate, fear, guilt, and degenerate forms of life, must I be consigned to hell?”
📚 NATIVE SON, by Richard Wright
Edith Wharton reflects on the mysteries of the creative process
“These people of mine, whose ultimate destiny I know, walk to it by ways unrevealed to me beforehand. Not only their speech, but what I might call their subsidiary action, seems to be their very own.”
📚 THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, by Edith Wharton
Thomas Wentworth Higginson advises young writers to dedicate themselves to their art
“Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on to something which needs no advocate but itself.”
Last week, we asked what books inspired by ancient myths you would recommend. Alison Plott, a reader in Chicago, suggested Circe, Madeline Miller’s “lyrical, poetic, and occasionally heartbreaking” retelling of the story of a magically gifted Greek goddess. Lorraine Berry, from Ormond Beach, Florida, and Wynne Cougill, from Washington, D.C., both put forward Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, a modern take on Sophocles’s Antigone. “Shamsie’s retelling is note-perfect,” writes Lorraine, “and yet something completely new.”
What challenging book do you love? Tweet at us with the hashtag #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing, or fill out the form here.
This week’s newsletter is written by Annika Neklason. The book she’s reading on the train is My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team, or write to booksbriefing@theatlantic.com.
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Updated at 5:41 p.m. ET on February 1, 2019.
Shantavia Jackson signed her three sons up for football to keep them out of trouble. As a single mother who works the night shift at a Home Depot warehouse 50 minutes away from her house, Jackson relies on the sport to shield the boys from gang activity in her rural Georgia county. They began in a local league five years ago when they were still little, their helmets like bobbleheads on their shoulders. Now 11, 12, and 14, they play in games across the region. Jackson says she passed up a daytime shift at Home Depot so that she can drive them to games and cheer them on.
Over time, the boys’ coaches have become mentors, making sure their athletes get good grades and stay off the streets. They take the boys on field trips to the beach and to Busch Gardens. Jackson’s eldest son, Marqwayvian McCoy—or Qway, as she calls him—has particularly thrived. Jackson says Qway has been diagnosed with schizoaffective bipolar disorder, which sometimes manifests in bursts of anger and an inability to focus at school. Now his teammates help him when he gets stuck in his studies and look up to him for his prowess on the field. They’ve nicknamed him Live Wire because he can hit so hard.
Jackson dreams that Qway will soon make it out of their home in Colquitt County, a place marked by fields of crops and cotton bales the size of Mack trucks. Football could help him do that. As a middle schooler, he’s already been asked to practice with the high-school team, the Colquitt County Packers, a national powerhouse that in 2016 sent two dozen boys to college with full scholarships. Qway knows his mother doesn’t have the money to send him to college, so he studies websites that track top high-school-football athletes and watches all the football he can online, hoping to get better at the game.
Marqwayvian McCoy at home in his jersey (Dustin Chambers)As Qway throws himself into football, the sport is facing a highly publicized reckoning more serious than any it has confronted since the Pop Warner youth-football program was established in 1929. Research suggests that tackle football can cause long-term brain injury, and as a result, many parents are telling their kids they can’t play. In the 2017–18 school year, 6.6 percent fewer high-school athletes participated in 11-player tackle football than in the 2008–09 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
Yet not all parents are holding back their kids from tackle football at equal rates, which is creating a troubling racial divide. Kids in mostly white upper-income communities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West are leaving football for other sports such as lacrosse or baseball. But black kids in lower-income communities without a lot of other sports available are still flocking to football. In keeping with America’s general racial demographics, white boys continue to make up the majority of youth-tackle-football players, according to data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. But proportionally, the scales appear to be shifting. A recent survey of 50,000 eighth-, tenth-, and 12th-grade students found that about 44 percent of black boys play tackle football, compared with 29 percent of white boys, as analyzed by the University of Michigan sociologist Philip Veliz. Football at the high-school level is growing in popularity in states with the highest shares of black people, while it’s declining in majority-white states. Other recent studies suggest that more black adults support youth tackle football than white adults.
This trend has become particularly visible as majority-white towns such as Ridgefield, New Jersey, and Healdsburg, California, have dropped their varsity-football programs due to a lack of interest. Meanwhile, in Lee County, Georgia, a majority-black area near where the Jacksons live, a coach recently started a new travel football team for kids to provide them with guidance and mentorship. These racial divides show up in the football that America watches: Today black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college-football players, up from 39 percent in 2000. White athletes make up 37 percent, down from 51 percent.
This divergence paints a troubling picture of how economic opportunity—or a lack thereof—governs which boys are incentivized to put their body and brain at risk to play. Depending on where families live, and what other options are available to them, they see either a game that is too violent to consider or one that is necessary and important, if risky. Millions of Americans still watch football; NFL ratings were up this season. That a distinct portion of families won’t let their children play creates a disturbing future for the country’s most popular game.
Sam and Megan Taggard’s colonial-style home in West Simsbury, Connecticut, has no shortage of sporting equipment. The couple’s four children stack bikes in the garage and clutter the wooden living-room floor with footballs and tennis balls. On the day I visited them last October, the Taggards’ 13-year-old son had two hockey games and their 9-year-old daughter had a basketball game. The family’s two younger sons horsed around a hockey goal in the living room.
Tackle football, however, was not on the agenda. “My kids aren’t playing,” Sam Taggard told me. Taggard played football years ago at Bentley University, and he says his 44-year-old body is still bearing the damage: He had back surgery two years ago and still feels the wear and tear of football on his body.* He also did a clinical doctorate in physical therapy and has seen how debilitating head and neck injuries can be. Football requires kids to endanger their brain every single game, he said: “In football, you’re literally trying to decimate the person in front of you. If you’re not, you’re not playing well.”
Sam Taggard played football in college and had to have back surgery later in life. (Monica Jorge)The Taggards aren’t the only family in their neighborhood pulling their boys from tackle football. At one of the day’s hockey games, I chatted with five other parents—all of whom were white—in the frigid stands of an ice-hockey rink on a private-school campus as their sons skated past. Four told me they wouldn’t let their son play. The fifth, a mother named Sharon Walsh, said she had objected, but her husband and son overruled her. She hated signing the waiver saying that she understood her child might die. Thankfully, she said, her son recently decided to give up football on his own.
Ron Perry, another hockey parent, echoed the sentiment that he wouldn’t let his son play tackle football, because of concerns about concussions and head injuries. A friend of his coaches a rec-football team and is always looking for players, Perry told me. But he wouldn’t recommend his son. “There’s just constant hitting,” he said. (Hockey, it should be noted, can also lead to head injuries. USA Hockey, which oversees high-school and club hockey in America, has been relatively proactive about safety, deciding in 2011 to ban bodychecking in games until age 13.)
A huge amount of evidence shows that football poses a risk to developing brains. Athletes who begin playing tackle football before the age of 12 have twice as much of a risk of behavioral problems later in life and three times as much of a risk of clinical depression as athletes who begin playing after 12, according to a 2017 Boston University study. A separate study from Wake Forest University found that boys who played just one season of tackle football between the ages of 8 and 13 had diminished functions in part of their brain.
One of the biggest risks of repeated head injuries is that players could develop CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that occurs when a protein called tau spreads through the brain, killing brain cells. CTE is linked with behavioral and personality changes, memory loss, and speech problems. Conversations about CTE tend to focus on the dangers of concussions, but brains can also be damaged by frequent hits to the head. A February 2018 study found that mice with repeated traumatic brain injuries, regardless of concussive symptoms, still had CTE. The condition has been found in the brains of many high-profile football players who committed suicide in recent years, including Junior Seau, Andre Waters, and Terry Long. One 2017 study of the brains of 111 former NFL players found that 110 of them had CTE.
Because of this research, a growing number of elite-level football players are trying to get kids to wait until high school to start playing tackle. By then, kids’ bodies are developed enough that head trauma may not be as detrimental, and the kids can better understand proper tackling procedures and control their body to follow them.
[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]
Even if kids wait until they’re in high school to play tackle football, though, they’ll need something else to do in the meantime. And that’s where Sam Taggard’s kids have an advantage over Shantavia Jackson’s. Throughout the country, affluent school districts offer more extracurricular activities than poorer districts, and upper-income parents can pay for more activities outside of school. On top of hockey, the Taggards’ oldest son, Jack, plays trombone in the band, volunteers to teach music to disabled kids, enjoys chess, and skis. Jack expects to go to college whether or not he excels at sports. Both his parents did, and his father has a master’s in business administration. Shantavia Jackson is still working on getting her GED.
As brain-damage fears have grown, upper-income boys have started decamping to sports such as golf or lacrosse, which are less available in poorer communities. The kids are influenced by adults who have their own biases about the safety of football. Just 37 percent of white respondents told researchers that they would encourage kids to play the sport, while 57 percent of black respondents said they would, according to a working paper by the sociologists Andrew Lindner of Skidmore College and Daniel Hawkins of the University of Nebraska.
The Taggard family outside their home in Simsbury, Connecticut (Monica Jorge)Now getting white kids just to play flag football can be a tough sell. Jim Schwantz, the mayor of Palatine, Illinois, and a former linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers, tried to start a flag-football league as an alternative for families in his area worried about concussions. Despite a strong start in 2012, interest fell each year in the mostly white suburbs where the league operated, because parents saw the sport as a gateway to tackle football. Schwantz decided to scrap the league in 2017.
Meanwhile, in Colquitt County, where the Jacksons live, football remains the biggest thing around. The county’s population is just 45,000, but it’s not unusual for the 10,000-seat high-school stadium to be full of local fans for Friday-night games. Timmy Barnes, a former player who later traveled with the football team as a police officer, has called Colquitt County “a community who only has football.” He wrote that after Rush Propst, the high-school coach, was nearly suspended after head-butting a player but was saved when he apologized and the community rallied around him.
On a fall afternoon, I sat with Shantavia Jackson on the metal bleachers of a high-school stadium in Thomasville, Georgia, a town in a neighboring county near the Florida border, as successive teams of boys came to play in a tournament branded “The Battle of the Babies.” Jackson was there from the start. She wore a gray long-sleeved Colquitt County Cowboys T-shirt to support her youngest son, Chance, whose Pop Warner team played in an early game. She cheered for him while keeping her 12-year-old, Jyqwayvin, entertained in the stands. Qway’s undefeated team was playing a team from Atlanta in the last game of the day, so the family’s day was dominated by football.
The stands were mostly empty when the 6- and 7-year-olds played around noon under a scorching Georgia sun, but they began to fill up as games featured older boys, who could run, jump, and hit harder than the little kids. Amid the sounds of the tournament—the cowbells and hollering from the parents, a DJ blasting Drake from the end zone, the referee’s whistles and the grunts of adolescent boys counting jumping jacks behind the stands—no one seemed bothered by the thuds of the hits. These happened constantly: when the 6- and 7-year-olds ran smack into one another trying to get a fumbled football, when a 9-year-old caught a pass and got leveled by a boy twice his size, and when an 11-year-old got yanked around the neck and tackled by another 11-year-old.
