Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 140

Orange Is the New Black: ‘We’ll Always Have Baltimore’

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 five, “We’ll Always Have Baltimore”

Read the review of the previous episode here.

Last episode, we saw very specific version of screwed-up gender attitudes in the form of Counselor Healy; this episode, we got a much more general look at stupid sexist nonsense. Women were treated as objects to be ogled, fondled, and used, while also often being denied the dignity of being treated as a full people—what else to make of Maxipads being labeled “inessential”?

Maritza’s story summed a lot of the episode up. Once upon a time, she used her cunning and a sob story to con nightclub patrons. But of course there was a more lucrative approach than empathy: “Get off the pity angle. Go straight for the dick, it’s the better play.” She did just that by following the instructions of car-thief kingpins, who likely abandoned her after she landed in the horribly awkward position of being in the passenger seat next to men she’d told competing lies to.

In the present, she could only perform her legitimate prison job in the driver’s seat of a van while being catcalled by the passengers who supposedly protect her. She turned their piggishness to an advantage, offering her body for the creep doing pat-downs so as to cause a distraction for the new panties-smuggling cartel. But when the guards came across the man at the pickup and Maritza convinced them he was just the gardener, it was a reminder—as the lead creep C.O. pointed out in Spanish—of the brains behind the beauty she’s so frequently been made to rely on.

More Orange Is the New Black

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Ep. 4: ‘Doctor Psycho’
Ep. 6: ‘Piece of Sh*t’

Would real life veterans-turned-prison guards be as openly sexist, racist, and irresponsible as this new batch is? The frat-house parody in the woods behind Litchfield seems a bit over-the-top, even for this show. Then again, it’s easy to find stories on the web about correctional officers driven to alcoholism, and the crack about Call of Duty: Guantanamo is a reminder of real-life examples of abusive behavior fostered in closed, authoritarian environments. Plus: Ethnic profiling, it’s plenty clear, is no fiction.

On that note: It’s maddening to see Piper either mindlessly or intentionally support full-fledged racism to squash a competitive racket that she could have prevented from existing in the first place if she’d let the new Latinas work with her. Praising someone’s noble Mayan lineage doesn’t excuse harnessing stereotypes about skin color for personal gain. Anyone could see the ominous direction things were headed from the moment Piper agreed to create a “task force”: Four seasons in, we’re finally going to get acquainted with the prison phenomenon that is white-power networks. What delicious irony in that it’s the supposedly tolerant Piper’s supposedly gang-busting efforts that leads to the Aryan gang’s creation. I loved that the show put a modern touch on the comedy trope of accidentally stumbling into racist rallies by having the inmates break out into “White Lives Matter!”

Caputo and Linda’s trip to CorrectionsCon may have felt farcical, but it was largely based in fact. Way back in 1998, The Atlantic was writing about precisely this kind of carnivalesque manifestation of the incarcerations industry:

The prison-industrial complex now includes some of the nation's largest architecture and construction firms, Wall Street investment banks that handle prison bond issues and invest in private prisons, plumbing-supply companies, food-service companies, health-care companies, companies that sell everything from bullet-resistant security cameras to padded cells available in a “vast color selection.” A directory called the Corrections Yellow Pages lists more than a thousand vendors. Among the items now being advertised for sale: a “violent prisoner chair,” a sadomasochist's fantasy of belts and shackles attached to a metal frame, with special accessories for juveniles; B.O.S.S., a “body-orifice security scanner,” essentially a metal detector that an inmate must sit on; and a diverse line of razor wire, with trade names such as Maze, Supermaze, Detainer Hook Barb, and Silent Swordsman Barbed Tape.

Lack of menstrual materials for women in prison is a real problem; laser guns in correctional facilities in line is a real thing. Perhaps the biggest liberty Orange Is the New Black took in regards to the trade show was making subtext text by having Danny (Mike Birbiglia’s recently M.I.A. character) point out just how grotesque the whole affair is. At first I suspected he warned Caputo about Linda being Satan just out of jealousy, but you do get the sense she’s a bit of a power nut, getting turned on by karate moves and blithely joking about the war on drugs as a goldmine for her employer.

She’s not the only power nut, though, as seen in Piscatella’s humorless, hardline, Giuliani-worshipping approach to the prison’s problems. It was good to have him humanized a bit in this episode, outing himself to Piper and cracking a joke about his quads being too big for suit pants. But mostly he remains a chilling figure, willing to use openly prejudiced tactics and unwilling to grant that prisoners have civil rights. Worst of all, he’s incompetent: His employees are drunk on the job, he’s being played by Piper, and he’s encouraged the creation of a gang that could turn out to be a lot more dangerous than the panty bunch.

As always, the show offered breaks from the heavy satire with a few purely comedic plots threaded through the episode. After an hour, we still have no idea who the shower pooper is but we do know that the show’s writers are having a ball pairing up Lorna and Suzanne for a detective mission. But my money for the funniest moment of the episode was Taystee getting online and trying to search for info on her friends—Poussey yielding porn and Red yielding, well, red.

Best line: The panel titles at the convention: “Media Relations: Turning Scandals Into Scandalade,” “Taking Max to the Max,” “Shanks for the Memories: A History of Prison Weapons”

Questions: Is Piper even going to try to derail the white power elements of her task force? Will Aleida keep up her studies after the thoroughly unhelpful tutoring from Soso? How feasible is it for Taystee to become a paparazzi photographer of Judy? And how will Caputo give his inmates purpose—or, per Linda’s frightening correction of him, the feeling of purpose?

Read the review of the next episode here.

Orange Is the New Black: ‘Piece of Sh*t’

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 six, “Piece of Sh*t”

Read the review of the previous episode here.

