Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1084

De Niro and LaBeouf, Together at Last

Finally we will get the chance to see Righteous Kill star Robert De Niro in a movie with Holes actor Shia LaBeouf. It's the team-up we've been waiting for forever. They're both in talks to star in a caper movie called Spy's Kid. No, not Spy Kids. Spy's Kid. It's about, um, a spy's kid. Robert De Niro will play a spy and Shia LaBeouf will play his kid, so he is the spy's kid, hence Spy's Kid. Does that make sense? Hopefully it does. Anyway, Shia's Disturbia and Eagle Eye director D.J. Caruso will be helming the project. But let's not get too excited. Neither De Niro or LaBeouf are fully committed, as they're waiting to read a script. Right, because clearly Bob De Niro and LaBeef are totally choosy about what scripts they do. That's been evident throughout both of their recent careers. So, yeah. This is happening. Spy's Kid. About a spy's kid. Robert De Niro is the spy, and Shia LaBeouf is the kid. Get into it. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Mario Lopez will return as a host of The X Factor next season, but his co-host Khloe Kardashian is out. Yeah, she was apparently super awkward and was made fun of a lot, so they decided to let her go. But of course Mario Lopez has been doing this hosting stuff for years now, so he knows what he's doing. Isn't it weird that Mario Lopez is as continually famous as he is? It almost gives one hope, doesn't it? I mean, Mark-Paul Gosselaar is on that Franklin & Bash program, Tiffani Amber Thiessen has her White Collar, and Elizabeth Berkley does her Ask Elizabeth advice column thing. Sure, Lark Voorhies has been in trouble and Dustin Diamond is still missing in the San Ysidro Mountains, but the majority of the Saved by the Bellers are actually doing pretty well! I mean, y'know, we are talking about The X Factor here. Does anyone even watch The X Factor? But still. It's something. It's something. [Deadline]

Odd. Laura Dern has joined the cast of one of those feel-good high school sports movies. You know, like Remember the Marshall or We Are the Blind Side. Isn't that strange? Seems like a weird kind of movie for her. Anyway, the movie is called When the Game Stands Tall and is about some high school football team that had like a crazy eleven-year winning streak. Jim Caviezel is going to play the magic coach, Michael Chiklis his bald and therefore slightly less effectual assistant coach, and Dern will play the coach's wife. That's all. Just the wife. Hm. Maybe it's a really good script? Could be! Oh and Alexander Ludwig from The Hunger Games is going to play the star player. You know, the big beefy one who used to just be the little kid from the new Witch Mountain movie. So you've got The Thing, Jesus, Witch Mountain Hunk, and Laura Dern, all together in a movie about football. Odd movie. [The Hollywood Reporter]

James Franco and Kate Hudson have signed on to star in the thriller Good People. They'll play an American couple living in London who take ₤200,000 from their dead tenant's apartment and then get in trouble with some bad people. So it's good people vs. bad people, with James Franco and Kate Hudson. Have we seen James Franco in a thriller before? I mean, yeah, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but a straight-up thriller like this? I don't know that we have. Could be interesting! The director also directed a bunch of episodes of the original Danish The Killing, so he ought to know what he's doing. Another weird cast, though. [Deadline]

Here's a first teaser for the Ryan Reynolds/Jeff Bridges ghost-cop movie R.I.P.D.. And that's not Rhode Island Police Department. The movie basically Men in Black meets The Frighteners and it does not look great. Both of those movies are good! But only as separate movies. When smooshed together like this, I'm not sure I like the results. But who knows, it's just a trailer. The director did that silly movie Red and that was a lot of fun, so this might be too. Let's give it the benefit of the doubt. But that name. That name. It's very bad.

       

Reddit's 'Find Boston Bombers' Founder Says 'It Was a Disaster' but 'Incredible'

There's no way around it: As well-intentioned as Reddit's power sleuthers may have been in their desperate, amateur efforts last week to track down the Boston Marathon bombers, they failed. And, yes, even the user behind the subreddit followed 'round the word is now admitting, in an interview with The Atlantic Wire, that his communal photo hunt was "doomed from the start" — while somewhat distancing his fellow Redditors from the media debacle they may have fostered, and taking "some responsibility for speculating about the possibility" that at least one suspect was someone he was not.

