Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 137

Can Brazil Make its Olympic Games Safe?

Australia’s Olympic Committee asked Brazil on Tuesday to step up its security ahead of the games in Rio de Janeiro after an athlete was robbed at gunpoint.

Kitty Chiller, the team leader, scolded Rio organizers after Liesl Tesch, a Paralympic sailor, was robbed at gunpoint Monday while she rode her bicycle. Tesch said she was training with her coach near her hotel when two men jumped in front of them and demanded money.

In a news conference Tuesday, Chiller said:

The Paralympic sailors were confronted by the men in broad daylight, it was 7.30 in the morning, and right near their accommodation. There were people around but no-one came to their assistance. This is a major concern and the only answer is for the authorities to put extra police and security on the ground now.

There have been several shooting incidents in the past couple of weeks. This is disturbing.

We have a duty of care to the athletes and officials. We are taking over 400 young athletes to the Games, we need to ensure they are protected at all costs.

Brazil has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Over the weekend, armed men stormed a hospital—a recommended facility for tourists during the Olympics—to free an injured gang member being treated there. One patient died and a nurse and an off-duty officer were injured. Nor was Monday’s incident isolated. Last month, three Spanish athletes were robbed at gunpoint as they made their way to breakfast.

Rio organizers have promised to deploy 85,000 police and security officers for the games.

Trump Is on the Verge of Losing Even Republicans

Better late than never: Like many aphorisms, it’s comforting, but only debatably true. Anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party now have a shot at testing its veracity.

A CNN poll released on Tuesday shows that a stunning 48 percent of Republicans polled would prefer that the party dump Trump in favor of another candidate. The presumptive nominee maintains the thinnest margin of majority support, at 51 percent. Unfortunately, it’s the first time CNN has asked the question, so it’s hard to get a good sense of how that number has changed over time. Trump did win the popular vote in the GOP primary handily, per RealClearPolitics’s count. But he still won only a plurality of the vote, not a majority.

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The Plot to Stop Donald Trump

These poll results come amid other bad public-opinion news for Trump, and they fit with the trend. Trump is trailing Hillary Clinton in every recent head-to-head poll, and his unfavorable rating has reached a dismal 70 percent. (Clinton’s own high disapproval is overshadowed.) Trump has had a terrible few weeks, in which he was hammered by Clinton, blundered into an ill-advised attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, saw his response to the Orlando massacre panned, and reported next to no fundraising. In short, Trump looks like an incredibly weak presumptive nominee, perhaps among the weakest ever. It makes sense that Republican voters would be losing some faith in him, just as most of the country seems to be doing. For conservatives who warned against Trump, it is bittersweet vindication.

Certainly some Republican officials are edging away. A small but growing number of them have either withheld support, specifically announced they won’t back Trump, or sidled away from him slowly in recent weeks. There’s also a new effort to defeat Trump at the Republican National Convention next month in Cleveland by somehow freeing up delegates to vote for the candidate of their choice. Reaction to this effort, including from me, has tended to be skeptical. After a long series of Stop Trump efforts petered out, or never even got started, it’s hard to imagine one taking hold—especially at this late stage in the game, when Trump has already won the delegates and driven his rivals out of the race. The time to stop Trump was probably long ago.

Nonetheless, The Washington Post reports Tuesday that organizers are now claiming they have nearly 400 delegates on board. That number should probably be viewed skeptically: Who are they? How committed are they? How easily would they swing back? Even if the report is accurate, that number is only about a sixth of the total delegates at the convention.

Meanwhile, Trump seems to be trying to reassure Republicans that he’s righting the ship. On Monday, he fired his controversial campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. On Tuesday, he unleashed a series of emails rebutting a speech by Hillary Clinton—the first such rapid-response effort by Trump’s campaign. On Wednesday, he’s giving a speech criticizing Clinton.

A Stop Trump campaign remains a very long shot. Many things would need to go perfectly for the organizers to succeed, and there would be two essential ingredients for success: a popular groundswell of support, and an alternative candidate. In the CNN poll, Trump’s opponents might see promise in the growing doubts among rank-and-file Republicans. So far, however, they still lack an elite replacement to stand as their figurehead.

Frank Ocean’s Radically Humane Response to the Orlando Shootings

I keep reading the reactions on Tumblr to Frank Ocean’s new post responding to the Orlando shooting. Here’s what the singer wrote, in full:

I read in the paper that my brothers are being thrown from rooftops blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs for violating sharia law. I heard the crowds stone these fallen men if they move after they hit the ground. I heard it’s in the name of God. I heard my pastor speak for God too, quoting scripture from his book. Words like abomination popped off my skin like hot grease as he went on to describe a lake of fire that God wanted me in. I heard on the news that the aftermath of a hate crime left piles of bodies on a dance floor this month. I heard the gunman feigned dead among all the people he killed. I heard the news say he was one of us. I was six years old when I heard my dad call our transgender waitress a faggot as he dragged me out a neighborhood diner saying we wouldn’t be served because she was dirty. That was the last afternoon I saw my father and the first time I heard that word, I think, although it wouldn’t shock me if it wasn’t. Many hate us and wish we didn’t exist. Many are annoyed by our wanting to be married like everyone else or use the correct restroom like everyone else. Many don’t see anything wrong with passing down the same old values that send thousands of kids into suicidal depression each year. So we say pride and we express love for who and what we are. Because who else will in earnest? I daydream on the idea that maybe all this barbarism and all these transgressions against ourselves is an equal and opposite reaction to something better happening in this world, some great swelling wave of openness and wakefulness out here. Reality by comparison looks grey, as in neither black nor white but also bleak. We are all God’s children, I heard. I left my siblings out of it and spoke with my maker directly and I think he sounds a lot like myself. If I being myself were more awesome at being detached from my own story in a way I being myself never could be. I wanna know what others hear, I’m scared to know but I wanna know what everyone hears when they talk to God. Do the insane hear the voice distorted? Do the indoctrinated hear another voice entirely?

