Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 142

All Hail the Return of Curb Your Enthusiasm

At a press tour for his sitcom The Goldbergs last year, the comedian and actor Jeff Garlin was asked about the future of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the show in which he was a supporting player for eight seasons until it went off the air in 2011. “Curb is the only show in TV history that only moves forward based entirely on creativity,” he said. “Larry David is so goddamned rich he doesn’t have to do anything unless it’s good.” It’s been five years (and David is still rich), but viewers are finally getting a ninth season of the show. If TV history, and Garlin’s educated opinion, are any evidence, it’ll be as good as it ever was.

It feels almost silly to say that television “needs” a new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm—a show that, like David’s previous creation Seinfeld, mines the little irrelevances of life for material. But it’s always been a deceptively (sometimes openly) political show, a next-level skewering of the pointlessness of high-society life that works by investing its viewer in that delightful pointlessness. It became the quintessential interpretation of Los Angeles’s vapidity, with every other scene set in someone’s cookie-cutter McMansion, and each new social event an eerie copy of the last (down to David’s blundering behavior). During the year he spent playing the crusading grump Bernie Sanders for Saturday Night Live, David may have tapped a new creative well—or maybe he was just reminded to return to the world he had so expertly satirized for years.

There’s almost no concrete information on the ninth season of Curb, which was announced with a brief press release by HBO, likely after getting the go-ahead from David. The show is almost entirely improvised, but each season is loosely plotted and structured by David in advance, often around some central story theme—he’ll be trying to open a restaurant, or preparing to appear in a production of The Producers, or arranging a Seinfeld reunion. As Garlin noted in his 2015 interview, there are two steps to a new season of Curb hitting the small screen. “‘Uhhh, I got an idea, I think I’m gonna write the show’—that’s step one,” Garlin said, poking fun at David’s creative process. Then he’ll write a handful of episodes before deciding it’s worth finishing.

David is more circumspect about the whole process. The HBO release includes a one-line quote from him: “In the immortal words of Julius Caesar, ‘I left, I did nothing, I returned,’” he said. Not quite. Since putting Curb on its latest hiatus in 2011, David has indulged various creative impulses. He wrote and starred in a TV movie for HBO called Clear History, a nakedly political work about the invention of a fictional electric car. The film broadly spoofed the clashing personalities of an irascible hippie (David) and a polished uber-libertarian (Jon Hamm) as they tried to take credit for the revolutionary vehicle. Critics were mostly bemused: Clear History lacked subtlety and leaned on surprisingly broad humor.

Then, David wrote and starred in a Broadway play called Fish in the Dark, a black comedy about a family squabbling over their hospitalized patriarch’s deathbed. It was a financial hit, but critics were again confused more than anything; though Fish in the Dark shared the tetchy, bleak humor of David’s best creations, its plottiness seemed its undoing, much like Clear History, or David’s previous film Sour Grapes (a famous 1998 bomb that remains the only thing he ever directed). Perhaps fans have just been waiting for David to return to the looser world of Curb, where the stories are more drawn-out, and whole episodes will pick at some small detail of life in Los Angeles to great effect.

Still, it certainly helps that David was the standout performer of Saturday Night Live this year, breathing life into its Bernie Sanders character where other political impressions (particularly Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton) have mostly seemed one-dimensional. Casting David was as obvious a move as bringing in Tina Fey to play Sarah Palin—he barely needed to work at mimicking the man’s voice or physical characteristics, since viewers already saw so much of David’s curmudgeonly onscreen presence in the insurgent Democratic socialist. The circle was completed with “Bern Your Enthusiasm,” a spot-on sketch parody of David’s show centered around the candidate.

While campaigning, David-as-Bernie got into minor altercations with supporters over various silly details, like someone coughing into a hand and not washing it, or the lack of coffee options at his office. In true Curb fashion, everything cleverly dovetailed into an ending that saw Bernie losing the primary by just a few votes.

