Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 146

When Is a Jury No Longer a Jury?

More than 2.2 million car crashes occurred at U.S. intersections in 2009. But only one of them led to a U.S. Supreme Court case on the federal judiciary’s power over juries.

In a 6-2 decision Thursday, the Court ruled federal district courts have the power to recall juries into service after they are discharged—but only within certain limits.

“District courts should exercise this power cautiously and courts of appeals should review its invocation carefully,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. “That was done here.”

The case, Dietz v. Bouldin, began at a nondescript intersection in Bozeman, Montana. Hillary Bouldin ran a red light on August 9, 2009, and struck Rocky Dietz’s car, injuring Dietz’s lower back. He sued Bouldin in federal court seeking at least $10,136 for past medical costs, plus additional damages for future expenses.

The trial was unremarkable. Since Dietz and Bouldin had agreed on the amount for past medical expenses, the jury’s role was to decide how much more than that would be awarded in damages. During their discussions, jurors sent a note to the judge: “Has the $10,136 medical expenses been paid; and if so, by whom?”

Speaking with both sides’ lawyers, the judge worried that jurors might not know they had to award at least $10,136 in damages. If they awarded less, it would result in a mistrial. His response to the jurors simply said their requested information was not relevant to their verdict.

Deliberations continued, and eventually the jury returned with its verdict: $0 in damages.

The judge thanked them for their service and ordered them “discharged.” He then realized the mistake and summoned the jurors back. Most of them had been mingling outside the courtroom in a public space. One had left the building entirely to get a hotel receipt before returning.

Dietz’s lawyer objected. Once juries are dismissed, they cannot be “un-dismissed.” The proper course of action would be a mistrial.

But the judge did not want to waste more time and money with a whole new trial, he said. After the jury reconvened, he asked them collectively if they had discussed the case with anyone else after leaving. When they said no, he informed them of the error—for which he accepted blame—and told them to return to their deliberations. They awarded $15,000 in damages the next day.

Dietz asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the verdict, but the court instead affirmed the judge’s actions. By ruling that federal district courts could recall discharged juries, the Ninth Circuit deepened a split among the federal appeals courts over the issue. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on January 19.

Writing for the majority, Sotomayor rejected what she described as the “‘Humpty Dumpty’ theory of the jury,” in which jurors’ neutrality and authority is irrevocably broken once dismissed.

“A discharge order is not a magical invocation,” Sotomayor wrote. “It is an order, like any other order. And, like any order, it can be issued by mistake.”

Avoiding mistrials from simple errors also furthers the judiciary’s interest in speedy and efficient justice, Sotomayor added. “Compared to the alternative of conducting a new trial, recall can save the parties, the court, and society the costly time and litigation expense of conducting a new trial with a new set of jurors,” she wrote.

But the power to recall juries is not without limits, especially with the risk of  potential prejudice, she noted. Among the factors she said lower courts should consider when assessing jury recalls are the length of time jurors were discharged, their possible exposure to Internet coverage, their conversations with non-jurors, and any reaction to their verdict that they witnessed.

The Court also declined to address whether juries could be reconvened in criminal trials, where the risk of double jeopardy and the presumption of innocence may alter the constitutional calculus.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a four-page dissent joined only by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Its shortness reflected its simplicity. Rather than grapple with the myriad and subtle influences that could taint reconvened juries, he argued, the Court should forbid judges from reconvening them at all.

“Granting a new trial may be inconvenient, but at least litigants and the public will be more confident that the verdict was not contaminated by improper influence after the trial has ended,” he wrote. “And under this bright-line rule, district courts would take greater care in discharging the jury.”

He also predicted the ruling’s vague categories would lead to confusion among the district courts. “And when the Courts of Appeals inevitably fail to agree on what constitutes prejudice, we will be called on again to sort it out,” Thomas added.

For Sotomayor and the rest of the majority, the benefits of a limited jury-recall power outweighed the potential increases in workload. “All judges make mistakes,” she wrote. “Even us.”