Around the release of his 2012 album Channel Orange, Ocean used Tumblr to post a similarly stream-of-consciousness note where he talked about a romance with a man. It was a culture-shaking event at the time—the world is still lacking for popular, young musicians who are LGBT, especially ones with connections to hip-hop—but Ocean has since maintained some mystery around his personal life, politics, and sexuality, saying only that he identifies with no label. That note began: “Whoever you are. Wherever you are … I’m starting to think we’re a lot alike. Human beings spinning on blackness. All wanting to be seen, touched, heard, paid attention to.”

This new note also speaks to commonality, but commonality in hatred. It draws a line between the murderous homophobia practiced by ISIS and the Orlando gunman the group inspired, the homophobia of conservative Christianity and his own father, and the internal loathing of many queer people who have grown up hearing such messages. It suggests that God is on Ocean’s side, but it wonders whether everyone thinks the same thing about themselves. “Do the insane hear the voice distorted? Do the indoctrinated hear another voice entirely?” He’s getting to the heart of the spiritual question left in the wake of an event like Orlando, asking how God, which for so many people stands for love, could be used to justify death.

Amid the white noise of the “where’s your album” reactions to the note on Tumblr—Ocean has yet to release a follow-up to Channel Orange—are fans answering his final questions about talking to God. Some selections: “From my time as a Bible salesperson, the indoctrinated only hear themselves and who they are afraid to displease,” “We are all kids of God and we all try the best in our life,” “I found myself manipulating my ideologies and morals to fit His needs in the hopes for acceptance. Maybe I’m contradicting everything I’m supposed to believe in for a spot in paradise?” One user confessed to never having had gay friends because, they now realize, society has trained them to avoid gay people.

This idea about unified humanity and the many faces of God is one of the defining ideas of Ocean’s work. You can hear it on the Channel Ocean track “Bad Religion,” a song that seems incredibly relevant after the Orlando attack. In it, he sings about being in the backseat of a taxi with a driver saying “Allahu akbar” to him. Ocean’s facing an emotional crisis:

It's a bad religion

To be in love with someone

Who could never love you

He could be talking about unrequited love toward another person. Or he could be talking about the Christian god that he’s been taught will never accept him. In either case, it’s the prayers of a Muslim that help him in the moment.

The ‘Brexit’ Campaign: A Cheat Sheet

Updated on June 21 26 at 2:08 p.m. ET

British voters will decide this week whether their country should remain in the European Union, the 28-country political and economic bloc that represents Europe’s most ambitious post-World War II experiment as well as one of the world’s largest economies. The intensity of debate is clear in recent remarks from U.K. politicians on opposing sides of the debate, who have invoked not only that exemplar of high-intensity rhetoric, Hitler (on behalf of the “leave” side), but his murderous, present-day ideological descendant, ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (in defense of staying).

There have been dire warnings about the consequences, economic and otherwise, of leaving the EU, pleas for the U.K. to remain, and impassioned arguments as well as practical ones for it to get out. But what exactly is at issue and who is saying what? What follows is an updating guide to the state of the debate ahead of the June 23 vote.

The Basics

What is “Brexit”?

It’s a portmanteau that combines “Britain” and “exit.” The convention is not original to this campaign; Greece’s economic crisis last year raised fears—as yet unrealized—of a “Grexit” from the group of countries within the EU that shares the euro currency.

When is the vote?

Thursday, June 23

Who can vote?

Adult citizens of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all get a vote, along with Irish citizens who live in the U.K., as well as citizens from the more than 50 Commonwealth countries—former British colonies such as Australia, India, and Jamaica—who reside in Britain. U.K. nationals who have lived outside the country for less than 15 years are also eligible.

What are they being asked?

“Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”

Why are they voting on this in the first place?

Britons voted in a referendum in 1975 on whether to stay in what was then called the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to the European Union, formed among six founding countries in 1957 to facilitate the movement of goods and workers among its members; the U.K. joined the EEC in 1973.” But the bloc has since become further integrated, rechristening itself the European Union in 1993, and has grown in both membership and influence. EU citizens can freely travel between member states, and much of the bloc has open internal borders. Many EU regulations apply to all 28 members. But the perceived burdens of free migration to the U.K. from elsewhere in the EU, and cumbersome regulations from the bloc’s capital in Brussels has prompted some Britons to ask: Is EU membership worth it? Following his Conservative Party’s victory in 2015 parliamentary elections, Prime Minister David Cameron fulfilled a 2013 pledge to schedule a referendum on the U.K.’s membership in the bloc.

What are the sides?

The official campaign from Britain to leave the EU is Vote Leave. The campaign to stay in the bloc is Stronger In. In brief, the “Leave” campaign argues that leaving the EU will allow Britons to “take back control and … spend our money on our priorities.” The “In” campaign says, “Britain is stronger, safer and better off in Europe than we would be out on our own.”

Allegiances are not defined by party affiliation. Both Cameron and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn support staying in, as does George Osborne, the U.K.’s chancellor of the exchequer, a Conservative, who warned the country would become “permanently poorer,” with its economy shrinking by 6 percent, if it left the bloc. But Boris Johnson, the former London mayor who belongs to the same Conservative Party as Osborne and Cameron, and who is a potential rival to Cameron for the party’s leadership, is an advocate of leaving, as is Kate Hoey, a prominent Labour lawmaker, and the U.K. Independence Party, the right-wing political group.