The message was brilliant: Bernie, so righteously assured of his correctness in every dispute, but befuddled by social interactions and inexplicable plot twists beyond his control, was just a more politically active David. Perhaps coming up with such an organically resonant caricature signaled to David that it was time to bring Curb back to life. Almost every episode is driven by David’s social awkwardness and unwillingness to keep his opinions to himself. The show isn’t set in the corridors of Washington power but in the moneyed suburbs of Los Angeles, where David (playing himself) is among the richest of them all. His status gives him all the more gumption to point out everyone’s real and imagined foolishness, while allowing audiences to laugh at his own obvious hubris. In its eight years, the premise proved to be comedic gold, and, if David’s SNL stint is any sign, Curb’s ninth season could be, too.

The Stanford Rape Case's Judicial Fallout

Local prosecutors in California successfully moved to remove Aaron Persky, the Santa Clara Superior Court judge, from a sexual-assault case Tuesday, citing his lenient sentencing of Brock Turner, the former Stanford student convicted of sexual assault, as a cause for concern.

The Santa Clara District Attorney’s office told reporters it was also “disappointed and puzzled” by Persky’s dismissal of a misdemeanor mail-theft case on Monday after the prosecution presented its case. According to the Mercury News in San Jose, Persky granted the motion to dismiss because the alleged thefts weren’t recent enough; prosecutors argued he misunderstood the case law he cited.

The removal adds to the growing fallout from the Stanford rape case, which ignited a national debate earlier this month over sexual assault and the criminal-justice system.

Persky was widely criticized for his role in the trial and sentencing of Turner, a former Stanford University student convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault in March for raping an unconscious woman on campus in 2015. During the sentencing phase earlier this month, Turner’s 23-year-old victim read a searing 12-page letter to her attacker in the courtroom that garnered international attention after it was published online by Buzzfeed.

Prosecutors originally asked Persky for a six-year sentence, essentially applying the two-year minimum guideline for each of the three felony counts. Instead, Persky instead sentenced Turner to six months in jail and probation. “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him,” the judge said. “I think he will not be a danger to others.” Turner will also have to register as a sex offender for life.

Tuesday’s removal also follows an extraordinary moment in Persky’s courtroom during jury selection in the dismissed misdemeanor case. The Mercury News reported at least 10 prospective jurors refused to serve on a case assigned to the judge.

"I can't be here, I'm so upset," said one juror, who according to multiple sources, told the judge while the lawyers were picking the jury in the misdemeanor receiving stolen property case.

Another prospective juror stood up and said, "I can't believe what you did," referring to the six-month county jail sentence Persky handed to Turner, who was convicted for sexually assaulting an unconscious intoxicated woman last year outside a Stanford University frat party.

In each case, the judge said, "I understand," thanked the prospective juror and excused her or him from duty.

Jury nullification isn’t unheard of in American legal history. But a jury pool’s mass refusal to participate because of the presiding judge’s actions in an unrelated case appears to be unprecedented, at least in the modern era.

Andrew Ferguson, a University of the District of Columbia law professor who specializes in juries, described the move as “interesting and troubling.”

“Imagine if jurors regularly chose to reject jury service because they disagreed with the prior decisions of a judge or their political or legal philosophy,” he said. “Jurors are the voice of the community, yes, and in one sense, these jurors should be commended for engaging in thinking about the application of criminal law in their courts. But this is a bad precedent.”

Community members outraged by Turner’s sentencing could soon have another way to express their displeasure. Stanford law professor Michele Dauber and other members of the local legal community are spearheading a recall effort to remove Persky, who is running unopposed for reelection in November, from the bench.

The Political Future of Brazil’s ‘Frank Underwood’

Two months ago, Eduardo Cunha was leading the impeachment movement that would temporarily unseat Dilma Rousseff, banishing her to the presidential palace to prepare for a trial while her vice president took over her job. Now, Cunha is facing his own fight for his political future.

Brazil’s congressional ethics committee on Tuesday voted in favor of removing Cunha from his seat in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Brazil’s congress. The decision arose from corruption allegations against Cunha, a member of the now-ruling Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) who has been described as Rousseff’s “political nemesis.” In May, just one week before Rousseff’s decisive impeachment vote, the country’s Supreme Court suspended Cunha from his position as speaker of the house, at the request of the attorney general, for using his high-ranking role to obstruct ethics committee hearings and intimidate lawmakers.