[Read: How students’ brains are in danger on the field]
“Get him, come on!” a grandmother yelled at her grandson, a tiny 61-pound 9-year-old named Zain who was flattened by a boy 40 pounds heavier. Zain came off the field crying and his mother went to stroke his head. With the exception of Zain and his family, nearly every other player and family in the stands was black.
By the time Qway’s game rolled around, the stands were packed and the sun had set, turning the sky a purplish blue. The game was a rout; the team from Atlanta was faster, bigger, and more organized than Qway’s team, and so the boys started getting violent in frustration, tackling one another after the whistle, grabbing at necks to pull one another down. Parents yelled at the referees for what they perceived as missed penalties, and then turned on one another. “We’re in the sticks now!” one Atlanta parent yelled, taunting. Qway got hit in the groin, and Jackson stood at the bottom of the bleachers, her hand by her mouth, waiting to make sure he was okay.
Shantavia Jackson (Dustin Chambers)Jackson knows football is dangerous. Her father broke his neck playing football when he was in high school; he was in the hospital for weeks and had to get screws in his spine. But she has a fatalistic attitude about injuries. Her boys could get injured in a car accident or a drive-by shooting. They could get injured if they joined gangs. “If it’s meant to happen, it’s going to happen. We can’t stop it,” she said. “You can get injured in any sport.” All she can do, she told me, is hug her boys and tell them she loves them before each game.
Other parents in the stands said similar things. One mother: “Boys will be boys. They need a little roughness.” Another: “You have to keep your child busy so they don’t have time to get in trouble.” One woman, Hope Moore, started her son in football when he was 6. At first he wasn’t interested in playing sports, Moore said, but she wanted to get him off the couch and away from video games. He fell in love with football from the moment he started playing. Moore used to worry about the hits, pulling him from games if she thought he was getting hurt. But the coaches told her that her son needed to learn to make mistakes, and how to get hit, she told me. Now he’s getting invited to live in other school districts so he can be on their teams. “It’s going to help him in college,” Moore said.
Even as the dangers associated with tackle football become more evident, the sport is growing more lucrative. Universities can make money from football on ticket revenue, broadcasting fees, licensing opportunities, and sponsorships through bowl games. Some of the biggest schools have doubled what they make from football over the past decade, according to Forbes. The football program at Texas A&M University, one of the nation’s top teams, brings in $148 million annually.
Seeing the revenue opportunities, many schools have expanded their football program and started offering more scholarships. Since 1988, the NCAA has added 62 Division I schools that are eligible to offer full-ride football scholarships, representing about 3,000 more scholarships available. By contrast, 31 fewer schools offer NCAA Division I scholarships for men’s swimming and diving than in 1988. “If [universities] started giving boys the same amount of scholarships in swimming, you’d see a whole bunch of poor kids jumping in the pool,” Robert W. Turner II, a professor at George Washington University who briefly played in the NFL, told me.
In communities like Colquitt County, many families see high-school seniors get full-ride football scholarships and aspire to something similar. Jackson’s boys, for instance, look up to Ty Lee, a former Colquitt County football player who was recruited to Middle Tennessee State University. They visit him when he’s home from school. Around 78 percent of black male athletes in the lowest income quintile expect to qualify for financial aid through an athletic scholarship, compared with 45 percent of white males in the same income bracket, according to a forthcoming paper by the Portland State University sociologists CJ Appleton and Dara Shifrer.
[Read: Football has always been a battleground in the culture war]
College recruiting can happen as early as middle school, which means kids can feel pressure to start playing sooner to hone their skills. If parents in Colquitt County were to prevent their kids from playing until they’re 14, their kids’ athleticism and knowledge of the game would be far behind that of boys who have been playing for years. Chad Mascoe Sr., who played football at the University of Central Florida and in the Arena Football League, and who now lives in Thomasville, Georgia, told me that his 14-year-old son, Chad Mascoe Jr., had three recruiting offers before he got into high school. Now, as a star freshman, Chad has 13 offers, according to his father. He was recently recruited to transfer to an elite boarding and sports-training school in Florida later this year.
The NFL starts marketing to children when they’re young, which has attracted criticism from groups who say the league’s material portrays football as safe and healthy, even as research shows that it is not. The league runs a website and an app for kids that has 3 million registered users, and it has funded NFL-branded fitness and healthy-eating programs in more than 73,000 schools. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the short-term health of students improved more in participating schools than in those not enrolled. In Colquitt County, schools got a visit from an Atlanta Falcons player through one of those programs in 2014. (The NFL declined to comment for this story.)
Even without the NFL’s presence, though, Colquitt County prioritizes football. In 2016, Colquitt County voters approved a ballot question that allowed the school board to use some proceeds of a sales tax for education funding to build a $3.7 million, 73,000-square-foot indoor multipurpose space that allows the football team to practice even in the heat of a Georgia summer. Propst, the high-school coach, made $141,000 last year, according to Open Georgia, which provides salary information for state and local employees. Most teachers at Colquitt County High School make less than half of what Propst does.
Colquitt County High School (Dustin Chambers)Without football, the options for boys in Colquitt County are limited. Only 80 percent of incoming freshmen at Colquitt County high schools end up graduating. Of those who do, just 29 percent go on to four-year colleges. For those who stay, job options are bleak: More than two-thirds of households in Colquitt County make less than $50,000 a year. That’s less than half the median household income in Connecticut’s Hartford County, where the Taggards live.
The people who do seem to be pulling their kids from football in Colquitt County are the ones who can afford other opportunities. I talked to Todd Taylor, who is white and lives in Moultrie, Georgia, a few miles from Shantavia Jackson’s hometown of Norman Park. He played football and baseball at Colquitt County High, and his family has season tickets to Colquitt County Packers football games. But his wife really doesn’t want their 8-year-old son, Jud, to play, because of concussion dangers. Instead, Jud plays baseball and dives at Moss Farms Diving, a powerhouse facility in Moultrie that has trained dozens of divers who get college scholarships. Moss Farms offers training tuition-free to those who need it, but diving remains an expensive sport in America, requiring pool time and lots of travel. Sixteen percent of the Moss Farms roster is made up of people of color.
The divide on the football field makes it hard not to see how inequality in America is worsening health disparities and raising the specter of another, darker era of American history. In the early part of the 20th century, black Americans were prevented from buying homes in well-off neighborhoods by racially restrictive covenants, excluded from trade unions and the jobs they guaranteed, and paid less than their white counterparts. The segregation that resulted has long had health implications. Today simply the fact of being black can be hazardous to one’s health. Low-income black boys are more likely than low-income white boys to live in neighborhoods with persistent poverty, violence, and trauma. These neighborhoods also have little access to healthy foods.
Despite the benefits football can provide, it may also be worsening these health disparities. The medical care accessible to low-income families in poor neighborhoods may be helping to obscure the dangers of brain injuries. Low-income black communities have less access to good medical services and information that would emphasize the downsides of playing football, says Harry Edwards, a civil-rights activist and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. “Nobody advises them as to the long-term medical risks,” he told me. “They are out of the loop.” Black people who said they had followed news about concussions were less likely to encourage children to play football than others who hadn’t been following the news, according to Lindner and Hawkins’s study.
[Read: The worst part about recovering from a concussion]
When black boys from low-income families look for examples of men who have come from similar backgrounds and succeeded, they don’t have as many positive role models outside of sports and music. Black NFL players who came from poverty are featured in commercials selling products, sitting behind desks at halftime in tailored suits, holding up trophies. They’re in newspaper stories and TV specials in which they talk about growing up poor in the South, raised by a single mother, and making it big in the NFL. “The media serves up encouraging stories for black kids to consume,” says John Hoberman, the author of Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Low-income black boys do not see the hundreds of athletes suffering in silence as their brain deteriorates, who ache when they get out of bed every morning, who damaged their body playing in high school or college but who didn’t even make it to the NFL.
While black boys are disproportionately getting channeled into a violent sport, white people are making the most money off of it. Seventy percent of NFL players are black, but only 9.9 percent of managers in the league office are. The NFL was just 52 percent black in 1985. Only two people of color are majority owners of NFL franchises: Shahid Khan, the Pakistani American owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Kim Pegula, a Korean American businesswoman who is a partial owner of the Buffalo Bills. “If you’re going to avoid 21st-century gladiator circumstances in terms of football, the teams have to look something like the demographic representation of this nation,” Edwards told me.
Last year, the NFL expanded its Rooney Rule, which was first implemented in 2003 and seeks to diversify teams’ coaching and front-office staff. Still, the gladiatorial overtones are hard to overlook. Players who want to get recruited by NFL teams must attend the NFL Scouting Combine, a week-long showcase in which they perform mental and physical tests. Athletes’ hand size, arm length, and wingspan are measured during this event, and players are asked to stand naked but for their workout shorts so that team recruiters can see how they are built, according to Edwards, who also works as a consultant with the San Francisco 49ers. NFL and team executives, mostly white men, are evaluating the bodies of black players, deciding whether to make an investment.
Even as broadcast networks lost viewers generally, NFL ratings were up in 2018. Americans still appear to have a growing fascination with the sport, even if a majority-white segment of the population doesn’t want their children to play it.
Without a reversal in economic fortunes for poor communities across the country, football could one day become a sport played almost exclusively by black athletes, while still enjoyed by everyone. Black athletes—who already make up the majority of players in the most dangerous on-field positions—would continue to suffer from long-term brain damage, their life cut short by dementia and the scourge of CTE. Black boys would continue to be drawn to a sport that could make their life painful and short. Everyone else would sit back and watch.
Efforts are under way to try to make football safer. Youth leagues are implementing concussion protocols, lessening the amount of hitting players do in practice, and even distributing helmets with special sensors that analyze whether an athlete has gotten a concussion. Dartmouth College eliminated live tackling in all practices in 2010; other Ivy League schools adopted similar rules in 2016. The NFL has made some changes, too, adding a concussion protocol in 2009 and altering kickoff and tackling rules to lower the risk of injury. The 2018 NFL season saw a 28 percent decrease in concussions, compared with the previous year.
Still, the league can’t do much about the fact that football, more than any other sport, requires players to run into one another over and over again and fall to the ground. “Football at the elite level is about as close as you can get to war and still stay civil,” Edwards said. Concussion protocols can’t erase the research that suggests that primarily brain trauma, not concussions, leads to CTE.
The Colquitt County Packers practice field (Dustin Chambers)Some lawmakers want the government to get involved by prohibiting kids from tackling in football before high school, or by banning youth tackle football entirely. Bills introduced in five states to restrict tackle football have faced backlash. “To demonize just this sport is unfair. It’s illogical, and frankly, it’s downright un-American,” Mike Wagner, the executive commissioner of Pop Warner’s Southern California conference, said in reaction to the Safe Youth Football Act, a failed California bill introduced last year that would have set a minimum age for organized tackle-football leagues.
The disappearance of tackle football could be a real blow to some communities, unless something changes so that those places offer more opportunity and less peril for low-income black boys. If tackle football were banned, for instance, Shantavia Jackson’s boys would lose the coaches who look out for them. Without football, they wouldn’t have something to look forward to on weekends, or as big of a community of teammates. They might not have a dream they can pursue that’s quite as tangible and achievable as playing college football.
