Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 129

Blood Orange and the End of The Toast: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Blood Orange and the Sound of Identity

Hua Hsu | The New Yorker

“Haze’s poem depicted an everyday kind of magic: the capacity of culture to help us imagine who we might become—not in terms of where to aim our libido but of how to walk the world with dignity and confidence. How ‘a fat black girl from Chicago / could dance until she felt pretty.’ Being yourself shouldn’t be this hard. But popular culture, even as it prizes difference, rarely captures the variety that resides within identities such as black, or queer, or immigrant.”

A Toast to The Toast, the Site That Was Just for You. Yes, Even You

Annalisa Quinn | NPR

“The Toast appealed to our most interesting selves—bookish, queer, into medieval art or Shakespeare, anti-pretentious, shamelessly emotional. The Toast bet that its readership was smart, and that weird passions, beautifully presented, were just as relatable as the trilling, manic prose of women’s magazines.”

Angels in America: The Complete Oral History

Isaac Butler and Dan Kois | Slate

“Slate talked to more than 50 actors, directors, playwrights, and critics to tell the story of Angels’ turbulent ascension into the pantheon of great American storytelling—and to discuss the legacy of a play that feels, in an era in which gay Americans have the right to marry but still in many ways live under siege, as crucial as ever.”

Bros Before Homes

Phoebe Maltz Bovy | The New Republic

“Pare things down, and rid yourself of, if not possessions, then at least the more frivolous (that is, stereotypically feminine or domestic) ones, and you’re on your way to a more meaningful, ethical existence. There’s nothing magical about favoring experiences over things, and there’s something subtly sexist about the refrain—especially in cases where the ‘stuff’ is still plenty present, but is being dealt with by the women in a man’s life.”

The Best Show on TV Is Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Matt Zoller Seitz | Vulture

“Deftly switching between melodrama, cultural satire, and fantasy, the show is at once arch and sincere, risqué but never trashy, ambitious but never pretentious, and it’s consistently honest about its characters’ flaws and blind spots, even when the plotting (as in most romances and musicals) is blithely unconcerned with plausibility.”

Lost Highway

Brian Phillips | MTV News

“Here, then, was the alien’s-eye view. A small, whitish cluster—the town—resting on the gray seafloor of the desert, the gray occasionally shading toward brown, the undulations of the landscape marbling into whorls as you looked east, along the Pecos River. It was hard to believe that much had changed since that July 4 (which may have been the exact date; again, there are disputes about the precise order of events, chronologies within chronologies, whole schools of competing conspiracy timelines). It was easy to imagine that you, too, were sailing down from the dark side of the moon.”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus Is the Leader We’ll Always Need

Katie Baker | The Ringer

“There is no actress so appealingly profane — so charmingly assholic — as Louis-Dreyfus. Her bared teeth are pearls; her jutted chin could cut diamonds. Whether she’s Elaine, Old Christine, or Madam President — ma’am — she is at her best when she is battling back: foul-mouth motoring, eyes mid-roll, diminutive bod in a pose of affront. ‘Get out!’ Elaine Benes always erupted. What’s incredible is how undeniably Louis-Dreyfus has stayed in.”

The Warriors Were Never Revolutionizing Basketball

Bethlehem Shoals | SBNation

“The Warriors have served up a vision for the sport, albeit one more nebulous than previously thought. It’s not about finding or manufacturing a Curry clone, but for being able to pull talent like Curry, Thompson, and Green (all drafted, all steals) and then intuitively piece them together. Instead of prescribing a course of action, the Warriors should put more pressure than ever on coaches and front offices to be astute and creative in the way they do their jobs. Imposing a top-down system on a roster demonstrates a lack of imagination and will invariably fail to get the most out of players, no matter how good they are.”

Mike and Dave Need a Gender Studies Course

Dana Schwartz | The Observer

“Forgive the crimes of poor writing and grammar. Forgive the crime of a dull non-story. But this book is sexist in its most dangerous and insidious form: the subtle sexism of nice guys who treat their moms and their sisters and their girlfriends well.”

How Garrison Keillor United America

On Saturday, Garrison Keillor will sign off as the host of A Prairie Home Companion for the final time, ending a four-decade run as the public radio show’s writer and voice. This fall, the program will return to its original format as a musical variety show, transitioning away from Keillor’s unique brand of radio sketch humor and his monologue of the news from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon where, he notes each week, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

A Prairie Home Companion is named after a cemetery in Minnesota, a nod to both the show’s Midwestern heritage and its wry humor. It’s telling that Keillor will wrap things at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, about as far from lutefisk and Norwegian bachelor farmers as anyone could be: The entire population of Anoka, Minnesota, Keillor’s hometown and inspiration for Lake Wobegon, could comfortably fit in the 17,500-seat venue with room to spare. So it’s hard not to feel like the fictional town is dying. Characters whom listeners have heard about over the radio for 42 years will give their final bow and shuffle off to a literary retirement home, never to be breathed to life again by the nasally baritone of America’s yarn-spinning grandfather, his delivery paced to the cadence of a rocking chair.

