Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 160

The Noble Futility of Madonna’s Prince Tribute

What’s a tribute, anyway? Sunday night’s Billboard Music Awards, the most soul-crushingly cynical of the soul-crushingly cynical music-awards shows, encouraged viewers to take an expansive definition of the word. Britney Spears’s opening set, where she determinedly walked through a medley of her hits and deep cuts, felt like nothing so much as a tribute to her past relevance. Kesha’s powerful version of “It Ain’t Me Babe” was less an homage to Bob Dylan than to her times as a more carefree pop star. Celine Dion doing Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” was an act of personal, public mourning.

But the most divisive performance of the night was the only memorial that was really billed as such—Madonna’s pitchy but pious rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “Purple Rain” with Stevie Wonder. The performance was, at its most basic level, a tribute to Prince, but like so much of the evening it felt like a statement of futility: Something’s gone forever, and the only, imperfect thing to do is sing about it.

That BET was so quickly able to advertise its forthcoming Prince tribute by bashing the Madonna one that had just aired (“Yeah, we saw that. Don’t worry. We got you.”) was a sign of how opinions around her performance had formed before it began. Madonna and Prince were peers on the charts, gained popularity in part through transgression, and had a real but complicated—and at times bitter—relationship. So it makes sense that she’d memorialize him at some point, somewhere, and an awards show where nominations are largely determined by record sales is, as these things go, a pretty low-stakes venue. But while he always was able to seem like a genuine freak, she has never been able to escape the impression of trying very hard for attention, and as a musician her strengths are very different from what his were. The fears of a catastrophe, something that tried to eclipse Prince’s achievements with Madonna’s antics, were high.

But showboat Madonna did not. This was as textbook-definition-respectful a set as anyone could have expected. The visuals were right: a flawless glistening suit as fashion homage, in front of images of Prince that were, appropriately, dwarfing. Her song choices did not try to wow with eclecticism, nor did they try to force a comparison between Prince’s dance songs and Madonna’s. Rather, they aimed for the tear ducts of the masses. In bringing in Stevie Wonder for “Purple Rain,” she made a respectable choice to share the stage with someone who highlights different, significant parts of Prince’s legacy.

She may have thought that all of these things meant she was playing it safe, but that idea discounts the fact that vocal ability is a real thing. Madonna simply isn’t equipped to hit the notes needed to convey the ache of these ballads. This gives the backlash that was already inevitable a devastating amount of legitimacy: You can point to her performance itself, not the politics of it, to make the case she wasn’t qualified for the gig. An uptempo song might have been a better fit, both for Madonna’s sake and the memory of Prince’s. At the very least, it seems like a mistake to let the need for weepy in-memorium strings prevent there from being a guitar anywhere on stage.

“Just to SING his work is brave enough,” Questlove tweeted.

But then again, does it matter? The announcement of BET having a Prince tribute of its own is a reminder that when someone as huge as this dies, no one person is going to be able to sum them up. After David Bowie passed earlier this year, Lady Gaga staged a frenetic Grammys medley that was precisely the opposite of Madonna’s approach last night—yet received similar accusations of arrogance and miscalculation. At later occasions, other performers from Lorde to the Flaming Lips to Cyndi Lauper took their worthy shots at covering Bowie, and as a result his legend has only grown.

So it shall be with Prince, as Questlove, who introduced Madonna’s set, pointed out on Twitter. He added, “Every Prince rendition will not be a life changing orgasmic xperience. Just to SING his work is brave enough.” I saw another comment today that summed up the failure of most tributes: “The thing about irreplaceable artists is that they are irreplaceable.” Nothing compares.

Game of Thrones: All Men Must Serve

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.

Spencer Kornhaber: “Hold the door” are the words that will render this one of the most memorable episodes in Thrones history. But a more telling phrase might be “A servant does not ask questions,” Jaqen H’ghar’s dictum to Arya.

Hodor, the ultimate servant, was denied a lot more than the ability to ask questions. Pressed into decades of thralldom thanks to the psychic wanderings of the boy of a boy he knew back in Winterfell, the stablehand Wylis now ranks as one of the mosts poignant characters in Thrones history. It’s tempting to say his sacrifice at the intensely dramatic end of this episode was a noble one. But for that to be true, wouldn’t he have had to have had some choice in the matter? While the realm has people who want to serve—the Briennes and Jorahs, the Crows and the Maesters—it is also full of people denied self-determination because of larger forces.

Those forces, whether magical or manmade, can have consequences ripple across time. The revelation that “Hodor” is really “Hold-the-door” was the last of the episode’s many examples of how the past can boomerang into into the present. Some of these examples were small: Sansa confronting Littlefinger for his recklessness as yenta; Tyrion summoning a sorceress based on what he saw in Volantis; Arya watching a warped version of her family tragedy on a stage.

