Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 166

Venezuela's State of Emergency

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro imposed a 60-day state of emergency Friday night, warning the citizens of “international and national threats against our fatherland” as the country is gripped by economic and political crises.

During a national broadcast announcing the declaration, the embattled heir of Hugo Chavez warned that “Washington is activating measures at the request of Venezuela’s fascist right, who are emboldened by the coup in Brazil,” referring to the ouster of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff last week by opposition parties in the legislature.

U.S. intelligence officials told the Washington Post on Friday that Venezuela’s government could be overthrown by a popular uprising by year’s end, citing the deepening economic malaise and political deadlock. And the country’s woes are likely to only get worse:

In the last two years Venezuela has experienced the kind of implosion that hardly ever occurs in a middle-income country like it outside of war. Mortality rates are skyrocketing; one public service after another is collapsing; triple-digit inflation has left more than 70 percent of the population in poverty; an unmanageable crime wave keeps people locked indoors at night; shoppers have to stand in line for hours to buy food; babies die in large numbers for lack of simple, inexpensive medicines and equipment in hospitals, as do the elderly and those suffering from chronic illnesses.

[…]

When a state is in the process of collapse, dimensions of decay feed back on each other in an intractable cycle. Populist giveaways, for example, have fed the country’s ruinous flirtation with hyperinflation; the International Monetary Fund now projects that prices will rise by 720 percent this year and 2,200 percent in 2017. The government virtually gives away gasoline for free, even after having raised the price earlier this year. As a result of this and similar policies, the state is chronically short of funds, forced to print ever more money to finance its spending. Consumers, flush with cash and chasing a dwindling supply of goods, are caught in an inflationary spiral.

Fueled by the unrest, opposition parties swept into parliament in December’s elections and now seek a referendum to remove Maduro from power. The maneuver is permitted under Venezuela’s constitution, and the government-leaning electoral commission authorized petitions in April.

Since then, the coalition has accused electoral authorities of delaying verification of their petition’s signatures. An opposition march in Caracas on Wednesday to pressure the commission ended in skirmishes between stone-throwing protesters and Venezuelan soldiers, who fired tear gas to disperse the crowds.

RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Art of Self-Love

The most successful drag queen in American history ends every episode of his long-running reality-TV show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, in the same way. “Remember, if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” he asks, beaming at the queens who’ve survived another week in the competition. “Can I get an amen up in here?”

The simplicity and earnestness of the declaration may strike those unfamiliar with the Logo show as hollow, more like a catchphrase than a mantra, but this rhetoric of self-love as a form of self-care has always been essential in the world of drag. The composer Jerry Herman captured the therapeutic value of the tradition in a song from the 1983 Broadway hit La Cage Aux Folles. In the tender number “A Little More Mascara,” the character Albin sings about the palliative power of turning into the star performer Zaza: “To make depression disappear / I screw some rhinestones on my ear / And put my brooches and tiara / And a little more mascara on.” More recent drag narratives—from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, to Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Kinky Boots—have carried the same undertones of self-empowerment.

Though RuPaul also subscribes to this idea of self-care as a natural outgrowth of drag, his show differs crucially from its film and theater predecessors. When Zaza hustles out her highest drag as her spirit starts to sag, she does so in the solitude of her own dressing room—away from her partner and the world around her. But when RuPaul’s queens face the long vanity mirror that flanks the pink workroom where they get ready, they often discuss their personal experiences with body image, self-esteem, prior prison convictions, and homelessness—in front of the camera and thus with the entire world. In other words, the reality-TV format of RuPaul’s Drag Race turns what are typically private, confidence-boosting anthems into communal moments for public consumption.

In this, the show much like drag itself, is reality TV’s limit case, maximizing the entertainment value of its contestants’ personal histories. And yet despite being produced in service of the genre’s thirst for fabricated authenticity, the added layers of performance (on camera and on stage) and the salient LGBT issues make these moments ring all the more true, in a refreshingly direct way.

To heighten the connection between the queens’ love of drag and their survival stories, the show’s producers often edit contestant interactions together with more personal confessionals. Early on in the show’s latest season, in a clip that Logo has billed online as “The Queen’s Open Up,” Kim Chi, a Chicago queen, talks about dealing with weight issues. Though she exudes the confidence to pull off her avant-garde looks (she describes her drag persona as “a live-action anime character who works as a high fashion model”), she gives a firsthand account of the obstacles she faced growing up as “the weird, fat, art kid who had a strong lisp and a strong accent,” before finding in drag a creative outlet that allowed Kim to emerge. As another queen later puts it, “When I was an overweight kid being ridiculed and made fun of, I wanted to have that poise and that confidence and that power. And now finally, with drag, I can do that.”

It’s a common refrain on the show, and one that speaks to RuPaul’s own beliefs, which he’s turned into a bestselling self-help book titled Workin’ It!: RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style. The book distills the wisdom he doles out on his show, perhaps best summed up in the Oprah Winfrey-esque saying, “You’re born naked and the rest is drag.” This, one of Ru’s most famous lines, gets at precisely the way he understands drag as a practice that destabilizes identity, but also one with use beyond the specificity of drag performance. It’s what he tried to establish with his other reality TV show, Drag U.

A spinoff of Logo’s banner series, Drag U used the template of pushing drag performance as a way to encourage inner confidence in “frumpy and shy” cisgender women. Much like in Drag Race, RuPaul meets individually with the women he’s coaching, modeling a type of life-coach session. In an episode featuring the TV personality Downtown Julie Brown, the conversation revolved around moving beyond wigs and makeup and dresses to find the essence of what drag could do for her—what RuPaul dubs the “emotional transformation” that takes place when you hit the stage, and which presumably helps you “find the you that you want to be,” as Brown puts it.

