Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 145

An Ethics Conviction in Alabama

Alabama House Speaker Michael Hubbard was automatically removed from office Friday after a jury convicted him on 12 felony public-corruption charges, adding to the state’s extraordinary political crisis.

Hubbard originally faced 23 charges, all of which accused the once-powerful Alabama Republican of using his office to enrich himself and others. The Huntsville Times has more:

Prosecutors said Hubbard used the power of his office to improperly benefit his companies and clients and to try to obtain $2.3 million worth of work, investments and financial favors.

Hubbard's defense argued that the transactions were legal and within the bounds of the ethics law and exemptions for normal business dealings and longstanding friendships.

Defense lawyer Bill Baxley told jurors that Hubbard took care not to run afoul of state ethics law and asked advice from the then-director of the Alabama Ethics Commission.

Prosecutor [Matt] Hart depicted Hubbard as a conniving politician who seized at opportunities to make money through his political party work and elected office.

Public-corruption trials aren’t exactly unusual among the 50 state governments. In New York, federal prosecutors toppled Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver last year. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing Bob McDonnell’s 2015 conviction for accepting lavish gifts from an influential donor while Governor of Virginia. And New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran resigned last October after pleading guilty to fraud and embezzlement.

But even by those standards, Alabama’s current situation is an outlier. In addition to Hubbard’s conviction and ouster, both the state’s governor and its chief justice are also facing removal from office.

Alabama’s House Judiciary Committee will meet this week to consider articles of impeachment against Governor Robert Bentley for the firing for Spencer Collier, the state Law Enforcement Agency secretary. Collier then accused Bentley of an extramarital affair with his senior political advisor. Bentley admitted to sending sexually explicit messages to her but denied an affair.

Last month, the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission also charged Chief Justice Roy Moore with six counts of violating judicial ethics. Moore issued a controversial order to the state’s probate judges in January forbidding them from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, effectively defying a federal district court’s orders. It would not be his first removal from office: Moore was previously ousted in 2003 for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state supreme-court building.

Hubbard’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 8. He faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on each of the 12 charges.

A Concert Shooting in Orlando

A gunman shot and killed singer Christina Grimmie, a former contestant on NBC’s The Voice, outside an Orlando concert Friday night before turning the gun on himself.

Grimmie opened for the band Before You Exit and was signing autographs after the concert when she was shot. Hours before her death, she posted a video on Twitter urging fans to come to the performance.

ORLANDO!! Come out to the show tonight at the Plaza Live! Starts at 7:30!

Lemonade and Sketches of Spain: The Week in Pop Culture Writing

A Love That Takes Off Masks: On Assumptions, Intentions and Lemonade

Daniel José Older | Seven Scribes

“Intent, of course, is irrelevant. As artists, one of the first things we learn about sharing work is that once it’s out there, it doesn’t matter what we hoped we made or meant to make. What we made is all that remains. What we made is what will change the world, for better or for worse. Knowing that is part of releasing it, what ignites the fire inside us to get it right, what keeps us pushing ourselves to do better. What matters is the work itself and the context of the society we create it in.”

 

‘It Was Not A Sentimental Love’: François Gilot on Her Years With Picasso

Emma Brockes | The Guardian 

“And then came Picasso. They met in a cafe in 1943, when Gilot was 21 and Picasso was over 60. Gilot had been making a name for herself at art school and her work was already selling. This is one of her bones of contention with her artist peers; that so many of them are hopeless about business. Not Gilot. ‘It comes from my father saying you have to be professional. I had no choice. And I must say, I owe him a lot. He said he wanted to put lead shoes on my feet, so that I wouldn’t float away. The result has been that I was capable of understanding the whole problem [of money].’”

What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation

Joshua Rothman | The New Yorker

“‘Maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation,’ Musk concluded, last week, since ‘either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.’ If you hope that humanity will survive into the far future, growing in power and knowledge all the while, then you must accept the possibility that we are being simulated today.”