Where British Politicians Stand


Toby Melville / Pool / AP

Prime Minister David Cameron, Conservative: STAY

Cameron sought—and received—better terms for the U.K.’s membership in the EU following negotiations that concluded in February, after which he said he supported staying in the bloc. “Britain can have best of both worlds,” he said. He described leaving the EU as a “leap in the dark. I do not believe that would be right for Britain.” And on June 21 he made a last-minute appeal to his fellow Britons: “Brits don’t quit. “We get involved, we take a lead, we make a difference, we get things done.”

Former London Mayor Boris Johnson, Conservative: GO

Cameron’s rival for Conservative leadership is the loudest voice advocating Britain’s exit. “There is simply no common political culture in Europe,” he said May 9. Days later, he took it a step further, telling the Sunday Telegraph: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.”

Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn, Labour: STAY

Corbyn has long been a Euroskeptic, that is, unconvinced on the merits of the European project and its impact on individual states. But he is fighting, at least publicly, to keep Britain in the bloc. “It is not the European Union that is the problem here, it is the Conservative Government” of Cameron, he said May 14, hardly a ringing endorsement of the European project. He added: “Do we allow xenophobes to take over or do we instead occupy that political and intellectual territory of the idea that you can solve things together? You’d better build those alliances working with people rather than isolating yourselves from them.”

Former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major: STAY

Major, a Conservative, and Blair, a Labourite, made a joint appeal on June 9 for Britain to stay in the EU, saying a vote to leave could lead to Scotland voting to secede from the U.K. and imperil the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Major’s words: “The plain, uncomfortable truth is that the unity of the U.K. itself is on the ballot paper in two weeks’ time. There is a serious risk of a new referendum, not immediately perhaps, but eventually.”

And Blair’s: “We understand that, although today Northern Ireland is more stable and more prosperous than ever, that stability is poised on carefully constructed foundations. And so we are naturally concerned at the prospect of anything that could put those foundations at risk.”

But Theresa Villiers, the government’s Northern Ireland secretary who backs the Leave campaign, called the suggestion “highly irresponsible.”

U.K. Voters: TOSS-UP

Daily tracking polls of the referendum indicate the contest is close: 41 percent voting to remain; 40 percent voting to leave; and 14 percent undecided. Here are the results of a YouGov poll that were published on May 18:

EU referendum: Leave lead at two https://t.co/f61CIcvqpx pic.twitter.com/RvnzZVJOuX

— YouGov (@YouGov) June 20, 2016

That figure had fluctuated dramatically in the days leading up to the vote, with the “exit” camp leading, but polls released June 20 suggested the prospect of an “exit” was diminishing, prompting a surge in global stock markets.

Taking Sides From Outside


Ben Stansall / Pool / AP

Former U.S. President Clinton: STAY

Writing in the New Statesman, Clinton echoed Major and Blair’s comments, saying he worried about “future prosperity and peace of Northern Ireland” if Britain voted to leave. He added:

In the end, the decision is yours. As someone who has felt great admiration and affection for your nation for almost 50 years, and who has worked with you in office and through my Foundation for more than two decades, I have seen the difference your leadership has made both within the EU, and as a leading representative of Europe throughout the world. I hope you will stay.

EU Voters: STAY

The European establishment has given Cameron many of the benefits he sought for continued EU membership, and, presumably, wants Britain to stay. There are also fears that an exit would prompt other EU members to leave, further weakening a bloc that has been buffeted since 2008 by economic malaise and the most-severe migrant crisis faced by the region since World War II. Perhaps more severe for the bloc is the threat of a credit downgrade for individual member states that are heavily exposed to Britain. European citizens, meanwhile, want Britain to stay.



European Council President Donald Tusk: STAY

Tusk, the president of the European Council, railed on May 17 against Johnson’s invocation of Hitler, calling it “absurd.”

EU remains most effective firewall against conflicts in Europe. Alternative is political chaos, national egoism & anti-democratic tendencies

— Donald Tusk (@eucopresident) May 17, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama: STAY

The American president has, quite controversially, weighed in on Britain’s upcoming vote. Obama’s view: “The U.K. is at its best when it’s helping to lead a strong European Union. It leverages U.K. power to be part of the EU. I don’t think the EU moderates British influence in the world, it magnifies it.” He added that even if Britons voted to leave the bloc, it wouldn’t alter the “special relationship” between the two countries, even if it pushed the U.K. to “the back of the queue” on trade deals with the U.S.

Donald Trump: GO

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee said in an interview that aired May 16 that if he were British he would probably vote to leave. Trump also called the EU “very bureaucratic and very difficult” and a “disaster.”

Economic Warnings


Reuters

U.S. Federal Reserve: Janet Yellen, the chair of the central bank, told congressional lawmakers on June 21 that an exit  could have “significant economic repercussions” that would result in “a period of uncertainty both for the United Kingdom and for the future of European economic integration.”

World Trade Organization: Roberto Azevedo, the head of the WTO, said in an interview published Wednesday by the Financial Times that leaving the EU would cost Britons an extra $13.2 billion in import tariffs. “Pretty much all of the U.K.’s trade [with the world] would somehow have to be negotiated,” he said. Full interview here.

Institute for Fiscal Studies: The nonpartisan think tank has warned that Britain could face two more years of austerity measures if it votes to leave the EU.  Those steps were introduced as Britain emerged from the global economic recession. Here’s an excerpt:

In the short run, our estimates therefore suggest that the overall effect of Brexit would be to damage the public finances. On the basis of estimates by NIESR, the effect could be between £20 billion and £40 billion in 2019–20, more than enough to wipe out the planned surplus. In the long run, lower GDP would likely mean lower cash levels of public spending.

