Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 159

Finding My Identity Via The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Like nursery rhymes and ice-cream truck chimes, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song was part of the soundtrack to my childhood. The fish-out-of-water tale of a streetwise teenager and his escapades with his wealthy relatives riveted me with its unusual storylines, hip-hop interludes, and ceaseless jokes. The show has since cemented its status as a quintessential ’90s pop-culture classic, but beneath the zany neon fashions and canned laughter, I found something more. To me, The Fresh Prince, which ended its run 20 years ago, traced a surprising and humorous parallel to my reality.

As a U.K.-born Nigerian girl living in the sparsely populated Highlands of Scotland, I was more likely to hear about another alleged Loch Ness monster sighting than I was to see an actual black person in town. My surroundings undoubtedly skewed more toward Highlander than Bel-Air, but through The Fresh Prince, I finally saw people who looked like me, who lived like me—as rare black faces in a predominantly white place. Besides giving me a vault of quotable punchlines, Will and the Banks family taught me countless lessons. The Hollywood Reporter may have initially said the series was “far from a revelatory experience,” but The Fresh Prince powerfully showed me how to embrace my blackness, irrespective of situation or location.

When the show debuted on British screens, it offered a kaleidoscopic array of black characters rarely shown on mainstream television. In the ’90s, only the barbershop-family sitcom Desmond’s and the BBC sketch show The Real McCoy offered a tiny, comedic glimpse into black British life. According to the media scholar Timothy Havens, The Fresh Prince gained “unexpected popularity” in Europe, and by 1997, it was the second best-selling U.S. sitcom in international markets. The globalization of African-American culture and music resonated with young British audiences, contributing to the show’s appeal.

Though it was a U.S. import, The Fresh Prince showed U.K. and global audiences that black people were multidimensional individuals, rather than a uniform entity. In a 2015 interview with TIME, the show’s co-creator Susan Borowitz noted, “There was a sense of this monolith of a black experience ... We liked the idea of challenging that.” On The Fresh Prince, black characters could be serious, whimsical, profound, shallow, or dorky. We could see ourselves as professors-turned-dancers, Barry Manilow fans, millionaire Ivy League lawyers, glee-club singers, or even—like the sarcastic butler, Geoffrey—British.

The show’s younger characters were instrumental in helping me forge my identity as a black girl. If my white friends related to Lizzie McGuire, then Ashley Banks, the family’s younger daughter, was my Transatlantic counterpart. She avoided the one-dimensional tropes common among black female characters—she was neither the Loyal Best Friend With Sage Advice, nor the racially codified Sassy Sidekick. Sometimes she even had the spotlight all to herself, allowing the show to trace her development as a character. The Fresh Prince showed her going on dates with teenage heartthrobs, engaging in Girl Scout-related hijinks, exploring after-school jobs, and dreaming of a music career. In showing that her story mattered, the show signaled to me that I mattered.

Fresh Prince powerfully showed me how to embrace my blackness, irrespective of situation or location.

Of course, I also desired to be cool like Will and stylish like Hillary, but it was preppy Carlton’s exploration of his racial identity that I found most fascinating. Carlton woefully lacked the requisite cultural signifiers Will associated with being an authentic black person. His cluelessness about rap music and African-American youth slang, coupled with his country-club attire, was the antithesis to Will’s idea of blackness. However, the straight-laced, Princeton-bound teenager functioned as the necessary straight man to his cousin’s carefree clown. Carlton’s existence didn’t hinge on an arbitrary concept of blackness, as formulated by his cousin. Instead, he usually “Carlton-danced” his way through Will’s incessant jabs, Tom Jones record in-hand. This signature goofy dance was a subtle act of defiance: Funny as it was, it allowed him to resist the scrutiny he faced for being black on his own terms—with this dance, he declared that his blackness would not be a constraint but could instead be its own kind of freedom.

But freedom comes at a cost. Like Carlton, I also learned that being in your skin can arouse dangerous suspicion. In the episode “Mistaken Identity,” Carlton and Will face arrest under questionable circumstances while taking a road trip to Palm Springs in a swanky Mercedes. Though gently couched in humor, the episode is clear nod to the harsh discriminatory realities African Americans face for “driving while black.” Steeped in sitcom tradition, the “very special episode” ends with Carlton reluctant to face an ugly truth. But even in its “regular” episodes, The Fresh Prince’s exploration of race and identity shed light on the humor and heartbreak that accompanies coming of age as a young black person in a majority-white culture.