David Letterman and the Missing Female Comedians

David Letterman’s post-retirement life has been fun to witness. Since leaving The Late Show on May 20, 2015, he’s grown out his beard, hung out at the Indy 500, and generally seemed very happy about no longer being beholden to broadcast television. He’s also been candid: Reflecting on his legacy in an interview with Tom Brokaw for an upcoming episode of Dateline, he spoke openly when asked who should have succeeded him on CBS, saying, “I don’t know why they didn’t give my show to a woman. That would have been fine.”

 

Letterman didn’t seem to bear any particular ill will for Stephen Colbert, the man who replaced him, though he’s repeatedly noted that he wasn’t consulted on which star should take up the Late Show mantle. But while his new comments reflect a refreshing viewpoint on the overwhelming maleness of late night, they sit uncomfortably alongside his legacy as a host. Letterman was a massive influence on comedy in his 33 years at Late Night and The Late Show, but perhaps the biggest strike on his record was the disproportionate lack of female comedians who appeared on his show over the years.

That issue came up for debate in 2012 when The Late Show’s comedy booker Eddie Brill said he didn’t favor female stand-ups because they were rarely “authentic,” telling The New York Times, “I see a lot of female comics who to please an audience will act like men.” Brill was fired, but the damage was done—he’d been the gatekeeper for The Late Show for 11 years, and in 2011, he let only one woman perform stand-up on the show (out of some 200 episodes).

I wrote earlier this week about the challenges female stand-up comedians have faced in a field that’s long been a boy’s club. From open-mic nights to televised specials to major movie blockbusters, women have historically been underserved at every level in comedy. Thanks to the fact that they now have alternative methods of promoting themselves, and to speak out against sexism, that’s beginning to change. And it’s great to see Letterman, free from PR concerns or fealty to network bosses, speak his mind in interviews on the subject, even if it doesn’t do poor Stephen Colbert any favors.

When asked by Brokaw if he missed late-night TV, Letterman said he surprisingly didn’t at all, adding, “I’m happy for the guys—men and women—there should be more women … You know, I’m happy for their success. And they’re doing things I couldn’t do. So that’s great.” It is great—women like Samantha Bee (the host of Full Frontal on TBS) are showing late-night TV just what it’s been missing for all these years—but it’s too bad it took Letterman so long to speak up.

The Murder Charges in the Kalamazoo Bicycling Crash

Updated on June 9 at 4:23 p.m. ET

A 50-year-old man who struck nine bicyclists Tuesday, killing five of them, was charged Thursday by the Kalamazoo County prosecutor with five counts of second-degree murder.

Here’s MichiganLive.com:

Charles Pickett Jr. faces five counts of second-degree murder for the bicyclists that died in the crash, and four counts of reckless driving causing serious impairment for the bicyclists injured in the crash. He could face up to life in prison if convicted of murder. The reckless driving counts are punishable by up to five years in prison.

 

Also identified were the five people killed and four who were injured. Those killed are Debra Ann Bradley, 53, Melissa Ann Fevig-Hughes, 42; Fred Anton "Tony" Nelson, 73; Lorenz John “Larry” Paulik, 74; and Suzanne Joan Sippel, 56. The injured are: Paul Douglas Gobble, 47; Sheila Diane Jeske, 53; Jennifer Lynn Johnson, 40; and Paul Lewis Runnels, 65.

Our original post:

Five cyclists are dead and four others injured after they were struck Tuesday evening by a pickup truck north of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and a local bicycling advocate called it “one of the worst” crashes involving bicycles and motorists in the county.

Here’s what happened Tuesday in Cooper Township, according to MichiganLive.com:

The bicyclists were struck by a blue Chevrolet pickup truck just after 6:30 p.m. in the 5500 block of North Westnedge Avenue, near Markin Glen County Park, in a hit-and-run crash.

The driver was found a short distance away by police officers and is in custody, Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Getting said at an 11 p.m. press conference at Kalamazoo Township Hall. The driver is a 50-year-old man from West Michigan, Getting said.

WOODTV reports the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office is leading the investigation into the crash while Michigan State Police are handling crash reconstruction.