Before she had kids, Jackson wanted to leave Colquitt County, but she ended up staying in the same town where her father and grandmother still live. The stakes are higher for her sons, she says, especially for Qway, whose mental-health condition sometimes sets him apart. He needs to be somewhere bigger, with more people like him, she told me. “There’s really nothing much here for him,” she said.
White parents may be doing the best thing for their sons by pulling them from tackle football. But parents of black boys in the rural South are facing a different reality, Jackson says. She believes that she is being a good parent if she gets her sons excited about tackle football. Their opportunities grow if they learn how to hit and tackle and run—how to be as much of a live wire—as well as they possibly can.
* This article previously misstated the university Sam Taggard attended.
Denise NestorTwo years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts gave the commencement address at the Cardigan Mountain School, in New Hampshire. The ninth-grade graduates of the all-boys school included his son, Jack. Parting with custom, Roberts declined to wish the boys luck. Instead he said that, from time to time, “I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice.” He went on, “I hope you’ll be ignored, so you know the importance of listening to others.” He urged the boys to “understand that your success is not completely deserved, and that the failure of others is not completely deserved, either.” And in the speech’s most topical passage, he reminded them that, while they were good boys, “you are also privileged young men. And if you weren’t privileged when you came here, you’re privileged now because you have been here. My advice is: Don’t act like it.”
As Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s maudlin screams fade with the other dramas of 2018, Roberts’s message reveals a contrast between the two jurists. Whatever their conservative affinities and matching pedigrees, they diverge in temperament. The lingering images from Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing are of an entitled frat boy howling as his inheritance seemed to slip away. By contrast, Roberts takes care to talk the talk of humility, admonishing the next generation of private-school lordlings not to smirk.
The chief justice also carries himself in a manner that reflects his advice. He chooses his words carefully. He speaks in a measured cadence that matches his neatly parted hair and handsome smile. He is deliberate and calm, not just in his public remarks but in his work as a judge—and as a partisan. Roberts declines to raise his voice or lose focus, because he understands politics as a complex game of strategy measured in generations rather than years. He also recognizes, but will never admit, that although politics is not the same thing as law, the two blend together like water and sand. More than 13 years into his tenure as chief justice, Roberts remains a serious man and a person of brilliance who struggles, under increasing criticism from all sides, to balance his loyalty to an institution with his commitment to an ideology.
BasicThe first biography of Roberts has arrived, Joan Biskupic’s The Chief. It will not be the last. A well-reported book, it sheds new light but is premature by decades. (Biskupic is a legal analyst for CNN.) As our attention spans dwindle to each frantic day’s headlines, we can forget that the position of chief justice is one of long-term consequence. Only 17 men have filled that role, and they have presided over moments of national crisis, shaping our government’s founding structure (John Marshall), hastening its civil war (Roger Taney), responding to the Great Depression (Charles Evans Hughes), and enabling the civil-rights revolution (Earl Warren).
Roberts seems ever likelier to face an equally daunting test: confronting a president over the value of the law itself. A staunch conservative, he has broken ranks with the right in a major way just once as chief justice, by casting the deciding vote to save the Affordable Care Act in 2012. What will Roberts do if the clerk calls some form of the case Mueller v. Trump, raising a grave matter of first principles, such as presidential indictment and self-pardon? He portrays himself as an institutionalist, but we do not yet know to what extent this is true. He must necessarily prove himself on a case-by-case basis, which injects a note of drama into his movements. Roberts is the most interesting judicial conservative in living memory because he is both ideologically outspoken and willing to break with ideology in a moment of great political consequence. His response to the constitutional crisis that awaits will define not just his legacy, but the Supreme Court’s as well.
As a young man, Roberts was the anti-Kavanaugh. Although he, too, attended a prestigious Catholic prep school—La Lumiere, in northern Indiana—Roberts had no time for drinking parties. His life as a young man is a story of purpose and industry. He studied constantly, acquired Latin, graduated first in his class, and entered Harvard as a sophomore. He planned to become a history professor. Still, however humbly he absorbed life’s blessings, Roberts, the son of a steel executive, grew up in a narrow world that made few calls upon his empathy. In personality he was quiet and serious, seeing much but revealing little. His displays of budding conservatism were rare but sharp-edged, as in a high-school-newspaper editorial objecting to the admission of girls.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Roberts clerked for two notable federal judges: Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals, and then William Rehnquist of the Supreme Court. Friendly, a revered jurist known for his scholarly opinions, seems to have taught the young man form; Rehnquist, a partisan conservative, taught him substance. Biskupic quotes repeatedly from Roberts’s correspondence with Friendly after Roberts entered Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981. “This is an exciting time to be at the Justice Department, when so much that has been taken for granted for so long is being seriously reconsidered,” he wrote. Surrounded by other Republicans after years in liberal Cambridge, Roberts displayed fierce conservatism on matters of legal policy. He wrote strident memos on voting rights, school prayer, abortion, and women’s equality. Advancing quickly, he went on to hold prestigious legal positions in Reagan’s White House and in the solicitor general’s office under President George H. W. Bush.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Roberts rose to the height of private practice as an appellate advocate. Biskupic writes that “with his deep, methodical research and direct, unadorned rhetoric,” he was uncommonly effective arguing before the Supreme Court. Biskupic ably conveys Roberts’s appeal, as well as her own skepticism:
Roberts does have a way of sounding eminently reasonable. He speaks with a steady voice and in clear, direct sentences. He argues with a thoughtful tone. His confidence is manifest, but never brazen. Roberts almost never looks flustered, and he never stammers. He prepares intensively for every public appearance he makes, working both on the substance of what he will say and on his presentation.These habits (along with a brief stint, beginning in 2003, as a federal appeals-court judge) all but guaranteed Roberts’s confirmation after George W. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court in 2005. With his baseball metaphors, charming family, and utter mastery of constitutional law, he was irresistible. Republicans fawned over his credentials and politesse, and even many Democrats conceded that he was a rare talent. Political handlers have advised subsequent nominees to study the tapes of Roberts’s confirmation hearings and do their best to sound like him. No one has come close.
[David A. Kaplan: John Roberts’s chance for greatness]
As chief justice, Roberts has proved a committed conservative whose defection in the 2012 Obamacare decision and then in a 2015 follow-up case somehow rendered him permanently squishy to true believers. He has sided with the right in 87.5 percent of 5–4 decisions, according to a 2015 article in the Journal of Legal Studies. Roberts voted to deregulate campaign finance in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, to constitutionalize gun ownership in District of Columbia v. Heller, and to restrict school-integration plans in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. The most significant, and destructive, decision of Roberts’s career so far was his 2013 opinion striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, in Shelby County v. Holder. Despite his frequent invocations of judicial modesty, Roberts has been willing to reach such results by overturning established precedents, and by deciding matters the parties have not raised.
Yet since 2012, the right has distrusted him. Roberts’s shocking defection in that year’s Affordable Care Act case roused anger and feelings of betrayal in a conservative movement increasingly bent on ideological purity. Even as he writes breathtakingly conservative opinions, Roberts’s mere willingness to pay lip service to institutional values such as restraint and nonpartisanship now arouses suspicion. In keeping with the fighting spirit of the times, members of the Republican base demand a warlike posture from the chief justice when strategic patience would better serve their interests. Perhaps the long and painful history of unreliable conservatives nominated by Republican presidents is to blame. Two of the most recent disappointments, David Souter and Anthony Kennedy, began to stray by joining a centrist triad in a politically sensitive case—just like the chief justice.
Biskupic reports in detail for the first time on the machinations of the Obamacare case, revealing that Roberts started out in a different place. She writes that he initially voted with the four other conservatives to strike down the ACA, on the grounds that it went beyond Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. Likewise, he initially voted to uphold the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. But Roberts, who kept the opinion for himself to write, soon developed second thoughts.
Biskupic, who interviewed many of the justices for this book, including her subject, writes that Roberts said he felt “torn between his heart and his head.” He harbored strong views on the limitations of congressional power, but hesitated to interject the Court into the ongoing health-insurance crisis. After trying unsuccessfully to find a middle way with Kennedy, who was “unusually firm” and even “put off” by the courtship, Roberts turned to the Court’s two moderate liberals, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. The threesome negotiated a compromise decision that upheld the ACA’s individual mandate under Congress’s taxing power, while striking down the Medicaid expansion. Future scholars will endlessly probe this fascinating moment in judicial history, but Biskupic deserves credit for writing the first draft.
Why did Roberts do it? Biskupic does not profess to have the answer.
Perhaps Roberts’s move was born of a concern for the business of health care. Perhaps he had worries about his own legitimacy and legacy, intertwined with concerns about the legitimacy and legacy of the Court. Perhaps his change of heart really arose from a sudden new understanding of the congressional taxing power.This much at least can be said: Roberts declined to join the other four Republican-appointed justices to invalidate the key legislative achievement of a Democratic president during an election year. Such a move would have further eroded the Court’s claim to transcend politics after the image-shattering decisions in Bush v. Gore (2000) and Citizens United (2010). Notably, although the Affordable Care Act was highly politicized, the provision of health care is not a matter of bedrock conservative judicial philosophy, as abortion, affirmative action, and the right to bear arms are. Maybe this freed Roberts to prioritize the Court’s reputation over the right’s immediate partisan interests. A future conflict with the executive branch over the nature of obstruction of justice or the reach of criminal laws may fall into a similar category. Only John Roberts can know.
For all his ability and charm, Roberts has so far been an uneven leader. He strives for unanimity and, in public remarks, extols the benefits of consensus for the Court’s reputation and collegiality. But he presides over a deeply divided Court that descends into rancor ever more frequently. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor have protested the conservative majority’s decisions in bitter and even personal terms. Bad blood is evident between several members: Kagan and Samuel Alito bickered like a divorced couple over a 2014 First Amendment case. Biskupic may go too far when she writes of Roberts’s “secretive ways” or of his “continued inability to win the personal confidence of his colleagues.” Yet, with the exception of a series of unanimous decisions in 2016, when the Court had only eight members, Roberts has generally been unwilling to forgo conservative victories for the sake of consensus. As Eve knew, sometimes the fruit is just too tempting.
[Read: The Supreme Court is headed back to the 19th century]
It is remarkable to think that the Roberts Court’s blockbuster decisions on gay rights, campaign finance, and immigration may be small potatoes compared with far more dramatic matters to come. Perhaps there will be no constitutional clash between the Court and the presidency. But if it does arrive, Roberts, as the Court’s leader and now the most centrist of its conservatives, will be the justice to watch. His legendary poise will count for only so much. One of his colleagues on the appellate bench told Biskupic, “John Roberts has always seen everything with pristine clarity, and almost instantly.” If that is true, then in his abilities, and his burdens, Roberts stands alone.
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “The Chief Justice’s Secret.”
NEWARK, N.J.—At a small service here Thursday night, people prayed for what Cory Booker was about to do.