It seemed like a good idea at the time: get people who spend the majority of their time on the Internet to help with the most crowdsourced terror investigation in American history. But /r/findbostonbombers — the page that vanished from the user-powered site this weekend almost as suddenly as Reddit became a household name when the FBI released suspect photos in the climax-to-the-climax-to-the-climax of last week's events in Boston — was "a disaster," says Reddit user "oops777." He started the subreddit last Wednesday — to mine through a massive amount of photos that had surfaced, including those posted on Flickr by Reddit users and published in a massive Google Doc titled "Boston Bomber Info Spreadsheet" — with seven rules (cached online here), including one in all caps: DO NOT POST PERSONAL INFORMATION. And while it helped shed light on a Facebook photo the FBI hadn't found as of its photo release Thursday night — a photo that made its way to The New York Times — the Reddit page that was so closely watched by reporters and social media users that it sparked digital witch hunts of innocent people.

The founder, who refused to be identified by his real name, admits that it was "naive" to think the theories from within the photo page wouldn't spread beyond Reddit, as so much of Internet news already does. He denied that the New York Post's front-page photo of two men was spawned on Reddit, but he did say he was "truly sorry" for the outing of a 22-year-old missing Brown University student, which took hold early Friday morning when members of the media connected a Reddit thread to an apparent blip on the Boston police scanner. The family of the missing student was immediately harassed, and the "Find Boston Bombers" founder says he stayed up all night deleting threads. He also said that "Reddit should never ever ever be used as a source, unless there's actually some proof there."

Such is the power of Reddit, which has long been a key Internet influencer but reached peak appeal in a case that gripped the nation — and which law enforcement officials now admit led to the FBI's public release of the images of the suspects, "in part to limit the damage being done to people who were wrongly being targeted as suspects in the news media and on the Internet." On Monday, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin admitted in a company blog post that the Boston subreddit "showed the best and worst of reddit's potential." The apology continued:

However, though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The reddit staff and the millions of people on reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened. We have apologized privately to the family of missing college student Sunil Triphathi, as have various users and moderators. We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure. We hope that this painful event will be channeled into something positive and the increased awareness will lead to Sunil's quick and safe return home. We encourage everyone to join and show your support to the Triphathi family and their search.

As for the "Find Boston Bombers" founder, he's still seeking answers, not about the ongoing investigation but about what went right and what went so very wrong in the second biggest week for Reddit ever. Here is our email exchange with him Monday, lightly edited for clarity and to remove the name of the falsely identified student at Brown:

Do you think r/FindBostonBombers was successful?  

Overall, it was a disaster. It was doomed from the start when you look at it in hindsight, because not one of the images that were available on the Internet actually had the bombers in it. I also fully admit that I was naive to think that everyone would listen to the rules and keep the posts within the subreddit. 

What were your goals for the subreddit, and how did reality measure up?

My goals were to consolidate all the speculative images and "who did it" posts into one subreddit (they were all over other subreddits), with specific rules regarding personal information. I tried to create a subreddit that would purely look through images and send suspicious things to the FBI, which is what the rules I wrote reflected from the start. This was, of course, pretty naive — as pretty much every post made it to Facebook, Twitter, and even mainstream media. 

Do you think Reddit was responsible for the mixup with the missing Brown student?  

Reddit users, in general, definitely hold some responsibility for speculating about the possibility — maybe all of the responsibly for the speculation part. I think it was a top rated post on /r/news. My particular subreddit never allowed posts about him — they were immediately deleted, as a name is personal information. But things changed when @NewsBreaker on Twitter tweeted that he was confirmed a suspect on the police scanners (since deleted). 

When this happened, social media went crazy. It was retweeted thousands of times, it made the front page of /r/news and /r/boston and was posted so many times in /r/FindBostonBombers that I had to stay up the entire night deleting them. The attitude within the subreddit also changed: all of the users turned against the mods [moderators], and there were multiple posts telling mods to stop censoring things, or as they called them at the time "facts." If the subreddit did play any part in the mixup, then I am truly sorry, but I think there are a few articles that appear to be blaming entirely that subreddit — and that's not fair. 