OECD:

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of 34 mostly rich countries, warned Britain against leaving the EU.

#Brexit would constitute a tax of £2200 per household/yr by 2020 & up to £5000 by 2030: OECD https://t.co/DHPCRDAnWW pic.twitter.com/UauKzusm33

— OECD (@OECD) April 27, 2016

International Monetary Fund:

The IMF said in mid-May that Brexit could hurt both the U.K. and Europe. Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, said the impact on Britain’s economy could range from “pretty bad to very, very bad.”

Bank of England:

Mark Carney, the bank’s governor, warned May 12 that the consequences of Britain’s exit from the EU “could possibly include a technical recession.”

Business leaders:

The private sector has come down on both sides of the issue. Large British companies and transnational corporations have warned against a vote to leave. But in a letter published in mid-May in The Telegraph, more than 300 other industry leaders said the EU’s bureaucracy hurt Britain’s competitiveness.  “Brussels’ red tape stifles every one of Britain’s 5.4 million businesses, even though only a small minority actually trade with the EU,” they wrote, adding: “It’s time to vote leave and take back control.” But on June 20, three days before the vote, the heads of some of the U.K.’s biggest business figures and institutions, including Richard Branson and the Premier League, urged a vote to remain.  

A Chinese Bank’s Motivational Spanking

A video that shows eight Chinese bank employees being spanked with what looks like a plank has led to the suspension of two of the company’s top executives, and huge backlash online.

The video was first posted Monday by the People’s Daily––the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party––and shows employees of Changzhi Zhangze Rural Commercial Bank at a training session standing on stage while a man paces behind them. More than 200 employees participated in the “Breakthrough Performance” class. And its trainer, Jiang Yang, singled out the eight people for “failing to make a personal breakthrough” and their “inadequate team cohesiveness.” Jiang is a corporate trainer for the Shanghai-based Leadership Academy, and reportedly earns $15,000 (100,000 yuan) for his services. Before he smacked each employee several times, Jiang said, “get your butts ready.”

Here’s the video:

The spanking happened Saturday, and along with the video, the People’s Daily posted photos of male employees who had their heads shaved, and female employees who had their hair cut, reportedly also for poor performance at the training.

The video was widely shared online, which prompted an apology from Jiang, who called the spanking “a training model I have tried for years,” but that bank executives had not condoned. The bank’s chairman and deputy governor have been suspended, the BBC reported. The company has also issued an apology. The People’s Daily reported that “compensation is in discussion for the spanked employees.”

Corporal punishment is banned in China. But this is not the first time it’s been used as a business motivator, as the Shanghaiist points out. Under-performing sales people have been forced to crawl around a lake, and employees have been made to kneel for an hour on a steel overpass.  Corporal punishment was outlawed in schools in 1986, but remains common practice in rural areas.

The NYPD's Corruption Scandal

A scandal within the New York Police Department, which led to four arrests Monday, has its roots within an investigation into Mayor Bill de Blasio’s fundraising.

The four officers were arrested Monday on corruption charges, including accepting gifts for favors. At the center of this controversy are two businessmen, Jeremiah Reichberg and Jona Rechnitz, who just happen to be major campaign donors for de Blasio.

The two men have for years allegedly tried to increase their political influence in the city and use the police department for their own personal interests, including using officers as chauffeurs or bodyguards. Federal authorities, who are investigating de Blasio’s many fundraising efforts, uncovered just how far the two businessmen’s reach had gotten throughout the city.

Investigators found that four officers—Deputy Chief Michael Harrington, Deputy Inspector James Grant, Officer Richard Ochetal, and Sergeant David Villanueva—had accepted more than $100,000 in gifts from the two businessmen. The New York Times reported Monday:

The court papers in the case detail lavish gifts the two senior police officials are accused of receiving in exchange for taking official action, including expensive meals and free overseas and domestic trips; and the referral of business to a security company associated with one of the officials. The deputy inspector was also accused of receiving a trip on a private jet to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl weekend in 2013, accompanied by a prostitute. The sergeant was charged in a separate but related scheme that involved aiding applicants for firearms licenses, the papers said.

Reichberg was charged along with the four officers. Rechnitz, the other businessman, recently pleaded guilty to corruption charges for allegedly bribing the head of the union that represents the city’s corrections officers as well as a hedge-fund financier, and has started cooperating with investigators.

To be sure, the mayor has not been linked to these latest arrests, but they come amid five ongoing investigations into de Blasio’s campaign fundraising. Some relate to Nyclass, an animal-rights group that donated heavily to influence legislation to take horses off New York City streets. The Times has reported on other aspects of the investigations:

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat elected in 2013, has made no secret of his attempts to raise significant sums to bolster his agenda through that group, the Campaign for One New York, and through an effort in 2014 to wrest control of the State Senate from the Republicans by supporting several Democratic candidates. Donors to the mayor’s political endeavors include major unions and real estate developers, and many of them have business before the city.

De Blasio has shut down his group, the Campaign for One New York, and said he has stopped raising money through it. But, the de Blasio’s fundraising efforts—State Senate Democrats, the Campaign for One New York, and his mayoral election—are tied back to the two businessmen, Rechnitz and Reichberg.

A company run by Rechnitz, JSTD Madison, donated $50,000 to the Campaign for One New York and $102,300 to New York’s Democratic Senate campaign committee (the limit for contributions to statewide committees), while Rechnitz himself donated $4,950 to de Blasio’s general-election campaign (the limit for individual donors) and collected $41,650 for the campaign as a bundler.

