Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 139

Game of Thrones: To the Reckless Go the Spoils

Every week for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz will be discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners are being made available to critics in advance this year, we'll be posting our thoughts in installments.

Spencer Kornhaber: Go ahead, bask in relief at Winterfell returned to the Starks, Ramsay cast to the kennel, Daenerys slaying slavers, and all of Game of Thrones’s most compelling characters still breathing despite the demise of few-to-no-liners like Rickon and the giant Wun Wun. But don’t let the endorphins distract you from the grand lesson of this episode, which is that Jon Snow really and truly knows nothing.

The safest-seeming prediction for how the Battle of the Bastards would go was that the Stark coalition would fight to the verge of defeat before Littlefinger’s army would save them, allowing Sansa a moment of revenge on Ramsay Bolton. The one big counterargument was that such an outcome seemed, well, too predictable. Tonight, Melisandre was even heard equivocating like a Thrones blogger writing a preview post, telling Jon that he could die again. But as is typical lately, the show chose the most obvious route—then executed with cinematic verve and just enough suspense.

That suspense largely relied on Jon making like a typical Stark man by putting emotional displays of honor over practical concerns. A lot of planning went into this battle, involving chips on tables and furrowed brows and synonyms for “flanking.” The result was a big, clear strategy for how to reverse the odds: Let the Boltons make the first attack. Sansa pleaded with Jon to be aware that Ramsay would try to goad him into doing something stupid. Jon said he wouldn’t fall for it.

And yet fall for it he did, abandoning logic at the first sign of toying from Ramsay. Granted, it would have been difficult both morally and moralewise for him to do nothing as Rickon ran from Bolton arrows. But for him to then charge against the Boltons after Rickon’s death, spurring his army to give up its important defensive position, was madness. As it was then demonstrated, this mistake should have gotten him and all his men killed, Sansa raped and/or killed, and the North lost permanently. Salvation only came thanks to the sister who he’d ignored, calling upon her frenemy (frenemuncle?), the de factor leader of the Vale.

Big-budget fantasy battles are easy to come by in Hollywood these days, but this one did stand out by breaking up the hack-and-slash slog with a few concrete, memorable elements. The longbow is a pivotal invention in military history, and here we saw the advantage that its coordinated use gave the Bolton side—an advantage ensured by the fact that they were the ones being charged at and not vice versa. While the phalanx is more reminiscent of ancient Greece rather than the medieval Western Europe that Westeros most directly resembles (and here are helpful Reddit historians explaining why that is), its implementation tonight came as a surprise and created some very tense viewing. Jon drowning in bodies will go down as one of the squirmiest, most unsettling moments in Thrones history.

Part of that squirminess owed to a sense of danger: Thrones usually kills off characters who err in the manner that Jon did tonight. If he wasn’t going to be trampled to his doom during the main skirmish, his weird confrontation with Ramsay in the Winterfell courtyard seemed like it might have resulted in him joining Wun Wun as a sad, dead porcupine. After all, running into a hail of arrows instead of having your soldiers gang up on your last remaining opponent is some Oberyn-level hubris. But the Lord of Light or at least the gods of Thrones ratings needs Jon alive, plausibility be damned.

The warfare in Meereen was far less tense than at Winterfell because it felt like the culmination of all of Daenerys’s too-sudden conquests, but with even more video-game camera swoops. You could even say it was a hat-trick of her greatest hits: 1) dragons;  2) converting enemy forces with promises of freedom; 3) murdering/intimidating pompous emissaries.

The Lord of Light or at least the gods of Thrones ratings needs Jon alive, plausibility be damned.

Far more interesting were the conversations before and after battle. Tyrion admonishing Dany to avoid scorched-Essos tactics so as to not be like her father should only fuel online speculation that the Khaleesi may turn into a Mad Queen. But her exchange with Yara and Theon showed that she’s actively trying to avoid becoming a villain. It was among the more overtly feminist scenes that the show has ever provided, a satisfying depiction of two women trying to break with millennia of gender roles so as to also break with millennia of injustice. Yes, Yara represents a smaller fighting force than uncle Euron, but Euron would force Dany into another marriage while Yara, delightfully, is merely open to the idea of a gay royal wedding.

The women-power themes in the East were matched in the West by Sansa ensuring victory for her house and then telling her longtime tormentor that she’d erase his name. Will she make like Dany and use her clout to try and “break the wheel” of cruelty in the realm? Throwing Ramsay to the dogs doesn’t exactly speak to a merciful heart, but if anyone has earned the right to feed a human to animals, it’s her and this human and these animals. More telling will be how she chooses to use wield influence with Littlefinger. Tonight’s battle wiped out the Stark army almost entirely; if Baelish wanted to take formal control of the North, he could. Why shouldn’t he, really? He’d be a smarter ruler than Jon.

