Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 130

A New Trial for Adnan Syed

Updated on June 30 at 4:54 p.m. ET

A judge in Baltimore has ordered a new trial for Adnan Syed, the murder convict who was the subject of the Serial, the popular podcast from Chicago Public Radio. Syed’s attorney tweeted the news:

WE WON A NEW TRIAL FOR ADNAN SYED!!! #FreeAdnan

— Justin Brown (@CJBrownLaw) June 30, 2016

Rabia Chaudry, a friend of Syed’s family who spearheaded the campaign to get him a new trial, tweeted: “I am shaking with joy, shaking! Thank you Judge Welch. Thank you.” Judge Martin Welch of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City signed Thursday’s order.

Syed was convicted in 2000 of strangling Hae Min Lee, 18, and burying her body in Baltimore’s Leakin Park. The two had dated when they attended the city’s Woodlawn High School. Syed was sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison for the killing.

But there were several questions raised about the trial, including the legal representation Syed had received; why investigators had not spoken to Asia McLain, a classmate who said she’d been with Syed in the school library at the time of the killing; and the reliability of cell-tower data used to convict Syed. The Serial podcast, though inconclusive, brought many of these issues to the public’s attention.

Judge Welch, in his order, cited the failure to cross-examine Maryland’s cell-tower expert about the technology’s reliability as a factor in ordering a new trial for Syed. He also ordered that McLain’s testimony from January 13, 2015,  be retransmitted to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.

Lee’s family has long said they believed Syed killed Hae Min Lee.

Learning to Be Human

Earlier this month, the Washington Post journalist Jeff Guo wrote a detailed account of how he’d managed to maximize the efficiency of his cultural consumption. “I have a habit that horrifies most people,” he wrote. “I watch television and films in fast forward … the time savings are enormous. Four episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fit into an hour. An entire season of Game of Thrones goes down on the bus ride from D.C. to New York.”

Guo’s method, which he admits has ruined his ability to watch TV and movies in real time, encapsulates how technology has allowed many people to accelerate the pace of their daily routines. But is faster always better when it comes to art? In a conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, and the cultural critic Leon Wieseltier agreed that true study and appreciation of the humanities is rooted in slowness—in the kind of deliberate education that can be accrued over a lifetime. While this can seem almost antithetical at times to the pace of modern life, and as subjects like art, philosophy, and literature face steep declines in enrollment at academic institutions in the U.S., both argued that studying the humanities is vital for the ways in which it teaches us how to be human.

The statistics Faust cited paint a fairly grim portrait of the humanities’ declining prestige. At the end of World War II, 11 percent of students nationwide chose to major in the humanities. In the 1960s, this figure rose to 17 percent, but now it stands at around 6 percent. Students are increasingly drawn to vocational majors in subjects like business, medicine, science, and education. “What we need to do is recognize the limitations of that mentality,” Wieseltier said. “The purpose of the humanities is not primarily utilitarian, it is not primarily to get a job ... The purpose of the humanities is to cultivate the individual, cultivate the citizen.”

Part of the problem, he argued, is a culture that—aided by technology—has come to value speed and conclusive answers over leisurely thought and complex questions. The “instant gratification of Google,” he said, has reduced knowledge “to the status of information, but information is highly inferior. Knowledge requires inquiry, method, and above all, time.” The impulse to voraciously consume as much news (or as many television shows) as possible in a short span of time is fundamentally at odds with deep consideration of questions about the universe, or measured study of culture. Faust cited a Harvard art history professor who assigns her students the task of spending three hours looking at a single work of art in a museum. Initially they’re horrified, she said, but “by hour three they’re seeing all kinds of things that they hadn’t noticed in hour one.”

The irony of the humanities’ declining prestige is that what they teach seems to be urgently needed in a polarized culture. “The humanities are such an important vehicle for widening the world … for teaching empathy for people outside yourself,” Faust said. “In this time of increasing tribalism, this seems like such a critical role.” History teaches students about the context of choices made in the past. Philosophy forces them to think about morality. Theater, literature, and film put students into the mindset of others. In difficult times, people inevitably turn to the humanities to try to understand adversity. “People in trouble don’t turn to regression analysis,” Wieseltier said. “Their souls require the fortification and the wisdom that only humanistic thinking can provide.”