From the Margins: Women’s Writing and Unpaid Labor

Leah Falk | VIDA

“Women who have the education and privilege to earn their own money and spend it on time devoted to non-market creative production are in some ways acting out Woolf’s dream. Every time we sit down to write, often in the economic margins of our own lives, we choose ourselves and our work over activities whose value has been set by others. Simultaneously, we determine a value scale for our writing that’s different from the one set by a magazine’s pay rates, a tenure committee, or the book-buying public.”

Who Owns Southern Food

John T. Edge & Tunde Wey | Oxford American

“In these conversations, I felt a tipping toward me of some odd power. A tentative deference was offered in exchange for my ‘black’ experience. My words were being elicited as a means to contextualize these folks’ white privilege and power—and maybe subconsciously to defend it. In these people, I saw scales falling away; they were struggling to understand a responsible place for their privilege vis-à-vis blackness. When their frustration finally metastasized into wisdom, they slowly corrected their postures, straightening up after formerly leaning toward me: things are changing, the obviousness was heavy.”

Kanye’s Chaos Theory

Justin Charity | The Ringer

“This week, the summer barricades at Webster Hall formed a glimmering cesspool of Yeezy fandom. There you’d meet nerds, preppies, and hypebeasts alike — kids with bad skin and Sith fashion sensibilities, wearing the very latest run of bright orange Pablo merch and dark leggings. Some rode in on electric unicycles, Marty McFly–style, or climbed USPS trucks and scaffolding in front of two dozen bored but watchful cops. All fandoms are a little bit mad, and pop stardom draws massive crowds in any case. The great non-concert at Webster Hall, however, proved a unique chemistry whereby Kanye, the sleepless celebrity, has cultivated his own madness as a form of entertainment.”

Rae Sremmurd’s Best Life

Naomi Zeichner | The Fader 

“All week, everyone has been talking about throwing a Cinco de Mayo house party. For a moment there was a feeling that it would have to be cancelled, after flights were booked for a May 6 show in Pennsylvania and they realized they’d have to depart at 6 a.m. Migo thought maybe they should do a ‘family function’ instead, taking everyone to eat together at a Mexican restaurant. But now the party is back on. Maracas, sombreros, and plastic necklaces are spread across the dining table. In gallon-sized dispensers, there are four flavors of margaritas: classic, strawberry, pineapple, and mango. A huge order of catering arrives. The brothers’ stepfather confirms the enchiladas are delicious.”

Sketches of Spain: Sun, Ham, and Rock and Roll at Primavera Sound

Molly Lambert | MTV

“Brian Wilson hits me at the perfect moment in my homesickness cycle. I look out at the ocean as the sun starts to set while Wilson plays his very reasonably early time slot at 7, and — California girl that I am — I feel just like I’m back home again. The Mediterranean is warmer and bluer than the Pacific, a perfect cartoon of a beautiful seascape, glistening in the sinking sun. But I know I am still in Europe because the ambient saltwater smell is always tinged with nasty cigarette smoke, which would never fly in California.”

Now You See Me 2: All Flash, No Magic

The most preposterous scene in Now You See Me 2—a movie brimming with preposterous scenes—is one in which a group of magicians known as the Four Horsemen tries to smuggle a valuable computer chip out of a secret facility. Suddenly suspicious, their escort orders the guards to search them. The slender chip is attached to a playing card, which the Horsemen attempt to conceal through sleight-of-hand tricks amongst themselves. As the pat-down continues, the magicians’ moves grow more elaborate. After a few minutes, the card is flying around the room in defiance of all known physical laws—from one Horseman’s hand, to the bottom of another’s shoe, up through another Horseman’s sleeve, down a pant leg, under a collar, into a bra, and so on. It’s like a scene out of a Harry Potter film—but with more Muggles, less fun, and (somehow) less logic.

