Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 104

One of the World's Longest Hunger Strikes Comes to an End

NEWS BRIEF Irom Chanu Sharmila last ate a meal 16 years ago. She has been on hunger strike since 2000, when an Indian paramilitary force killed 10 people in the northeastern state of Manipur. Her aim has been the repeal of a law that allows the military expansive powers; on Tuesday she said she would fight that law another way.

Sharmila has survived without food for so long because the government forced a feeding tube up her nose. The 44-year-old is called the “Iron Lady,” and her means of peaceful protest has led her to be compared to Nelson Mandela. She has lived in and out of jail and hospitals during her fast, because Indian authorities have constantly arrested her under a law that makes attempting suicide illegal. On Tuesday she said she would try a new method of resistance: to seek political office.

“I have to change my strategy,” Sharmila said. “ Some people are seeing me as a strange woman because I want to join politics. They say politics is dirty, but so is society. I want to stand in the elections against the government.”

Then, in front of media, she took her first taste of food in 16 years, a dab of honey from her fingertip:

#IromSharmila first taste of food for almost 16yrs pic.twitter.com/gqjr2HGCbM

— Vidhi Doshi (@VidhiDoshi91) August 9, 2016

The law Sharmila has fasted in opposition to is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which grants the Indian military special powers in what it regards as disturbed areas. It was passed in 1958, and is viewed by activists as outdated, draconian, and a threat to human rights. The law is in effect across India’s northeastern states, sometimes known as the “seven sisters,” home to separatist rebellions, as well as in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, where separatists are fighting for their own homeland.  

AFSPA allows the government the power to stop and search citizens suspected of acting against the state, to take their belongings, and to shoot them without fear of civil repercussion. The law remains in effect.

Their Bodies, Ourselves

“Okay, before we walked out, I thought I was going to vomit,” Aly Raisman announced after the conclusion of Sunday’s women’s gymnastics qualifications, in Rio. At this confession, her four teammates dissolved into giggles of agreement.

“Um, in the back, I thought I was gonna die,” Simone Biles admitted.

“Yes!” Raisman replied. “In the bathroom, when me and you were in the bathroom, I asked you, ‘Are you okay?’” Raisman paused. “And I was like, ‘Me neither.’”

They all began sharing their nerves-before-competition stories, talking over each other with giddy mentions of the shaking hands and near-vom experiences that came when they finally—finally—found themselves on the Olympic stage. “We just sat there,” Biles said, recalling those tense pre-competition moments, “and we were like”—at that point the three-time world champion, the woman an NBC commentator referred to earlier in the evening as “the greatest of all time,” made a dramatic shruggie gesture. In response to which: Her team giggled some more.

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NBC’s roving cameras caught that off-stage exchange—superhumans, acting in a decidedly human fashion—after the five women in question had clinched the U.S.’s spot to compete for team gold in Rio. But the five athletes (also known as “Team USA,” the “Fierce Five: Redux,” and “The Most Dominant U.S. Gymnastics Team Ever Assembled”) didn’t merely secure the team’s place in the finals, and they didn’t merely come away with a first-place ranking heading into the competition that will determine who wins medals. Instead, they smashed through the high expectations set for them. And yet here they were, after their big, if unsurprising, victory, commiserating and confessing and laughing and human-emoji-ing and acting, in the end, like exactly what they are: a group of young—very young—women.

Women’s gymnastics is traditionally one of the most-watched events of the summer Games—much more popular than its masculine counterpart, which features similar feats of super-human strength and skill. (The rings! THE RINGS.) That’s in part because women’s gymnastics is completely riveting—the balance beam alone is basically a 4-inch-thick hunk of Hitchcock—but it is also, likely, because the sport presents collisions of a more cultural strain. Here are young women, bedecked of bow and bedazzled of leotard, flexing and flipping and generally giving a massive side-eye to gravity itself. Here are the performance of sport and the performance of femininity, united in a singular, if extremely precarious, harmony.

The team’s leos will feature nearly 5,000 crystals in designs that evoke shooting stars and swirling clouds.

In that sense, women’s gymnastics captivates because it insinuates: The sport serves, on top of everything else, as a metaphor for a cultural moment that is appending notions of strength (and not just “moral strength”) to womanhood. It exemplifies a time that is newly distinguishing between the female and the feminine. It’s a sport, too, with an undeniably political edge: Women’s gymnastics, like this particular moment in feminism, pays lip service to ideals of “empowerment,” but its workings are underscored by the knowledge that years’ worth of effort can, through gravity’s apathy, be undone in a single instant. It acknowledges, through its athletics but also through its aesthetics, the fact that the culture at large is engaged in a balancing act.