Cunha said he would appeal the decision to another congressional committee. The full chamber will now vote on the ethics committee’s recommendation, which would require an absolute majority of members—257 of 513—to pass. If legislators vote to kick Cunha out, the chamber would hold elections for a new speaker; Waldir Maranhao, a member of the Progressive Party and a Cunha ally, currently holds the position on an interim basis. And Cunha, dubbed the “Frank Underwood of Brazil” by Western media for spearheading House of Cards-esque impeachment proceedings, would be barred from running for political office for eight years.

Cunha’s political crisis is reminiscent of the one he laid out for Rousseff, the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT), this spring. Rousseff is accused of lying about and concealing the state of the government’s troubled financial situation during her re-election campaign in 2014; Cunha is accused of lying about and concealing bank accounts he owns in Switzerland. Rousseff spent days in limbo as lawmakers considered whether to oust her; Cunha will do the same. Signs reading “tchau querida”—bye, darling—followed Rousseff out after the months-long impeachment saga; last month, members of the lower house who oppose Cunha held up placards that read “fora Cunha”—out Cunha. Both Cunha and Rousseff have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. And both face increasing public distrust because of the same thing: the biggest corruption scandal in the history of Brazil.

Two years ago, investigators uncovered a decade-old money-laundering scheme at Petrobras, the state-run oil firm and the largest company in Brazil, that allowed executives, politicians, and others get rich from bribes and kickbacks. The scandal ensnared dozens of Brazil’s top politicians across the political spectrum. Rouseff has not been directly implicated in the scheme, though the fact she had served on Petrobras’s board of directors while it went on didn’t help her image. But Cunha has. A day before the congressional ethics committee voted to boot him out, prosecutors in the Petrobras investigation, known as Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, filed a civil lawsuit against Cunha, alleging he took $5 million in bribes from companies looking to secure contracts with the oil company. If Cunha loses his seat, he’ll lose the parliamentary immunity granted by Brazil’s constitution, which shields elected officials from prosecution, even for capital crimes, and could be arrested and tried for corruption.

“From left to right; from the anonymous to the most powerful public figures, no one, no one at all, will be above the law, as far as it concerns the public prosecutor’s office,” said Rodrigo Janot, Brazil’s chief prosecutor, according to Brazilian newspaper Estado de São Paulo.

Last week, Janot asked the Supreme Court for permission to arrest Cunha, Jose Sarney, Brazil’s president in the mid-1980s, Senate President Renan Calheiros, and Senator Romero Juca—all members of the PMDB. Their arrests would add to a series of setbacks the new administration, led by Michel Temer, has suffered in its first month. In late May, Juca, a Temer confidant, resigned from his new role as minister of planning, development, and management after he was heard on recordings discussing the need to stymie the Petrobras investigation. Days later, Fabiano Silveira, the newly appointment minister of transparency, supervision, and control, quit for the same reason.

On Wednesday, Cunha took to Facebook to refute news reports he had met with his lawyers to talk about potentially resigning. “It’s very unpleasant having to come here all the time and refute the lies,” he wrote in a post that ended in a hashtag of his own name. “Especially because it’s a fascist practice to repeat lies so many times until they become the truth.”

Cunha’s potential removal won’t affect Rousseff’s impeachment trial, which is expected to reach a verdict in mid-August, during the Olympic games in Rio. Rousseff said Tuesday she’s preparing a letter that would call for early presidential elections should she survive the trial. Until then, the first female president of the Brazil is hanging out in the Palácio da Alvorada, riding her bike in the mornings, reading The New York Review of Books online at night, and having her credit card declined at grocery stores.

The Southern Baptist Call to Stop Displaying Confederate Flags

The representative body of Southern Baptists called on its members to stop displaying the Confederate battle flag.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant Christian denomination in the U.S. with 15.8 million members, on Tuesday adopted a resolution that said the flag was an emblem of slavery, and called members to discontinue its display “as a sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ, including our African-American brothers and sisters.”