But there were also glimpses of much larger and more overdue reckonings. Long-festering resentments against the rest of Westeros may steer the Ironborn toward Essos. The history of the North may determine the loyalties in the coming war between Starks and Boltons. And mankind’s ancient aggressions, it turns out, caused the invention of the superweapon that is the White Walkers—a neat allegory for any number of potentially apocalyptic problems facing the real world today.

All this stitching together of past and present resulted in an unusually satisfying episode, one that offered crucial context and invited viewers to game out the story’s future. The siblings Greyjoy are on the lam while the rest of the Iron Islanders work toward becoming one of the pinchers that may eventually clamp down on King’s Landing. Brienne was sent to do what she does best—move across the map—so as to bring the Tullys back into the mix. And while the outcome of Arya’s assassination homework is unknown, watching her get smacked up by her young Faceless rival was weirdly heartening because it hinted that she, too, will be soon be more than proficient in the exquisite art of karate.

Also heartening: Dany, when bidding farewell to her scaly Ser Jorah, reaffirmed her intention to pursue the Iron Throne. But how long is it going to take for her to get there? On one level, it’s fun to see the Lord of Light’s minion show up in Meereen because it makes for another intersection of far-flung storylines. But everything else about this new Red Lady screams plot drag. Why exactly does Tyrion need sorceresses for a propaganda campaign? We’ve seen the dangers of trying to harness religion for political means, both with Stannis’s disastrous campaign and with Cersei’s. This time, Varys’s distaste for magic may be the crucial power check needed, but then again, the priestess seemed to enchant him pretty easily with details of his childhood trauma.

The most tantalizing plotline is Sansa and Jon’s efforts to unite the North to take Winterfell, which promises the kind of politicking the show excels at and the good ole’ good-vs.-evil conflict it rarely offers. In other words... be very, very worried. The last storyline like this was Robb marching against the Lannisters. The North and everyone else remembers what happened next.

It shouldn’t go unmentioned that the battle at the great tree felled a number of strong and frequently silent servants in addition to Hodor: Summer the Direwolf, Leaf the Child, and Max von Sydow’s unnamed character, who was dispatched in much the same slashing motion as his unnamed character in The Force Awakens was. Lenika, Chris, let me know whether you thought these characters got proper sendoffs—and whether you felt sparks from this bona fide ice-and-fire event.

Entries from Lenika Cruz and Christopher Orr to come.

Turkey's New Prime Minister

Turkey’s governing party has elected an ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as its new leader, allowing him to assume the office of prime minister.

Binali Yildirim, the country’s minister of transport, maritime, and communication, received 1,405 out of a total of 1,470 votes at a meeting of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP. Yildirim was the sole candidate for chairman at the special session called after Ahmet Davutoglu announced earlier this month he would not seek re-election.

Yildirim is a longtime ally of Erdogan; in the 1990s, Yildirim ran a high-speed ferry company in Istanbul, where Erdogan was mayor, according to Reuters. He has held his ministerial position since 2002. Davutoglu formally resigned hours after the vote, AP reported. Erdogan is expected to formally ask Yildirim to form a new government later Sunday.

Davutoglu’s decision to step down was widely believed to be a result of irreconcilable differences between Davutoglu and the president. Yildirim is expected to support Erdogan in his hopes of transitioning the country to a U.S.-style presidential system. Erdogan’s two predecessors held largely ceremonial roles and never chaired a cabinet meeting, which were overseen by prime ministers. But since his election in 2014 Erdogan has absorbed the power of the prime minister’s office and has sought constitutional reforms that would extend presidential authority and, to some observers, advance his own political ambitions.

Erdogan and Davutoglu’s falling out began over the country’s fight against the Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK, a separatist group the Turkish government considers a terrorist organization. Government forces and PKK have been engaged in a decades-long armed conflict in the country’s southeast, punctuated by several failed cease-fires. The AP’s Suzan Fraser and Dominique Soguel recently gave this timeline of the politicians’ fraying relationship:

Erdogan lambasted Davutoglu after he spoke of the possibility of resuming peace talks with Kurdish rebels.

The gulf widened over Davutoglu's opposition to the pre-trial detention of journalists accused of spying and academics accused of voicing support for the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Erdogan spurned his premier and even suggested that anyone deemed to be supportive of extremists should be stripped of citizenship.

But what sealed Davutoglu’s demise was his lukewarm support for a powerful presidential system.

Yildirim on Sunday called for a new constitution to recognize Erdogan’s expanded role.

“The most important mission we have today is to legalize the de facto situation, to bring to an end this confusion by changing the constitution,” he said. “The new constitution will be on an executive presidential system.”