As more and more things become quantifiable, from workouts to Netflix binges to the number of dollars per visitor a museum exhibition costs, both argued that it’s critical for students to realize that not everything can be reduced to a data point. “Many of the deepest experiences in life can’t be numerically measured,” Wieseltier said. “What the humanities teach, what literature and art and music and philosophy and history teach, is that the correct description and analysis of human life is not a scientific affair.” Or as Faust put it, in a quote frequently attributed to Albert Einstein, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

The Stabbing Death of a 13-Year-Old Israeli Girl

A 13-year-old Israeli girl has been stabbed to death in her bedroom in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Hallel Yaffa Ariel was attacked in her home in Kiryat Arba Thursday while she was sleeping, the BBC and others report. The assailant was stopped and fatally shot by security guards, one of whom was wounded in the confrontation and is in serious condition. The attacker was identified as Mohammed Tarayreh, a 19-year-old man from Bani Naim, a Palestinian village to the southeast. More from the BBC on the attack:

In Thursday’s incident, the attacker infiltrated Kiryat Arba before entering Hallel Ariel's home, which is next to a fence surrounding the settlement.

Israeli media reported that the girl was repeatedly stabbed in the upper body.

She was taken in a critical condition to the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem, where she died shortly after arriving, hospital officials said.

“Like all adolescents during summer vacation, my daughter was asleep—tranquil, calm—and a terrorist came and murdered her in her bed,” Rina Ariel, her mother, told reporters outside the hospital, according to The Times of Israel.

The U.S. State Department said the young girl was a U.S. citizen.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the attack “horrific” and ordered the home of Tarayreh to be demolished. This is customary for the Israeli government; when Palestinians are found to commit crimes, Israeli military forces destroy the homes of their family members as punishment. Occupants are typically notified several days before the demolition and are told to evacuate.

In March, three Israeli solders were wounded in two separate attacks in Kiryat Arba. The three suspected attackers, who were armed with guns and knives, were shot dead, and the homes of two were raided by Israel forces. At least 33 Israelis have been killed in stabbings, shootings, and other attacks since last fall, according to the AP. About 200 Palestinians have been killed during the same time period, most of whom Israel has identified as attackers.

The Architects Who Will Design the Obama Library

NEWS BRIEF A pair of American architectural firms will design Barack Obama’s future presidential library in Chicago, the Obama Foundation announced on Thursday.

New York-based Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, a husband-and-wife team, will be the lead designers with help from Interactive Design Architects (IDEA). They were selected from seven finalists that the president’s foundation requested formal proposals from in December. The choice of two U.S. firms was notable given that speculation in architectural circles had centered on David Adjaye, a Tanzanian-born Briton whose firm was a finalist and who designed the Nobel Prize Center in Oslo. Adjaye also led the design of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is under construction on the National Mall.

Williams and Tsien designed the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and the LeFrak Center, an ice-skating rink in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. IDEA designed the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing along with several other buildings in Obama’s hometown. The choice of architects comes a little over a year after Chicago beat out New York as the host city for the Obama Presidential Center. A specific site hasn’t been selected, but it is expected to be on the south side and affiliated with the University of Chicago, where Obama served as a lecturer before going into politics. The foundation has not released any renderings of the museum’s design.

“It is a joy, an honor, and a responsibility to create a place that reflects the optimism and integrity of the president and the first lady,” Williams and Tsien said in a statement. “This has been a transformative presidency and we will work to make a Center that embodies and expands the Obamas’ vision.”

Martin Nesbitt, the foundation’s president and a close friend of Obama, told the Chicago Tribune that personal chemistry between the architects and the first couple was an important factor in their selection.

Construction on the $500 million project won’t begin until after Obama leaves office, and the center won’t open until well into his successor’s term. That timeline could work out well for the Obamas, who have announced they plan to stay in Washington until their youngest daughter, Sasha, graduates from high school.

The U.S. Military's Welcome for Transgender Troops

The U.S. military will allow transgender people to serve openly in the military for the first time in U.S. history.