Chris and Lenika, you’ve written a lot about anticipating the death of Ramsay. How do you feel now that it’s happened?

Entries from Christopher Orr and Lenika Cruz to come.

Why Istanbul Banned LGBT Rights Marches

Turkish riot police fired tear gas and plastic bullets at LGBT rights activists on Sunday in Istanbul. Authorities had banned the demonstration to “safeguard security and public order.”

Several dozen demonstrators marched down one of the major commercial arteries of Istanbul, many with rainbow flags, before 300 policemen dispersed the crowd with anti-riot gear, CBS News reports.

While homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey, like it is in several Arab countries, the governor of Istanbul has banned LGBT parades and demonstrations for security concerns. As the BBC reports, the security measures may be to prevent reactionary violence from Islamist extremists.

It comes after suspected Islamists attacked people listening to a rock album in an Istanbul record store on Friday evening for drinking alcohol and listening to music during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan...

Security in the city is already tight after bombings in recent months blamed on so-called Islamic State and Kurdish militants.

An ultra-nationalist youth group, the Alperen Hearths, called those planning to participate in the gay pride event immoral and said it would “stop the march” if it went ahead.

Istanbul Pride, another march for LGBT rights in Turkey, was scheduled for June 26. The event has gone on since 2003 and has, at times, been met with resistance from authorities. Last year, police shot water cannons and tear gas at demonstrators.

Authorities banned Istanbul Pride this year. Organizers of the event said “the governorship prefers to limit people’s rights and freedoms instead of taking measures to deal with the threats.”

Deadly Landslides in Indonesia

At least 35 people were killed in landslides and flooding in Indonesia this weekend, triggered by heavy rains.

The landslides happened in the Central Java province east of Jakarta, the capital of the Southeast Asian country. Officials with the Indonesian Disaster Management Agency said Sunday that of the 35 dead, 31 people were killed in landslides and four died being swept away in flooding.

Purworejo, a regency in the southern part of Java island, took the brunt of the landslides and flooding after the Bogowonto River swelled from heavy rains. At least 11 people died there, while several more are missing. CNN reports:

In one deadly incident, truck passengers tried to clear debris from a small landslide that had blocked the road. Numerous motorcycles were behind the truck when a bigger landslide hit them. Nine people died.

There are still 25 people missing in the 16 towns affected by the flooding and landslides, officials said. While most of the flooding has receded, soldiers, police, and volunteers are quickly searching the affected areas as heavy rains are expected to continue until Monday, the Associated Press reports.

The Most Contentious Meal of the Day

It was the (up)shot heard ‘round the world. In May, The New York Times’s data blog, having conducted a lengthy review of scholarly assessments of the meal that Americans have been told, time after time, is the day’s most important, declared what many had known, in their hearts as well as their stomachs, to be true: “Sorry, there’s nothing magical about breakfast.”

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Breakfast Cereal's Last Gasp

The pre-emptive “sorry” was an appropriate way both to soften the announcement and to sharpen it: Breakfast—when to eat it, what to eat for it (cereal? smoothies? cage-free eggs fried in organic Irish butter?), whether to eat it at all—has long been a subject of intense debate, accompanied by intense confusion and intense feeling. “Breakfast nowadays is cool,” the writer Jen Doll noted in Extra Crispy, the new newsletter from Time magazine that is devoted to, yep, breakfast. She wrote that in an essay about her failed attempt to enjoy pre-noon eating.

But breakfast wasn’t always cool. People of the Middle Ages shunned it on roughly the same grounds—food’s intimate connection to moral ideals of self-regimentation—that people of the current age glorify it; later, those navigating the collision of industrialization and the needs of the human body came to blame hearty breakfasts for indigestion and other ailments. Breakfast has been subject to roughly the same influences that any other fickle food fashions will be: social virality, religious dogmas, economic cycles, new scientific discoveries about the truth or falsity of the old saying “you are what you eat.” And all that has meant that the meal associated with the various intimacies of the morning hours has transformed, fairly drastically, over the centuries. Our current confusion when it comes to breakfast is, for better or worse, nothing new: We in the West, when it comes to our eggs—and our pancakes, and our bacon, and our muffins, and our yogurt, and our coffee—have long been a little bit scrambled.

* * *

The Europeans of the Middle Ages largely eschewed breakfast. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, lists praepropere—eating too soon—as one of the ways to commit the deadly sin of gluttony; the eating of a morning meal, following that logic, was generally considered to be an affront against God and the self. Fasting was seen as evidence of one’s ability to negate the desires of the flesh; the ideal eating schedule, from that perspective, was a light dinner (then consumed at midday) followed by heartier supper in the evening. People of the Middle Ages, the food writer Heather Arndt Anderson notes in her book Breakfast: A History, sometimes took another evening meal, an indulgent late-evening snack called the reresoper (“rear supper”). The fact that the reresoper was taken with ale and wine, Anderson writes, meant that it was “shunned by most decent folk”; that fact also might have contributed to breakfast’s own low status among medieval moralists, as “it was presumed that if one ate breakfast, it was because one had other lusty appetites as well.”

