Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 117

The Olympic Terror Threat

NEWS BRIEF Brazilian police arrested 10 people they say were planning to strike at next month’s Rio Olympics in the name of the Islamic State.

Officials say they believe the individuals, detained Thursday, belonged to a group that supports ISIS. Brazil’s Justice Minister Alexandre de Moraes said the suspects are all Brazilian citizens, residing in several of the country’s states, Reuters reported. They did not know each other, and used online communication—like WhatsApp and Telegram, which allow users to send encrypted messages—to discuss an attack.

The justice minister said the group did not have direct contact with ISIS leaders, but had pledged allegiance to the terrorist organization. They had not yet acquired weapons. More from Reuters:

“It was an absolutely amateur cell, with no preparation at all, a disorganized cell,” the minister said, adding that authorities decided to intervene when the group started to plan actions.

The arrests come several days after the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors potential jihadist activity on the internet, reported a group in Brazil had pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of ISIS, on Telegram.

The Brazilian government—already battling negative publicity because of the Zika virus that has kept away visitors and athletes—has boosted security in Rio since last week’s attack in Nice, France, where a driver plowed a truck through crowds during Bastille Day celebrations, killing dozens. Interim Brazilian President Michel Temer attempted to reassure visitors about the security measures during the games. “We have reinforced security very much in the city and you can come without worries,” he said in a video Monday.

The games begin August 5 and more than 500,000 foreign visitors are expected.

The Cost of Athletes Taking Political Stands

NEWS BRIEF WNBA players are paying for their political activism.

The league fined the New York Liberty, Phoenix Mercury, and Indiana Fever each $5,000 and fined their players $500 for wearing black warm-up shirts following recent deadly police-involved shootings of black men. Teams in the league were warned earlier this week about the uniform policy. Still, those three teams decided to wear the black shirts. WNBA President Lisa Borders explained the league’s reasoning to the Associated Press:

We are proud of WNBA players' engagement and passionate advocacy for non-violent solutions to difficult social issues but expect them to comply with the league's uniform guidelines.

The WNBA warned its athletes against making political statements by wearing unsanctioned shirts after the Minnesota Lynx, and later New York and Phoenix, wore black shirts with white lettering commemorating the Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Dallas shootings two weeks ago. While four Minneapolis police officers walked out of their private security jobs during the Lynx game, these athletes paid no true financial price for speaking out politically. That seems to have changed, and some athletes are not pleased, including Mercury forward Mistie Bass.

Don't say we have a voice and then fine us because we use it. #notpuppets #cutthestrings

— Mistie Bass (@A_Phoenix_Born) July 21, 2016

Liberty forward Tina Charles said last week the team had agreed to wear the black shirts for the rest of the year. Though that may change following the league’s fines.

Professional athletes have been moved to take more public stances on news events in recent weeks. During the ESPY Awards last week, NBA players Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade, and LeBron James called on fellow athletes to use their voices to speak out against racial injustice.

Hoppy Days for Big Beer

NEWS BRIEF The beeropoly is upon us. From now on, Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Coors, Corona, Michelob, Stella Artois, just about every bottled beer behind the bar will come from one company.

On Wednesday the U.S. Justice Department approved a $108-billion merger between the world’s two largest beer makers, Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller. The deal still needs approval from China, but it has already been signed off by most of the world’s countries, and the U.S. was seen as the hardest sell.

That’s not to say the deal came without its caveats. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the Department of Justice:

... put restrictions on the beer giant’s ability to pursue the fastest-growing part of the U.S. beer market by getting AB InBev to agree to let antitrust enforcers review any future craft beer and distributor acquisitions. Normally, many of those transactions wouldn’t be big enough to qualify for such scrutiny.

The Justice Department agreement with AB InBev also limits the Belgian-based brewer from creating incentive programs that encourage independent distributors to sell and promote its beers over rivals. It means AB InBev will have to abandon a new plan that would financially reward U.S. distributors for focusing on brands like Budweiser and Stella Artois.

Another concession, though by the companies own choice, was SABMiller’s offer to sell its U.S. stake in MillerCoors to Molson Coors Brewing. That would make Molson the second-largest brewer in the U.S., and essentially leave the beer market there unchanged by the larger merger.

This deal is supposed to bring the world market together for the two companies, because while SAB Miller has a strong presence in some areas, like Africa, Anheuser-Busch’s is limited there. The same goes for Latin American countries. The deal is also a reaction to a global slowdown in the companies’ growth. The craft-brew market has cut into both companies’ share of the beer market, though as my colleague David Graham wrote when the deal was first announced, the larger brewers have often reacted to this by buying up the small crafters.