The group of nine adult bicyclists were riding in an organized group together at the time they were struck. Getting, the Kalamazoo County prosecutor, said police had received calls about the blue pickup prior to the crash, but declined to elaborate. 

“I think this is one of the worst, if not the worst, bicycling-motorist accidents in the county,” Paul Selden, director of road safety with the Kalamazoo Bicycle Club, told MichiganLive.com.

Of the four people injured in the crash, two are being treated at the Bronson Methodist Hospital; two others—one of them in critical condition and other in fair condition—are being treated at Borgess Medical Center.

In 2014, 4,884 pedestrians and 726 bicyclists were killed in crashes with motor vehicles (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).

— Brian Sterling (@BriSterling) June 8, 2016

 

What Won’t Happen in Vegas

A U.S. company that planned to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with China’s help called off the deal Thursday, nine months after it was announced.

In September, the U.S. company XpressWest announced that the state-run organization, China Railway International, would provide $100 million in capital to help fund the project. But XpressWest said in a statement Thursday that federal regulations constrained the project:

The team at XpressWest is optimistic CRI and its affiliates will one-day succeed in establishing a viable presence in the United States rail market, however, our ambitions outpace CRI’s ability to move the project forward timely and efficiently. 

...

Our biggest challenge continues to be the Federal Government’s requirement that high-speed trains must be manufactured in the United States. As everyone knows, there are no high-speed trains manufactured in the United States. This inflexible requirement has been a fundamental barrier to financing high-speed rail in our County. For the past 10 years, we have patiently waited for policy makers to recognize high-speed rail in the United States is a new enterprise and that allowing trains from countries with decades of safe high-speed rail experience is needed to connect the Southwest region and start this new industry. 

There were two possible routes proposed for the rail line. One would have run 185 miles from Las Vegas to Victorville, which is about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The second was a 230-mile line that would have conncected Las Vegas directly to Los Angeles. XpressWest had obtained approval and permits from many of the federal agencies it would need to build the line, the Los Angeles Times reported. But to construct the 230-mile line would have required additional approvals and an analysis on potential environmental impacts.

A Major Blow to Concealed Carry

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that the Second Amendment does not protect a right for ordinary citizens to carry concealed firearms in public, a major decision on the constitutional boundaries of gun rights that could elicit review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In his 52-page majority opinion in Peruta v. County of San Diego, Judge William Fletcher laid out an exhaustive history of British and American laws prohibiting concealed weapons, tracing a continuous thread from a decree by Edward I to his sheriffs in 1299 to a series of state supreme-court decisions in the 19th century.

“Based on the overwhelming consensus of historical sources, we conclude that the protection of the Second Amendment—whatever the scope of that protection may be—simply does not extend to the carrying of concealed firearms in public by members of the general public,” Fletcher wrote.

The 7-4 ruling upheld California’s broad restrictions on concealed-carry use in their entirety. Under current law, California residents must show “good cause” when obtaining a concealed-carry license from their county sheriff. What constitutes “good cause” is defined by policies outlined by each sheriff.

Edward Peruta and his fellow plaintiffs sought concealed-carry licenses from sheriffs in San Diego County and Yolo County in 2009, but were denied under the good-cause requirement. Backed by state and national gun-rights groups, they asked the courts to overturn the statute under the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.

Two federal district courts upheld California’s statute in 2010 and 2011, but a divided three-judge panel ruled for Peruta and the other plaintiffs in the combined appeal. San Diego County and the state of California appealed that ruling to the entire Ninth Circuit, which formed an 11-judge panel to consider the case.

Thursday’s ruling explicitly refused to address whether the Second Amendment protects the right to openly carry firearms in public. And, perhaps anticipating an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, three judges argued in a concurring opinion that California’s statute is reasonable enough to survive judicial scrutiny even if the Second Amendment’s protections did apply to concealed firearms.

In dissent, four judges on the panel argued the majority had contradicted the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which found an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment for the first time.

