Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 125

Renee Zellwegger and Baseball: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Empathy and Orange Is the New Black

Emily Nussbaum | The New Yorker

“Orange Is the New Black is not the only show to fold the Black Lives Matter movement into its narrative. The sitcoms Black-ish and The Carmichael Show did cross-generational takes. Scandal offered a healing fable; Empire rudely satirized the theatre of protest. In Orange, this subject matter feels unavoidable, and it’s used smartly to complicate the critique of capitalism that fueled Season 3. But, if Poussey’s death is realistic, it also casts a shadow backward. There’s a sweet scene in Season 2 in which Taystee tickles Poussey affectionately, until she gasps, ‘I can’t breathe.’ Does that make the story deeper or just more unbearable?”

The Softening of Sabermetrics’ Sipowicz

Bryan Curtis | The Ringer

“These days, Kenny is like an autodidact showing off his latest find. Ahead of the Curve is surely the only sabermetric tract that includes quotations from Ezra Pound, Robert Heinlein, and Voltaire. Over dinner, Kenny cited psychologist Daniel Kahneman and Noam Chomsky. (‘Chomsky is so important in my thinking!’)”

30 Minutes On: The Lobster

Matt Zoller Seitz | RogerEbert.com

“There aren’t many comic filmmakers you could identify within a few minutes, just by studying the characters’ dialogue, the actors’ performances and the way the movie photographs its situations. Lanthimos is that kind of comic filmmaker. I like his work so much that it’s OK that sometimes I don't like it. I don't even hold it against him that I'm writing this piece at 3:15 a.m instead of sleeping because I saw his movie.”

The Philosophy of Punctuation

Paul Robinson | The New Republic

“Let me now introduce my dramatis personae. First come the period and the comma. These are the only lovely marks of punctuation, and of the two the period is the lovelier, because more compact and innocent of ambiguity. I have fantasies of writing an essay punctuated solely with periods and commas. I seldom see a piece of prose that shouldn’t, I feel, have more periods and fewer of those obtrusive marks that seem to have usurped its natural place. The comma, as noted, was once over-used, but it now suffers from relative neglect. The missing comma before the ‘and’ introducing the last item in a series is merely the most obvious example.”

Renee Zellweger, Margot Robbie, and Blake Lively Exposed to Hollywood’s Insidious Male Gaze

Jen Yamato | The Daily Beast

“She has dared to age. Maybe she looks different because of plastic surgery—maybe not. Faces change. Bodies change. Perhaps she dared to alter her own body for reasons we, and certainly Gleiberman, have no knowledge of. Perhaps not. Maybe Hollywood’s institutionalized obsession with beauty and youth and lack of opportunity for aging actresses spurred her on to drastic measures.”

Inside the Church of Chili’s

Daniel Riley | GQ

“The history of America is a history of expansion—mostly westward, but also outward. A swelling of cities, in the manner of waistlines subject to too much salt. Population centers press beyond their intended boundaries—their rivers and mountains and highway belts—and spill into the great in-between. And when an American city spills into the great in-between, the way it usually works is first there's an office park, then there's a housing tract, and eventually there's a Chili's.”

Iceland Is so Hot Right Now

Wright Thompson | ESPNFC.us

“On Sunday, he's going to watch the game, and on Monday, he'll go back out on the water. The old ways matter to him, which is what he'd been trying to articulate back at the cafe, I think, explaining what Iceland had lost. It's an island of fishermen finding new paths and new traditions in a new world, and yet this soccer team seems pulled from the past, from an Iceland where men sailed the Arctic Sea and Atlantic Ocean without waterproof jackets or rubber gloves. Jon loves that the players win because of their unity and their fighting spirit. They play like his grandfather's hands.”

A Killing. A Pointed Gun. And Two Black Lives, Witnessing.

James Poniewozik | The New York Times

“But for all of video’s power to bring us directly into a moment, it can’t help but remind us of the gulf between virtual and physical presence, as Ms. Reynolds’s livecast does in its last wrenching minute. She sits in the back of a police car, handcuffed, with her daughter. She makes her case again: ‘The police just shot him for no apparent reason.’ She tells any friends watching live that she’s going to need a ride. Finally, she loses her composure and screams. ‘It’s O.K.,’ we hear her daughter say. ‘I’m right here with you.’”



Roxane Gay, I’m Sorry I Wasn’t Listening

Allison McCarthy | The Establishment

“This stuff about fat bodies—the truth of lived experience—isn’t easy to speak about publicly because it’s not the joyful, uplifting message of acceptance. What Gay’s talking about is the harder, more candid reality of what it means to take up space in a body that doesn’t grace the cover of a Torrid catalog.”

Bangladesh's Long Road to Islamist Violence

On Thursday, three people died in an attack at an Eid celebration near the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. That incident follows another outburst of violence last Friday, when gunmen stormed a restaurant in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter, killing 20 in the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history. These were only the latest in a series of dozens of deadly attacks over the past few years in the predominantly Muslim nation of 156 million people, as Islamist militants there have targeted bloggers, secular activists, and others.  

Since 2005, Bangladesh has seen about 60 major attacks that have claimed approximately 600 lives—and about 90 percent of the attacks have occurred since 2013.