* * *

Women’s gymnastics, in its current form, owes a lot both to second-wave feminism and to Title IX—which brought about the general de-dainty-ization of the traditionally balletic sport. (“Before the 1970s,” the essayist Meghan O’Rourke points out, “women’s gymnastics had been snoozy and staid, resembling, as a Sports Illustrated writer put it, ‘a lyrical exercise somewhere this side of ballet.’”) A recent change in the sport’s scoring system, which took away the long-standing cap of 10, allowed for ever-upward difficulty levels in routines, which in turn further emphasized feat-affording strength among its athletes. It may have preserved its official name—“artistic gymnastics”—amid all these changes, but the sport’s champions ascend by embracing moves that are traditionally not “ladylike”: leaping, grasping, thudding, punching the air after a stuck landing.

But gymnastics is determinedly unladylike in another way, too: It is for the most part practiced, at the elite levels, only by very young women (the current U.S. team ranges in age from 16 to 22). This is emphasized in an aesthetic that borrows heavily from what you might call “pageant chic.” Team USA is known, in particular, for its bedazzled competition uniforms, and each Olympics has brought with it leotards that are more bedecked—with Swarovski crystals, as “they have the most shine and sparkle”—than the last. (Given how much of a “typical” adolescence elite gymnasts are made to sacrifice in their athletic pursuits, it’s a cliche of the sport to talk about their sparkling competition leotards as their “prom dresses.”) This year, The New York Times reports, the women’s leos will feature nearly 5,000 individual crystals in designs that evoke shooting stars and swirling clouds and the other stuff of dreams fulfilled.

Dramatic makeup, too, is a mainstay of the gymnastics floor—Biles, last night, wore sparkling eyeliner that mimicked the swooping lines of the team leo—as are manicured fingers and pedicured toes. (This is perhaps because USA Gymnastics stipulates, without a bit of irony, that each athlete competing under its auspices must be “well groomed in her appearance.”) On Sunday, NBC’s omniscient camera caught Madison Kocian, the 19-year-old whose specialty is the uneven bars, kneeling on the floor after having executed a nearly perfect routine. She was zipping her chalk-covered grips into a hot-pink makeup bag.

It’s not only gymnasts, of course, who embrace their femininity on the field of play. Hair ribbons are a mainstay of women’s softball. Brandi Chastain celebrated her scoring of the U.S. women’s soccer team’s game-winning penalty shot against China by taking off her shirt to reveal her sports bra. Flo-Jo was known for her elaborate manicures, and in her spirit, this time around, come—among others—the French basketball player Emmeline Ndongue, who wears patriotic stripes on her nails, and the American volleyball player Destinee Hooker, whose manicure sports the union flag and the Olympic rings. Procter & Gamble went so far as to set up a nail salon in the Olympic village so that athletes—presumably women—might similarly bedazzle themselves.

Women’s gymnastics, though, is notable for something beyond its athletes’ embrace of their femininity: its simultaneous embarrassment about their femaleness. Women gymnasts have come to resemble swimmers in their uniform lack of body hair—waxing being an unspoken mandate that has as much to do with aesthetics as with aerodynamics. (Well groomed in her appearance.) The gymnasts’ outfits, too, their snazzy sparkles notwithstanding, suggest a certain abashment about the female form: Judges are free to deduct points for underwear that peaks out from beyond the athletes’ leos.

It’s a sartorial awkwardness that reflects a more systemic one: In gymnastics, the body fat that is a typical signal of healthy womanhood is stubbornly burned off. The development of breasts has curtailed otherwise promising careers. The rigors of training—coupled with eating disorders that have been known to afflict its athletes—can delay menstruation among athletes. Women’s gymnastics, on the whole, may celebrate its eponymous “women”; it is also, however, decidedly ambivalent about them. Many of its workings suggest a preference to see those women, whatever their age and achievement, as girls.

USA Gymnastics stipulates, without a hint of irony, that each athlete must be “well groomed in her appearance.”

And then, of course, there are allegations of sexual abuse that have long cast a shadow over the sport. Joan Ryan’s 1995 book, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, told stories not just of bullying young athletes have endured at the hands of their coaches, but of abuse. USA Gymnastics banned Don Peters, the coach of the 1984 Olympic team, from the sport after several of the athletes he’d trained made accusations against him—but it didn’t do so until 2011. Last week, the IndyStar released the results of a lengthy investigation into the matter, concluding that USAG has “turned a blind eye to sex abuse.”

