Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 149

Mirror Mirror: Brilliant, Scathing UnREAL Is Back

The Bachelor justifies itself—its retrograde premises, its gleeful misogynies, its blithe rejections of the moral underpinnings of “diversity”—by way of the same excuse that many similar shows proffer: ratings. Eight million viewers can’t be wrong, you know? And so, bolstered by the mandate conferred by so many weekly eyes and hearts and minds, the show cheerfully pits bikini-clad women against each other in the fight for one man’s affections. It operates so far outside the constraints of “reality” as most people experience it as to list, without irony, a guy’s professional occupation as “hipster” and a girl’s as “chicken enthusiast.” It creates situations that treat romance—obtained, in its universe, through hot tubs and Fantasy Suites and candle-lit Darwinian struggle—as something that is available only to the hot and the straight and the young.

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UnREAL Turned The Bachelor Into Literature

Those are all reasons to mock The Bachelor (and, to an only slightly lesser extent, its sister show, The Bachelorette, which is currently at the start of its 12th season). The reason to resent The Bachelor, though—to treat viewership of the franchise not just as a guilty pleasure, but as participation in something that might be more actively pernicious—is the show’s terrible history with race. The franchise, in its 21 seasons, has never featured a Bachelor or Bachelorette of color. And the contestants of color who have participated in the show over the years, vying for a rose from the season’s appointed Hot Person, have generally not made it very far in the competition. “I’ve heard appalling things about race all the time,” Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, a former producer for The Bachelor, told Variety of her behind-the-scenes experiences of the show. It was an admission that, given the show’s weekly output, would come as a surprise to precisely nobody.

Shapiro is now an executive producer for UnREAL, the excellent dark comedy that acerbically—and, given Shapiro’s experience, expertly—satirizes The Bachelor. The scripted drama, which debuted as a sleeper hit last summer about a reality show called Everlasting, begins its second season Monday evening on Lifetime. This time around, those “appalling things,” which spent the previous episodes simmering as a background affront, are the focus of UnREAL’s gimlet gaze. The show still uses fiction to skewer a genre audacious enough to call itself “reality”; now, though, the “reality” that comes in for questioning involves race.

UnREAL’s new season begins with Rachel (Shiri Appleby), Everlasting’s producer, and Quinn (Constance Zimmer), its creator, congratulating themselves: The two have cast a black man, Darius Hill (B.J. Britt), as the new season’s Suitor. (Darius is an NFL quarterback who, like Everlasting’s previous Suitor, the British playboy Adam, is in need of an image rehab—in this case, Darius insulted a female reporter on live TV with an unfortunately timed, “Bitch, please.”)

UnREAL, in talking about TV, is by default talking about all of us. It is questioning and cajoling and calling our collective bluffs.

Rachel is convinced that this casting choice, which is otherwise the stuff of typical, transactional Hollywood image management, will somehow compensate for Everlasting’s 14 seasons’ worth of failed “reality”—and maybe, too, perhaps, for the many, many moral compromises Rachel, and her show, made during UnREAL’s previous season. She is, because of all that, exceedingly proud of herself. “It was me!” Rachel yells, early in season two. “The first black Suitor, it was me! We’re gonna make history!”

Arrogance about progress about a fiction about a fantasy about reality: It’s a fittingly complicated premise for a show that is, in its many layers, a delicious pop-cultural parfait. UnREAL’s first season, which pitted Rachel’s feminism against her job and her self-interest, questioned the extent to which ends can justify means: Rachel compromised and compromised until finally she could compromise no more. Trolly problems became train wrecks. Rachel said she wanted to “cure AIDS babies,” aware but not aware enough of how glib that aspiration was; instead, though, she ended up making a TV show that sold out her fellow women, cat fight by cat fight and villain edit by villain edit. Television is tentacular, UnREAL suggested, to the extent that a producer’s failings become a show’s failings—which become its audience’s. And all of ours.

The new season of UnREAL (at least the first two episodes of it, the ones that were made available to critics) expands on those ideas of compromise and complicity. Now, though, something has shifted: Rachel, instead of hoping to leave Everlasting to make the world a better place, wants to use the show itself to do that world-bettering. This time around, her defining cynicism has been replaced by something resembling wild-eyed optimism. (“I’m not manic, I’m changing the world!” Rachel informs Everlasting’s on-set therapist, with no apparent irony.) It’s a loaded transformation: Rachel, who spent UnREAL’s first season doing the wrong thing and then feeling bad-but-probably-not-bad-enough about it, has shed that pesky ambivalence: She is now supremely confident that she is doing the right thing. Everlasting, she has convinced herself, is a platform for making the world a better place. And she’s going to use it. We’re gonna make history.

What’s especially compelling about that premise is that Rachel has a point: TV is a platform not just for entertainment, but for cultural argument—for good or for ill. That is precisely what makes The Bachelor’s failings so resonant. And it is precisely why UnREAL can have so much to say about the world beyond its screens: In talking about TV—consistently popular TV, no less—it is talking about all of us. It is questioning us and cajoling us and calling our collective bluffs. Eight million viewers can’t be wrong—or can they?

And now, UnREAL is doing all that when it comes to race. The show’s driving question is whether Rachel is equipped to use her platform for legitimate progress, to eke some good out of a show that is otherwise so flawed—or whether, indeed, “diversity” will be, for her, the new “AIDS babies.” Rachel, as part of her quest, recruits not just Darius, but also Ruby Cartner (Denée Benton), a black civil-rights activist at Berkeley, to be one of the contestants vying for his rose and his heart. Ruby is smart; Rachel convinces her to participate with the promise that her presence on Everlasting will do more for Black Lives Matter and other civil-rights movements than any Twitter campaign ever could. The stakes of all this are high, because TV’s stakes are high. Will Ruby and Rachel team up to make Everlasting a show that is about more than performative romance? Or will one betray the other? Will Ruby be ruined by reality TV, as so many before her have … or will she harness the power of “reality” to improve reality?

UnREAL’s early episodes leave those questions tantalizingly open, with characters, and its plots, that are elastic and complicated enough to accommodate many possibilities. But the new season’s early episodes suggest future ones that will have compelling things to say—about the collision of politics and media and race, about intersectional feminism, about good intentions gone awry, about television’s complicity in the white-savior industrial complex. As Rachel says at one point, gleeful and giddy and full of newfound moral purpose, “I feel like God.” It’s a line that should strike fear in the hearts of UnREAL’s characters and viewers: As the first season of UnREAL made clear, God is a role for which Rachel, in TV as in everything else, is hopelessly miscast.  