He also said “operations will continue without pause” against the PKK.

The Families Suing Russia Over MH17

Families of the passengers of the Malaysia Airlines airplane shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014 are suing Russia and its president, according to Australian media.

Thirty-three relatives from Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia have filed a lawsuit against Vladimir Putin and his country over the crash that killed 298 people in 2014, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Saturday. The claim was filed by Sydney law firm LHD Lawyers in the European Court of Human Rights, an international court based in France. The claimants demand $10 million in Australian dollars, or $7.2 million in U.S. dollars or 6.4 million euros, for each victim.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, an international passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was struck by a surface-to-air-missile in July 2014, at the height of fighting in the Ukraine conflict. A Dutch investigation found the aircraft was shot down by a Russian-made rocket, but did not say who fired it. Ukraine and Western nations say Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine are responsible, but Russia accuses Ukrainian forces.

Of the victims, 193 were Dutch, 43 were Malaysian, and 27 were Australian. The remainder were citizens of Belgium, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom.

News.com.au reports the lawsuit alleges Russia and Putin violated the passengers’ “right to life.” The other allegations include, according the Sydney Morning Herald:

The documents allege that the Russian Federation has worked to keep its involvement hidden. It has failed to conduct an internal investigation, refused to participate in the cockpit reconstruction and its “Pawn Storm” cyber warfare unit hacked into the Dutch Safety Board investigative website, it states.

Jerry Skinner, a American aviation lawyer who also works at LHD Lawyers, is leading the case, according to Australian media. Skinner helped to negotiate $10 million in compensation from Libya for the families of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. In that incident, 270 people were killed when a bomb detonated aboard a Pan Am flight as it traveled over Scotland.

“Our clients want them to accept responsibility and be accountable in some measure that will be satisfying to the individuals," Skinner told Australian broadcaster ABC.

Some families of victims in Australia are considering suing Malaysia Airlines over failing to consider potential security concerns about flying over eastern Ukraine at the time.

Preacher: A Refreshingly Fun Comic-Book Drama

In the TV world, the words “comic-book adaptation” are usually enough to inspire feelings of dread. Not because of their quality but because of their tone: Dramas like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and The Walking Dead are among the most gripping small-screen offerings ripped from the comics rack, but they share a particularly bleak outlook on life. Perhaps that’s why AMC’s new show, Preacher, stands out in a genre over-clogged with darkness: Though it stays faithful to the original landmark Vertigo series, which is known for its gory ultra-violence, it also remembers to have plenty of fun along the way.

That’s perhaps unsurprising considering Preacher’s creative team. The show is looking to fill the boots of The Walking Dead as AMC’s next big genre hit, but it’s been adapted for the screen by the comedy veterans Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, best known as writers for their work on films like Superbad and This Is the End. The pair’s devotion to Garth Ennis’s Preacher, an indie comics hit that ran from 1995 to 2000, shepherded it to the small screen after many failed attempts to translate its transgressive themes into Hollywood formula. As a series, Preacher announces its strange, heightened tone in its first scene: Seized by some demonic energy in the middle of a sermon, an African priest suddenly explodes all over his congregation. Preacher’s going for gross and, with its tongue planted firmly in cheek, it doesn’t shy away from the wise-cracking, pulpy excitement of its genre.

The aforementioned priest isn’t the only religious leader spontaneously exploding in Preacher’s pilot episode—throughout the first hour, the same supernatural accident befalls several people of faith, including (in one of the show’s funniest cut-away gags) Tom Cruise on his Scientology dais. Rogen and Goldberg (who directed the pilot, which was co-written by the Breaking Bad scripter Sam Catlin) move between this growing apocalyptic mayhem and the travails of a disenchanted small-town preacher, Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), who’s weighing leaving his flock behind before he’s imbued with an unknown supernatural power.

There are plenty of disparate threads to unite—work the pilot episode only partially embarks on. While Jesse is dealing with the troubles of his local congregants, the audience is also introduced to Cassidy (Joe Gilgun), an Irish drifter skilled in the art of destruction with an odd aversion to sunlight, and Tulip (Ruth Negga), some kind of mysterious super-assassin on the run who’s easily the breakout character of the show’s early episodes (four were provided to critics). Soon enough, everyone’s paths begin to intertwine, but don’t expect a quick explanation for exactly what’s going on.

Preacher has a lot of plot to get through, and though it’s a relatively faithful adaptation of Ennis’s comic, it steers away from mindlessly following his story, instead drawing out the humor and humanity in his central characters. Ennis’s work was a profane, violent jolt to the genre in 1995 that feels a little tamer two decades later, so it’s good that Preacher mostly avoids congratulating itself for being blasphemous. After the priest-exploding stunts of the pilot episode, the focus wisely narrows onto the show’s core characters, including Cassidy, Tulip, and the grotesque Eugene Root (Ian Colletti), a boy disfigured by a suicide attempt.