But with Keillor’s retirement, Americans lose something else, equally valuable and increasingly rare: a cultural figure fluent in the worldviews of both progressives and conservatives. Raised as a fundamentalist Christian in a small Midwestern town, Keillor crossed a vast ideological chasm during his career, becoming a stalwart political leftist without forgetting his small-town roots. Through his novels, his poetry, and his public-radio show, he’s served as a cultural liaison between red and blue states, interpreting each for the other, and offering a humorous, if not sympathetic, glance in both directions. His stories of life in rural America transport his listeners into a world where those of different beliefs and backgrounds exist in a surprisingly similar fashion to themselves.

For all its political implications, A Prairie Home Companion has always been about nostalgia, first and foremost. The director Robert Altman’s final film of the same name describes it as “a live radio variety show, the kind that died 50 years ago, but somebody forgot to tell them.” Keillor—who remained in his home state as he made the leap from college radio to a professional broadcasting career in the late-’60s—is unabashed about his origins, his beliefs about manners, morality, and what makes America a good place to be from. He sings patriotic ballads loudly and unironically.

While much of Keillor’s work draws on his family and childhood, the rest comes from his experience as a Minnesota writer seeking acceptance among New York’s literary elite. His life goals even as a young boy had much more to do with New York than Minnesota. Indeed, it was a 1973 New Yorker assignment about the Grand Ole Opry that planted the seed for A Prairie Home Companion, which debuted a year later. Keillor could have easily stayed in New York and pursued literary greatness there, and during his brief hiatus from the radio show in the 1980s he tried to do exactly that. But when his daughter was born in 1997, he elected to move back to Minnesota to be close to family.

Perhaps because of this sort of dual citizenship in two cultural spheres, Keillor has frequently veered far to the left of his conservative childhood on many political issues. In his 2004 memoir/manifesto/screed Homegrown Democrat, Keillor memorably described George W. Bush as an “Etch-a-Sketch president with a voice like a dial tone, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions in general, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.”

On his radio show, Keillor generally leaves politics to mild satire of famous caricatures, typically offering equal time for barbs aimed at both parties. When Al Gore won a Nobel Prize in 2007, Keillor wrote a skit in which the younger Bush sparred with Gore over the number of votes the Nobel committee actually awarded him. Keillor also regularly spends time talking about the political divisions between normal folks, as with a 2012 “Catchup Advisory Board” ad, in which a bleeding-heart liberal and a bitter bootstrapping conservative quietly bickered over politics. When Keillor travels to red states, he writes skits and songs that highlight their points of local pride (only to gently rib them when he leaves). In a recent op-ed for the Houston Chronicle he noted admiringly,

When I stopped in Lubbock, I knew where I was. The city went 69 percent for Mitt Romney, 28 percent for Barack Obama. But I don't feel like an alien there. I admire old windmills, I’m curious about prairie dogs, and I’m a fan of Buddy Holly. To me, he does not fade away. And I feel enriched by biscuits and gravy.

The thing with politics, Keillor says, is that the “guy from Lubbock” has to live in this country, too. Such a compassionate view of one’s political opponents is rare. Left-leaning, politically active personalities are as ubiquitous in public radio as pledge drives, tote bags, and Hamilton aficionados. But Keillor has always stood apart with his bizarre blend of liberal tenacity and Midwestern aplomb.

During a brief phone conversation with Obama in May 2008, Keillor told him, “Senator, the thing that’s going to happen to you after you’re elected is that you are going to feel greater and greater empathy for George W. Bush.” Obama was purportedly taken aback, and eventually responded, “I think you’re right.” Keillor, who in his endorsement message said that Obama would end the “long sour period of the current occupant,” wanted to remind him, in their only conversation, that Bush might one day soon appear more human to him.

This is the true legacy of Keillor’s life in the public eye. Having crossed, Sherpa-like, the icy, sharp-sided crevasse that separates the political right and left, he’s been able to shade the views of each to the other with finesse and a pinch of humor. What an inveterate progressive or conservative may fail to comprehend is that the opposing group acts in a way that makes sense in the light of their particular brand of jaundiced glasses. Having seen through both, Keillor can point out the foibles of each. His decision to lionize rather than lambast his conservative roots, to create and animate sympathetic characters from a culture he no longer agrees with politically, remaining civil instead of sarcastic—these are traits worth celebrating.

If Keillor were purely a political figure with a facility for cutting turns of phrase, he likely wouldn’t have drawn in 3.5 million listeners a week. If he just had a musical radio variety show, not many would care. It’s the stories of Lake Wobegon that are the heart and soul of A Prairie Home Companion. Tom Keith, the show’s long-time sound-effects man, explained that people wait for “Garrison’s Lake Woebegon stories, and when he gets to that point, you can just feel the audience settle in, and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we came for.’”