There were some exceptions to those prohibitions. Laborers were allowed a breakfast—they needed the calories for their morning exertions—as were the elderly, the infirm, and children. Still, the meal they took was generally small—a chunk of bread, a piece of cheese, perhaps some ale—and not treated as a “meal,” a social event, so much as a pragmatic necessity.

‘It was presumed that if one ate breakfast, it was because one had other lusty appetites as well.’

It was Europe’s introduction to chocolate, Anderson argues, that helped to change people’s perspective on the moral propriety of breaking fast in the morning hours. “Europe was delirious with joy” at the simultaneous arrival, via expeditions of the New World, of coffee, tea, and chocolate (which Europeans of the time often took as a beverage), she writes. Chocolate in particular “caused such an ecstatic uproar among Europe’s social elite that the Catholic Church began to feel the pressure to change the rules.” And so, in 1662, Cardinal Francis Maria Brancaccio declared that “Liquidum non frangit jejunum”: “Liquid doesn’t break the fast.”

That barrier to breakfast having been dismantled, people started to become breakfast enthusiasts. Thomas Cogan, a schoolmaster in Manchester, was soon claiming that breakfast, far from being merely acceptable, was in fact necessary to one’s health: “[to] suffer hunger long filleth the stomack with ill humors.” Queen Elizabeth was once recorded eating a hearty breakfast of bread, ale, wine, and “a good pottage [stew], like a farmer’s, made of mutton or beef with ‘real bones.’”

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century—and the rise of factory work and office jobs that accompanied it—further normalized breakfast, transforming it, Abigail Carroll writes in Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal, from an indulgence to an expectation. The later years of the 1800s, in particular, saw an expansion of the morning meal into a full-fledged social event. Wealthy Victorians in the U.S. and in England dedicated rooms in their homes to breakfasting, the BBC notes, considering the meal a time for the family to gather before they scattered for the day. Newspapers targeted themselves for at-the-table consumption by the men of the families. Morning meals of the wealthy often involved enormous, elaborate spreads: meats, stews, sweets.

With that, the Victorians met the Medieval edicts against breakfast by swinging to the other extreme: Breakfast became not a prohibition or a pragmatic acquiescence to the demands of the day, but rather a feast in its own right. And that soon led to another feature of industrialization, Carroll writes: the host of health problems, indigestion chief among them, that people of the 19th century and the early 20th came to know as “dyspepsia.” They weren’t sure exactly what caused those problems; they suspected, however, that the heavy meals of the morning hours were key contributors. (They were, of course, correct.)

Here were the roots of the current obesity epidemic—the culinary traditions of active lifestyles, imported to sedentary ones—and they led to another round of debates about what breakfast was and should be. Fighting against his era’s preference for heavy breakfasts, Pierre Blot, the French cookbook author and professor of gastronomy, stipulated that breakfast that be, ideally, as small as possible. He also argued that it should, when consumed at all, consist of meats (cold, leftover from the supper the night before) rather than cakes or sweets, which rotted the teeth. (Blot further advised against taking tea with breakfast—water, coffee, milk, and even cocoa were preferable—and prohibited liquor.)

Blot was echoed in his advice by the Clean Living Movement that arose during the Jacksonian era and that has remained as a feature of American culture, in some form, ever since. The movement, which emphasized vegetarianism and resisted industrialized food processes like the chemical leavening of bread, also recommended abstinence from stimulants like coffee and tea. It led to products like Sylvester Graham’s eponymous “crackers”—made of the whole grain that, Graham thought, would curb sexual appetites along with those of the stomach—and helped to make cereal a thus-far-enduring feature of the American breakfast table. (The irony that the “cereal” of today is laden with sugar and chemicals would surely not be lost on Graham or on his fellow Clean Living proponent, John Harvey Kellogg.)

The cereals invented by Graham and Kellogg and C.W. Post became popular in part because they could simply be poured into bowls, with no cooking required; soon, technological developments were doing their own part to turn the laborious breakfasts of the 19th century into briefer, simpler affairs. The advent of toasters meant that stale bread could be quickly converted, with the help of a little butter and maybe some jam, into satisfying meals. Waffle irons and electric griddles and the invention in Bisquik, in 1930, did the same. Those appliances and other cooking aids made breakfast more convenient to produce during a time that found more and more women leaving the home for the workplace—first in response to the labor shortages brought about by the World Wars, and then on their own accord.

During a time that found Betty Friedan equating cooking with the oppression of women, breakfast became the locus for a fight: Could women both win bread and toast it?