“In the context of present-day California law, the Defendant counties’ limited licensing of the right to carry concealed firearms is tantamount to a total ban on the right of an ordinary citizen to carry a firearm in public for self-defense,” Judge Consuelo Callahan wrote. “Thus, Plaintiffs’ Second Amendment rights have been violated. While states may choose between different manners of bearing arms for self-defense, the right must be accommodated.”

The Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, which applied Heller to the states in 2010, transformed the legal landscape for gun rights. In the six years since the rulings, lower courts have deliberated about the scope and boundaries of the individual right to bear arms post-Heller. But the Supreme Court justices have not. The Court has yet to hear a major Second Amendment dispute since McDonald, and no such cases appear on its docket for the upcoming term.

Hillary Clinton, Tracy Flick, and the Reclaiming of Female Ambition

This time last year, at a producer’s conference in Hollywood, a member of the audience asked Reese Witherspoon whether she’d ever consider playing Hillary Clinton in a movie. 

She already had, Witherspoon responded: One of her earliest roles in film was Tracy Flick, the teenage villain of Election, 1999’s dark satire of high school politics. And: She was only partially joking. “When I did meet Hillary Clinton,” Witherspoon recalled, “she said, ‘Everybody talks to me about Tracy Flick in Election.’”

Related Story

Television Loves Female Presidents, as Long as They're Republican

It is supremely strange, on the one hand, that the American public would associate the former lawyer and First Lady and U.S. senator and secretary of state—and also the mother, and the grandmother, and the woman whom the American media once spent years chastising for an expressed preference against cookie-baking—with a cupcake-wielding adolescent. On the other hand, though, the association makes perfect sense: Election is all about the layered strifes of, well, elections. It revels, in its sardonic way, in the lingering martial framework of the “campaign.” The story of Tracy Flick’s effort to win the presidency of Carver High School’s student government is a broader meditation on political ambition—and on the pitfalls and punishments that can result, in particular, when that ambition has the audacity to be realized by a woman. 

Americans, who are subject to a mess of rules when it comes to self-assertion (confidence: good! arrogance: bad!; hard work: good! overeagerness: sad!), have, by extension, a generally awkward relationship with political ambition—one whose awkwardness extends across genders and generations. For women, though, the self-assertions required of political candidacy are particularly fraught. And that’s been reflected not just in news media reactions to Hillary Clinton’s runs for office, but also in broader cultural treatments of (necessarily fictional) lady presidents. Pop culture has long offered depictions of women in positions of political power; ambition, however, is another matter. People compare Clinton to Tracy Flick, the stateswoman to the organization kid, for a simple reason: Hollywood hasn’t given them anyone better to compare her to. 

That’s not to say that TV and movies haven’t, in the many years leading up to a woman’s clinching of a major-party presidential nomination, provided the American public with a host of fictional female leaders. In the high-heeled footsteps of Leslie McCloud in 1964’s Kisses for My President and Julia Mansfield in 1985’s Hail to the Chief have come Kathryn Bennett in Air Force One, Elaine Barrish in Political Animals, Mackenzie Allen in Commander in Chief, Caroline Reynolds in Prison Break, Claire Underwood in House of Cards, Sally Langston in Scandal, Elizabeth McCord in Madam Secretary, Selina Meyer in Veep, and many more. These characters have been the stuff of (political) science fiction: They have been framed, self-consciously, for the future. They have been evidence of Hollywood, whose products have claimed partial credit for marriage equality and the presidency of Barack Obama, recognizing its great capacity for world-expanding, and then attempting to use that power for good—one Madame President at a time.

And yet, despite all the accomplished women who have occupied Hollywood’s various West Wings, it’s Tracy Flick, the manic pixie scheme girl—the perfectionist, the know-it-all, the girl whose hand was perma-raised—who has persevered as a metaphor. It’s Tracy Flick—not Elizabeth McCord or Mackenzie Allen or Selina Meyer, but Tracy Flick, whose ambition makes her a menace—whom Hillary Clinton is (still!) asked about. And that’s likely because of things that have, in the end, very little to do with who Clinton is and much more to do with the work she has been engaged in this year. Election is unique, and uniquely resonant, because of the premise its title suggests: It depicts a woman who is not just passively occupying political office, but actively striving for it.