“To make depression disappear / I screw some rhinestones on my ear / And put my brooches and tiara / And a little more mascara on.”

In this broader sense, the question of “why drag?” takes on renewed vigor. It’s no surprise that RuPaul’s longtime friend, the famed New York performer Lady Bunny, would frame the answer to such a question—in itself the title of the celebrity photographer Magnus Hastings’s upcoming photography book—in those very terms. Drag is “my armor,” she writes. “My mask, or whatever you want to call it that gives me confidence.” Many queens do approach drag from a purely performance or artistic angle, but RuPaul’s Drag Race is giving new life to the idea of the practice as a way to conquer personal shortcomings.

Another recent narrative that links personal growth with drag performance is Jeffery Self’s new YA novel, Drag Teen. The touching and hilarious “tale of angst and wigs” centers on JT Barnett, a young, gay, overweight high-school senior from Clearwater, Florida, who’s beginning to fear he may never get out of his small town. In the novel’s narrative, JT’s only chance to escape from a dead-end job at his family’s gas station is a teen drag competition in New York. Luckily, he’s a drag aficionado—who learned about this art form from RuPaul’s Drag Race. Just as he’d been inspired by watching “that old ’90s movie,” To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, JT finds the queens on Ru’s show to be beacons of hope: “[They] knew how to cope with their inner strands of self-doubt and sew those strands into something fabulous. Usually a dress.”

Self’s repurposing of drag as emotional therapy is all the more fascinating for the way it refuses to accept the passivity of the “It Gets Better” rhetoric that’s monopolized LGBT youth-aimed activism. Instead, he adopts the active language of drag and performance. This allows JT to stress the serious effort it took to become himself and to project himself into, in the words of the novel, an “otherwise” previously believed to be unimaginable. It’s the inverse of what viewers saw in the final taped episode of last season’s Drag Race, where RuPaul asked the four finalists to address their younger selves—a device he has deployed again this season, suggesting he’s intent on making it a staple of the show’s final episodes moving forward.

Drag’s self-empowerment narrative speaks to the way RuPaul has often talked about his own desire to don a dress, a wig, and some heels.

“What would Pearl have to say to little Matthew?” Ru asked the final queen standing in front of the show’s judging panel. The prompt was an attempt to, as usual, marry pop psychology with the very essence of drag. To talk back to their younger selves from a different identity in both time and kind, the queens were made to think of their personas as necessary extensions and logical responses to those bright-eyed boys whose photos RuPaul held in his arms.

In the contestant Pearl’s case, viewers had already heard quite specifically how she’d dealt with the personal demons that haunted her as a child and how “little Matthew” eventually found in drag a means through which to overcome them. “Pearl was this character that I would draw just ’cause it distracted me from, like, the horrible things that I felt were going on around me,” she’d confessed to the camera earlier during the season, “And one day I just painted her on me.” You can see why such a narrative would appeal to RuPaul: It speaks to the way he has often talked about his own desire to don a dress, a wig, and some heels.

In a way, the show’s weekly final moments, which feel like a celebration (“now let the music play!” RuPaul commands as the credits roll), can be read as a hopeful reworking of that other famous cultural landmark that brought viewers backstage to meet the queens of the ball: Paris Is Burning. Jennie Livingston’s seminal 1990 documentary ends on a decidedly dour note, with a queen putting on some more mascara on and summing up the wisdom she now espouses: “You’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it … You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better to just enjoy it.” Her voice suggests abdication, the hardened outlook of someone who struggles just to get by. In the privacy of her dressing room, facing herself in the mirror, the drag queen Dorian Corey refuses to buy into the illusion of her own performance as anything but a provisional reprieve from her daily existence.

Twenty-five years later, RuPaul’s show suggests a more earnest belief in the self-affirming role that drag can take. The issues may, depressingly, remain all too familiar (Drag Race has had contestants open up about HIV diagnoses, family intolerance, suicidal thoughts, and self-hatred), but RuPaul’s platform depends on celebrating their survival stories. As he put it most recently in his sit-down interview with Vulture, drag “actually didn’t save my life, it gave me a life.” It’s no surprise he’s dedicated his most recent platform to give others the chance to really embrace theirs.

Ghost in the Shell and Avatars: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Ghost in the Shell and Anime’s Troubled History With Representation

Emily Yoshida | The Verge

“But I never had to visually deal with the fact that these magical girls and teen soldiers and melancholy robots were Japanese—€”culturally, yes; racially, no. It was enough for me to hear Japanese being spoken and Japanese culture being referenced to. But Japanese people—€”flesh-and-blood humans—€”had long since been removed from one of Japan’s chief cultural exports.”

What Do Our Online Avatars Reveal About Us?

Amanda Hess | The New York Times Magazine

“But as I traverse the Web, I naturally scan for subtle clues in the avatars chosen by friends and strangers, reading their U.S.A.-themed scrapbooks and cat GIFs like leaves at the bottom of a teacup. On Twitter, an avatar flipped to Beyoncé in Lemonade or Prince reads like a pledge to a newly materialized online club; a bizarre cartoon points to a person who tweets frequently and with open self-loathing; an unhatched egg that appears automatically upon profile creation has become its own anti-avatar avatar.”

How Air Jordan Became Crying Jordan

Ian Crouch | The New Yorker

“For those of us who were sentient when Jordan was winning championships, seeing his face become a mocking emblem of sadness and incompetence has been jarring. Jordan never lost when it counted, and even during his strange baseball interlude, few dared call him incompetent. But today, Crying Jordan is one element in a much broader repositioning of Jordan’s place in the culture.”