Also crucial to me was how the show weaved black identity into the themes of home and heritage. Something as simple as the Banks sisters’ huddled reunions and their piercing yelps of joy reminded me of my relatives. The animated glee that came with greeting those who were your own—shared history, kin, and skin—was authentic. Even if I wasn’t quite in their circle, I felt present. As a first-generation child from the African diaspora, I identified with Will’s attempts to reconcile his heritage with his environment. Will’s identity and his perception of blackness were inextricably tied to his upbringing in West Philadelphia, and his episodic footnotes and references to home were his way of staying close to his roots. Will’s oral history of his life was ultimately for his benefit, not the audience’s—a public act of recognizing where he came from. From him, I learned that home was a location, but I could take my heritage anywhere.  

By the age of 10, I had become a stalwart veteran of The Fresh Prince: all 148 episodes completed and countless reruns watched. Twenty years since the show has ended, my viewing skills are a little rusty, but I still remember how it showed me the meaning of the word “black.” What we call black is really a multitude of shades, dimensions, and cultures. We use one word, but there’s a richness that lies beyond it, a majesty awaiting ever-newer ways of expression. For a little girl discovering her world from a television set, it didn’t get fresher than that.

Reports of a Federal Investigation of Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

The FBI and the U.S. Justice Department’s public-integrity unit are investigating Virginia’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, over whether campaign contributions he received were illegal, CNN and WTVR, the CBS affiliate in Richmond, reported Monday.

CNN, which quoted unnamed U.S. officials briefed on the investigation, reports:

As part of the probe, the officials said, investigators have scrutinized McAuliffe's time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a vehicle of the charitable foundation set up by former President Bill Clinton.

There's no allegation that the foundation did anything improper; the probe has focused on McAuliffe and the electoral campaign donations, the officials said.

WTVR, which identified its sources with identical language, reported:

Among the McAuliffe donations that drew the interest of the investigators was $120,000 from a Chinese businessman, Wang Wenliang, through his U.S. businesses. Wang was previously delegate to China’s National People’s Congress, the country’s ceremonial legislature.

Wang also has been a donor to the Clinton foundation, pledging $2 million. He also has been a prolific donor to other causes, including to New York University, Harvard and environmental issues in Florida.

Wang holds a green card, and as such is eligible to contribute to McAuliffe’s campaign, his spokeswoman told WTVR. Federal law generally prohibits foreign nationals from donating to elections, but makes an exception for green-card holders.

McAuliffe has not been contacted about the reported investigation, but a spokesman for the governor told both CNN and WTVR that he would cooperate if contacted. And, the spokesman said, all donations to the governor were legal. The FBI and the Justice Department declined comment.

McAuliffe is the second consecutive Virginia governor to be investigated by federal authorities. His predecessor, Bob McDonnell, a Republican, was convicted of corruption and sentenced to two years in prison and two years of supervised release. His appeal is being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Reports of the investigation into McAuliffe could have consequences on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. Hillary Clinton, a close friend of McAuliffe, is the Democratic front-runner. The Clinton Foundation and its Global Initiative, set up by former President Bill Clinton, have faced scrutiny for donations they received while Hillary Clinton served as U.S. secretary of state. McAuliffe served as the head of the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005.

Where Saturday Night Live Failed This Season

As Saturday Night Live wrapped its season last weekend, it made sense that it led off with Hillary Clinton (Kate McKinnon) and Bernie Sanders (Larry David) bidding each other farewell, and Donald Trump nowhere to be seen. The 41st year of SNL has struggled to find its voice during this demented election season, a time when the show usually taps into the zeitgeist, but if there’s anything it’ll be remembered for, it’s the inspired casting choice of David as an avatar of grumpy disgust with the nation’s political process.