 

The sequence perhaps captures everything that’s wrong with Now You See Me 2: Magic is supposed to inspire wonder, even if the audience knows it’s all smoke and mirrors and hidden trapdoors and misdirection. But very little about this hollow sequel to 2013’s heist thriller Now You See Me feels mysterious; its biggest set-pieces will make viewers ask not “Whoa, how’d they do that?” but “Wait, huh?” At the center of both films are The Four Horsemen, a group of illusionists following the orders of an ancient magician’s alliance called The Eye. Their “tests” often involve exposing corrupt businessmen or giving jilted people their money back, which turns them into global heroes and gets them in trouble with the FBI (naturally). The sequel, directed by Jon M. Chu, takes the worst elements of the first—a bloated plot, excessive CGI—and doubles down on them over an exhausting 129-minute running time. 

Now You See Me 2 (technically titled Now You See Me: The Second Act) picks up where its predecessor left off. Hiding from law enforcement, the Horsemen have a new leader in Dylan Rhodes, the FBI agent who hunted them for the entire first movie only to reveal (spoiler alert!) at the end that he’s the mastermind feeding the Horsemen their orders, as well as the son of a famed, late magician. Only three of the original Horsemen remain—the pickpocket Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), the surly J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), and the hypnotist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson)—after its one female member (Isla Fisher) bailed. Here, she’s replaced by a new woman, Lula (Lizzy Caplan), who almost immediately points out the tokenism at work: “I’m the girl Horseman!” (Indeed, it’s a dude-heavy affair—the gender breakdown may be the most authentic thing about this movie).

The action really begins after the Horsemen’s attempt to hijack the keynote event at Octa, an evil Apple-like company, goes horribly awry. The gang is split up from Dylan, whose double-agent ways are unveiled on live TV, forcing him to go on the run. Feeling abandoned, the Horsemen find themselves at the mercy of the wealthy and eccentric recluse Walter Maybry, played by none other than the actor whose face is synonymous with a very different kind of magic—Daniel Radcliffe. Water gives the Horsemen a choice: They can help him steal an Octa-developed computer chip capable of de-encrypting all the data in the world (yes) in exchange for new identities. Or they can die.

Also in the Horsemen’s orbit is an imprisoned “magic debunker” named Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), whom Dylan blames for his father’s death and framed out of revenge in the last film. The two begin an uneasy alliance as Dylan tries to locate the missing Horsemen, but that’s about as sensical as their storyline gets. (On the heels of everyone is an exasperated team of FBI agents who barely register as a threat.)

All of which is to say that, despite the film’s constant fourth-wall-breaking dialogue about how “seeing is not believing” and “the eye can lie,” there isn’t actually much beneath the surface. Fascinating themes and ideas hover at the margins—the malleability of perception, the virtues of inspiring awe in a world where technology has ably supplanted magic—but the film mostly keeps them hidden behind a curtain. Even the movie’s heavy-handed populist messages about digital privacy and corporate transparency feel strangely remote, perhaps because Now You See Me 2 is more invested in making every scene look as cool as humanly possible.

Take the absurd card-smuggling scene—only worse than the motion sickness it induced was the sense that the sequence was supposed to be the casual magic lover’s equivalent of seeing Don Draper delivering a brilliant ad pitch. Much of the rest of the film is bogged down by obnoxious slow motion, slick montages, and songs that make you feel like you’re walking into a really loud club (though, the use of Lil Kim and 50 Cent’s “Magic Stick” at one point was easily one of the highlights). The original film was guilty of much of the same, but its plot seems positively streamlined compared to the sequel’s. By the time Now You See Me 2 enters its final act, the audience is prepared for even the most outrageous reversals and tricks (resurrecting a pigeon, transporting people to a different continent, stopping rain) and that nothing surprises.