John Oliver's $15 Million Debt Giveaway

John Oliver, the comedian and host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, dove into an investigation Sunday on how easy it is for predatory companies to purchase peoples’ debt from a bank and hold it over their heads. To demonstrate how easy it was, Oliver bought $15 million of medical debt for pennies on the dollar, and then announced he’d forgive it all.

Oliver called it the “largest one-time giveaway in television history,” trumping Oprah Winfrey’s car giveaway in 2004.

Oliver bought the debt by starting a company online for $50, which he then registered in Mississippi. He called his company Central Asset Recovery Professional, Inc, or CARP, “for the bottom-feeding fish.” Once he set up the company, he said he received an offer to buy $15 million of unpaid medical debt for less than $60,000.

In some instances, a company will purchase debt like this, Oliver explained, then harass the debtors to earn a profit off the collections. In Oliver’s case, the $15 million of debt belonged to 9,000 people, and by the end of his show he stood by a big red button, which once pressed, he said would move the debtors’ information to a nonprofit that forgives medical debt.

“Tonight, at my signal, with the power vested in me as chairman of the board of CARP, they will commence the debt-forgiving process,” Oliver said.

In 2004, Winfrey gave away a car to every member of her audience––“You get a car!” she yelled “You get a car!”––which was all together valued at $8 million. By buying and forgiving this debt, Oliver said the title of most generous host now belonged to him.

Comedy: Slowly Becoming Less of a Boy's Club

Comedy has long had a reputation for being a boy’s club. All too often, stand-up shows have just one or two women on the roster, and on television and in movies, women have historically held tokenistic roles as performers and are often ignored altogether as an audience demographic. The refrain that “women aren’t funny” recurs too often to be the small-minded belief of just a few sexist dinosaurs: Indeed, the idea seems to resound throughout the industry, from the admission of David Letterman’s former booker Eddie Brill that he didn’t like to hire women to the recent Vanity Fair cover that showed a depressing sameness among late-night talk-show hosts.

But in recent years, there have been detectable—if uneven—efforts across all levels of the entertainment industry to feature more women. Comedians like Kristen Wiig and Amy Schumer have broken onto Hollywood’s A-list, and film franchises like Ghostbusters are being rebooted with all-female casts. This year, Samantha Bee left The Daily Show to host her own talk show on TBS, and both Maria Bamford and Chelsea Handler had new series debut on Netflix. Comedy Central’s recently announced slate of half-hour stand-up specials—a reliable indicator of which performers are on the verge of major stardom—featured five women out of 17. There’s a lot more work to be done before the comedy world reaches real gender parity, but as more paths to recognition have opened for stand-ups around the country, there have already been heartening results.

The comedian Sara Schaefer, the co-host of MTV’s now-defunct talk show Nikki & Sara Live, publicly noted the dramatic progress that Comedy Central has made in recent years with its half-hours, which until recently were given almost exclusively to male performers. As someone who’s long spoken out about comedy’s gender imbalance, Schaefer said she’s encountered enough pushback over the issue over the years that she takes particular care to note positive or negative change. “When you have these conversations with people about whether there’s sexism in the industry, and you have a lot of people doubting you, you start collecting evidence,” she told me.

To her, Comedy Central’s traditional reliance on male talent wasn’t proof of a grand sexist scheme, but rather reflective of issues at the lowest rungs of comedy: the open mics and stand-up nights hosted in clubs and bars around the country that serve as the proving ground for young comics. “Because there were only one or two women per show when I started in New York, naturally if you look up the chain to Comedy Central, there’s going to be fewer women,” Schaefer said. “When a small bar show in New York starts booking women and championing them, that gives more opportunity for them to be seen.”

Letterman’s booker, Brill, was symbolic of that institutional problem. In the years before the internet became a viable platform for up-and-coming stand-ups, Letterman’s Late Show functioned as an important audition stage for comedians seeking to “make it.” When talking about his process for picking comedians to feature on the show, Brill defended only booking one woman in 2011 by saying, “There are a lot less female comics who are authentic ... I see a lot of female comics who, to please an audience, will act like men.” He was quickly dismissed by CBS, but his outlook reflected a pervasive attitude many female comics had long noticed among bookers throughout the U.S.

“You either want more women on your show or you don’t.”

“I’ve had this conversation with people who book comedy rooms, and they say, ‘Everyone says I have to book more women, and I can’t find them,’ Schaefer said. Her response: “They’re there, and you’re just not looking hard enough, or they’re not in your circles of friends. You either want more women on your show or you don’t.” She noted that Comedy Central was beginning to feature more female-driven scripted comedy, like Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, and Not Safe with Nikki Glaser, and that simultaneously, progress was being made on the stand-up front.

Though five out of 17 half-hour specials going to women might not seem like much, it reflects noticeable incremental progress. In 2012, only one Half Hour featured women (the comedy duo Garfunkel & Oates). 2013 and 2014 saw two female comics featured out of 17, and in 2015 there were three out of 14. At the same time, Half Hour has become an increasingly valuable showcase: Not only does the special air on TV, but now it can also have an even longer life online, serving as a springboard to the myriad sketch shows, showcases, and live tours that make up a comedian’s yearly paycheck.

Aparna Nancherla is one of the stand-ups who got a half-hour from Comedy Central this year, after emerging on the Washington D.C. comedy scene and working as a writer on Late Night with Seth Meyers. She echoed Schaefer’s sentiments about the narrow-mindedness of many bookers. “There would be a comfort zone in clubs, of a certain type of comedy [the bookers are] ‘used to,’ and it’s easy to stay within that box,” she told me.“It’d be unusual for there to be a bunch of women, unless it was a specifically female-branded show.” But as Nancherla moved from the relatively small D.C. comedy world to the larger scenes of Los Angeles and New York, she found things changing: “The old gatekeepers don’t have as much sway as they used to ... You don’t have to do A, B, and C anymore to get to where you want to go, necessarily.”