And yet David isn’t in the main cast of Saturday Night Live—technically, he’s an alumnus of the show, having written for its 10th season. Darrell Hammond, who impersonated Donald Trump for most of the year after Taran Killam’s early attempt, is another veteran brought in for a specific role. And the 41st season finale, easily one of the best episodes of the year, worked mostly because its host Fred Armisen brought back many luminaries from his time on the show to help recall his own glory days. In the three years since Armisen departed, Saturday Night Live has struggled to define its new era, and the joy of seeing its old cast return has only helped to underline that troubling fact.

It stands to reason that Hammond’s reappearance as Trump on the show (he was a regular cast member from 1995 to 2009) should have given SNL the shot of energy that Tina Fey delivered in 2008 with her work as Sarah Palin. But Hammond’s Trump has run into the same problem as plenty of other late-night shows: It’s hard to turn and find the underlying satire when the subject is already a living cartoon. The Late Show With Stephen Colbert tried having its host talk to an actual animated character. Jimmy Fallon’s Trump impression struggled to match up to the real thing when Trump guested on his show.

Hammond’s impression is technically fine, but it doesn’t get anywhere near the dark heart of Trump’s candidacy and the reactions it’s inspired across the country. That’s been best indicated by the public outcry SNL sustained for inviting Trump on as a host, months after NBC ended its relationship with him on The Apprentice for calling Mexican immigrants “criminals and rapists.” The episode itself fell flat largely by playing up Trump as a harmless figure—having him in the same room as Hammond’s exaggerated impression made him look normal by comparison, and the episode’s most memorable moment ended up being his aimless dance to Drake’s “Hotline Bling.”

Perhaps that’s why David’s casting as Sanders was so smart—he didn’t take Hammond’s approach of trying to precisely imitate his target’s cadence and speech patterns, but his impression understood the underlying humor of Sanders’s popularity. David was basically playing himself as Sanders, mocking the candidate’s phlegmatic style while also getting at his surprising appeal: After all, no one would’ve pegged the ornery co-creator of Seinfeld to become one of the most beloved comic actors of an entire TV generation, and yet here he stands. No one thought the Vermont senator’s candidacy would have made it this far, but it took the whole season for SNL to say goodbye to him.

But little else has stood out on Saturday Night Live in recent seasons. Its solid cast lacks a breakout star outside of McKinnon, though there’s also no obvious dud of the bunch (only Jon Rudnitsky, the new hire for this season, has struggled to stand out in sketches). If the previous era headlined by stars like Armisen, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, and Andy Samberg perhaps relied too much on recurring characters, this iteration of the show almost entirely lacks for memorable sketches worth repeating.

Saturday Night Live has struggled to define its new era, and the joy of seeing its old cast return has only helped to underline that.

“Weekend Update,” still hosted by Colin Jost and Michael Che, has settled into utter mediocrity after its horrendous start. Che winked to the tumult in the season finale, reeling off a list of jokes they rejected over the year with the caveat, “What’s the worst that could happen, they fire Colin?” “Update” is another segment that should work better in a political year, but Jost and Che’s chemistry has never sparked like previous hosting pairs (Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon, or Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers), and there’s no obvious successor waiting in the background.

That’s the problem with this SNL cast: They still feel like they’re settling into things, even though stars like Killam, Vanessa Bayer, Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, and Jay Pharoah have been on the show for years now without carving out the niches their predecessors found. There are things to applaud: With the addition of Leslie Jones, the show’s cast is more diverse than it was in Wiig and Samberg’s glory days, though it still lacks for a Latino or Asian cast member. Season 41’s stars have undoubtedly been its women—McKinnon’s “Update” characters, like the Russian correspondent Olya Povlatsky, are among the few that prompt genuine excitement from the crowd for every appearance.

But if this year’s political tumult gave SNL the chance to regain the spotlight, season 42 will be an even more crucial test. A swing and a miss during primary season gives the show a chance to readdress its biggest problem areas, including finding a compelling way to present Donald Trump, shaking up “Weekend Update” either behind the scenes or with a change of hosts, and looking for new talent to help bolster the cast’s diversity. SNL is not in a crisis, and it has rebounded from far worse years. But if America’s premier sketch show can’t find a way to stand out from the pack in the year of Trump, viewers have ample other topical television shows to choose from.

The NFL’s Concussion Cover-Up

The National Football League improperly tried to influence a government research center that was studying the connection between concussions and brain disease, according to a new congressional report released Monday.