Preacher doesn’t shy away from the wise-cracking, pulpy excitement of its genre.

With Preacher, AMC has somehow delivered another show that, like The Walking Dead, is set in the Deep South and mostly features a British cast adopting country drawls. But it’s hard to fault Cooper’s casting. In a television world burdened with flawed male protagonists, Custer’s angst is happily not the primary focus of Preacher after the first episode, when he’s suddenly imbued with mysterious power and starts to explore its higher celestial purpose. Gilgun’s Irish brogue is nigh-impossible to understand, but it barely matters—he brings the same anarchic, sparking energy that made him such a standout in the U.K. cult hit Misfits and the silly sci-fi caper Lockout.

But Negga is undoubtedly Preacher’s ace card, and Rogen and Goldberg prove they know it, directing her first appearance (a barnstorming, bloody action scene witnessed by a delighted pair of children cheering from the sidelines) with gleeful bravura. That’s what sets this show apart from its miserable apocalyptic cousin, The Walking Dead series, which remains the crown jewel of AMC’s schedule from a ratings perspective. That comic-book adaptation has such a desolate tone that Preacher is almost worth watching just as a necessary salve: a reminder that though many comics are filled with lurid violence and never-ending threats to humanity, that doesn’t mean they all have to be portentously grim affairs.

Targeting the Taliban's Leader

U.S. forces carried out a drone strike in Pakistan targeting Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour, the leader of the Taliban, on Saturday night, U.S. officials said.

CNN reported that the U.S. believes Mansour was likely killed in the strike, although details are scarce and verification is difficult.

The New York Times has more:

A United States official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the military operation, said that the strike occurred around 6 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday, and that Mullah Mansour and a second adult male fighter traveling with him in a vehicle were probably killed. Even so, officials offered caution because early assessments of the deaths of militant and terrorist leaders in American strikes have proved inaccurate in the past.

The drone strike, authorized by President Obama, took place in a remote area of Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan, southwest of the town of Ahmad Wal. The strike was carried out by several unmanned aircraft operated by United States Special Operations forces, the official said.

Mansour became the Taliban’s acting leader after Mullah Mohammed Omar died in 2013. Omar’s death remained secret until July 2015, at which point Mansour became the group’s official leader. Mansour’s tenure, however, was marked by prolonged infighting as he struggled to consolidate power over an increasingly splintered movement.

Blac Chyna and Colorism: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

How Blac Chyna Beat the Kardashians at Their Own Game

Sylvia Obell | BuzzFeed

“The pattern of ‘Columbusing’ isn’t unique to the Kardashians, but the extent to which the family has profited from it is remarkable. This element of cultural appropriation in the Kardashians’ style has left many feeling like they created an empire using things that don’t belong to them. To quote actor Amandla Stenberg, they ‘cash cropped’ our cornrows. So when Chyna, an actual black woman, decided to not only get a slice but come for the entire Kardashian pie, those watching couldn’t help but cheer as she swooped in.”

From Nina to Lemonade, Why We’re Still So Bad at Talking About Colorism

Mallika Rao | Vulture

“Under this logic, racism effectively looks like a zero-sum fight, comprised of winners and losers: white versus black. Acknowledging that there are also winners and losers inside the black community threatens a powerful, singular narrative of oppression. In this way, the bigness of racism directly feeds the persistence of colorism.”

Men Are Sabotaging the Online Reviews of TV Shows Aimed at Women

Walt Hickey | FiveThirtyEight

“And for a perfect example of this, all you have to do is look at how men rate TV shows aimed at women compared with how women rate shows aimed at men. When you rely on the wisdom of the crowd on the internet, you risk relying on the opinion of mostly men. Seventy percent of IMDb TV show raters are men, according to my analysis, and that results in shows with predominantly female audiences getting screwed.”

I Speak to God in Public: Chance the Rapper’s Faith

David Dark | MTV News

“On Chance the Rapper’s third mixtape, Coloring Book, the heart of the 23-year-old Chicago MC is very much on his sleeve. But we’ve seen Chancelor Bennett’s heart before. Love requires a context, like lust needs a setting. For Chance the Rapper, the context (classroom, church, family, neighborhood, fans) is never far away. There’s no life to be lived without one. On Coloring Book, heaven—like hell—is always other people.”

On Playing Games, Productivity, and Right Livelihood

Janet Frishberg | The Rumpus

“I wanted to know what it meant to spend a life this way. How much damage can you do to anyone else if you stay quiet and alone all day, if all you’re doing is rearranging the same sets of pixels on a screen with your fingers on a touchpad or a keyboard for points or to complete levels? If you have nothing to show for your day, I wanted to believe, nothing can hurt anyone.”