Nancherla also noted that the expanding, internet-fueled world of alternative comedy had allowed comedians like her to find new, more openminded audiences to help build their acts. Podcasts like Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson’s 2 Dope Queens (which records live shows and featured Nancherla in its first episode) and Comedy Bang Bang have also become popular ways for comedy fans to discover new acts.

As for more mainstream avenues to visibility, Nancherla said she thinks there’s “more awareness of the disparity” among programmers at networks like Comedy Central, and guessed there was “a concerted effort” this year to keep the Half Hour slate from being overwhelmingly male. For all of that, she acknowledged anything close to a 50/50 split would still be unusual but that she’d welcome attempts by the network to overcompensate.

Schaefer agreed. “Some people look at that increased percentage, and it scares them,” she said, noting the amount of sexist pushback she received online simply for praising the Comedy Central move. “You’re not being oppressed. This is what equality feels like.”

Can Prosecutors Convict Anyone at All in the Death of Freddie Gray?

The trial of Officer Caesar Goodson for his involvement in the death of Freddie Gray was always going to be the highest-profile case, among the trials of the six officers accused. Goodson was driving the van in which Gray was loaded on the morning of April 19, 2015. By the time the van arrived at a police station less than hour later, Gray’s spine was nearly severed, and he would die several days later. Prosecutors brought an unusually strong slate of charges against the officers involved, especially Goodson, who is accused of depraved-heart murder, the gravest of the charges in the case.

But the stakes have been raised by the results in the two preceding trials of officers in the case: The state enters Goodson’s trial with no wins so far. The trial of Officer William Porter ended in a hung jury and a mistrial; prosecutors intend to retry him. Then in late May, Officer Edward Nero—one of the officers who initially apprehended Gray—was acquitted by a judge on charges of second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and two counts of misconduct in office. Nero opted for a bench trial, meaning Judge Barry Williams ruled, rather than a jury. (Defense attorneys have generally argued that the officers can’t get a fair jury trial in Baltimore.)

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Can the Baltimore Prosecutor Win Her Case?

On Monday, in preliminary hearings, Goodson opted for a bench trial as well, despite expectations that he’d choose a jury trial. “Goodson's case presents a unique challenge for prosecutors in that he was the only one of the six officers who did not give a statement to investigators,” The Baltimore Sun reports. “The trial is expected to feature medical experts giving contrasting opinions over exactly how and when Gray was injured.” Many observers expect the question of whether Gray was given a “rough ride”—in which police intentionally bang suspects around while in transport, to punish or injure them—to be central in the case. Goodson, 46, also faces charges of manslaughter, second-degree assault, and misconduct in office.

The state’s winless record is particularly pivotal in this case because Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby won loud praise and loud criticism when she announced the charges. Police-reform advocates viewed her decision as an unusually strong step to combat police abuses, especially after several cases around the country where prosecutors and grand juries were seen as too deferential to police. But critics worried that Mosby was moving too fast, didn’t have the goods to charge the officers, and was reacting more to political pressure created by protests in the streets of the city. (Others accused her of more crassly political motives: Her husband, City Council member Nick Mosby, was a prospective mayoral candidate, but he later dropped out of the race.)

When Mosby charged the officers, I spoke with David Jaros, a professor of law at the University of Baltimore. He brings a nuanced perspective to the case, because he has written on the need to reform police, but as a former public defender is wary of prosecutorial overreach. He argued at the time that Mosby had likely overcharged the suspects, but also that such overcharging was common. Jaros has been following the trials closely, and I spoke with him again to understand why the prosecution has struggled so far, what to expect from the Goodson trial, and the thorny issues that have arisen during the trials. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

On what to expect from the Goodson trial:

It’s widely viewed as the strongest case for the prosecutor, and it is the one that has the most serious charge. It’s been really hard to evaluate the strength of the state’s cases, because we’re not privy to all of their information. Everything is based a little bit on the assumption that what we know is all there is to know. To the extent that the state has committed itself pretty clearly to the idea that Mr. Gray’s fatal injury occurred in the van, and I think both intuitively and legally the van's driver would appear to have the greatest duty of care, but that by no means guarantees that he's criminally liable in these cases. It remains to be seen the degree to which the defense can suggest that Officer Goodson was either not fully aware of Mr. Gray's condition or that another officer was the one who he was relying on to insure that he was adequately secured.

Officer Goodson is charged with depraved-heart murder in a case that on its face seems more like negligence, whereas depraved-heart murder says that the individuals showed such wanton and reckless disregard for human life that it amounts to malice. That is a very different mens rea that the commonwealth says is akin to intentional murder. The example I use in class for depraved-heart murder is that the students stand on the roof of the law school and throw cinderblocks off the edge into a crowd below. Where they're not aiming for anyone specifically, they don't have the intent to kill, but they're perfectly fine with the possibility that they might crush someone's skull. That's depraved-heart murder. It's a pretty significant step from that to failing to buckle someone into a van.

On the importance of whether the prosecution can prove that Goodson was giving Gray a “rough ride”:

If you believe that there was a rough ride and the driver not only didn't secure [Gray] but was attempting to cause him some physical injury by driving in an erratic manner or braking sharply, then it becomes more reasonable to think that those actions could amount to depraved heart murder. To me, it would be a big step in that direction if he were in the process of giving him a rough ride, or at least deliberately trying to injure him with an understanding that there was a high probability that he'd be causing this guy's death, and simply not caring. If he simply is not thinking about the risks to his passenger, and he's simply callously doing his job transporting people whose welfare he frankly doesn’t give a lot of thought to, I’m not even sure that amounts to recklessness. It may just be negligence. Negligence is just, you don’t do what a reasonable person would do. Recklessness is where you’re aware of what you should do and you choose not to do it.

“It’s widely viewed as the strongest case. Intuitively and legally the van's driver would appear to have the greatest duty of care.”