The National Institutes of Health does not permit private donors to influence its peer-review research process, but the report from Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce said that the NFL rescinded a gift to the NIH for concussion research when it learned the study’s findings would be detrimental to the league’s image. ESPN reports:

The 91-page report describes how the NFL pressured the National Institutes of Health to strip the $16 million project from a prominent Boston University researcher and tried to redirect the money to members of the league’s committee on brain injuries. The study was to have been funded out of a $30 million “unrestricted gift” the NFL gave the NIH in 2012.

After the NIH rebuffed the NFL’s campaign to remove Robert Stern, an expert in neurodegenerative disease who has criticized the league, the NFL backed out of a signed agreement to pay for the study, the report shows. Taxpayers ended up bearing the cost instead.

Research has found that concussions and repeated hits to the head from playing football can lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. This brain disease has been linked to depression and suicidal thoughts in several former athletes. Deadspin has highlighted several of the major findings in the 91-page report.

Moogfest 2016: A Futurism Weighted With History and Trepidation

DURHAM, N.C.—There are festivals devoted to musical genres and subgenres. There are festivals centered around particular bands. There are festivals focused on specific instruments—guitars, violins, horns. There are festivals that celebrate certain aesthetics, festivals where all of the acts pair mysteriously well with particular narcotics, and festivals that seem mostly designed for profit.

What makes Moogfest unusual, and intriguing, is that it’s oriented somewhat orthogonally—centered not exclusively around the Moog synthesizer, one of the first commonly used electric synths, but billed as a tribute to Bob Moog, who designed it. (It’s pronounced “mohg,” in case you weren’t sure.) As such, it brings together a strange coalition of sounds, such that some attending the festival might, within a few hours, take in sounds ranging from Grimes’s edgy pop to the synth O.G. Gary Numan performing a classic album to a thumping DJ set by the Black Madonna. The result is pleasantly disorienting, a mix of sounds that helps keep visitors from falling into the weariness and auditory ruts that are a risk at any multi-day festival.

The converse of that benefit is that it’s impossible to succinctly sum up the sound or zeitgeist of this year’s Moogfest. But a few particularly outstanding sets might help to map out the landscape.

The buzziest set of the three-day run, so far as I could tell, was Blood Orange, the alter-ego-cum-band of Dev Hynes. With good reason: It was an unstoppable performance. It’s hard not to think about Prince this spring, but Blood Orange delivered a particularly Princeian performance. Hynes fronted a larger ensemble—six other musicians, including a pair of backup singers—and he sang, danced, and played incendiary propulsive, funky Nile Rodgers rhythm guitar. Live performances gave a ragged edge to the meticulously constructed electronic R&B of his records. This was sexy, sexual music—though sometimes tinged with paranoia and disappointment—and somehow a backdrop of sun-drenched images of Manhattan in late afternoon made it seem even more louche. But Hynes also worked to connect not just with the audience’s feet and baser impulses but with their brains. The set began with a brief rendition of “Afro Blue,” the Mongo Santamaria tune most associated with John Coltrane, and later quoted “A Love Supreme.”

About an hour after Blood Orange finished up—too soon for anyone in the audience—Daniel Lanois played a set a few blocks away. Lanois is best known for his collaborations with Brian Eno and his production work (U2, Bob Dylan, the Neville Brothers, Emmylou Harris), but he’s also a skilled guitarist, pedal-steel guitarist, and songwriter. His performance, with the lap-steel guitarist Rocco DeLuca and the bassist Jim Wilson, could hardly have been more different. Most of the set was a meditative, calm collection of songs, like a rendition of “The Maker” even more ethereal and trancelike than the recording. For a few songs, though, Lanois (with help from Wayne Lorenz) performed electronic compositions consisting of pre-recorded tracks that he manipulated and mixed live. Lanois finished after 1 a.m.—and then only under apparent pressure from the house staff—with a inspired run through DeLuca’s “We Congregate.”

Similarly meditative, and otherwise entirely different, was Laurie Anderson’s performance on Saturday. Anderson played keyboards and violin as she delivered her trademark spoken-word style—a series of stories, loosely strung together and often politically focused that were by turns hilarious and chilling. At times, she didn’t even play, but just sat in a chair on stage and spoke. The opening story involved a correspondence with then-Senator John F. Kennedy that culminated in JFK sending the 13-year-old a dozen roses to congratulate her on a winning student-government campaign. Later, she refashioned Aristophanes’s The Birds into a parable to criticize Donald Trump.