“We are seeing something qualitatively and quantitatively quite different than what we’ve seen before,” C. Christine Fair, an associate professor at Georgetown University, told me in an interview. “This is worrisome.”

The South Asian nation is officially a secular democracy. In the past, it has dealt domestic militancy—leftist radicals in the 1970s and Islamists in the 1990s—for the most part effectively. It was not wracked with the kind of violence that afflicted regional neighbors such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the accelerating attacks of the past few years raise the question: What happened?

The roots of the current wave of militancy in Bangladesh go back to the 1990s, Ali Riaz, a professor at the Illinois State University, told me. “It had a direct connection with [the war in] Afghanistan when Bangladeshi volunteers in the conflict came back.” These returnees operated mostly along the borders with Myanmar and India’s northeast; their proliferation within Bangladesh was limited. But that changed.

In 2005 the outlawed Jamaat-ul-Mujahedeen Bangladesh (JMB) succeeded in detonating nearly 500 bombs in 63 of 64 of Bangladesh’s districts within an hour of one another. The explosions had limited impact, but the experts I spoke to pointed out that the logistics of pulling off an operation like that in a country with more navigable rivers than roads were impressive. “It was a show of force and showed the reach of JMB,” Riaz said.

“The government seemed to move resources to chasing political opponents rather than militant groups.”

But the government at the time—led by the Bangladesh National Party,

which was in alliance with the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), an Islam-rooted party—had denied the existence of the problem, Riaz said. These denials, in addition to moral, and in some cases logistical, support from some elements in the government, allowed JMB to grow, Riaz said.

But in 2006, things changed. The BNP-led government was replaced by a military-backed caretaker government that cracked down on militants. “The government came up with a very robust counterterrorism strategy,” Riaz said. “They went after militants.”

The Awami League, which came to power in 2009, continued that approach. But the fight began to falter around 2012. At that point, according to Riaz, “the government seemed to move resources to chasing political opponents rather than militant groups. Whatever the reason that drove them to this shift … [it] created the space where militant groups started to flourish.”

Within that context, by 2014, the Islamic State was strengthening its ability to attract young people as far from its core territory in the Middle East as Europe, North America, and Asia. Its major rival in South Asia is al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), al-Qaeda’s branch in the region. And it was the Islamic State that claimed responsibility for last Friday’s attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery.

“As of now, what I see is ISIS and AQIS have made inroads into Bangladesh,” Riaz said, adding they are being supported by local groups. Fair said JMB has “essentially repurposed” itself by trying to link itself to ISIS. Indeed, she believes while ISIS and AQIS are definitely present in Bangladesh, it’s highly unlikely ISIS directly planned last Friday’s attack.

She points out that each attacker appears to pose in separate photographs before the attack with the same gun, an AK-22, which is, in essence, a training gun for the AK-47, the weapon of choice for militants the world over. Most victims of the attack were reportedly stabbed to death; and pistols, as well as three AK-22s, were recovered from the scene—not the hallmark, Fair says, of an ISIS-directed attack.

“The problem with all of this, I think, comes down to defining critically: What is ISIS and what qualifies as an ISIS attack?” Fair told me. “It matters for a couple of reasons because if you start to go down the ISIS rabbit hole, as so many people have, then you start looking for answers elsewhere. You start looking for foreign connections and all of this stuff, when from everything that is evident these look very much like homegrown Bangladeshi militants that have donned this ISIS uniform largely for the publicity they got for the attack.”

“If I fix a poster of IS here and stand with a machine gun, will it establish that IS is here?”

Still, the photographs of the six young attackers show them posing in front of the flag of the Islamic State. They are each dressed in black, have donned red kaffiyehs, hold guns, and have smiles on their faces that belie what they would do next: kill 20 people on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan.

Yet Bangladeshi authorities have been reluctant to label that event an ISIS attack. Asaduzzaman Khan, Bangladesh’s home minister, told Reuters: “If I fix a poster of IS here and stand with a machine gun, will it establish that IS is here?”

Khan and other officials have blamed JMB, which has pledged allegiance to ISIS, though direct links between the two organizations appear to be tenuous. But Fair points out: “We have to take seriously the fact that the fellows did choose to parade about an ISIS flag. They clearly intended to give the impression that this was a much more international operation than you would have gathered from the actual details of the attack.”

Fair, who is a critic of the BNP and JI’s activities, also criticizes the Bangladesh government’s approach to Islamist militancy in the country under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. “She has been using every opportunity to hunt down, criminalize … to eviscerate Jamaat-e-Islami and BNP,” Fair says.

Indeed, 11,000 people, including many BNP workers, were arrested last month after the brutal killings of activists and others. Fair says the arrests are part of a broader problem with Bangladesh, where there are high levels of support for suicide bombings. “Bangladesh is often lauded as a secular democracy,” she says, “but it really isn’t in many ways. … This government has taken away the ability to be a moderate Muslim in Bangladesh.”

Riaz agrees with that assessment, and he too blames the opposition.

“The opposition parties … too bear responsibilities for creating the enabling environment as they have adopted violence in 2013 and 2015. … These,” he says, “have long-term implications, these actions have also naturalized violence.”

The Dallas Shootings: What We Know

What we know:

—Twelve officers were shot by one gunman, identified by police as 25-year-old Micah Johnson, in downtown Dallas on Thursday night. Of these, four Dallas police officers and one officer from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit were killed.

