Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 165

The International Space Station's Odometer Hits 100,000 Orbits

The International Space Station has made its 100,000th orbit around the Earth.

The orbital station has now traveled about 2.6 billion miles since its launch in 1998, or “roughly the distance between Earth and Neptune” and the “equivalent of about 10 round trips between Earth and Mars at the average distance between the two planets,” NASA said in a statement Monday.

The station travels at 17,500 miles per hour, orbiting Earth every 90 minutes. Its residents experience 16 sunrises and sunsets per day. Here’s the sunset from Sunday night, courtesy of NASA astronaut Jeff Williams:

Another great Sunday comes to an end on the International Space Station. Good Night!

A photo posted by Jeff Williams (@astro_jeffw) on May 15, 2016 at 5:21pm PDT

The first components of the ISS were launched in November 1998 as part of a joint construction project of the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada, and members of the European Space Agency. The station was assembled piece by piece, module by module. Today, it’s slightly larger than a football field, and provides the living space of a six-bedroom house. People have lived and worked there continually since 2000. The first crew— two Russian cosmonauts and one American—stayed for four months. The ISS has largely escaped the effects of political disagreements between the U.S. and Russia, making it one of the few places in the universe where Moscow and Washington can agree.

There are six people aboard the ISS: Williams; his fellow NASA astronaut Tim Kopra; Russian cosmonauts Yuri Malenchenko, Oleg Skripochka, and Alexey Ovchinin, and the first British astronaut, Tim Kopra.

The Geopolitics of Eurovision

Eurovision is meant to be a politics-free zone—“lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature” are banned, according to the rules. But that doesn’t always happen.

In 2014, when Anastasia and Maria Tolmachevy, the twin sisters representing Russia, got on stage to perform in Copenhagen, the audience booed. The competition aired just two months after Russia annexed Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula, a move decried by nearly all the participating countries. Both Russia and Ukraine had qualified for the finals, and Eurovision suddenly became a reflection of geopolitical affairs.

Two years later, the tensions were still on full display Saturday in Stockholm. Russia’s representative, Sergey Lazarev, performed “You Are the Only One,” a love song. Ukraine’s representative, Jamala, performed “1944,” a song lamenting the expulsion by the Soviets of Tatars from Crimea. Neither Russian nor Ukrainian juries gave each other votes. While Lazarev won the vote among all television viewers, he scored third place, and Jamala took first place overall. Ukrainian officials were thrilled, but their Russian counterparts were not.

“It was not the Ukrainian singer Jamala and her song ‘1944’ that won the Eurovision 2016, it was politics that beat art,” told Frants Klintsevich, the deputy chairman of the defense and security committee of the upper house of Russia’s legislature, told Russian reporters after the final round. “If nothing changes in Ukraine by next year, then I don’t think we need to take part.”

Jamala, the first Crimean Tatar to perform at the contest, says she wrote “1944” for her great-grandmother and her five children who were deported from Crimea under Joseph Stalin; they were among the nearly 250,000 Crimean Tatars expelled that year. She told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the song is also dedicated for Crimean Tatars living under Russian control now:

When she sings it, she said, she remembers her own family, which is still in Crimea.

“Now the Crimean Tatars are on occupied territory,” she told RFE/RL. "And it is very hard for them. They are under tremendous pressure. Some have disappeared without a trace. And that is terrifying. I would not want to see history repeat itself.”

Russian officials had attempted to convince Eurovision to ban “1944,” which they said was a clear political statement about the conflict in Ukraine—and therefore in violation of the contest’s rules—but Eurovision backed Jamala and Ukraine.

The lyrics of “1944” are in English and Crimean Tatar, the first time a Eurovision entry has included the language of Crimea’s ethnic minority. Human-rights activists say discrimination against Crimean Tatars has increased since Russia took over the peninsula.

The First Penis Transplant in the U.S.

A man in Massachusetts has become the first person in the United states to have a penis transplant.

The patient was Thomas Manning, a 64-year-old whose penis was amputated because of cancer. Massachusetts General Hospital made the announcement Monday that a team of a dozen surgeons and about 30 health-care workers, led by Dr. Curtis L. Cetrulo and Dr. Dicken Ko, performed the procedure last Friday.

After the surgery, Manning said he felt well, and only experienced slight pain. In an interview with Manning over the weekend, The New York Times reported that:

The surgery is experimental, part of a research program with the ultimate goal of helping combat veterans with severe pelvic injuries, as well as cancer patients and accident victims.

If all goes as planned, normal urination should be possible for Mr. Manning within a few weeks, and sexual function in weeks to months, Dr. Cetrulo said.