Well, Nicky is (almost) back at Litchfield, thanks to Judy King’s lawyer, Judy King’s money, and Luschek discovering a conscience amid a few month’s worth of mail. The segue between Piscatella telling Ruiz he was recommending she get an extra three to five years for her panty smuggling operation and Judy telling Luschek she’d solved his problem was perfect. First scene: “You know what we do with gang leaders, Ruiz? We make examples of them.” Second scene: “Oh, honey. A little money and a good lawyer go a long way.”

That Orange Is the New Black is able to make such blistering points about racism, sexism, prejudice, privilege, power, and corruption, but do so underneath the veneer of a screwball ensemble comedy is pretty bananas. The show has never been shy about depicting guards forcing inmates to give them sexual favors (it was actually the coda to this very episode, when Nicky decided to go back on drugs), but in Judy’s case, an inmate was able to do a favor for a guard and force him to repay it. “I took care of you,” she said, sweetly. “Now you take care of me.”

More Orange Is the New Black

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Ep. 4: ‘Doctor Psycho’
Ep. 5: ‘We'll Always Have Baltimore’

Once again, this was an episode without a flashback, possibly because the scenes in Max offered enough ghosts from episodes past (including a cameo from Stella, back on drugs, to the disgust of her sometime-lover, Nicky). The irony of the episode was that although she was in a maximum-security prison, Nicky finally seemed to be in a good place—she got to celebrate three years of sobriety and acknowledge how proud she was of herself, even though the guard took away her chip because it was contraband. But the impetus for her throwing all that away was encountering Sophia in a desolate state in SHU, and then having to clean up Sophia’s bloodied cell, with no sign of its former inhabitant.

Back at Litchfield, Piper was forced to acknowledge that she’d inadvertently formed an offshoot of the Aryan Nation, not to mention made an enemy for life in Ruiz. And here again the episode expertly wove in commentary on privilege and assumption—Piper sees herself as a businesswoman, being ruthless to protect the organization she founded and built from the ground up. But Ruiz, doing exactly the same thing, is a gang leader. And because she’s seen as one, she becomes one. Caputo can brainstorm all the educational programs he likes, but the reality is that the system he’s working within is so fundamentally flawed that it corrupts people rather than rehabilitate them, driving them to self-harm, drugs, and crime. At the beginning of the episode, Ruiz told her girls that they wouldn’t deal drugs because they had a “system”; by the end she’d figured, why the hell not?

Amid the grimness of the neo-Nazis and the trading of drugs for sexual favors, there were moments of levity, notably Cindy finally bonding with her roommate over their mutual love for Lawrence Wright’s Scientology exposé, Going Clear. (“Motherfuckers don’t even pay taxes.”) And at least we finally know what the drone persecuting Lolly was doing: taking paparazzi photos of Judy, now being billed in gossip magazines as the “Mother Teresa of Litchfield.” There was also the world’s saddest basket, woven by Pennsatucky out of discarded socks and trash bags. (“300 hours … It’s still not done,” she told Caputo.)

Best line: “Pizza, daisies, smelling markers, any animal, picking a booger.” Suzanne, in response to being asked what’s better than being famous.

Questions: Two episodes in, it seemed clear that this season was going to spark a race war. Between the prison’s new gang of white supremacists and the fact that the guards are only frisking inmates of color (a microcosm of stop-and-search), how ugly are things going to get?

The Belated Verdict of an Auschwitz Conspirator

It’s been more than 70 years since he was an SS guard at Auschwitz, but Reinhold Hanning, now 94, was sentenced to five years in prison on Friday for his role in the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

Around 1.1 million Jews and other ethnic and political minorities were killed in Auschwitz. A court in Detmold, a city in western Germany, found Hanning guilty of being an accessory in the murders of 170,000 people at the notorious camp.

While reading the verdict, presiding judge Anke Grudda told Henning he was a cog in a “perfectly functioning machinery of destruction,” reports the Associated Press. Further, she said:

“You were in Auschwitz for two and a half years and performed an important function. You were part of a criminal organization and took part in criminal activity in Auschwitz.”

Back in April, Hanning apologized for his role in Auschwitz, saying “it disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organization.” According to the AP:

Hanning joined the Hitler Youth with his class in 1935 at age 13, then volunteered at 18 for the Waffen SS in 1940 at the urging of his stepmother. He fought in several battles in World War II before being hit by grenade splinters in his head and leg during close combat in Kiev in 1941.

He told the court that as he was recovering from his wounds he asked to be sent back but his commander decided he was no longer fit for front-line duty, and so sent him to Auschwitz, without his knowing what it was.

Though there was no evidence Hanning was responsible for a specific crime, he was tried under new legal reasoning that as a guard he helped the death camp operate, and thus could be tried for accessory to murder.

The trial lasted four months. Last year, another SS sergeant, Oskar Groening, was charged with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder for his time at Auschwitz using the same argument.

The Plot to Stop Donald Trump

The latest effort to stop Donald Trump comes 366 days late and at least a dollar short. Ed O’Keefe reports in The Washington Post:

Dozens of Republican convention delegates are hatching a new plan to block Donald Trump at this summer’s party meetings, in what has become the most organized effort so far to stop the businessman from becoming the GOP nominee.

Dozens! Out of the 2,472 total! This should be right in the nick of time.

Perhaps that’s too snarky. O’Keefe notes, “The new campaign is being run by the only people who can actually make changes to party rules, rather than by pundits and media figures who have been pining for a Trump alternative.” Even with that difference, it’s hard to put much stock in this.

For one thing, there’s a legacy of failed pushes to stop Trump—each trumpeted as the one that would finally take him out. There was National Review’s symposium of sharp-minded scribblers; the magazine even declared victory after Trump lost the Iowa caucus:

You're welcome. https://t.co/beXjdcM5L9 #IowaCaucus pic.twitter.com/w338mIzFPT

— National Review (@NRO) February 2, 2016

The rest is history.