The tension, across the sport’s elite levels—a dynamic of fragility and strength, of empowerment and its opposite—has escalated to such a degree that some critics have wondered whether watching women’s gymnastics is, at this point, unethical. (One of those wonderings accompanied its text—ironically, or perhaps fittingly, and either way revealingly—with artistic photographs of Olympian and other elite gymnasts that emphasized not just the athletes’ muscles, but also their manicures and hairdos and, in a couple of cases, their crotches.)

* * *

In that, gymnastics is an extreme reflection of a widespread cultural ambivalence—about youth in general, perhaps, but about girlhood in particular. On the one hand, “empowerment” is the ethic of the moment, via toys and clothes and media messaging that seek to downplay gender as a factor in a young person’s life. NBC, on Sunday, featured a bio package with Gabby Douglas, one of the stars who emerged from the London Games (and the other gymnast—with Raisman—who is representing the U.S., in 2016, for her second Olympics). Douglas, in an interview, cited Serena Williams as one of her role models, and her explanation reflected the feminist messaging of the moment. “She’s just so dominant,” the star gymnast said of the tennis star, “and she just goes after what she wants, and she’s just so aggressive. I love strong, empowered women.”

Gymnastics, even more than other sports, emphasizes the challenges gravity-bound women must navigate.

In the same series of Better Know an Athlete packages, though, NBC emphasized, for Simone Biles, not her dominance or her aggression, but instead her … girly femininity. Biles’s short documentary featured footage of the young athlete grinning at the camera while getting a manicure (and requesting that her nails be done in patriotic red and blue). The young champion, Bob Costas intoned, “in any other context might seem like any other teenager”—and his thesis was proven, again and again. “She loves girly stuff,” her mother shared in an interview for the package, “so she loves to shop and she loves to get her hair done, her nails done. She likes to feel pretty.” Her father, in a separate interview, agreed: “She’s a teenager. A typical female teenager.”

These mini-movies will always engage in a kind of doubling: to emphasize the ordinariness of athletes who have chosen lives that are, by definition, anything but ordinary. They will always revel in the banality of greatness, and vice versa. What they also did, though, in Sunday’s treatments, was to suggest another kind of paradox. This may be the age of women’s empowerment, the age of Serena Williams and Gabby Douglas and Simone Biles and Hillary Clinton; it is also, though, the age of Donald Trump and the wage gap and the tampon tax and the Bic for Her Fashion Retractable Ball Pen, manufactured in a lady-friendly pink. It is also the age that found the Chicago Tribune, on Sunday, announcing the fact that Corey Cogdell-Unrein had won Olympic bronze for the U.S. in trap-shooting with the tweet, “Wife of a Bears’ lineman wins a bronze medal today in Rio Olympics.”

The political message of women’s gymnastics is on the one hand what the political message of any women’s sports will eventually be: It separates achievement, casually but also meaningfully, from aesthetics. Sports don’t care what a woman likes like, or whether she’s graceful, or whether she’s pleasing. They care only how high she jumped, how quickly she ran, how many goals she scored.

And yet gymnastics comes with particular caveats about looks and behavior and grace. It carries standards, both stipulated and unspoken, about behavior and comportment. It enforces, for all the strength it demands of its athletes, a certain daintiness. In that sense it is, for better or for worse, much more in line than other sports are with the challenges that gravity-bound women face every day. Its athletes, no matter what else they achieve, had better look good while doing their achieving. An Under Armour ad that went viral in the lead-up to the Rio Games showed Madison Kocian training, with other women gymnasts, for her Olympics debut. The ad ended with the brand’s tagline of-the-moment empowerment: “Rule yourself.” It featured scenes of the gymnast who is currently the world champion in the uneven bars sacrificing, hurting, striving, pushing … and getting her nails done.

'A Major System-Wide Outage'

What we know:

—Delta flights worldwide have been delayed or canceled following a systemwide computer outage in Atlanta, where the airline is based.

—The airline’s CEO says an “all-hands-on-deck effort” was underway to restore normal operations.

—We’re live-blogging the major updates. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).

2:02 p.m.

Ed Bastian, Delta’s CEO, is apologizing to customers for the delayed and canceled flights, saying an “all-hands-on-deck effort” was underway to restore normal operations. Here’s more:

I apologize for the challenges this has created for you with your travel experience.  The Delta team is working very, very hard to restore and get these systems back as quickly as possible.