Campaigning, much more than simply governing, demands a whole host of things that Americans tend to view with a mixture of resentment and resignation: Running for office requires—at all levels, but especially at the highest—bragging and smarming and compromising and pissing people off and, in all but the best of circumstances, making promises you will almost certainly be unable to keep. Fictional worlds have long recognized that significant bug of the non-fictional, generally treating campaigns either with overt disdain (see: Wag the Dog, Bullworth, The Good Wife, Veep), or, even more commonly, with a kind of muffled embarrassment. (See: The West Wing, which morally ratified its fan-fictional presidency by making clear that President Bartlet was plucked from relative obscurity—the governorship of New Hampshire—to ascend to the White House. Josiah Bartlet, Cincinnatus by way of Sorkin, did not seek office; office, the show made clear, sought him.)

Despite all the accomplished women who have occupied Hollywood’s various West Wings, it is Tracy Flick, the manic pixie scheme girl, who has steadily represented female power.

And for women candidates, in particular, the calculus becomes even more difficult, since the things campaigning requires—the assorted forms of swaggering—are particularly frowned upon when they’re exhibited by women. Clinton, doing the basic campaign-trail work the American electorate demands of its would-be executives, has been accused of yelling and bragging. (Last time around, in 2008, the simple act of talking led some pundits to dismiss her as “shrill.”)

Pop-cultural products, which tend to prefer inspiration and aspiration to more pragmatic depictions, have reflected those anxieties through a kind of negative space: Their depictions of women politicians have largely spared those women (and, by extension, their audiences) the various indignities associated with campaigning. They often present their female protagonists in medias res: Their productions simply start with them in positions of power, their origin stories only eluded to. Or, more commonly, they take a Bartletian path, elevating the women through fate (or some extension thereof) to the lofts of power, with minimal striving required of the loftee. Commander in Chief’s Mackenzie Allen ascended to her show’s titular role after a coincidental promotion from vice president. Veep’s Selina Meyer, similarly, became president through the fluke of political scandal; Scandal’s Sally Langston, through the fluke of political violence. Madam Secretary, a show the Clintons have said they watch together, began with its protagonist, the former CIA agent Elizabeth McCord, becoming secretary of state when her old friend—the U.S. president—appointed her to the role. 

Chosen to serve: It’s the most common and self-delusional of tropes in American politics, the result of tiara complexes and culturally enforced passive aggressions and George Washington’s insistence that, all things considered, he really would have preferred to be a gentleman farmer. And it leads, as far as depictions of women in power go, to things like Vice President Kathryn Bennett, in Air Force One, embodying her role as the film’s moral compass by resisting every chance she has to become president herself, ensuring that the executive authority of President Marshall (Harrison Ford) will never be in doubt. It leads, even, to Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope—one of the most delightful lady-pols in pop-cultural history—repeatedly confirming her worthiness for public office by demonstrating that her desire to serve comes from selflessness (rather than personal, and therefore more stereotypically masculine, and therefore more fraught, ambition).

Pop culture has yet to grapple, in a deep way, with the women who defy the cultural conventions in order to star in the political ones. 

In America, you prove your worthiness for power by proving your lack of desire for that power. If you are a woman, you have an added challenge: You must prove that you will use the power you want-but-don’t-want to act on behalf of everyone but yourself. 

These assumptions, combined, have led to a series of fictional women who are generally powerful but not, you know, awkwardly powerful—women who, by way of the writers who created them, know their place. Women who, despite their occupation of the White House, end up exemplifying more regressive notions of what feminine leadership is all about: soft power, cheerful submission to the social order, the strident desire not to strive too far. 