Mr. Manning welcomed questions and said he wanted to speak out publicly to help dispel the shame and stigma associated with genital cancers and injuries, and to let other men know there was hope of having normal anatomy restored.

Manning first became aware of his cancer after an accident at his job. The doctors who treated him noticed a growth in his penis, and tests revealed potentially fatal cancer. In order to live, Manning would need amputation. He was single at the time of the procedure, and Manning said that since  the operation dating had become out of the question, and as a result he’s suffered from depression.

Doctors said in a statement the transplanted penis had begun to receive regular blood flow, and showed no signs of infection or rejection. The team of doctors prepared for the surgery for more than three years, often using cadavers for dissection and to practice attaching and removing tissue. It took Manning two weeks waiting on the donor list to find someone with matching skin tone and blood type. The donation had to first be approved by the deceased donor’s family because a penis is not among the regular body parts included when someone agrees to become a donor.

Penile cancer is relatively rare. There were only 2,030 cases reported in the U.S. this year, but as the Times reported, doctors hope veterans can benefit from his type of surgery. With the prevalence of manmade explosives on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 1,000 soldiers suffer from genitourinary injuries. Suicide rates are already high among veterans, but they’re even higher for those with genital damage.

Doctors in China and in South Africa are the only others to attempt a penis transplant. The operation in China failed in 2006, but in 2014 the surgery in South Africa worked. Last June, the girlfriend of the South African patient said she was pregnant.  

The team that performed the surgery on Manning already has another patient waiting for a surgery, which can happen just as soon as a donor becomes available.  

How Pet Sounds Invented the Modern Pop Album

In 2008, when Guns ‘N Roses finally released its album Chinese Democracy after 15 years working on it, the writer Chuck Klosterman declared the end of a zeitgeist. “Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context,” he wrote in his review for A.V. Club. “It’s the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs.” But nearly a decade later, the idea of the album-as-event lives on. Consider Ryan Adams enthusiastically covering Taylor Swift’s 1989, or Kanye West feverishly revising the track-list for The Life of Pablo. Within the last several weeks alone, new full-length records by Beyoncé and Radiohead have dropped, defined their blast craters, and triggered countless thinkpieces.

It wasn’t always thus. Popular music’s first big, coherent statement—The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, released 50 years ago on May 16, 1966—wasn’t an immediate sensation, at least in the U.S. (a worried Capitol Records even rushed out a package of greatest hits, as if to recall to the public the fun, foamy band behind “Surfin’ USA”). Over time, however, Pet Sounds came to occupy the upper echelons of best-of lists—or at least, the lists in magazines like Rolling Stone and Mojo that tended to prefer rock over other genres (and white, male artists over everyone else). Such “rockism” persisted from the 1960s to the 2000s, and during this time, albums fortified by theme, like Pet Sounds, were thought to be more “serious” than one-off singles.

Brian Wilson, who wrote Pet Sounds, certainly anticipated the modern pop-centric era, which privileges producer over artist and blurs the line between entertainment and art. (Wilson, his fans will delight in reminding you, carbonated classical music with pop.) But if the big-budget artistic statement is now back—if it’s okay to be preposterously ambitious again—the current moment owes something to the pretensions of Pet Sounds. Wilson’s bildungsroman about the life and death of adolescent love wasn’t just a great record: It was also a record of a great artist’s mind—popular music’s first long-form investigation into the psyche of an auteur.

* * *

Before Pet Sounds, there was Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours (1955)—a kind of concept album informed by the singer’s recent break from Ava Gardner. But the songs themselves predated the split; they were standards, written at different times by different people, and curated to match Sinatra’s mood. It would be another decade before Wilson composed a concept album of his own. He had quit the road after a mid-flight anxiety attack in 1964, and had come to depend upon a loose collective of Los Angeles session musicians, first assembled by Wilson’s idol, Phil Spector. Wilson had figured out that songs weren’t enough; production was critical. Moving forward, he would make the backing tracks, while the rest of the band took care of the touring. (They would put down their vocals later.) At this point, The Beach Boys were more or less The Backstreet Boys. Like his Swedish heir Max Martin, the producer and architect behind Britney, Katy, and so many others, Wilson holed up in the studio while attractive avatars fronted the product.

It was a record of a great artist’s mind, popular music’s first long-form investigation into the psyche of an auteur.

But Wilson didn’t simply want to manufacture hits. The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul had encouraged him to disdain filler and seek to create a coherent experience. (He had already run a theme through the second side of The Beach Boys’ 1965 album Today!, girding five songs with a feeling of unity.) Pet Sounds would go further: It would walk listeners through a relationship, starting with the youthful optimism of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and ending with the disillusionment of “Caroline No.” It would also double as confessional poetry, the poetry of an artist outpacing his moment. Songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” even boasted Kanye-grade complaints like, “Every time I get the inspiration / To go change things around / No one wants to help me look for places / Where new things might be found.”  