For those of you who have been inconvenienced and need to access and make changes to your travel plans, we have instituted system-wide waivers and you can access those either through delta.com or by talking to any of our reservation agents.

1:37 p.m.

The number of flights canceled by Delta amid its global outage has risen to 451, the airline said at 1:30 p.m. It’s operating about 1,679 of its nearly 6,000 scheduled flights.

1:23 p.m.

The system outage has caused Delta to cancel 427 flights worldwide, the airline said at 1 p.m. It operated about 1,590 of its nearly 6,000 scheduled flights.

12:17 p.m.

Delta has released the latest on its day of cancellations and flight delays:

As of noon ET @Delta has cancelled approx. 365 flights and operated more than 1,260 flights of the nearly 6,000 flights scheduled today.

— Delta News Hub (@DeltaNewsHub) August 8, 2016

10:44 a.m.

In its update at 10:30 a.m., Delta said it had canceled approximately 300 flights and operated 800 flights of the nearly 6,000 flights scheduled that were scheduled for Monday.

10:17 a.m.

.@Delta has cancelled approx. 300 flights due to power outage. Systems are coming back online, but delays and cancellations continue.

— Delta News Hub (@DeltaNewsHub) August 8, 2016

It’s unclear when full service will be restored.

8:45 a.m.

Delta says its ground stop has been lifted and some planes are now taking off, though cancellations and delays continue.

Here’s more from the airline:

Customers heading to the airport should expect delays and cancellations. While inquiries are high and wait times are long, our customer service agents are doing everything they can to assist. There may also be some lag time in the display of accurate flight status at delta.com, the Fly Delta App and from Delta representatives on the phone and in airport.

Updated at 8:16 a.m. ET

NEWS BRIEF Delta flights worldwide were affected Monday following what the airline called “a major system-wide outage.” The outage caused all departing flights to be delayed, though those en route are operating normally, the airline said.

Here’s more from the airline at 6:55 a.m.:

A power outage in Atlanta, which began at approximately 2:30 a.m. ET, has impacted Delta computer systems and operations worldwide, resulting in flight delays. Large-scale cancellations are expected today. All flights enroute are operating normally. We are aware that flight status systems, including airport screens, are incorrectly showing flights on time. We apologize to customers who are affected by this issue, and our teams are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. Updates will be available on news.delta.com.

Delta said it will allow those people whose flights were affected to make a one-time change to their tickets without incurring a fee. And, it said: “If your flight is canceled or significantly delayed, you are entitled to a refund.”  Delta, the world’s third-largest airline by number of passengers, carries 138.8 million people each year.

Frank Ocean Is Working on His Own Terms

One week ago, The New York Times broke what might have been one of the biggest pop-music stories of the summer. Frank Ocean, “the innovative and enigmatic R&B singer, is set to release his next album, Boys Don’t Cry, on Friday through an exclusive deal with Apple Music, according to a person with knowledge of the release plans,” wrote Ben Sisario and Joe Coscarelli.

The story coincided with the arrival of an “endless” video showing Ocean performing carpentry work. But because the stream was posted without mention of an imminent album, it seemed likely that the Times’ source, “who was not authorized to discuss the release plans and therefore spoke on condition of anonymity,” was someone high-up at Ocean’s label, or in Ocean’s creative camp, or at Apple. The unauthorized breaking of silence was a reminder that even for a talent as singular as Ocean—and even in an era when physical distribution and long-lead promotion are no longer essential steps in the album-release process—no major musician fully works alone.

Friday came and went without Boys Don’t Cry materializing, spurring understandable frustration among fans. But the false alarm seemed of a piece with one of the ideals that Ocean has long stood for: the notion of an artist fully in charge of his art. It’s possible that logistical snares have held up the album, of course, and it’s possible it was never actually planned for Friday in the first place. But at this point, after so many previous delays from him, Ocean may again be exercising his prerogative to stall—perhaps to continuing to polish the music, or perhaps to confound expectations again, or to retreat because of nerves, or to simply finish building whatever object he’s been working on in the video stream.

By now it seems most healthy to think of all the waiting as part of the act. Throughout last week, Ocean appeared and disappeared on his stream for a few hours at a time, sporting various fresh outfits as he progressed from sawing to welding to entering a second room where he spray-painted boxes. It hasn’t been scintillating viewing. But it has put a spotlight on the other crucial way in which artists never fully work alone—fandom.

At least some people are taking Ocean’s construction as performance rather than publicity stunt.