On the lessons to be taken from Officer Nero’s trial:

It was pretty interesting to me that Officer Nero gets acquitted, but we should be very careful about what we draw from that. The state came up with this rather novel legal theory. They had to acknowledge a Supreme Court case called Illinois v. Wardlow, which is the law of the land despite it resulting in very racist and unfair practices, which says officers can have reasonable suspicion to chase and detain someone if someone in a high-crime area runs from them unprovoked. If in Sandtown, where Freddie Gray runs, someone runs from the police, they can grab them, but if they run in my neighborhood, they can't. The state’s attorney had to acknowledge that was the law. Their theory was, [Officers Nero and Garrett Miller] had the right to grab him, but they once they grabbed him they had to immediately act to dispel their reasonable suspicion or confirm it. Because they waited for the officer who initially called out the chase, this legal detention morphed into an illegal arrest, and that illegal arrest was an assault. That's really stretching the law. It’s certainly criminalizing conduct which police regularly engage in. Yet the state’s attorney was also, she commented in her closing statement, reacting to the police—the term she used was "jacking up [Baltimore] citizens" on a daily basis, by simply grabbing them and throwing them against a wall or a car without probable cause. If we can’t stop the police from doing that that kind of behavior, which is a violation of constitutional rights and which grossly degrades the social fabric in communities and trust between police and the people they are supposedly protecting, then we are pushed toward using the criminal law in a way that I find troubling for the individual defendant.

Interestingly, the judge acquitted Nero not because he rejected this theory, but because they failed to show that in the course of the detention morphing into an arrest, that Officer Nero was actually the one who touched Freddie Gray. As a law professor who was particularly interested in this novel legal theory and perhaps skeptical of it, I was expecting him to say this was a lawful detention. He never said that. If I were the prosecutor, frankly, I might be emboldened by the Nero acquittal, because there was not that clear rejection of their theory by the judge.

“If I were the prosecutor, frankly, I might be emboldened by the Nero acquittal, because there was not that clear rejection of their theory by the judge.”

On why the state hasn’t managed to obtain a conviction yet:

As the case has played out in court and the evidence we’ve seen, we haven’t gotten a lot of additional information about what happened that suggested particularly more egregious behavior by the police, which has led to some difficult questions. It’s forced the prosecutor to adopt some novel theories about criminal liability. One explanation for the aggressive effort the prosecution is making in these cases is that they believe that even more egregious a thing occurred than they alleged in court, but they simply don't believe they have the evidence to back it up. That might explain why they are pursuing such legal strategies. At the same time, we haven’t seen it.

On the way the case is viewed in Baltimore:

One should be careful about speaking on behalf of the temper of a city, particularly when there are different communities who feel so differently about the case. People are talking about, "How does Baltimore feel about what happened? How does Baltimore view the fact that Marilyn Mosby's office lost this case?" What it's driven home for me is the degree to which there are very different communities in Baltimore who experience the police in very different ways, and therefore view this prosecution through very different lenses, and are drawing very different lessons about what the two most acquittals mean.

On the implications for police reform nationally:

I, being a former public defender and not a great believer in the use of criminal law to shape people’s behavior, am not completely comfortable with the idea of using individuals to promote broad policy reform, and yet at the same time we are faced with egregious practices a powerful institution that has thus far resisted any other efforts to reform it. We have to balance our concerns about individuals being used as a tool to reform—individuals and the application of the criminal law to reform the police, which I think raises issues of fairness and notice. I don’t think this is a case where, well, the police routinely beat the crap out of suspects to get a confession so it's unfair to charge the first one who actually get charged with assault. What is clearly a crime and has been ignored should be prosecuted.

“If we can’t stop police behavior that is a violation of constitutional rights, then we are pushed toward using the criminal law in a way that I find troubling for the individual defendant.”

That goes to the technical questions of getting a conviction. It is this widespread and historic reluctance or failure of prosecutors to aggressively go after police misconduct for a variety of reasons. Some of which that they work with the police every day; others are that it's hard to get convictions in those cases, and we saw criticism in Ferguson and Staten Island with Eric Garner, where there was a feeling that the prosecutor's offices did not treat those cases the way they would treat other cases involving crime with suspects who were not police officers. This case remains a notable step in a very different direction of prosecutors taking seriously cases where there is potential criminal activity by the police, but it is in many ways not as obviously an egregious case as some of those cases in other parts of the country. This is a case where it turns out the crime is a crime of omission, rather than a crime of commission, at least as far as we know, because we don’t have evidence of a rough ride. It’s, "You failed in your duty to effectively protect the suspect." The law in Maryland is—it requires a level of recklessness which may not be easy for the prosecutor to prove.

Policing in poor communities is a real problem in America, and while this case may not involve particularly egregious behavior by these officers, it has certainly uncovered widespread egregious behavior that occurs on a regular basis and is not otherwise being acknowledged or dealt with by policymakers.

We have ample evidence that rough rides are occurring, even if there wasn’t a rough ride in this case. We have the state’s attorney acknowledging for the first time that police routinely grab people on the street, throw them up against the wall without probable cause, and search them. How are we going to stop this egregious behavior? I think the answer is, we shouldn’t necessarily be doing this with criminal law but, we can't then just not do it. We are struggling with a way out of this mess which requires that we respect individual rights and limits of what criminal law can accomplish but not give up on the need to reform egregious policing practices.

Game of Thrones: Fighting Someone Else’s War

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

Lenika Cruz: Over the course of five and a half seasons of battles, betrayals, and beheadings, Game of Thrones has racked up plenty of “broken” men and women. While the episode’s title was most directly referring to the traumatized and mutilated Theon, and to the Hound (whose return has been long the subject of speculation), it could’ve also been alluding to the one-handed Jaime, the still-imprisoned Loras, the aging Blackfish, the miserable hostage Edmure, or the good-natured septon Ray (RIP). Each was, in his own way, a casualty of seemingly endless cycles of violence. And yet the wheels of war continued to spin this episode, as characters worked to build alliances for looming fights or else failed to reason with rivals.

With the show heading into its final three episodes, “The Broken Man” did a lot of crucial set-up in economical fashion and via plenty of elegantly written scenes. We reunited with Sandor Clegane some time after he joined a kind of religious commune run by Ray (Ian McShane), a septon whose lax devotion to scripture seemed directly correlated with his desire to bring goodness into the world. It turns out he rescued a nearly dead Hound some time ago and nursed him back to enough health that he can chop wood and haul logs 24/7.

It would’ve been nice to learn more about Ray and his followers before they were unceremoniously slaughtered (offscreen!), but the septon’s conversations with the Hound offered just enough to jumpstart the younger Clegane’s reentry into the show. In summary: Hate kept the Hound alive (Hate for Arya? For the things he’d done? For the Lannisters?), and he’s both ashamed of his past actions and unable to embrace pacifism the way Ray, an ex-soldier, has. “Violence is a disease,” the septon said. “You don’t cure a disease by spreading it to more people.” A lesson unlikely to ever stick on this show: The hour ended with a newly enraged Hound striding off with his axe, presumably to hunt down the Brotherhood Without Banners.