Are there any positive takeaways from the week on Reddit?

I think the fact that a group of strangers can come together with a goal and work off each others theories is pretty incredible. People were creating new websites and ideas for ways of gathering and organizing information which could be very useful for other things. 

What do you think the Reddit community could have done better? 

No names or personal information should have ever been posted. The posts, pre-police scanner, about [the Brown student] were just ridiculous — there was nothing to suggest he was one of the suspects, and in my opinion he didn't even look anything like them. I think the zoomed-in photographs, with the red circles, should have had the faces blurred out, if the person was deemed suspicious enough — just send the un-blurred one to the FBI and post the blurred one. 

What would you like people to know about Reddit that everyone may be glossing over?

The fact that the New York Post's front page image of the "blue jacket and white hat" guys didn't come from Reddit, or even the Internet. They admitted themselves that the image came from law enforcement agencies. We had never even seen a picture that so clearly showed their faces and what they were wearing — all the images we had were from above, whereas the front-page image was from the ground. 

Also, Reddit shouldn't be grouped into the same category as media outlets. When someone on Reddit says something is suspicious, it's no different from someone on the street saying it. There's a big difference between journalistic integrity and the opinion of some guy on Reddit. Reddit should never ever ever be used as a source, unless there's actually some proof there. It's no different from a newspaper printing "a guy on the street said, 'My mate told me that this guy is a bomber.'"
The media also seems to be blaming "Reddit" as if Reddit is some singular entity. I think there's something like 8 million visitors a month to Reddit, so to talk about anything being "Reddit's fault" is just being disingenuous.

In regard to "Find Boston Bombers," I think the media is talking like everything to do with the Boston bombers was posted there, when it's clearly not true.

(Illustration above via ficusdisk/Flickr; photos via Reddit's r/findbostonbombers thread, since removed, though the photo at top left was acknowledged by officials to be accurate.)

       

No, Getting U.S. Citizenship Isn't a Terror Tactic

"Is citizenship now a tactic in the war on terror?" asks conservative RedState.com columnist Dana Loesch. Should that cause you to scratch you head, she goes on to point out that "It's a legitimate question." Which it is, if you are judging it only according to the rules of English grammar and syntax. Read literally, it seems to be a question no one is asking, unless someone is proposing granting U.S. citizenship as a way to fight terrorism. But judging by the rest of her post, and in the context of the policy responses to terrorism and its tactics, it is merely a stupid question.

Here are some related questions Loesch asks:

Is it beyond the realm of possibility to believe that individuals intent on terror would also hide behind newly acquired civil liberties to avoid detection and surveillance or to shut down an investigation? Why aren’t these questions being asked? And what are we doing to remedy this without impeding law-abiding immigrants who simply want to be Americans?

To the first question: Yeah, basically, which we'll get to. To the second: They are, legitimately! And to the third: There is nothing to remedy because this makes no sense.

Becoming a citizen of the United States is not easy. If it were easy, there would be little to no illegal immigration. Last week, we walked through what it took for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to gain his citizenship last year, ten years after he got to America. He had to get a tourist visa through his family. They sought asylum. After a year, he could become a permanent resident. After another five years, he could apply for naturalization. At each step, robust background checks — the sort of background checks that tripped up Tamerlan Tsarnaev, preventing him from getting his citizenship.

That's all via the relatively expedient process of asylum-seeking. It's trickier if the person seeking to become a citizen isn't a refugee, requiring sponsorship by a family member or business. Loesch touches on that, but doesn't actually seem to understand it.

The 9/11 terror attacks began as an immigration problem. I’ve said this for years. Terrorists in our country on expired visas were stopped by police for traffic reasons weeks before the attack. The Boston bombings, by looking at the suspects, was also an immigration problem. I know upstanding individuals with no criminal record or associations who have waited 12 years, paid five figures, and hired attorneys to get the same citizenship status awarded in a shorter time to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – citizenship our government was in the process of considering for Tamerlane [sic] Tsarnaev, despite his FBI interrogation and tip from Russian government.