Reading the Reddit thread with the comprehensive summary of what’s happened on the livestream—and all of the social-media spectacle surrounding it—offers a strange thrill: At least some people are taking Ocean’s activities as performance rather than publicity stunt. Hypnotic gifs have been made. The instrumental music that’s played in the background has been recorded and analyzed. Futile attempts have been made to locate the warehouse where he’s been working (though there are indications the entire stream may have been prerecorded). Theories as to the project’s meaning have been offered (“Frank is trying to make us realize that it takes a long time to create something”). Black-and-white images have been colorized. The irony of literally watching paint dry has been noted.

Someone even created an online motion detector to alert the Internet whenever Ocean appears, though, unfortunately, it hasn’t had a chance to be used: As of this writing, Ocean’s last construction stint happened early Friday morning.  The reigning theory is that he has been building a staircase; for now, the boxes that might be individual stairs sit in the main workroom, unattended despite the livestream still running. You can tune in whenever you want, and Ocean, most likely, will return whenever—and only whenever—he wants.

Mexico's Deadly Mudslides

NEWS BRIEF Violent rains caused by Hurricane Earl sent mud flowing down hillsides and killed about 40 people in two Mexican towns along the east coast over the weekend. Meanwhile, towns on the opposite side of the country are preparing for another bad storm.

Hurricane Earl dropped about a month’s worth of rain in a single night in Veracruz and Puebla. The torrents loosened the earth near the two communities and mudslides buried homes and people. About 25 people are believed to have died near the town of Huauchinango, a community in the Sierra North de Puebla mountains.

As Reuters reported, the death toll is rising:

Rafael Morena Valle, governor of Puebla state, said canine units were searching for the missing, but the number of unaccounted for residents was unclear.

Images of the damage from Earl, broadcast on Mexican television, showed massive mudslides burying entire hillsides, trees felled and buildings creaking under collapsed walls and roofs.

Earl was downgraded to a tropical storm and is expected to dissipate.

On the opposite coast of Mexico, near Cabo San Lucas on the Baja peninsula, Tropical Storm Javier pushed within 75 miles of land. Its winds have reached 50 mph and the National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane warning for the area, where Javier is expected to follow the coastline north, possibly making landfall late Monday night.

Trump's Shotgun Marriage of Populism and Supply-Side Economics

Donald Trump reads the polls closely—he’s been talking about them for the last 14 months—and he can tell they’re not good right now. “I don’t know why we’re not leading by a lot,” he lamented in Florida last week. “Maybe crowds don’t make the difference.”

It’s not just that crowds don’t say much on their own. It’s also who’s in the crowds. In particular, the Republican presidential nominee can see that while he does well among white working-class men, he’s weak in many other demographics. That’s a useful way to think about his major economics speech, which he delivered at lunchtime Monday at the Detroit Economic Club. (Weirdly enough, that’s also the site Jeb Bush chose for a major economic address last year; Emily Badger notes how the right likes to use Detroit as a backdrop and shorthand for all that they feel ails the American economy.)

The economic platform that Trump proposed amounts to an awkward shotgun marriage of the economic populism that has been his trademark since he entered the race, some of which runs directly counter to conservative economic orthodoxy, and a few well-worn conservative proposals on taxes and regulations. With several policies, Trump seems to be trying to reach more affluent, college-educated whites, and especially women, with whom he is weak, but also to reassure and woo wealthy members of the donor class.

As usual, Trump argued against free-trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, promised new tariffs, and vowed to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act. Trump also claimed that although Clinton has announced she opposed the TPP, she will back it once in office—a claim bolstered by comments from Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe. While calling for the repeal of climate-change regulations imposed by the Obama administration, he also complained that trade deals were unfair because, he said incorrectly, China does not have environmental regulations.

But there’s quite a bit of new material in the speech as well. Among the most interesting bits is his proposal to make the average cost of child care fully tax deductible. That’s an idea that outflanks Democrat Hillary Clinton from the left, offering a more generous proposal than her own, which is to cap child-care costs at 10 percent of family income. During a speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last month, Trump’s daughter Ivanka mentioned a list of policies—like paid family leave, equal pay, and affordable child care—that raised eyebrows, both because they fit more with the Democratic platform and because Donald Trump had not previously discussed them. On Monday, Trump specifically credited her for helping inspire the idea.

A child-care deduction seems aimed at women, and particularly more affluent ones, who have voted Republican but have abandoned Trump more or less en masse. Most lower-earning Americans take a standard deduction; it’s wealthier ones who are more likely to itemize. If Trump were trying to help mostly the working class, he would be better served to propose a tax credit, rather than a deduction. The Associated Press notes that 40 percent of Americans don’t even owe income tax at the end of the year. Details of the plan weren’t immediately available, although one aide told the AP that it would include an income-cap on eligibility.