It’s difficult to imagine the show surviving without Keillor and his commitment to storytelling. The beauty of Lake Wobegon is that it cuts beneath the veneer of red and blue, and exposes the good of American life. As much as politicians and pundits may square off and battle over electoral-college votes and Senate seats, A Prairie Home Companion argues, the things that actually make life worth living are the simple pleasures, like the memory of a childhood romp through the snow, or a long conversation with an old friend on Saturday night.

Keillor reminds his listeners that regardless of political leanings, the people in the “other” world continue to exist, providing a check on the idealization of one’s own view and demonization of the other. Women are strong and men are good looking the world over, and Lake Wobegon, for all its faults, reminds us that it is unlikely for one camp to hold all the answers to life’s persistent questions.

An Attack in Bangladesh's Capital

What we know:

—Bangladeshi police carried out a raid on a restaurant in Dhaka early Saturday morning after gunmen took multiple hostages there Friday night.

—Police officials said at least 6 gunmen are dead and 13 hostages are safe. It was not immediately clear how many hostages had been taken overall. At least two policemen also died during the standoff’s early stages and another two dozen officers were injured.

—ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, which struck in the city’s diplomatic quarter.

—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).

1:30 a.m.

Much remains unclear, but early reports suggest at least five bodies have been found, which may be those of the gunmen, and that the Japanese government says at least 12 hostages were rescued. The Associated Press has more details on the raid:

At least 35 people, including about 20 foreigners, were trapped inside the restaurant, said kitchen staffer Sumon Reza, who was among more than 10 people who managed to run to the rooftop and escape when the militants moved in Friday night.

With the sound of gunfire and explosions, local TV stations reported that the rescue operation began at 7:40 a.m. It included army personnel with automatic weapons and at least seven armored vehicles. Several ambulances were on standby.

Local media reported that an Argentine and two Bangladeshis were rescued from the restaurant early Saturday, but details about their condition were not immediately available.

Updated on July 1 at 10:56 p.m.

Details are scarce, but multiple news agencies report Bangladeshi authorities have launched an operation to end the standoff.

BREAKING: Gunshots, explosions heard as security forces move to end Bangladesh hostage standoff.

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 2, 2016

We'll update with more information when it becomes available.

4:56 p.m.

The U.S. State Department in a statement said the American Embassy in Dhaka had confirmed all its personnel were safe and unhurt. It said it was working to determine if U.S. citizens of Bangladeshi staff were affected. The statement said it was assessing ISIS’s claims of responsibility for the attack.

4:14 p.m.

Harsha de Silva, Sri Lanka’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, tweeted that at least two of the hostages may be Sri Lankan.

4:03 p.m.

In a subsequent tweet, SITE noted that Amaq, the news agency affiliated with the Islamic State, claimed multiple people had been killed. There is no independent verification of this claim.

3:36 p.m.

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack in Dhaka.

#ISIS' 'Amaq News Agency reported that #ISIS fighters carried out the attack at a restaurant in #Dhaka #Bangladesh pic.twitter.com/3rJFjX2M7q

— SITE Intel Group (@siteintelgroup) July 1, 2016

Police are negotiating with the gunmen who took over the restaurant in Dhaka.

Benazir Ahmed, the head of the city’s anti-crime force, told the Associated Press:

“Some derailed youths have entered the restaurant and launched the attack. We have talked to some of the people who fled the restaurant after the attack. We want to resolve this peacefully. We are trying to talk to the attackers, we want to listen to them about what they want.”

Meanwhile, police confirmed the death of a second officer, Rabiul Islam, the assistant commissioner of the detective branch Dhaka police.

3:25 p.m.

President Obama has been briefed on the unfolding situation in Dhaka, a White House official said Friday.

Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, led the briefing and will keep the president informed as the standoff continues.

2:40 p.m.

Gunmen are holding around 20 hostages in Holey Artisan Bakery, a restaurant in the Dhaka popular among expatriates.

John Kirby, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, told reporters Friday that the U.S. government has accounted for all Americans working at the U.S. Embassy in the Bangladeshi capital.

While the standoff is still ongoing, Salahuddin Ahmed, a deputy commissioner for the Dhaka police, was killed in the attack, the Dhaka Tribune reports. The BBC reports there could be as many as nine gunmen.

1:13 p.m.

Police and gunmen are exchanging fire at a restaurant in the diplomatic area of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.

Several hostages are reportedly being held, including several foreigners. Although it’s unclear if there are casualties, several media outlets are reporting shootings. The Daily Star reports there are five assailants, who have allegedly thrown bombs.

Sumon Reza, a kitchen staff of Holey Artisan Bakery, who managed to escape said several armed assailants entered the restaurant around 8:45pm and took the chief chef hostage.

“They blasted several crude bombs causing wide-scale panic among everyone. I managed to flee during this confusion,” he said.

After these reports, the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka tweeted:

Reports of shooting and hostage situation in Gulshan 2, Dhaka. Please shelter in place and monitor news.

— U.S. Embassy Dhaka (@usembassydhaka) July 1, 2016

Gulshan, the area of Dhaka under attack, is an affluent neighborhood that hosts many NGOs and embassies, including the U.S. Embassy.