Fame Is Other People

Elspeth Reeve | The New Republic

“Social media takes the plebs behind the wall. Even better than getting into a celebrity’s house, they can get into their brains through their phones. The flood of famous trivia—favorite smoothies, waist-cinchers, bathroom décor, best friends—has spawned fandoms that act like amateur detectives. Think CSI: Instagram. But while social media seems like a mirrored window that lets us glimpse famous lives, it’s two-way.”

Through the Looking Glass: How Children’s Books Have Grown Up

Byrd Pinkerton | NPR

“Gleason says these books were part of a shifting sense of what childhood really meant. In the late 1800s, a child, or, at least, a middle-class Anglo-American child, was becoming less of an economic unit and more of an emotional one. Childhood was seen as a space of protected innocence. So Alice embraced childhood curiosity and wonder, reinventing children’s books.”

Moving Beyond Pain

bell hooks | bell hooks institute

“Viewers who like to suggest Lemonade was created solely or primarily for black female audiences are missing the point. Commodities, irrespective of their subject matter, are made, produced, and marketed to entice any and all consumers. Beyoncé’s audience is the world and that world of business and money-making has no color.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Chance the Rapper: Men of Steel

Nadeska Alexis | Complex

“Drawing parallels between a Founding Father and a Detroit rapper may seem like a stretch for most, but for these two, it’s easy to see the connection. Both, they point out, were driven by an urgency to create, innovate, and rewrite the rules in order to win. Our cover stars share that same sense of obligation, along with the faith that success is within reach if you’re prepared to put in the elbow grease.”

Delicious Is Disgusting: How One Word Conquered Food Porn

David Andrew Stoler | Aeon

“Delicious. With nary a plosive in sight after that first soft ‘d’, the syllables slush together somewhere in the jowls before being … ejected … by a mouth that maybe sort of expected them but was by no means a voluntary partner in their arrival. Phonaesthetically, it’s like biting into an apple neither crisp nor cold but mealy, like a sock full of sawdust. More than anything, it’s gross.”

Radiohead Burns Itself Clean With a Tense and Pained New Album

Alex McCown | A.V. Club

“Many of the tracks contain only one theme, of which the ensuing musical journey explores various permutations of that dominant concept. Songs expand or contract a single melody—or, more often, merely a motif—as though seeking to tease out the most compelling variant, before subsiding. Things like verses and refrains are mostly absent, so if the mood-music refinements of the last couple albums struck you as unsatisfying, there’s little here to intrigue.”

​How Republicans Finally Got a Victory on Obamacare

For the last five years, Republicans in Congress have adopted a rather simple and old-fashioned strategy for going after Obamacare: Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.

They’ve tried to repeal it; defund it; shut down the government to block it; pray that the Supreme Court would overturn it (twice); persuade Democrats to help them undermine it; and most recently, sue President Obama over how the government chose to implement it.

On Thursday afternoon, House Republicans found out that something finally stuck. A federal judge decided in their favor and ruled that the Obama administration was spending money on insurance subsidies that Congress never specifically appropriated. Like several of the GOP’s previous maneuvers, this victory is tentative and may be temporary: Judge Rosemary Collyer, a George W. Bush appointee on the U.S. District Court in D.C. stayed her own ruling so the government could appeal, and a higher court might reverse the decision or find that the House of Representatives had no standing to sue the president in the first place.

Yet this latest legal threat to the Affordable Care Act ​seems to validate​ the GOP’s try-anything approach. When House Republicans first came up with the idea to take the president to court nearly two years ago, they planned to sue the administration over a completely different part of Obamacare. Then-Speaker John Boehner was, as usual, facing pressure from conservatives who were frustrated at Obama’s liberal use of executive authority and their inability to derail the hated health-care law. So he and his leadership team hatched a plan to file a lawsuit accusing the president and his administration of exceeding their authority by unilaterally delaying the implementation of the employer mandate in Obamacare. The requirement that businesses with more than 50 employees provide insurance to their workers had long been a big target for Republicans and one of the more contentious policies in the law. It was the middle of the mid-term congressional campaigns, and Republicans suspected the administration was delaying the mandate to put off the political pain of compliance until after the election.

“The president changed the health-care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it,” Boehner said in a statement at the time. “That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own.” The irony was that House Republicans had repeatedly assailed the employer mandate as a jobs killer, and yet here they were suing to force the administration to implement it faster.

The first step for Boehner was to engineer passage of a resolution formally authorizing the House to sue the president. In drafting that resolution, the speaker’s legal team left themselves some wiggle room. Instead of specifically focusing on the employer mandate, the resolution authorized the House to initiate litigation over the implementation of “any provision” of the Affordable Care Act. That would become important later.

It’s not easy for anyone to sue the president or his administration, and as House GOP leaders would soon find out, it is particularly difficult for one chamber of Congress to bring a lawsuit against the executive branch. Courts have traditionally deferred to the president in legal conflicts with Congress and have been reluctant to serve as a referee for political disputes that are ordinarily hashed out through the give-and-take of legislative negotiation. Because Democrats controlled the Senate at the time, House Republicans appeared to be at a disadvantage since only one half of Congress would be claiming injury as a result of the administration’s actions.

Further complicating matters, the House GOP struggled to find a lawyer who would actually take the case to court. The first two firms the House hired quit, supposedly under pressure from Democratic clients who did not want to be associated with such a partisan case. Boehner’s office considered forgoing outside counsel entirely or combining the Obamacare suit with a legal challenge to the president’s executive action on immigration. Finally, they found a lawyer who would commit to the case, Jonathan Turley, and in late November 2014, the House sued the administration.

An appropriation from Congress “cannot be inferred”—it must be made explicitly.