The measure was passed at the convention’s annual meeting, which took place in St. Louis, by the predominantly white evangelical conservative leadership.

Russell Moore, who runs the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the SBC, wrote in a blogpost:

As I’ve said before, the Cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire. Today, messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, including many white Anglo southerners, decided the cross was more important than the flag. They decided our African-American brothers and sisters are more important than family heritage. We decided that we are defined not by a Lost Cause but by amazing grace. Let’s pray for wisdom, work for justice, love our neighbors.

And let’s take down that flag.

Four years ago, the convention elected Fred Luter, the first black president in its 171-year history, who served for two years. It was only in 1995 that the convention adopted a resolution apologizing for condoning slavery and racism in its past. Slavery has been a major part of the convention’s past, my colleague Emma Green wrote in 2015:

[In 1845,] the Southern Baptist Convention had formed when a group of churches broke away from another loose association of Baptists, called the Triennial Convention. The foreign-outreach arm of the organization had forbidden a slaveholding church elder from becoming a missionary, saying it would violate the organization’s neutral position on slavery. After attempting to negotiate a compromise, 293 dissenting church leaders—representing as many as 365,000 Christians—met in Augusta, Georgia, and formed a new association that supported slavery.

Since the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, last July that left nine black churchgoers dead, discussion over the Confederate battle flag’s place in the country has increased. In the months that followed, South Carolina removed the flag from its statehouse grounds. In May, the U.S. House voted to ban the flag from Veterans Administration cemeteries. And earlier this June, the National Cathedral in Washington also decided to remove the Confederate flag from its stained glass windows.

Yea or Nay-vy: A ‘Brexit’ Battle on the Thames

It was bound to happen schooner or later: Two rival flotillas—one supporting Britain’s exit from the European Union and the other wanting the U.K. to remain—sailed down the Thames on Wednesday and engaged in an exchange of hose fire (no Sir Francis Drakes here) until a police launch had to keep them apart outside Parliament. (Ladies and gentlemen, we merely report the news.)

The situation so far #Thames pic.twitter.com/2hzzMH0MkD

— James Harewood (@bobdobbelina3) June 15, 2016

Nigel Farage, undoubtedly buoyed by polls showing the “Leave” side leading ahead of the June 23 referendum, led a flotilla of fishing boats up the Thames to protest what he called the “destruction” of Britain’s fishing industry because of EU membership.

“There are now many harbors without a single commercial vessel,” said Farage, who heads the U.K. Independence Party. “Compare and contrast all of this with Norway [not an EU member] who control all fishing stocks up to 200 miles within the North Sea and has a booming commercial and angling tourism industry.”

His rivals in the debate didn’t sea it that way. Farage’s flotilla was met by one led by Bob Geldof, he of Live Aid fame. Geldof seemed to be angling for a fight, playing the song “The In Crowd” over his vessel’s speakers. And, he said:

Here are the facts about fishing. One, Britain makes more money than any other country in Europe from fishing. Two, Britain has the second largest quota for fish in Europe after Denmark. Three, Britain has the third largest landings. Four, you are no fisherman’s friend.

Farage took the bait, calling Geldof’s counter-protest “just disgusting.”

With just more than a week to go before the June 23 referendum, Britons will likely look at the flotilla fracas and ask themselves whether they cod do batter.

Coffee, for Your Health

The idea that our favorite indulgences might actually be good for us is a long-standing and beloved narrative. It’s why people adore stories about centenarians who attribute their longevity to a daily glass of whiskey, or the idea that cheese is what makes French people slim.

It’s likely, then, that the World Health Organization’s announcement Wednesday that regularly drinking coffee may prevent cancer will be met with similar jubilation by the well-caffeinated set. After all, the conclusion represents a rare reversal from the organization’s position 25 years ago, when it cautioned that coffee was possibly carcinogenic.

Too-hot coffee, or any other beverage for that matter, is still believed to cause cancer, the WHO points out. That’s based on studies that have found an association between drinking very hot coffee—close to 160 Fahrenheit—and esophageal cancer. According to The Wall Street Journal, this is “roughly 10 degrees hotter than people in the U.S., U.K. and Europe are accustomed to drinking coffee or tea,” and more consistent with the temperatures of tea or maté served in China and South America.