To his credit, Wilson’s ambition was cut with a sense of play that pervaded every aspect of Pet Sounds. In a move that would’ve pleased Andy Warhol, Wilson recruited an advertising copywriter to come up with the album’s lyrics. In a move that would’ve pleased a Dadaist, he rattled listeners’ sense of sonic possibility. On “God Only Knows,” he contrived the clip-clop of horses’ hooves using a bottle. Elsewhere, he integrated banjo, bass harmonica, electric bass, kettledrums, and more.

But the result was regarded by many—including some of the Beach Boys who sang on it—as too ambitious for its own good. The great heyday of rock criticism, the 1970s, was still to come, and there was certainly no Internet to provide exegeses (read: hot takes). Nevertheless, Wilson patented a type that lives on to this day— that of the reclusive genius whose instrument is the entire studio. Pet Sounds foreshadowed the big-budget psychodramas of the future—albums by Michael Jackson, Prince, Radiohead, and other skittish artists successful enough to find a fully-stocked studio at their ego’s disposal.

Anytime a band or musician disappears into a studio to contrive an album-length mystery, the ghost of Wilson is hovering near. Anticipating the working methods of today, he took to recording his work in fragments, which were collaged together later. He came so close to completing another concept album—this one an odyssey through America called Smile—that Capitol even commissioned cover art. But he lost his resolve. His bandmates, who preferred applying their vocals to songs about the intersection between surfer and girl, were resistant to Wilson’s seemingly arch aspirations. Then there was the ever-present problem of the Beatles. It didn’t matter that Pet Sounds had inspired Paul McCartney to compose a concept album of his own: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which the Beatles launched in 1967, effectively ended the arms race between the two bands. Overwhelmed by the success of Sgt. Pepper, the Beach Boy ran ashore.

Anytime a band or musician disappears into a studio to contrive an album-length mystery, the ghost of Wilson is hovering near.

Today, of course, music fans venerate boldly ambitious statements like 808s & Heartbreak and Lemonade, and romanticize the precocious talents behind them. But in the late ’60s, there was no readymade narrative against which to plot Wilson—in part because he was pop’s Ur-auteur, first in a line to be populated by Lauryn Hill, Axl Rose, Lee Mavers, and other recluses. He withdrew to a mansion in Bel Air, gained weight, and took up the accoutrements of the legend with lived experience (robe, beard, equity in a health-food store). But the myth is stigmatizing: Wilson was never especially pretentious or tortured. He remained enthralled to the goal of the perfect pop song, with the Spector-produced “Be My Baby” as his sacred text. Wilson even attempted several comebacks, and some of them, like 1977’s Love You, yielded rewards.

Nevertheless, Pet Sounds remains the masterpiece. There’s the gorgeous music, which has inspired countless musicians. (REM’s 1998 love letter to the Wilson aesthetic, “At My Most Beautiful”, quotes sleigh bells, cellos, and rumbling tympani.) But there’s also Wilson’s approach. Swap out the Hollywood studio peopled with unionized musicians for a laptop loaded with sound files, and the author of Pet Sounds looks a lot like the godfather of the current age—the first to assemble hits from fragments, the first to turn an album into an occasion. His approach was especially impressive when you consider that what he was splicing together was tape. (Wilson was artisanal, his heirs, digital.) With Pet Sounds, Wilson brought an ambition to pop that it hadn’t previously known and helped make heroes out of producers. “I just wasn’t made for these times,” he sings towards the end of Pet Sounds, a square Beach Boy in a round world. It turns out the lyric was one part boast, one part prognostication.

How Did the 'Secret' Sykes-Picot Agreement Become Public?

Monday marks the 100 years since the signing of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret Anglo-French pact reached during the First World War that proposed splitting the Middle East up into zones of foreign control. The Middle East has been frequently afflicted with war since then, but the situation now—with ISIS holding territory in Iraq and across the Fertile Crescent, civil war in Syria, government paralysis in Lebanon, growing autocracy and violence in Turkey, and talk of an intifada in Israel and the occupied territories—has inspired particular debate on the century-old agreement’s legacy. Laments about Sykes-Picot drew arbitrary divisions that bedevil the Middle East even now have met with just-as-impassioned insistence that the secret agreement’s influence is overstated.