Bookslut Was Born in an Era of Internet Freedom. Today’s Web Has Killed It

Jess Crispin | The Guardian

“Back then, nothing you did mattered. And that gave you freedom. Back then, the online book culture was run mostly by enthusiasts and amateurs, people who were creating blogs and webzines simply for the pleasure of it, rather than to build a career or a brand. I know that nostalgia is a stupid emotion, but still I regret the day money found the Internet. Once advertisers showed up, offering to pay us to do the thing we were doing just for fun, it was very hard to say no. Or understand exactly what the trade-offs would be.”

Conservatives Anonymous

Andy Kroll | California Sunday

“Hollywood is a famously brutal place to work. So many talented people are competing for so few spots; rejection—and the insecurity that comes with it—is the norm. It’s not just actresses who see their careers evaporate at 35, replaced by the latest crop of ingénues living at the Oakwood Apartments ... Conservatives in the industry face an additional question with no clear answer: Have their political views stifled their careers?”

Banshee, Game of Thrones, and the Problems With Serial-Killer Plots

Maureen Ryan | Variety

“In a show that is all about people’s movement through different moral agendas—from pragmatism to amorality to self-interest to clan loyalty—Ramsay has been a fixed point, but not in a good way. A character going from incredibly monstrous to even more monstrous is not a journey; he’s just become a bigger and blunter version of the thing he always was.”

Ayesha Siddiqi | The New Inquiry

“But a major-studio movie with model-pretty actors that has zero cachet when name-dropped in conversation is the perfect conclusion to anachronistic first-wave millennial angst and pre-Condé Nast Pitchfork-era debates. Maybe that’s why it inspired so much knee-jerk dismissal, reigniting the old impulse to make fun of the Troy Boltons of the world and their lack of cool irony.”

Violence Is Golden: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Shane Black’s Simple Art of Murder

Priscilla Page | Birth Movies Death

“The detective is driven to solve the mystery by an obscure object of desire, something powerful and unknowable, and in the process he is driven to his destruction or his redemption. In Black’s movies, his protagonists are at their most damaged, and the secret, unknowable thing they’re driven toward is innocence, magic, redemption.”

Frog and Toad and the Self

Millennials are so frequently hyped as the first digital generation that people tend to forget that we were raised first and foremost with books. TV and the Internet may have shaped our identities, but so did old-fashioned, printed stories. And looking back now, it’s hard to think of a children’s author who better prepared young readers for growing up than Arnold Lobel.

Lobel’s Frog and Toad series, published in four volumes containing five stories each during the 1970s, remains his most popular and enduring work. Frog and Toad, two very different characters, make something of an odd couple. Their friendship demonstrates the many ups and downs of human attachment, touching on deep truths about life, philosophy, and human nature in the process. But it isn’t all about relationships with others: In the series, and in his lesser-known 1975 book Owl at Home, Lobel offers a conception of the self that still resonates decades later. Throughout his books, he reminds readers that they are individuals, and that they shouldn’t be afraid of being themselves.

Although Frog and Toad’s world is perhaps more pastoral than that of their average reader, most can recognize and relate to the situations the duo find themselves in. Their various struggles might involve deciding whether to stay in or go out, the difficulty of restraint when it comes to cookies, and the challenge of adhering to a daily to-do-list. Frog represents the practical and sensible part of the self, while Toad is emotional and tempestuous. But they’re both deeply realized characters who sometimes defy expectations. In the marvelous story “Shivers,” Frog reveals himself to be a horror fan, and tells Toad about a childhood encounter with the terrifying “Old Dark Frog” that may or may not be true. In “A Swim,” Toad decides to respond to mocking comments about his bathing suit by calmly and defiantly walking past the laughing crowd.

While many of Lobel’s stories are metaphors for the interesting and silly adventures that occur in human relationships, some go deeper. In the story “Alone,” Toad is upset when Frog decides to spend some time by himself. Frog explains that there’s nothing wrong with solitude, saying, “I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think about how fine everything is.” Lobel tackled this theme more directly in his standalone book Owl At Home, published in 1975. It’s less well-known than the Frog and Toad books, but Lobel called it his most personal work, and it constitutes one of the great literary reflections on solitude, reminding readers that they can learn from introspection.

In the story “Strange Bumps,” Owl grows alarmed at the sight of his knees pushing up the sheets on his bed. The story is farcical and hilarious, but it also captures one of the central curiosities and struggles of growing up: the obligation of confronting our sometimes strange, sometimes threatening bodies. Owl casting off his sheets in the story feels now like a symbolic reminder to embrace our bodies as they are, without being duped by distorted perspectives.