Before that, there was Katie Packer’s Our Principles PAC, which recruited heavy-hitting donors. There was the fervent belief that there would be a contested convention where Trump could be stopped. There was Liz Mair’s Make America Awesome PAC, which succeeded in drawing Trump into an unwise attack on Heidi Cruz but barely blunted his momentum in the primary. There was the truce between John Kasich and Ted Cruz, in which they split up the map so as best to stop Trump, which lasted less than 12 hours before falling apart. More recently, there was Bill Kristol’s vow to recruit a third-party candidate, which failed to attract either a boldface name like Mitt Romney or a respected but obscure one like David French. (So far!)

What the newest effort gains in terms of ability (in theory, at least) to change the rules at the convention, it loses in terms of lateness. The time for stopping Trump was months ago—not now, with a month to go before the convention and Trump having won a majority of delegates and a wide plurality of primary votes. Now trying to replace him will require a clear contravention of the will of Republican voters, and huge violations of protocol. If people think the primary showed the anger of GOP voters toward the GOP establishment, just think what will happen if organizers at the convention use procedural hijinks to try to throw Trump over.

The other problem is that, like Kristol, these delegates have no one to crown as a savior. Paul Ryan, once the name commonly mentioned as a white knight, has gone off and endorsed Trump, which makes him an even more remote possibility. As Cook Political’s Amy Walter wrote this week, trying to kill the idea of a dump-Trump campaign once and for all:

More important, as I have written many times before, an “Anti-Trump” campaign can’t succeed without a “Pro-Another Candidate” to replace him. The most obvious choices to oust Trump at the convention – Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz – have said they aren’t interested in putting up a fight. Leaders of the #NeverTrump movement have failed to produce a third-party option. You can’t have a coup without a replacement. Period.

As with the effort to draft David French, it’s probably unfair to judge the supporters on the basis of how plausible the campaign is. The goal of nominating someone like French was to give conservatives who refused to vote for Trump but couldn’t stomach voting for Hillary Clinton a candidate who they could be proud to support—even if his chances of winning were effectively nil. That’s probably the best argument for an attempt to defeat Trump at the convention, too: not that it’s likely to work, but that it gives Trump’s opponents the chance to vote their conscience and say they did everything they could.

At this juncture, there are only two obvious people who can stop Donald Trump. One is Trump, who could either for some reason drop out of the race rather than face defeat, or else so thoroughly alienate his party by some statement or deed that there was a groundswell to dump him. But that would require much more than a few delegates scheming over rules and procedures. It would require a full-scale rebellion. (In fact, “

California's Raging 'Sherpa Fire'

A wildfire burning in Santa Barbara County, California, doubled in size overnight, shut down a highway, and threatened several communities.

The Sherpa Fire, as it’s being called, jumped from 1,400 to 4,000 acres by Friday morning. The sudden explosion in size pushed flames across the scenic Highway 101, which runs along the coast. It also forced evacuations of nearby beaches and canyons. Communities like Las Varas, Dos Pueblos, Eagle Canyon, among others, have been asked by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office to prepare to evacuate.

#SherpaFire: Wildfire north of Santa Barbara surges again overnight, 5 percent contained https://t.co/zAJGuk09Ga pic.twitter.com/Z0m8hpFmtC

— 89.3 KPCC (@KPCC) June 17, 2016

More than 1,200 firefighters are battling the blaze, which began Wednesday afternoon. The overnight growth has been blamed on “sundowners,” warm winds that pick up in the evening.

In the first six months of the year, California has had twice as many acres burned as in all of 2015. This is the state’s fifth consecutive year of drought.

Jo Cox Killing: What We Know

Here’s what we know:

—British Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn have appeared together in Bristall, where Jo Cox was killed Thursday.

—West Yorkshire Police say they are investigating the mental health, as well as possible links to extremist groups, of the 52-year-old man who was arrested in connection with the attack.  

—Follow the developing story below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time.

1:15 p.m.

West Yorkshire Police says the mental health of the man who killed Jo Cox as well as his alleged right-wing links are clear lines of inquiry into the fatal attack on the Labour Party MP. Here’s more from Dee Collins, the temporary chief constable:

We are aware of the speculation within the media in respect of the suspect’s link to mental health services and this is a clear line of enquiry which we are pursuing.

We are also aware of the inference within the media of the suspect being linked to right wing extremism which is again a priority line of enquiry which will help us establish the motive for the attack on Jo.

Collins also said the attack on Cox “appears to be an isolated, but targeted attack.” She also provided a timeline of the events that led to the attack on Cox:

We have now confirmed that just before 1pm yesterday (Thursday 16/06/16) Jo arrived in a vehicle in company with two colleagues outside the Library on Market Street and whilst enroute to the library where she had a scheduled constituency meeting, she was attacked and sustained serious injuries from both a firearm and a knife and despite assistance from passers-by, the ambulance service and police officers who were quickly on the scene, she sadly died of her injuries.

During the course of the incident a 77-year-old man bravely intervened to assist Jo and in doing so sustained a serious injury to his abdomen and although now stable he remains in hospital.

9:03 a.m.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says Thomas Mair, the 52-year-old man arrested in connection with Cox’s death, was a longtime supporter of the National Alliance, a U.S.-based neo-Nazi group. Mair allegedly shot Cox, a rarity in a country where gun crimes are traditionally rare (though last year saw a 14 percent rise).  Here’s more from the SPLC:

Mair purchased a manual from the NA in 1999 that included instructions on how to build a pistol.