When the House filed its suit in federal district court, the administration’s delay in implementation of the employer mandate was not the only challenge it brought. The complaint also cited a much more technical matter—the government’s funding of subsidies to insurance companies that reduce the cost of co-payments, deductibles, and other costs for low-income people. As The New York Times has reported, staffers for the House Energy and Commerce Committee discovered that there was no explicit congressional appropriation for the $130 billion or so over 10 years that the government was sending to insurers as reimbursements. The administration argued that language in the Affordable Care Act meant for the program to be funded permanently, while the lawsuit countered that it was subject to annual appropriations by Congress. Since the Republican-controlled Congress had never explicitly appropriated the money, they argued, the Obama administration was violating the Constitution by spending money without approval from legislators.

The government first tried to block the House from even bringing the case by arguing that a chamber of Congress lacked the standing to sue over what was essentially a political dispute. Last September, Judge Collyer issued a two-part ruling. She threw out the GOP’s challenge to the employer mandate—the original source of complaint from Republicans—but she allowed the subsidy claim to go forward, deciding that it was a constitutional question over the separation of powers. And in a 38-page ruling on Thursday, she found in the House’s favor: An appropriation from Congress, she wrote, “cannot be inferred”—it must be made explicitly.

Unlike the two previous challenges to Obamacare that the Supreme Court has rejected, the House lawsuit would not destroy the law completely, although it could wreak havoc by raising the cost of health-care plans. It would also require Congress to find an alternative source of money to use in reimbursing insurers—an unlikely scenario while Republicans are in charge. Collyer’s ruling won’t be in effect while the administration appeals, and the White House is confident it will receive a friendlier hearing before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Democratic appointees have a majority.

For now, however, Republicans are rejoicing. Boehner, since deposed, hailed the decision as “a victory for the American people, and for House Republicans.” His successor, Paul Ryan, echoed the sentiment and credited Boehner for the win. This ruling may not be what Republicans initially envisioned, but that matters little now. When it comes to attacking Obamacare, the GOP motto is: whatever works.

Pfizer v. Lethal Injections

Pfizer said Friday it would impose stringent controls on distributors to block its drugs from use in lethal injections, underscoring the pharmaceutical industry’s consensus against participation in the death penalty amid a nationwide shortage in execution drugs.

“Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve,” the pharmaceutical giant’s updated policy said. “Consistent with these values, Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment.”

The new policy’s impact on future executions will be difficult to measure. Many states with capital punishment have also enacted laws that shield the identities of execution-drug providers, making those drugs’ origins hard to trace. It is also unclear when or how often Pfizer-manufactured drugs have been used in U.S. executions.

But Pfizer’s move adds new barriers as states struggle to find reliable suppliers of execution drugs. Maya Foa, executive director of Reprieve, a U.K.-based human-rights organization, said in a statement that Pfizer’s move means “all FDA-approved manufacturers of all execution drugs have spoken out against the misuse of medicines in lethal injections and taken steps to prevent it.”

A Pfizer spokesperson said the company opposed the use of its drugs in lethal injections before today’s update. An earlier version of its policy on capital punishment took a less forceful stance on the issue than Friday’s update, insisting that “efforts to influence policy” were better directed towards legislators and public officials.

“Our distribution plan, which restricts the sale of these seven products for unintended uses, implements our publicly stated position against improper use of our products and, most importantly, doesn't stand in the way of patient access to these critical medications,” an October 2015 version of the policy stated.

“However, due to the complex supply chain and the gray market in the United States, despite our efforts, Pfizer cannot guarantee that a U.S. prison could not secure restricted products through other channels not under Pfizer’s control,” it cautioned.

The updated policy includes neither the redirection towards lawmakers nor the hedging of its own ability to control the supply chain. Instead, it outlined the company’s efforts to regulate the distribution of key lethal-injection drugs.

Pfizer’s distribution restriction limits the sale of these seven products to a select group of wholesalers, distributors, and direct purchasers under the condition that they will not resell these products to correctional institutions for use in lethal injections. Government purchasing entities must certify that products they purchase or otherwise acquire are used only for medically prescribed patient care and not for any penal purposes. Pfizer further requires that these Government purchasers certify that the product is for “own use” and will not resell or otherwise provide the restricted products to any other party.

Pfizer will consistently monitor the distribution of these seven products, act upon findings that reveal noncompliance, and modify policies when necessary to remain consistent with our stated position against the improper use of our products in lethal injections. Importantly, this distribution system is also designed to ensure that these critical medications will remain immediately available to those patients who rely on them every day.

States rely on a small collection of drugs to perform lethal injections, typically administered in one-drug or three-drug cocktails. Pfizer manufactures seven of them: the sedatives propofol, midazolam, and hydromorphone, the muscle relaxant pancuronium bromide and two variants of it, and potassium chloride, which is used to stop the inmate’s heart.

Until recently, the standard method of lethal injection used sodium thiopental, a sedative, followed by a muscle relaxant and then potassium chloride. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the sodium thiopental cocktail’s constitutionality in Baze v. Rees. In recent years, death-penalty opponents began pressuring drug manufacturers to stop selling it and other key drugs to U.S. prisons for executions. The European Union imposed an export ban on drugs for lethal injections to the U.S. in 2011.

With major pharmaceutical companies off limits and supplies dwindling, states turned to alternative, “grey market” sources instead. Multiple state departments of corrections purchased lethal-injection drugs from unlicensed suppliers in Britain and India, including one provider based in a single office above a driving academy. Both the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Food and Drug Administration have repeatedly seized unlicensed imports of lethal-injection drugs from states over the past three years.