The government was not "in the process of considering" citizenship for Tamerlan. It had rejected his application because of that FBI interrogation. They would also probably have stopped considering his application anyway, because he is dead.

None of this makes much sense and is pretty transparently just an effort to impugn the Senate's existing immigration reform proposal, as others did today. But what's completely goofy about it is how ridiculous the idea is.

The Tsarnaevs, guilty or not, weren't interested in "hiding behind their civil liberties." Tamerlan died during Thursday night's spectacular gunfight; it appears that his brother may have tried to kill himself. Nor do foreign terrorists come to America to be tried in a court of law. They come to America to kill Americans — and in nearly every recent example, they've been willing to die in order to accomplish that goal. Perhaps Loesch fears that the terrorists will use their status as naturalized citizens to shield themselves from FBI investigation. It's not entirely clear how suspicious activity from a citizen would be treated much differently than suspicious activity from a non-citizen. Take the Tsarnaev brothers. Did Dzhokhar have some advantage his non-citizen brother didn't?

The main reason Loesch's question is goofy is that terrorists are very unlikely to sit around for nearly a decade — having no contact with anyone else remotely linked to terrorism, never traveling to any area likely to arouse suspicion, never breaking the law, studying American history, learning English, and being quizzed repeatedly by immigration officials — all so they have a legal case against the FBI and AT&T if their phone calls are monitored. No one is going to go through all of that when one could just as easily put nails and a pipe bomb inside a pressure cooker and take it to a marathon finish line.

Is Dana Loesch serious? This is a legitimate question.

Photo via AP: A group of people who are not terrorists take their oath of citizenship.

       

Did This Dagestani Terrorist Inspire the Boston Bombers?

As investigators try to understand what led Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev to attack their adopted home city, they are looking carefully at one of the brother's connection to the far off region of Dagestan. YouTube videos posted by Tamerlan after his 2012 visit to the Russian province suggest a possible connection or relationship with Abu Dujana, an Islamic militant leader who was killed by the Russian army last Decemeber.

The older Tsarnaev brother left the United States for six months last year, and apparently spent part of that time Dagestan. The brothers' father currently lives in Dagestan's capital, Makhachkala, which was also home to Abu Dujana, who was believed to have links to larger separatist movements in the region, including Chechen terror groups. In December, Abu Dujana—also known as Gadzhimurad Dolgatov—and several others were killed by Russian security forces in a brutal firefight. (CNN has broadcast video of the battle that the Russians had released to prove both that Dolgatov was dead, and that his group was heavily armed and equipped at the time of the fight.) 

Tsarnaev's YouTube channel had linked to videos of online speeches by Dolgatov that have since been taken down. Authorities haven't yet established any direct link between Dolgatov and Tsarnaev and its possible that he never did meet with any terrorists while in Dagestan. According to the Daily Mail, during his trip there last year, Tsarnaev met several times with a low-level member of the local "underground" Islamic militant movement, but neither of them were ever questioned, even though he had already drawn the attention of Russian security services.

However, the video links could suggest that Tsarnaev was at least aware of and sympathized with Dolgatov's movement and perhaps could even have been inspired by his death. It may also have been a connection between the two that inspired authorities on both sides of the world to take an interest in Tsarnaev, leading to claims today that the FBI "dropped the ball" when tracking the potential terrorist. 

       

Over Half the Prisoners at Guantanamo Are Now on a Hunger Strike

Things aren't going so well down at Guantanamo Bay. A few days after The New York Times published a rather arresting column written by an inmate staging a hunger strike, 25 percent more prisoners have joined the protest. The latest report from United States officials puts the number of inmates on hunger strike at 84 — there are 166 total inmates at Guantanamo — with at least 17 of them, including the author of the Times column, being force fed. The number of prisoners participating is up 32 since last Wendesday and has continued to increase over the weekend.