But the back-and-forth on coffee more broadly, and in particular the question of whether consuming it is harmful, dates back more than a century, if not longer. In the 1870s, drinking coffee was advised for those interested in having good manners. “Unsweetened coffee cures bad breath,” a Tennessee newspaper reported in 1877. (The paper also advised people to eat cheese with a fork, and discouraged girls from strolling away with a gentleman at a picnic.)

In the early 1900s, doctors and health agencies warned that caffeine was essentially “poison,” and that drinking coffee would cause “nerve storms,” according to a 1912 issue of The Salt Lake Tribune. Nervous women, the newspaper cautioned, should abstain from coffee altogether. “Unsteady nerves are foes of beauty,” it said.

But ads for coffee at the time promised scientifically perfected brew that would produce wondrous health effects. Advertisers also marketed special coffee formulas for people who couldn’t handle the real stuff. One ad, published in 1907, read: “Does coffee disagree with you? Probably it does! Then try Dr. Shoop’s ‘Health Coffee.’” Health Coffee apparently wasn’t coffee at all, but brewed from a “clever combination of parched cereal and nuts” and advertised as safe “even for the youngest child.”

Other ads encouraged people to drink coffee not because it was good for you, but as a way of selling pills for indigestion, like Stuart’s Dyspepsia Tablets, featured in the 1920 advertisement below.

Library of Congress

“Good coffee is good for you,” another ad—this one for Hill Bros. Red Can Coffee—promised that same year.

Library of Congress

Over time, the debate about coffee—fueled by a combination of legitimate research, junk science, marketing, and the rumor mill—has amounted to what the writer Andrew Revkin has called “whiplash journalism,” in which sweeping conclusions about what’s good or bad for you contribute to a mess of contradictions. Just reading The New York Times in the 1980s, for instance, might leave someone wondering what to do given that drinking coffee could give you pancreatic cancer, but switching to decaf might put you at a higher risk of a heart attack.

Red wine and chocolate occupy similar places in culture (new technologies, too, are routinely subject to exaggerated ideas about what’s ultimately good and bad for people). In media coverage about the potential health benefits associated with resveratrol—a substance found in grapes, chocolate, and red wine—one important detail is often buried: the fact that you would have to drink dozens of bottles of wine per day to get a potentially beneficial dosage of the chemical. (And by then, you’d be dead.)

Today, the health effects of coffee are of great enough interest to necessitate their own Wikipedia page—which is at least one way to measure cultural influence. But even the World Health Organization’s news on Wednesday doesn’t dramatically change conventional wisdom (or challenge recent research) about the beverage. Last year, the top nutrition panel in the United States concluded that, for adults, three to five cups of coffee daily—the equivalent of up to 400 miligrams of caffeine—is tied to reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. After that, in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new dietary guidelines, coffee consumption was described as being part of a “healthy dietary pattern,” citing a protective association between coffee intake and the risk of Parkinson’s disease. (Though it did caution against overdoing it with sugar and cream.)

“Coffee has a long history of being blamed for many ills,” writes the Mayo Clinic on its website, “from stunting your growth to claims that it causes heart disease and cancer. But recent research indicates that coffee may not be so bad after all. So which is it—good or bad? The best answer may be that for most people the health benefits outweigh the risks.”

‘Saint Pablo’ and the Power of an Unfinished Album

One of Kanye West’s catchphrases of late has been, “This is not regular!” As his brags go, it’s a pretty smart one. While some of his special achievements are more dubious than others (see: evangelizing for dad fashion, putting out fashion zines filled with unclothed women, continuing to troll Taylor Swift), it’s inarguable that West really does find ways to be exceptional. For example: The news that overnight Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was “refreshed and redelivered” with changes, including a new song, is not regular. It is not regular for a major album to be both in the market and a work in progress, revised and updated at its creator’s whim like software or bits of the Harry Potter canon.