A Victory For Voting Rights in Texas

A U.S. federal appeals court struck down Texas’s voter-ID law on racial-discrimination grounds Wednesday, handing a major victory to voting-rights activists ahead of the 2016 election.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Senate Bill 14 disproportionately burdened black and Hispanic voters, thereby violating the federal Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial discrimination in American elections.

“The record shows that drafters and proponents of SB 14 were aware of the likely disproportionate effect of the law on minorities, and that they nonetheless passed the bill without adopting a number of proposed ameliorative measures that might have lessened this impact,” Judge Catharina Haynes wrote for the majority.

Most cases in the federal appeals courts are heard by three-judge panels. But the Fifth Circuit agreed to rehear the case, Veasey v. Abbott, in a rare en banc hearing with its entire complement of 15 judges in March.

The majority sent back the plaintiffs’ claims of racially discriminatory purpose to the lower courts for further consideration. It also rejected claims the law imposed an unconstitutional poll tax.

The ruling comes just over three years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Shelby County v. Holder revived the controversial law:

The law in question, known as Senate Bill 14, imposed voter-ID requirements on Texas voters when it was signed by then-Texas Governor Rick Perry in May 2011. But a federal court blocked the law from going into effect soon thereafter, ruling that Texas hadn’t proved the law lacked a racially discriminatory purpose or effect. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required certain jurisdictions, including Texas, to receive federal approval for changes to voting laws before enacting them. Critics argued the law would leave thousands of poorer voters, many of them from African American and Hispanic communities, without the means to cast a ballot.

SB 14 lay dormant until June 2013, when a Supreme Court decision helped revive it. In a sharply divided 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, the Court struck down the formula in Section 4 that determined which jurisdictions fell under Section 5’s preclearance requirements. With that formula gone, Section 5 became inoperative. Texas officials announced a few hours after the ruling that they would enforce SB 14.

A group of Texas voters then challenged SB 14 under a different part of the Voting Rights Act that forbids racial discrimination in voting laws nationwide. That provision, known as Section 2, is a weaker alternative to preclearance. Section 5 required state officials to prove the absence of discriminatory intent or effect when crafting new election laws—an extremely high threshold for those jurisdictions. Section 2 instead places the burden to prove racial discrimination or effect on voters themselves.

Texas’s next step would be a last-minute request for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. But the Fifth Circuit’s ruling tilts the odds of success before the shorthanded court against the state: A 4-4 split among the justices would uphold the lower court’s decision in favor of the plaintiffs.

The justices have signaled they are keeping an eye on the case. After the Fifth Circuit agreed to an en banc hearing in March, the high court set a de facto deadline of July 20 to issue a ruling before either Texas or the plaintiffs could ask the justices to intervene. The Fifth Circuit met the deadline with only a few hours to spare.

This article will be updated.

UnREAL and the Dangers of Thinkpiece-Friendly TV

This post contains mild spoilers for the most recent episode of UnREAL.

Have you heard the joke about the camel? That the creature, with its awkward humps and gangly legs and unpleasant personality, is a horse that has been designed by committee?

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UnREAL's Surprisingly Sober Look at Violence

I kept thinking about that while watching the most recent episode of UnREAL, Lifetime’s satire of The Bachelor, and of reality TV more broadly. “Ambush,” the seventh installment of UnREAL’s second season, featured, variously: the awkwardly explained return of two castaway characters; two romances that make little sense to begin with crashing forward at breakneck speeds; the cremated remains of an contestant’s ex-boyfriend serving as a prop in a reality show (in a fake Venetian gondola, in a fake California lake); and then, finally, a shooting of an unarmed black man at the hands of incompetent police.

Legs, humps, overbite: The whole thing was chaotic and frenzied and whiplashing, enough to transform a show that has thus far distinguished itself by blending the sharp and the subtle into a kind of televised grotesque. And “Ambush” wasn’t the first episode this season to do that. As Slate summed things up, harshly but accurately: UnREAL’s second season “has gone completely off the rails.”

There are several potential reasons for why this might be, chief among them, very possibly, the departure of UnREAL’s co-creator, Marti Noxon, a TV veteran who was responsible for much of the show’s writing in season one. But there could be another problem, too. The show may have simply fallen victim to its own status as a show-within-a-show, and as a series that is both a satire of TV and TV itself. UnREAL has, from the beginning, emphasized the irony inherent in its premise. Its fictions have doubled as commentaries about the world beyond UnREAL’s hazy borders—about gender, about class, about Hollywood, about a genre of entertainment that claims the mantle of “reality.” The show has featured stories that have been animated by the ideas that are simmering in the cultures beyond its very hazy borders. That is what has made the show so layered and, in its way, literary.