The hunger strike dates back to February 6, when a group of prisoners took action against prison guards they say desecrated the Koran. It didn't help that some of the prisoners have been locked up for over a decade without having received a trial or even been formally charged with a crime. On top of that, news emerged about a week after the hunger strike started that the supposedly private rooms where inmates meet with their lawyers had been bugged illegally. Guantanamo officials swear they never used the surveillance equipment, but that didn't do anything to improve prisoner-guard relations. Last month, a stand-off between prisoners and guards even led to gunfire, though nobody was killed.

This all sounds very dramatic, and it is. It's also unclear how much Americans care about what's happening in the off-shore prison, where we send men to forget them. Initially — read: before that Times column — there was debate over whether the hunger strike was happening at all. But that column. Wrote Guantanamo prisoner Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel of the hunger strike:

People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.

And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.

With the spike in participation, there will soon be more people fainting with exhaustion, more blood-infused vomit, more pain, more suffering. No word from Obama on when he might keep his promise to close the prison, though. In fact, it looks less likely than ever.

       

Last Week, CNN Itself Became the Poop Cruise

As reactions to the media's handling (or rather, mishandling) of breaking news during a busy week continue to flow in, perhaps none is more condemning than David Carr's latest column in The New York Times. The media critic came down hard on correspondent John King, newly appointed chief Jeff Zucker and the rest of the CNN news team that famously fumbled during the aftermath of the Boston bombing and hunt for the suspects. Most notably, the network erroneously reported the arrest of a suspect on Wednesday, when everybody now knows that a suspect wasn't arrested until Friday when police found Dzokhar Tsarnaev hiding in the back of a boat.

Carr has an analogy for that. In discussing the mistake, one that more than one person described as "devastating," Carr reminded us of the most recent moment that CNN's stolen the limelight — perhaps not in a good way:

It was not the worst mistake of the week — The New York Post all but fingered two innocent men in a front-page picture — but it was a signature error for a live news channel. … Until now, the defining story in the Zucker era had been a doomed cruise ship that lost power and was towed to port, where its beleaguered passengers dispersed. This week, CNN seemed a lot like that ship.

Zing. Inevitably, Carr's piece comes off almost as apologetic. In his parting words, the veteran journalist points out how even the president "wants CNN to be good." So when it's bad, it's hard to watch.

Slate's Fahrad Manjoo brought up a similar point last week in the immediate aftermath of CNN's arrested suspect debacle but cut the network a little more slack. "Breaking news is broken," he argued, pointing out how it wasn't just CNN or The New York Post that screwed up in the bedlam that was the immediate aftermath of the bombings and subsequent investigation. The real problem is that both Twitter and CNN now depend on technologies that make it possible to follow breaking news too closely," Manjoo wrote. Solution? When breaking news flashes onto your screen, turn off the screen.

So which one is it? Is CNN a big poop cruise, drifting along off the shores of reality, stealing too much attention and not adding enough value? Or is the whole system broken? Should we just give up on breaking news and just wait for the official New York Times version of the story the next day? Manjoo thinks so. Carr's not sure. And CNN — if CNN host Piers Morgan can speak for the network in reaction to all the criticism on Sunday night — CNN might've been wrong, but everybody's wrong now and then. And a lot of people were wrong last week, including The New York Times.

       

Wearing an NRA T-Shirt Leads to Criminal Charges for West Virginia Teen

A 14-year-old middle school student appears to be staging some sort of intriguing political protest in Logan, West Virginia, where he was recently charged with causing a disruption after wearing an NRA T-shirt to school.

[image error]Actually, let's qualify that a little bit. It appears that Jared Marcum just went to school one day, wearing a T-shirt bearing the NRA logo. (Spoiler: There's a gun in the logo — two, in fact.) A teacher spotted the article, while Marcum was in the lunch line, ordered him to turn it inside out, Marcum refused and police officers got involved. Police arrested the eighth grader, who now faces charges of "disrupting an educational process and obstructing an officer," the Associated Press reports. 