But breakfast also became more fraught. During a time that found Betty Friedan equating cooking with the systemic oppression of women, the morning meal forced a question: Could women both win bread and toast it? Breakfast presented a similar challenge for men: In the 1940s and 1950s, Anderson notes, amid the anxieties about traditional gender roles that the post-war climate brought about, cookbooks aimed at men emerged in the marketplace. They suggested how to cook breakfasts, in particular, that would be composed of “manly” foods like steak and bacon. They proposed that eggs be fried not in pats of butter, but in “man-sized lumps” of it. Even baked goods got masculine-ized: Brick Gordon, in 1947, recommended that male cooks might, if baking biscuits, eschew ladylike rolling pins for … beer bottles.

Today, those anxieties live on, in their way: Breakfast remains fraught, politically and otherwise. (And that’s not even outside of the slow-poached minefield that is brunch.) The current debates, though, tend to address not gender roles, but rather considerations of health—for the individual consumer, for the culture in which they participate, and for the planet. The low-fat craze of the 1990s, the low-carb craze of the 2000s, today’s anxieties about animal cruelty and environmental sustainability and GMOs and gluten and longevity and, in general, the moral dimensions of a globalized food system—all of them are embodied in breakfast.

And so is another unique feature of contemporary life: the Internet argument. The essay in which Jen Doll declared breakfast’s coolness was a confessional titled “I’m a Breakfast Hater.” The Times’s article describing the non-magical nature of breakfast was preceded by “Is Breakfast Overrated?” and, elsewhere on the web, an article explaining breakfast’s importance from the blog Shake Up Your Wake Up. It was preceded by thousands of other pieces that are all, in some way, engaging with profound questions about the most basic meal of the day. One of them was from the Times itself. It was called “Seize the Morning: The Case for Breakfast.”

Orange Is the New Black: ‘It Sounded Nicer in My Head’

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 seven, “It Sounded Nicer in My Head”

Read the review of the previous episode here.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” Piper told Nicky as her melanin-deprived posse lifted buckets and grunted about C.S. Lewis behind her.

“Of course not,” Nicky replied. “But real talk: Sometimes what it looks like is all anybody can see.”

More Orange Is the New Black

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Ep. 6: ‘Piece of Sh*t’
Ep. 8: 'Friends in Low Places'

Yep, real talk. After the literally searing end to this episode, all anybody will see about Piper is that she’s a neo-Nazi, even though she doesn’t think she’s one—which draws parallels with how the mark of a criminal conviction works in the larger world as you wish. It’s hard to not feel both sad for Piper and mad at her. The game she had been playing with the Latinas was less about politics or profit than pride, and even worse, Piper was sloppy: a serious operator wouldn’t make a strategic mistake like abandoning Hapakuka. She inflicted very real consequences on Ruiz, and Ruiz has now returned the favor, in some ways rendering physical the mental and spiritual corrupting that viewers have noted in Piper over four seasons.

Lolly has a contrasting view on perception from Nicky—“Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she told Healy—but that’s because of medical problems, not Piperesque hubris. This episode poignantly showed the frustration and sadness that Lolly, a typically comic character, has faced throughout her whole life, reminding that correctional facilities often end up as places to stow the mentally ill outside of society’s sight. It’s been a long struggle—spanning the Amiga computers era to the 2000 election to whenever gentrifiers first started eating green spaghetti—and Christina Brucato was so good at aping Lori Petty’s mannerisms and vibes that it took me a while to disbelieve my eyes and realize these were two different actresses. In helping Whitehill, Healy got probably his best and last chance for some amount of image rehabilitation with viewers—who can’t relate to his speech on the passage of time?

Poor Judy King is also facing the issue of perception vs. intention. Whatever person she is today, in the ‘80s she put on a puppet show whose very synopsis is enough to make Yoga Jones wince. In turn, Taystee & co. are trying to capitalize on the demand for images of King that “tell a story”—the truth of the story itself be damned. The world is now primed to believe that the photo of Judy running from Black Cindy reflects larger controversy, and so in this show where the most hilarious/tragic thing that could happen usually does, we can expect that the world shall have that photo in circulation soon enough. Until then, we get hilarious scenes of Judy trying to cloak her utter terror while misunderstanding why the black girls are suddenly trying to get her alone.

Newly returned Nicky is an expert in how to put on one particular kind of appearance: of sobriety. The fact that she got hooked again right before returning to Litchfield is heartbreaking and a bit frustrating as a viewer—it would be so much more fun to have Natasha Lyonne using her arsenal of facial tics for the camera without having to worry about when her narrative will turn dark again. Of course, addiction is addiction; the storytelling around it has to be, to some extent, repetitive. For now, we can appreciate her vulgar mouth, tell-it-like-it-is intelligence (shower-pooper case closed, instantly), the sight of Morello hanging off of her (a preview of marital infidelity?), and her ability to make Red into a soft, loving presence—though one imagines Red won’t be happy when she realizes her stove has been used for human branding.