Earlier Friday, ISIS claimed responsibility for killing a Hindu priest in his temple in southwestern Bangladesh.

Shyamananda Das, the 52-year-old priest, was hacked to death by alleged Islamist extremists while he was gathering flowers that would be offered in prayers. Gopinath Kanjilal, assistant superintendent of police in the Jhenaidah district, told CNN:

“Three men rode up on one bicycle. They were wearing helmets. They jumped off, attacked the priest, and then rushed away.”

This is just the latest in a series of attacks against religious minorities and secularists in the predominantly Muslim, but officially secular, South Asian country. Das is the second Hindu priest killed in that district in the last month.

Bangladeshi authorities continue to deny that ISIS and its sympathizers are operating in the country.

How Gay Culture Helped Everyone Come Out of the Closet

We live in an age of (relative) sexual liberation: Sex outside of marriage is common to the point of normalcy. Homosexuality and gender fluidity are increasingly accepted as natural expressions of the human sexual experience. Sex, in general, is the subject of public and open discussion in a way it hasn’t been before.

That all happened extremely quickly. Within the space of only a few generations—and with an acceleration that occurred over just the past several decades—American culture has done what in the centuries before would have seemed unimaginable: It has become (mostly, sort of, relatively) comfortable with sex.

You can attribute at least some of that, says the sex columnist and LGBTQ advocate Dan Savage, to the queer rights movement—and to the speedy normalization of gay culture in American life that arose as a result of its efforts. As more and more gay characters appeared on TV, and as more actors and athletes came out and encouraged their non-famous counterparts to do the same, and as queer rights advocates worked with their communities, Americans in general became, quickly, much more aware than they had been about gay life. And with that came an awareness, too, of gay sex.

And that changed things for the better, and not just for the LGBTQ community. As Savage said today in a conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic: “Gay people coming out, in the face of judgment and shame, about their sexual expressions encouraged a lot of straight people to express their sexual identities beyond just ‘I want to meet someone, get married, and have some babies.’”  

American cultural life is still—still!—informed by our origin story: Americans, when it comes to sex as well as many other things, tend to maintain, in subtle ways and not-so-subtle ones, what Savage termed “this puritan hatred of pleasure.” Gay sex, however, disentangles sexual pleasure from the possibility of procreation: It exists for itself, and for its participants, on its—and on their—own terms. (Or, as Savage put it: “Gay people were the original recreational sex-ers.”) And their awareness of that kind of pleasure-for-pleasure’s-sake sexual expression, Savage said, helped to create a model for straight sex that emphasized desire over obligation, and pleasure over guilt.

‘Gay people were the original recreational sex-ers.’

One thing in particular helped to bring gay sex to the forefront of the American consciousness, Savage argued: the AIDS crisis. The crisis, when it was finally discussed openly in American culture, in some ways flipped traditional ideas of what was permissible, and what was deviant, in sex. “Things that were ‘normal’ were suddenly less safe than things that were ‘perverse,’” Savage said. Sexual activities that had been held up as signs of moral depravity—oral sex and the like—were suddenly safer than penetrative sex. As a result: “I think the AIDS epidemic,” Savage said, “forced people to talk about not the sex we thought we should be having, but the sex we were actually having.”

And that permission for frankness opened the door, Savage suggested, for straight people to think more liberally—and more permissively—about their own sex lives. As gay culture left the shadows, the sense of sex as pleasure alone came out along with it. “I really think that that changed the way people talk about sex,” Savage said, “and the way that they’re entitled to sex and desire.” That forced the members of an aggressively heteronormative culture to question, for themselves, what sex is really for. And it opened up the possibility, formerly foreclosed by Americans’ latent puritanism, that sex could exist, if you wanted it to, for pleasure alone.

Or, as Savage summed it up: “A lot of closets were opened after gay people came out of them.”

The Moral Panic About Online Porn

One of the most surprising facts about online pornography is how little concrete data exists about the ways in which it’s consumed. The most thorough collection of statistics to date was released six years ago by a company called Online MBA, but there are no details about how its information was collected. The most frequently touted claims about online porn—37 percent of the internet is pornographic content, Utah has the highest online porn subscription rate in the U.S.—seem erroneous at worst and dubious at best.

Given this absence of specifics, it’s perhaps not surprising that pornography inspires fierce debate on both sides of the culture wars. The psychotherapist Marty Klein likens the current moral panic around online porn to the epidemics of fear and suspicion that sprung up around satanic cults in the 1980s, and even around comic books in the 1950s. Pornography, he argues, is simply a catalogue of human sexual fantasies, and for most people, those fantasies have very little predictive value when it comes to real desire. The most crucial thing people can do when it comes to protecting their children, according to Klein, is to inform them that porn is fictional, and as distinct from real sexual encounters as Steph Curry’s three-pointers are from a pickup basketball game.