With each prayer, hands clasped and hands released. The congregation at Metropolitan Baptist Church, Cory Booker’s small home church, in the middle of the ward he started out representing on the city council, grasped hands Thursday night as the Reverend Dr. David Jefferson called up preachers and congregants. A prayer for consecration. A prayer for guidance and direction. A prayer for Esther, for the women in the room.
“Let this nation see that something good comes out of Newark, New Jersey,” a woman from the congregation said. “Let Cory know that everything he does, as it abides with you, blesses the future as much as it blesses the past, as much as it honors the future.” Over 40 minutes, no one made any kind of official announcement. But by the end of the prayer service, they all knew why they were there.
The New Jersey senator announced his presidential campaign hours later on Friday morning, the first day of Black History Month, with a run of early-morning appearances on black and Spanish-language radio. His first big interview would be across the river in Manhattan for The View.
After a break for the Super Bowl, there will be more next week, then a swing to South Carolina and Iowa next weekend. His launch video, set to the snare drums of a high-school marching band, runs through his own family’s story of white lawyers helping his family break through a pattern of local housing discrimination in a way that changed the course of his life. It splices together clips of resistance marches and civil-rights marches, and talks about collective action and interwoven destiny, panning from shots of the homeless on a city street to a field growing corn.
Booker’s campaign will roll out big lists of staff hires and supporters in all the early-presidential-primary states, years of preparations unleashed for a show of force he and his aides think is going to pave the way for a traditional ground game, despite being built around a black man obsessed with the “conspiracy of love” who is not a traditional candidate at all. But before it began, he brought together a group of friends, supporters, and current and former aides for what the reverend described on Thursday night as an intimate prayer service. Booker’s Senate office in Washington is filled with religious books; last week he quoted the Torah in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. He’s comfortable sitting for six hours in a church service, head bowed, nodding along. Even as other plans shifted, he knew he wanted this to be where he spent the night before everything became official.
Still, the evening was such a secret that some of the invitees weren’t even sure why he was there and asked whether he was really about to announce his White House run. Aides alerted just three reporters. The only sign from the outside that anything special was happening inside Metropolitan Baptist was two police cars, parked on the street and in the parking lot. Their flashing lights shone through the stained-glass windows as the prayers went on.
Booker sat in a chair by himself, most of the time leaning forward with his eyes closed. His mother, Carolyn, was called up to sit next to him.
After each prayer, he stood and patted his heart twice, the way he always does, and gave a hug. The reverend sent someone for his oil—this was going to be old school, he told them—and he literally anointed Booker, drew a cross on his forehead, and then laid his hand on the senator’s head while his wife grasped the back of his neck. “We don’t believe, God, that you took him so far to leave him now,” the Reverend Jefferson said.
“I just feel this sense of blessed,” Booker told me in the hallway outside the chapel, after he’d finished all the hugs and selfies. “A quiet confidence about the road ahead, every risk I’ve taken, every leap into the unknown, God’s always blessed me with people who are there, who are here, who’ve allowed me to be used for something much larger than myself.”
He said he was humbled. I pointed out to him that running for president is about the most egotistical thing a person can do—decide that you and only you should be in charge of the country and the world.
He put his head down and laughed, and then, without prompting, looked up and compared himself with Donald Trump.
“What is real strength? Is it bombast? Is it swagger, braggadociousness? Is it strut? No, I think strength is seen in vulnerability. It’s seen in those people who stood before fire hoses and armed troopers unarmed,” Booker said. “I think it’s people who are willing to let the truth be told. We’re all imperfect folks trying to make a better nation, and I look forward to offering up a very strong spirit of love and kindness and grace and decency, along with my policy ideas, and put that before the American public. And I trust and have faith in America, and if that’s not what folks want right now, so be it. But I feel this sense of liberation tonight.”
For weeks, as other big-name candidates jumped in, “Where’s Cory?” became a running joke among Democratic operatives. He’d seemed like he was ready to go. Some figured he’d even announce in December. Then Elizabeth Warren announced her candidacy on New Year’s Eve, with the kind of big online launch that could have come out of him. Some figured he’d try to get out ahead of Kamala Harris, at least, seen as prime competition because they’re both black and both know that heavily black South Carolina, home of the third primary, will almost certainly be essential to their hopes of getting into the final round in the fight for the nomination. When people heard he was spending Martin Luther King Jr. Day in South Carolina, they assumed that was going to be announcement day. Then word spread that Harris was going to announce on King Day, picking that symbolism, and it seemed like she had boxed him out, though Booker’s team insists that it was a head fake all along.
The jokes were still going around through Thursday afternoon, after a small group of reporters had been quietly alerted to Friday’s plans and Booker was leaving Washington to head back home here. They were confused. Had he blinked? And if he hadn’t blinked, what was he waiting for? January was over. Big donors already knew the numbers of the other candidates. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders loom large with the potential to redefine everything, but the dynamics within the rest of the field seemed like they were beginning to set.
The answer, according to Booker’s people, was that they were building. Building and watching. Whatever benefit they would have gotten from moving more quickly, they decided, wouldn’t have matched the benefit of having more time to finesse their organization and plan.
Internally, as the other announcements piled up, Booker would repeat a line about how the process was like a hurdle race: “If you’re looking to the lanes to your left or your right, you’re going to trip.”
True, he’s a month behind Warren, two and a half weeks behind Kirsten Gillibrand, and a week and a half behind Harris, Booker figures, but he’s ahead of Biden, Sanders, and Mike Bloomberg.
“It’s February. It is very, very early,” Booker said after the church service. Running through all the pieces that have been put in place, he added, “I think we’re going to run the best campaign we could possibly run.”
All of Booker’s love talk, his tendency to give sermons—rather than speeches—that count as short if they’re under 40 minutes, the wide eyes, and the constant hugs can make people forget that the documentary about his first big campaign, against incumbent Newark Mayor Sharpe James in 2002, was called Street Fight, and that he has been defined by ambitious, hard-edged politics. Watch the movie now (it’s streaming on Netflix), and it’s notable how much, 17 years later, Booker looks the same and sounds the same, talking about his philosophy of walking every street that he wants to represent, getting into fights with the cops James sent out to harass him.
“No disrespect to Sharpe James, but he’s had 16 years to show you what he could do. And anything he could have done, he should have done by now. It’s time for some new, young blood,” Booker says to one voter early in the movie. Talking to his consultants during a scene in the final stretch, he pushes back on running negative ads.
“I’m not going to lose this race because we’re afraid to punch Sharpe in the nose. I just think there’s a way to do it with dignity—you’re still rolling up your sleeve and slugging this guy in the face, but there’s a way to do it with dignity,” he tells them on speakerphone.
On Thursday night, Booker said his opponents are making a mistake if they think he’s going to be all about hugs and preaching unity. The password for the preview of the launch video his staff sent to reporters was BringIt.
“I came up through Brick City,” he told me, using the old nickname for Newark. “But we have this, we have this, we have this mistaken sense that being strong is being mean, that being tough is being cruel. It’s just not. Separate those things for a moment. You can be a strong, tough street fighter and still be a person of grace and love and kindness and empathy and vulnerability.”
He paused. “We all yearn for a nation that comes back together and fights for each other.”
Booker lost that race against James, but came back and won four years later. These days James’s son, John, is on the Newark city council. He’s a close-enough political ally in town to have been invited Thursday night (but not close enough to be ready to jump on board Booker 2020). Booker is “going to go for it on his own,” John James said. “He doesn’t need my endorsement.”
James stood for the whole service, clapping when he was asked to help.
Booker has been making real moves to run for president for the better part of a year, but his plans crystallized the first weekend in October, when he flew straight from the Senate floor vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation to the big annual Iowa Democrats’ dinner in Des Moines. It surprised him just how much appetite there was for a spiritual, single black vegan from New Jersey in a state that’s about as different from downtown Newark as you can get without leaving the country.
“I saw that people didn’t just want a politician who’s going to say, ‘I’m going to punch Trump in the face,’ when I saw that people really wanted to rise above it and pull people back together to our common ideas and common principles,” Booker said.
His mother walked out of the service on Thursday night with a big smile on her face.
The moment, watching her son be anointed with oil 11 hours before launching his presidential campaign, was huge. She didn’t seem fazed.
“It’s a journey,” Cory Booker’s mother said, “and today was the first step of the journey.”
Between a sidewalk and a cinder-block wall grew seven mushrooms, each half the size of a doorknob. Their silver-green caps were barely coming up, only a few proud of the ground. Most lay slightly underground, bulging up like land mines. Magnolia bushes provided cover. An abandoned syringe lay on the ground nearby, along with a light assortment of suburban litter.
Paul Kroeger, a wizard of a man with a long, copious, well-combed beard, knelt and dug under one of the sickly colored caps. With a short, curved knife, he pried up the mushroom and pulled it out whole. It was a mushroom known as the death cap, Amanita phalloides. If ingested, severe illness can start as soon as six hours later, but tends to take longer, 36 hours or more. Severe liver damage is usually apparent after 72 hours. Fatality can occur after a week or longer. “Long and slow is a frightening aspect of this type of poisoning,” Kroeger said.
He and I were in a quiet neighborhood of East Vancouver, British Columbia. Across the street, behind St. Patrick Elementary School, kids were playing basketball, and their voices echoed between the occasional passing cars. Kroeger likes kids. As we’d hunted mushrooms from the sidewalk earlier that day, he had cooed at every stroller, then stopped the parents to warn them about the death caps in the neighborhood.
As he shook the mushroom free of its soil and added it to the others he’d lined up on a sheet of wax paper, he surveyed the collection and said, “Enough here to kill an entire Catholic school.”
The death caps were slightly domed, with white gills and faintly greenish stems. At the bottom of each stem was a silky slipper, called the volva, which was a purer white than the rest of the mushroom. The Amanita phalloides species accounts for more than 90 percent of mushroom-related poisonings and fatalities worldwide.
Kroeger, who studied the biochemistry of medicinal mushrooms while working as a lab assistant and technician at the University of British Columbia, is a founding member and the former president of the Vancouver Mycological Society, and the go-to authority on mushroom poisonings in western Canada. When Amanita phalloides first appeared in British Columbia in 1997, he took careful note. It had never before been seen in Canada. The single reported specimen was found among imported European sweet chestnut trees near the town of Mission, an hour east of Vancouver.
The species appeared again a year later, under a large, ornamental European beech tree on the grounds of a government building in the provincial capital, Victoria, on southern Vancouver Island. Ten years later, death caps began to appear in Vancouver, in a neighborhood shaded with mature European hornbeam trees. Kroeger recruited volunteers to search neighborhoods, and put out the word to mushroom hunters. During the first year, they documented about 50 locations in Vancouver. Kroeger wanted to know where the mushrooms were coming from, and where they’d turn up next. Sooner or later, he feared, they would have deadly consequences.
The first serious poisoning in British Columbia was reported in 2003, and another occurred in 2008. Both victims survived. Then, in 2016, a 3-year-old boy from Victoria died after eating mushrooms found outside an apartment complex. Kroeger thought he had anticipated the worst, but he was not prepared, he said, “for a wee child to die.”