“This is the right thing to do for our people and for the force,” Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said Thursday. “We’re talking about talented Americans who are serving with distinction or who want the opportunity to serve. We can’t allow barriers unrelated to a person’s qualifications prevent us from recruiting and retaining those who can best accomplish the mission."

The new rules will be phased in over the course of one year. Effective immediately, transgender people in the military now will not be discharged. After one year, transgender people will be permitted to join the military, including attending the academies or Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs.

The decision comes nearly a year after Carter announced the Pentagon would review its policies on transgender service. Back then, Carter called the current regulations an “outdated, confusing, inconsistent approach.”

Transgender people currently serve in all five branches of the U.S. military. But the military still recognizes them by their gender at birth, and requires members to adhere to uniform standards of that gender. Under current rules, transgender people are considered physically and psychologically unfit to serve. Rules prohibit those with a “current or history of psychosexual conditions, including but not limited to transsexualism, exhibitionism, transvestism, voyeurism, and other paraphilias” or those with “history of major abnormalities or defects of the genitalia including but not limited to change of sex” from serving in the military.

The announcement comes amid a national debate over trans rights, particularly in states like North Carolina, where legislators have considered so-called “bathroom bills” that require trans people to use public restrooms that correspond to their gender at birth. It also comes a day after another historic moment: two transgender women in Utah and Colorado won their primary elections for Congress, a first in U.S. history.

U.S. military policies on service eligibility have undergone significant changes in the last few years. In 2011, the nation ended the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Carter also opened all military jobs, including combat, to women in 2016.

A Canadian Trumpathon

NEWS BRIEF Wednesday’s energy summit in Ottawa began awkwardly enough when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rather clumsily tried to finagle a three-way handshake with United States President Barack Obama and President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico. It only got more awkward when reporters began peppering the North American leaders with questions about Donald Trump.

All three men have harshly criticized the presumptive Republican nominee over the last several months in their home countries. Peña Nieto has compared him to Hitler and Mussolini, Trudeau has said he practices the politics of fear and division, and Obama has denounced his rhetoric on immigration, national security, and just about everything else over the course of the presidential campaign.

But as they stood together under the trappings of a formal press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Peña Nieto, Trudeau, and Obama each resorted to diplomatic euphemisms when reporters asked about Trump’s pledges to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement and construct a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico (paid for by Peña Nieto’s government).

Or at least they tried to.

“I look forward to working with whomever the American people elect in November,” Trudeau said. Without mentioning Trump by name, he seemed unconcerned about what he called “inflated rhetoric” and said that the longstanding ties among Canada, the U.S., and Mexico would “lead us to much more alignment than differentiation.”

“My government will respect fully the domestic electoral process in the United States,” Peña Nieto said. He neither rescinded nor repeated his comparison of Trump to the World War II-era fascists, instead warning more generally about “political actors using populism and demagoguery.”

Both Peña Nieto and Trudeau were pointedly trying observe the diplomatic tradition of not taking a public position on elections inside another country, even if their statements in other venues have made it obvious they are rooting for Hillary Clinton. And although he has endorsed Clinton, Obama criticized Trump only implicitly as he defended America’s tradition of welcoming immigrants and the trade agreements Trump has trashed on the campaign trail.

“Sorry,” the president said. “This is one of the prerogatives when you get to the end of your term. You go on the occasional rant.”

But at the very end of the press conference, Obama dropped the facade. He took issue with a reporter who referred to Trump’s “populism” in a question to the other leaders about his appeal to voters opposed to trade agreements like NAFTA and Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership. “I’m not prepared to concede the notion that some of the rhetoric that’s been popping up is populist,” he said. (Obama still wouldn’t use Trump’s name, but it was apparent that the president was talking about him.) He contrasted his own record of supporting policies to reduce income inequality with the record of “somebody else who has never shown any regard for workers, has never fought on behalf of social-justice issues.”

They don’t suddenly become a populist because they suddenly say something controversial in order to win votes. That’s not the measure populism. That’s nativism. Or xenophobia. Or worse. Or it’s just cynicism.