But wait a second: secret agreement? How did a confidential document become a hotly contested matter of the public record not long after it was signed? The answer is a tale of intrigue that serves as a reminder of how unstable closed-door diplomacy is, and how fast quiet handshakes can cause public backlash, even in the age before Wikileaks.

The agreement was negotiated, on the British side, by Mark Sykes, an aristocrat and soldier. A veteran of the Boer War and member of Parliament, he was plucked from the reserves—and saved from the front lines—by Lord Kitchener, the secretary of war, at the start of World War I and became a leading Middle East hand. He barely outlived the war: Sykes died of Spanish influenza in February 1919 while attending the Paris Peace Conference that would formalize the terms of the settlement. François Georges-Picot, who negotiated on behalf of the French, was somewhat older, a career diplomat who had been stationed in Beirut and Cairo.

European governments had long viewed Ottoman Empire as weak. But the French and British, the Ottomans’ opponents in World War I, decided the empire couldn’t outlast the war, and in 1915 moved toward splitting up the Levantine territories under Ottoman control. Sykes and Georges-Picot were charged with figuring out how. The agreement they came to—with the assent of their ally Russia—granted Russian control over present-day eastern Turkey. The French would influence or control southern Turkey, Lebanon, present-day Syria, and Northern Iraq. The British would dominate a corridor running from Egypt west through the Negev Desert, present-day Jordan, and most of what is now Iraq and Kuwait. Present-day northern Israel and the West Bank would become an international zone, though Britain would control the port of Haifa.

The map above tells most of the story. (Here’s a full version.) The agreement itself is rather drab to read, cloaked in diplomatic niceties—although the heavy focus on railroad-building rights harkens back to a time when rails, rather than oil, were the most important geopolitical infrastructure in the Fertile Crescent. Today, those train lines have atrophied.

The agreement was concluded in secret partly because it represented a betrayal of promises the British government had already made to Hussein bin Ali, the sharif of Mecca. During the war, in an effort to foment an Arab rebellion against the Ottomans, the British sought Hussein’s support by agreeing to back the creation of an independent Arab state, with a few caveats. In what is known as the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, Britain laid out the conditions: It wanted to maintain rights in Baghdad and Basra, and it wanted to set aside pieces of present-day Syria, which it said were not fully Arab. The Arabs duly revolted against the Ottomans, with the help of the British military officer T.E. Lawrence. But after the war, the British would maintain that the correspondence did not represent a formal treaty, though Hussein and his family insisted it did. In any case, the promises made to Hussein were in irreconcilable conflict with the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

A further British promise incompatible with Sykes-Picot came later, on November 2, 1917, when U.K. Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote to British Jewish leader Walter Rothschild, stating that the British government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” That seemed in conflict with the international zone Sykes-Picot envisioned in the Levant.

In the meantime, Tsar Nicholas II had been overthrown in Russia. First, a provisional government ruled, but in November 1917—the same month the Balfour Declaration was sent—it was overthrown, and the Bolsheviks took power. They came across the text of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and on November 23, 556 days after the deal was signed, published it in Pravda and Izvestia. Three days after that, The Manchester Guardian also published the text. The publication of the secret agreement was an embarrassment to the Allies, showing them carving up the Middle East, and in particular showing Britain making incompatible promises to Hussein and the Arabs as well as to the Zionists.

The extent to which Sykes-Picot remained in force even at the time is a matter of debate. Once the agreement was revealed, Britain and France scrambled to contain the fallout. In 1918, the Anglo-French Declaration decreed support for “indigenous Governments and administrations in Syria and Mesopotamia.” The international mandate system set up by the League of Nations to govern formerly Ottoman territories also superseded the agreement—though the outlines of those mandates roughly coincided with those set out in Sykes-Picot.

Dead and buried or undead and haunting the Middle East today, the Sykes-Picot Agreement has echoes that still resonate. Despite the controversy when the text was revealed, the British and French were not deterred from signing another secret agreement in 1956, five years after Georges-Picot’s death. That deal, which also included Israel, set in motion a plot to topple Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser over his seizure of the Suez Canal. The British, French, and Israelis were militarily successful in ensuing war but were forced to retreat under pressure from the Americans and—who else?—the Soviet Union. The secret protocol was revealed, and U.K. Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign.

Today, the United Kingdom and United States governments, along with a cast of allies, are trying to contain ISIS in Iraq and Syria, while also eventually bringing about the end of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. It’s a complicated process, involving both public and secret diplomacy, as well as military operations both covert and announced. But those efforts have been confounded by the intervention of Russia, which has staunchly backed Assad and attacked rebel groups allied with the U.S. and U.K. Lazy commentators like to trace Middle East strife to the spurious explanation of “ancient hatreds,” ethnic and sectarian conflicts running back centuries in the region. As Russia’s continuing role in confounding Anglo-American efforts shows, however, one of the most intractable geopolitical conflicts in the Levant is just turning 100 this year.