Best line: Morello: “I don’t think racism should be a group activity. It’s private!”

Questions: Will Piper endure the pain to turn her swastika into a four-square? Is Red and Gloria’s peace with each other permanent, and will it result in any action on saving Sophia? Will Aleida’s nail-salon ambitions stick? Just how ripe for lawsuits is the pending chain-gang education program? And is the next great Litchfield scandal over a seltzer machine?

Read the review of the next episode here.

Orange Is the New Black: ‘Friends in Low Places’

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 eight, “Friends in Low Places”

Read the review of the previous episode here.

“I think that I’ve been trying to win prison, and I’ve destroyed people’s lives.” Thus spoke Piper, in an extraordinary moment of clarity brought on by smoking crack in a cornfield while sitting on top of a dismembered corpse.

I winced, I confess, when she reached for the pipe. The end of episode seven, wherein Piper got a makeshift swastika tattoo at the hands of Ruiz’s gang was one of the darkest moments the series has offered up. Sure, Piper’s annoying, and sure, she was due for a fall after sauntering around like John Gotti, but watching her get branded with a red-hot iron while screaming in hysterical fear and agony was pretty bleak. So having her become a drug addict, too? Eesh.

A lesser show would have followed Piper’s iffy decision to inhale down a road of “Just Say No”-inspired degradation and misery (although maybe it would have added sweet irony to the fact that Alex calls her “Pipes”). And Orange still might, who knows. Instead (and I’m not advising this for people who haven’t been branded with a Nazi tattoo or forced to suffocate a cartel hitman), crack brought catharsis. Piper showed Alex and Nicky her arm. Alex admitted she’d killed a man. The grisly confessions seemed to relieve them both.

Morality, Orange continually says, is complicated, particularly in prison, where rules are enforced by people who unfailingly break them. The show emphasized this in “Friends in Low Places” by reviving The New York Times Magazine’s now-infamous debate about killing baby Hitler, after the inmates pondered what they’d do if they could go back in time. Hapakuka would “go back, raise him right, give him lots of love, encourage his artistic side, try to be a good mom figure to him. Maybe he’d have less anger issues.” One of the skinheads, in less cuddly fashion, would “go back and tell him to seize the Suez Canal early on. That’d secure most of the Mediterranean, giving the Third Reich easy access to oil.”

There was also Coates’s apology to Tucky, which came across as sincere and heartfelt. If he could go back in time, he told her, “I would have treated you like a person, not a duck, or a thing. I’m still trying to figure out why it happened, why I did what I did. I’m sorry, Doggett.” Boo thinks that Coates raping Tucky in a fit of rage makes him unredeemable, but the fact that he acknowledged his failings and sought forgiveness for his actions rather than hide behind contributing factors, if nothing else, sets him apart from so many others.

Definitely indefensible: Linda From Purchasing, for pointing a gun at Crystal Burset and telling her basically to get off her lawn. And Caputo, for having sex with her instead of throwing her out with the garbage. Let’s remember that in Linda’s hands Caputo’s plan to teach the inmates life skills turned into making them build a new dormitory in the blistering heat, unpaid. MCC might be forcing Caputo to keep Sophia in SHU, but he’s made plenty of his own horrible decisions this season.

Spencer, remember when we were wondering whether Judy was Martha Stewart or Paula Deen? I guess, given Judy’s racist puppet show on 1980s local television, the answer is Deen. Judy’s woe-is-me isolation also seemed to echo Piper’s in so many ways: “It’s hard enough being in here without feeling like everybody hates me,” she told Poussey. And although she probably is a racist, she’s “the friendliest racist that you’ve ever gonna meet, so can’t we all get along?” The first step in redemption is admitting you have a problem, I guess?

The second step appears to be pretending to be in an interracial lesbian relationship, letting your co-conspirators profit at the hands of gossip magazines, and thus thwarting public perception that you’re a racist. Genius.

Best lines: So many: “While not my first choice, crack in small amounts is actually good for you.” (Nicky) “When God opens a swastika, he closes a window.” (Red)

Questions: Will Aleida make her nail salon dreams come true on the outside? Will Sophia ever get out? Is Cindy’s mama going to flip about her daughter’s April-October relationship?

Another Prison Term for Egypt's Former Leader

An Egyptian court sentenced former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi to life imprisonment Saturday for allegedly passing state secrets to Qatar, a regional rival.

Two of Morsi’s aides also received 25-year sentences. Six defendants in the trial received death sentences, including two al-Jazeera journalists tried in absentia. (Al-Jazeera is owned by the Qatari government.)