For the biggest Now You See Me fans, there may be enough to make the sequel worth seeing, though maybe not in theaters. Caplan as the kooky Lula and Radcliffe as the unhinged Walter are occasional comedic delights, despite their thinly written characters. When the film’s story moves to Macau, it has fun playing on the protagonists’ Western-centric assumptions (when one character brings up Chinese food, Merritt remarks, “I think where we are, they just call it food”). But for anyone else, Now You See Me 2 will strain the limits of patience and belief, suspended or otherwise: When it comes to this flashy but empty tribute to the wonders of magic, seeing really is believing.

The Joy of Instagram

Is there any genre of image that better captures the current technological moment than the sea of screens, at a concert or a rally or a show, thrust upward to document a shared experience? The layering of the lights—reflecting an event in the moment, and capturing it for later—neatly conveys the frenetic beauty of life as it’s lived at the dawn of the Internet age. And the anxieties, too, because, you know: Does documenting something cheapen it? Does that sea of screens take something meaningful away from the stage they are aimed at? Does our impulse to snap and Insta and tweet and otherwise capture the events of our lives denude those events, and by extension those lives? 

Related Story

In Defense of Instagramming Your Food

According to a new paper: Nope. Kristin Diehl, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, and a team of colleagues wanted to put those ideas to the test. So they conducted a series of lab experiments and field tests designed to measure people’s enjoyment of events when they documented them, as opposed to when they didn’t. And their results, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and reported by Time, suggest that longstanding anxieties about the ‘grammification of experience may be misplaced: Capturing experiences through photos, the team found, far from compromising people’s enjoyment of those experiences, actually seemed to amplify that enjoyment. A photographic mindset doesn’t seem to prevent people from “living in the moment,” as the old accusation goes; it might actually help them to do that living. 

“What we find is you actually look at the world slightly differently, because you’re looking for things you want to capture, that you may want to hang onto,” Diehl explained of the study’s results. “That gets people more engaged in the experience, and they tend to enjoy it more.”

Instagram makes us the editors of the texts of our own lives; it demands choices about what is significant—and therefore worth remembering.

It’s not the act of photo-taking itself, to be clear, that leads to that enjoyment; it’s the kind of mental curation that is required when you’re thinking about what is worth documenting in the first place. Instagram makes us the editors of the texts of our own lives; it demands choices about what is significant—and therefore worth saving, and savoring, and remembering—and what is less so. Even the simple act of taking “mental photos,” Diehl said, in the manner of Cam Jansen, is enough to add joy to an experience. 

And that seems to be true, the team found, across varied types of experience. Diehl and her colleagues tested the idea on a sightseeing bus, with nearly 200 participants—and found that the people who photographed the sights in question enjoyed the experience much more than those who simply sat and watched and absorbed. They tested it in museums, too: People reported enjoying exhibits more when they photographed them. And, yep, the findings held when it came to that most cliched of activities: the Instagramming of food. The study participants who were encouraged to take photos while they ate lunch, Time notes—in this case, at least three photos—ended up being more immersed in the dining experience than the people who weren’t. 

It may come down to the difference between “dining” and merely “eating”—the notion that even something as simple as lunch can be, if you allow it to, An Experience: something worth savoring in the present, sure, but also worth preserving for the future. And, all apologies to Susan Sontag, but what better way to ratify the significance of an event, be it a meal or a party or a concert or anything else, than to take a photo of it? And, in doing all that, to make a memory?

More Flights to Cuba

Americans will now have more opportunities to fly to Cuba.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Transportation approved six domestic airlines to begin flights to Cuba from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. This is the first time there have been scheduled flights between the U.S. and Cuba in more than 50 years. Charter flights between the two countries, though, have been allowed for several years, making around 100 crossings per week.

The airlines—American Airlines, Frontier Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Silver Airways, Southwest Airlines, and Sun Country Airlines—were approved to fly to nine cities in Cuba. Havana, though, is not on that list. As USA Today reports:

But the department is still considering which airlines will get a combined 20 daily flights to the capital out of 60 proposals, which will be announced later this summer.