Few of these performances, you may have noticed, rely much on analog synths like the Moog, or on any synths at all. But there’s a thread. Hynes’s electronic R&B flows from a synth-driven milieu. The cool detachment of synths has been an essential element of Anderson’s oeuvre. Lanois, meanwhile, is an obsessive sound freak and gearhead, and even his pedal steel was run through a series of carefully orchestrated effects. (A careful listener could hear the clatter of the steel’s pedals amidst the swells of sound, a poignant reminder of the physical and mechanical work that undergirds even the most electronic music.)

Other performers addressed the role of modern musical tools in other ways. Daniel Bachman, a talented guitarist in the mold of John Fahey, performed with peculiar instruments built by Forrest Marquisee—strange cylindrical, hand-cranked beasts that created a fuzzy, droney electronic feel without any electricity. GZA, on the other hand, has built a career rapping over carefully crafted beats that depend on sampling technology, yet he played the second of two nights with a powerhouse live band. (I didn’t catch Gary Numan’s sets, which were attended by a throng of rabidly excited middle-aged men; one attendee had reportedly been to a Deadhead-esque 400 Numan shows)

Among the other acts I saw were Floating Points, delivering a Pink Floyd-reminscent set; Odesza, a pair of Seattle rhythmbros who played a fun if not especially challenging set of EDM, occasionally backed by live performers; and Grimes. The latter, a dance-pop critical darling, has in the past struggled with performing live. While she seemed nervous between songs, her stage show was exhilarating, backed by three young women who danced and occasionally played instruments. The music itself seemed unusually poppy for the audience—“weird music for normal people,” a friend suggested. More interesting was an installation put together by Grimes, Listen, and Microsoft that used interactive technology to allow listeners to affect the song: By pushing on mesh nets arranged in a dark tent, listeners could affect the volume of certain elements of the song, or tweak the equalization of the mix. Another exhibition gave attendees the chance to play and buy a range of synthesizers, both Moogs and other brands, as well as theremins. Some people signed up for workshops to build their own.

With its celebration of Bob Moog’s technological advances, Moogfest is also in part a tech conference. This year’s theme revolved around “Future Sound” and “Future Thought.” It was also the first time Moogfest has been located in Durham, after previous stints in New York City and then in Asheville, North Carolina, the hometown of the Moog company but a more remote location. That fits nicely with Durham, which is positioning itself as an East Coast alternative to Silicon Valley and Austin, and there were faint echoes of South by Southwest. (The sidewalks of downtown were plastered with somewhat eyeroll-inducing propaganda about the city’s friendliness to startups. To the relief of residents and attendees alike, Moogfest remains less overwhelming than SXSW.) Martine Rothblatt, a pharmaceutical CEO and founder of SiriusXM delivered one keynote, focusing on creativity and futurism—though her presence, as a transgender woman, stood as rebuke to HB2, the recent North Carolina law targeting transgender bathroom accommodation.

A festival celebrating a 50-year-old analog synthesizer is bound to attract different viewpoints—including those who admire the Moog’s innovation but eye more recent technologies with some trepidation, complaining they lack the warmth or naturalism of the original Moog. Fittingly, then, there was a current of dubiousness about the future running through the festival. A second keynote featured the VR pioneer-turned-technoskeptic Jaron Lanier, but a particularly pointed moment came in the midst of Laurie Anderson’s show, which she calls “The Language of the Future.” Speaking over soft keyboard chords, she recalled an encounter with the author Gary Shteyngart, then in the midst of an experiment with Google Glass that seemed to be doing no favors to Shteyngart, his interlocutors, or Google. Perhaps, Anderson seemed to suggest, to seek the language of the future is to open a virtual Pandora’s box.

The Battle Against ISIS in Fallujah Begins

Iraqi government forces, backed by U.S. and coalition airstrikes, have launched a military offensive to recapture Fallujah from Islamic State militants who overran the Iraqi city more than two years ago.

The battle for the city, located east of Baghdad, began overnight Sunday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi said in a televised announcement. The offensive includes Iraqi troops, police, and Shia militias.