Probably the most unique story in Owl at Home is “Tear-Water Tea,” in which Owl makes a special tea brewed from his tears. To produce the tears, he thinks of sad things like “songs that cannot be sung because the words have been forgotten” and “pencils that are too short to use.” It’s children’s literature straight from the nihilism section of the bookstore. Owl’s tears come from those broken and disjointed parts of existence that make no sense, so all that is to be done with them is to accept them, and drink them with a pot of tea.

Lobel was a deeply private man. His obituary noted, “He was a small, sickly child who was often bullied at school, but who made up for his physical shortcomings by enthralling his classmates with stories he invented.” Fresh out of art school in 1955, he married Anita Kempler, who would become a prolific and critically acclaimed illustrator in her own right. As sometime collaborators, they were a power couple among children’s book authors. Nevertheless, there has long been speculation about how Lobel’s sexuality influenced his books. The writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton has described Lobel as “a closeted gay man for most of his life.” The book Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature analyzes how Lobel “existed outside the mainstream” for most of his life, even before he came out in his later years.

Frog and Toad are frequently lauded as a subtly powerful force when it comes to children understanding same-sex relationships. Last year, the author Barbara Bader included Lobel in an article on “Five Gay Picture-Book Prodigies,” writing, “Frog and Toad jousting, in what are essentially two-character skits, could be two old loving, teasing, mutually indulgent mates. Or they could simply be humanized animals in the tradition of Beatrix Potter.”

Lobel himself simply said, “Frog and Toad are really two aspects of myself.” And between Frog, Toad, and Owl, his readers learned to consider themselves as individuals, empathizing with small, universal struggles and weighing the significance of their own actions while facing fears and dreams with honesty. The charming and funny animals in Lobel’s books helped prepare my generation for the diverse, fun, and scary world we are now helping to shape; hopefully, they’ll continue to resonate with children for decades to come.

A Veto for Oklahoma's Quixotic Abortion Bill

Updated at 6:07 p.m. on May 20

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin vetoed a unprecedented bill Friday that would have made it a felony for physicians to perform abortions in the state, saying the proposed law would not survive the inevitable legal challenges against it.

“While I consistently have and continue to support a re-examination of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, this legislation cannot accomplish that re-examination,” Fallin said in a statement.

Senate Bill 1552 would have imposed a one- to three-year prison sentence for performing an abortion and stripped providing physicians of their medical licenses—a direct violation of Roe v. Wade that was virtually guaranteed to be struck down by the courts.

Oklahoma’s Senate approved the bill by a 33-12 vote on Thursday. The Oklahoma House previously passed the legislation in April by a 59-9 vote.

Fallin, who strongly opposes abortion, signaled Thursday she could veto the legislation after it passed the Senate. “The governor will withhold comment on that bill, as she does on most bills, until she and her staff have had a chance to review it,” Fallin spokesman Michael McNutt told the Washington Post at the time.

SB 1552 was the most drastic effort yet by Oklahoma lawmakers to curtail legal abortion. Previous attempts, however, often failed to survive judicial scrutiny. The Associated Press has more:

Nearly every year, Oklahoma lawmakers have passed bills imposing new restrictions on abortions, but many of those laws have never taken effect. In all, eight of the state's separate anti-abortion measures have been challenged in court as unconstitutional in the last five years.

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case over an overturned Oklahoma law that would have required women to view of an ultrasound of her fetus before an abortion is performed. That same year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down a law that would have effectively banned all drug-induced abortions in the state.

In 2014, the state Legislature approved a law requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, but a challenge is pending before the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

With SB 1552, anti-abortion legislators anticipated the inevitable legal fight. State Senator Nathan Dahm, the bill’s author, told reporters he hoped the bill would lead the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Oklahoma’s legislation joins a bevy of anti-abortion bills passed by Republican-led state legislatures in recent years. According to the Center for Reproductive Freedom, which supports abortion rights, state lawmakers passed 47 new laws restricting abortion and proposed 400 more in 2015.

In February, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which challenges Texas’s restrictions on abortion clinics. As my colleague Garrett Epps noted then, a ruling in favor of the restrictions could force 32 of the state’s 40 clinics to close and leave nearly 1 million Texas women of reproductive age more than 150 miles from the remaining ones. The Court’s decision is expected in June.

The Search for EgyptAir Flight 804

What we know so far:

—Egypt’s military says parts of wreckage of EgyptAir Flight MS804 were found in the Mediterranean, some 180 miles north of Alexandria.

—That follows a day of confusion in which Greek and Egyptian authorities offered conflicting versions of whether the wreckage had been located near the island of Karpathios. It had not.