The nine destinations in Cuba are Camagüey, Cayo Coco, Cayo Largo, Cienfuegos, Holguín, Manzanillo, Matanzas, Santa Clara, and Santiago de Cuba. Each city could have received up to 10 U.S. flights per day.

In February, Cuba and the U.S. signed an agreement to re-establish scheduled flights between the two countries, allowing for 110 daily round-trip flights. This is yet another step in the growing diplomatic relations that began December 2014, and was most notably highlighted by President Obama’s trip to the Communist Party-run island nation in March.

What's Next for Gawker?

Updated on June 10 at 2:57 p.m. ET

Gawker Media, reeling from the $140 million awarded to former pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan in an invasion-of-privacy suit, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and said it’s being sold to Ziff Davis, the media company that owns PC Magazine and other publications.

“We are encouraged by the agreement with Ziff Davis, one of the most rigorously managed and profitable companies in digital media,” Nick Denton, Gawker Media Group’s (GMG) founder, said in a statement. “A combination would marry Ziff Davis’ strength in e-commerce, licensing and video with GMG’s premium media brands.”

Here’s more:

In order to offer the business free and clear of legal liabilities and maximize value for all stakeholders, GMG subsidiary GM LLC has filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors. The sale will be conducted through a bankruptcy court supervised auction, in which other bidders may offer a higher price for the company. GMG is being advised by Mark Patricof of Houlihan Lokey.

During the sale process, GMG will maintain normal operations, publishing news and opinion on technology, politics and other interests to its 6 million readers each weekday, and providing advertisers with access to this desirable audience.

The statement said the sale and the bankruptcy filing will allow Gawker Media to appeal the judgment in the Hogan case. Here’s a screen grab of Gawker’s filing: 

Gawker petition grab pic.twitter.com/I1SrCqcguA

— Max Frumes (@maxfrumes) June 10, 2016

See @HulkHogan listed as largest unsecured claim in Gawker bk pic.twitter.com/PsDAjBQYMW

— Max Frumes (@maxfrumes) June 10, 2016

The New York Times reported earlier, citing a person briefed on the plan, that ZiffDavis submitted an opening bid of $90 million to $100 million for Gawker Media.

“By using the bankruptcy, there’s an argument for Gawker ... that they don't have to post a bond on appeal, and the appeal [against the $140 million award] can proceed without them posting that bond,” Christopher Ward, vice-chair of the bankruptcy practice at the law firm Polsinelli, said. 

And, he added, the bankruptcy filing protects Ziff Davis, as well.

“Under the bankruptcy code, the assets will sell free and clear of any liens and claims,” Ward said. “So the judgment will stay behind in the Gawker bankruptcy estate and the assets will be sold free and clear on the judgment on it.”

Questions about Gawker’s fate have swirled since a Florida jury awarded Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, $115 million in March in his invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the company that owns the gossip website of the same name and other properties. Two weeks later, he was awarded another $25 million in punitive damages.

In 2012 Gawker ran a one-minute, 41-second video clip of Hogan having sex with a wife’s friend. Hogan sued, saying he had been recorded without his consent. Denton had defended the decision to post the clip, which the website said it had received anonymously. The company’s lawyers contended that Gawker’s decision was protected by the First Amendment—a position the jury did not buy. As my colleague Matt Ford noted at the time:

Beyond press-freedom concerns, the case’s sheer costs also loomed over Gawker as an existential threat. The New York Times reported last year that the site had to pay its legal fees in the Hogan case out of hand after exceeding its insurance cap. Denton also told the Times that there was a one-in-ten chance he would have to sell a controlling interest to keep the company solvent.

Gawker’s legal strategy always hinged on the appellate courts, which could be more favorable terrain for the company when raising First Amendment concerns and less susceptible to the case’s more salacious aspects.

Indeed, Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, tweeted:

Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of our nation. Like them or not, sad to see NYC media giant @Gawker forced to the brink.