Voice of America has more:

The court on Saturday also sentenced to death six of Morsi’s co-defendants, including two al-Jazeera employees and another reporter. Two other defendants who had worked in Morsi's office were sentenced to life in prison.

All of Saturday's sentences can be appealed. Seven of the 11 defendants, including Morsi, remain in custody.

The two al-Jazeera employees were identified by the judge as news producer Alaa Omar Mohammed and news editor Ibrahim Mohammed Hilal and the third reporter sentenced to death was identified as Asmaa al-Khateib, who worked for Rasd, a media network widely suspected of links to Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.

Morsi was previously sentenced to 20 years in prison after a 2015 trial on charges of inciting violence and allegedly torturing protesters in 2012. Amnesty International described those proceedings as a “travesty of justice.” He also received a death sentence last year for allegedly inciting mass jailbreaks during the 2011 uprising that ousted longtime President Hosni Mubarak.

A longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood imprisoned under Mubarak, Morsi became Egypt’s first democratically elected leader in 2012. One year later, a coup led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, then a senior army general and now president, deposed him amid large-scale street protests against Morsi’s rule in the summer of 2013.

Under al-Sisi, Egypt has struggled with a sluggish economy, an ISIS-linked insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, and widespread human-rights abuses. A 2015 report by Human Rights Watch condemned the government’s use of unfair trials and mass imprisonment to suppress political opponents.

Kim Kardashian West and Friend-Zone TV: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Kim Kardashian West on Kanye and Taylor Swift, What’s in O.J.’s Bag, and Understanding Caitlyn

Caity Weaver | GQ

“It is Kim Kardashian West’s full-time job to make you feel privy to her secrets—that you are getting to see (or gently squeeze) a very special part of her enchanted world. She’s the progenitor of a new kind of fame. While a celebrity, Kim doesn’t have the luxury of an actor to request that her personal life remain private, because her personal life is what pays her bills. She deploys radical transparency about her life not just because she wants to, but because she has to; the continued viability of the Kim Kardashian West brand demands it.”

Friend-Zone TV

Willa Paskin | Slate

“Game of Thrones is rich in characters, rich in ideas, rich in details. It is also rich in needless torture, dull travel arrangements, and front-runners for the Iron Throne who have trouble making multiple facial expressions. And even as I type this, I can feel how petty these quibbles sound, how trifling compared with the grandiosity of the series, its sprawling, churning plot, and the energy expended by it and on it.”

Why ‘Transcending Race’ Is a Lie

Greg Howard | The New York Times Magazine

“In a time of black revolution, Simpson was a counterrevolutionary; as blacks embraced black power and self-love, Simpson surrounded himself with white people. There were plenty of great black football players around his time, but Simpson was special: Not only did he play better than most, he also used his wit and charm in the service of making white people feel safe. In a period of nationwide change and unrest, he was ‘one of the good ones.’”

Please Don’t Stop the Music

Richard Kim | The Nation

“Gay bars are therapy for people who can’t afford therapy; temples for people who lost their religion, or whose religion lost them; vacations for people who can’t go on vacation; homes for folk without families; sanctuaries against aggression. They take sound and fabric and flesh from the ordinary world, and under cover of darkness and the influence of alcohol or drugs, transform it all into something that scrapes up against utopia.”

Orange Is the New Black Is Netflix’s Only Great Drama

Alison Herman | The Ringer

“This mosaic, deceptively sprawling and carefully managed, is what makes Orange unlike anything else on television. It’s also what makes the show perfectly suited for Netflix — and the only drama to date to turn its format’s pitfalls into a feature rather than a bug.”

What Kind of Queer Ally Is Nick Jonas?

Myles Tanzer | The Fader

“As a 23-year-old celebrity, he could be doing and saying a lot worse. It’s not his words, then, but some of his actions, which have given me pause—moments like the boner joke, in which gay people are not positioned as his peers … Though Jonas has spoken in support of LGBTQ people, his actions suggest it is his own image he is most interested in protecting.”

The Magic of EJ

Kelley L. Carter | The Undefeated

“On this day in May, a few minutes past noon, Johnson sweeps into a lush penthouse suite atop the tony Hudson Hotel in Manhattan’s midtown. A five-star oasis in a city known for its grit, it’s a place where millionaires congregate and host private, superexclusive events. It’s a location that magazine and video crews use to frame the remarkable ones—like Johnson.”

Zadie Smith on the Young Writer Who Teaches Her Everything

Zadie Smith and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah | Elle

“All I could think to do was recreate the kind of teaching I’d known as a student: imperious, formal and cold, qualities that don’t work in the U.S. 
I looked up from my lecture and saw Rachel’s head down on the table. She was totally exasperated with me. I learned later her mother is a professor so she already knew that it’s possible to impart knowledge in an inclusive way rather than delivering sermons from the mount. She taught me more in that class than I taught her.”