—Johnson was killed by police officers early Friday morning. Three others were taken into custody following the shooting, but no further details about their role, if any, have been released by officials. The slain suspect said he “wanted to kill white people,” the Dallas police chief said.

—The deadly attacks occurred during protests against police-involved shootings of black men this week in Louisiana and Minnesota. In separate incidents, officers also appear to have been targeted in Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri, but no police were killed in those encounters.

—We’re live-blogging the major updates, and you can read how it all unfolded below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).

9:01 p.m.

President Obama will return to the United States ahead of schedule from his European trip, the White House said Friday evening.

Obama attended an annual NATO summit in Poland on Friday. He will travel next to Spain, where he’ll meet with the country’s leaders before returning to Washington on Sunday night.

The White House said Obama also accepted an invitation from Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings to visit the city early next week, where he is expected to speak about the shootings as well as broader issues of race and policing.

4:56 p.m.

The Dallas Police Department in a statement on the investigation said “detectives have interviewed over 200 officers and it appears at least 12 officers discharged their duty weapons.”

The department officially identified the dead shooter as Micah Johnson, 25; he had no criminal history, the statement said. Here’s more:

The suspect’s Facebook account included the following names and information: Fahed Hassen, Richard GRIFFIN aka Professor Griff, GRIFFIN embraces a radical form of Afrocentrism, and GRIFFIN wrote a book A Warriors Tapestry.

During the search of the suspect’s home, detectives found bomb making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics.  Detectives are in the processing of analyzing the information contained in the journal

Separately, the department said, a man identified as Brandon Waller, 25, was arrested during the protests late Thursday on unrelated weapons charges. The statement did not offer any information on the three others—two men and a woman—arrested earlier. It’s unclear if Waller is one of them.  

4:41 p.m.

Another officer has been shot—this one in Valdosta, Georgia. The city said the suspect called 911 to report a break-in, and then ambushed, and shot the officer. Here’s more:

Officer Randall Hancock, a 10-year VPD veteran, arrived on-scene, and shortly after arriving, was shot multiple times by an Asian male in the parking lot. The officer then returned fire and radioed for emergency assistance, resulting in other Valdosta Police Officers and officers from multiple agencies responding to assist.

Both Officer Hancock and the male offender were transported to South Georgia Medical Center (SGMC) for treatment. Officer Hancock underwent surgery and is in stable condition. The male offender is also in stable condition and has been transported to a hospital in Florida.

“I’m relieved that my officer is fine,” Chief Brian Childress said at a news conference. “I’m equally relieved the offender is going to make it.”

3:16 p.m.

An officer has been shot in Missouri. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, citing sources, that an officer was shot in the neck and critically wounded during a traffic stop in Ballwin. Here’s more:

They said without further explanation that the officer was shot at least once from behind and there were at least three shots fired at him. A suspect was captured shortly later during a foot chase, the sources say.

Meanwhile, investigators say a man who opened fire on a highway in Tennessee on Thursday, killing one person and wounding three others, including a police officers shot in the leg, may have acted after “being troubled by recent incidents involving African-Americans and law enforcement officers in other parts of the country.” The alleged gunman, who was arrested, was identified as Lakeem Keon Scott.

2:54 p.m.

Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said at a news briefing investigators had ruled out any links between the shooter and terrorist groups.

1:52 p.m.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick, the state’s lieutenant governor, have both reacted to the killings.

Here’s Abbott’s statement, in part (via the Morning News):

In the coming days, there will be those who foment distrust and fan the flames of dissension.

To come together - that would be the greatest rebuke to those who seek to tear us apart.

There is far more that binds us together. We see that great strength in times of tragedy, in times of great need. Whether fire or flood or the acts of depraved individuals, Texans are the first to open their hearts, their homes, their wallets to offer charity and love.

   

Patrick, appearing on Fox News, said: “I do blame people on social media with their hatred toward police. I do blame … [people] calling police racist without any facts. I do blame former Black Lives Matter protests. Last night was peaceful, but others have not been … this has to stop.”   

1:44 p.m.

A prayer vigil in Dallas for the slain officers has attracted hundreds of people.

Incredible turnout came in support of our officers. pic.twitter.com/ofEy7QX5k5

— Dallas Police Depart (@DallasPD) July 8, 2016

Kind of tough to see and hear, helicopters still overhead. But cheers start from front and crowd joins in. #Dallas pic.twitter.com/iW4xCVjlJ7

— Jill Cowan (@JillCowan) July 8, 2016

Speaking at the vigil, Chief David Brown, wiping away tears, said: “This was a well-planned, well-thought-out, evil tragedy.”

1:07 p.m.

The Associated Press, quoting the Army, is reporting that the slain Dallas attacker served a tour in Afghanistan.  

BREAKING: Army says Micah Xavier Johnson, named as #Dallas shooting suspect, had served as enlisted soldier; served tour in Afghanistan.

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 8, 2016

Officials, as we’ve previously said, have not publicly identified the attacker.

The Army later said Johnson was a private first class who had been deployed to Afghanistan  from November 2013 to July 2014. He served in the 420th Engineering Brigade, which is based in Texas, as a carpentry and masonry specialist. Johnson served in the Army from March 2009 to April 2015.

12:27 p.m.