Much of the rest of the episode saw characters either trying to justify the necessity violence to others or weighing its costs themselves. If anything, this installment reminded me just how many currently neutral parties still exist on this show to be recruited for one cause or another. On Bear Island, Lady Lyanna (easily the episode’s coolest character) posed the question powerfully: “Why should I sacrifice one more Mormont life for someone else’s war?” The key, as Davos realized, was turning “someone else’s war” into “our war”—selling selfishness to get people to buy into teamwork.

Many of these parties were forced to consider what joining the fray would mean for their entire house, or family, or race. Jon, with an assist from Tormund, managed to convince the reluctant wildlings that fighting the Boltons was in their best interest if they didn’t want to be the last free folk. The Stark siblings had worse luck with House Glover, whose lord declared his men would not abandon their “ancestral home to fight alongside wildlings.” When approached by Cersei to join forces against the Sparrows, Lady Olenna rejected her in hopes of making it back to Highgarden safely, and trusting that her granddaughter would do what she could at the capital to ensure the Tyrell name lived on. Yara, too, had to win her brother over to fight to take back the Iron Islands. Meanwhile in Riverrun, Jaime tried (and failed) to convince the Blackfish that the “war is over,” with the Tully lord stubbornly committed to defending his home against the people who murdered his family.

In keeping with the show’s increasingly rich gender politics, “The Broken Man” seemed to have quite a bit to say about the pitfalls of masculinity, at least the destructive, regressive kind often valued in the world of the show. Many of the broken men on display here were (or had once been) fighters: Jaime, Loras, the Hound, Theon. And each had, in some way, been emasculated, whether by losing their fighting ability, being unable to to father children or continue their family name, or being defeated by a woman.

Much of the episode saw characters either trying to justify violence to others or weighing its costs themselves.

The episode also showed women succeeding by adopting more moderate approaches to power than many of their male counterparts. In an early scene, Margaery quoted a verse in the Book of the Mother about, essentially, women being able to calm the “brute nature” of men—it’s not hard to imagine she sees herself as the King Whisperer and her brother’s savior because of her calculated poise with the High Sparrow. In the North, the young Lady Mormont showed herself to be eminently reasonable and honorable, swayed more by Davos’s reference to her fierceness than by Sansa’s looks-based flattery. Then, of course, was the scene where Yara got to flaunt her sexuality in front of her castrated brother, before promising she would take care of him and get him revenge.

Not quite fitting into all of this is Arya, whose bloody walk through a Braavosi marketplace after being stabbed in the stomach by the Waif couldn’t have been met with crueler indifference (“Ugh, another young girl exsanguinating on our cobblestones?” the onlookers’ glares seemed to say). But since the episode focused so much on penitence—with Cersei, Margaery, the Hound, Ray—it’s possible there’s something redemptive at work. Arya did, after all, deny the dying Hound mercy when he begged her for it, so maybe she’s being forced to suffer to learn a lesson. Whatever the reason, we can at least rest assured that she’ll live on to the next episode—even if getting stabbed multiple times in the stomach is something most people don’t get to come back from.

Spencer, what did you make of the Waif’s ambush, the Hound’s long-awaited return, and the general politicking of this episode? And did Bronn’s delightful shutdown of Jaime’s Lannister-debt speech (“Don’t say it. Don’t fucking say it.”) make you as happy as it made me?

We will update this post with entries from Spencer Kornhaber and Christopher Orr.

The Civilians Trying to Flee Fallujah

At least four people died Saturday trying to flee Fallujah, as the fight for control of the city between Iraqi forces and Islamic State militants enters its third week.

Two children, their mother, and a man drowned when the boat carrying them sank in the Euphrates river, Reuters reported Sunday, citing local police. Nine other people thought to have been on the vessel are missing.

At least 50,000 people, 20,000 of them children, are believed to be trapped in Fallujah as Iraqi special forces, Shiite militias, and local police exchange fire with Islamic State fighters, who took control of the city more than two years ago. About 5,000 people have managed to escape the besieged town, according to United Nations humanitarian officials. Many have fled on foot, while others made the crossing in the Euphrates on the outskirts of the eastern part of the city.

Abu Tabarak told Reuters he watched from shore as the boat, which was carrying his wife, son, and daughter, sank. “I’ve seen with my own eyes my family disappear under the water,” he said. “There was no place for me on the departing boat, so I had waited with my second daughter for the next one.”

A local official told Reuters more than 1,000 families have crossed the river into territory that is not ISIS-held. Civilians have been turning anything that floats into makeshift boats, including “empty refrigerators, wooden cupboards, and kerosene barrels.”

Others have been killed by sniper fire from ISIS as they tried to run from the city, or by explosive devices planted by the militant group along the roads. ISIS has corralled some residents inside the city to be used as human shields as government forces approach.

The military offensive began May 22 and is backed by air strikes from the U.S.-led coalition that has been fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria since 2014. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said last week the slow pace of the operation was deliberate and an attempt to reduce soldier casualties and protect civilians. Iraqi forces have focused on dislodging ISIS militants from the outskirts of Fallujah before entering the city.

The Iraqi government and humanitarian agencies have set up shelters for Fallujah residents in Ameriyat al-Fallujah, about 30 kilometers, or 19 miles, away.

Fallujah has been held by ISIS since January 2014. Food, medicine, and other supplies are in short supply. Humanitarian agencies say they have been unable to reach the city for months because Iraqi forces have cut supply routes between Fallujah and nearby Ramadi in an attempt to hinder ISIS operations. Iraqi forces recaptured Ramadi in December after six months of ISIS control.

No Stopping Novak Djokovic

Novak Djokovic won his first French Open title Sunday, becoming the eighth man in history to complete the career Grand Slam.

The Serbian player beat Scotland’s Andy Murray 3-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 in the men’s singles tournament Sunday in Paris. Djokovic is ranked No.1 in men’s tennis.

A day earlier, fourth-seeded Garbiñe Muguruza of Spain won her first major event in the women’s tournament, defeating defending champion Serena Williams of the United States in straight sets.