UnREAL’s own story now seems to mirror Rachel’s: So determined is it to Make a Difference™ for humanity, it has forgotten how to be human.

But now? Rather than the first season’s premise of commentary in the service of art, UnREAL has been largely serving up the opposite: art in the service of commentary. Thus: plot points about Black Lives Matter. Plot points about political activism. Plot points about the power of TV to change, or not to change at all, the way people think. Plot points that now involve police shootings. Rachel, and her boss-cum-frenemy Quinn, have together determined to “make history” by doing what The Bachelor, in the world that parallels UnREAL’s, has thus far not accomplished: selecting a person of color as its star. Quinn, distracted by a new boyfriend, seems to have forgotten that goal; Rachel, however—though she is in her own way distracted by her new boyfriend—has not.

This could be great fodder for great televised fictions. These ideas could be wrapped up subtly and satisfyingly into UnREAL’s stories. Instead, UnREAL serves up preachy dialogue like this, between Adam—last season’s Everlasting suitor, and one of the two (two!) of Rachel’s ex-boyfriends who appeared, jarringly, in the episode—and Rachel:

Adam: Why are you still here, with Quinn, in this place? Wake up! This place is a vortex of evil and dysfunction, turning everything it touches to shit. How do you not see that?  It’s ruining your life.

Rachel: And what, you’re some, like, moral authority now? You, like, kiss a few AIDS babies for some photo op, and you think you’re doing God’s work? I’m actually helping people.

Adam: Really?

Rachel: Yes.

Adam: Tell me, who do you think you’re actually helping here?

Rachel: Um, the 16 million people who watch my television show every week. Okay? I have single-handedly broken down all these pre-conceived notions on love and race. Because Coleman and I? We are making television that matters. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but we actually have the first black suitor. That’s groundbreaking.

Adam: Your black suitor is on a fake date, on a fake boat, on a fake lake. That is Everlasting, and you’re completely delusional.

This is … on the nose. It is in-your-face. It is very, very camel-y. And it is also a repetition of similar conversations that have been had between Rachel and many other characters since the first episode of UnREAL’s new season. For a series of episodes that have featured so much sex and betrayal and violence and twists of fate, very little has actually changed. The broad arc of Rachel’s story—despite all the nonsensical dramas that have ensued since that episode—hasn’t moved forward; what has changed are the ideas—about wokeness, about allies, about police brutality—that underscore that story. They are the stars here.

There are good things that have come out of that structure, certainly. “Casualty,” the episode that preceded “Ambush,” offered a subtle, and also meaningfully non-subtle, treatment of domestic and sexual violence. And “Ambush” itself, through Everlasting’s treatment of its black stars as pawns in its grand social experiment, is playing with important ideas about personal agency and cultural influence and the tenuous connections between those two things. As Jay, one of Everlasting’s producers and one of the show’s very few remaining moral compasses, tells Rachel about her role in that experiment: “This is not your story to tell.”

That’s a powerful line. It’s a good line. Here’s hoping there will be more like it as UnREAL’s second season goes on. For the moment, though, UnREAL’s own story now seems awkwardly reminiscent of Rachel’s: So determined is the show to Make a Difference™ for humanity, it has forgotten how to be human. The series seems so aware of itself as fodder for thinkpieces and cultural conversation—that it’s prioritized commentary over quality, and politics over art. Future episodes may well bring redemption for a series that started so strongly, and with such literary nuance; at this point, though, UnREAL is uncomfortably dromedarian—a show that seems to have been, like the messy culture it is reflecting, designed by committee.

Trump's Wall Goes Up (In Miniature)

NEWS BRIEF Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, got his wall––or at least, a wall. Plastic Jesus, the Los Angeles street artist described as the “Banksy of L.A.” enclosed Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a six-inch barbed wire gray wall.