The president has ordered flags to fly at half-staff until sunset on July 12 in response to the killings. Here it is, in part:

As a mark of respect for the victims of the attack on police officers perpetrated on Thursday, July 7, 2016, in Dallas, Texas, by the authority vested in me as President of the United States by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby order that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, July 12, 2016. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half-staff for the same length of time at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

Separately, Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a televised statement said: “After the events of this week, Americans across the country are feeling a sense of helplessness, of uncertainty, and of fear. These feelings are understandable and they are justified. But the answer must not be violence. The answer is never violence.”

11:05 a.m.

Details are emerging about the man who was killed by a police robot bomb in the Dallas garage.

Alleged Dallas gunman Micah X. Johnson was an Army veteran, an Army personnel spokesperson confirmed to me. #DallasPoliceShooting

— Alex Horton (@AlexHortonTX) July 8, 2016

Later, CNN, citing a law-enforcement official, reported Johnson had no criminal record or known ties to terrorism.

10:53 a.m.

The Los Angeles Times, CBS News, and NBC News, citing anonymous sources, are identifying the shooter killed in the garage as Micah Johnson, 25, of Mesquite, Texas. Some news organizations are identifying him as Micah X. Johnson; others as Micah Xavier Johnson. Authorities have not publicly confirmed the dead man’s identity.

9:15 a.m.

We have reactions from the presumptive presidential nominees of the two main political parties:

Prayers and condolences to all of the families who are so thoroughly devastated by the horrors we are all watching take place in our country

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2016

I mourn for the officers shot while doing their sacred duty to protect peaceful protesters, for their families & all who serve with them. -H

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 8, 2016

My colleague Priscilla Alvarez’s story on the political reaction to the killings is here.  

8:44 a.m.

Police Chief David Brown, at a news conference this morning, said the suspect who was cornered in a garage was blown up by a bomb robot dispatched by police. He did not kill himself as had been reported, Brown said.

“He was upset about Black Lives Matter,” Brown said of the suspect. “He was upset about” the shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota. He said “he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

Brown said the suspect said he wasn’t affiliated with any group and was acting alone. “The suspects said other things that are part oft his investigation,” he said.

8:28 a.m.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings told NBC’s Today show that the three suspects in custody are not cooperating with police.

“They are being pretty tight-lipped about it,” he said.

He said their motivation was to “kill police officers, and, sadly, they did.”

Rawlings said eight Dallas police and five transit officers were shot, along with two civilians. We know that five Dallas officers and one transit officer are dead.

8:15 a.m.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings says the suspect involved in a stand-off with police died after officers used explosives to “blast him out.” This was the suspect Police Chief David Brown said had earlier been “cornered” in a downtown parking garage and exchanging gunfire with SWAT officers.

7:40 a.m.

It turns out police mistakenly identified a suspect last night, but within hours it became clear Mark Hughes had nothing to do with the shootings.     

Here’s what happened: The Dallas Police Department identified Hughes, who was carrying a gun during the protests, as a suspect in a tweet that was recirculated tens of thousands of times:

This is one of our suspects. Please help us find him! pic.twitter.com/Na5T8ZxSz6

— Dallas Police Depart (@DallasPD) July 8, 2016

But within hours, images and video footage of Hughes showed him among the protesters at the time of the shootings.

@wfaachannel8 The " Suspect " Seen Here Not Shooting... “@dallasnewsphoto: Shots fired @dallasnews pic.twitter.com/EG8stdCZz0”

— Benjamin Boyd (@BenBoydKMOX) July 8, 2016

His brother Cory Hughes told local media Hughes was merely exercising his constitutional right to bear arms. Texas has open-carry laws that permit such public displays of weapons.

Mark Hughes later told local TV that he didn’t know his face had been plastered on TV screens across the country.

“We received a phone call that my face was on there as a suspect, and immediately I flagged a police officer,” he said.

Indeed, he is seen in a video handing his weapon over to a police officer. The department later tweeted that he had turned himself in. Mark Hughes later told local media he was questioned by officers for about 30 minutes. They told him, he said, that they had video of him shooting.

“At the end of the day,” he said, “the system was trying to get me.”

He added: “I don’t know what to say. I can’t believe it.”

The local CBS affiliate in Dallas spoke to the Hughes brothers. The full interview is worth watching:

The Dallas Police Department has not yet released information about Hughes being freed or no longer being a suspect.   

7:23 a.m.

Speaking in Warsaw, President Obama said the officers had been targeted. You can watch the president’s remarks here:

“We are horrified over these events, and that we stand united with the people and the police department as it deals with this tremendous tragedy,” Obama said. “We still don’t know all the facts. What we do know is that there has been a vicious, calculated, and despicable attack on law enforcement.”  

Updated at 5:28 a.m.

A fifth Dallas police officer has died:

It has been a devastating night. We are sad to report a fifth officer has died.

— Dallas Police Depart (@DallasPD) July 8, 2016

DART identified its slain officers as Brent Thompson, 43, who joined the transit agency’s police department in 2009. He’s the first DART officer killed in the line of duty. The transit police department identified the injured officers as Omar Cannon, Misty McBride, and Jesus Retana.

President Obama, speaking in Warsaw, Poland, called the attacks “vicious, calculated, and despicable.”