In another populist-themed move, Trump called for the elimination of the carried-interest loophole, in which high earners are able to treat income as capital gains for tax purposes. (As Alec McGillis points out, this is often called the hedge-fund loophole, though other sectors like private equity use it more.) In demanding that the loophole be closed, Trump joins Hillary Clinton, who also wants it closed.

But much the rest of Trump’s speech was targeted not at the average American but at corporations and high earners, with many of the ideas borrowed from the standard Republican playbook of supply-side economics. (Trump specifically positioned himself as continuing Ronald Reagan’s legacy.) For example, he proposes eliminating the estate tax, which would not help many blue-collar workers, though it might benefit Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, and Barron.

On the tax front, Trump would reduce the number of income-tax brackets from seven to three. He previously proposed brackets of 0, 10, 20, and 25 percent, but now says he will follow Speaker Paul Ryan’s scheme of 12, 25, and 33 percent. He would also slash the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent. These, too, fit with standard conservative proposals to cut taxes, especially for higher earners, and to stimulate business by reducing taxes. (Curiously, a tax plan that was posted on Trump’s website as recently as Sunday has since been removed.)

Likewise, Trump promised to cut down on regulation, a proposal that straddles income levels, because it’s designed to appeal to both middle-class business owners and to major corporations. In an unwritten aside in his speech, Trump asserted, nonsensically, “You cannot ever start a small business under the tremendous regulatory burden you have today.”  In particular, he said he would impose a moratorium on any new financial regulations until the economy reaches some unstated level of improvement. The mechanics of such a moratorium are a little murky. As the conservative law professor Jonathan Adler points out, it would probably bump up against statutory deadlines instituted by Congress. It’s also somewhat at odds with his charge that Clinton is “owned” by Wall Street. Clinton has proposed stricter regulation of the financial sector.

Although Trump has been described as the candidate of the white working class, Nate Silver points out that he also does very well with more affluent white voters, especially males. Pushing forward with these more traditional right-wing proposals could help firm up support among any of these voters who might be wavering on Trump after his atrocious last 10 days. They might also go some way to bringing wealthy donors into the Trump tent. Although he reported a larger-than-expected fundraising haul in July, Trump continues to struggle with larger donors and bundlers.

Trump’s economic proposals face a familiar challenge of Republican economic proposals: They are conservative in popular political parlance, but they’re not necessarily fiscally prudent. In a December analysis of Trump’s economic proposals up to that point, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that he would reduce federal revenue by $9.5 trillion over a decade. “The plan would improve incentives to work, save, and invest,” the center reported. “However, unless it is accompanied by very large spending cuts, it could increase the national debt by nearly 80 percent of gross domestic product by 2036, offsetting some or all of the incentive effects of the tax cuts.” He has promised to do all this without touching entitlements—a break with previous Republican candidates, and one that has broadened his appeal. Add in elements like a child-care deduction and the revenue problem only gets trickier—although more detailed plans will be needed to gauge the impact of his revised proposals.

Covering child care edges into the territory staked out by the so-called “reformicons,” conservatives who have tried to push the GOP to focus more on helping the middle class and working class through targeted tax breaks. But the broad tax cuts Trump wants at the top don’t match, and the staunchly anti-Trump (and reformicon-friendly) conservative journalist Ross Douthat tweeted that it’s “increasingly clear that Trumpian economic policy will have the worst populist ideas and the worst elite-conservative ideas.”

Figuring out how to square his economic populism with a passel of proposals calibrated to help the wealthiest Americans is a challenge that Trump hasn’t quite mastered yet. Meanwhile, his standard doom-and-gloom read on the American situation sits uneasily with the realities of the U.S. economy. Although any analyst would say that the U.S. recovery from the 2008 recession has been slow, more recent statistics paint a rosier picture. Last Friday’s jobs report was the second month of large employment gains, and the hires came with quickening wage growth, as well. (On Monday, Trump  called the unemployment rate “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics”; while some economists argue that the standard rate doesn’t tell the whole story, Trump’s suggestion that the real rate could be as high as 42 percent has been thoroughly debunked.) An improving economy tends to be a decisive factor in helping the incumbent party hold the White House—just another one of the many political obstacles facing Donald Trump.