Investigators want to see if the city gave the two businessmen, who were both members of the mayor’s inaugural committee, favorable real estate deals. In April de Blasio said: “I know of no favorable municipal action that they got.”

In May, the mayor returned $32,200 in contributions from seven “straw donors,” whose donations were funneled through a Queens beauty wholesaler to avoid campaign finance limits. Meanwhile, de Blasio continues to face criticism that he has rewarded large donors with political appointments. The mayor maintains that his fundraising, while aggressive, was legal. “I feel fine,” he said in April, “because everything we’ve done was legal.”

The Paradox of ‘Pretty’

Have you heard of the pencil test? It goes like this: Put a pencil under one of your breasts. If the pencil falls, then good news for you, friend: You are the owner of a pair of perky bosoms. If the writing implement remains aloft, however—prevented by flesh from falling to the floor—then this is evidence of, if you’ll pardon the language, sag. The un-fallen pencil indicates that gravity has won out, yet again, with its victim being not just your chest, but also—this is the real point of the test—your sexual relevance.

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Arch Enemies

It should go without saying that the pencil test is, its vaguely sciency application of gravitational forces notwithstanding, exceedingly stupid. But so desperate are we—“we,” as a cultural collective, and “we,” as women in particular—for signs of our status within the great hierarchy of human hotness that the test has been deployed by women who are otherwise thoughtful, otherwise rational, and otherwise not prone to using office supplies as scientific instruments.

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano is one of those women: She took the test on a lark, having arrived at her 30s, to measure her own bosomic perk. As she writes in her new book Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s Lives, amused in retrospect at her folly, “It probably doesn’t take a degree in women’s studies to see the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ trap at play here. Standing there in my kitchen, I laughed out loud when I realized I’d done the same test 20 years prior”—that time around to determine whether her breasts were developed enough to, yep, hold a pencil in place. “I mean, what’s the sweet spot?” she asks. “To indicate that its subject is properly breasted, should the pencil stay but shake loose after six seconds? Dangle by the eraser? Levitate?”

Naomi Wolf’s “beauty myth” has given way to something more nebulous: a beauty imperative that is not only pervasive, but also at odds with itself.

There is no sweet spot; the pencil test is yet one more way that the assorted expectations of our aesthetic existence have exerted themselves on a culture that is at once obsessed with beauty and dismissive of it. It’s been 25 years since the publication of The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf’s scathing—and best-selling—critique of the beauty industry; the intervening decades have seen the rise of, among many other things, Jezebel/the term “unretouched photos”/the term “empowerment”/Amy Schumer/several iterations of the Dove “real beauty” campaign/consumerized feminism. They are also decades, however, that have seen the rise of Sephora and Spanx and the architectural heights of celebrity stilettos.

Wolf’s beauty myth—beauty as a social force that is informed by a collision of capitalistic urges and outdated cultural assumptions—has retained its mythic status: Whoever you are, and however you see yourself as a person and as an object in the world (which is also to say, however you see other people seeing you), its forces will exert themselves on your life. Yet in an age of internet-driven cultural awareness, the myth has given way to something more nebulous and perhaps even more pernicious: a beauty imperative that is not only pervasive, but also, in many ways, fundamentally at odds with itself.

That’s one conclusion, at any rate, that you can take away from Face Value. Beauty, with its hazy, heady mix of aspiration and anxiety, tends to be both excessively documented and poorly understood, in part because of a culture-wide confusion when it comes to beauty’s various, often unspoken, mandates. (The word “beautiful,” Whitefield-Madrano points out, shares a proto-Indo-European root with bene, the Latin for good; we still, on some level, read moral messages into appearances, though we are now generally self-conscious enough to preface any such readings with a palliative “not to be superficial, but …”)

The messy relationship women, in particular, have with beauty derives in part from another paradox: The beauty imperative sees attractiveness on the one hand as a goal to be strived for, but on the other as something that must be strived for silently and with a degree of embarrassment. The current culture demands that women work for compliments when it comes to our appearance, but also that we not, for the most part, accept them—to be obsessed with our looks, but also, per the delicate dance that must be done between “ego” and “egotism,” to hate them. “The assumed marriage of insecurity and beauty,” Whitefield-Madrano puts it, “creates an expectation that we stick to a particular storyline—we can admit we look good only if we’ve already paid our dues of not liking how we look.”

It’s a tangled web: beauty as objective, and genetic, and Darwinian—atoms, arranged just so—but beauty, also, as unpaid labor whose results are intimately connected to social worth, perceived and otherwise. For humans caught in that web, male and especially female, it can be a frustrating, not to mention exhausting, thing to navigate.

The author has an academic background in women’s studies and a professional one in editing women’s magazines; she has, for the past several years, been combining both areas of expertise in her blog The Beheld, which explores the beauty imperative as both a lived reality and a sociological phenomenon. (Tagline: “beauty, and what it means.”) Face Value is the outgrowth of that project, and its purpose is to tease out the nuances and contradictions inherent in the beauty imperative so that our conversations about its impact can be better informed—and thus more productive. “Beauty invites gaps in our thinking,” Whitefield-Madrano writes. She wants her book to help “to close these gaps by challenging our assumptions, looking at beauty not only in terms of gender, power, and low self-esteem but sisterhood, ideology, and identity.”

Wherever there is an easy conclusion about beauty’s role in our lives, Whitefield-Madrano injects doubt, and detail, and nuance.