Updated at 1:59 a.m.  on July 8

Two gunmen shot eleven police officers in Dallas, Texas, during a protest on Thursday night, killing at least four of them, police said. The death toll makes this one of the deadliest days for police in the history of American law enforcement.

At a late night press conference, Dallas Police Department Chief David Brown said a male suspect is “cornered” and exchanging gunfire with SWAT officers in a downtown parking garage. The suspect told officers “the end is near” and claimed he had placed bombs throughout the building and the downtown area, Brown said.

A female suspect is also in custody, Brown added, although he did not identify her as a shooter. Police officials also said two suspects were taken into custody on a nearby highway. It’s unclear whether there are other suspects still at large.

No motive has yet been established and it’s unclear whether the shooting was related to the protest.

“Tonight it appears that two snipers shot ten police officers from elevated positions during the protest/rally,” Brown said in an initial statement. “Three officers are deceased, two are in surgery, and three are in critical condition. An intensive search for suspect is currently underway.” The police department later said an eleventh officer had also been injured and a fourth officer had been killed.

“At 8:58 p.m., our worst nightmare happened,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said at the press conference.

Two of the deceased officers are from the Dallas Police Department. Dallas Area Rapid Transit also said four of the officers were from its police department, including one of the fatalities, on its official Twitter account.

Four DART police officers were shot in downtown Dallas. 1 deceased, others not life-threatening. No IDs yet. Updates via twitter.

— dartmedia (@dartmedia) July 8, 2016

The shootings occurred during a protest against police killings earlier this week in Louisiana and Minnesota. Hundreds rallied in downtown Dallas, near the corner of Main Street and Lamar Street. Local news footage captured what sounds like several gunshots being fired, and the crowd scattering.

#BREAKING: Our cameras captured several shots ring out during a protest in Downtown Dallas pic.twitter.com/OWOBOOI8Jg

— FOX 4 NEWS (@FOX4) July 8, 2016

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said he would end an out-of-state trip and return to Dallas following the shootings. In a statement, he also offered his condolences to the officers’ families.

My statement on tonight's shooting in #Dallas. pic.twitter.com/oXoAJOUCoF

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) July 8, 2016

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick initially said more than one officer had been shot in Dallas, but did not have further details on the number or their condition.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the police officers who were shot in #Dallas tonight. Awaiting further details.

— Dan Patrick (@DanPatrick) July 8, 2016

As the Washington Post noted, Dallas’s reform-oriented police department is considered a national model, credited with improving transparency and lowering homicide rates. The department’s official Twitter account posted photos earlier Thursday night of officers peacefully mingling with protesters at the demonstration.

Demonstration in #Dallas @ Belo Garden Park pic.twitter.com/IUx5IaERSB

— Dallas Police Depart (@DallasPD) July 8, 2016

We’ll update this story with more information as it becomes available.

The Hurt and Rage of This Week's Protest Music

It’s been difficult to keep up with the many horrifying violent events in America in recent days; it’s also been difficult to keep up with the body of music responding to the violence, a protest-art boom where songs are emerging almost with the speed of punditry. There’s a remarkable diversity to the messages of these works: sad or angry, focused inward or focused outward. But there’s also a remarkable commonality—not only in the lyrics’ grief, but in the way they’re rooted in a feeling of powerlessness. What is there to be done at times like these but make music? In some cases, the songs suggest answers, but they’re not the kind of solutions meant to provide comfort.

Jay Z says that the song he posted yesterday, “Spiritual,” has been in the works for years. A friend of his, Top Dawg Entertainment’s CEO, Punch, urged him to release it on the occasion of Mike Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. “Sadly I told him ‘This issue will always be relevant,’” Jay Z wrote on Tidal. “I'm hurt that I knew his death wouldn’t be the last.” This queasy feeling of inevitability is a steady theme in recent music about police brutality. Miguel’s newly released “How Many” is a demo that he says he will keep updating every week. Slim Thug’s “IDKY” was intended for a forthcoming album but became relevant in light of recent news. “I remember thinking in the last few weeks this song might be too late cause it's been a minute since the last one and look here we go again twice in less than 24 hours … #BlackLivesMatter” he wrote.

Jay Z’s “Spiritual” (out on Tidal) is a self-examination that feels remarkable even at a time when sensitivity and introspection are in vogue among popular rappers. He opens by talking about how trauma can carry both over generations and over a person’s own lifetime, and it’s clear that his own past—deeply influenced by his race and where he grew up—is causing him problems in the present. He sounds panicked about whether he can raise a daughter when he was raised without a father, and he draws a striking portrait of his own vulnerability: “I need a drink / shrink or something I need an angelic voice to sing something / Bless my soul, extend your arms, I'm cold / Hold me for a half hour until I am whole.”

The chorus cuttingly links hopelessness, affirmation, and danger: “I am not poison / Just a boy from the hood that got my hands in the air in despair / don’t shoot.” Robotic and manipulated voices create an unbalanced feeling, but peeking out from the chaos is the line, “I just want all this work to pay off.” Jay Z’s life story is one of rising from dangerous circumstances to build an empire and a family. But he worries it could all be taken away, and/or the progress of society over time could be undone—if it wasn’t illusory in the first place. “I’m saddened and disappointed in THIS America - we should be further along,” he wrote in the song’s introductory note. “WE ARE NOT.”