The Most Expensive Gun Sold at Auction

A gun owned by the man who captured Geronimo, the Apache leader, set a record over the weekend as the most expensive single gun ever bought at auction.

The Rock Island Auction in Illinois said it sold the Model 1886 Winchester rifle, owned by U.S. Army Captain Henry Ware Lawton, for $1.2 million on Saturday. Its buyer is anonymous.

On its website, the auction house made a video that features the gun, and tells a little of its role U.S. history:

In 1886, the same year the gun was made, Lawton commanded a group of men who rode south across the U.S.-Mexico border to hunt down Geronimo.

After Lawton captured Geronimo, a friend and former Army lieutenant who was working for Winchester, the gunmaker, secured the first production piece of the new Model 1886 rifle and offered it to Lawton as a gift.

Surveying Fort McMurray by Satellite

The government of Alberta has released a mapping app that allows more than 90,000 residents of the Fort McMurray area who were forced to evacuate by the massive wildfire to view satellite imagery of their homes.

The app, released Saturday, resembles Google Earth and allows users to zoom in and out over terrain (access it here). At least 94,000 people were displaced and 2,400 homes and businesses were destroyed by the wildfires that erupted earlier this month and quickly spread across the northern part of the province. Heavy smoke obscured the area, and in the first days of the blaze officials could not describe the extent of the damage.

Danielle Larivee, Canada’s municipal affairs minister, warns in a message that accompanies the app that “viewing these images may be traumatic.”

“Structures that appear to be standing should not be considered undamaged,” the message says.

CBC News spoke to a Fort McMurray couple who learned through the app that their home was undamaged:

​Rifat and Kozeta Dyrmishi, who are staying at the Northlands evacuation centre in Edmonton, are breathing a sigh of relief after searching for their home on the app for the first time.

“It’s our home, our house, we have all our belongings and memories and everything,” Rifat said.

“My house is safe, it’s great.”

Seeing their home on the app offers a peace of mind they said you can’t get from reports saying certain neighbourhoods might be untouched, he added.

Alberta officials say they hope evacuees can eventually use the images accessible on the app for insurance claims. The images come from the French space agency’s satellite Pleaides-1A.

More than 2,000 firefighters continue to battle the the blaze, which Alberta’s government described as “out of control” Sunday night. Fort McMurray remains under mandatory evacuation order nearly two weeks after its 88,000 residents were forced to leave. Sixteen centers for evacuees are operating across Alberta.

The Alberta government warns Fort McMurray residents should not expect to return to their homes “for an extended period of time.” Only emergency responders have been allowed into the city. Residents can return when when wildfires are considered to no longer pose an imminent threat and fire, police, local government, and other services are restored.

Game of Thrones: Burning Down the Hut

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: Finally, Game of Thrones has delivered its long-awaited hot take on fire safety, stressing the importance of emergency exits and properly anchored braziers. Now, as to plausibility of Daenerys’s pyrotechnic coup: Would the Dothrakis’ immediate response really be to kneel for the treacherous foreigner who just roasted their leaders? Dunno. But what’s clear is that in the list of times when Daenerys has suddenly and improbably added entire civilizations to her portfolio, tonight’s barbecue ranked in thrill value only behind the torching of Astapor—and this time, she didn’t need dragons.

At least two Quentin Tarantino movies, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, come to mind after tonight’s conclusion, both because of the obvious mass-revenge-murder similarities and because of the larger historical-ethical question at play. When dealing with an evil system, are compromises and truces enough? Can peace be had? Or is righteous violence needed? This unusually philosophical episode—the season’s strongest installment so far—pondered these issues throughout, with the final flameout giving Thrones’ unwavering answer.

Fittingly, the hour opened on a weapon, Longclaw. But it was Edd, not the sword's owner, Jon, who picked it up. Dying, it turns out, transformed Lord Snow into a pacifist, which makes some sense given that all his killing just ended up with him getting killed. The rest of the world can battle; he, at least, can seek some peace for himself.

Except: He still cares about people in this world. Sansa’s arrival was the latest too-conveniently-timed plot turn this season, but the show used this rare Stark reunion for a nice, authentic injection of emotion. Though you could argue Sansa jumped into the role of military mastermind a little quickly, all the work Thrones has done over the years in depicting her evolution is paying off: While her brother has begun to tire of driving the action, she, understandably, is hankering to take the wheel.