Without fail, Kroeger noted, death caps appeared in urban neighborhoods, not in deep woods or city parks. They showed up most often in the strip of grass between sidewalks and streets.
For the past few years, Kroeger and his network of fungiphiles have been putting up posters in infected neighborhoods. The BC Centre for Disease Control sends out his warnings in press releases, and he sets up a booth at street events in order to warn anyone willing to listen that death caps should be left alone. When I joined him in East Vancouver, most of the people he stopped on the sidewalk—parents with strollers and passersby with groceries—had already heard of the invader. A man in a tool belt coming off a house remodel said he’d seen death caps a few blocks away in East Vancouver, and Kroeger scribbled down the address. I asked the man why he was so interested in mushrooms; he said he just liked to know what was growing in the neighborhood.
The first death cap Kroeger found that day had been in front of a house decorated for Halloween, which was two weeks away. He dug into the leafy ground cover, revealing several more greenish domes. Like a leaping gnome, he jumped across the sidewalk, grabbed a plastic human skull off a post, and brought it back to his find. Nestling the skull into a nest of purple periwinkle beside the emergent death caps, he laughed to himself and took a picture. Sometimes, he almost seems to side with the death caps. He appreciates their mysterious tenacity. He greets each one with an excited smile, talking to it: “There you are.”
By the end of the day, Kroeger had collected a couple of dozen death caps, each placed in wrinkled wax paper and then into one of the plastic boxes he carried in a faded, bucket-style day pack. They’d be dried and stored at the university. Most were from new locations. Before rolling a thin cigarette for himself, he fished out a damp cloth to clean his hands. He explained that he couldn’t use a moist towelette with alcohol because it could facilitate the passage of toxins through the skin. While he thought the mushrooms could usually be handled safely, a whole day of repeated touching was risky, since it was always possible to forget and touch one’s face, nose, or lips. “Just to be safe,” he said, wiping his hands and offering the cloth to me.
Dr. Kathy Vo, a medical toxicologist in San Francisco, publishes case studies on rare or unusual poisonings. Amanita phalloides poisonings, she told me, are some of the worst. “When the liver starts to fail, you see bleeding disorders, brain swelling, multi-organ failure. It’s very, very rough,” she said.
The levels of fluid loss, Vo said, are some of the most dramatic she’s seen. The body flushes everything it has. “There’s not an antidote,” she said. “That’s what makes this particularly deadly. We institute a variety of therapies, but there’s not an A, B, C, D. It’s not always the same. The best bet for the patient is fluid, fluid, fluid; keep watching the liver, and if the liver is failing, go for a transplant.”
On average, one person a year has died in North America from ingesting death caps, though that number is rising as the mushroom spreads. More than 30 death-cap poisonings were reported in 2012, including three fatalities, while 2013 saw five cases and no deaths. In 2014, one person died of death-cap poisoning in Michigan; two in California; and one in Vancouver, after a Canadian man traveled to California, ate the mushrooms as part of a meal, and returned to Vancouver, where he became ill and died.
Amanita phalloides are said to be quite tasty, and a person who eats one could feel fine for a day or two before illness sets in. The poison is taken up by the liver cells, where it inhibits an enzyme responsible for protein synthesis; without protein, the cells begin to die, and the patient may start to experience nausea and diarrhea—symptoms that can easily be attributed to general food poisoning or other ailments. “If the patient doesn’t realize the connection, doesn’t see the illness as a result of eating a mushroom a day or two earlier, it’s a hard diagnosis,” said Vo.
The first death caps to appear on the West Coast hit Northern California in 1938. Since then, Amanita phalloides has been a constant menace to people in the Bay Area. Vo said that an outbreak of poisonings typically follows a rainy season; in November of 2016, after a long spell of warm weather and copious rain, the Bay Area Mycological Society got in touch with the California Poison Control System hotline, warning that death caps were sprouting up. “Five days after that, we started getting calls,” she said.
[Read: A few things to consider before eating wild mushrooms]
As part of a cluster of 14 poisonings in the fall of 2016, a Bay Area family grilled wild mushrooms gathered by a friend, not knowing they were death caps. They were eaten by the young mother and father, their 18-month-old daughter, and two other adults. The parents and a third adult underwent aggressive fluid treatments and were released from the hospital after a couple of days, while the fourth adult and the child required liver transplants. In the process, the little girl, who reportedly ate half a mushroom cap, suffered what Vo described as permanent neurological impairment, and is no longer able to feed herself or follow commands.
“Every year we get lots of calls about mushroom ingestion,” Vo said. “A kid finds one in the backyard and eats it. We ask them to send a picture and usually it’s not a big problem. We call them ‘little brown mushrooms.’ They cause irritation, sometimes nausea and vomiting. But Amanita phalloides is a different case. Flip the mushroom over and tell me if the gills are white. If they are, I’m really concerned.”
The death cap is a global traveler, but only in the past century has it caught its stride. Long after eucalyptus trees and feral cats spread across Australia, long after pigs and mongooses were running loose in Hawaii, Amanita phalloides was still home in Europe, where it grew mostly in deciduous forests and was the leading cause of mushroom poisonings from the Balkans to Russia to Ireland.
The first death caps in North America were identified on the East Coast in the early 1900s. The first in California were spotted on the grounds of the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey in 1938, growing from the roots of a planted, ornamental tree. After that, the species landed hard in the Bay Area, where it is now common, having spread into wild oaks; it is becoming more abundant in California than in its native European habitat. After the Bay Area, it was reported in a string of Pacific Northwest cities, each one farther up the coast.
The species wasn’t just spreading from tree to tree, gradually expanding its range. Instead, it landed like an isolated bomb, colonizing outward from each impact. While this pattern suggests that the mushrooms in British Columbia may have started in California, Kroeger began to suspect that they represented a separate invasion.
When Kroeger put together maps of the first death-cap outbreaks in Vancouver, he had no problem seeing the pattern. They were showing up in neighborhoods built in the 1960s and ’70s, growing under broadleaf trees that had started off in nurseries.
Glenn HarveyMost mushrooms propagate in the form of spores that fly into the air and land like seeds. Death-cap spores are especially fragile; they degrade in sunlight, and don’t travel far or well. By any measure, the species should have remained a rare European endemic, but somehow, it successfully hitched a ride all the way to North America—not once but many times.
Most of any mushroom is underground, invisible. The majority of its biomass consists of mycelia, a network of living threads that send up occasional fruiting bodies in the form of mushrooms. Death-cap mycelia live only in tree roots. They form a symbiotic bond with certain trees, growing into a web that dramatically extends the reach of their roots.
As the web penetrates the root structure, becoming an inseparable part of the tree, the fungus begins to live off the sugars stored in the roots—while offering the tree greater access to water, nutrients, and chemical messages from surrounding trees. The relationship is called ectomycorrhizal: ecto (outside), myco (mushroom), rhyzal (root). If a sapling with ectomycorrhizal fungi were to be dug up and moved, the fungi would travel with it. In this case, Kroeger surmised, the fungi had been inadvertently carried across the Atlantic to southern British Columbia.
Kroeger can stand on a hill in Vancouver, or look from a freeway, and pick out the neighborhoods where he is most likely to find death caps. He looks for a combination of mature broadleaf trees and European ornamentals, especially hornbeams, mixed with what he calls mid-century modern domestic architecture, where the longest wall of the house is built parallel to the street rather than tucked back into a landscaped lot. This dates a neighborhood, and its trees, to the 1960s and early ’70s.
Death caps appear in these neighborhoods decades after planting, because the mushroom lies dormant for that long. Its mycelia live in the roots of a host tree until the tree reaches maturity—when it stops pouring energy into growth and starts storing sugars. For these European imports, that’s about half a century. When surplus sugars enter the fungal web, the first fruiting bodies emerge.
Shadowing Kroeger along streets pillared with old broadleaf trees is like pursuing a fox, not a creature of sidewalks. The matrix he follows is underground. Cutting between parked cars, smoking one of his thin cigarettes as he traveled, he seemed to know every grassy back way, every portage around apartment complexes and medical facilities.
[Read: The aftermath of a deadly mushroom bloom in California]
Wearing sneakers and a red flannel jacket, he glided swiftly and paused often. Most of what he found were red and white Amanita muscaria, a showy native species. Like A. phalloides, this Amanita attaches to tree roots, and rings of its fruiting bodies rise like fairy kingdoms around the trunks. Poisonous and hallucinogenic, they had been brought out by the rains, and they were all over the city, some as big as dinner plates, some like cherry-colored doorknobs dotted with white flakes. Kroeger crawled on the ground with his camera, capturing tableaus, tapping on their tops, feeling their firmness in the ground. Passersby stopped to comment, amazed at how beautiful and numerous they were.
The death caps were lurkers. They had to be searched for. Rooting around in a strip of vines and flowers in front of a house where he’d found new specimens, Kroeger looked up as a woman cracked open the front door.
“What are you doing in my garden?”
Kroeger stammered that he was a professional mycologist. He clearly enjoyed talking to mushrooms more than to people. He stood upright and lifted a death cap in his hand like a freshly removed appendix. Did she know that deadly mushrooms were growing in her garden? When she didn’t answer, Kroeger said in his gentle, earthy voice, “I’m just here to collect these.”
“Okay,” she said. “But stay out of my garden.”
He waited a moment after the door slammed, making sure she was gone, then reached into the base of a shrub, using his curved knife to pry up another silver-green mushroom.
As we packed up and moved on, he said, “The development style of the city set the stage for their introduction and proliferation. They will never go away, not, at least, through any known human decision.”
Once an ectomycorrhizal fungus is in the ground, even killing the host tree won’t stop it. A proposal was put before the city to chop down every hornbeam, the major source of death caps. “But then you have to cut the lindens, sweet chestnuts, red oaks, English oaks. That’s a lot of the city, and you still won’t get rid of [the death caps],” Kroeger said.
Across from the Catholic school where Kroeger had collected death caps a few hours earlier, a mature hornbeam tree towered over the neighborhood, its deciduous canopy shading both sides of the street. The house of the woman who had scolded him stood 30 feet from another stately hornbeam. Kroeger has maps of land use over the century, detailing development block by block. To him, they are maps of present and future death-cap distribution. Decade by decade, like an underground echo, more and more appear. Kroeger wonders how long it takes people to learn how to avoid a common and deadly mushroom. It is not common yet, but he knows that it likely will be, and that the first fatality in British Columbia from a local death cap, in 2016, will not be the last.
Britt Bunyard, the founder, publisher, and editor in chief of the mycology journal Fungi, has tasted a death cap. “Very pleasant and mushroomy,” he told me. “A nice flavor, and then you spit it out.”
For the amatoxin poison to begin to work, it needs to enter the intestinal tract. A quick bite without swallowing has little effect.
“Poisonous snakes, reptiles, plants, [and] fish have aposematic coloration that shows off that they are poisonous. Mushrooms don’t,” Bunyard said. “The dangerous ones are all mostly drab or brown, green-brown, bronze. There’s nothing in the taste that tells you what you are eating is about to kill you.”