—The Airbus A320, which “disappeared from radar” early Thursday morning, had been flying from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board.  

—Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy said Thursday terrorism was more likely to have brought down the aircraft than technical problems.

Updated on May 20 at 5:21 p.m.

Aviation Herald, an aviation-related website, is reporting there was smoke aboard the plane—but it’s not yet clear what caused that smoke or whether that development had anything to do with the plane’s eventual fate. The website based its reporting on data from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which transmits data from a plane to the ground. The messages relayed from the plane spanned minutes.

Here’s more from Aviation Herald:

On May 20th 2016 The Aviation Herald received information from three independent channels, that ACARS (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System) messages with following content were received from the aircraft:



00:26Z 3044 ANTI ICE R WINDOW

00:26Z 561200 R SLIDING WINDOW SENSOR

00:26Z 2600 SMOKE LAVATORY SMOKE

00:27Z 2600 AVIONICS SMOKE

00:28Z 561100 R FIXED WINDOW SENSOR

00:29Z 2200 AUTO FLT FCU 2 FAULT

00:29Z 2700 F/CTL SEC 3 FAULT

no further ACARS messages were received

12:37 p.m.

EgyptAir says body parts, aircraft seats, and luggage has been found.

EGYPTAIR Official said that Egyptian Military and Marine Forces have discovered more debris /1

— EGYPTAIR (@EGYPTAIR) May 20, 2016

passengers’ belongings, body parts, luggage, and aircraft seats. Search is still in progress. /2

— EGYPTAIR (@EGYPTAIR) May 20, 2016

10:01 a.m. ET

At a news conference in Athens, Panos Kammenos, Greece’s defense minister, said Egyptian authorities had informed their Greek counterparts that “a body part, two seats and one or more items of luggage where found in the search area.”

He said the items were found in an area slightly south of where the aircraft vanished from radar. That area is a particularly tricky part of the Mediterranean to search:

#EgyptAir #MS804 wreckage may be on one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean. pic.twitter.com/jDnHx712Es

— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) May 20, 2016

Updated on May 20 at 5:48 a.m. ET

The Egyptian military says it has found parts of the wreckage from the missing EgyptAir flight that vanished off radar Thursday in the Mediterranean, about 180 miles north of Alexandria.

Here’s the military statement:

Egyptian airplanes and naval vessels were able to find on Friday some passengers' belongings as well as parts of the plane debris.

The military said the search operating was now also focused on finding the plane’s black box.

The Egyptian Armed Forces have informed EGYPTAIR that they have found first debris from the missing aircraft operating flight MS804 #MS804

— EGYPTAIR (@EGYPTAIR) May 20, 2016

Thursday’s coverage

3:40 p.m. ET

EgyptAir first said that it did not know whether the debris seen in the Mediterranean belonged  to the plane. It then Greek officials had said the debris, in fact, did belong to the missing EgyptAir flight. Now, unnamed Greek officials  are telling news organizations the wreckage is not from the plane.

Senior Greek air safety official says debris found so far in the Mediterranean Sea does not belong to aircraft. https://t.co/n8O35O7bJ8

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 19, 2016

EgyptAir later said the debris seen in the Mediterranean was, in fact, not from the missing plane.

In Washington, John Kirby, the U.S. State Department spokesman, said it’s premature to speculate on what caused the crash. At the U.S. Defense Department, Peter Cook, the spokesman, said a P3 aircraft belonging to the U.S. Navy is helping with search and recovery efforts in the Mediterranean.  

1:02 p.m. ET

EgyptAir now says Greek authorities have found debris near the island of Karpathios, including apparent aircraft parts. Here’s more from the airline’s statement on Facebook:

CNN, meanwhile, is quoting Ahmed Adel, EgyptAir’s vice president, as saying: “We have found the wreckage.”

12:49 p.m. ET

EgyptAir says it cannot confirm that debris from the plane has been located:

With reference to the information aired by several TV channels about finding wreckage of the missing Egyptian aircraft /1

— EGYPTAIR (@EGYPTAIR) May 19, 2016

EGYPTAIR has contacted the concerned authorities which did not confirm this information. /2

— EGYPTAIR (@EGYPTAIR) May 19, 2016

10:33 a.m. ET

The Greek Civil Aviation Authority has provided a timeline of when the flight was in Greek airspace:

2:24 a.m. local time: The aircraft enters Greek airspace. “It was Radar identified and cleared by the competent Air Traffic Controller for the flight path.”

2:48 a.m. local time: The flight was transferred to the next area and was cleared by air-traffic control for exit from Greek airspace. “The pilot was jocund and thanked in Greek.”