Mair, who resides in what is described as a semi-detached house on the Fieldhead Estate in Birstall, sent just over $620 to the NA, according to invoices for goods purchased from National Vanguard Books, the NA’s printing imprint. Mair purchased subscriptions for periodicals published by the imprint and he bought works that instruct readers on the “Chemistry of Powder & Explosives,” “Incendiaries,” and a work called “Improvised Munitions Handbook." Under “Section III, No. 9” (page 125) of that handbook, there are detailed instructions for constructing a “Pipe Pistol For .38 Caliber Ammunition” from components that can be purchased from nearly any hardware store.

There were reports Thursday that the killer had shouted “Britain first” while attacking Cox. This has not been officially corroborated.

Updated on June 17 at 8:49 a.m.

British Prime Minister David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, appeared together in Bristall, just feet away where Jo Cox was killed on Thursday.

David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn lay flowers near where Jo Cox was attacked in #Birstall. https://t.co/NzWPb4VAMu pic.twitter.com/sjMAeu9FyG

— BBC Look North (Yks) (@BBCLookNorth) June 17, 2016

Meanwhile, the U.K.’s Parliament, which is on a break, is being recalled Monday to pay tributes to the slain Labour Party MP, as tributes continue to pour in for her, and flags flew at half-staff over City Hall and Number 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s residence.

Updated on June 16 at 9:33 p.m.

Krishnadev has a longer look at Cox’s life and legacy:

The activist was elected to Parliament for the first time last year and quickly made a name for herself on matters such as immigration, Syrian refugees, and Britain’s membership in the European Union. Prior to that, she spent a decade working at Oxfam, the British aid agency, in various senior capacities in the U.K., U.S. and Brussels. Immediately before she was elected to Parliament in May 2015, she worked at the Freedom Fund, an anti-slavery organization, and at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to a biography on her website.

4:26 p.m.

Tributes are being paid in Bristall and London to Cox.

Floral tributes as Birstall remembers Jo Cox pic.twitter.com/tzHk1V7cgH

— Katie Spencer (@SkyKatieSpencer) June 16, 2016

Jo Cox's houseboat neighbours pay moving nautical tribute to MP hours after she was killed: https://t.co/pZK7pL7DVw pic.twitter.com/eV9BjKs7LY

— delcrookes (@hairydel) June 16, 2016

Jeremy Corbyn lead a moving vigil for #JoCox outside the parliament she joined a year ago https://t.co/TDPNQ7Ewrt pic.twitter.com/cVF4eQjGnQ

— LBC (@LBC) June 16, 2016

3:07 p.m.

British news reports have identified Cox’s attacker as Thomas Mair. Here’s the start’s of The Telegraph’s story on him:

The man arrested in connection with the death of MP Jo Cox was named as "loner" Thomas Mair, 52, who lived in a small semi detached house on the Field Head council estate in Birstall.

The neat semi in Lowood Lane was cordoned off and under police guard as neighbours spoke of the "very quiet but very helpful" suspect.

Neighbours said that Mair had lived in the house for 40 years and was living with his grandmother until she died about 20 years ago. Since then he has lived on his own and has never had any full time employment.

Neighbors said they had never heard him “express any views about Europe or anything like that.”

3:01 p.m.

British publications are reacting to the fatal attack on Cox, and we’re including a few editorials and op-eds:

A day of infamy (Alex Massie in The Spectator). The piece appears no longer appears to be on the magazine’s website, but here’s an archived version.

An attack on humanity, idealism, and democracy (The Guardian)

We’ll update this list as more editorials emerge.

2:32 p.m.

Watch Jo Cox’s maiden speech to Parliament in 2015:

2:07 p.m.

Oxfam and Save the Children said:

All @oxfamgb are devastated at the loss of our much loved and admired former @Oxfam colleague Jo Cox MP. Deep condolences to Jo's family

— Oxfam (@oxfamgb) June 16, 2016

Our heartfelt thoughts are with the family of Jo Cox. We're shocked and saddened by this horrific news. https://t.co/7o7RsIoe4F

— Save the Children UK (@savechildrenuk) June 16, 2016

1:47 p.m.

Gabrielle Giffords, the former Democratic congresswoman, who was shot and wounded in 2011, tweeted her condolences, as well:

Absolutely sickened to hear of the assassination of Jo Cox. She was young, courageous, and hardworking. A rising star, mother, and wife.

— Gabrielle Giffords (@GabbyGiffords) June 16, 2016

1:21 p.m.

Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, and his wife, Sarah Brown, with whom Cox worked closely, have both responded to her death. The former prime minister said: “Our memories will be for ever scarred by this moment. Our hearts will always be hurt at our country’s loss.” Sarah Brown added:

I am heartbroken. Jo had a truly remarkable spirit and passion that shone through in her work with Oxfam and with me on our countless campaigns for women and children.

Jo cared about everybody but she reserved a special place in her heart for the most vulnerable and the poorest citizens of the world.

She was fearless, she was endlessly upbeat and she reached out to so many to join her cause. Her mission was to make the world a better place.

But above all else Jo had utter devotion to her husband Brendan and their two children Cuillin and Lejla.

1 2:57 p.m.

Brendan Cox, the husband of the late MP, said in a statement he will “fight against the hatred that killed her.” He added:

She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn’t have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.

Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full.

1 2:47 p.m.

As our colleague Matt Ford notes, Cox is the first MP to be assassinated in office since Ian Gow, a Conservative lawmaker who was killed in a car bombing by the Irish Republican Army in 1990. Irish republicans targeted members of Parliament from time to time during the Troubles, the spasmodic violence that wracked Northern Ireland for a half-century, but British legislators rarely faced security threats from elsewhere.

1 2:43 p.m.

Prime Minister David Cameron reacted to the death of Cox on Twitter:

The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP. My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children.

— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) June 16, 2016

1 2:36 p.m.

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, said he was “in shock” following the announcement that Cox died from the attack. He said in a statement:

Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. It is a profoundly important cause for us all...

In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jo’s husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.

1 2:25 p.m.