States have also relied on clandestine domestic outlets to obtain the drugs, including compounding pharmacies with less stringent regulations. The Apothecary Shoppe, a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma, secretly manufactured drugs for at least three executions in Missouri in 2013 and 2014, a BuzzFeed investigation found. The pharmacy shut down earlier this year after state and federal investigators found thousands of regulatory violations.

Another compounding pharmacy also provided the Oklahoma Department of Corrections with the midazolam used in the botched execution of Clayton Lockett on April 29, 2014. Lockett’s death triggered a legal battle by other inmates that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court last year, where the justices upheld the use of the controversial sedative midazolam by a 5-4 vote in Glossip v. Gross.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, accused capital-punishment foes of waging a “guerrilla war against the death penalty” during oral arguments. In a lengthy dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer urged the Court to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty itself.

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Contempt of Court

A federal judge ruled Friday that Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff who became famous for his stance on immigration, was in civil contempt of court for failing to follow an order stemming from a racial-profiling case.

Three years ago, U.S. District Judge Murray Snow ordered the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which Arpaio heads, to stop racially profiling people during traffic stops––mainly while conducting immigration sweeps aimed at Latino neighborhoods. After Arpaio’s seeming resistance to follow the order, Snow started hearings a year ago to determine whether Arpaio and the deputies were in contempt of court.

It all stems from a complaint the sheriff’s office racially profiled Latinos. The Arizona Republic reported that:

The hearings were based on three alleged violations: that the Sheriff's Office failed to turn over video evidence that was required before the racial-profiling trial; that officials continued to enforce immigration law after Snow barred the practice; and that Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan failed to quietly collect evidence after the trial, as Snow had ordered him to do.

Arpaio and Sheridan have both acknowledged the failures but deny the violations were willful. The distinction could mean the difference between civil and criminal contempt, and served as the primary topic for debate in Snow's courtroom.

The hearings, which started with four days of testimony in April and resumed with 16 additional days of testimony in the fall, often turned into a much broader discussion that focused on the sheriff’s enforcement priorities and whether he was more interested in settling political scores than rooting out the racial profiling that Snow found in the Sheriff’s Office.

The original complaint against Arpaio came from a Mexican tourist, legally in the U.S., named Jesus Ortega Melendres, who was pulled over by Arpaio’s deputies while a passenger in a car with a white driver, and detained for nine hours. With the help of the American Civili Liberties Union, he filed a complaint against the Sheriff’s Office in the U.S. District Court District of Arizona. Eventually, two Latino siblings also joined the complainant.

In 2011, Snow issued an injunction that prohibited deputies from targeting Latinos in traffic stops, and in 2013 he appointed a court monitor to see Arpaio complied.

The ruling on Friday sets up a possible criminal contempt-of-court proceeding against the Maricopa County sheriff.

This Week in Culture

Don’t Miss

Arch Enemies — Megan Garber’s magnum opus on how a new company is bringing the engineering savvy of rocket science to the design of the high-heeled shoe. She asks: Can stilettos that are actually comfortable to wear change centuries’ worth of symbolism?

Film

A24

The Lobster: A Dystopian Tour de Force — Christopher Orr on Yorgos Lanthimos’s allegorical rumination on finding a mate, a witty, cruel, and deeply unsettling film.



Money Monster: A Bear of a Wall Street Satire — David Sims on how new film wastes an impressive cast on a flimsy drama that can’t find its mark.



How Capitalism Took Over Sports Movies — Mike Miley on an unsettling trend in popular culture, where businessmen and managers have ousted teams and players as dramatic heroes.



Picking Sides in Captain America: Civil War — Four Atlantic writers discuss the newest installment in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe.



The Spin Zone — Megan Garber on how Twister, 20 years after its release, is an extremely dumb movie with extremely important insights.

Television

CBS

The Women and the Wine — Megan Garber on television female characters’ omnipresent wine glass, and how the beverage has become a metaphor for anxieties that are uniquely feminine in their form.



Can Chelsea Handler Break the Late-Night Format? — David Sims on how the comedian’s new Netflix show has a ‘near-live’ recording schedule and an eclectic mix of guests.



The Good Wife: Florrick v. the Sisterhood — Megan Garber on how CBS drama’s dramatic finale brought a sad but fitting end to a show that has always been a little bit awkward about its female friendships.



Bartlet for America, Forever — David Sims on how pop culture—and even the White House itself—seems to be longing for the return of the fictional administration fromThe West Wing, a decade after the show ended.



Underground: A Thrilling Quest Story About Slavery — Vann R. Newkirk II on a harrowing new period drama that takes its cues from both history and the apocalyptic narratives that populate today’s TV and film.



Game of Thrones: And All the Nights to Come — Three Atlantic staffers discuss ‘Oathbreaker,’ the third episode of the sixth season.

Music

Amy Sussman / AP

Meghan Trainor: Views From the Uncanny Valley — Spencer Kornhaber on the “All About That Bass” singer, which is the sound of an era of pop and Internet discourse folding back in on itself.



A Moon Shaped Pool Is Radiohead’s Strangest Album Yet — Spencer Kornhaber on how the band’s beautiful but difficult ninth album is as much sculpture as it is a song collection.



Ding Dong, Azealia Banks Is Off Twitter — Spencer Kornhaber on the controversial rapper’s final (for now) racist freakout, which he argues exemplifies the worst Internet behavior.

Books

Fitzgerald Publishing Company

Harriet Tubman Was My Wonder Woman — For our Childish Things series, Brentin Mock on how the black history icons he learned about as a child through comics were larger-than-life—and how they prepared him to grapple with America’s racial past.



The Growing Divide Between Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin — David Sims on how the new chapter of the sixth book in the sprawling A Song of Ice and Fire series shows how much the TV adaptation has diverged from the novels.