Albums of course have, in the past, been released in remastered versions, demo versions, remix versions, and deluxe bonus-track versions. But those typically fall into the category of extras: Once you’re heard the original, you could go and hear the new thing if you want. West’s doing something else. Outside of a $20 download on West’s site, it’s only legally available on streaming platforms, which means the canonical copy is in the cloud, able to be tinkered with or even deleted—as it was for a few hours on Tidal last night—as the musician sees fit.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that some musician or another would eventually make use of the fundamental ownership change caused by streaming technology for aesthetic purposes. What’s less obvious is whether that would be a good thing for the music itself. Isn’t this yet another example of the internet’s immediacy eroding quality? Doesn’t the ability to polish a product into eternity reduce the incentive for creators to nail it the first time? The fact that West worked until the very last hour on Pablo even after multiple release-date delays, and the fact that the result is the most uneven album of West’s career, suggests yes. But it’s hard to complain when the phenomenon gives rise to a new track like “Saint Pablo,” added as The Life of Pablo’s closer last night (the eve after the announcement of West’s forthcoming Saint Pablo Tour).

“Saint Pablo” feels like a “classic” Kanye West song in a way that little of his 2016 output has. It has a wistful, steady beat (built off a Jay Z sample but reminiscent of “Runaway”); a sturdy, hummable chorus (from the soulful British singer Sampha); and West rapping with political edge, self reflection, humor, and a logically clear through-line. He has said the song was inspired by him confessing on Twitter to being $53 million in debt, which means it likely was recorded after The Life of Pablo’s February 14 release (unofficial versions have appeared online since shortly after that time).

Pop music’s thrill comes from familiar things being made new—the Pablo transformations make that appeal almost literal.

Indeed, West’s “Saint Pablo” verse opens with him talking about his wife admonishing him for being too loose with his money. It progresses from there, suggesting that debt is a sign of him finding success on his own terms: “The media said he’s way out of control … I’m not out of control, I’m just not in they control.” In verse two West turns his attention to race, saying that black people need to help each other succeed, which then bleeds into an explanation of why Kanye sided with Jay Z’s Tidal streaming service rather than Apple. His rap closes with a tight little ur-Kanye couplet of petty dissing and epic bragging—“She got the same shoes as my wife but she copped ‘em at Aldo  / Modern day MJ with a Off the Wall flow”—before Sampha poignantly guides the song out.

The track’s lyrics also mention that a million people have illegally downloaded The Life of Pablo, which is perhaps an odd thing to boast about for an artist trying to pay his bills. But West is touting his cultural reach, and he’s also signaling that he understands how his album is being received. Hardcore fans should by now have a copy of the original version of Pablo on their hard drive, allowing them to tell whenever West makes a subtle change to Pablo—say, bumping up the vocal levels on “Waves” or making a slight edit to Chance the Rapper’s verse on “Ultralight Beam.” Obsessively comparing and contrasting as West fiddles can be an essential part of enjoying Pablo for the true believers.

For others, the experience of the album shifts in more subtle ways due to it being, as West said, “living breathing changing creative expression.” I haven’t regularly spent time with Pablo since the weeks after its Madison Square Garden premiere event: It has its virtues, but to my ears it’s a contender for West’s worst album. So I’ve not closely tracked the bulk of the changes West has thus far made to it (most of them were implemented in April, though Redditors point out that last night’s update tweaked the previous closer “Fade”). Listening anew is a strange experience, like coming home after a trip and suspecting that someone has been nudged your things a few inches from where you left them. A choral line comes in where you don’t expect it; a rhythm suddenly hits harder than you remember it doing; was that synth tone there before?

It’s a jarring feeling, but also an exciting one. Pop music’s thrill comes from familiar things being made new—the Pablo transformations make that appeal almost literal. With more spins, you can decide whether or not the new tracks are “better.” But the intriguing sense of dislocation might be a virtue itself, one of the many things West has done that aren’t regular.

Teaching Kids About Genocide

Public schoolchildren in Michigan are now required to learn about the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide as part of their social studies curriculum, according to a law Governor Rick Snyder signed on Tuesday.