Unfortunately, educating children about pornography involves talking freely with them about sex, something the large majority of parents tend to find distinctly uncomfortable. But since schools are often restricted by law from what they’re allowed to say to students, and the entertainment industry is a notably unreliable interpreter, it’s up to parents to start the conversation. “It’s the biggest thing as a culture that we need to be addressing,” Klein said in a conversation with Emily Yoffe at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “There are a lot of young people who are looking at porn and they’re getting the wrong ideas about sex. Porn leaves out the best parts—the kissing the cuddling, the talking, the laughing.”

Klein issued a list of porn literacy checkpoints for parents to go over with their kids that includes emphasizing that most people don’t have bodies like porn performers, that many recurring images in porn (like threesomes, anal sex, and spontaneous sex unprompted by conversation) are theatrical devices and don’t reflect what many men and women want from sexual encounters, and that most women don’t want violence or rough play during sex. But he decried common assumptions that watching pornography leads to sex addiction, or cheating, or degrading and abusive treatment of women. “If people talked about porn in a reasonable way, a lot of that fear would go away,” he said.

A 2010 article in The Scientist seemed to agree that no correlation has been found between watching pornography and having negative attitudes toward women. But it’s undeniable that the vast majority of porn is made for and by men, with its primary focus being male gratification. Even if it doesn’t encourage abusive or violent treatment of women, it teaches a dynamic of sexual pleasure that’s almost entirely male-centric. (You could argue that romance novels offer a similarly distorted perspective of sex to women.)

In a 2003 article for New York titled “The Porn Myth,” the writer Naomi Wolf interviewed young women on college campuses who reported feeling alienated and inadequate in the eyes of young men whose understanding of sex had been defined by a false standard of perfection. “Pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian,” she wrote. “An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on.”

Klein argues that this kind of criticism is overwrought. But with an estimated 60-70 million Americans watching porn online every month, what’s hard to deny is that more research on how and why people watch it would surely benefit parents, children, social scientists, and sex therapists alike.

The Civilians Killed in U.S. Airstrikes

The U.S. killed 64 to 116 civilian in drone strikes in areas outside those of active hostilities between January 20, 2009, and December 31, 2015, the White House said Friday. Between 2,372 and 2,581 combatants also were killed by the strikes in that period, it added.

The figures, released before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, are the first time the Obama administration has provided an accounting of those killed by the drone strikes carried out around the world. The figures are much lower than some non-governmental organizations had independently estimated.

In a statement, the Obama administration said:

… in releasing these figures, the U.S. Government also acknowledges that there are differences between U.S. Government assessments and reporting from non-governmental organizations on non-combatant deaths resulting from U.S. operations.  Although the U.S. Government has access to a wide range of information, the figures we are releasing today should be considered in light of the inherent limitations on the ability to determine the precise number of combatant and non-combatant deaths outside areas of active hostilities, including the non-permissive environments in which these strikes often occur.

The government took its numbers from a report by the Director of National Intelligence that looked at 473 airstrikes made “outside areas of active hostilities.”

Governmental watchdog groups have put the civilian casualties at much higher rates. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in London, examined 424 strikes since 2004, and found between 424 and 966 civilian were killed.  The New America Foundation, a security-policy organization based in Washington, D.C., estimates that since 2004, anywhere from 255 and 315 civilians died in U.S. airstrikes.

Swiss Army Man Is a Sweet, Flatulent Adventure

Almost everyone who heard of Swiss Army Man in the months leading up to its release has probably heard the surreal new comedy referred to as “the farting-corpse movie.” Wisely, the film doesn’t shy away from that provocative label. In its opening minutes, Swiss Army Man shows its protagonist Hank (Paul Dano) stranded on a desert island and contemplating suicide, when Daniel Radcliffe’s prostrate, flatulent corpse washes up on the beach. After some contemplation, Hank approaches the figure; as the film’s score begins to swell, Hank starts to sing along, mounting the body and riding it into the open ocean, propelled by its, well, gas power. Swiss Army Man wants its audience to buy in early—if you’re on board with all of that, then the next 90 minutes should be a delight.

The film is the feature debut of the writing and directing duo known as “Daniels” (Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan), a pair of visually inventive upstarts who have built an impressive resume of music videos and commercials in recent year. Swiss Army Man is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a highly distinctive work, one that unites its gorgeous cinematography, DIY special effects, and soaring music (which Hank frequently chimes in on) around a surprisingly touching tale of finding comfort in one’s own skin. The film recalls Michel Gondry’s emphasis on practical, yet dreamlike visual magic, with a uniquely American gross-out twist—a combination that makes Swiss Army Man one of the most exciting new comedies of the year.

Back to the farting corpse. Swiss Army Man spends no time explaining what Hank is doing on a desert island, or how he got there; neither do viewers get any adequate reasoning for who Manny (the name Hank assigns to the body played by Radcliffe) is or where he comes from. The metaphors are broad and easily recognized: Hank is a lonely sort, besieged by social anxieties and insecurities about his appearance, who has barricaded himself away from society, whether accidentally or on purpose. Manny begins his life in the film as a basically inanimate object (except for all the farting), but as he and Hank begin to chart a path home, he develops a personality beyond the random bodily functions.