Hystopia: An Ambitious, Dystopian Retelling of the Vietnam War — Amy Weiss-Meyer on David Means’s debut novel, which examines the psychological implications of a world where trauma can be erased.



The Challenge of Genderless Characters — Stephanie Hayes on what the 30-year-old novel Sphinx reveals about hidden biases.

Sports

Reuters

Why Stephen Curry Is So Captivating — Conor Friedersdorf on how the NBA’s most compelling player entertains with a kind of suspense unseen since Magic Johnson.

Food

Panera Bread

One Thing Considered: Why Is Panera Selling Us Dirty Lettuce? — The fast-casual bakery chain’s ad campaign, “Should Be,” navigates the thin line between food marketing and foodsplaining.

The Apparent Hijacking of George Zimmerman's Gun Auction

George Zimmerman’s plan to sell the pistol he killed Trayvon Martin with appears to have backfired, because the bidding on Friday surpassed $65 million, and the names of the subsequently deleted highest bidders include “Racist McShootFace” and “Tamir Rice,” suggesting the auction had been hijacked.

Zimmerman shot 17-year-old Martin in 2012 inside a gated community in Sanford, Florida. He was charged with murder and later acquitted. On Thursday, Zimmerman listed his Kel-Tec PF-9 pistol on Gunbroker.com, and after the site removed his listing, another picked it up. The gun was posted on the United Gun Group’s website, and by Friday afternoon it’d received more than 1,000 bids.

Several accounts placed bids of $65 million, and one of those accounts used the name Racist McShootFace. It was later deleted, and the Associated Press reported that:

Other screen names of bidders on the site included "Donald Trump" …  and "Tamir Rice," the name of a black 12-year-old who was shot and killed by Cleveland police in 2014 while playing with a pellet gun.

Another bid above $65 million came from someone named Craig Bryant, but that name too was deleted.

The biddings started at $5,000. Zimmerman’s ad said he would donate part of the proceeds to “fight BLM violence against Law Enforcement officers” and to “ensure the demise of Angela Correy’s persecution career and Hillary Clinton’s anti-firearm rhetoric.”

BLM is the Black Lives Matter Movement, which mostly protests police killings of unarmed black men. Corey, whose last name Zimmerman misspelled, is the Florida State Attorney who unsuccessfully prosecuted him in Martin’s death.

The original posting for the gun was taken down by Gunbroker.com, which later released a statement saying:

Our site rules state that we reserve the right to reject listings at our sole discretion, and have done so with the Zimmerman listing.

We want no part in the listing on our web site or in any of the publicity it is receiving.

It was then picked up by United Gun Group. Zimmerman said that since the Department of Justice returned his pistol, he received wide interest from potential buyers. He even said the Smithsonian had asked to buy the gun—an assertion the Institution denied.

Zimmerman told FOX 35 in Orlando that he wanted to sell the gun because it was time to move on. When asked by a reporter if he thought it was crass to sell a gun that had killed someone, Zimmerman said, “Do I think it’s distasteful to put it on auction, because someone died? No, I don't.” If the pistol didn’t sell, he told the news station, he’d stick it in a safe and no one would ever see it––until he gave it to his grandkids.

The auction ends in four days.

The Lie of Trump's 'Self-Funding' Campaign

Throughout the fall and winter, a favorite media narrative was to link Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump together, two outsiders who were upending their respective parties’ races by blasting donor-driven big-money politics. Sanders has kept to that rhetoric into the spring, making the recitation of his famous $27 average donation a centerpiece of every stump speech. But for Trump, it has turned out to be just that: rhetoric.

With the Republican nomination all but secured, Trump has changed his tune for the general election. Trump is suddenly looking to build a major fundraising operation, complete with donors and super PACs, rather than self-funding, as he’s boasted time and again that he is doing.

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“I will make a decision fairly soon as to that,” he said last week, wiping away those months of promises. “I mean, do I want to sell a couple of buildings and self-fund? I don’t know that I want to do that necessarily, but I really won’t be asking for money for myself, I’ll be asking money for the party.”

My colleague Conor Friedersdorf this week labeled that a betrayal of Trump’s supporters. That’s not wrong, but Trump’s claims of self-funding have always been dubious at best and actively misleading at worst.

It’s not just that Trump is now courting major donors. (Sheldon Adelson, perhaps the most famous conservative donor not named Koch, has a column in today’s Washington Post explaining why he backs Trump, even though Trump has (1) bashed major donors and (2) been extremely aloof to Israel, Adelson’s major cause.) It’s also that he’s opening up to super PACs. Formally, Trump can do little to stop super PACs—according to the federal rules, it’s illegal for campaigns to coordinate with them. But candidates, including Trump, have found ways to send messages. In October, Trump demanded that super PACs backing him close up shop—though only after the Post spotlighted the close ties between the Trump campaign and one of the super PACs. In April, Trump’s campaign sent a cajoling letter to Great America PAC, a new super PAC backing him, complaining that the group could confuse backers and muddy his message.

More recently, however, after Great America hired former Ronald Reagan operative Ed Rollins, Trump seemed to be more accepting, calling Rollins “tremendous.” Rollins—who to be fair has a reputation for being a loose cannon with little regard for bosses—seemed confident about the PAC’s role, saying, “Usually a super PAC is frosting on a cake. We’re going to be part of the cake.”

Calling this simply a flip-flop lets Trump off the hook, though. Trump has made self-funding a major point of his campaign, proof that unlike his rivals, he’s not beholden to anyone. There are highly popular Facebook posts—

—and it’s been a staple of his stump speech. At Trump events, backers have repeatedly told me and other reporters that Trump’s self-funding and refusal to take money is a major selling point. Too often, the press was content to report those claims without scrutiny. In fact, Trump was never really self-funding—at least not in any traditional sense.