That wariness is present in the other protest songs to emerge this week. Miguel’s “How Many” opens with him muttering about not being able to sleep or stay silent—“I feel the violence in my soul.” The song is a graceful plea for change and a call for people to speak up: “How many heart beats turned into flat lines?” “I’m tired of being afraid.” “Change does not come for the quiet.” What exactly that change could be beyond wider protest and empathy isn’t really articulated. The killing just has to stop. Miguel says he’s going to keep fine-tuning the track, but the current version’s spare, echoing guitar and scuffed-up beat suit the lyrics’ desolation.

Swizz Beatz and Scarface’s “Sad News” shares in that grief, using piano chords and the echoing chorus, “A little boy got shot down today / I hope his family is okay,” for the kind of teary singalong that, if the content were different, might end up on a movie soundtrack. Scarface’s verse betrays some of the externally inflicted self-loathing that Jay Z’s song does: “I often sit and wonder could this world be mine, nah / I be lying if I said I ain't heard em when they told me I was just a nigga / Nothing but a burden to society.” But he eventually gets to considering some solutions both reform-minded (fire unfair judges) and radical: “If Trump want war I give to him, gon buck em / America with three K's / Freedom got a shotgun.”

The literal enactment of that kind of wits-end angry mentality may be what motivated the sickening killing of five police officers in Dallas on Thursday night. Some conservatives have taken the sniper spree as reason to throw around rhetoric about civil war; that rhetoric has never been absent from hip-hop, but for different reasons. Yesterday, Young Buck, a member of the rap group G-Unit, released “Riot,” which begins with a quote of Tupac telling black men to arm themselves. From there, the sound of gunshots rings in the background as Buck openly calls for violence against police. As with so many things in rap, exaggeration and fiction stemming from disempowerment and oppression have to be factored into the listener’s ear. But the song and its creator rage with flagrant disinterest in being taken with a grain of salt; already, Breitbart has written the track up, noting that Buck has sent an approving tweet about Dallas.

More nuanced is “6 Shots,” from the Bay Area’s Mistah F.A.B. Like “Riot,” it was recorded and released with extraordinary speed, referencing this week’s killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “We can’t jump into a healing process right away because to ask ‘How can we heal?’ is to be forgiving,” F.A.B. said in a statement that came upon its release. Referencing grievances from slavery to the disproportionate white outcry over the death of Harambe the gorilla, the song is a work of sharp writing and straightforward logic, even as it hurls toward extraordinarily grim conclusions: “They say all cops ain't bad well shit I can't tell / Cause every time I turn around they kill a black male.” In verse three, he arrives at a very specific fantasy of reprisal:

Coward ass white boy still scared of niggas

Want us to talk it out, want us to keep quiet

Laugh cause it's our own shit we burn when we riot

Let's start hitting their communities and let's see what happen

Set fire to their brand new Benz, Ferrari's, and mansion

I bet the National Guard be on the scene quick

The song closes with the recording that went viral of the black police officer Nakia Jones seething at her fellow officers: “How dare you sit next to me in the same uniform and murder somebody. How dare you?” The rise in her voice’s pitch and volume over the course of the clip is the sound of betrayal and hurt becoming anger, a process that’s lately become very familiar both to music and the country.

The Secret Life of Pets Is Redeemed by Good Dogs

Great art has occasionally had the acuity to recognize that dogs are superior to humans. When Odysseus returned to Ithaca and disguised himself as a beggar, Argos recognized his owner even when his best friend, Eumaeus, couldn’t. White Fang saved a judge from a murderous criminal. Eddie the Jack Russell was indisputably the least irritating character on Frasier.

The Secret Life of Pets is by no means great art, but what saves it from being a hugely predictable Toy Story ripoff/monomyth-by-numbers is simply the fact that it has dogs. A wiry, complacent dog named Max. A big, schlubby, emotionally inconsistent dog named Duke who looks a bit like a Snuffleupagus. A snow-white cotton ball of a dog named Gidget who has attachment issues. It has cats, too, and a moronic guinea pig, and a homicidal bunny, and a carnivorous hawk, and a pig with tattoos, but the primary reason for the movie’s appeal is its ability to comprehend the bizarre fidelity of dogs to their humans. Pets isn’t exactly faith-in-humanity restoring in the manner of Wall-E or Inside Out, but at the end of a week in which mankind has illustrated some of its most dismal traits, there’s something quietly therapeutic about spending 90 minutes with some nutty, heroic furballs on a hero’s journey with very low stakes.

Promos for the movie have sold it as imagining an alternate reality wherein animals get up to zany hijinks while their owners are at work. Approximately everything funny about this scenario has already been included in the trailer—the poodle who switches the music from Mozart to death metal when his owner goes out, the dachshund who uses the KitchenAid to scratch his belly. So the onus is mostly on Max (voiced by Louis C.K.) to carry the movie by doing an excellent impression of a good dog, and having an adventure. He’s helped by Gidget (voiced with asthmatic brilliance by Jenny Slate), who’s in love with Max for no reason other than that she sees him through the window sometimes and he seems like a good dog.