While most students in Michigan no doubt learn about the Holocaust already, the new law would require teachers in public schools to spend a certain amount of time on these topics. Between eighth and 12th grades, schools must spend a combined six hours on genocide education, specifically the Holocaust—in which, during World War II, Nazi Germany killed 11 million Jews, Roma, and other ethnic minorities—and the Armenian genocide—in which Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1920. While Turkey denies a genocide took place, 29 countries and 45 U.S. states use the term “genocide” to refer to the killings.

In his signing statement, Snyder, a Republican, said:

Our next generation of leaders needs to have the wherewithal to recognize and help prevent widespread harm to their fellow men and women. Teaching the students of Michigan about genocide is important because we should remember and learn about these terrible events in our past while continuing to work toward creating a more tolerant society.

Several U.S. states, including California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, already require public schoolchildren to learn about the Holocaust and other genocides. The new law in Michigan also requires the governor to make appointments to a 15-person genocide education panel, the Associated Press reports.

The Two Things Obama Refuses to Name

President Obama on Tuesday offered one of his longest public explanations yet for why he doesn’t use the phrase “radical Islam” to describe the motivations of acts or perpetrators of terrorism—and a lengthy rebuke of the Republicans who argue he should.

“When exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this?” Obama said in a speech from the Treasury Department, after a meeting with his national-security advisers. “The answer is none of the above.”

He added: “Not once has an adviser of mine said, ‘Man, if we really use that phrase, we’re going to turn this whole thing around.’”

The lecture was aimed at one Republican in particular, who Obama has also avoided referring to by name: Donald Trump.

Obama said he understands well the threat of extremists, regardless of what he calls them, and “so do the intelligence and law enforcement officers who spent countless hours disrupting plots and protecting all Americans, including politicians who tweet and appear on cable-news shows.”

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has spent the last few days bashing Obama’s response to the rampage in Orlando that left 49 people dead, the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Trump criticized Obama for saying the suspected killer, Omar Mateen, was driven by “extremist ideology” and “perversions of Islam,” and not, as Trump and other Republicans call it, by radical Islam. If the United States can’t name its enemy, the conservative argument goes, it can’t defeat it. “We can’t afford to be politically correct anymore,” Trump said Sunday. 

Obama has previously made thinly veiled digs at Trump, but he rarely speaks his name in public, referring to him instead as “the Republican nominee. “You know he seems to do a good job mentioning his own name,” Obama PBS News earlier this month. “So, I figure, you know, I’ll let him do his advertising for him."

Obama’s critics say his unwillingness to use the phrase “radical Islam" is a sign the president does not understand the nature of the threat of ISIS. (Recall his description of ISIS as a “JV team” in January 2014, days after the group overran in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which it still controls today.) But the president has sought to make a clear distinction between Islam, a religion of 1.6 billion people, and acts of terrorism carried about by a small group of extremists who follow radical interpretations of it. So did George W. Bush before him, who in 2002, just months before the Iraq invasion, said “ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith. But ours is a war against individuals who absolutely hate what America stands for.” Obama argues that to place the actions of the Islamic State and other religious extremist groups in the context of Islam would provide those groups with legitimacy. He says the use of “radical Islam” frames the fight against ISIS as a war between the West and Islam, and risks alienating both Muslim Americans and Muslim nations considered allies. Obama doesn’t call ISIS by the name it prefers, instead using the acronym ISIL. “ISIL is not Islamic, and ISIL is certainly not a state,” he said in 2014.

Obama reiterated this rationale in his speech Tuesday. Groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda “want us to validate them by implying that they speak for those billion-plus people, that that they speak for Islam,” he said. “If we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush and imply that we are at war with an entire religion, then we are doing the terrorists’ work for them.”

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, had largely echoed the White House’s rhetoric during her campaign—until this week. “Radical jihadist, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Today” show Monday. “I’m happy to say either, but that’s not the point. All this talk and demagoguery and, you know, rhetoric is not going to solve the problem.”

Trump took credit for Clinton’s new terminology in a tweet Monday. At the time of this writing, Trump had not tweeted about Obama’s comments Tuesday.