3:27 a.m. local time: Greek aviation authorities tried to communicate with the flight in order to transfer communication and control from Greek to Egyptian officials.

Despite the repetitive calls, the flight did not respond and thus the Air Traffic Controller called on the emergency frequency without response.



At 03:29 am local time the flight was over the boundary point, between ATHINAI and CAIRO FIRs [Flight Information Region].



At 03:29:40 am local time the flight signal was lost from radar, almost 7 NM south/southeast from KUMBI point (boundary point, between ATHINAI and CAIRO FIRs), within Cairo FIR.



Immediate assistance of the Hellenic Air Force radars was requested for possible target tracking, with no avail.



At 03:45 am local time Search and Rescue (SAR) operations were activated through JRCC (Joint Rescue Coordination Center), NAOP (National Air Operations Center)and ADIC (Air Defense Information Center), while updating the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authorities.

10:00 a.m. ET

Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy says “the possibility of having a terror attack is higher than the possibility … a technical problem”  caused the plane to crash.

Separately, Greek state TV reported that debris had been spotted in the Mediterranean, but the objects were nowhere near the area where it is thought to have gone down.

Missing #EgyptAir aircraft debris found south of greek island of Karpathos in southern Mediterranean - greek state tv

— ReutersAerospaceNews (@ReutersAero) May 19, 2016

07:51 a.m. ET

Sherif Fathy, Egypt’s civil-aviation minister, says while he will not deny the EgyptAir Flight MS804 might have crashed, authorities are not ruling out other possibilities, and, for now, he will refer to the aircraft as “lost.”

“We haven’t located the plane yet,” he said at a news conference.

06:29 a.m. ET

French President Francois Hollande says EgyptAir Flight MS804 likely crashed into the Mediterranean.

“The information we have gathered—ministers, members of government and, of course, the Egyptian authorities—confirm, sadly, that it has crashed,” he said at a televised news conference. “It is lost.”

And, he added, no hypothesis has been ruled out in why the plane went down.

"J'ai été averti que l'avion parti de Paris pour aller au Caire a été perdu. Il s'est abîmé." @fhollande #DirectPR

— Élysée (@Elysee) May 19, 2016

Earlier, speaking to reporters at Cairo airport, Sherif Ismail, the Egyptian prime minister said: “The search operation for the aeroplane is currently under way in the area where it is thought to have disappeared when communication was lost.”

And, at a news conference in Athens, Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said the plane made "sudden swerves" and plunged from 37,000 feet to 15,000 feet before it vanished over the Mediterranean.

Here are his remarks from a news conference:

At 3:39 a.m., the course of the aircraft was south and southeast of Kassos and Karpathos. Immediately after, it entered Cairo FIR (flight information region) and made swerves and a descent I describe: 90 degrees left and then 360 degrees to the right.

05:36 a.m. ET

A Greek military C-130 aircraft and an EMB-145 H early-warning aircraft have  been deployed to the Mediterranean Sea to search for EgyptAir Flight MS804, which “disappeared from radar” early Thursday morning, the Greek Embassy in London said.

Other aircraft are also on their way, the announcement said.

Greece participates in the rescue operation underway in the sea region 130 nautical miles southeast of Karpathos,... https://t.co/PBrbiyjXSA

— Greek Embassy UK (@GreeceinUK) May 19, 2016

The reason for the plane’s disappearance is as yet unclear, though Airbus, the aircraft’s manufacturer, said it had been “lost.”

Updated at 1:42 a.m. on May 19

EgyptAir Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo “disappeared from radar” on early Thursday morning, the airline said.

An informed source at EGYPTAIR stated that Flight no MS804,which departed Paris at 23:09 (CEST),heading to Cairo has disappeared from radar.

— EGYPTAIR (@EGYPTAIR) May 19, 2016

56 passengers, seven crew members, and three EgyptAir security personnel were aboard the Airbus A320 airliner when it vanished from radar, according to the airline. Among the passengers are a child and two infants.

Flight MS804 departed Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris late Wednesday night at 11:09 p.m. local time and was scheduled to land at Cairo International Airport at 3:05 a.m. local time.

According to EgyptAir, the flight disappeared from radar about 10 miles inside Egyptian airspace at about 2:45 a.m. Cairo time. The airline said the plane was flying at 37,000 feet when contact was lost.

FlightAware, a website that tracks aircraft radar signals, showed Flight MS804’s last position about midway between the Turkish and Egyptian coasts over the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

According to the manifest, the passengers included 30 Egyptians, 15 French nationals, 2 Iraqis, and one citizen each from Algeria, Canada, Chad, Kuwait, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the United Kingdom.

The Egyptian Navy has deployed search-and-rescue teams towards the flight’s last known position, EgyptAir said.

We’ll update this story with additional details when they become available.