Gawker Was a Great Place to Become a Journalist

Adrian Chen | The New Yorker

“This was long before Gawker became the subject of national fascination as a principal player in a drama that resembles something that Trey Parker and Matt Stone might imagine if they were commissioned to write a musical about the First Amendment … In 2009, Gawker, like most of the internet, operated on a smaller stage. It was best known as a diversion for college students and bored office workers, who obsessively refreshed the site to devour its young writers’ acerbic dissections of New York City power players’ comings and goings.”

House Republicans Abandon One of Their Own

Republican Representative David Jolly of Florida is not under indictment. He has not been implicated in a sex scandal. He hasn’t committed some unspeakable gaffe, and he is not particularly unpopular.

So why do GOP leaders want nothing to do with his last-minute bid for reelection to the House—a race that could conceivably help the party keep its majority in a year that will likely favor Democrats?

The answer is money. And loyalty.

Jolly announced on Friday that he would drop his bid for the U.S. Senate and instead run to keep his seat in the House, which he first won during a special election in 2014. The move was a ripple effect of Marco Rubio’s imminent decision—which Jolly seemed to preempt—to seek a second term in the Senate after losing his presidential bid. While top Republicans begged Rubio to try to keep his job in the Senate, they couldn’t care less about Jolly’s effort to do the same in the House.

Consider this statement—first reported by Roll Call—on Friday afternoon from Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “The NRCC was not included in his ‘deliberations’ and has not had any discussions with David about him running for reelection. We do not—and will not—comment about commitments for financial support or anything else.”

The NRCC exists to protect and expand the Republican majority in the House and support incumbents against Democratic challengers. It nearly always encourages Republican congressmen to seek reelection, unless they are so politically toxic that a lesser-known candidate would stand a better chance of winning. That even goes for members who desert party leaders in votes on the floor.

Jolly is an incumbent and by all accounts has the best shot against Charlie Crist, the former Florida governor (and ex-Republican) who won the Democratic nomination in his latest bid for a political comeback. A statement that does not even cheer his decision, much less commit support, is remarkable. (The NRCC hadn’t endorsed any other candidate while he was running for the Senate, in part because there weren’t any other serious Republican contenders.)

“We do not—and will not—comment about commitments for financial support or anything else.”

The committee helped Jolly win a tough special-election race in early 2014, a victory that presaged the GOP’s national gains in November of that year. But a rift emerged in April after 60 Minutes featured Jolly in a profile about his effort to pass legislation that would bar members of Congress from directly soliciting campaign donations. In an interview on the program, Jolly said that right after he was elected, a member of the party leadership sat him down and told him that his “first responsibility” as a new congressman was to raise $18,000 a day to get reelected.

The NRCC denied the meeting took place, and it was particularly angry that CBS was able to get a hidden camera into its “call center” near the Capitol where members dial for dollars. The 60 Minutes piece portrayed Jolly in a glowing light as a political reformer fighting against the odds. But fellow Republicans viewed his participation as a self-serving betrayal of the party and a barely disguised bid to boost his standing in a Senate race in which he was struggling to gain traction—no doubt in part due to poor fund-raising. Even more galling to Republicans was the insinuation that Jolly, a former congressional staffer and lobbyist, didn’t know what he was getting into when he arrived in Congress.

Still, the party might be able to forgive all of that, except for one thing: Jolly’s seat was never one they planned on contesting, and it might not be winnable even with him in the race. Redistricting made Florida’s 13th district more Democratic, and Crist won the area even in the years that he lost statewide. The NRCC was never planning to spend money on the race; Jolly’s disloyalty gives the committee an excuse not to support him. While Jolly could certainly use the financial help, his flap with party leaders should help him promote himself as an independent reformer, which might not hurt in a year full of anti-establishment sentiment. Martin’s statement was also noncommittal, leaving wiggle room for the NRCC to jump back in if Jolly seems like he has a chance to win in the fall. It wouldn’t be the first reversal for the committee, which abandoned Mark Sanford, the scandal-plagued former South Carolina governor, during his comeback bid for a House seat in 2013 when it looked like he would lose. Sanford won the race anyway, and the NRCC was back in his corner the next year when he sought reelection.

So the party could change still its mind about Jolly. It could forgive and forget in a few months, especially if Republicans see an opportunity to knock down Crist, who not only betrayed the party but abandoned it altogether. Yet the GOP coolness shows that members who want its support have to play by its rules. The sin that is hardest to absolve, it seems, is unmasking the money-dominated game that politicians who want to win—and keep—their seats must play.

Orange Is the New Black: ‘Doctor Psycho’

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 four, “Doctor Psycho”

Read the review of the previous episode here.