— Eric Schneiderman (@AGSchneiderman) June 10, 2016

 

But last month, another wrinkle emerged in the story. It turned out, Hogan’s case against Gawker was financed by Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal who is also a major donor to the Committee to Protect Journalist. Thiel was famously outed as gay by the gossip website in 2007.

Thiel told the Times that story and articles about his friends in Gawker “ruined people’s lives for no reason.” Thiel funded lawyers to, in the words of the Times, “find and help ‘victims’ of the company’s coverage mount cases against Gawker.”

“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” Thiel told the newspaper. “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”

 In writing about the revelation of Thiel’s role in the Gawker case, my colleague Ian Bogost noted that it was the logical conclusion of a flame war—albeit one with financial consequences.

There are no winners in this dispute. Is Gawker any more virtuous for casting their tabloid publication of Hogan’s sex tape as journalism in the public interest—or outing Thiel—than Thiel is in underwriting their comeuppance for it? We can debate the details, but “virtue” probably won’t enter the conversation. And even debating the details entails the tacit acceptance of attention’s victory over knowledge in today’s media ecosystem. It’s not just tabloid editors and billionaires; everyone is scrambling to make their voices louder than everyone else’s. The loudest, it turns out, get to be right.  

Gawker Media owns Gawker, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Kotaku, Deadspin, Gizmodo, and Jalopnik.

David Perdue's Prayer for President Obama

There are a few axioms to live by in American politics, even in this degraded age: All politics is local. If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Politics stops at the water’s edge. And, uh, don’t pray for the death of the sitting president of the United States.

At least, that last one seemed like common sense. Yet Senator David Perdue appeared to break the rule Friday morning. In his remarks at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference, Betsy Woodruff reported, the freshman Georgia Republican encouraged attendees to pray for President Obama. According to Perdue’s office, he said:

I think we’re called to pray for our country, for our leaders, and yes, even our president. In his role as president I think we should pray for Barack Obama. But I think we need to be very specific about how we pray. We should pray like Psalms 109:8 says. It says, “Let his days be few, and let another have his office.”

As many people quickly pointed out, the quotation is not exactly a benign plea for a new president in its original context. Here’s a chunk of the psalm:

8. Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

9. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

10. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

11. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.

12. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.

13. Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.

That’s pretty ugly stuff. As frightening as the imprecation is in its original Old Testament version—its really masterful, bitter language—it takes on an even more chilling aspect in Christian theology. In the New Testatment book of Acts, Peter quotes the psalm as foretelling the ruin of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus.

Perdue didn’t make this up. In fact, this verse—sometimes labeled “the Obama Prayer”—has been circulating for years among conservatives. Gawker’s John Cook noted the prevalence of the reference on internet message boards and in CafePress t-shirts and bumperstickers back in November 2009. Other cases have popped up over the years, from the Manatee County, Florida, sheriff’s office to the Kansas House, where the speaker forwarded an email involving the psalm.

Malice toward a sitting president isn’t limited to one party. It’s not hard to find news reports about liberals wishing or praying for death for George W. Bush. The obvious difference is that none of those involved was a sitting (or even retired) Democratic senator. Going further back, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and Secretary of State Al Haig were both targets of the prayer.

What was Perdue thinking? Maybe he didn’t know better—though that’s a good argument against quoting Scripture you don’t fully understand, which in turn is a reminder of the importance of humility in understanding God’s word. (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”) Maybe he just meant it to be “tongue in cheek,” which is how many of the people who have quoted Psalm 109 in the past have explained away the use, although really, there are better jokes to be made. Maybe he saw Hillary Clinton’s success with internet memes on Thursday and just wanted to get in on the action. Not a great call, either way.

In a statement, Perdue’s office clarified, “He in no way wishes harm to our president and everyone in the room understood that,” and accused the media of “pushing a narrative to create controversy.” 

One of the more peculiar things about Perdue’s unwise remark is that it spotlights the persistence of the “Obama prayer” joke. Obama’s days in office are constitutionally numbered, and the end of his term is known. Moreover, it doesn’t seem as though the prayers did much good for Obama’s opponents in the first term; he was handily reelected in 2012. Perhaps intervening in elections by striking politicians dead isn’t how God works.