The topics at hand (ideally, of course, a well-moisturized one) will feel familiar to anyone who is already conversant with the ideas Wolf tackled in 1991: the media’s effect on women’s self-image; scientists’ Sisyphean attempts to quantify physical attractiveness; corporations’ vested interest in the propagation of feminine insecurity. Where Whitefield-Madrano distinguishes herself, though, is in her partially subjective approach to those topics—an approach informed not just by her own life (the pencil test!), but also by those of the women, and to a lesser extent the men, she interviews. She starts with herself as a test case for the contradictions she is illuminating: She is both a feminist and a nearly lifelong lover of makeup. She is self-confident and, at times, unsure of herself. She loves what beauty represents; she also hates it. Understanding those contradictions within her own experience, Whitefield-Madrano examines the scientific literature, and finds similar contradictions and nuances played out at the level of the culture.

The result of all this: Wherever there is a conventional, easy conclusion or stereotype about beauty’s role in human lives (“women wear makeup because they’re insecure,” “the media make women feel bad about themselves,” etc.), she injects doubt, and detail, and nuance. Images of models with glossy hair and taut skin and thigh gaps may make women dissatisfied with what they see in the mirror; those images, just as readily, can serve as aspirational fantasies that have no bearing, and occasionally even a positive one, on women’s self-esteem. Beauty may cause jealousy between women; just as often, though, the shared recognition of its expectations and requirements can bond women together. Makeup, far from being smearable evidence of feminine insecurity, is used by many women as a tool of self-expression. (“Cosmetics” derives from the Greek kosmos, which means both “adornment” and also, more interestingly, “order.”)

When a culture is so tangled up in its own contradictory anxieties, teasing out the nuances is precisely the kind of effort—and Face Value is precisely the kind of book—that can be beneficial: We need to understand the paradoxes we have internalized if we are to have any hope of unknotting them. And Whitefield-Madrano is an expert guide in all that, writing with a cheerful, blog-inflected tone (one of Face Value’s chapters is called “Hotties, Foxes, and Cankles”) and yet citing the studies and the people you’d expect: Simone de Beauvoir, Sigmund Freud, Erving Goffman, Aristotle. (She doesn’t mention Foucault, but his theories about the power structures that shape human lives whisper, insistently, from the periphery.)

Where Face Value is slightly less rigorous, though, is in the particularities of beauty mandates as they are experienced by minority women. Whitefield-Madrano, at the outset, promises that she will try to be as diverse and inclusive as possible in her selections of the people she interviews and highlights. She does indeed address the particular frustrations of normative beauty standards as experienced by queer women, the ways that bonding and competing over beauty affect them. But while she notes that “certainly women of color navigate a different set of challenges in regard to beauty than white women do,” the nuance and detail that otherwise inform the book are less evident when it comes to those challenges.

Despite that shortcoming, though, Face Value is an immensely valuable work, one that seamlessly—and impressively—combines the tropes of the academic lit review and the memoir and the work of cultural criticism into an engaging, and timely, follow-up to The Beauty Myth and the other similar books that have come before. “Starting a conversation” is traditionally a very dull purpose for a book; in this case, though, Whitefield-Madrano makes a convincing case for the urgency of the conversation she hopes to have. We live in a confessional culture, provoked by social media and the internet and the warmth of the human impulse to share and admit and commiserate. And yet beauty—the thing that affects us all, for better or for worse—remains largely outside of the realm of rigorous discussion. That is in large part because its imperatives are judged to be too silly to be discussed in polite company—and, at the same time, too profoundly significant.

Democrats Fight Back on Gun Control

The White House criticized the U.S. Senate’s rejection of a series of gun proposals on Tuesday, as Democratic backers of gun control turned up the heat on opponents.

“What we saw last night on the floor of the United States Senate was a shameful display of cowardice,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on MSNBC Tuesday. He added: “Republicans have run around and spent the last week saying ‘radical Islamic extremism’ to anybody who will listen. But when it actually come to preventing those extremists from being able to walk into a gun store and buy a guy, they’re AWOL.”

President Obama has vented his frustrations with the stagnation of gun laws in Congress in the past, most recently following an attack on an Orlando nightclub on June 12 that left 49 people dead. And on Tuesday, he did it again, saying on Twitter, “Gun violence requires more than moments of silence. It requires action. In failing that test, the Senate failed the American people.”

A series of mass shootings in recent years has led to repeated calls by Obama to tighten gun regulations. But on Monday afternoon, such proposals failed to pass—again. Senators introduced a series of gun control measures that would have expanded background checks and barred people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns. They were voted down. As my colleague Russell Berman noted, “It was all a familiar ritual, the latest reaffirmation of deep political division that has followed several of the mass shootings in recent years.”

In response, Democrats offered a series of inflammatory charges. Senator Chris Murphy, who led a 15-hour filibuster on the chamber floor last week, suggested that by not tightening gun regulations Republicans are helping ISIS get access to guns. “We’ve got to make this clear, constant case that Republicans have decided to sell weapons to ISIS,” Murphy said. “That’s what they’ve decided to do. ISIS has decided that the assault weapon is the new airplane, and Republicans, in refusing to close the terror gap, refusing to pass bans on assault weapons, are allowing these weapons to get in the hands of potential lone-wolf attackers. We’ve got to make this connection and make it in very stark terms.”

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren agreed with Murphy on Twitter:

.@ChrisMurphyCT said it right: The @SenateGOP have decided to sell weapons to ISIS.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 20, 2016

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cited measures sponsored by Senators John Cornyn and Chuck Grassley as “real solutions.” “No one wants a terrorist to be able to buy guns or explosives,” he said. For now, as has happened before, the measures have been put on hold.