The piece of street art appeared Tuesday afternoon, and is a reference to Trump’s call for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The artist’s wall closes off Trump’s square, and features tiny American flags, and signs in Spanish and English that read, “Keep Out.” Here’s a picture:

Someone built a wall around #DonaldTrump star on Hollywood Walk of Fame today. Said to be the work of Plastic Jesus. pic.twitter.com/3nb8h7cnoT

— Kacey Montoya (@kaceymontoya) July 20, 2016

Plastic Jesus is a British-born street artist. His last work, in April, replaced “No Parking Anytime” signs with “No Trump Anytime” signs all across L.A., as well as in Washington, D.C., outside the Capitol, and in New York outside Trump Tower. He has also criticized discrimination in Hollywood with a pop-up art installation placed on L.A.’s Melrose Avenue. That piece featured two sinks, one labeled “White,” and the other “Colored.” Beneath the “colored” sign, the artist placed a sink with the plumbing exposed. Beneath the “White” sign was a fancy vanity mirror with champagne on the counter next to an Academy Award.

This tiny wall is actually the second Trump-inspired art instillation this month. Two artists, David Gleeson and Mary Mihelic, built a small portion of wall from 52 cinder blocks, about 70 miles from the real U.S.-Mexico border, near Jacumba Hot Springs, California.

'Lock Her Up': How Hillary Hatred Is Unifying Republicans

CLEVELAND—For many Republicans, it’s not enough that Hillary Clinton be defeated at the polls in November. They want to see her imprisoned—or worse.

So far, the Republican National Convention has been as much about Clinton as it is about Donald Trump, who was formally nominated Tuesday. The party hoped the confab in Cleveland would allow the GOP to unify after a fractious, acrimonious primary season and maybe even begin pivoting toward the general election. On that count, we’ll give the RNC a gentleman’s incomplete so far. On the one hand, Donald Trump was formally named the nominee on Tuesday, as expected, and a slew of establishment figures—including Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—got up to speak in his favor, with as much warmth as they could muster. Meanwhile, in its first two days, the convention has been riven by procedural fights and furious reactions from anti-Trump leaders and delegates.

With Trump remaining a divisive figure, Clinton provides a useful rallying point. Some of that is garden-variety political talk, as when Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson critiqued the Clintons’ time in his state. But there’s a darker strain present, too. It’s on display during some of the most striking moments at the Quicken Loans Arena, when the hall has broken out into spontaneous chants. It’s on display in the sartorial choices around downtown Cleveland, where “Hillary for Prison” shirts seem nearly as popular as the famous “Make America Great Again” hats. It’s on display in the speeches delivered from the dais and the comments made by delegates.

Those shirts are not new, and anyone who’s attended a Trump rally (or even a Bernie Sanders rally) this year will have seen them. Styled after Clinton’s 2008 logo, they produce frantic double-takes every time I see one, thinking a Hillary backer has gone out into the fray. But they’re especially popular here.

Then there are the speeches. One of the emotional peaks of Monday’s convention slate was a short address by Patricia Smith, whose son Sean Smith was killed in the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi while stationed there by the U.S. Foreign Service. As she told her story, someone on the floor shouting “Hillary for prison!”

“That's right,” Smith replied. “Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes.”

Tuesday night, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie made it even more explicit. A former U.S. attorney, Christie approached his speaking slot like a prosecutor making his case against a defendant. He even asked the audience to deliver a verdict. “We must present those facts to you, a jury of her peers, both in this hall and in living rooms around our nation,” he said. “Since the Justice Department refuses to allow you to render a verdict, let’s present the case now, on the facts, against Hillary Clinton.”

The crowd was delighted to oblige. Throughout Christie’s speech, attendees broke into chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

Still, these sentiments are by some measures the moderate ones. Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire delegate who has appeared at events with Trump, railed against Clinton during a radio interview on Tuesday, as BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynzski reported.

“Hillary Clinton to me is the Jane Fonda of the Vietnam. She is a disgrace for the lies that she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi. She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting back up security. Something’s wrong there,” he said. “This whole thing disgusts me, Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”

On Friday, West Virginia delegate Michael Folk reached a similar conclusion, though he prescribed a different method of execution. Tweeting at Clinton, he said, “You should be tried for treason, murder and crimes against the U.S. Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, D.C.”

The attitude that Clinton must be jailed or even executed is by no means universal. Some delegates seem as disgusted by the saber-rattling as they are by their nominee and the fights over rules at the convention—more signs of a party veering into populism and barbarity. Clinton is also an unusual figure in that she is plagued by some real legal problems, so it’s not just partisan animosity. But the Justice Department’s decision not to bring charges against Clinton over the use of her private email server inspired a harsh backlash. For months, Republican leaders suggested that Clinton would be indicted, despite legal experts’ consensus view that a prosecution was unlikely. When FBI Director James Comey dashed those hopes by recommending against charges, people who had gotten their hopes up were furious. Since the Justice Department won’t bring charges, people like Smith, Baldasaro, and Folk are making their own citizens’ indictments.