At first Manny is infantile, making simple noises and asking Hank basic questions about life and human behavior. He quickly develops into a horny, extroverted teenager, displaying many more natural biological quirks, before maturing into adulthood. This rapid evolution all happens within the rotting, limp body portrayed by Radcliffe, who offers an incredible physical performance that often boils down to a single eye-twitch or the particular hoarseness of a line reading. Scheinert and Kwan set themselves, and Dano, a daunting challenge with Swiss Army Man—95 percent of its screen time involves just Hank and the body he’s lugging around the forest—and yet it remains gloriously energetic throughout.

Hank is both embarrassed by Manny’s inadvertent openness—from the farting to his frequent erections to his penchant for asking probing personal questions—and also deeply afraid of loneliness and mortality, pining over a picture of an anonymous woman on his phone. Manny’s very existence is a direct challenge to Hank’s various insecurities, and while the film’s plot is ostensibly about them getting back to civilization, it’s quickly clear that Hank’s self-worth is the real mountain the pair need to summit.

The film recalls Michel Gondry’s emphasis on practical, yet dreamlike visual magic, with a uniquely American gross-out twist.

The downside of this arc is that this is an indie film recycling an age-old indie trope—that of the introverted, lonely white dude, unlucky in love and pining for a silent woman who isn’t afforded similar agency by the plot. Swiss Army Man does a decent job subverting this arc but can’t quite overcome it: This is Hank’s story more than anything, and though the film’s conclusion does flip some narrative expectations on their head, it remains his story.

To its credit, Swiss Army Man isn’t trying to be a traditional sad-ballad rom-com, but rather a celebration of the connection between Hank and Manny, and the strange mutability of their partnership. The relationship evolves from a parent-child dynamic, to adolescent best friends, to ostensible romance, gleefully blurring the lines of their connection every time. Dano and Radcliffe throw themselves into each new configuration with admirable aplomb. That’s why Swiss Army Man works—from the gassy opening minutes, it’s a film asking the viewer to meet it on its terms, and its winning performers make for ideal ambassadors. Those who can bring themselves to embrace the premise and the cavalier shattering of the fourth wall should be with it right until the absurd, bleak, yet somehow joyous, end.

What Does It Really Mean to Be 'Single'?

In 1957, a team of psychology professors at the University of Michigan released the results of a survey they had conducted—an attempt to reflect Americans’ attitudes about unmarried people. When it came to the group of adults who remained single by choice, 80 percent of the survey’s respondents—reflecting the language used by the survey’s authors—said they believed that the singletons remained so because they must be “immoral,” “sick,” or “neurotic.”  

It’s amazing, and reassuring, how much has changed in such a relatively narrow slice of time. Today, certainly, marriage remains a default economic and social arrangement, particularly after having been won as a right for same-sex couples; today, certainly, those who do not marry still face some latent social stigmas (or, at the very least, requests to explain themselves). But the regressive language of failed morality and psychological pathology when it comes to singledom? That has, fortunately, been replaced by more permissive attitudes.

That’s in part because the culture has shifted, in transformative ways, along with the language: More and more people—women, in particular, as the journalist Rebecca Traister argues in her book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation—are remaining single. Some are staying single for longer than women did before. Some of them are staying single for good. And it’s not just women: Across demographics, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, the author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (and, more recently, the co-author of Modern Love), has written, people are living independently. The assumption that to live alone is to live with loneliness may sometimes hold true; more and more, though, Americans who are in economic positions to live on their own are availing themselves of that opportunity.

That will bring about, Traister and Klinenberg argue, ephocal shifts—in politics and in culture. Despite all the progress in our thinking when it comes to singledom, the world of 2016 is, much like the world of 1957, still designed around, and for the benefit of, married people. That will likely change—it will need to change—as “married people” cease to be the default demographic in American life. Policy will have to, as it so often has had to, play a game of catch-up, re-accommodating itself to a time in which more and more people live, and navigate life, independently.

Part of that shifting will come down to language. Much of American culture’s logic of singledom and marriage comes down to a basic binary: Have you said “I do” or some version of it in a legally recognized ceremony? Then you are married. Have you never done that, or have you dissolved an earlier marriage contract? Then you are single.

Much of American cultural life comes down to a basic binary: Have you said “I do” or some version of it in a legally recognized ceremony, or not?

This easy dichotomy is reflected in everything from tax policy to rom-coms, which tend to treat marriage—or the promise of long-term commitment—as the signature social shift in someone’s (and particularly in a woman’s) life. Even reality shows like Say Yes to the Dress, Traister noted, operate from the assumption that a woman’s wedding day is the most important day in her life—more important than graduations, and more even, in some ways, than the day she becomes a mother. It is the day, after all, that her status—and, with it, the thinking goes, her identity—switches over. She now checks the other box. With any luck, permanently.  