Cox has died from her injuries, multiple news sources . Dee Collins, the chief constable of West Yorkshire police, said the MP was declared dead at 1:48 p.m. GMT by a doctor working with paramedics.

In a press conference Thursday afternoon, Collins also said a 77-year-old man was also attacked during the incident. However, details about the victim are still unknown.

Collins says police believe this was a lone incident and not part of a broader plot.

1 1:25 a.m.

Here’s more background on Cox: She was born in Batley, part of the area she represents in Parliament, and graduated from Cambridge University in 1995. Before becoming an MP, she worked as a policy analyst for Oxfam, the aid agency, and also was an adviser to Sarah Brown, the wife of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. After her election in 2015, she was one of three-dozen Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the party’s leadership. In the end, though, she voted for Liz Kendal, Corbyn’s rival for the position, and later said she regretted nominating Corbyn, who now heads the party. She also strongly supported accepting 3,000 child refugees from Syria.

11:07 a.m.

Brendan Cox, Cox’s husband who previously worked with Save the Children, tweeted this image of his wife:

pic.twitter.com/mPOaytowxN

— Brendan Cox (@MrBrendanCox) June 16, 2016

10:54 a.m.

Initial eyewitness accounts of such incidents often vary from the final version, however multiple British news organizations are reporting that a witness at the scene heard Cox’s attacker shout: “Britain first.”  The Guardian is reporting that local police are talking to at least one witness who heard those words being shouted. Britain First is the name of a far-right U.K. nationalist party. The party’s response:

Media desperately try to incriminate Britain First in shooting of Labour MP Jo Cox ... - https://t.co/1rENtmI7he pic.twitter.com/lGhohrf0RL

— Britain First (@BritainFirst) June 16, 2016

That image on the left, which was first tweeted by the BBC, reportedly shows Cox’s attacker being apprehended.

10:33 a.m.

David Cameron, the British prime minister, says he’s canceling his visit to Gibraltar where he was scheduled to campaign for Britain to remain in the EU.

It's right that all campaigning has been stopped after the terrible attack on Jo Cox. I won't go ahead with tonight's rally in Gibraltar.

— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) June 16, 2016

10:16 a.m.

Both of the main groups in the “Brexit” debate have suspended their campaigns in response to the attack on Cox.

We are suspending all campaigning for the day. Our thoughts are with Jo Cox and her family.

— Stronger In (@StrongerIn) June 16, 2016

Vote Leave also said it is suspending its campaign.

In a recent monthly column, Cox had explained why she would vote to remain. An excerpt:

I know for many people that this is a tough decision, that the debate has been highly charged and the facts difficult to pin down. But I believe that the patriotic choice is to vote for Britain to remain inside the EU where we are stronger, safer and better off than we would be on our own.

What’s more a vote to remain is a vote for certainty. The EU may be imperfect and definitely needs reform but risking all the current advantages of being inside Europe to take a leap in the dark doesn’t feel very patriotic to me.

And in a recent article she wrote that while immigration to the U.K—a reason often cited by backers of Brexit—was a “legitimate concern,” it wasn’t a good enough to reason to leave the EU.

10:09 a.m.

We’d earlier said it was unclear whether Cox had been attacked during or after her meeting with constituents at the Birstall Library. Her website says she was scheduled to meet with constituents from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. GMT (9 a.m. to 10 a.m. ET). Police says they were called at 12:53 p.m. GMT, which suggests she was attacked prior to her meetings.

10:05 a.m.

Cox, in an op-ed last month in The Times, criticized the U.S. and U.K.’s approach to Syria, but noted:

I am a huge President Obama fan. I worked on his first campaign in North Carolina in 2008, I admire the leadership he has shown on everything from the financial crisis to climate change and the good advice he gave us recently on Europe. But on Syria both President Obama and the prime minister have been a huge disappointment.

10:01 a.m.

The BBC adds: “An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying and bleeding on the pavement [sidewalk] after the incident.”

9:54 a.m.

Politicians from across the political spectrum are reacting in horror to the attack on Cox. Here’s a sampling:

Very concerned about reports Jo Cox has been injured. Our thoughts and prayers are with Jo and her family.

— UK Prime Minister (@Number10gov) June 16, 2016

Utterly shocked by the news of the attack on Jo Cox. The thoughts of the whole Labour Party are with her and her family at this time.

— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) June 16, 2016

@BorisJohnson Early reports suggesting she was attacked by a Leave voter. Great company you keep.

— mchawk (@mchawk) June 16, 2016

Shocked to hear terrible news about brilliant MP and friend Jo Cox. Thinking of her and praying for her and family.

— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) June 16, 2016

9:39 a.m.

Cox broke with her Labour’s party leadership and supported military action to end the Syrian civil war. She is also a campaigner for Britain’s continued membership in the European Union. (Britons vote in a June 23 referendum on whether to remain in the bloc.)

She isn’t the first British MP to be attacked. In 2010 Stephen Timms, also a Labour MP, was stabbed twice by a woman for his vote to support the Iraq war.

9:36 a.m.

The West Yorkshire Police have issued a statement on the attack and the arrest. Here it is in full:

At 12.53 today, police were called to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries and is in a critical condition.

A man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby also suffered slight injuries.

Armed officers attended and a 52-year-old man was arrested in the area. There are no further details at present.

Police presence in the area has been increased as a reassurance to the community.

9:33 a.m.

Here’s more on Cox from her website:

Jo … spent a decade working in a variety of roles with aid agency Oxfam, including head of policy, head of humanitarian campaigning based in New York and head of their European office in Brussels. Jo then went on to work closely with Sarah Brown to galvanise international action to stop mums and babies dying needlessly in pregnancy and childbirth. ...