Her first argument for why Jon should attack Winterfell was about honor and duty and nostalgia for childhood—mushy motivations that he’s sensibly written off by now. Her second appeal to him was more effective, saying that only through war can there be safety. The charming letter that later arrived from Ramsay backed that idea up. (One miscellaneous gripe about the Wall scenes: Davos just got around to asking about Stannis and Shireen now?)

The second big sibling reunion of the episode came when Theon, sailing on what must have been a speedy ship, arrived home to the unwelcoming glare of Yara. But contrary to her initial expectations, and to the general practice of most Highborn folks in Game of Thrones, he’s not interested in ascending to rule—he’d be happy sitting out the wars to come. Like Jon, he’s lived through too much; like with Jon, family may press him back into the fray, though it’s unclear to me whether battle metaphors will work to describe whatever a “Kingsmoot” is.

In the Vale, Petyr Baelish used the piety of nonviolence as a weapon, manipulating Robin into sparing Lord Royce’s life so as to ensure a loyal fighting force. Though the falcon Littlefinger gave his nephew was cool, the star of that scene was the actor Lino Facioli, who’s grown gangly a la Bran in the time since we’ve last seen him and yet has maintained the oblivious/petulant/psychopathic air he’s had since he played a suckling in Season 1. Robin is an underrated member of the Game of Thrones hall of fame for demented young men, and interestingly, his uncle’s machinations may lead him to meet the reigning champ Ramsay, last seen knifing another underrated and little-seen supporting character (R.I.P. Osha).

In Meereen, it was impossible to miss real-world political parallels as Tyrion negotiated to avert war. The compromise he proposed tests the limits of “pragmatism” or “realpolitik”: The human cost of seven more years of slavery is theoretically incalculable, and yet he went and put a price on it. It shall be fascinating to watch a) whether he’s able to maintain the loyalty of his advisers, especially Missandei, who looked in disgust as Tyrion plied their enemies with prostitutes; b) whether Dany returns to find his machinations palatable, or whether she makes the whole situation moot by sacking the rebellious cities with her new cavalry; and c) how many think-pieces about Reconstruction, Hillary vs. Bernie, and/or ISIS shall be inspired by this plot line, and whether I will decide to write one of them.

You don’t bargain with brutal enemies; you make them ashes.

King’s Landing, too, was filled with people trying to find a way out of tough situations without causing a scuffle. Loras wanted to give up resisting the Sparrows; Tommen cautioned against antagonizing them; Cersei and Jaime cooked up a plan for the Lannister forces to stand by as the Tyrell army rescued royals. Did that plan make a lot of sense to everyone else? It didn’t make a lot of sense to me—there seem to be some inconsistent standards surrounding whether and when to respect the king's wishes. In any case, civil war in the capital seems likely to become a reality soon. From a viewer’s perspective, fighting in the streets would be preferable to the stalemate that’s mired what was once the most exciting locale in show.

Even the would-be rescuers Jorah and Daario found time for nonviolence debates. First, Daario pooh-poohed the idea of dueling with his elderly frenemy—he’s got nothing to gain by it. Then, that elder knight counseled a plan of weapons-free infiltration of the Dothraki city. Turns out that following Jorah’s course of action likely would have been fatal, but luckily for the both of them Daario turned out to be too attached to his dagger to part with it. It was another example of how in Thrones, for however much people yearn for peace, might usually is right. You don’t bargain with brutal, misogynistic, slaving enemies; you make them ashes.

What did you two think? Maybe it was the heat of the final confrontation, or the warm fuzzies of Starks reunited, or the flush of anticipation about the battle brewing in the North, but this felt to me like the most crackling episode of Thrones all season. Agree or no?

Entries from Lenika Cruz and Christopher Orr to come.

Off to the Swamp Buggy Races

Malcolm Lightner grew up in a trailer park down the street from the original “Mile O'Mud” swamp buggy track, a DAYTONA-inspired race course in the everglades. Drivers reach 75mph in their half boat, half-dragster hybrids, splashing spectators with abandon. Lightner photographed the races for nearly a decade, documenting the beauty contests, Confederate Flags, fried food, and revelry with the affection of a native Floridian. But Lightner wasn't always drawn to the competition; his childhood encounters with the track consisted of searching for his father, who would go missing for days. Returning as an adult to witness the wild weekend-long events at Florida Sports Park allowed Lightner to explore his own heritage (his great-uncle was one of the original racers) as well as preserve the Frontier sport. “I unveiled family connections that I did not know existed and heard numerous stories about my father,” Lightner said. “The races demonstrated to me the All-American desire to compete to win—as well as the power of family and community.” The resulting images have been published by PowerHouse Books and a selection can be found below.