Hitchcock/Truffaut Is a Master Class in Cinema

In 1962, the French director Francois Truffaut sat down with his filmmaking idol. For eight days, he and Alfred Hitchcock, discussed their shared love of cinema, Hitchcock’s filmography, and his approach to the art form. Their conversation became a 1966 book, Hitchcock/Truffaut, a totemic work in the field of film theory. Now, the director Kent Jones has turned it into an engaging film, airing Monday on HBO, that wisely doesn’t try to dramatize the actual interviews, but instead delves into the story themes and visual motifs that so fascinated Truffaut.

Hitchcock/Truffaut, which premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, takes full advantage of its medium, breaking down some of Hitchcock’s most iconic filmmaking techniques as Truffaut tried to do more than 50 years ago. Jones—who previously helmed documentaries about the director Elia Kazan and the producer Val Lewton—intersperses Hitchcock and Truffaut’s dialogue throughout the film, pairing their words with clips from Hitchcock’s works. The result might be most appealing to movie buffs. But Hitchcock/Truffaut does well to avoid technical jargon, instead boiling the English director’s craft down to terms simple enough to be accessible, but nuanced enough to invite a deeper appreciation and consideration of film.

It helps that Jones enlisted a slate of top-notch filmmakers to help explain Hitchcock’s impact on their work. There are Hollywood titans like David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, and Richard Linklater, but Hitchcock/Truffaut tries to honor the international feeling of that original meeting of minds by also including directors from around the world, including Olivier Assayas, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Arnaud Desplechin. Each picks out specific moments from Hitchcock’s catalog that inspired him as a young cineaste (it’s worth noting that all of the interviewees are men, reflecting the slow-moving and embedded sexism of the profession); in between, Jones cuts back to Hitchcock and Truffaut’s conversation, including the voice of the interpreter, a woman named Helen Scott, who sat with them throughout.

With all of this, Hitchcock/Truffaut is building to a larger point: that there’s a transcendent language to cinema that extends beyond English, French, or anything else. In 1962, Truffaut was a 30-year-old upstart, a former film critic who had directed just three movies (The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, and Jules et Jim); Hitchcock was 63 years old, with more than 50 films to his credit, and operating at the peak of his Hollywood powers, having made Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho in the last five years alone. But, as viewers can tell from the audio Jones includes, their dialogue is that of two peers. They sound like old friends clapping each other on the back, though Truffaut’s utter awe for his subject does occasionally shine through.

Unlike many critics, Truffaut realized the genius of Hitchcock’s consistency as a filmmaker.

Today, Hitchcock is universally regarded as a great director, but in 1962, he was seen by many critics as a master of schlock, a blockbuster filmmaker who leaned too heavily on violence and cheap suspense to be taken seriously. The 1960 New York Times review of Psycho is a perfect example of the chiding tone that often greeted even Hitchcock’s most popular films (“The consequence in his denouement falls quite flat for us. But the acting is fair”). But Truffaut, and many of his contemporaries at Cahiers du Cinema, the French film-criticism magazine that was also home to Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, realized the genius of Hitchcock’s consistency as a director. They embraced his favored themes, such as voyeurism; his use of certain camera angles; and his focus on telling stories visually, rather than through Hollywood’s classically didactic narration or expositional dialogue.

Some documentaries about filmmakers take a strictly chronological approach. Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s 2016 film De Palma, which relies solely on interviews with Brian De Palma, tackles his films one-by-one, in the order of their release. Hitchcock’s filmography is far too vast to make such an attempt in only 90 minutes, so Jones instead takes some of Hitchcock’s defining visuals and lays them out in mini-montages. Viewers get a quick lesson in Hitchock’s high-angle shots, signifying judgment from above, and recognize his skill at presenting villains and slowly getting the audience to identify with their particular foibles. They learn about his love of silence, and the emphasis it placed on his cross-cutting visuals, all meticulously storyboarded in advance.

Hitchcock/Truffaut mostly avoids going deep on the biggest clichés about the director, such as the lurid sexuality of his work and his reputation as a “master of suspense” who bragged about his ability to endlessly drag out climactic scenes, to the squeamish delight of his audiences. But the documentary is smart enough to build to Hitchcock’s most memorable sequence of all, the shower murder in Psycho—at the time of the 1962 meeting, the director’s most recent film, and now, easily his most notorious. It’s a clever capper to the thoughtful, studious approach of Hitchcock/Truffaut: Jones has laid enough of a foundation on Hitchcock’s style that viewers can watch one of cinema’s most famous moments with fresh eyes. And then, perhaps inspired, they can go out and do the same with the rest of his work.