Immediately prior to standing for Parliament Jo was working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The Freedom Fund, a charity working to end the scourge of modern slavery. She was also in the process of launching UK Women, a new research institute dedicated to better understanding the views and needs of women in the UK. …

Jo is married and has two young children. She divides her time between her home on a boat on the River Thames and her home in Batley & Spen.

9:30 a.m.

The BBC is now reporting that a 52-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the attack.

9:28 a.m.

The latest from Sky News:

Here's what we know so far about the shooting of Labour MP Jo Cox in Birstall https://t.co/A5zwPZtsol pic.twitter.com/NpastUBFH1

— Sky News (@SkyNews) June 16, 2016

9:24 a.m.

Cox was reportedly stabbed either during or after—this is still unclear—meetings with constituents—which in the U.K. are called “advice surgeries”—The Telegraph reported. Cox, 41, is an MP for Batley and Spen. She was elected for the first time in 2015.

9:20 a.m.

The Yorkshire Post is reporting that Cox was attacked on the steps of Birstall Library.

9:16 a.m.

Jo Cox, a Labour Party member of Parliament, was reportedly shot and stabbed in Birstall, near Leeds, British news reports say.

Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley and Spen, injured & taken by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary pic.twitter.com/8ZrcGnohyu

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) June 16, 2016

Her condition is said to be serious and authorities have launched a manhunt for her attacker.

This is a developing story and we’ll update it as we learn more.

Central Intelligence: A Fun Action Comedy You’ll Instantly Forget

The advertising campaign for Central Intelligence, an uber-formulaic spy comedy starring the beefy Dwayne Johnson and the pint-sized comedy star Kevin Hart, states that “saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson.” When a movie has a tagline as outrageously snappy as that, it’s hard not to speculate that the studio started with that pun and commissioned a script around it. Unfortunately, the gag may be the cleverest thing about the entire film.

That alone shouldn’t write Central Intelligence off completely: After all, this isn’t a film that’s really shooting for “clever.” The groan-inducing nature of the tagline underscores the larger point of the film’s existence: It’s an excuse to get Johnson and Hart, two charming superstar actors, together for two hours so that they can be delightfully silly on-screen. The plot is largely irrelevant, the action mostly perfunctory, but if you’re a fan of either Hart or Johnson’s usual movie shtick, Central Intelligence is just about fun enough to recommend.

The film is directed and co-written by Rawson Marshall Thurber, a Hollywood oddity who seems to thrive more in silly territory than serious. His biggest hits have been Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and We’re the Millers, antic, instantly forgettable comedies; his more serious efforts—like an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—fell disappointingly flat. For Central Intelligence, Thurber is back in comedy mode—this is the kind of film to enjoy in a hotel room when there’s nothing else on cable.

Its highlights include Johnson, who’s a bona-fide movie star who rarely seems to find projects that match his magnetic screen presence. Perhaps it’s his next-level beefiness, which usually slots him into a specific role as the stone-faced straight man in a comedy. Central Intelligence is wise enough to undo that stereotype, having Johnson play Robert Weirdicht (yes, it’s pronounced “Weird Dick”), a high-school dweeb who looked up to star athlete Calvin Joyner (Hart) in his youth and became a hard-bodied CIA action hero in an effort to emulate his popularity. Hart, meanwhile, peaked in his teens and has become a pencil-pushing nobody, though equipped with the manic energy Hart brings to all of his performances.

In flashbacks, CGI trickery turns Johnson into an overweight, awkward fool of a teenager, singing with abandon in the gym showers and getting publicly bullied in an early sequence that pushes both good taste and visual credibility (computer-generated teen Robert looks downright bizarre, though not as strange as Johnson’s turn as The Scorpion King). But the film pulls it off by staying resolutely on Robert’s side and carrying his goofy personality over to adulthood, where he gets to inhabit Johnson’s chiseled form. Robert still loves unicorns, singing En Vogue, and sharing dated memes (he reconnects with Calvin on Facebook by sending him a link to the Budweiser “Wassup” commercial). But he’s also an international superspy.

The problem with this is that it forces Hart into the straight-man role, which feels like a waste of his live-wire talents. A dull accountant who bemoans the loss of his glory days, Calvin spends most of the film reacting to Robert’s martial-arts and sharpshooting expertise with delight and horror, while being dragged from one location to the next by a perfectly nonsensical plot. There are double agents, encrypted codes, and a CIA authority figure played by Amy Ryan whose trustworthiness is suspect, but it’s hard to buy into any of Central Intelligence’s perfunctory twists. The story here is Robert and Calvin’s reconnection, and the joke that you can never quite shake who you were in high school—the bullets whizzing around are almost beside the point.

Still, Johnson is a gifted enough physical comedian that he sells some of the set-pieces. Part of the joke with Robert is that he’s utterly unflappable in the field, dispatching assassins with delighted ease while Calvin contributes jittery yelps alongside him. Early on, confronted with a knife-wielding enemy, Robert picks up his only available weapon to counter with—a banana—and the audience is never in doubt as to who will win that showdown. Anytime Robert is in action mode, the stakes are decidedly low.

But when he reunites with his old high-school bully (played in adulthood by a sneering Jason Bateman), he freezes up, and there’s just enough pathos to the moment for it to land, partly because the film never fails to celebrate Robert’s goofiness. “I realized high school was nothing like Sixteen Candles,” he confides to Calvin, recalling his experiences with bullying. “And I’ll never be like Molly Ringwald.” Central Intelligence does its best to make Johnson its Molly Ringwald—and it’s that effort that makes it just memorable enough to recommend.

A Charity’s Protest Against the EU’s Refugee Policy

The international aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Friday it will no longer accept donations from the European Union or its member states in response to the bloc’s policy on refugees.