These “indictments” don’t carry the force of law, of course, but they do carry a worrying rhetorical weight. Around the world, it’s not uncommon for rulers who have just come to power to prosecute, imprison, and even execute their rivals or predecessors; historically, it’s probably the norm. The United States has been an international outlier—it has been exceptional, even—in its long pattern of peaceful and non-recriminative transfers of power. Even Richard Nixon, who likely could have been convicted of crimes, was pardoned by Gerald Ford. In announcing that decision, which was deeply unpopular, Ford cited the necessity of preserving American norms. It would take too long for Nixon to be tried, Ford said. “During this long period of delay and potential litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused, our people would again be polarized in their opinions, and the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad,” he said.

Would a President Trump be inclined to engage in this kind of score-settling? It’s impossible to tell. Throughout his business career, Trump has often held long grudges and sought revenge. (By some accounts, it’s the entire motivation behind his campaign.) But even mainstream figures like Christie have talked with varying degrees of seriousness about “never let[ing Clinton] within 10 miles of the White House again.” Even if Clinton loses, quietly returns to private life, and doesn’t face any further prosecution, the scene of thousands demanding that a political rival be jailed will remain another disconcerting episode in an election packed with them.

Remembering Garry Marshall

Garry Marshall, one of the founding fathers of the modern American sitcom, died Tuesday at the age of 81, after a storied career in the world of television and film. The sitcoms he created include Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork & Mindy, and The Odd Couple; the films he directed—Pretty Woman, Beaches, Runaway Bride, and The Princess Diaries among them—make up some of the last century’s best-known titles. Marshall was often gently derided as a purveyor of easy, popular fare, but he had his finger on the pulse of popular culture for decades, telling stories so recognizable that they now pass for cliché.

Some of the stars he discovered and nurtured in Hollywood were Julia Roberts, Henry Winkler, Robin Williams, and his sister Penny Marshall. His career took in every major phase of mainstream Hollywood comedy, from the zingers of late-night hosts like Joey Bishop and Jack Paar, to the rigorously antic sitcoms developed by Dick Van Dyke and Lucille Ball, to the broader, more emotional work he embraced in his own shows. He made it plausible for slight romantic comedies to have the box-office pull of expensive Hollywood blockbusters. Marshall never stopped working, and near the end of his life his films veered into critically disdained formula—but it was always his formula, one he not only invented but also perfected.

Marshall was born in the Bronx in 1934 and started his comedy career writing jokes for Bishop and Phil Foster before being hired by Paar’s Tonight Show. From there, he and his writing partner Jerry Belson had a hand in some of the biggest sitcoms of 1960s television, from The Dick Van Dyke Show to The Lucy Show (the follow-up to I Love Lucy). Their first creator credit was on the adaptation of Neil Simon’s play and film The Odd Couple, an ABC sitcom starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman that ran for five seasons. It was an Emmy-nominated hit, and from there Marshall went on to create the crown jewel of his burgeoning TV empire, the sitcom Happy Days, a paean to mid-’50s Americana and that decade’s softer version of teenage life.

Happy Days, starring Ron Howard (who departed after seven seasons) and Winkler (as the iconic cool greaser Fonzie), ran for 10 years and spawned seven spin-offs, including huge successes like Laverne and Shirley and Mork & Mindy. Mostly set in Milwaukee, these shows moved away from the more rigid, punchline-focused sitcoms of the ’50s and ’60s, instead leaning into broad life lessons and rose-tinted portrayals of adolescence and growing up. They usually ran for too long—the phrase “jumping the shark” comes from a notoriously silly episode of Happy Days—but that only helped the sitcoms endure in syndication, and to be discovered by later generations as harmless, highly watchable pieces of supreme nostalgia.

Some of Marshall’s later sitcom creations failed to click. Makin’ It, starring David Naughton as a New Jersey disco dancer, was an infamous bomb in 1979; The New Odd Couple was a noble effort to update Marshall’s old sitcom with an African-American cast in 1982, but it only lasted one season. Perhaps perceiving that the TV landscape had evolved past his particular brand, Marshall entered the world of film, starting with the broad spoof Young Doctors in Love, then scoring mild successes with comedies like The Flamingo Kid (starring a young Matt Dillon), Nothing in Common (with Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason), and Overboard (with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell).