Reuters reporters in Baghdad described the fight on Monday:

Some of the first direct clashes occurred in the area of al-Hayakil on Falluja's southern outskirts, a resident said. Iraqi troops also approached the northern suburb of Garma, the top municipal official there said, to clear out militants before turning their attention toward the city center.

Air strikes and mortar salvoes overnight targeted neighborhoods inside the city where Islamic State is believed to maintain its headquarters. The bombardment had eased by daybreak.

Seven civilians and two militants were killed in the shelling, while 21 civilians and two militants were wounded, a source at Falluja's medical center said.

The number of fatalities is expected to rise. No casualties among Iraqi troops were reported Monday, according to Reuters.

Fallujah was the first of several cities in Iraq to fall to ISIS in 2014. The Islamist militant group has controlled the city since January of that year. That summer, the group declared a caliphate covering large parts of Iraq and Syria.

In December 2015, Iraqi troops and the U.S.-led coalition regained control of Ramadi, the Iraqi city that had been under ISIS control for about six months. U.S. and Iraqi officials hope next to attempt to retake Mosul, a city north of Fallujah. ISIS took control of Mosul in June 2014.

In the early aughts, Fallujah served as a stronghold for the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda. In 2004, 100 American troops were killed and 600 were injured in Fallujah in a six-week battle against al-Qaeda insurgents during in the Iraq war.

Kenya’s Violent Protests

The fourth week of protests against Kenya’s electoral commission turned violent Monday as demonstrators clashed with police, leaving three dead and several others injured.

:

Security and medical sources have now confirmed that three people were killed in clashes between police and opposition supporters in Kenya.

Two men were killed in western Siaya town while another man was killed in the lake city of Kisumu.

Police used water cannons and tear gas in multiple Kenyan cities to disperse groups rallied by the opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) ahead of general elections in August 2017. The party views the election commission as “politically-biased.”

CORD leaders and supporters marched on the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) building in Nairobi, Mombasa, and other cities, calling for the removal of IEBC’s members.

In 2013, CORD accused the commission of manipulating the presidential election result.

Reuters reports:

… politicians are already trying to galvanise their supporters in a nation where violence erupted after the 2007 vote and the opposition disputed the outcome in 2013.

CORD, led by Raila Odinga who lost the 2013 vote and unsuccessfully challenged the result in court, has accused the IEBC of bias and said its members should quit. IEBC officials have dismissed the charge and say they will stay.

According to the Daily Nation, crowds threw stones at police and multiple people were shot during the protests.

Police called the protests illegal and the government urged CORD to suspend the demonstrations and pursue IEBC’s removal through the constitution.

“The demonstrations are illegal and the organizers have been clearly warned. If they insist on rioting, they will meet us there,” Lucas Ogara, Mombasa's police chief, told Reuters.

But at a news conference Sunday, CORD leaders confirmed Monday’s demonstrators would go on, stating:

Kenyans will be doing this, as we have done in the past, in exercise of their right to assemble peaceably and to direct the widest possible attention to a great national issue.

How Did Thieves in Japan Steal $13 Million From Convenience-Store ATMs?

Thieves in Japan stole $12.7 million by withdrawing money from convenience-store ATMs in one coordinated attack that took about two hours.

Investigators revealed the theft Sunday, though it happened on May 15. Authorities suspect more than 100 people were involved, and that the criminals used counterfeit credit cards stolen or leaked from a bank in South Africa. Police said the thieves were part of a large-scale international crime organization, and that they exploited Japan’s 100,000-yen withdrawal limit ( about $900) to take out millions from 7-Eleven convenience-store ATMs in Tokyo and 16 other prefectures across the country.

The Japan Times reported:

In each of the approximately 14,000 transactions, the maximum amount of ¥100,000 was withdrawn from Seven Bank ATMs using the fake credit cards, according to the sources.

ATM transaction data suggests that information from 1,600 credit cards issued by a South African bank was used, the sources said.

Authorities are looking through security camera footage to try and identify the people who withdrew the money. Investigators will also work with South African authorities through Interpol, The Japan Times reported.