Obama singled out Bernie Sanders as someone who “I genuinely feel deserves the title” of a populist, “because he’s been in the vineyards fighting.” And although he’s not on the ballot this year, the president was adamant about his own populist credentials. He brought up the auto bailout he presided over early in his tenure, a move that he said was not popular “even in Michigan” at the time. “Maybe that was an elitist move on my part because it didn’t poll well,” Obama said.

Then he turned back to Trump. “Somebody who labels ‘us versus them’ or engages in rhetoric about how we’re going to look after ourselves, take it to the other guy, that’s not the definition of populism,” the president said.

When he was done, Obama realized he had perhaps gone on a bit too long, hijacking a press conference devoted to energy and climate issues and aimed at highlighting the close relationship among the three nations of the continent. “Sorry,” the president said. “This is one of the prerogatives when you get to the end of your term. You go on the occasional rant.”

The Discovery of 148-Year-Old Shipwreck

A New York-based team of explorers announced Wednesday they discovered the shipwreck of a Canadian schooner in Lake Ontario that sank in 1868.

Using sonar to locate the wreck, Jim Kennard, Roger Pawlowski, and Roland Stevens found the Royal Albert in waters off Fair Haven, New York, this month. The 104-foot Royal Albert was built 10 years before it sank with 285 tons of railroad iron onboard “that shifted in rough conditions, bursting the ship’s seams.”

According to AP, the crew survived the wreck by taking a small boat to shore.

More from the AP on the discovery:

Kennard says the wreck was found in mid-June using side-scan sonar. He says video images taken by a remotely-operated vehicle helped identify the wreck as the Royal Albert, the only two-masted schooner known to have sunk off Fair Haven.

EgyptAir Crash: Flight Recorder Showed Smoke on Board

Investigators say they have successfully downloaded information from the flight recorder of EgyptAir Flight 804 and found there was smoke on board before the crash.

Egypt’s Aircraft Accident Investigation in a statement Wednesday:

“Preliminary information shows that the entire flight is recorded on the FDR since its takeoff from Charles de Gaulle airport until the recording stopped at an altitude of 37,000 feet where the accident occurred. Recorded data is showing consistency with [Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System] messages of lavatory and avionics smoke.”

Investigators have yet to fully analyze the data, which could give more insight into the cause of the smoke and why the Airbus A320 flying from Paris to Cairo plunged into the Mediterranean Sea on May 19, killing 66 people. There are still several possible causes of the crash, including human or technical error and terrorism.

Two weeks ago, investigators recovered the flight recorder in the Mediterranean, but said it was “in several pieces.” French officials are still repairing the cockpit voice recorder they found around the same time.

A Sea of Blockbusters and Almost No Female Filmmakers

If you need more evidence that women behind the scenes in Hollywood face an Everest-like uphill climb, look at the current slate of big-budget summer films—where franchises and sequels and remakes abound, but female directors of mainstream movies are virtually nonexistent. Even films with a majority-female cast like Bad Moms and Ghostbusters have male directors. For years, the so-called “celluloid ceiling” has been the norm in the entertainment world. But lately the industry, the public, the federal government, and researchers have become more vocal about Hollywood’s many diversity issues, and there’s been a growing amount of data showing why the gender disparity makes no financial sense.

In an analysis of 1,591 films released from 2010 to 2015, the online movie-financing platform Slated found that movies with women in key roles in front of and behind the camera tend to make more money—even though female-helmed projects are rarer and usually receive smaller budgets. The study, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, arrived at several findings that only strengthen the argument that having more opportunities for women in the industry is good for business and moviegoers alike.

The Slated analysis, which looked at nearly every film that appeared on at least one theater screen in the U.S., found that men and women directors didn’t gravitate toward any specific genre—contrary to stereotypes saying women direct more rom-coms or men direct more action films. (This largely holds true even if you adjust for the fact that there’s a far bigger sample size for male directors.) The study found that movies with women producers, writers, and lead actors enjoyed a greater return on investment than those from their male counterparts.

There was one area where this trend of superior performance didn’t hold true: women directors. And yet, the study concluded that the single biggest predictor of success for a film by a female director was the number of screens their movie appeared on. Though distribution for studio films with at least $25 million budgets was basically the same for male and female directors, lower-budget movies by women only appeared on one-third as many screens as low-budget movies by men. This drastic distribution gap somewhat undermines the vision of indie filmmaking as an accessible artistic haven for those marginalized by Hollywood.