Obama’s Last Slow Jam

There are two broad ways politicians can work with pop culture. They can reference it with meme-dropping tweets or popular dance moves to try and give the impression of being plugged in. Or they can harness a cultural platform’s reach and their own star power to spread their agenda. These two routes are often related: A politician might, say, quote a hit song lyric, and then use the ensuing attention to make a point.

Barack Obama has been particularly deft at this maneuver. Reviewing his White House’s hipness efforts earlier this year, I wrote that both he and Michelle tend to “[create] the impression of edginess while also strategically exercising restraint” and try to “make culture work for them, not the other way around.” You can see those tactics clearly in the president’s new, and maybe last, Tonight Show appearance.

When Obama joined Jimmy Fallon for a “Slow Jam the News” segment in 2012, he took to the stage with the warm affect of a politician smiling for re-election and then recited some campaign talking-points about student loans. Last night, he put on a repeat performance, but this time—as might befit a president with the freedom of having termed out—he maintained a mock-serious face the entire time, as if he suddenly believes what Gretchen Carlson said about his first Slow Jam: that these comedy shows are beneath the presidency.

His slow jam was made up of brags about his eight years in office—the fallen unemployment rate, the legalization of gay marriage, the Affordable Care Act, etc.—and a jokey dig at Donald Trump: “Orange is not the new black.” There was no hiding the attempt to shore up his legacy and boost Hillary Clinton, his newly endorsed would-be successor. The only obvious attempt at going viral on Obama’s part came from him ever-so-briefly reciting Rihanna’s “Work,” and, as he has tended to do lately, literally dropping the mic.

The rest of the entertainment value came from Fallon, capitalizing on the frisson of being next to the president of the United States as he played racy. He bellowed the following words: “Oh yeah, President Obama stimulated long-term growth, in both the public and private sector. In 2008, the country wasn’t feeling in the mood, it was too tired and stressed, said it had a headache. Barack lit some candles and got some silky satin sheets and told the American people ‘yes, we can.’” He also said this: “He’s accomplished a lot in eight years, even when Congress tried to block him, he found a way in the back door,” to which Obama replied with a choreographed look of disapproval. In a more excellent and less controversy-baiting moment, Fallon called Obama “the Prez dispenser.”

During the interview portion of the show, Obama maintained his usual stance toward celebrities like Fallon: friendly but dismissive. He seemed horrified to learn that he was the first sitting president to be on The Tonight Show’s New York set, and he said that in all his time in office, no one has been more awkward upon meeting Obama than Fallon was. During a segment where the host and Obama wrote thank you cards, Fallon took a sharp jab at the presumptive Democratic nominee for president: “Thank you, Hillary Clinton, for possibly becoming the first f...president. I would have said ‘female’ but someone deleted the ‘emale.’” Obama barely acknowledged the joke, but he did then snap at The Roots to start playing music—another instance of the politician leading entertainers and not the other way around. 

Warcraft: Game Over

The act of describing Warcraft seems beyond that of a mere mortal critic. This is a film that requires an instruction manual going in—or perhaps years of training alongside solemn mages—simply to possess the superhuman endurance needed to enjoy it. It’s based on a series of video games, but the story resembles a conversation about The Lord of the Rings overheard at a loud bar: There are orcs, yes, and humans, and some magic too, but after that, things get very complicated and extremely forgettable. Warcraft is a well-meaning attempt to present a colossal fantasy world, largely unknown to moviegoers, using recognizable tropes and then instantly subverting them. It is also a calamitous failure.