The French Open’s official Twitter account marked Sunday’s results with a heart emoji:

"This is something that’s so rare in tennis... it’s gonna take a long time for it to happen again"



Andy to Novak ❤️ pic.twitter.com/LN7dW8ZJED

— Roland Garros (@rolandgarros) June 5, 2016

Rare, indeed: Djokovic, 29, is only the third player in tennis history to hold all four Grand Slam championship titles—Wimbledon and the U.S., Australian, and French opens—at the same time, according to the Association of Tennis Professionals. The last player to hold all at once was Rod Laver, in 1969.

Murray, 29, was seeded second at the tournament. He had defeated the tournament’s defending champion, Stan Wawrinka, the 31-year-old from Switzerland, in the semifinals. Swiss player Roger Federer, 34, skipped this year’s tournament because of a knee injury, ending his streak of competing in every Grand Slam event since 1999. Spain’s Rafael Nadal, 30, who has won the most French Open titles, did not compete because of a wrist injury.

Switzerland's 'Money for Nothing' Proposal

Swiss voters rejected a proposal Sunday that would have guaranteed every adult citizen in the country a minimum monthly income no matter how much or whether they worked, according to projections.

About 78 percent of voters opposed the measure and 22 percent voted in favor, according to Swiss polling company gfs.bern. The proposal had called for unconditional pay regardless of employment that supporters said would cover people’s basic needs in the wealthy nation. It received a referendum under a federal system that allows citizens to suggest changes to the national constitution and opens for a public vote those that garner 100,000 signatures.

The proposal suggested paying Swiss adults a monthly income of 2,500 Swiss francs, or $2,560, and giving 625 Swiss francs, or $640, to each child. Salaried workers who earned more than that would not have been eligible.

The measure was not expected to pass. Daniel Häni, a cafe owner in Basel and one of the founders of the campaign, said he had expected a smaller percentage of voters to back the plan, and called the support “fabulous and sensational.”

Supporters of the proposal said it would encourage household and volunteer work and could even replace the country’s social welfare system. Critics said it would drain the government’s funds, attract workers from other countries looking to profit from the policy, and remove the incentive to work. The Swiss government had urged voters to reject the proposal. Less than 10 percent of members of parliament support the proposal, according to gfs.bern.

“If you would offer every individual a Swiss amount of money, you would have billions of people who would try to move into Switzerland,” Luzi Stamm, a member of parliament and the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, told BBC Sunday.

The proposal’s supporters had publicized the initiative by handing out money to commuters in Zurich in March and unfurling a giant, Guinness World Record-breaking poster that read “What would you do if your income were taken care of?” in Geneva last month.

Similar policies are being explored elsewhere. The Dutch cities of Utrecht, Tilburg, Groningen, and Wageningen are considering trial programs that provide universal monthly income, and last year the Finnish government said it was researching the idea.

Switzerland is the first country to hold a national vote on a fixed basic income. Switzerland’s unemployment rate is 3.5 percent, well below the average for developed countries. According to statistics from the last five years, about 7.7 percent of the nation’s 8 million people live below the poverty line, half that of many European nations.

Stealing Books in the Age of Self-Publishing

One day two years ago Rachel Ann Nunes, who writes Mormon fiction and romance novels, received an email from a reader asking a strange question: Had she collaborated with someone named Sam Taylor Mullens? Nunes had never heard the name before. But the reader went on to say she had noticed similarities between one of Nunes’s novels, A Bid for Love, and another self-published book by Mullens. When the reader confronted Mullens about the parallels, she was told the two authors were simply collaborators. If that was a lie, the reader said—and it was—then Nunes may have been the unwitting victim of plagiarism.

With that single exchange, Nunes found herself part of a trend affecting many professional authors in the age of self-publishing. An anonymous stranger seemed to have stolen her book, changed it superficially, and passed it off as her own work. First published in 1998, A Bid for Love did well enough to spawn two sequels before it eventually went out-of-print. Mullens’ book, titled The Auction Deal, looked like the same story with much of the same language. In Chapter 2, Nunes writes, “The dark brown curls were everywhere. They were a curse, and had been for twenty-eight of Cassi’s twenty-nine years.” Compare that to Chapter 2 of Mullen’s book, which begins, “Dark brunette curls were everywhere. They were a curse, and had been for the thirty-one years of my life.”

There was one major difference between the books: The Auction Deal had sex scenes and was being marketed as mainstream romance—the most profitable category in self-publishing. “I was floored,” Nunes said. “I didn’t believe it was true that someone would do that.”

In the world of self-publishing, where anyone can put a document on Amazon and call it a book, many writers are seeing their work being appropriated without their permission. Some books are copied word-for-word while others are tinkered with just enough to make it tough for an automated plagiarism-checker to flag them. (Though the practice is legally considered copyright infringement, the term “plagiarism” is more widely used.) The offending books often stay up for weeks or even months at a time before they’re detected, usually by an astute reader. For the authors, this intrusion goes beyond threatening their livelihood. Writing a novel is a form of creative expression, and having it stolen by someone else, many say, can feel like a personal violation.

Often, the perpetrator’s identity is shrouded in mystery. When Nunes tried to find out more about Mullens, things started to get weird. The anonymous person on the other side of the computer seemed to multiply into an array of fake online identities. Strangers posted Facebook messages attacking Nunes’s character, and hostile one-star reviews began appearing on her Amazon author page. “I felt like I was being attacked,” Nunes said. “When I went on social media, I didn’t know what would be waiting for me.”

The stress took its toll on Nunes. She couldn’t sleep or write and gained 20 pounds. She was faced with the choice of either letting the plagiarism go in the hopes the harassment would stop, or fighting back through the legal system. Finally, Nunes decided to sue for $150,000 in damages, rallying financial support with a GoFundMe page. She alleges that the person behind it all is Tiffanie Rushton, a third-grade teacher who didn’t return attempts to contact her about this article. The case is set to go to trial later this year.

Nunes’s situation is hardly an isolated incident. There are pages on sites like Goodreads dedicated to identifying fake books, including plagiarized novels. Most of the plagiarism is happening to romance novels, which accounts for the largest proportion of ebook sales, but new cases are popping up in other genres as well, from cookbooks to mystery novels. Even public-domain classics like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Dracula have been adapted and passed off as original works.