The Abductions in Kabul

NEWS BRIEF  Two university professors—an American and an Australian—were abducted at gunpoint Sunday near the American University of Afghanistan campus in Kabul, Reuters reports.

Their identities have not been released. The U.S. State Department and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed they were aware of the kidnappings, but declined to comment further.

The Washington Post has more:

According to Kabul police early Monday, the professors were in a vehicle just outside the university when they were stopped and seized. An Afghan colleague and a driver were with them but they were not abducted, police said. Police said no group has made contact demanding ransom or claiming responsibility. Officials at the foreign and education ministries could not be reached early Monday morning. There has been no immediate comment from the U.S. Embassy.

The kidnappers reportedly wore military uniforms, though no individual or group has claimed responsibility. Afghan security officials announced Monday efforts to recover the two professors.

Kidnappings of foreigners have become more common in Afghanistan in recent years. Individuals from India, Germany, and the Netherlands were kidnapped in separate incidents this year, though they were eventually released. The whereabouts of Katherine Jane Wilson, an Australian aid worker who was kidnapped in Kabul last April, remain unknown.

The Lawsuit on Behalf of 'Clock Boy'

NEWS BRIEF In the 11 months that have passed since Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school that teachers thought looked like a bomb, the 14-year-old Muslim boy from Texas  has received national media attention, death threats, and a scholarship that took him to Qatar. Now, his family is suing the school district and city for violating his civil rights.

The lawsuit, which was filed Monday, claims Mohamed’s rights were violated in the incident, citing what it says were years of racial discrimination in the Irving Independent School District. The lawsuit also alleges Mohamed was held unlawfully without cause. More from the suit:

There was very clearly no probable cause to believe that Ahmed had committed any crime. The officers were well aware that the home-made clock was not a bomb, as indicated by their actions in plugging it in and keeping it in the room with them for almost an hour and a half while they interrogated Ahmed. They had no information at all that a single person claimed that Ahmed had made any threats, caused any serious alarm or intended anyone to believe that the clock was anything but a clock. It defies common sense to say that because it had wires and electronics, it looked like a bomb.

While the charges of bringing a hoax bomb to school were dropped, the 9th grader, known nationally as “Clock Boy,” was still suspended from MacArthur High School for three days last September.

Mohamed returned to Irving from Qatar in June for vacation. It was then that his family hired the Texas firm that is currently representing a Baylor University student who is suing the school for allegedly ignoring her sexual-assault claims, The Washington Post reports. The specific dollar amount that the family is seeking in damages is not yet public.

Targeting a Hospital in Pakistan

Updated on August 8 at 3:45 p.m. ET

NEWS BRIEF  A suicide bomber in Quetta, Pakistan, killed at least 50 people on Monday in an attack on a hospital that targeted those mourning a prominent lawyer who was shot and killed earlier in the day.

SITE, the terrorism-monitoring group, said ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack through its Amaq news agency. The claim cannot be independently confirmed, and earlier reports had said the Pakistani Taliban faction, Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, took responsibility. Death tolls vary, with some placing it at 53, and others at 63. The man the mourners had come to see at the Quetta Civil Hospital was attorney Bilal Kasi, who was shot Monday on his way to his work.

As Dawn, the Pakistani newspaper, reported:

Abdul Rehman, the director at the Civil Hospital, said the bombing killed 63 people, mostly lawyers. He said they were also treating 92 wounded in the explosion.

According to senior police official Zahoor Ahmed Afridi, most of the dead were lawyers. Several lawyers including the former president of Balochistan Bar Association Baz Mohammad Kakar were reported injured.

Quetta is one of Pakistan’s largest cities; the southwestern Balochistan region, which shares a border with Iran and Afghanistan, has seen unrest for the past decade. Much of the violence there has been blamed on Taliban and al-Qaeda attacks on the minority Shia and Hazara communities. The region also is the scene of a separatist rebellion.

Pakistani lawyers said they will observe three days of mourning during which they will not appear in court. One local lawyer, who tweeted that his mentor was killed in the blast, raised concern that the loss of experience could also have larger ramifications on the area's legal system.

To put the magnitude of destruction into perspective, I got my law license back in 2010, joined Balochistan Bar last year in September...

— Barkhurdar Khan (@BarkhurdarAchak) August 8, 2016

Batch are now in the top 100 practicing lawyers both in terms of standing and seniority. Let that sink in for a moment. All, I repeat ALL..

— Barkhurdar Khan (@BarkhurdarAchak) August 8, 2016