This is the second massive heist this year. In February, hackers stole $81 million from the Bangladesh’s central bank. In that case, authorities believe a sophisticated hacking group corrupted the messaging system used by banks across the world to approve money transfers. The thieves then rerouted Bangladesh’s money, which was being held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to accounts the hackers had set up in the Philippines. From there it passed into the country’s local casinos, where privacy laws make it almost impossible to track.

Game of Thrones: Sansa Stark Will Be Heard

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Game of Thrones has been very fairly criticized, again and again, for its rampant depictions of violence—against kids, against women, against random characters, against everyone. The criticism generally involves a subsidiary accusation: not just that the show revels in its violence, but that it isn’t thoughtful about the way it deploys it. That it depicts blood and gore and death—and the human pain that comes with it—wantonly and gleefully. Sadism, without strategy.

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Sunday night’s episode—definitely, as my colleague Spencer Kornhaber summed it up, “one of the most memorable episodes in Thrones history”—offered something of a rebuke to those criticisms, and also a rebuke to the show’s own checkered history of violence. The episode considered time travel. It considered the machinations of fate. In all that, it considered the circularity of violence: the notion that a violent act cannot be understood as a single event, but rather as something that will reverberate across people and space and time. As something that will, indeed, linger in the air.

The most striking instance of all that was, of course, the straining, clawing, and self-sacrificial death of Hodor. (The phrase “Hold the door,” which is outside of the Game of Thrones universe the stuff of polite banality, will never be quite the same.) But there was a subtler—and arguably more significant—moment of violence in the episode, too: Sansa returning to Littlefinger and forcing him to hear the atrocities that Ramsay—whom Sansa had been married to, ultimately, because of Littlefinger’s manipulations—had committed against her.

Sansa has very little recourse, but she has her words, and she will weaponize them as best she can.

“Did you know about Ramsay?” Sansa (Sophie Turner, in a standout performance) spit, stone-faced, to Littlefinger, as Lady Brienne looked on. “If you didn’t know, you’re an idiot. If you did know, you’re my enemy.”

She continued: “Would you like to hear about our wedding night?”

Littlefinger did not want hear about that. She continued anyway.  

“He never hurt my face. He needed my face—the face of Ned Stark’s daughter. But the rest of me? He did what he liked with the rest of me. As long as I could still give him an heir. What do you think he did?”

“I can’t begin to contemplate,” Littlefinger replied.

Sansa was not deterred. He would be made to contemplate. “What do you think he did to me?” Sansa asked again. They stared at each other in wide-eyed silence, until Lady Brienne interrupted: “Lady Sansa asked you a question.”

“He beat you,” Littlefinger said.

“Yes, he enjoyed that. What else do you think he did?”

“Sansa, I don’t—”

“What else?” Sansa said.

“Did he cut you?”

“Maybe you did know about Ramsay all along.”

Finally, Littlefinger admitted, “I made a mistake.” Sansa, however, ignored him. The admission was not what she was after. “The other things he did,” Sansa continued, “ladies aren’t supposed to talk about those things. But I imagine brothel keeps talk about them all the time.”

As Littlefinger stared at her, dumbfounded, Sansa continued: “I can still feel it. I don’t mean ‘in my tender heart, it still pains me so.’ I can still feel what he did, in my body, standing here, right now.”

Standing here, right now. The dialogue took place in a notably darkened room; there was nothing to see here—no action, no setting—there was only something to hear. Sansa was coming to terms with what Ramsay had done to her, via nothing but stark (and Stark) words. And she was forcing Littlefinger to do the same. She was insisting on being being heard. Her recitation—her forcing Littlefinger to know of her pain, and maybe even to experience just a little of it himself—is a telling moment of verbal vigilante-ism. Because Sansa has, in her current state, very little recourse for Ramsay’s abuse, and no way to undo the past. But she has her words, and she will weaponize them as best she can.

You could read the exchange as an act of contrition on the part of Game of Thrones: an admission that violence must be more than mere titillation.

In all that, the scene sent a powerful message: Sansa is a survivor, but that does not mean, she insisted, that she is “unharmed.” On the contrary. She is scarred. She is wounded. She is hurting. She will continue to be all of those things, because of Littlefinger and Ramsay and memory and time and the fact that violence lives on long after the act of it is done.

But: She won’t be silent about what she is, or about what happened to her. She has her voice, still.