The Future Is Almost Now

Last fall, a friend who went to see The Martian in theaters reported back with the following anecdote. Seated nearby was a woman who, during the credits, leaned over and whispered to her companion, “You know, this movie is based on a true story.” It would be easy to feel superior to this misinformed viewer, who seems unaware that humans have yet to set foot on Mars. Yet the mistake seems a little more understandable when you consider how contemporary science fiction has drifted toward plausibility and familiarity. The Martian may be a Ridley Scott film, but unlike the director’s other space odysseys, Alien and Prometheus, or even Blade Runner—movies that all conjure up patently distant times and places—the strangest thing about The Martian may be the sangfroid with which the protagonist Mark Watney receives the news that he’s stuck on the Red Planet.

There are still plenty of films that continue the genre’s tradition of truly fantastical worlds: Mad Max: Fury Road, Snowpiercer, and, of course, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But recently, such exercises in strong futurism seem to have been outnumbered by more modest speculative efforts—narratives imagining a moment that seems to barely anticipate, if not intersect with, the present. Compared to many of the canonical works of science fiction past (Planet of the Apes, Dune, Alien, 2001, Ender’s Game, The Road Warrior), the visions of the future furbished in recent films like Ex Machina, Her, and Gravity, or series like Orphan Black or Black Mirror, feel positively cautious in their predictive scope. It’s as if the genre has been struck by some combination of ambition and restraint: a desire to prognosticate, but not overstep, to achieve maximum prescience with minimum risk. The result is a genre less invested in world creation, per se, than world acceleration.

Many new works of science fiction seem to represent a strain of pre-apocalyptic cinema, characterized by a willingness to dramatize disasters that are less hypothetical than poised to happen. Both Ex Machina and Her, for instance, unfold against backdrops whose production design suggests that viewers are witnessing only a lightly futurized version of 21st-century life. However technically fictional the gadgets on display, the advances the films imagine—an artificially intelligent OS, a Turing-test approved robot—strike audiences as not just possible, but highly probable. As Ex Machina’s partly mad scientist declares, “[t]he arrival of strong AI has been inevitable for decades. The variable was when, not if.” Spike Jonze’s Her similarly takes its paradigm shift—humans falling in love with machines—for granted. Unlike The Terminator and Matrix franchises, these films don’t predict an apocalyptic “rise” of machines so much as a gradual digital takeover, the next phase of a revolution already in progress.

As such, the worlds of newer sci-fi films can look and feel eerily familiar. The opening shots of Interstellar, which feature hardscrabble towns and actual Depression-era footage, initially lead viewers to suspect they’re witnessing, if anything, the recent past. As the critic A.O. Scott noted in The New York Times, “[the director Christopher] Nolan ... drops us quietly into what looks like a fairly ordinary reality.” Or as NPR’s Amanda Fiegl put it, “it’s science fiction with an uncomfortable ring of truth.” It’s possible that such realistic settings—also seen in Ex Machina and Her—are meant to serve moralizing ends, reminding audiences that dystopia is nigh.

It’s as if science fiction has been struck by some combination of ambition and restraint.

Yet these films are hardly cautionary tales; if anything, they’re dispassionate about humanity’s demise, which they treat as a mostly foregone conclusion. That said, it’s hard to deny that the proximity of doom doesn’t heighten its impact. In her study of science-fiction film, the scholar Vivian Sobchack suggests that what distinguishes horror from sci-fi is that the latter “produces not the strong terror evoked by something already present and known in each of us, but the more diluted and less immediate fear of what we may yet become.” It’s possible the genre’s contours have shifted—by making the danger a little more “present,” sci-fi can inspire more potent fear.

A case in point may be the British anthology series Black Mirror. Like its spiritual predecessor The Twilight Zone, the show is unsettling precisely because its bizarrerie takes place in what mostly looks like the here-and-now. The premise of its third episode, for instance—that most people possess wearable tech called a “grain” that records their every movement—seems merely like a next-generation amalgam of a FitBit and Google Glass. Similarly, the scenario explored in the second-season premiere—that software could reverse-engineer avatars of the deceased, by trawling their emails and online activity—seems feasible enough to raise any viewer’s paranoia levels.

Like Black Mirror, the Canadian TV series Orphan Black sprinkles real-world signifiers—soccer moms, relationship drama, grouchy cops—into a universe that also happens to revolve around human clones and a vast bio-military conspiracy. Though some of the show does take place within the hi-tech halls of the Dyad Initiative, where white lab-coated employees conduct rapid genomic sequencing, what’s remarkable is how casually characters regard such activities. It’s not every series, after all, that would juxtapose a season-long arc about an anti-clone cult with a subplot involving a character’s stint in rehab. Orphan Black shares Black Mirror’s nonchalance about even the most outlandish of its premises: The sensation is often that of watching stories ripped from next year’s headlines.