Without going into the details of the case — which are so far pretty vague — it's worth pointing out how we know the young suspect's name. He is a minor, after all. However, Marcum's name is in the press, because that's what Marcum wants. "The Associated Press typically does not identify juveniles charged with crimes," the AP noted in its story, "but Marcum and his family wanted his name and case known." Marcum is a freedom fighter, see. "When the police came, I was still talking and telling them that this was wrong, that they cannot do this, it's not against any school policy," the teen told the press. "The officer, he told me to sit down and be quiet. I said, 'No, I'm exercising my right to free speech.' I said it calmly."

So this is about free speech. Fair enough. The topic of middle school dress codes typically makes for a rather dry debate. But when Congress has just failed spectacularly at passing gun control reform — another way of putting that would be to say that the NRA just won magnificently — a standoff over a T-shirt provides a curious lens through which to view the whole debate. Without know the particulars of the Logan Middle School dress code, we can't definitively say that he violated the policy or not. We can, however, say that this reeks of unresolved hysteria.

It's never a good idea to wear a T-shirt with guns on it to school. Tons of kids probably get into trouble for this kind of thing every day, but when one kid in a tiny West Virginia town wins national headlines over his T-shirt, there's clearly a lot more going on than an inappropriate T-shirt. During a violent week for America, one that follows too many violent weeks before it, tension is high. Gun control reform, even in the eyes of the NRA, remains an unfinished mission, and clearly, Americans are still thinking about it. It's probably going to take a more assertive effort than arresting a middle school to clear the air, though.

       

Twitter's Hashtag-Powered Comedy Festival Sounds Confusing

The entertainment industry's looking pretty experimental these days, with the announcement of a new five-day-long comedy festival on Twitter. Yes, there is a hashtag involved. Starting on Monday, you'll start to see some familiar handles making jokes with the descriptively named hashtag #ComedyFest. Comedians will use Vine to upload six-second videos, and there will be one live event on Monday night. Everyone from Judd Apatow to Mel Brooks, who will both appear on Monday night, is on board with Twitter's lastest attempt to look like a media company. With Comedy Central as a partner and a whole separate algorithmic comedy app in the mix, the whole situation sounds a little dizzying.

It could be amazing. The so-called #ComedyFest sounds a lot like what comedians do on Twitter on a daily basis, but with the hashtag, it's going to be a lot more focused and organized, right? Well, hashtags aren't exactly the most organized organizing principle in the world. As anyone who's ever followed a really popular hashtag will tell you, sometimes the information simply flows through the stream to quickly to be consumed. In recent months, there's been renewed criticism over whether or not the convention is useful at all since its as prone to noise as it is to order. But it sounds like networks are okay with making you do a little work to find the content you want. 

Take the upcoming Comedy Central app, CC:Stand-Up. Almost described as an Amazon for comedy by The New York Times, the new app uses recommedation algorithms to help you curate a selection of your favorite comedians. A Comedy Central executive told The Times's Amy Chozick that the network would soon "be ambivalent about where people watch Comedy Central." And since you can't really watch TV on Twitter — Twitter is the "second screen" people tend to talk about when talking about "second screen experiences" — you get to watch some hybrid creation of Comedy Central's special programming and Twitter's regularly scheduled programming to create this strange five-day occasion that a lot of people probably won't even notice.

But once again, it could work. If Comedy Central's trying to create algorithmic stand-up (of sorts) and Twitter's trying to be a TV network (if only for a few days), then clearly folks in the entertainment industry are open-minded. Now, let's see if they can be funny, too.

       

Reese Witherspoon Asked Her Arresting Officer, "Do You Know My Name?"

Because, yes, that Reese Witherspoon was arrested and spent a night in jail this weekend for disorderly conduct. And yes, that Reese Witherspoon tried to argue with the cop because she's a famous person and she is allowed to "stand on American ground."

This is the story, according to Variety: Witherspoon and her CAA agent-husband James Toth were pulled over Friday evening in Atlanta, Georgia when a police officer noticed their silver 2013 Ford Focus weaving between two lanes. Toth blew well over the legal limit on his breathalyzer test despite claiming to only have had one drink with dinner a few hours before. As the officer was booking her husband, Witherspoon became restless while waiting in the car:

"Mrs. Witherspoon began to hang out the window and say that she did not believe that I was a real police officer," according to the police report. "I told Mrs. Witherspoon to sit on her butt and be quiet."