In 1988, he directed the legendary weepie Beaches, starring Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler, a major hit that had an even longer life on cable and VHS. Two years later, he helmed Pretty Woman, a box-office sensation that turned Julia Roberts into one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and remains the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time (adjusted for inflation, it made $365 million domestically). Along with the droll Hector Elizondo, who appeared in every film Marshall directed, Roberts became a lifelong muse for the director, returning to work with him in Runaway Bride, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day.

Marshall’s later films never quite met the memorable, endlessly quotable heights of Pretty Woman, though Runaway Bride and the more kid-focused Princess Diaries (the first major role for Anne Hathaway) were both huge box-office wins. At the end of his career, he made three anthology films centered around holidays (Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve, and Mother’s Day) that shamelessly recycled the meet-cutes and rom-com story beats he had mastered over his long career. None were well-received, though they all sold tickets; through it all, Marshall remained amusingly self-aware about his place in the industry.

“When you work as a director, sometimes you find your niche, whether it’s shoot-‘em-up pictures or crazy space pictures or flying people,” he said of his last film, Mother’s Day. “I really don’t do those things. I do rom-coms and holidays.” Decades ago, in his 1995 autobiography, Marshall addressed critics who said his work seemed to target average viewers. “I believe that television was, and still is, the only medium that can truly reach society’s lowest common denominator and entertain those people who maybe can’t afford a movie or a play,” he wrote. “So why not reach them and do it well?” For generations, Marshall did exactly that.

Political Pop Music Bites Back at the RNC

The Republican National Convention has provided a few oversized reminders of how popular entertainment belongs not to its makers but to the public, which is mostly free to do whatever bizarre thing it wants with it. There was Donald Trump using Queen's “We Are the Champions” to address an arena that had ratified anti-gay policies. An RNC official invoked My Little Pony to defend Melania Trump's plagiarism. Melania herself contributed to the ongoing memeification of Rick Astley’s career. All this, paired with the long history of left-leaning music from Bruce Springsteen to Rage Against the Machine being re-appropriated by conservatives, was enough to make you wonder whether creators’ intentions really ever matter at all.

But last night in Cleveland saw a strange reassertion of the artist as unfiltered political messenger, through an act that few casual listeners associate with the words politics or, really, art: the ‘90s pop-rockers Third Eye Blind.

Headlining an RNC-affiliated charity event at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they committed the worst possible sin a nostalgia band can commit: playing everything but their hits. That is, until they brought out the 1997 single “Jumper,” about a gay friend of the band who killed himself. The frontman Stephan Jenkins told the crowd he wished they would welcome people “like my cousins who are gay into the American fabric.”

“To love this song is to take into your heart the message and to actually have a feeling to arrive and move forward and not live your life in fear and imposing that fear on other people,” he added. To love this song is to take into your heart the message—it’s a clear attempt to correct against pop listeners’ penchant for ignoring a song’s words while bopping to its beat. Is it a futile attempt? Clips on social media show his speech was received with both boos and cheers. But maybe some people learned for the first time what “Jumper” is about.

Third Eye Blind tonite at #RNCinCLE event: We believe in tolerance, acceptance

'Why Do They Kill Journalists in Ukraine?’

NEWS BRIEF A journalist who worked for one of Ukraine’s most prominent newspapers was killed Wednesday in a car bombing in Kiev.

Pavel Sheremet, 44, a Belarussian citizen, had worked in Russian state radio and television before moving to Ukraine in 2014 where he worked for Ukrainska Pravda. He was driving to work in a car that belonged to his partner, Olena Prytula, a founding editor of the newspaper. Witnesses said they heard a loud blast, then a burst of orange flames, and car parts flying into the street. The Ukrainian prosecutor general confirmed Sheremet was killed by a car bomb.

The Guardian reported:

The editor of Ukrainska Pravda, Sevgil Musaieva-Borovyk, told news agencies he thought Sheremet was killed for his “professional activity.”

“Why do they kill journalists in Ukraine? Someone wants to destabilise the situation in the country by doing this,” the editor said.

The killing is one of the highest-profile murders of a journalist in Ukraine.The last came in 2000, with the killing of Georgiy Gongadze, who also worked for Ukrainska Pravda. Gongadze was a critic of the country’s president at the time, and his work exposed major government corruption.

В центре Киева взорвался автомобиль, погиб журналист Павел Шеремет: https://t.co/8ujEPDfabD pic.twitter.com/8dln5HKB6U

— Буквы (@Bykvu) July 20, 2016