Movies by women tend to make more money than ones by men—even though female-helmed projects are rarer and usually receive smaller budgets.

Though women directors face much better distribution odds at the studio level, the summer’s dearth of female-helmed blockbusters adds another disheartening dimension to the whole picture. The only mainstream female-directed “summer” movies have been Money Monster and Me Before You. This year as a whole so far isn’t much better (unsurprising, considering that just 6.4 percent of feature films from 2013 to 2014 were directed by women, according to the Directors Guild of America). The most successful film directed by a woman to-date in 2016 was Kung-Fu Panda 3. Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who became the first woman to solo direct an animated feature film with Kung-Fu Panda 2, co-directed its sequel with Alessandro Caroloni. The only other female-directed film in the 20 top-highest-grossing pictures of the year was the Christian drama Miracles From Heaven.

One of several common (but annoyingly misguided) refrains about the dearth of female directors, especially for big-budget projects, is that they’re simply not experienced enough. And yet Hollywood has a healthy record of handing the reigns of major franchises to men whose only experience is in directing indie features. Take Colin Trevorrow, who helmed the 2012 comedy Safety Not Guaranteed (budget: $750,000) and then three years later came out with Jurassic World(budget: $150 million). Next, he’ll be directing the even more expensive  Star Wars: Episode IX.

The meritocratic fallacy obscures the serious problem of the “trust gap” that exists at the mostly white and male higher echelons ofthe studio system when it comes to hiring women. “This is the institutional bias, that you’ve somehow been taught as you’ve risen the ranks in the studio, that it’s a safer bet to go with a man,” Stephan Paternot, Slated’s CEO, told The Hollywood Reporter. “The women have given you better financial results, yet your gut’s still telling you to give them less money to work with.” Manohla Dargis also explored in The New York Times in 2014 how inertia and tradition, more than malice, perpetuates a sexist system:

The reluctance to hire women seems symptomatic of a conservative, fear-driven industry that recycles the same genres, stereotypes, and impoverished ideas year after year. So, exactly like the outside world, the movie business clings to dusty stereotypes as when insiders refer to directors as generals and ship captains, as if today women don’t have those jobs.

It’s always tempting to say, “Maybe next year will be different.” And maybe it will, but as of now, 2017’s slate of summer movies is filled with male directors with one notable exception: Patty Jenkins. She’ll be directing Wonder Woman.

South Sudan's Canceled Independence Day

The world’s youngest country canceled its upcoming independence-day celebrations.

South Sudan, plagued by a civil war and a struggling economy, will not have any official commemorations on July 9 to mark the fifth anniversary of breaking off from Sudan. On Tuesday, Michael Makuei, the minister of information, said, “We need to spend the little that we have on other issues.”

The situation in South Sudan, as Al Jazeera describes, is critical:

South Sudan is struggling to stem soaring inflation caused by the war, rampant corruption and the near collapse of the oil industry, which accounts for 98 percentage of government revenues.

The International Monetary Fund  has warned that the economy is in ruins with inflation at almost 300 percent and the currency falling by 90 percent this year.

Civil war erupted in South Sudan in December 2013 but rebel chief Riek Machar returned to the capital in April as part of a peace deal that saw him become vice president, forging a unity government with [President Salva] Kiir.

Despite this agreement, fighting has continued throughout the country between different militia forces, leaving tens of thousands dead. This week, more than 50 people were killed in fighting between government forces and rebels in the remote town of Wau.

There are now around 10,000 people who have taken shelter at a nearby United Nations base. Moses Peter, humanitarian coordinator of the Caritas Diocese of Wau, told the Associated Press:

“The army, which is patrolling the streets here, has asked people to return to their homes but the displaced are still in fear. They do not want to return to their homes because they do not trust the army, because they say it is the army that killed civilians.”

Another 160,000 people are sheltered at other UN bases in the country, as civilians fear future ethnic massacres, torture, rape, and the recruitment of child soldiers.

In previous years, despite the civil war, the country still held military parades on its independence day. This year, though, Kiir, the president, will just address the country.