 

It’s a particular shame given that Warcraft (a $160-million epic from Universal) is directed by Duncan Jones, a promising voice in genre filmmaking whose debut Moon was one of the best sci-fi films of the last decade. With Warcraft, he tackled a challenge Hollywood has continually struggled with—turning an uber-popular video game into something resembling a linear blockbuster narrative. Even the most audacious games can feel a little flatter onscreen simply because their plotting feels so familiar, and Warcraft suffers in that regard. It tries to offer a new angle on the high-fantasy storytelling viewers have seen onscreen for decades, but eventually it just descends into another weak action hodgepodge.

On to the plot, which flows as plentifully in Warcraft as the CGI. First, there are the orcs, a race of hulking warriors with boar tusks for teeth, who are possessed of a rather fearsome underbite and represented through sophisticated motion-capture technology. Their universe has been ravaged by some apocalypse, so a spiky green shaman called Gul’dan (Daniel Wu) has zapped open a portal for their warriors to run through, beginning a war with a world called Azeroth. This new place is home to humans, elves, dwarves, and plenty more, though we’re mainly introduced to the humans.

Jones, who co-wrote the script with Charles Leavitt, strives to present heroes and villains on both sides, which keeps Warcraft from being another tale of strapping white Euro-warriors taking on a dark horde of man-beasts. Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel) is a steadfast knight for the kingdom of Azeroth, backing up the noble King Llane (Dominic Cooper), while the lead orc Durotan (Tony Kebbell) is a new father and respected chieftain who’s suspicious of Gul’dan’s dark magic.

There’s also Garona (Paula Patton), a half-orc (her tusks are much less prominent) who straddles both sides of the conflict, and Medivh (Ben Foster), a mysterious human wizard who may or may not be up to no good. At the beginning of the film, Medivh is carving a giant golem statue in his tower—and you know what Chekhov said about introducing a golem in the first act. Medivh is constantly warning about “the fel,” a source of evil magic that seems to be driving the orc invasion, but like so much of Warcraft’s fantasy jargon, there’s absolutely no wider explanation of what it is or how it works—it’s just quickly name-checked as if the audience should understand what’s going on.

Warcraft’s story resembles a conversation about The Lord of the Rings overheard at a loud bar.

This happens over and over again: Characters spout whole monologues about the “Guardian of Tirisfal” or the rules of ancient orcish battle rituals, and things quickly become too muddled to even hope to keep track of. Warcraft doesn’t engage in much world-building; instead, it throws viewers into an already-constructed world expecting they’ll get the gist of it. And perhaps they would, if the film weren’t such a jarringly edited mess, overloaded with sub-Tolkien dialogue about sorcery and honor that consistently lands with a clunk.

Unfortunately, there’s no Han Solo here, no wiseacre for audiences to hold onto as someone with a remotely relatable personality. Though the movie is already quite silly—a wizard played by Ben Foster literally carves a 15-foot golem out of clay—there isn’t much deliberate comic relief, since everyone is as deadly serious as the fel magic they won’t shut up about. Anduin is a noble warrior whose motivation is winning the war and defending his king. Llane is a noble ruler whose motivation is protecting his people with honor. Durotan is a proud chieftain whose motivation is obeying the customs and traditions of his clan and keeping them safe.

There are supporting characters like Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer), a wizard who abandoned his monk-like order, who would feel rebellious if Schnetzer weren’t so apple-cheeked and idealistic. Garona, the half-orc warrior caught between two races, should probably be the protagonist of the film, but she’s too often pushed to the side, advising one hero or the other, or trying to inspire a little romantic tension. Patton is a wonderful actress, but pulling off a good performance in such a dramatically inert environment is a task even a level-50 mage would struggle with.

Perhaps most frustratingly, over its two-hour running time, Warcraft only builds to more exposition: The promise of future tales to be told, of character arcs paying off in promised sequels, of yet another globe-conquering franchise Hollywood has vainly tried to conjure up to keep pace with all the superheroes. It’s likely the producers felt they had earned such arrogance with a huge budget, fancy CGI, and a well-known brand. And perhaps with a different story, or with a more clearly explained world, the film could have worked. Sadly, when the time came, Warcraft failed to cast its spell.