In practice, of course, singledom does not adhere to such check-box binaries. As experienced and lived today, it encompasses a range of situations and statuses and identities. There’s the singledom that results from a simple preference to live alone, and to meet one’s social needs through friends and family rather than romantic partnerships. There’s the singledom that happens when one is in a relationship, but unmarried. There’s the singledom that is complicated by co-habitation. There’s the singledom that comes from waiting to find the right person, or perhaps persons, and feeling no economic or social need to rush the search. There’s the singledom of divorce’s aftermath, and death’s.

And there are, of course, many, many others. As Traister summed it up, from the feminist perspective: “It’s not so much that there’s married versus single. It’s that there’s married versus a greater variety of options than women have ever had.”

What that amounts to, Traister and Klinenberg argue, is the need to reassess American social life—and political life, and cultural life, and economic life—in terms of a less binary logic. Language may be the start of it, or the end; either way, the real demand is for more flexibility and expansiveness when it comes to the assumptions we make about the way our romantic lives inflect our lives overall. We need political approaches, when it comes to tax incentives and government aid programs and the like, that account for the wide array of ways there are to be single. Marriage, certainly, as experienced by those who are in it, may be just as widely varied and nuanced as singleness. Policy-wise, though, at this point, it’s singleness that needs its advocates.

Who Will Control Colombia's Cocaine Without FARC?

Last week Colombian and FARC leaders shook hands in Havana. It was the first tangible promise of peace in a half century. But despite this, 170,000 acres of an emerald-green plant still threatens violence.

The cease-fire between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) ended a 50-year war that killed 250,000 people, and displaced 6 million, a population twice the size of Chicago. Barring the unpredictable, the 8,000 FARC soldiers who have lived and killed in the jungle will soon put down their weapons and relinquish control of 60 percent of the world’s most-productive coca crops.

It’s unclear what exactly will happen to the coca fields when FARC leaves. The government hopes the Marxist guerrilla group will help farmers transition from coca to another crop, leading to a tranquility that’s been absent from rural Colombia since bands of poor farmers fled to the mountains in 1948. But FARC’s absence could also create a vacuum that any number of other criminal groups already in the jungle may seek to fill, giving rise to more violence.

FARC operates in 25 of Colombia’s 32 provinces. When it’s time to demobilize, its soldiers will come to designated safety zones where they will surrender their  guns, and begin the government-supervised process of reintegration, something that will be tough for the individual guerrilla.

“It implies a whole different life for us, a different regime,” Alberto Camacho, a FARC commander, told The Guardian. “We have been living in boots for so long.”

It will also be tough for FARC to extricate itself from the cocaine business, which has earned it anywhere between $200 million and $3.5 billion a year.

“But with coca, the buyer will come to your house.”

FARC has never admitted its full involvement in the drugs trade. It began as a political movement, when a group of communist farmers ran to the mountains to protect themselves from the government. In the 1950s, nearly all of Colombia had split into armed political factions, and the government saw the farmers’ Marxist ideology as a threat. The farmers fought back and their action gave birth to FARC and an armed rebellion. At its peak, FARC claimed 20,000 fighters. And it owes its success and survival to the money brought in through kidnapping, extortion, and beginning in the early 1980s, cocaine.

Although growing coca in Colombia is illegal, poor farmers cultivated it because by the time they transported their legal crops and fruits to the markets from their remote towns and villages through the dense forests, the transportations costs eroded any profit margin.

“But with coca,” Jeremy McDermott, co-director of Insight Crime, told me, “the buyer will come to your house.”

Two years ago, McDermott, who lives in Medellin, wrote about FARC’s ties to cocaine in an article titled “The FARC and the Drug Trade: Siamese Twins?” In it, he wrote FARC taxes farmers $50 per kilo of cocaine and criminal organizations $200 per kilo. It charges $100 per kilo to the laboratories that soak the green leaves in kerosene to extract the alkaloids that 1.5 million U.S. cocaine users regularly snort. FARC charges airplanes that transports the drugs from its territory, and has even shipped cocaine itself.

FARC soldiers work in units called fronts, which are its fighting blocs. Each is responsible for itself, but answers to the Secretariat, the rebel group’s governing body. The jungle is vast and the guerrillas use the small towns spread in the countryside as bases of operation. For that reason, and because of the nature of being a rebel group hiding from the Colombian government, FARC’s central command can’t oversee everything. One fear is that after peace, autonomous fronts will stay put in the jungle, having forged their own relationships with mafia and cartels, completely able to oversee the growth, manufacture, and shipment of cocaine.

“That is the ‘FACRIM’ scenario,” McDermott told me.

That term is something McDermott coined based on another armed rebel force that disbanded and turned into fractured criminal groups. They are now collectively called BACRIM, a combination of “bandas criminales,” Spanish for criminal bands. Most of the BACRIM began as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing group supported by both drug dealers and the Colombian army. For a while, the government found AUC useful. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it hunted and killed FARC members. But the U.S. later labeled it a terrorist organization—like FARC—and by 2006 it had largely demobilized. Some of its fighters remained in the jungle, and these groups now buy cocaine from FARC-controlled growers.