By making the danger a little more “present,” sci-fi can inspire more potent fear.

Literature, too, has been on a similar trajectory as television and film. Claire Vaye Watkin’s apocalypse-in-progress novel Gold Fame Citrus, for example, envisions the effects of a massive drought on a still-recognizable group of Southwest survivors, while Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven describes a lethal flu pandemic striking a world that is basically ours. To quote the film critic Devon Faraci, on the subject of the original Mad Max, the initial chaos “could be taking place next Tuesday.” But it’s Dave Eggers’s The Circle that may produce the greatest shock of recognition. The novel details the emergence of a global technocracy, which ushers in a totalitarian-ish world of absolute transparency. And of what is the digital Panopticon comprised? Just some old-fangled devices like body cameras, drones, and social media. It’s apocalypse almost now.

In a recent interview with George Saunders, the author Ben Marcus offers support for the idea that American fiction is witnessing an unprecedented breakdown between realism and more “fantastic” modes of literary expression. As he puts it, “[t]he magical and disruptive inventions that used to feature prominently in some stories have now been folded into more typical domestic realism.” His description captures the way works like Black Mirror repeatedly juxtapose the far-out and the familiar. Indeed, the trend Marcus discerns isn’t medium-specific: Other narrative forms are engaged in what he calls “a small love affair with the future.” Margaret Atwood, both a theorist and practitioner of the genre, traces the tendency toward reality-based fantasy back to Jules Verne, who, in contrast to true sci-fi writers like H.G. Wells, inaugurated a tradition of “speculative fiction,” which concerns itself with “things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books.” (Or, in Atwood’s words, “no Martians.”) Wells, in short, is otherworldly; Verne, this-worldly.

What’s interesting is how strongly the Vernian strain seems to be making itself felt today. The possibility that sci-fi could be breaking in favor of the near-future is especially surprising, given that prophetic boldness has often been seen as one of the genre’s signal features. If, as the critic Northrop Frye has argued, the job of science fiction has been “to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery,” what does it mean that so much recent sci-fi has been taking place on a plane that’s relatively proximate to ours?

Orphan Black shares Black Mirror’s nonchalance about even the most outlandish of its premises.

In other words: Why this rise in near-future stories, and why now? One possibility is that verisimilitude allows for better social commentary, guaranteeing that parallels between the fictional world and the real one don’t go unperceived. For all its complexities, it’s hard not to see Eggers’s novel as a techo-pessimist fable. If sci-fi is a genre that has long provided sturdy cover for social critique, it’s also possible that excessive fantasy can blunt its impact. It’s useful here to consider Ex Machina alongside Blade Runner, an earlier entry in the replicant-gone-rogue genre. Both films, of course, confirm people’s worst fears about the Singularity. But only in the newer film is that event presented as something that might actually, you know, happen. All it takes is a tech-savvy billionaire and an underground bunker—no depopulated urban dystopia required.

Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay, “The Imagination of Disaster,” presents a different possibility. In it, she argues that the science-fiction film should be understood as an “emblem of an inadequate response,” or a byproduct of humanity’s inability to deal with the “unthinkable.” Should the fact that sci-fi seems to now be handling such scenarios more concretely, then, be seen as a sign of progress? Or is this insistence on concrete-ness merely a symptom of what the sci-fi luminary William Gibson sees as the end of speculation—the collapse of imagination into a reality that has already outpaced it? In other words, perhaps the reason writers and filmmakers are less inclined to imagine new “disasters” is that they’re already adapting to so many. As Gibson explained in a 2007 interview, “I have to figure out what it means to try and write about the future at a time when we are all living in the shadow of at least a half a dozen wildly science-fiction scenarios.”

There may be no stronger confirmation of the notion that reality is keeping pace with fantasy than the arrival, last fall, of an auspicious date: October 21, 2015, the day that in Back to the Future II was made to represent “the future.” What in 1989 had seemed impossibly distant had suddenly arrived. Yet what struck many observers was not the dissonance of Robert Zemeckis’s Reagan-era vision, but instead, its surprising resemblance to postmillennial reality. As The New York Times noted in an article chronicling the things the film got right (video conferencing, voice activation), “this strange world is not so far-fetched after all.” And it may be that contemporary audiences find themselves in a position not unlike that of the film’s protagonist, Marty. These days, no matter where people turn, they can’t keep from running into their future selves.