Trump has raised roughly $48 million so far, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—far less than Hillary Clinton, Sanders, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or Ben Carson, including super PAC donations. More than $12 million of that—fully one-quarter of his total—comes from, you guessed it, donations to the campaign. Until last fall, they were the major fuel for Trump’s run. Politifact’s Lauren Carroll notes, “From the start of his campaign in April through October last year, individual contributions made up about 67 percent of total money raised for his campaign.”

That leaves the remaining three-quarters of Trump’s fundraising. For months, staffers kept saying Trump was about to start pouring money into his campaign, and for months that was largely a feint. Now he’s finally ponying up, but whether you call that self-funding is a judgment call. For one thing, a good chunk of the money that Trump’s campaign is spending is actually going right back to companies controlled by Donald Trump, as payment for services rendered. The New York Times reported in February:

About $2.7 million ... was paid to at least seven companies Mr. Trump owns or to people who work for his real estate and branding empire, repaying them for services provided to his campaign. That total included more than $2 million for flights on his own planes and helicopter, a quarter of a million dollars to his Fifth Avenue office tower, and even $66,000 to Keith Schiller, his bodyguard and the head of security at the Trump Organization.

While the convoluted accounting is required by law—so that Mr. Trump’s companies do not make illegal corporate contributions directly to his campaign—it also means that Mr. Trump is in effect taking millions of dollars out of one pocket and depositing it into another.

For another, the money Trump has “spent” on his campaign has been not in the form of donations to his campaign, but in the form of loans. As Trump—a man who has strategically declared bankruptcy through his companies four times, and who has been deep in debt—knows well, the thing about loans is that you’ve got to pay them back, unless of course the lender forgives them.

Ari Melber pointed this out in a great piece Friday. Back in March, Melber he wrote, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Trump would not attempt to recoup the money. But that was before Trump began publicly courting donations, and now his team won’t rule it out. There’s also good reason not to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

In 2000, Trump told Fortune, “It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” Raking in donations and then paying himself back—with interest—would be one good way to do that, in addition to payments to himself for services rendered.

In reality, self-funding a general-election campaign for president was never plausible. Trump has managed to skate through the primary with less money than his rivals because of his ability to get free media attention. That won’t work as well in a general election, and Trump has estimated he’d need around $1.5 billion for the general. That seems plausible; Obama and Mitt Romney each raised a little more than $1 billion in 2012.

Trump claims to be worth $10 billion, a claim which ought to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. Even if true, spending 15 percent of one’s fortune on a presidential race seems like a gamble, although Trump has made plenty of bad bets in his career. If he’s worth closer to $4.5 billion, as Forbes guesses, it’s an even more painful choice. The last major (using the term loosely) candidate to self-fund was H. Ross Perot in 1992. Perot was at the time worth $2.4 billion, according to Forbes. But campaigns were much cheaper then: A book by two professors pegged the total cost of Perot’s campaign at just $68.4 million.

How successful will Trump be? Major Republican donors are split, with some, like Adelson, getting in line; others refusing to go along; and the majority keeping quiet for now. As for the super PACs, the largest ones haven’t done a great to help their candidates this year, though the primary and the general election are different beasts. Meanwhile, another pro-Trump super PAC bears some of the hallmarks of a “scam PAC.” As a matter of principle, it’s hard to reconcile Trump’s wildly popular claims of self-funding with his recent turn toward raising money. In practice, however, the new approach is hardly any change at all from his MO throughout the race.

The Women and the Wine

This week’s series finale of The Good Wife gave the show’s protagonist, Alicia Florrick, a problem that is not the worst kind to have, all things considered: The high-powered lawyer had to choose, once and for all, between the three suitors who’d courted her throughout the show’s seven seasons. As Alicia struggled with the decision, she tried to imagine what life would be like—day-by-day, year-by-year—with each man. She played out the scenes in her mind, imagining coming home to each one. There was Jason, tall and typically shaggy, standing in her kitchen, holding two bulbous glasses of red wine. And then: There was Peter, in the same place, with the same glasses. And, finally, there was Will, with … yep.

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Alicia’s imagined homecomings offered a moment of romantic melodrama—potential futures to be chosen and rejected—but they also offered, for The Good Wife’s hardcore viewers, a winking nod to one of the show’s most oft-repeated bits of character development: Alicia Florrick is a woman who really, really likes wine. Something to celebrate? Wine. Long day at work? Same. Stressful day with the family? Same. Wine, wine, wine—red and generously poured and gulped as often as it’s sipped.

Alicia is not alone in her penchant for televised oenophilia (scroenophilia?). She shares her habit with Olivia Pope. And Tami Taylor. And Skyler White. And Carrie Mathison. And Claire Underwood. And Joyce Flynn. And many, many other TV characters—almost all of them women—who telegraph their internal turmoil via swigs of Syrah.

It’s a little, um, on the nose: sour grapes suggesting sour grapes. But the trope has become fairly standardized across shows and characters and genres, shared by the women of noirish drama as readily as those of low-stakes sitcom. (Even Cersei Lannister, who exists in Game of Thrones’s fantasy-fied parallel universe, will not be deprived of her goblets of wine.) Per the tropic convention, the wine in question is often, but not always, red—which is both moody and vaguely ominous, in the manner of Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” and also more practical from a TV-production standpoint than white (which can, if served chilled, present pesky problems of camera-awkward condensation).

The wine, gulped just as often as sipped, is a visual metaphor for that most modern of afflictions: stress.

And: The wine is often very generously poured—into traditional glasses, as with Olivia Pope’s iconically extended-stemmed versions, or, as in the long-running gag of Cougar Town, into the larger vessels, flower vases included, that its characters repurposed as wine goblets. (One episode of the show found Jules holding a funeral after the shattering of the glass she’d named Big Joe—who was, she eulogized, “always here when I needed him.”)