In the world of self-publishing, where anyone can put a document on Amazon and call it a book, more writers are seeing their work ripped off.

For authors, finding out their book has been plagiarized can be traumatic. This was especially the case for the best-selling author Opal Carew, who learned her serial romance Riding Steele had been plagiarized the same day her sister died from cancer. An hour after her sister passed away, Carew got an email from a friend saying the novelist Laura Harner had changed the genders of the characters in Carew’s work and published it under a different title. Apparently, Harner had done this before, stealing Becky McGraw’s novel My Kind of Trouble, switching genders, and calling it Coming Home Texas. For Carew, the news added surreal stress to her grief. “All my writing friends were sending me condolences about plagiarism, and all I could think about was my sister,” she said.

Unlike most offenders, Harner was well-known in the self-publishing community as an author of male/male romance novels. She has publicly acknowledged her actions, saying that “personal and professional issues ... stretched me in ways that haven’t always been good for me.” The cases against her were settled for undisclosed amounts.

Some observers believed Harner resorted to plagiarism to keep her rankings up, Carew said. Before she was caught, Harner was considered unusually prolific, producing 75 novels in five years. Amazon rewards writers who come out with new books quickly by putting them higher in the rankings, which in turn means more sales. This policy also puts pressure on authors to write more to maintain visibility and to offset the dropping price of ebooks. “This may sound crazy, but I have 18 releases planned for this year,” Carew said. “In order to survive, I have to put out as many books as I can ... If you’re living on your writing like I am, the stress can get to you.”

When a reader buys a self-published book, Amazon keeps 30 percent of the royalties and gives the rest to the authors—meaning the company makes money whether the book is plagiarized or not. A traditional publisher is liable if it puts out a book that violates copyright. But Amazon is protected from the same fate by  federal law as long as it removes the offending content.

Amazon regularly complies with this rule, and plagiarized books are removed from the site. However, it can take a while for the company to respond to complaints, which can be maddening for authors, since every day a fake book is up is a day they’re losing sales. The company spokesperson Justin O’Kelly said Amazon has a team dedicated to stopping plagiarism, but he wouldn’t go into details about their methods for fear of giving plagiarists ideas. “In the rare instance when plagiarized titles make it through, that same team makes sure they are taken down quickly, and repeat offenders are blocked,” he said.

Without Amazon, few authors could make a living self-publishing.

It’s unclear what constitutes a “repeat offender.” Though Harner admitted she plagiarized several books, her work is still up for sale on Amazon. There’s also nothing stopping a plagiarist from reregistering on the site and doing it all over again under another name. Some writers, like McGraw, feel that Amazon doesn’t do enough to protect authors. When she asked the company to remove Harner’s backlist, they refused, saying they’re only required to remove plagiarized titles. “Whenever plagiarism happens, and [Amazon] can verify it, they should pull the whole list, you know—one strike, you’re out,” said McGraw. “But you know what? When they take 50 or 75 books down, they’re losing money.”

To be fair to Amazon, copyright infringement also occurs with other self-publishing retailers, including Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Kobo, and Smashwords. Google Play has been accused of “rampant” piracy, with spammers selling books by Malcolm Gladwell, Sidney Sheldon, and Ellery Queen for $2.11 each. Still, Amazon has the biggest chunk of the self-published ebook market, with some estimates putting it at 85 percent. Without Amazon, few authors could make a living self publishing.

These issues become especially sticky when the plagiarized book sells well. The Irish author Eilis O’Hanlon and her partner Ian McConnell co-wrote the mystery novel The Dead, which they published in 2003 under the pen name Ingrid Black. The novel won awards and sold well but eventually went out of print, and the copyright reverted to the authors. Last year, O’Hanlon wrote about learning The Dead was being sold as Tear Drop by Joanne Clancy. Even worse, Tear Drop was a number-one bestseller in the Irish crime-fiction category. Readers were raving about it on Amazon, (“A well-plotted, perfectly paced book. I was hooked from the start”), not knowing Clancy was profiting off the work of other writers.

“I was quite angry about it all, but it was followed very quickly with a feeling that I can only describe as a violation,” O’Hanlon said. “Neither of us had thought about these books in years, because they were very much in the past, but suddenly all these memories came flooding back. Memories of late nights, pulling our hair out over plot problems, tending to young children, and now some stranger had come along and stolen them.” When Clancy moved onto the second book in the series, publishing The Dark Eye as Insincere, O’Hanlon contacted Amazon, which eventually removed the pirated novels and banned Clancy. (Many of her books are still available on the site through third-party sellers.)

There was also the question of how much money Clancy made. O’Hanlon emailed Clancy directly to ask and was surprised to receive a response. Clancy admitted what she’d done and apologized, saying, “I published Tear Drop on August 25th, so I only earned a few hundred Euro from that.” Amazon had a different figure, reporting that Clancy made $15,791.60 on Tear Drop and $3,844.40 on Insincere. Roughly $2,000 had been transferred to her before she was caught.

Amazon reimburses royalties if the author can prove plagiarism, but it’s not a straightforward process. Even in cases where the company has removed books for copyright infringement, the author must provide further documentation to receive royalties. Luckily, O’Hanlon had the email from Clancy admitting guilt, which she forwarded to Amazon to receive payment. Still, most authors won’t be lucky enough to get a confession from their plagiarist and will likely have to hire a lawyer to get any royalties they’re owed.

Because plagiarists are driven more by financial motivations than creative or artistic ones, they tend to be repeat offenders. Clancy, for example, might have repackaged all four Ingrid Black mysteries if she hadn’t been stopped. In a blog post, she explained that she got into self-publishing because she was inspired by Amanda Hocking, who famously got rich via Amazon. “In early 2010, she began self-publishing her books, and by March 2011, she was a Kindle millionaire!” Clancy wrote. “Amanda’s story was the catalyst that changed my life.”

Most authors won’t be lucky enough to get a confession from their plagiarist and will likely have to hire a lawyer to get any money they’re owed.