The exceptions tend to prove the rule. Commander in Chief’s Mac Allen, having obtained the presidency by default, decides to run—actively run—for a second presidential term. Selina Meyer, in Veep, does the same thing. Alicia Florrick, in The Good Wife, runs for State’s Attorney. Claire Underwood puts herself forward for U.N. Ambassador, in a way that is typically and shamelessly Underwoodian. And the women are each, in various ways, punished for it. Claire is humiliated for her hubris. So is Alicia. Campaigning brings out the worst in Selina, highlighting, even more than office-holding does, her moral vacuities and her political ineptitudes. That other Reese Witherspoon political vehicle, the decidedly non-dark comedy Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, suggested that the high-powered Congresswoman Victoria Rudd was corrupt not because of who she was, but rather because of the many compromises, personal and ethical and otherwise, demanded by the permanent campaign. Commander in Chief, in the end—the show was cancelled after a single season—prevented Mac from engaging in a campaign that would be fully her own. 

The tropes, combined, create a series of fictional women who are powerful but not awkwardly powerful.

That narrative (non-)turn of events was the stuff of external coincidence, but it also neatly highlights the problem: Even a series that wanted to show a woman running for president, and to do so earnestly, devoid of judgment and exoticism … could not. With the overall result that, despite all the depictions of female leaders on TV and in film, pop culture has yet to grapple, in a deep and realistic way, with the women who defy cultural conventions in order to star in political ones. It hasn’t yet considered the political implications of the discrepancy between notions of female ambition (which is often pathologized and mistrusted and feared) and its masculine counterpart (celebrated, rewarded, normalized). As The Huffington Post summed things up, elegantly, in 2014: “Ask a woman if she’s ambitious and she’ll look at you as if you just asked whether she sticks pins in puppies for fun.”

That’s true, in its way, for even the most powerful women in the country. Rebecca Traister, in her recent (and excellent) profile of Hillary Clinton, also ended up profiling, basically, all women: 

It’s worth asking to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait. Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men doing it? Though those on both the right and the left moan about “woman cards,” it would be impossible, and dishonest, to not recognize gender as a central, defining, complicated, and often invisible force in this election. It is one of the factors that shaped Hillary Clinton, and it is one of the factors that shapes how we respond to her. Whatever your feelings about Clinton herself, this election raises important questions about how we define leadership in this country, how we feel about women who try to claim it, flawed though they may be.

It does. It will keep doing so. And some of those questions will come back to one Tracy Flick—who’s remembered as a villain, cold and calculating, but who is also, you have to admit, probably a pretty good leader. She does her homework. She prepares. She gets things done. She cares, about her own interests and those of everybody else, so insistently, and so aggressively—indeed, so ambitiously—as to blur the line between the two. She strives and she wants and she works so, so hard. That is the source of her villainy. It is also the source of her particular charisma. 

The Cathedral and the Confederacy

Last June, after a 21-year-old white gunman, entered a church in Charleston, South Carolina, declared he was there “to shoot black people,” and killed nine, the image of the Confederate battle flag began disappearing across the country. The shooter had posed with the flag in pictures before the shooting, and his car had Confederate license plates. The massacre catalyzed a bipartisan movement to erase the symbol from public display. The Confederate flag was removed from South Carolina’s statehouse, and monuments and memorials honoring Confederate soldiers were taken down. Walmart, Amazon, and other big-name retailers stopped selling any merchandise bearing the symbol. Last month, the Republican-controlled House passed legislation that would ban the flag from some military cemeteries.

This week, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., one of the country’s most prominent churches, followed suit, voting unanimously to remove the two images of the Confederate battle flag from its windows. The cathedral said in a statement Wednesday the images will be replaced by plain glass, and the removal will be paid for by private donors.

Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and the interim dean of the cathedral, told The New York Times Thursday she only learned of the images’ existence last summer.

“They were brought to our attention after the Charleston massacre last year,” she said. “That’s when it resurfaced in our consciousness that the Confederate flag was part of our stained-glass artistry.”

The glass windows were installed in 1953 to commemorate Confederate Army Generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The cathedral announced it will hold public forums next month to discuss “issues of racism, slavery, and racial reconciliation as part of the next phase of considering the future of stained-glass windows” that pay tribute to the pair of Confederate leaders.

“Instead of turning away from that question, the Cathedral has decided to lean into it,” the Reverend Kelly Brown Douglas, the cathedral’s canon theologian, said in this week’s statement. “Instead of simply taking the windows down and going on with business as usual, the Cathedral recognizes that, for now, they provide an opportunity for us to begin to write a new narrative on race and racial justice at the Cathedral and perhaps for our nation.”