What most distinguishes the televised wine, though, is that it is most commonly used as a symbol of the stress that the woman who is drinking it is experiencing. There’s a notable darkness to the Pinots, be they blanc or noir, that Olivia and Alicia and Skyler and their fellow women—Jules included—down so voraciously: Theirs is not, for the most part, social wine or with-dinner wine. It is coping wine. It is medicative wine. It is wine that is often consumed alone. And it is wine that is, as an element of TV production, used by its respective storytellers as a visual metaphor for its drinkers’ worry and fear.

In that sense, the wine suggests something different than the things suggested by, say, the beers of Cheers or the sherries of Frasier or the cosmos of Sex and the City. Instead of conviviality and/or snobbery, the wine in this case suggests the stormy silence of that most modern of afflictions: stress. While traditional wine-drinking might suggest social confidence-building  (“lubrication,” etc.), this version emphasizes introversion rather than extroversion: anger that steams into a closed vessel, fear that has no outlet. Olivia gulps wine when, you know, she thinks she might be murdered. Alicia does it when she thinks her husband might go to jail. Skyler, Claire, Carrie, Tami—their wine, to varying degrees of acuteness, indicates the pressures that bear down on them, constantly. And the notion that those pressures must be borne, ultimately, alone.

So while wine, as a beverage and as a cultural phenomenon, has several built-in signifiers—“whenever a character is shown drinking wine,” the site TV Tropes reports, “it’s usually a good sign that person is high class or sophisticated, especially if the wine comes from their special private stock”—the wine consumed by so many of TV’s recent women whiffs of more than the effete or the elite. During a time that finds wine “becoming part and parcel of America’s culture,” TV characters’ repeated Grenache-gulping suggests something both more basic and more specific: personal chaos. And the ritualization of that chaos.

Alicia drinks wine, she once explained, because it’s something she used to do every day when she was a housewife—a quotidian ceremony that carried over as her life became both more exciting and more turbulent. Tami turns to the (wine) bottle after a hard day at work, or while she and Eric are having financial worries, or when any other stressor emerges. (She does it enough to have earned some loving mockery from Amy Schumer.) For Lindsay in You’re the Worst, wine suggests the systemic rejection of adulthood and its responsibilities. For Joyce and Victoria Flynn in Mike & Molly, too, wine is much more than a beverage: It becomes a metaphor, in its blithely sitcomic way, for the anxieties of the American middle class. The women drink because their lives are hard: not violently hard, or tragically hard, but paycheck-to-paycheck and bill-to-bill hard.

From a production standpoint, it makes sense that TV writers and producers would turn so repeatedly to wine to do that telegraphic work. Stress is universal—and thus literarily compelling—but also notoriously hazy and hard to quantify, even for those who are experiencing it. And it tends to manifest, externally, not as itself, but as other things: quickness to anger. A penchant for tears. Or, perhaps, a tendency to swig Zinfandel from a bulbous, 23-ounce goblet, if not right from the bottle. Wine in that sense is extremely effective as a visual indication of inner turmoil. (“Everyone has a tell,” Quinn tells Olivia, in Scandal. “Yours is wine. Red wine. Rare, complex, fantastic red wine.”)

You rarely see TV’s men gulping wine from goblets, alone in their kitchens—and, when you do, the sight will immediately suggest A Problem.

It’s notable, though, that the wine-drinking trope tends to be realized by female characters. Rowan Pope, Olivia’s father and the person who instilled in her her love of those red wines, indulges his own taste for them via sips and strategic food-pairings and an unapologetic use of the word “palate.” Wine, for him, suggests the things it traditionally did, when wine was the beverage of the elite: structure, refinement, and an appreciation for “the finer things” that is, above all, measured and moderate. Eric Taylor has wine with his dinner, sure—because Tami has served it to him—but he doesn’t gulp it with the vague air of desperation that his wife does. Same with Frank Underwood. You rarely see TV’s men gulping wine from goblets, alone in their kitchens—and, if you do, the sight of such hard-and-hermited drinking will likely suggest, in the manner of Don Draper, A Problem.

And that’s the problem with the women-and-wine trope: It refuses to acknowledge anything problematic about its characters’ reliance on wine. Instead, it presents their ritualized wine-gulping as, simply, a fact of female life. “In theory,” The New York Times’s Eric Asimov noted of the emergence of the trope, in 2014, “it’s a nod in the direction of Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca, downing shots to dull the pain of Ilsa Lund’s reappearance with another man. In practice, it’s different because it’s wine, not spirits, and those who love wine see it as far more than a numbing palliative for heartache and anxiety.”

It’s also different, though, because it’s Alicia, not Rick, who is using the alcohol in this way. It’s Claire. It’s Carrie. Wine—through which, according to its connoisseurs, one can taste the subtle flavors of the earth—is acting as a metaphor for anxieties that are internalized rather than converted into external action. And the fact that the trope is so commonly applied to female characters suggests—vaguely but also, in its repetition, insistently—that women are, uniquely, subject to that kind of helplessness. The problems faced by Olivia and Alicia and Skyler and their fellow ladies were created, largely, by men; the wine suggests, in its way, that they must be solved by those men. It suggests the extent to which these women—whom their respective shows have presented as strong and independent and even heroic—are also passive participants in their own lives. Kathie Lee Gifford, who with Hoda Kotb regularly drinks it’s-5-o’clock-somewhere glasses of wine during the Today show, explained that the wine is there “to keep the mood festive and to keep it light and happy and uplifting.” If only it served the same purpose for those women’s fictional counterparts.

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