Over the past 18 months, MSF has treated some 200,000 men, women, and children who have crossed the Mediterranean. Last year the group received the equivalent of $68 million in donations from EU countries. While it could miss out on that money, the organization said it is a necessary statement to make against the EU’s refugee policies, especially the recent agreement to deport migrants to Turkey.

On its website, MSF said:

The EU-Turkey deal sets a dangerous precedent for other countries hosting refugees, sending a message that caring for people forced from their homes is optional and that they can buy their way out of providing asylum. Last month, the Kenyan Government cited European migration policy to justify their decision to close the world’s largest refugee camp, Dadaab, sending its residents back to Somalia. Likewise, the deal does nothing to encourage countries surrounding Syria, already hosting millions of refugees, to open their borders to those in need.

The EU’s refugee policy deports to Turkey all migrants who illegally arrive in Greece. In exchange, EU states will take an equal number of registered refugees who live in camps. The arrangement, for which Turkey will receive more than $3 billion, is an effort to ease the burden of Greece of the most severe migrant crisis to hit Europe since World War II.  

MSF said the new EU policy has led to more than 8,000 migrants stranded in crowded camps in Greece. It also said the policy deprives these migrants of legal aid, which is their one defense against being returned to the dangerous countries they fled, like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The charity has said none of those it treats will be affected by the announcement.

The Singular Experience of the Queer Latin Nightclub

At the Orlando gay club where a gunman perpetrated the worst mass shooting in modern American history, DJs were playing reggaeton, bachata, merengue, and salsa, according to The New York Times. The vast majority of the dead were Latino; more than half were Puerto Rican.

The discourse following the attack at Pulse nightclub has focused largely on terrorism, guns, religion, and homophobia. But this was an attack on a very specific kind of event: a queer Latin night. There are many such nights happening at clubs in cities across America every week of the year.

To understand more about the particular history and meaning of such gatherings, I spoke on Thursday with Ramón Rivera-Servera, the author of Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics and an associate professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Spencer Kornhaber: Just to start, do you have anything in general to say about your reaction to what’s happened?

Ramón Rivera-Servera: As a queer Puerto Rican myself with family connections to Florida, there’s that immediate “me” reaction, about how you feel reflected in that scene, in that space, in that experience, and the violence. But immediately I also had this punch-in-the-gut feeling about how this tragedy would be immediately co-opted and put at risk other vulnerable populations. I’m thinking here about anti-Arab, anti-Islam sentiment. My first social-media posting was about recognizing the trauma but also warning us to be careful not to go into the easy pigeonholing of large categories of population that in our queer activism, and in our Latino activism, we work against.

“These are experiences of pleasure charged with the knowledge of risks.”

Kornhaber: There’s been a lot of discussion of whether the media and society are talking enough about this as an attack on queer people specifically. What do you make of that discussion? Do you think there should also be an ethnic or racial element of it?

Rivera-Servera: Of course we cannot deny the national importance of this story, and folks feel vulnerable about different aspects of their experience—about race, about ethnicity, about sexuality, and gender. But there have been problematic ways in which the story has been taken up by mainstream LGBT organizations. This is a difficult thing to put forth because they equally shared in the vulnerability and the trauma of the incident, and I don’t want to minimize that experience for them. But for the first few days, the reactions distanced themselves significantly from the specificity of this as a Latino, primarily Puerto Rican, experience.

There’s a longer history to the kind of experience of the young men, women, and trans folk who were in that space celebrating together. If you start reading the bios [of the victims], you see the stories of migration, you see the working-class from the community college, you see all these nuances that the prepackaged HRC framework of activism—which is necessary and important at the national scale—runs the risk of erasing.

So a lot of on-the-ground activism from Puerto Ricans and Latinos was to really mark that there is a racial, ethnic component to this experience that we cannot forget. As we learn more about the biography of this really disturbed individual, we start realizing that there are conflicts around his masculinity and his sexuality, but equally so there was a history of racism. There is a conjoining of hate, of phobias, not only shared by somebody that goes into the nightclub with a gun, but also in smaller, less explicit ways evident in how easily we can co-opt this narrative and whitewash it.

Kornhaber: Your career has involved writing about queer, Latino dance and performance. What should people know about the history here?

Rivera-Servera: The nightclub has been historically for Latinos, African Americans, and white Americans a place of congregation and conviviality that does not conform to simplistic notions of “safe space.” There’s a clear sense of these spaces being respites from some dangers outside, but also replete with all kinds of risks themselves. In these spaces, we started thinking not just about our pleasures together, but what it took to protect those pleasures and to demand our right to those pleasures.

Latinos have always been present in the mainstream LGBTQ community; I think of Sylvia Rivera of Stonewall. But they have oftentimes been marginalized in our rendition of national history. So Latinos have also created their own spaces, whether they are establishments devoted to the Latino queer encounter, or the temporary one night in the otherwise mainstream gay club that invites this Latino congregation, this other soundscape, this other way of moving and dancing.

“It’s not a monolithic group. At Latino night, something coheres for them.”

Especially in the 1990s when the LGBTQ movement was attaching to an aspirational middle-class sense of how we would be integrated into the nation, the Latino club or the Latino night provided a space where folks who had difficulty [with that], or who consciously refused to be seen within that aspirational framework, could meet each other. Latinos come from very different places with very different backgrounds and trajectories of immigration: It’s not a monolithic group. At Latino night, something coheres for them. The commonalities are an appreciation of the potpourri of musical difference, or language, or a history of seeing themselves as “other” within the United States—sometimes willfully, sometimes the result of how U.S. mainstream gay culture continues to center whiteness.

Kornhaber: You mentioned the soundscape. Can you describe what that soundscape might include and how it would be different from another night at a gay club?