He's With Her

In perhaps the least shocking development of the 2016 presidential campaign, Barack Obama has formally endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. The backing, proclaimed in a video on Clinton’s site, comes shortly after Obama met with Senator Bernie Sanders at the White House on Thursday. Obama said:

For more than a year now across thousands of miles and all 50 states, tens of millions of Americans have made their voices heard. Today I just want to add mine. I want to congratulate Hillary Clinton on making history as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Look, I know how hard this job can be. That’s why I know Hillary will be so good at it.

The president promised to hit the trail soon to campaign for Clinton.

In the video, Obama positions himself as a peacemaker between the Sanders and Clinton factions in the party. He rejects the idea that the primaries have divided the Democratic Party, citing how he and Clinton worked together in 2008. And he heaped praise on Sanders, who, he said, “has run an incredible campaign”: 

I had a great meeting with him this week and I thanked him for shining a spotlight on issues like economic inequality and the outsize of money in our politics, and bringing young people into the process. Embracing that message is going to help us win in November. More importantly, it will make the Democratic Party strong, and it will make the country stronger.

The meeting between the two men wasn’t quite a come-to-Jesus moment. Sanders emerged from that meeting sounding a conciliatory note but not quite ready to go, as my colleague Clare Foran reported. In remarks outside the White House, Sanders vowed to compete in Tuesday’s District of Columbia primary, yet he also acknowledged the clear reality and promised to collaborate with Clinton. “I look forward to meeting with her in the near future to see how we can work together to defeat Donald Trump and create a government, which represents all of us and not just the one percent,” he said.

Obama for his part worked to emphasize the agreements between Sanders and Clinton, saying that they share a vision for an America that is hopeful, “big-hearted,” and fair.

“Those are the values the unite us as Democrats,” he said—and then, taking the chance to swipe at Donald Trump, “Those are the values that make America great.”

Obama had long been expected to back Clinton, but he stayed out of the primary to avoid acrimony, as sitting presidents have done before. (Ronald Reagan waited until May 1988 to back his vice president, George H.W. Bush.) Sanders may well hang around until Tuesday, but Obama’s intervention signals the start of a major push to unify the party. Aides have told reporters that the president is eager to get out on the trail—not just to back Clinton, but to start getting his licks in on Trump.

The Deadly Attack in Tel Aviv

At least three people were killed and five injured in Tel Aviv Wednesday after gunmen opened fire at an open-air public market. 

The shooting occurred at the popular, upscale Sarona Market in central Tel Aviv. The Associated Press reports:

[Israeli police] spokeswoman, Meirav Lapidot, said initial reports show there were “at least two terrorists.” She says both were “neutralized,” which can mean either killed or detained.

Police are searching the area to make sure there are no other attackers or possible bombs. Channel 10 TV says reports indicate that at least one of the attackers was disguised as an ultra-Orthodox Jew with black coat and hat.

Just after the shooting occurred, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport, arriving from a trip to Moscow. Haaretz reports he headed to the defense ministry’s offices, where he was briefed on the attack.

The Americans' Brutal Season Comes to an End

Midway through this season of The Americans, the undercover KGB agents Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) faced their umpteenth moral crisis: whether to kill their daughter’s youth pastor Tim—who’d discovered their double lives due to her indiscretion—and risk traumatizing her forever. They unsurprisingly opted to spare him in the hope he’d keep his mouth shut, a decision their Soviet handler Gabriel (Frank Langella) warned would feel like “living in a burning house.” “What else is new?” was Philip’s dour reply.

 

What was new in this season of The Americans, though, was the sense that Philip and Elizabeth’s story is winding to a close, that their secret crusade for the motherland is a doomed cause riddled with ethical holes, and that their daughter Paige’s (Holly Taylor) future might be the only thing worth saving. The fourth year of the critically appreciated, under-seen, and under-awarded FX drama (which airs its finale Wednesday night) was the show’s most existential and least action-packed to date, as it continued to test the audience’s allegiance to the lead characters as their ideological crusade grew more gruesome and pointless. The season was, overall, a grim triumph—one that was at times painful to stick with. But the news that the show now has a firm end date in mind should be heartening for fans eager to see the series build to a conclusion with its last two seasons.