For his part, Trump has delivered multiple responses to the Orlando shooting. In a Monday morning interview with Fox News, he appeared to suggest Obama was complicit in the mass shooting or may sympathize with Islamic extremists. “Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind … There’s something going on,” he said. Later that day, in a speech in New Hampshire Monday, he reiterated his call for an indefinite ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S. He encouraged law enforcement to form partnerships with American Muslim communities and accused them of sheltering terrorists—“they know what’s going on”—in almost the same breath. And he spoke of the LGBT individuals in a manner largely unheard of for Republican politicians, acknowledging their rights to “love who they want and express their identity.”

Obama has found some surprising allies in his latest rebuke of Trump: Republicans on Capitol Hill. Top Republicans, including U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, have reiterated their beliefs that barring Muslims from entering the U.S. is not a reasonable policy proposal. Republican lawmakers have condemned Trump’s reaction to the Orlando shooting, many of whom had hoped the nominee would use this time to comfort a reeling public rather than rile it—or at least give lawmakers a break from having to answer to their constituents for Trump’s inflammatory remarks.

Trump: Obama Puts America's 'Enemy Over Our Allies'

On Monday, Donald Trump strongly implied that Barack Obama was somehow complicit in, or at the least turning a blind eye to, Islamist terror, a shocking and unfounded accusation to make against the president of the United States. When The Washington Post accurately reported his comments, a furious Trump announced he was banning the newspaper from his events.

On Tuesday, Obama ripped Trump while explaining his reluctance to refer to “radical Islam.” And Trump, who had been so outraged by the Post’s headline, responded by, well, accusing Obama of treason.

“President Obama claims to know our enemy, and yet he continues to prioritize our enemy over our allies, and for that matter, the American people,” Trump said in a statement to the AP. “When I am President, it will always be America First.”

Although various observers other than Trump disputed the meaning of his comments yesterday, his statement today leaves no doubt: He’s plainly accusing Obama of putting the interests of the enemies of the United States over those of its own citizens. It is a watershed moment, though perhaps it’s only a small leap from claiming that the president is not actually American, as Trump has repeatedly done, to claiming that he is acting to harm America.

Trump acts in many ways as a caricature—not in that he is comedic, but in the way he takes the script for a standard conservative American politician and amplifies it just a little bit more, to the point of making accusations that are unheard-of, and often frowned upon by the GOP. Many Republicans speak stridently about immigration and the need for increased security at the Southern border, to the point that the party was already scared about losing Hispanic support. Trump took that a step further, and accused Mexicans of being criminals and rapists while promising to build a massive border wall. Many Republicans warn about the threat posed by Islamic radicalism, but Trump took that a step further, calling for a total ban on Muslim immigration that horrified fellow GOP leaders.

So it is with Trump’s statement today. Republicans have hated Obama’s conduct of foreign policy, especially the nuclear deal with Iran. Senator Ted Cruz, one of Obama’s most outspoken critics, said this in March:

Our friend and allies, we've abandoned them. This has been the most anti-Israel administration we have ever seen. And we have shown weakness and appeasement to our enemies.

That’s already a controversial stance. (Is this really the most anti-Israel administration ever?) But Trump takes that idea a crucial step further: Not only is Obama insufficiently friendly to Israel and other allies, Trump contends that Obama is intentionally aiding and abetting foreign enemies.

Not that Trump’s idea makes much sense. Yesterday, he argued that actions were more important than words. Obama’s refusal to use the words “radical Islamic terror” may or may not make sense, but his actions hardly suggest sympathy toward ISIS. For example, he has launched thousands of airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq, in addition to deploying military forces on the ground. He’s literally ordering American troops into combat against ISIS. There’s a great deal of space for disagreement that falls between applauding the president’s strategy and accusing him of favoring the enemy. Trump leaps over it without a second thought.

Today’s American politics is plagued by an inability by many partisans to assume good faith. But generally, as with Cruz’s statement, that’s left in the shadows—perhaps Obama is merely mistaken. Trump’s innovation is to make the accusation of bad faith his go-to move.