Ugh, Sam Healy. His comic book equivalent, Luschek and Judy agree, is Wonder Woman’s Dr. Psycho: “Oh! Oh! Oh! The one who hates women.” But his defining trait, I’d argue, even more than misogyny, is pettiness. It’s what prompted him to tell Caputo that Judy had been “hanging out with some unsavory types.” (“Hard to avoid in prison,” Caputo sagely countered.) And it’s what compelled him to force Judy into staging a cooking class for the inmates even when she told him she’d really rather not, all things being equal. The idea that someone like him—with such virulent mistrust of women, and who takes such vast pleasure in tiny acts of totalitarianism—could be a counselor to some of the most vulnerable women in society beggars belief; it’s also (as history attests) completely plausible.

There was more backstory on Healy’s mommy issues in this episode. In season three, it was revealed that his mother suffered from mental illness, was occasionally abusive, and underwent electroshock therapy. In “Doctor Psycho,” we learned that she suffered from delusions, saw angels, and “people in the wall, and sometimes Roy Orbison,” that she hated the way her treatments made her feel, and that she ran away from her family in the middle of the night after making little Sam deviled eggs and orange juice. Later, grown-up Healy thought he saw her sitting in a doorway after a bad date at the movies, but it was another woman, whom he begged to stay with him all the same.

More Orange Is the New Black

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Ep. 3: ‘(Don’t) Say Anything’
Ep. 5: ‘We'll Always Have Baltimore’

I could live without extra Healy exposition—it’s already been made abundantly clear that he has abandonment issues (note his desperation to please his mail-order wife), and that he has a pathological fear of women having sex with each other (which now seems related to his mother’s “episodes”). To this we can now add that he’s long used his power inappropriately with women—his date to the movies complained about him being her “therapist”—and that he seems to have deep-rooted angst about women having any degree of freedom. What was interesting to me in this episode, though, was how accidentally helpful he was. His cooking class with Judy was the best attended event in prison history, and seemed to really thrill the inmates (not least Poussey, who’s forgiven Soso), and his counselling to Lolly genuinely comforted her, even as it undermined the truth of the corpse in the greenhouse.

It’s a huge relief to see Lolly out of danger, and away from the oleander tea, at least for now. And it was funny to see Healy so easily dismiss her confession of killing a hit man who worked for an international drug cartel as the paranoid ramblings of someone suffering a mental break. But what of Alex? She mentioned in episode three that her insides “have completely liquefied,” and now that Red knows, that’s one more person aware of the rotting corpse under the tomatoes. (Side note: how have neither Caputo nor any of the guards not noticed that he’s missing?)

As you noted in your last recap, Spencer, the show is particularly deft this season at exploring prejudice. In this episode, too, it seemed to scrutinize privilege, particularly Judy’s. Yes, she gets a private room, a “nonthreatening” roommate, a tea kettle, and countless other luxuries, but she also gets to wield some of her own power against Healy, simply by complaining to Caputo that he makes her uncomfortable, and has power issues. Any other inmate airing these opinions would surely be on the fast track to the SHU for speaking out, but Judy has high enough status thanks to her outside-world fame that she won’t be bullied. It’s inevitable that Healy won’t take this well, but Judy’s certainly one of the better antagonists you could dream up for such a small, sad man.

Far more momentous, though, was the season’s first glimpse of Sophia, not to mention—super spoilers ahead—Nicky. Laverne Cox continues to do heartbreaking work as Sophia, now locked up in SHU for her fight with Mendoza, and with Caputo clearly unwilling to get her out. His cruelty to her as he lied about Crystal was breathtaking, but almost worse was how he proffered small amounts of empathy in order to be able to live with himself, telling the guard to get Sophia another shirt before she’s hypothermic, because “this isn’t Guantanamo Bay.” Sophia’s response—setting fire to her cell to force her way out—could easily have ended in tragedy (her guard seems not so attentive), but instead she was ushered to safety past Nicky, last seen being dragged off to max for possessing heroin.

The other epic—although slightly more subdued—showdown this episode was between Pennsatucky and Coates, who’s seemed mystified for four episodes as to why she isn’t being nicer to him. But she finally found the conviction to use the “r” word, telling him in a doorway that she “just wanted to make sure” he wasn’t raping Maritza. “But I love you, I told you that!,” he replied, mystified. “But it don’t feel any different,” she said. I still think Tucky’s evolution from a malevolent meth addict who murders doctors on a whim to a sensitive and plucky heroine is one of the show’s more implausible developments, but Tucky 2.0 is infinitely more compelling.

Best line: “Poison is beneath you. It’s for witches and bored housewives, not badass bikers with octopus tattoos.”

Questions: Can the show ever get over the Piper panties storyline, which is deathly? Will Aleida get Daya’s baby back? Do dragons have feathers or fur? (Suzanne’s list of questions for the public library seemed like a completely brilliant, gonzo chain of queries plaguing someone who doesn’t have access to Google.)

Read the review of the next episode here.