Pets is the latest animated feature from the director Chris Renaud and Illumination Entertainment, the animation production company that made Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, and their despicable spinoff, Minions. But it seems to owe a greater debt to Pixar’s Up, which produced the best portrayal of an anthropomorphized dog to date in Dug, a dopey Golden Retriever who runs up to humans and declares, “I have just met you and I love you.” Max waits faithfully by the door when his human (Ellie Kemper) leaves, and fixates on a small green ball. His blissful existence in captivity is complicated only when Duke lures him away from the dog walker and the two get picked up by Animal Control, after which they’re broken out by a psychotic rabbit named Snowball (Kevin Hart), who wants to initiate them into his gang of Flushed Pets (all the animals mythology and Gawker would have you imagine live in New York City sewers).

The visuals throughout The Secret Life of Pets are gorgeously imaginative: One of the weirder scenes is an elaborate fantasia in which Max and Duke break into a sausage factory and hallucinate dancing wieners that sing “We Go Together” at a fairground while blissfully submitting to being devoured. There are intriguing tensions in the subtext that the movie does its absolute best not to explore. (Is it better to be a free pet or a pet in fealty to humans? Does human love make up for being trapped in a 600 square-foot apartment for 22 hours a day?) Mostly, though, it’s about loyal, idiotic, optimistic dogs and their redemptive love for humankind. This by itself—even without the lengthy celebrity lineup and the sophisticated visuals and the recurring gags about cats being the worst thing ever—justifies its existence. As Charles de Gaulle once summarized, “The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.” Or as Max might put it, “Ball!”

The First Zika Death in the Continental U.S.

NEWS BRIEF

Updated at 4:13 p.m. EST

The first death caused by the Zika virus in the continental United States occurred in Salt Lake County, the country’s health department announced Friday.

#SLCo sees 1st confirmed Zika-related death in continental U.S. Media conf. today at 2pm at SLCo Gov. Center (2100 S. State), room S2-830

— Salt Lake Health (@saltlakehealth) July 8, 2016

In a press conference on Friday, Salt Lake County medical officials said they learned the deceased person was infected with the Zika virus after the death. Officials have yet to release more information.

There have been at least two women, one in Hawaii and one in New Jersey, infected with Zika who have given birth this year in the United States. The mosquito-borne disease is associated with birth defects in newborns including microcephaly, a condition that causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads.

A Week of Bloodshed in America

Alton Sterling, 37, was shot and killed by police officers on Tuesday, July 5, while he was selling CDs outside of a convenience store. The following day, Philando Castile, 32, was shot and killed by a police officer after he was stopped for a broken tail light. Videos of both killings were widely shared on social media, causing hundreds to take to the streets in protest of police actions, as well as memory of the two men killed. Thursday night, snipers shot and killed five officers at such a protest in Dallas, Texas. Questions of police brutality, America's historic racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, and second amendment rights have been pushed to the forefront of the nation's consciousness.

Why Germany Has Fewer Asylum-Seekers This Year

NEWS BRIEF

Limited by blocked routes through the Balkans and and restricted sea departures from Turkey, the number of asylum-seekers arriving in Germany has sharply decreased in the first half of this year.

German officials on Friday said the country has accepted more than 222,000 asylum-seekers from January to June. In all of 2015, Germany registered 1.1 million people as asylum-seekers.

While nearly 92,000 people arrived in January as asylum-seekers, those numbers have been much lower subsequent months. In June, there were just over 16,000. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, though, cautioned, saying, “I wouldn't guarantee that this will also remain the case in the coming months.” The Associated Press also reports:

At the height of the influx through the Balkans last year, Germany registered more than 206,000 asylum-seekers in November alone...

Though the overland Balkan route is now closed to large groups, de Maiziere said smugglers are getting small groups across borders. He added that there are increasing—though still small—numbers arriving from Italy via Switzerland, and an increase in asylum-seekers from Russia's Chechnya region.

The number of people arriving in Italy through the Mediterranean are at the same levels as last year. Syrians remain the largest group of asylum-seekers, as almost 75,000 have arrived in Germany this year.

The Fall of Theranos

NEWS BRIEF

The CEO of a blood-testing startup once lauded in Silicon Valley has been banned from owning and operating a laboratory for two years.

Elizabeth Holmes, who in 2003 founded Theranos, a company that in 2014 had been valued at $9 billion, has been under scrutiny since last year. Then, regulators with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, questioned whether the company had adequately tested blood.

In the investigation, regulators found deficiencies with the company’s technology and laboratory practices. As such, Theranos threw out two years worth of test results and lost its partnership with drugstore chain Walgreens.

Holmes, in a statement late Thursday, said the company would work to fix the issues that led to the ban by regulators. She said:

We accept full responsibility for the issues at our laboratory in Newark, California, and have already worked to undertake comprehensive remedial actions. Those actions include shutting down and subsequently rebuilding the Newark lab from the ground up, rebuilding quality systems, adding highly experienced leadership, personnel and experts, and implementing enhanced quality and training procedures.

In addition to the measures against Holmes and the company, Theranos also had to pay a fine of an unspecified amount. While the ban does not take place for another 60 days, the company said it would not halt testing for the near future.

This has been a long fall for a company that once had the backing of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Majority Leader Bill Frist, and for a CEO who was compared to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

The Dallas Shooting and the Advent of Killer Police Robots

In the mourning over the murders of five police officers in Dallas, and relief that the standoff had ended, one unusual detail stuck out: the manner in which police killed one suspect after negotiations failed.