A large portion of people who are poisoned by death caps in North America are Hmong or Laotian immigrants. They mistake the species for a prized edible from home, what is called the “white Caesar,” Amanita princeps.
Death caps are not only a North American problem. They have spread worldwide where foreign trees have been introduced into landscaping and forestry practices: North and South America, New Zealand, Australia, South and East Africa, and Madagascar. In Canberra, Australia, in 2012, an experienced Chinese-born chef and his assistant prepared a New Year’s Eve dinner that included, unbeknownst to them, locally gathered death caps. Both died within two days, waiting for liver transplants; a guest at the dinner also fell ill, but survived after a successful transplant.
“Because the mushrooms don’t taste bad, they’re probably not meant to be poisonous to ward off being eaten or foraged,” Bunyard said. “Mammals, not even all mammals, are the only ones affected. Some squirrels and rabbits can eat them without being harmed. Why it’s so toxic to humans—who knows? Some poisons are used as communication molecules, and just happen to be poison to us.”
To Bunyard, the death cap’s journey is only a symptom of a larger phenomenon—the global mobilization of the entire Fungi kingdom. With their blowing spores and underground mycelia, mushrooms can travel in as many ways as humans can carry them. Bunyard, who has a Ph.D. in plant pathology, is concerned about how mushrooms might displace and change their new ecosystems. “The way bacteria are the primary pathogen for animals, fungi are the primary pathogens for plants,” he said. “What’s going on is under the soil, what we don’t see. Some of the native mycorrhizal fungi are being displaced, which will in turn displace plants.”
How a newly introduced mushroom and its underground cobweb impacts the life around it is poorly understood. Much about the life cycles and taxonomy of fungi remains elusive. Fungi were not given their own kingdom—now known as the “fifth kingdom”—until 1968. Before that, mushrooms were categorized as plants. Genetically and evolutionarily, they are closer to animal than plant. Mycology is a relatively new science, and researchers are only now beginning to understand how instrumental fungi are in almost every ecosystem, not only in breaking down and recycling organic matter, but also in concentrating nutrients for plant life and acting as chemical communicators.
Kroeger has reported that death caps are now moving from their imported European host trees to an oak species native to British Columbia. The first identified species jump was in 2015. This was seen in California decades ago, when they began moving into wild garry oak trees, which exist in areas ranging from the Bay Area to Vancouver. Tree roots mingle underground and mycelia reach across, taking up new residence. Death caps have begun to naturalize, spreading without external aid.
“They could get rid of a lot of humans and dogs,” Kroeger said. The occasional fatality is a risk Kroeger tries to mitigate, but, like Bunyard, he worries more about what he calls the “unexpected consequences” of a biological invasion following paths of modern civilization. What does it mean to move a tree-root mushroom to a distant continent? The steamship gave living plants and mushrooms their first chance to enter global commerce. Now, container ships and airplanes can get them anywhere. “I think anything humans do has a chance of going wrong,” Kroeger said. “The monkeys have a bad history.”
The next day, on a Chinatown-bound city bus, Kroeger moved toward the back like a gentle ghost. His ponytail lay down his back, neatly combed. He sat with his pack on his lap, plastic bins empty for another day of hunting and gathering. As the bus traveled down Main Street near East Vancouver, he rubbed his hands together with some excitement, saying, “We are about to pass the 13th Street location; we must genuflect.”
He was referring to the crop of death caps he’d found the day before, across from the Catholic school. Every year he finds more, new appearances along sidewalk edgings and corner gardens. Soon, he fears, they will move from the city into the surrounding woods. Southern British Columbia could be the next Bay Area in terms of death-cap abundance, with fatalities or life-affecting illnesses after every good rain.
As the bus stopped and started toward the edge of downtown Vancouver, Kroeger ticked off the ways mushrooms get around the world: volcanic pumice rafts, ship ballast, animal stomachs, packing crates, live plants, peat. Human activities that introduce mushrooms to new habitats tend to bring in other non-native species too. “Most of the time you’d never know it’s happening,” he said. “It’s only because this mushroom kills people that we’re paying attention.”
[Read: The mysterious fungus infecting the American Southwest]
In 1987, Kroeger identified a mushroom previously unknown to science. He found it growing in clumps at the University of British Columbia Botanical Gardens—in mulch beds, on the wet, marshy edges of ponds, and along trails. “Pretty little thing,” he said, as if describing something precious. “Gray gills and an amber-colored cap.” As he does when he talks about any mushroom, he sounded like he was in love.
Kroeger and a colleague named this new species Hypholoma tuberosum, and it was not long before other sightings were reported in New York, Japan, Germany, Belgium, and Australia. The species wasn’t native to British Columbia, but it wasn’t a new arrival, either; it had simply not been noticed by anyone willing to go to the trouble to name it. Since it seemed to favor landscaped grounds, mycologists began looking for its source, thinking that like the death cap, it must have been incidentally carried by humans. The source appeared to be a single nursery in metropolitan Sydney, Australia, where peat carrying H. tuberosum was being used for potting plants, which were then shipped worldwide. That peat had been collected from a bog 130 kilometers away—the likely native source of a mushroom that could have easily remained an obscure local, but has become a global cosmopolitan.
As the bus slowed in downtown Vancouver, Kroeger lifted his pack, saying, “Our stop.”
We got out on Hastings Street and moved along a wide, crowded sidewalk, bedsheets and flattened cardboard stretched out in what looked like a blocks-long flea market. Half the vendors were curled up or sprawled semiconscious next to their wares; it was early in the day in a rough part of town. Kroeger said he’s been hesitant to put up signs in neighborhoods around here: “People with psychiatric issues, suicidal, possibly even with malicious intent. I don’t want them intentionally going after death caps.”
Several blocks away, in a shaded neighborhood, he stopped in front of a house on the corner of East Georgia Street and Princess Avenue. Moving back a fern frond with his hand, he said, “Speak of the devil.”
In the shade of the underbrush was a metallic-colored mushroom, pale green verging on gold. There are 96 hornbeam trees on this chain of blocks, Kroeger said, and he had already found death caps under eight of them. Now the count was up to nine.
Kroeger stopped not just for death caps but for every troop of mushrooms. Anything bright or emergent caught his attention. “Nicely poisonous,” he said about a button-topped Agaricus growing on a corner lawn. “Not near as poisonous as phalloides,” he added.
Later in the day, his plastic containers were full, and he’d gone through five or six thin cigarettes. He found one last death cap, a mature one growing in the grass near the base of a rock wall. He looked around, noting the nearest intersection, committing the location to memory. Then he moved on, leaving the mushroom behind. It had been a long day, and Kroeger is not on a crusade to remove every death cap. He wants to know what they are up to, and he wants to take out enough to matter. He loves kids and dogs, after all.
The death cap he passed up, grown from the roots of a nearby hornbeam, stood clear of the grass on its slender white stalk. Digging it up would not slow what is happening underground; it would not change the worldwide flow of soils and roots, and the fibrous bodies living within them. Digging it up would be almost a symbolic act, less than a drop in the bucket. So Kroeger left the mushroom in place—a nod to the fifth kingdom, the unstoppable.
As the encounter in Washington between Black Hebrew Israelites, American Indians, and Catholic Trump boys recedes from Twitter and the opinion pages, it lingers on in a deeper place in my mind. At the level where argument loses its sharp contours and will unclenches, the encounter stops being a viral video, a proxy political fight, an avalanche of commentary, and it begins to resemble a dream sequence. The events, the landscape where they unfold, take on an incongruous and inevitable logic that has nothing to do with reason or morality. The wide plaza, leading away to famous stone monuments; the light slowly failing as the weak winter sun sets behind the Lincoln Memorial; the groups in different costumes wandering onto the landscape, disappearing, and then reappearing just in time to move the drama along to a crisis; the way key words—mock, hate, demon, America—are repeated: It feels like a story generated by the unconscious.
[Caitlin Flanagan: The media botched the Covington Catholic story]
The drama unfolds in three overlapping scenes. In the first, the Black Hebrew Israelites, in their white-and-black robes and long beards, encounter the American Indians, in their colorful skirts, playing drums and horns.
You not supposed to worship eagles, buffaloes, rams, all types of animals. This is the reason why the Lord took away your land. Why am I so angry? Give me Proverbs 77.
… Where are you from?
We’re from here. We’re natives, too. My people are so-called Puerto Ricans. Yes. We are from the tribe of Ephraim. This is your tribe. This is your nationality. You’re not an Indian. Indian means savage.
… I’m here for peace.
That’s the reason why the white man got his foot in your ass. And that’s the reason—
And that’s why you talk like that! Because the devil’s in you!
You a five-dollar Indian! You go over there, you five-dollar Indian. You ain’t no child of God. You are the devil … Stop trying—you always want to take our culture, just like the white man.
That’s right.
He wants to be the Egyptians.
That’s right.
He wants to be the Israelites.
Right.
He wants to be everybody.
The language is fringed with comedy, but has an undercurrent of anxiety, bordering on hysteria. Whenever the anxiety starts to subside, something happens to whip it up again—declaiming turns to screaming, language grows toxic, a new character wanders into the encounter, someone gets too close, threats fly—as if calm would cause the video footage to stop. But it doesn’t stop. The provokers keep going, expressing in an extreme way what others feel.
[Julie Irwin Zimmerman: I failed the Covington Catholic test]
A blond woman blows a ram’s horn.
Just cause you blow a ram horn doesn’t make you our people. You’re a damn culture vulture … you’re a damn blue-eyed demon … That’s the last Mohican. You out your mind.
These Black Hebrew Israelites belong to a tiny mad sect that ought to be ignored, and in another setting they would be ignored. But now, somehow, no one can ignore them; they’ve planted themselves at the crossroads to lure passersby into their madness—You too, brother! You too, sister!—and as they hurl their vile provocations in every direction, the groups around them draw near, engage, and are inflamed. The air is already charged with static, the insults half-formed. The Black Hebrew Israelites toss their matches on dry wood and watch the fire spread.
You an Uncle Tomahawk. You think there’s just Uncle Toms? You an Uncle Tomahawk. Out your mind. Got your head up the white man’s ass. Talking bout peace. Ain’t going to be no peace. You going to be ripped in pieces, thus saith the Lord, if you don’t repent from your wicked ways.
… Where does it show hate in the Bible?
Where it shows it? Give me Ecclesiastes the third chapter. We’re going to show you hate in the Bible.
Let’s hear it.
Let’s hear it. That’s a great question. I like that … He wants to see hate in the Bible. Let’s see hate in the Bible. Let’s see where the Christians and the Catholics don’t go into.
Ecclesiastes Chapter 3, verse 8: “A time to love, and a time to hate.”
And a time for what?
“To hate.”
A time for what?
“To hate.”
There’s no hate in the Bible?
From the fringes of the plaza, Catholic Trump boys in their red hats are suddenly standing close by, signaling that the second scene has begun. A boy pulls his blue hoodie over his head.