There’s certainly money to be made in self-publishing, as the writers Tammara Webber and Jamie McGuire demonstrate. Webber’s new adult novel Easy made the New York Times bestseller list, prompting Penguin to offer her a publishing contract. McGuire’s Beautiful Redemption was the first self-published novel sold at Walmart. Their success probably didn’t escape the notice of Jordin B. Williams, who plagiarized both authors in one book, Amazingly Broken. Using the work of two successful authors in one novel turned out well for Williams: Although Amazingly Broken was only up for a week, it reached number 50 in the Kindle store, which meant it made enough to force Webber and McGuire to get lawyers involved.

Plagiarists usually hide behind multiple aliases, stolen biographies, and fake photographs. Bloggers and readers discovered that Williams used several identities and that the blonde woman on the author profile was a photograph from a modeling site. In legal proceedings, it surfaced that Williams is a man. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount, which Webbers and McGuire ended up donating to charity. When Webber found out her work was plagiarized, she cried. To describe how she felt at the time, Webber used a word that comes up repeatedly when authors talk about plagiarism: violated. “I think it has to do with a sudden, blinding awareness of vulnerability,” she said. “You had something you believed belonged to you and someone took it.”

The effects of plagiarism go beyond lawsuits and royalties, as was the case for Chase Weston, whom Tiffanie Rushton also allegedly targeted. A former soldier who served in Iraq, Weston survived an IED attack with a broken back and brain injury. He wrote about his experiences at a treatment center for combat veterans with PTSD, which was published online as Terror in a Cloud of Dust. Rushton seems to have used Weston’s words in her romance novel Hasty Resolution, and Weston was upset to see his personal experiences used in someone else’s erotic fiction. In an open letter to Rushton, Weston’s wife Lilah said it bothered him so much he had trouble sleeping. “That writing of his was something he was actually proud of, and now he feels that [it] is something cheap and ruined,” she wrote. “Ruined by a complete stranger with no consideration for the soldiers who were there that day.”

Though the specifics vary from case to case, being the subject of Internet plagiarism is inevitably an ordeal. While some authors have publishers to fight for them, many are left on their own and must decide whether to sue, an expensive endeavor that may not be worth it in the end. However, in virtually every case I studied, the author found out about the copyright infringement from readers. An informal community of bloggers, book lovers, and writers has sprung up to protect authors from having their work stolen. When it happens, they rally in support of the victim, scouring the Internet for clues of the culprit’s identity and other evidence to help the author build a case. There’s a certain irony to the whole cycle: The circumstances that enable criminals to profit off other people’s work also help to expose their misdeeds, however messily. The result is an imperfect ecosystem that authors, readers, and self-publishing platforms will likely help to refine in the future as digital technology and culture continue to merge.

Muhammad Ali and the Importance of Identity

All the things that my father loved and admired about Muhammad Ali were the things my grandfather despised—or, perhaps more aptly, feared.

If you talk to my dad long enough about his childhood, he will inevitably bring up Muhammad Ali. He talks about the boxer in a way that he talks about few other athletes or entertainers. My dad isn’t really much of a “fan,” he’s not into celebrity or hero worship. But, for him, Ali’s approach to his sport, to politics, to his beliefs, and to what it meant to be a black man in America was momentous.

“Ali changed everything for me,” my father said to me Saturday morning when I called to talk to him about Ali’s death. “I realized if people were going to notice me for being different, I wanted to really give them something to notice.”

He loved Ali’s quick wit, his confidence, and the way he could back it all up. In the 1960s, the world that my father inhabited was just starting to diversify. Black and white kids could talk to each other, go to school together. But the behavior and boundaries considered acceptable for a young black man were still stifling. He grew up in Indiana—a hotbed of Klan activity. While he enjoyed relative safety in Indianapolis, the growing calls for equality during his childhood only inflamed racial tensions in other parts of the state. When he traveled, he still had to be mindful of which bathrooms he used, of where he tried to buy a meal. Even as demands for equal treatment gained strength, a black man courting attention, bragging and taunting and wearing his blackness proudly, was a rarity.

That rarity set him at odds with his own father. Ali’s methods were unsettling to my grandfather, who was born in 1890, only 25 years after the end of the Civil War and slavery. His understanding of race relations were born in the South during the height of Jim Crow, when violence and terror were the norm. Being acceptable or at least inoffensive to white people wasn’t a matter of preference—it was a matter of survival.

For my grandfather, the realities of this country and its potential for brutality were clearer and more deeply entrenched than they were for his son, who was just reaching adolescence. His memory of what this country could do to a young, brash black men was longer and sharper than my dad’s. He could also readily remember the brutality that had happened not-so long ago: Emmett Till, the young black boy murdered when his own black boy was just a toddler.

Grandad’s distaste for Ali was part an old-school rejection of a young man who talked too much, but it was also the fear that the result of Ali’s braggadocio could be a squashing of the progress blacks had made thus far. In Indianapolis my grandfather could earn a respectable living, he could buy a home and a car, and take care of his family. He could provide a modicum of safety and security for his family, and surround them with other black people who were doing well too. But he knew that safety could be fleeting and precarious in this country, and feared what a black man invoking the ire of white society could mean. The result was a complex generational rift. Ali and his persona were one of the few things my dad and grandfather fought about.

It wasn’t just Ali’s pride, it was his pride about who he was—black, Muslim—at a time when society didn’t encourage men like him to have any pride or voice at all, that really struck a chord with my father. Whether or not he agreed with his views on Vietnam or refusal to fight did not matter. At a time when black men were supposed to apologize and accommodate, to simply keep their heads down and do as they were told, Ali’s push to stand up for himself and his beliefs was invigorating. While my father’s childhood included vivid memories of segregation, of racial violence, of the fight for basic rights, they also included the hope that one day this country would be a more equitable and welcoming place for people like him. Ali’s radicalism could help make that hope, reality, he thought.

Until I talked to my father Saturday morning it wasn’t clear to me how much his lessons from Muhammad Ali informed who he was, and how he taught my brother and I to maneuver in this world. Ali’s boldness inspired my father to push for a life bigger than the one that had been imagined for him. To leave Indiana for a state he had never been to, to go to a fancy East Coast school and figure out life on his own terms. It’s what helped inspire my dad’s dreams for his kids—to be black and excellent, and to wear both proudly and without fear.

Ali did not transcend race. His singular life and achievements can never be divorced from his identity as a black, Muslim man. He forced America to wrestle an iteration of black excellence that wasn’t quiet, or ashamed, or defined by white people. By defining himself through word and deed, Ali taught other black people that they could, too.