The Hidden Insights of Ben Affleck’s Viral Armageddon Commentary

Like many Hollywood actors, Ben Affleck’s career has been defined by epic highs and sweeping lows—over more than 20 years, he’s been an indie darling, a marquee idol, a comic-book superhero two times over, an Academy Award-winning director, and the star of critical and financial flops like Daredevil, Jersey Girl, and Gigli. When Affleck does appear in stinkers like Batman v. Superman, he’s often the most interesting part of the film, but his continued presence in such awful movies prompts questions of just how self-aware he is about his career arc. The best place for answers, strangely enough? The DVD commentary of his 1998 hit Armageddon.

The internet is full of forgotten pop-culture nuggets, and last week, a snippet of Affleck’s sarcastic peanut-gallery performance, recorded 17 years ago, went viral. Over a clip that sets up the disaster movie’s premise (where a team of oil drillers flies into space to blow up an oncoming asteroid), Affleck snarkily recalled the director Michael Bay telling him to shut up when he dared poke holes in the plot. “In a week, we’re going to learn how to be astronauts?” Affleck joked. “This is a little bit of a logic stretch, let’s face it.” It’s practically a buried secret on a special DVD edition of the film, but if you can find it, it’s a wonderfully candid gem that sheds light on the absurdity and appeal of the big-budget blockbuster.

The commentary track is only featured on the Criterion Collection’s edition of Armageddon, which was an odd release even at the time (Criterion usually only puts out obscure art films, great works of foreign cinema, and forgotten classics). The DVD is now only intermittently available for purchase on Amazon. The commentary cuts between Bay, the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and Affleck’s co-star Bruce Willis, all of whom contribute general platitudes and back-patting about the film’s tough production. Then there’s Affleck, chiming in with extended parodies of the film Sling Blade, which was about an intellectually disabled Southerner (played by Armageddon co-star Billy Bob Thornton), making silly sound effects during any elaborate stunt scene, and pointing out all of the film’s numerous plot holes.

“Have you ever noticed that everybody in all these movies always has to be ‘the best?’” he muses. “Bruce Willis is ‘the best’ deep-core driller? I didn’t know they rated deep-core drillers. Like, if you went around and asked somebody ‘Who’s the best deep-core driller?’ You know what I mean? Like, ‘I’m the best espresso maker in Manhattan.’ How do you know? Who’s keeping track of these things?”

Affleck’s continued presence in awful movies prompts questions of how self-aware he is about his career arc.

In 1998, when the commentary was likely recorded (such tracks are usually done right before a film premieres), Affleck was an up-and-coming star, having appeared in Kevin Smith’s indie hit Chasing Amy and won an Oscar for his Good Will Hunting screenplay alongside Matt Damon. His headline-grabbing relationship with Jennifer Lopez and string of flops were around the corner. The following years would bring his comeback directing Oscar-winning films like The Town and Argo, his public divorce from Jennifer Garner, and his subsequent rebound into superstardom as the new Batman.

All of which is to say that Affleck has seen every facet of Hollywood fame. But what comes out most in his Armageddon commentary is his playful inquisitiveness about the business of making such big films, and his respect for (and gentle mockery of) the product that ensues. “It cuts together pretty seamlessly, I must say, for something that I thought would look like total hokum,” he says of one major set-piece, after remembering how chintzy it seemed on set. Of another scene that features a one-second shot of a helicopter, he notes,

This is where you just have a random helicopter in the background, just because you’re a big movie, and you’re expensive, and you can. But you have no idea how much of a headache having a helicopter in the background causes. It’s all safety this, and money that, and so many hours they can fly, and they’re on the walkies, and the wind’s blasting everywhere. If I hadn’t brought it up, you’d have forgot about that yellow helicopter in the background right now.

The irony, of course, is that Affleck was making fun of the excesses of the big-budget Hollywood films that would come to define him—Armageddon was a big hit, but another film he made with Bay, Pearl Harbor, was a relative disappointment. Even after rebounding critically he’s once again been shackled to a large-scale franchise in the new wave of Batman movies. During an interview, he was asked about Batman v. Superman’s terrible reviews, and his pained expression became the internet’s new favorite meme. Vulture eventually proclaimed, “We Are All Sad Ben Affleck,” identifying with his disappointment even though he brought much of it on himself.

And yet Affleck’s commentary isn’t just a Statler and Waldorf routine. He might sometimes seem disdainful of the high-octane cinema style of Bay, who’s responsible for films like Bad Boys, The Rock, and the Transformers series. But he gives credit where it’s due, backhanded though his praise might be. “It kinda looks like a Miller Genuine Draft commercial, but, I like those commercials,” he says of one montage, midway through the film, of children waving American flags in the street. “It’s patriotic, simple, beautiful, just about, you know, America! I’m a cynic, and not incredibly jingoistic, but I find it moving!”

Perhaps that’s why Affleck returned to work with Bay on Peal Harbor, an ultra-jingoistic misfire that abandoned the inherent silliness of Armageddon and bombed with critics as a result. Like many viewers, he may only be able to recognize the flaws in a film after the fact—and for all of Armageddon’s easily-mocked plot holes, it was one of the biggest hits of the decade. “He’s like a kid,” Affleck says of Bay. “I think that’s why his taste is so in tune with the people who go to these movies in droves, cause most of these people are kids themselves.”

That insight is partof  the fascination of listening to Affleck jokingly trash Armageddon. As a filmmaker and movie star, he hasn’t ever quite learned from the mistakes he’s obviously aware the film makes. At the same time, he knows the movie was crucial in giving him the fame he’d later capitalize on for bolder artistic endeavors, both great and flawed. Early on in the commentary track, he recalls performing one of his own stunts on camera, a new experience after years making micro-budget indie movies like Dazed and Confused and Mallrats. “That was my introduction to Michael Bay,” he says. “[Bay] said, ‘You just jump off this thing, and it’s slow motion and there’ll be an explosion behind you.’ And I thought, ‘I’ve arrived.’” Indeed, he had.