We got the Trump supporters. He gonna cover up his hat … See how you got these pompous bastards come down here in the middle of a Native rally with they dirty-ass hat on, with they dusty-ass hat on. Dusty-ass animals.
… You asked where’s hate in the Bible. We showed you that the Lord said, “There’s a time to hate.” You think that you can ever love Donald Trump? Answer that sincerely. With sincerity. What?
Love your neighbors, love your neighbors.
… Finished. America is finished.
The Catholic Trump boys have arrived in large numbers, and many are standing on the steps leading up to the Lincoln Memorial. In the theology of the men in black-and-white robes, the boys in red hats are not one of the 12 lost tribes of Israel, like the American Indians, who can be saved because their only sin is idol worship. The boys in red hats are Edomites, the demonic offspring of Esau, and as the abuse grows, they pull closer.
All y’all are is a bunch of future school shooters … Ain’t nobody else on the face of the Earth shooting up schools, shooting up churches, shooting up synagogues. But you got a problem with us? You want to build a wall?
That’s right.
Build a wall in front of Europe. Y’all think we crazy. Y’all think we deranged …
Look at Esau, look at the demons, vicious crowd. They love that drama.
You want to wave hi. A bunch of incest babies. A bunch of babies made out of incest. Child porn babies. This is what “Make America great” looks like.
The boys in red hats begin to chant: Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! One boy strips to his waist and flexes his arms and leads the others in school cheers to drown out the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Hey, do y’all understand who the real cave man is now? … And guess what, we surrounded and they won’t do a damn thing, look at this. Bold as a lion!
… This is what Donald Trump incest children look like. A bunch of Donald Trump incest children.
… That’s right. Here come Gad.
An American Indian man, followed by others, walks between the men in black-and-white robes and the boys in red caps, and stops in front of one of the boys, beating his drum.
Here come Gad. Here come Gad … Look at they “Make America great again” hats; look at they hats! … Look at Gad. That’s right, Gad! ... Gad not playing; he came to the rescue.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!
The third scene has begun: The American Indian with the drum stands face-to-face with chanting, whooping, tomahawk-chopping Catholic Trump boys.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!
… Mockery. You at a Native rally with “Make America great again” hats.
… School shooters! That’s your future … You about to go postal?
I have to go to the bathroom.
Do it! But go shoot up a school before you do it. Think about it! When have you ever seen one of our people shoot up a school? … Guess what. All of you got the school-shooter haircuts. It’s in your eyes.
My haircut is in my eyes? You’re making a lot of sense.
I’m telling you, it’s in your eyes.
… Hey guys, back it up! Back it up! Back it up!
… Christ is coming back to kick your crackers’ asses.
No, we’re not equal … and understand, America will burn.
The Catholic Trump boys leave, the American Indians disappear, the Black Hebrew Israelites stay as darkness falls into night, ending the film, ending the dream.
[Conor Friedersdorf: This is how the left destroys itself]
In his novel Underworld, Don DeLillo describes an art installation where people are watching the Zapruder film in different rooms, at different speeds, again and again, until one of the viewers imagines that she is seeing footage of consciousness itself: “The progress of the car down Elm Street, the movement of the film through the camera body, some sharable darkness—this was a death that seemed to rise from the steamy debris of the deep mind, it came from some night of the mind, there was some trick of film emulsion that showed the ghost of consciousness.”
I have a similar feeling watching the video shot by the Black Hebrew Israelites—as if the footage was an impression of the mind. It seems to act out a drama in which we’re all caught, but in grotesque exaggeration. As if we are already moving through an empty plaza where our individual identities dissolve and a tribal identity is suddenly fixed for us, whether we will it or not; where we are assigned a name that is absurd but can’t be escaped—Gad, Esau, Ephraim; where we are showered with abuse, and in turn shower others; where language is reduced to epithets, chants, cheers, and the shouting never ends; where it is a time to hate, and rage and confusion reign. The video shows where we are, and where we are going. It’s our collective nightmare.
From the point of view of those outside Britain, Brexit must look like a mess. And how it looks is how it is. A mess. As a longtime Labour Party politician and a member of Parliament since 2010, I believe the only way out is through another referendum.
Now, I can imagine that people might wonder, having had our politics turned upside down by a ballot measure, why anyone would think another one is wise. The reason is that the 2016 Leave campaign was inherently contradictory. Brexiteers argued that by voting to sever itself from the European Union, Britain could retreat from the world’s challenges. Yet they also promised that Britain, on its own, could be a world-leading power and economy.
For some on the right of British politics, the answer to the world’s challenges is Donald Trump–style isolationism and protectionism. The Leave campaign exploited the refugee crisis to drum up fears of mass migration to the United Kingdom. The leading Brexiteer and former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson claimed that Turkey would soon join the EU, implying that Brexit was necessary to spare the country of the need or responsibility to welcome new citizens of Turkish origin. And that familiar strain of anti-immigrant rhetoric could be heard throughout the campaign.
[Read: Welcome to the new Britain, where every week is hell]
Brexiteers foretold a quick expansion in British industries protected from European competition and European trouble. They suggested, for example, that leaving the EU would free Britain’s waters from European trawlers and that the British fishing industry would boom as a result. Matthew Elliott, Vote Leave’s chief executive, said Brexit would put the U.K. in a uniquely good position for negotiating trade deals. In July 2016, former Brexit Secretary David Davis said new trade agreements “will come into force at the point of exit and they will be fully negotiated.” This could not be further from the truth. Two and a half years on, the U.K. is no closer to an independent trade deal with anyone.
Brexit, as described to the people who voted for it, was supposed to turn the U.K. into a commanding global player by removing it from the global stage. That’s incoherent. And that is why Prime Minister Theresa May is having such a hard time enacting it.
The proposal she put before Parliament in January was a complete muddle, and it was voted down by a resounding majority of 230. It did not resolve central questions on trade, immigration, or the nature of the U.K.’s future political relationship with the EU.
This week, the Conservatives managed to pass an amendment, giving the illusion of a united party, that instructed May to renegotiate her deal with the EU. She is supposed to focus on how the border with Ireland will work when the U.K. leaves the union. But a renegotiated deal is a unicorn—it is not going to happen. Europe and the prime minister have said as much. Again and again. The liberal wing of the Conservative Party wants to protect rights and jobs, while its hard right wants to fully escape the EU. May will never succeed in pleasing both sides.
[Read: Theresa May lives to fight another day. But for what?]
This, then, is the reason for contemplating another referendum. In 2016, no one knew how much Brexit would cost. No one knew that this internal contradiction—that Britain would close and open up to the world at the same time—would produce such a catastrophic car crash. No one can say what it will mean for our population, which is aging like most in the developed world, to suddenly stop the free movement of European citizens into our country. Most likely, the country will struggle to staff many of its most important businesses and public services.
The lack of clarity means that the public should have a say in how to move forward. We have to have this out, properly. Under any normal circumstances, the country would be having a general election now, but the will of the Conservatives to keep their hands on the tiller of power, without any real direction, prevents that outcome.
The truth is that the 2016 campaign was terrible on both sides. The argument for continued membership in the EU was that Britain would be worse off without it. True enough, as has been shown by the economic reaction since the vote, but utterly uncompelling, given the next-to-zero wage growth experienced by huge sections of the population from the 2008 crash onward. What’s more, austerity fiscal policies pulled the rug out from under many communities. People felt that they were being asked to vote to protect a status quo that was not working for them.
[Read: Brexit is chaos. The movie is anything but.]
A second public vote is not at all impossible. Recent opinion polls have shown that a majority of the population wants another referendum, and parliamentarians across the House of Commons support that option, as well. We will vote on the prime minister’s deal again in a couple of weeks. In all likelihood, it will fall again. Where do we go from there? A public vote is the only way out.
A new Remain campaign would not privilege the already privileged. It would begin with listening and deliberation, and would include institutions such as faith groups and trade unions that have been crying out to be more involved. The best argument for the European Union is the solidarity it offers. It is not faultless, but the risks of globalization, new technology, and an ever-changing economy are surely better managed in tandem with others.
Nationalism in Europe means power for the already powerful. Solidarity pushes back the other way. That is the argument my party must make in another referendum, and we must make it clearly.
It’s a good bet that the press is making too much of Howard Schultz’s presidential trial balloon. The former Starbucks CEO isn’t officially in the race, doesn’t have anything resembling a coherent platform, and has no prior experience in politics. Moreover, there’s little reason to believe a third-party run would work.
The problem is that Schultz’s rollout has been so clumsy that journalists find it irresistible to mock him. He doesn’t seem to know anything about political polarization, or history, or how primary elections work. In fact, Schultz is a little reminiscent of Donald Trump four years ago. But it’s only on the surface: Schultz’s bumbling shows that the roots of Trump’s success remain misunderstood, including by Schultz himself.
Back in August 2015, when Schultz flirted with running for the 2016 Democratic nomination, I wrote a mocking article pointing out some of the similarities between Trump’s and Schultz’s biographies: outer-borough boys made good; billionaires; lack of political experience; a disastrous stint owning a sports franchise; a history of donating money to both parties, etc. I wrote that Schultz, if he ran, would likely fail “for the same reason Trump will probably come up short.”
[Read: Is Howard Schultz the liberal Donald Trump?]
I was, of course, wrong about Trump, and will now pause for a heaping bite of crow. (Delicious!) But one reason I and others were skeptical of Trump was that we’d seen a succession of rich putzes over the years who figured that since they were successful in business, they’d be able to succeed in politics too. Then they’d flame out ignominiously. Trump was the one in a thousand who was able to pull it off. His success is likely to convince even more rich putzes that they can do the same thing—when in fact the nascent Schultz campaign is demonstrating why they can’t.
If the parallels between Trump and Schultz were notable four years ago, the Schultz press blitz suggests that they go beyond biographical details. Schultz has shown that, like the president, he combines strong opinions on politics with a lack of information or sophistication about it. Like Trump, he has often not bothered to vote. Like Trump, he’s running on an inchoate nostalgia for a golden past that didn’t really exist. On Wednesday, Schultz said his favorite president of the past 50 years was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died 74 years ago. He also said Ronald Reagan was the greatest Republican of the past 50 years because he never took his jacket off in the Oval Office, which isn’t true and is, moreover, a ridiculous reason to rate a president highly.
Because Trump has governed so extremely, it’s easy to forget that he ran as a centrist, and was even to the left of Hillary Clinton on some issues. That’s Schultz’s game, too. His political ideas, insofar as they exist, are mostly borrowed from the Democratic Party, but as Vox’s Matt Yglesias notes, he’s to Trump’s right on a few issues. And like Trump, Schultz is styling himself as a truth-teller, the guy who will say what the other politicians won’t.
But that’s where Schultz stumbles. As a candidate (and since, as president), Trump was willing to say out loud things that a sizable chunk of Republican voters held to be true or were willing to ignore, but that GOP leaders either didn’t believe or had insisted were verboten: Mexican immigrants are rapists, free trade is bad, China is stealing your jobs, there were lots of good people among the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, etc.