And that could lead to the scenario with the greatest likelihood for violence, which is one where no one clearly controls the cocaine.

Another possibility is that FARC soldiers with a stronger desire to hold onto their fields rather than make peace could take their coca-knowledge and their holdings to the National Liberation Army (ELN), another communist guerrilla group with a similar history. The ELN was founded in the 1960s and headed for a long time by leftist Roman Catholic priests. It’s now a designated terrorist organization with ties to drug smugglers. Although ideologically similar,  ELN and FARC have not always gotten along, but they formed a loose alliance after 2008.

Coca farmers have been able to grow in relative comfort because of FARC’s protection, in exchange for a fee. If FARC leaves, ELN could slip into this role, bolstered by FARC’s dissident blocs. The ELN is also in peace talks with the government, although they are not as far along. This could mean the ELN also bows out of the cocaine business, leaving it to others. And that could lead to the scenario with the greatest likelihood for violence, which is one where no one clearly controls the cocaine.

Convincing farmers to grow bananas instead of coca is an entirely different battle. Those who’ve tried to make the switch often find they earn one-third of what they did growing coca. The government says it plans to subsidize these farmers, weaning them onto another crop. That will take time. And when the FARC drops its weapons, it will leave behind a desirable void, a vacuum of control worth billions.

“How do you fill the vacuum in these areas where the criminal economy makes up 70 percent of the whole economy?,” McDermott asked.

That’s what the Colombian government is trying to figure out now that the most stabilizing force in those areas, FARC, is preparing to leave. The most optimistic future is one in which FARC uses its influence to ease farmers into legitimate crops. But it will be difficult: In 2014 Colombians planted 44 percent more coca plants than the year before. Last year, they likely planted even more. Cocaine has been big business for decades. Then again, it was just nine years ago that FARC doubled down on attacks against the government. Now there’s peace for the first time in a half-century, so it seems anything is possible.

A Tesla Fatality and the Future of Self-Driving Cars

Federal officials are investigating a crash that killed the driver of a Model S, a Tesla vehicle with a partially autonomous driving system, in a move that has major implications for the future of driverless vehicles.

“This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated...” Tesla wrote in a statement on Thursday. “It is important to emphasize that the NHTSA action is simply a preliminary evaluation to determine whether the system worked according to expectations.”

The investigation may be standard procedure, but it’s also certain to influence the ongoing conversation about the safety of self-driving vehicles.

The Model S isn’t technically a driverless car, but Tesla has been a vocal player in the race to bring truly driverless cars to market. The company’s Autopilot feature is an assistive technology, meaning that drivers are instructed to keep their hands on the wheel while using it—even though it is sophisticated enough to complete tasks like merging onto the highway. It wasn’t clear from Tesla’s statement how engaged the driver was at the time of the crash.

“What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided highway with Autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S,” Tesla said. “Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.”

Autopilot is still in beta mode, so drivers who use it have agreed to test the technology for Tesla and transmit data about its use back to the company. Tesla has repeatedly emphasized that Autopilot requires drivers to stay as focused as they would if they were driving as usual. But that hasn’t stopped people from viewing Autopilot as a stepping stone to a self-driving near-future—or more. When the feature was first introduced last fall, it didn’t take long before people began uploading YouTube videos of themselves pushing the Model S beyond its intended level of autonomy. Some drivers sat with their hands far from the wheel. In one video, a man held up a newspaper between himself and the windshield as the car essentially drove itself. “They’re not all being insanely stupid,” John Leonard, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me at the time. “But some of these people are totally reckless.”

Plenty of roboticists chalk up these stunts to human nature, but they pose a real quandary to engineers who are building driverless systems to be safer than existing human-driven vehicles. “I think people just exhibit unsafe behaviors period, right?” said Missy Cummings, the head of Duke’s Robotics Lab, when I met with her at the university last month. “We have seen—and Google has their own films of it—what people will do to a car if they think it is driverless. There’s a gamesmanship.”

Experts have long said the first death involving a driverless or partially autonomous car was only a matter of time. After all, there are more than 30,000 traffic fatalities every year in the United States alone. The fact that Google’s driverless fleet has logged more than 1.5 million miles in fully-autonomous mode and caused just one minor accident along the way is remarkable. But even the biggest advocates for driverless technologies say a perfect track-record on safety isn’t sustainable.

What remains to be seen is how people will react—both culturally and from a regulatory standpoint—to driverless-car deaths when they occur.

So far, the self-driving car industry—which includes Tesla, Google, and several existing automakers—have resisted establishing universal safety standards. Their testing data is also proprietary. It’s possible that, in the wake of Tesla’a fatality, lawmakers will revisit the possibility that such standards should be drawn up by the government, which could force more public scrutiny of the technology.

“I think if they would come together and set their own standards, that would be very beneficial to them—instead of having federal oversight,” Cummings said. “I have no confidence that the U.S. government can put together what I would say would be good safety standards. But I do think industry can.”