And Game of Thrones, the show, is letting her use that voice. It is letting her tell her story. You could read the exchange as a kind of literary act of contrition: an admission on the part of the show’s creators, to its unseen but vocal audiences, that violence—even, yes, violence that the show inflicted on its own character—will have its consequences. You could read it as an insistence that the violence here has a purpose, and its own kind of story to tell. Here was violence, treated not as a titillation or an entertainment, but acknowledged as, simply, pain. And here was violence, too, made full in its cyclicality. As my colleague Lenika Cruz noted, the episode’s opening scene, which showed Sansa at work with her sewing needle, was “a sweet throwback to when we met her in the pilot—smiling as Old Nan praised her stitching, while Arya fidgeted nearby, distracted by the sounds of arrow-shooting outside.” And as she talks to Littlefinger—another full-circling—here was Sansa coming to terms, or trying to come to terms, with her own past.

And here was Game of Thrones, doing something similar. Here was the show, letting its survivor tell her story of violence, in her own voice. “I can still feel it,” Sansa says. And she will keep talking about what she feels and what she has endured—even though ladies aren’t supposed to talk about those things. She will talk, and the show will talk, and that won’t undo anything, but it will be something. The words here are a small measure of catharsis, for the character who utters them and for the show that’s played its own part on inflicting pain on her: They acknowledge the way violence reverberates, and insinuates, and destroys. They understand that it will come back in the most unexpected of places and times. They admit that, in violent acts as in so much else, what is dead may never die.

The First Verdict in the Freddie Gray Case

A Baltimore judge found police officer Edward Nero not guilty on Monday for his part in the arrest of Freddie Gray, a black man who died in police custody last year.

Nero was charged with second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and two counts of misconduct in office. Prosecutors had argued that Nero assaulted Gray by detaining him without cause, and that placing him in a police van without fastening a seatbelt amounted to reckless endangerment.

Nero asked to be tried by a judge instead of a jury, and the decision from Judge Barry Williams comes after six days of hearings.  Nero is one of six officers charged in connection with Gray’s arrest and death.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said in a statement Monday:

This is our American system of justice and police officers must be afforded the same justice system as every other citizen in this city, state, and country. Now that the criminal case has come to an end, Officer Nero will face an administrative review by the Police Department. We once again ask the citizens to be patient and to allow the entire process to come to a conclusion.

The police officers arrested Gray on April 12, 2015 for reasons that remain unclear. Gray had attempted to run away. After he was detained and searched, officers found a switch blade in Gray’s pocket, which is illegal to carry in Baltimore. Gray was loaded into a police van and placed in leg shackles. During the half-hour drive to jail, he sustained a spinal injury, which he died from in the hospital a week later.

In the days after his death, protestors marched and filled the streets, decrying the death of another black man after an encounter with police that year. The city nearly shut down for a few days as 2,000 National Guard troops patrolled the streets and enforced a curfew. The city’s chief prosecutor called Gray’s death a homicide, and Rawlings-Blake would later fire the police commissioner.

The first police officer to be tried in Gray’s death was William Porter, who faced charges of involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. Like in Nero’s case, prosecutors argued that Gray died because Porter never fastened Gray into seat belt, and that even after Gray was injured, the officer failed to call for medical help. In December, a judge declared a mistrial in the case against Porter.

After the news of Nero’s not-guilty verdict, the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police, a police union, said:

Officer Nero is relieved that for him, this nightmare is nearing an end. Being falsely charged with a  crime, and being prosecuted for reasons that have nothing to do with justice, is a horror that no person should ever have to endure. Unfortunately, however, his relief is tempered by the fact that five other Police Officers, outstanding men and women, and good friends, must continue to fight these baseless prosecutions. None of these Officer did anything wrong. The State Attorney’s office responded to the riots and violence in Baltimore by rushing to charge these Officers rashly and without any meaningful investigation.

The remaining officers have yet to stand trial. Officer Caesar Goodson Jr. has been charged with, among others, second-degree depraved-heart murder, which carries a possible 30 years. Lieutenant Brian Rice and Sergeant Alicia White are both charged with involuntary manslaughter and other offenses. Officer Garrett Miller is charged with second-degree assault and other offenses.