Orange Is the New Black: ‘Toast Can’t Never Be Bread’

For the fourth season of Orange Is the New Black, Spencer Kornhaber and Sophie Gilbert are discussing the series via recaps, taking turns to analyze one episode at a time. Spoilers abound; don’t read further than you’ve watched.

Episode 13, “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread”

Read the review of the previous episode here.

Why Daya? So many characters have been antagonized by Litchfield’s administration this season—off the top of my head: Ruiz, Maritza, Alex, Piper, Blanca, Red—but it was an inmate who mostly stayed in the background, quietly trying to navigate her place in the social order, who picked up a pistol and pointed it at C.O. Humphrey. The feeling of randomness, that it could be any girl who ended up with that gun, is what’s so brilliant about this cliffhanger. For one thing, it shows that the inmates’ grievances really are shared. For another, it creates a feeling like the one when Poussey died—the lurching sensation when the wheel of fate spins and lands on someone.

Daya is, no doubt, a fascinating character to be in this position. She’s been with the show from the start, and we’ve been made very aware of the stakes that exist for her: a baby, and now her mom, on the outside. Running through her head must be the realization that if she pulls the trigger, it means she’ll likely never get to be a mother to her kid. But so too must the memory of C.O. Bennett, the war-vet guard who impregnated her and abandoned her. “Fuckin’ C.O.s, y’all are pieces of shit,” she spat with more anger (and at a quicker pace) than we’ve ever heard from her.

More Orange Is the New Black

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Ep. 11: ‘People Persons’
Ep. 12: ‘The Animals’

It’s a testament to the careful construction of this season that viewers are, on some level, hooting along with the mob of inmates for Daya to spill some prison-guard blood. Individually, Humphrey is a monster. Collectively, we’ve come to see, MCC is something worse—a carefully calibrated machine that treats inmates as objects. This episode re-emphasized the cravenness of prison overlords who would let a dead woman rot on the dining-hall floor so they could spend time figuring out who to dishonestly blame for her death. Most sickening was Dixon trying to comfort Bailey by casually listing atrocities he’d committed in Afghanistan—the latest sign of Orange Is the New Black’s surprising transgressive skepticism toward veterans, and of its willingness to make Piscatella’s guards the rare totally unsympathetic characters on this show.

The inhumanity of MCC was in stark contrast to the raw and varied mourning of the humans within the prison. Norma breaking her silence vow to sing to Soso was when I almost lost it. Poussey’s closest friends charted the range of possible reactions, with Janae airing the righteous rage of Black Lives Matter, Cindy eating and bantering, Suzanne obsessing over the manner of death, and Taystee trying to make herself useful. This show’s embrace of the meaning of “dramedy” has never been so heightened, with slapstick scenes amid the grief, culminating most deliriously at the expense of Abdullah’s hair: “It’s like Backdraft up in that shit!” “Little red riding head!”

Poussey’s death rippled also across the cliques that didn’t take much of an interest in her in life. After all, her suffocation happened as a result of the entire population’s collective action. That doesn’t mean the Aryans weren’t willing to say awful, insensitive stuff or that the meth-heads weren’t going to drink Poussey’s hooch or that Red wasn’t going to first and foremost worry about how this tragedy would affect her girls. But it does suggest a shared struggle. Some things really are universal: The ongoing joke was that people kept inappropriately sharing stories of their encounters with death, whether it was DeMarco talking about her cousin being murdered by someone with a full head of hair, the snorer revealing her parents’ suicides, or Doggett recalling the pilfering ghost of her uncle.

Popular culture is usually interested in straightforward hero-and-villain tales, and Orange Is the New Black has definitely given us some straightforward villains. But it wasn’t the most obviously terrible guard who killed Poussey. It was hapless, immediately apologetic Bayley, a kid who was enjoying a night in New York the same time as Poussey a few years back. Even eerier: Both got busted for trespassing while smoking marijuana, and while the white guy got let off by cops who joked about the idea he’d be seriously punished, the black woman was sent to the prison where she’d die. Caputo immediately excusing Bayley’s actions at the press conference was another example of screwed-up double standards, but in declining to blame either the killer or the victim, he implicitly pointed a finger where a finger most deserves to be pointed: at the system. I wish Caputo had criticized MCC directly, but maybe, just maybe, the uprising his speech caused will end up accomplishing the same. At the very least, it’s now a lot more difficult for Judy King to claim ignorance about the whole situation.

When Alex said of her would-be assassin Aydin that “he was a person,” she was repeating a mantra that’s surfaced in various forms across the season (most recently when Frieda was pelted with an egg). The simple notion that everyone is someone has been shown to be radical in a place like Litchfield, and it indeed can be a radical one in the wider world. Last season ended with a joyful moment of unity for the prison, where people rediscovered their shared humanity by the lake. This finale united everyone in anger, but it also made another call for empathy by depicting Poussey’s one wonderful night in New York City, full of drag queens and improv monks and some harmless trespassing. Orange Is the New Black isn’t just saying that someone like Poussey is a person. It’s saying that being a person means having the capacity for joy and wonder, and that the biggest crime is for all of that to be taken away.

Best line: Angie and Leanne screaming “Attica” without knowing what it means. “Oh, maybe it’s the dad from that bird book?” “Oh you mean To Kill a Mockingjay?” “Yeah! Hungry Games!”

Questions: The obvious one: What will Daya do? But also: What’s Piscatella’s secret? Will Coates quit? Will Judy speak out? And will this uprising have any reforming effect, or will it just get the entire population sent to Max?