“We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was,” Chief David Brown said in a press conference Friday morning. “Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased … He’s been deceased because of a detonation of the bomb.”

That use of a robot raises questions about the way police adopt and use new technologies. While many police forces have adopted robots—or, more accurately, remote-controlled devices—for uses like bomb detonation or delivery of non-lethal force like tear gas, using one to kill a suspect is at least highly unusual and quite possibly unprecedented.

Related Story

The Dallas Shootings: What We Know

“I’m not aware of officers using a remote-controlled device as a delivery mechanism for lethal force,” said Seth Stoughton, an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina who is a former police officer and expert on police methods. “This is sort of a new horizon for police technology. Robots have been around for a while, but using them to deliver lethal force raises some new issues.”

Robotics expert Peter Singer of New America also told the Associated Press he believed the use was unprecedented.

But while there are likely to be intense ethical debates about when and how police deploy robots in this manner, Stoughton said he doesn’t think Dallas’s decision is particularly novel from a legal perspective. Because there was an imminent threat to officers, the decision to use lethal force was likely reasonable, while the weapon used was immaterial.

“The circumstances that justify lethal force justify lethal force in essentially every form,” he said. “If someone is shooting at the police, the police are, generally speaking, going to be authorized to eliminate that threat by shooting them, or by stabbing them with a knife, or by running them over with a vehicle. Once lethal force is justified and appropriate, the method of delivery—I doubt it’s legally relevant.”

Police forces have adopted remote-controlled devices for a wide variety of tasks in recent years, from tiny to large. These tools can search for bombs, take cameras into dangerous areas, deliver tear gas or pepper spray, and even rescue wounded people. Police used one small robot in the manhunt for Boston Marathon bomber Dzohkar Tsarnaev. In May, the Dallas Police Department posted on its blog that it had acquired new robots. Other law-enforcement agencies have experimented with flying “drones,” again more correctly remotely controlled aerial vehicles. So far, those uses appear to have been solely for surveillance. The Department of Justice said in 2013 that it had used drones in the U.S. on 10 occasions.

In a few cases, forces have used remote-controlled devices to deliver non-lethal force, too, as Vice reported last year. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2014, “the Bomb Squad supported APD’s SWAT Team on November 9 at a local residence. The SWAT team requested robot assistance to assist on a barricaded subject armed with a gun. The Bomb Squad robot was able to deploy chemical munitions into the subject’s motel room, which led to the subject’s surrender.” Vice cited other news reports that involved hostage situations where robots were deployed, though the applications are sometimes vague. A remote-controlled device could also be equipped to deliver a flash-bang grenade, used to disorient suspects.

Brown didn’t explain what kind of explosive DPD attached to their device. While a department might stock flash-bangs, explosives for breaching doors, and a few other explosive devices, “I’m not aware of any police department having on hand something that is intended to be used as a weaponized explosive,” Stoughton said.

Use of remote-controlled devices by law enforcement raises a range of possible questions about when and where they are appropriate. The advent of new police technologies, from the firearm to the Taser, has often resulted in accusations of inappropriate use and recalibration in when police use them. Stoughton pointed out that prior to the Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Tennessee v. Garner, the “fleeing-felon rule” gave officers the right to use lethal force to prevent a suspect in a serious crime from escaping. But the justices limited the rule, saying that firearms meant the rule was no longer current. Unless either they or civilians are in danger of death or serious bodily harm, police can only use non-lethal force to stop a fleeing felon. Similarly, the adoption of the Taser has raised questions about whether officers are too quick to use the devices when they would be better served to deescalate or use their hands.

“I think we will see similar  concerns when we’re talking about the use of robots to employ lethal force,” Stoughton said. For example, in Dallas, the police appear to have faced danger of death or serious bodily harm. But imagine a scenario in which a suspect has been shooting but is not currently firing, and in which all officers are safely covered. In such a case, police would likely not open up a gun battle. But would commanders be quicker to deploy a robot, since there would be less danger to officers? And would current lethal-force rules really justify it? There is reason to believe they would not.

The nascent questions over police use of remote-controlled devices echoes an existing argument over the military use of such tools. U.S. drone strikes overseas are believed to have killed hundreds of civilians, and the legal justifications for when and where they are used are often hotly contested. In some cases, drone strikes have killed American citizens without due process. Many civil libertarians are troubled by the implications for stateside use. In 2013, Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, mounted a 13-hour filibuster blocking the confirmation John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to direct the CIA, over the White House’s refusal to say whether it believed it could use military drones to kill American suspects on American soil. Attorney General Eric Holder later wrote Paul to say that the president does not have the authority to do so.

Move away from the realm of remote-controlled devices into the world of autonomous or partially autonomous robots that could deliver lethal, or even non-lethal, force, and the concerns mount. There’s already a heated debate over whether and how the military should deploy lethal, autonomous robots. That debate, too, could transfer to police forces. But as Stoughton noted, law enforcement serves a different purpose than the army.

“The military has many missions, but at its core is about dominating and eliminating an enemy,” he said. “Policing has a different mission: protecting the populace. That core mission, as difficult as it is to explains sometimes, includes protecting some people who do some bad things. It includes not using lethal force when it’s possible to not.”