[...]

As the report details, "Mrs. Witherspoon asked, "Do you know my name?" I answered, "No, I don't need to know your name." I then added, "right now." Mrs. Witherspoon stated, "You're about to find out who I am."

The report also specified, "Mrs. Witherspoon also stated, 'You are going to be on national news.' I advised Mrs. Witherspoon that was fine."

Oof, that's not a good look. Witherspoon's insubordination earned her a disorderly conduct charge. The actress is in Atlanta filming a movie called The Good Lie. There's a courtroom joke here that's just on the tip of the tongue but won't, oh, forget it. I don't want to live in a world where Reese Witherspoon is this much of a jerk. 

We're not entirely sure what the craziest part of this whole story: that squeaky clean Reese Witherspoon was arrested, or that it somehow stayed out of the news until Sunday evening. We heard nothing from TMZ, who cover the legal troubles of Hollywood women, or Deadline, who cover the workings of agencies like CAA, all weekend. Usually they would be on this like fruit flies on vinegar. But we heard nada. 

The happy couple are booked for a court appointment Monday morning, but it's unlikely they'll show up. (A lawyer usually does the dirty work for these things.) Maybe Witherspoon will have some helpful advice for her counsel. She does have some experience in the legal realm: 

    

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is Awake and Answering Questions

Update 8:34 p.m.: Sources tell ABC News and NBC News that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev regained consciousness and began answering written questions from police on Sunday night. The 19-year-old is still in serious condition but is reportedly fielding questions about other potential members of a terrorist cell and unexploded bombs that might still be out there. It remains unclear if Tsarnaev will ever be able to talk again after taking a gunshot wound to the throat.

Meanwhile, more details about Dzhokhar and his brother Tamerlan continue to emerge. The Los Angeles Times managed to track down the brothers' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, who characterized her last conversation with the older, now late Tamerlan just hours before his shootout with police last Thursday night. "He would call me every day from America in the last days," she told The Times from her home in Dagestan, "and during our last conversation on the morning [before the shootout], he was especially touching and tender and alarmed at the same time. He said he got a private phone call from [the FBI] and said that they told him he was under suspicion and should come see them." Just before hanging up, he added, "If you need me, you will find me."

Zubeidat suggested that American authorities have had their eye on Tamerlan for a while — or at least, he thought they did. "You know the FBI followed him for several years," she said, "and when he got back from Dagestan last year they called him and asked him what was the purpose of his visit to his homeland."

Original Post: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is still in the hospital. His condition is not improving, and he still can't speak to investigators because of a potentially self-inflicted neck wound. The 19-year-old suspect is still under surveillance at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he's been since his arrest late Friday night. He was in serious but stable condition Sunday morning, according to the F.B.I., but the Boston Police Department just released an update saying it's been downgraded to critical but stable condition. That's bad. That means his condition is getting worse. 

The truth is, there's a very real possibility investigators won't get a chance to speak with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. "We don’t know if we’ll ever be able to question the individual," Mayor Tom Menino cautioned Sunday morning on ABC's This Week.

What's holding them up and causing the most serious problems is a neck wound that's hampering his ability to speak with the special interrogators brought in for when he is eventually healthy enough to explain himself. The New York Times reports Tsarnaev has a breathing tube down his throat and he's currently sedated because of what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The wound "had the appearance of a close range, self-inflicted style," a law enforcement source told the Times. This implies that Tsarnaev intended to kill himself before being taken alive, which doesn't bode well for hopes he might cooperate. Neither does the fact that he was "swearing profusely" during his initial ambulance ride before the neck wound silenced him, according to the L.A. Times. 

So the public should maybe start to prepare itself for what seems inevitable at this point: we may never hear an explanation for these attacks from the source. The Justice Department was expected to file charges against Tsarnaev on Sunday, but they decided to delay that decision, NBC's Pete Williams reports. All we can do is wait.