In its early seasons, The Americans was the story of a marriage: The strange, forced bond between Elizabeth and Philip, united by Soviet superiors and ordered to have children in order to strengthen their deep cover while living in Washington D.C. Over the years, that bond has been tested and stretched in every way possible, but once the show brought their daughter Paige to the foreground and had her learn her family’s secret, it discovered a whole new set of stakes, which this fourth season explored in fascinating depth. Elizabeth and Philip were no longer just fighting a Cold War viewers knew they’d lose (the show is set in the 1980s, with this season taking place in 1983); they were also waging an internal battle over whether to impose their beliefs on their daughter (which Elizabeth wanted) or to protect her from their crimes (Philip’s stance).

That’s the “burning house” that the Jennings family lives in, the one that constantly threatens to consume them—especially when Paige makes youthful mistakes like confessing her parents’ secret to her pastor, or when Elizabeth and Philip fear they’re showing symptoms of the deadly American bio-weapon they tried to steal for their country. The specter of mass destruction hovered over The Americans more than ever before this season, from the biological warfare arc (where Philip fears that stealing such advanced weaponry for his motherland could genuinely accelerate the apocalypse) to the fear of a hair-trigger nuclear war.

The fourth year of the critically appreciated and under-seen drama was the show’s most existential and least action-packed.

One of this season’s most powerful episodes centered around the airing of the notorious TV movie The Day After, which dramatized a nuclear attack on America and famously shellshocked even Ronald Reagan, the most fervent Cold Warrior, into pushing for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Soviet Union. Though The Americans’ early seasons were about Elizabeth and Philip’s romantic tribulations, this year explored the fears parents have about their children’s future. Philip and Paige are both horrified after watching The Day After, and even Elizabeth realizes the devastation that her crusade to obtain bio-weapons for her country could cause.

If the “burning house” has been present since episode one of The Americans, this year many of the exits out of that house started to collapse. The idea that Philip and Elizabeth could just flee to safety in the Soviet Union should their cover be blown seemed all the more ridiculous, especially given Philip’s growing disgust with his home country and their children’s total lack of ideology. Some of season four’s most resonant drama came from the parents’ strained efforts to explain their lives to Paige while leaving out the most gruesome details. That tightrope became even harder to walk after Elizabeth efficiently killed a mugger who attempted to attack her and Paige on the street, giving her daughter a real glimpse of what her parents do for a living.

Paige may still mostly be in the dark, but the body count in season four was astronomical, a reflection of the chaos Philip and Elizabeth have left behind over the years. Most brutal was the execution of Nina (Annet Mahendru), a fellow KGB officer who lost her life in a Soviet prison after giving information to the FBI. But almost as wrenching was the show’s goodbye to Martha (Alison Wright), a State Department employee who Philip wooed and eventually fake-married as part of a long con to extract security information from her office. When the ruse was discovered this year, Philip had to pack her off to Russia simply to keep her alive, shattering her illusion of a happy marriage and robbing her of everything she held dear in life simply for access to a governmental fax machine. In an effort to clean up the mess, KGB agents eventually killed the FBI boss Frank Gaad (Richard Thomas) as well, a move that has only intensified the Bureau’s efforts to sniff out the sleeper agents.

Though so much of season four was internal—with Philip and Elizabeth’s shifting mindsets making up the main emotional narrative of the show—the spate of character deaths and Paige’s growing self-awareness suggest more explosive material awaits in the show’s final seasons. The fourth-season finale offers a few shocking plot twists, but more than anything, it hones in on the show’s essential message, one crystallized in a speech by Gaad midway through the year as he surveyed the wreckage of Martha’s life after her disappearance. “Whatever comes up—feelings, sympathy, friendship, whatever—you can’t lose sight of who these people are,” he said. What makes The Americans so superb is that, over its four years on TV, it never has.