Rivera-Servera: I can speak generally about the establishments I’ve been looking at in the past 20 years. And most of these are in major cities, Orlando being similar population-wise. In these spaces, music that may be recognizable to a mainstream gay audience—a house bass or techno bass musical palette—can very quickly switch into a merengue or a salsa in the Caribbean social-dance tradition. It can very quickly turn into a cumbia or a quebradita in the Mexican-Colombian social dance tradition. And it can just as quickly go into reggaeton, and Jamaican dancehall-, Caribbean-, Central American- inflected choreography and music arise.

The patterns and the energy of the dance floor can fluctuate in ways that reflect the amalgam of influences that constitute Latino queer demographics. That’s what’s beautiful about it. Some Latinos gain the expertise of being able to move fluidly across all those genres, and then a lot of others will dance nonetheless and you’ll see the movement hiccups that occur in trying to fit in. I find that beautiful because it manifests both how much we’re there in an effort to be together, but also the complications of attempting to do so.

I don’t idealize the club as this exclusively safe space. I love the club as a platform that allows us to enter the risk of being together, this effort to find our pleasure together, knowing that it can be a bumpy ride. Nobody is under any pretenses that we did not arrive at that place without risking a lot—risking, at times, our lives. These are experiences of pleasure charged with the knowledge of risks, of the everyday violence that we endure to afford this moment of release.

Kornhaber: Do you think the attack will change how people think about or participate in these kinds of experiences?

Rivera-Servera: This attack is a really extreme manifestation of the kind of violence and hate and phobias that characterize that broader experience of risk I was invoking. We have to honor the scale of this event, the amount of the loss, and we are already seeing the kind of important political action that needs to happen in reaction to it. [But] we also need to see this moment as also quite typical, just on a bigger scale. This moment allows us to identify a lot of different problems in terms of the risk that queer Americans, Latino or otherwise, continue to run by living in this country.

“The energy of the dance floor can fluctuate in ways that reflect the amalgam of Latino queer people.”

Racism continues to be a problem in this country, within and without the queer community, and we have to be really careful to not forget to honor racial ethnic difference. We have to make sure not to simply co-opt this as a banner event for another HRC easy political framework. This is not to dispute HRC as an important political institution, but historically HRC has not done a really good job for the particular community that congregated in that space that night.

Part of the activist effort needs to be channeled towards gun control. All of the hate and phobias that this horrific incident so explosively showcased are a sad component of the American fabric, and we need to disarm them, starting with the guns that enable the most gruesome aspects of a culture of violence. Then the even harder work of dealing with the roots of this violent culture begins.

Kornhaber: What struck you about the response that you’ve seen within the Latin world?

Rivera-Servera: Within the Latino community, the first thing that struck me was their immediate demand for specificity. They wanted their community to be named, to be spoken about. They wanted that Puerto Rican-ness to be part of the story. This morning on NPR finally somebody was tracing the individual story of one of these Puerto Rican young men whose body is being brought back to the island to the town of Guánica for burial. So the nuance of those stories is starting to emerge, but I feel they’re starting to emerge because the Latinos started demanding it. They did not want to be erased.

Although we don’t want to essentialize Latino as a linguistic category, seeing that list of victims’ Spanish surnames was important in terms of recognizing ourselves. In social media, people have been talking very intelligently and quite beautifully about their experience and about their anger—the anger of recognizing their own vulnerability, the anger of seeing this story run the risk of being whitewashed or co-opted, the anger in the delay of that recognition.

The most touching thing for me has been to see how queer Latinos in my social media frames, text messages, and emails have just been checking in with each other, asking ourselves, “How are we?” and expressing our love for each other. That has been an incredible way of sharing our desire to make more of this than simply survive it. You hope that we don’t forget, that we don’t need these kinds of events to realize the deep need we have for each other, and to ask for each other’s support in advancing deeply needed changes in this country.

Karen King Responds to ‘The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife’

For four years, Karen L. King, a Harvard historian of Christianity, has defended the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” against scholars who argued it was a forgery. But Thursday, for the first time, King said the papyrus—which she introduced to the world in 2012—is a probable fake.

She reached this conclusion, she said, after reading The Atlantic’s investigation into the papyrus’s origins, which appears in the magazine’s July/August issue and was posted to its website Wednesday night.

“It tips the balance towards forgery,” she said.

Critics had argued for years that errors in Coptic grammar, similarities with the Gospel of Thomas, and other problems pointed to forgery. But King had placed her faith in the opinions of expert papyrologists, along with a series of carbon-dating and other scientific tests, at MIT, Harvard, and Columbia, that had turned up no signs of modern tampering or forgery.

When I called her in March while reporting my Atlantic story, she said she was not interested in commenting on—or even hearing about—my findings before publication. Thursday afternoon, however, she called me to say the story was “fascinating” and “very helpful.”

Although she had exchanged numerous emails with the owner and had met him in December 2011, she realized after reading the article that she knew next to nothing about him, she said. Walter Fritz had never mentioned his years at the Free University’s Egyptology institute, his formal study of Coptic, or his work as a pornographer whose star actress was his own wife—a woman who’d written a book of “universal truths” and claimed to channel the voices of angels. He had presented himself to her as a “family man” who enjoyed trips to Disney World and was independently wealthy.

“I had no idea about this guy, obviously,” she said. “He lied to me.”

I asked why she hadn’t undertaken an investigation of the papyrus’s origins and the owner’s background. “Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated,” she said.

King said she would need scientific proof—or a confession—to make a definitive finding of forgery. It’s theoretically possible that the papyrus itself is authentic, she said, even if its provenance story is bogus. But the preponderance of the evidence, she said, now “presses in the direction of forgery.”

King hoped that Fritz would allow the scrap to remain at Harvard, so that scholars could continue to probe questions of authenticity. “I’m finding myself not even really angry” at him, she said. “I’m mostly just relieved. I think the truth always makes me calm.”

I’ve reached out to Walter Fritz for comment and will update this post if he responds.