[Read: Ex–Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz could get Trump reelected]
Schultz appears to be trying to be over-the-top combative like Trump, calling Medicare for All and doubts about a third-party candidate’s prospects “un-American.” Just as Trump arguably ran out of personal pique, Schultz says he’s running as an independent because he was offended by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a 70 percent marginal tax rate. Like many of the things that Trump said during the 2016 campaign, these are nonsensical or wrong or misguided. Unlike the things that Trump said during the campaign, however, there aren’t voters out there who have just been waiting for someone to tell them that it’s okay to oppose single-payer health care, or that third parties are good, or that taxing the super-wealthy is bad. Some of these beliefs are popular, and others less so, but none of them is edgy or illicit.
Neither Schultz nor any of his billionaire peers is going to be able to match Trump, because they don’t have the right views—they probably don’t think there were good people in the Charlottesville ranks. And even if they did, they would be unwilling to say them out loud because of the reputational damage they’d sustain, whereas Trump is immune to shame.
That leaves Schultz trying to replicate Trump’s success while advocating for milquetoast views with no clear constituency. Not only is Schultz pushing on a locked door, but there’s no one on the other side.
The Super Bowl may seem like an invincible juggernaut. In a world of fragmented content, in which all digitally connected human beings awaken to their own News Feed, Netflix recommendations, or Spotify Discover Weekly playlist, it’s the one piece of media that is all but guaranteed to reach 100 million Americans at the exact same time. Of the 10 most watched broadcasts in U.S. history, nine of them are Super Bowls from the past decade (the other is the 1983 M*A*S*H finale).
But the Super Bowl is like a large castle perched at the top of a rapidly eroding island. The game faces two broad threats: a declining audience for televised football, and a new advertising culture that jeopardizes the Super Bowl’s identity.
In general, Americans care a bit less for football than they once did. As recently as 2007, 43 percent of Americans said it was their favorite sport to watch. At last reading, in 2017, that figure was down to 37 percent—the result, some argue, of more awareness about concussions, or perhaps the kneeling controversy. When the aging stars Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Aaron Rodgers leave the NFL, as they inevitably must, those numbers might tick down yet further.
[Read: Football alters the brains of kids as young as 8]
The Super Bowl has thrived for half a century in the fertile fields of traditional television, which are quickly becoming a disaster zone. Americans under 35 watch at least 40 percent less traditional TV (that is, on the cable bundle) than they did in 2010. Ratings are drowning for everything on television, from broadcast to cable and from news to scripted programming. Although the big game might be dog-paddling to stay above water, it is still vulnerable: The Nielsen rating for the Super Bowl has declined every year since 2015.
Even as football’s viewership base erodes, political and social forces might complicate the very identity of the Super Bowl.
Traditionally, everything about the big game was designed to offer respite from controversy or partisan rancor. The pregame ceremony featured enough flags to furnish several presidential inaugurations. A noncontroversial artist belted out the national anthem before a patriotic burst of fireworks. An unobjectionable pop star (especially in the post-Nipplegate era) played PG hits during the halftime show. In the commercial breaks, Pixar-ish animals told Jay Leno–esque jokes to sell cars and soda.
But big companies, including those paying for prominent ad placement during the Super Bowl, are learning that controversy can be good for business. For example, Nike partnered with the quarterback Colin Kaepernick to support his calls for criminal-justice reform, and Gillette took on toxic masculinity.
[Read: Millennials stare into the void, and Gillette stares back]
“You’re seeing corporations embrace social-justice messaging because their consumers want it, their employees want it, and their potential employees want it,” said Nneka Logan, an assistant professor of communication at Virginia Tech. “The historical disjuncture between corporations and activists is breaking down.”
In an otherwise crowded and fragmented media environment, controversies can earn attention on television news. “What corporations want to do when they veer left is be noticed, incite conversations, and feature on TV news as editorial,” said Tom Goodwin, the executive vice president and head of innovation at Zenith Media.
Right-wingers burning Nike socks? That’s an advertisement for Nike. A CNN panel debating Gillette’s foray into gender relations? An ad for Gillette. Fox News ridiculing Starbucks’ “Race Together” campaign? Free marketing for Starbucks. “Even the backlash can draw positive attention to the brand,” Logan said, “as long as it focuses people’s attention on something the company sincerely wants to talk about.”
One has every reason to expect this political tone to take over the Super Bowl just as it’s taken over the rest of the public sphere. In fact, in a recent Super Bowl, Budweiser went so far as to project the somehow controversial message that immigrants are actually good.
[Read: The absurdist spectacle of the Nike boycotts]
But Super Bowl ads won’t all veer left. Any event that reaches 100 million Americans touches on every conceivable demographic, and the NFL’s most devoted audience resembles an approximation of the Republican Party. A 2018 Gallup poll found that men, older Americans, and conservatives are all about 10 points more likely to name football as their favorite sport than women, young people, and liberals. Brands that appeal to this demographic might treat the Super Bowl as a platform to defend old-fashioned American values from progressive change. “We’re going to see ads that represent old, traditional American values and others that push liberal boundaries about, say, the role of women and girls in society,” Logan said.
The Super Bowl once represented a unique and unifying cultural spectacle. But we may soon see the emergence of a game within the big game: not just conference versus conference, but culture versus culture. Two visions of the future of American values, doing battle in interstitial 30-second spots.
Unlike concussion fears or the decline of traditional television, this might not spell the end of football as we remember it. But it would be the end of the Super Bowl as we know it.
There’s no bigger concert stage than the Super Bowl halftime show. Year after year, more Americans watch the game than any other TV event, and even with cord-cutting and controversy eating into NFL ratings recently, the Super Bowl still draws more than 100 million viewers from red and blue America alike. No musician would ever otherwise have that kind of audience for a single performance.
Which is why the halftime show has historically been often dazzling, often disappointing, and perpetually contested. Big-tent icons—Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna—have put on defining performances. But popular culture’s fault lines have a way of surfacing, too. Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” kicked off debates about decency and double standards. In M.I.A.’s middle finger, America experienced the revenge of the punkish types whom the mainstream routinely steals from and defangs. And Beyoncé helped usher in a new discussion about race by punctuating Coldplay’s set in Black Panther Party couture.
The issue of race has indeed put the 2019 halftime show—and the game around it—in a strange spot. The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 decision to begin kneeling during the national anthem at the beginning of games, a gesture against institutional racism, set off a domino line that’s still falling today. Kaepernick spurred a protest movement among players, which drew an intense backlash that Donald Trump gleefully stoked. The situation has built to the point where even the most milquetoast entertainer will have a tough time navigating halftime.
When Kaepernick left his contract with his team at the start of the 2017 season and was not hired elsewhere despite solid performance stats—raising suspicion that he was being blacklisted for kneeling—he filed a legal grievance with the league. By the fall of 2018, his followers had taken up a boycott effort in solidarity. Meanwhile, on the right, Trump has called for tuning out pro football because it’s not been more punitive to “that son of a bitch” Kaepernick and his peers.
Into this maelstrom comes the supposed diversion of the halftime show. Rihanna, Jay-Z, and other stars have spoken publicly about declining the 2019 gig out of allegiance to Kaepernick’s cause. And the comedian Amy Schumer said she turned down a Super Bowl commercial because of the athlete. Still, after a reportedly difficult search, a willing headliner was found: Maroon 5, the Los Angeles septet that’s released airy-voiced diet-pop-rock smashes since 2002.
In any year, Maroon 5 would seem like a suitably bland choice for the Super Bowl stage, in line with the smiley mass appeal of the previous performers Coldplay and Bruno Mars. Pop’s provocateurs can’t be called on every time. And in a moment of division, maybe the fact that no one can’t hum along to “She Will Be Loved” could be thought of as unifying. Perhaps since this is not really a band known for politics—the members seemed genuinely unaware of the “alt-right” connotations of their 2017 album title, Red Pill Blues—they would be exempt from the fray.
But a boycott drive is a boycott drive: The point, for Kaepernick’s supporters, is that no one should sing. And so a petition with 112,000 signatures and counting calls for Maroon 5 to drop out of the Super Bowl, and some celebrities, such as Schumer, have echoed the message. The band’s keyboardist, PJ Morton, told People that they thought carefully about whether to play, and decided they could toe the line: “We can support being against police brutality against black and brown people and be in support of being able to peacefully protest and still do our jobs. We just want to have a good time and entertain people while understanding the important issues that are at hand.” On Tuesday, the NFL said the band would skip the traditional pregame press conference, a likely attempt to sidestep tough questions.
Even more controversy has attended the black artists who have considered joining Maroon 5 onstage. At the outset, it seemed likely that hip-hop would be involved, given that one of the capital cities for America’s favorite genre is Atlanta, the venue for this year’s game. But a rumored half-dozen rappers or R&B singers were approached, according to Variety, and none said yes. Cardi B, an obvious pick, given that she has a hit single with Maroon 5, declined the gig “because of how she feels about Colin Kaepernick and the whole movement,” according to her rep.
Two rappers have opted in, though. One is Big Boi, half of Outkast, the hip-hop pioneers synonymous with Atlanta (check the disapproving replies to his announcement tweet). The other is Travis Scott, the Houston star who rose to ubiquitous status last year via his single with Drake, “Sicko Mode.” Public pressure on Scott to not participate has been intense. He said he spoke with Kaepernick before accepting the gig, and “while the two did not necessarily agree, they emerged from the conversation with mutual respect and understanding,” according to a source interviewed by Variety. But Kaepernick’s partner, the radio host Nessa, tweeted, “There is NO mutual respect and there is NO understanding for anyone working against @Kaepernick7 PERIOD. #stoplying.”
It’s quaint to remember now, but the only controversy Justin Timberlake’s sluggish concert last year had was over how he’d pay tribute to Prince. In the months since then, Kaepernick’s broadly focused campaign against police brutality and discrimination has taken up the specific cause of his treatment by the NFL. His legal grievance comes at a time of general scrutiny toward football due to the physical toll on its players, its handling of misconduct, and, according to Trump, a general wimpification. Ratings have declined for the regular-season NFL, as has youth participation in football—but not so much that football is close to losing its status as the nation’s No. 1 sport.
There’s something unsettling about this drama happening at the same moment when the Oscars can’t find a host and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has all but disintegrated. The causes vary: For the Super Bowl, it’s the league’s handling of peaceful protest; with the Oscars, the proposed host, Kevin Hart, was unwilling to reckon with his bigoted jokes; with the Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump’s attacks on the press proved poisonous. In all cases, the issues at stake—bigotry or authoritarian tendencies—are so grave that they kill the pretense that differences of opinion don’t matter.
For now, Maroon 5 might be able to croon and clap through their set without setting off trip wires. The band and Scott have tried to offset the appearance of siding against Kaepernick via charity: Maroon 5 (with the league and their record label) is donating $500,000 to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and Scott is having the NFL send the same amount to the social-justice organization Dream Corps. Some have called for the musicians to take a knee during the performance, a notion that, if it comes to pass, would send the arguing into a yet higher register. One rumored gesture, however, shouldn’t offend anyone: Maroon 5, it appears, may play a song in tribute to the late creator of SpongeBob SquarePants.
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