Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 167

The Oldest Person in the World and the Secret to Her Longevity

The oldest person in the world died Thursday night in New York, and that title passed to Emma Morano, who at 116 is believed to be the last person alive born in the 1800s.

Morano lives in the Italian mountain town of Verbania, and she was born November 29, 1899. She has seen her country transition from a constitutional monarchy to a republic. She’s lived through two wars and two decades of Fascism. In 2015 she told The New York Times about her secret to longevity:  

Ms. Morano has no doubts about how she made it this long: Her elixir for longevity consists of raw eggs, which she has been eating — three per day — since her teens when a doctor recommended them to counter anemia. Assuming she has been true to her word, Ms. Morano would have consumed around 100,000 eggs in her lifetime, give or take a thousand, cholesterol be damned.

She is also convinced that being single for most of her life, after an unhappy marriage that ended in 1938 following the death of an infant son, has kept her kicking. Separation was rare then, and divorce became legal in Italy only in 1970. She said she had plenty of suitors after that, but never chose another partner. “I didn’t want to be dominated by anyone,” she said.

Scientists are studying the secret to long life, and one place they are looking at is Sardinia, which last year had 21 centenarians. Besides Iceland, it’s the most genetically homogenous place in the world. For a long time, scientists thought the residents’ longevity was because of their genes. But recently researchers have looked into diet as the strongest factor in long life. The secret food? Beans.

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Age discrimination affects us all. Who cares about youth? James Hamblin turns to his colleague Jeffrey Goldberg for advice.

'Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone'

It was near the end of September, an unusually warm week in 1871, and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and a group of wealthy New Yorkers stood atop a grassy hill near the Platte River in Nebraska, where two miles off they spotted six huge brown beasts.

Cody was a legend of the frontier era, part myth conjured in dime novels. The men from New York had expected to find him as a “desperado of the West, bristling with knives and pistols,” but they did not. Cody was loquacious and friendly, an expert hunter. He knew that with the wind blowing from behind, the men risked their scent being carried to the animals and scaring them away. Then again, a buffalo is a lumbering, hirsute cow, and the men were outfitted with some of the quickest horses and held the best guns owned by the U.S. Army, which was outfitting the hunting expedition. The Army wasn’t in the business of guiding hunting trips for soft-skinned Wall Streeters, but it was in the business of controlling the Native Americans in the area, and that meant killing buffalo. One colonel, four years earlier, had told a wealthy hunter who felt a shiver of guilt after he shot 30 bulls in one trip: "Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

Cody and the men made a contest of the hunt. Whoever killed the first buffalo would win an engraved silver chalice. Years later, in an article he wrote for the magazine Cosmopolitan, Cody would call this trip the best equipped he’d ever taken. The Army had supplied an armed escort and 25 wagons filled with cooks, linen, china, carpets for their tents, and a traveling icehouse to keep their wine chilled. The reason for such extravagance was undoubtedly because the New Yorkers were well-connected, but also because Major-General Phillip Sheridan, the man with the task of forcing Native Americans off the Great Plains and onto reservations, had come along with them. This was a leisure hunt, but Sheridan also viewed the extermination of buffalo and his victory over the Native Americans as a single, inextricable mission––and in that sense, it could be argued that any buffalo hunt was Army business. After the men circled the herd, they charged down the hill, chasing after the six buffalo, eager for the first kill.

On Monday, President Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act, making the American bison––or the buffalo as it’s more often called––the national mammal. It’s only the second animal to represent the U.S., joining the bald eagle. It’s ironic, of course, because at one time American settlers and hide-hunters killed the animal to near-extinction, and tourists shot the animals from the windows of trains as if the slaughter could last forever. Buffalo had once numbered more than 30 million, and by the end of the 19th century there were only a few hundred in the wild. Today, some 20,000-25,000 remain in public herds.

Many things contributed to the buffalos demise. One factor was that for a long time, the country’s highest generals, politicians, even then President Ulysses S. Grant saw the destruction of buffalo as solution to the country’s “Indian Problem.”

Before Sheridan joined Cody and the New Yorkers on the hunt, and before he oversaw the relocation of Native Americans on the plains, he was a major-general for the Union during the Civil War. It was there he learned the power of destroying enemy resources. He’d used the same scorched-earth strategy that William Tecumseh Sherman, then a major-general, used in his March to the Sea, tearing  up railroad ties, toppling telegraph poles, and lighting nearly all of Atlanta and anything an infantryman could digest ablaze. After the war, President Grant asked Sherman and Sheridan to command armies in the Great Plains.

Sherman knew that as long as the Sioux hunted buffalo, they’d never surrender to life with a plow.

This was Manifest Destiny, and there’d never be enough room for Native Americans and white settlers. In treaty after reneged treaty, the land granted to the tribes of the Great Plains shrunk. The U.S. wanted them docile, to take up farming on the reservations and stay put. But the Sioux, the Kiowa, and Comanches, nearly all the tribes of the plains, lived alongside buffalo herds and took from them their skins for tents, and their meat for food.

When miners discovered gold in Montana, in some of the best hunting grounds in the country, the Sioux fought the white settlers rushing to extract yet another profitable resource from their land. That escalated into a small war, and eventually what’s called the Fetterman Fight, named after the U.S. Army captain leading the troops. The Sioux killed Captain William J. Fetterman and all 80 of his men. At that time, it was the worst loss the U.S. had ever suffered on the Great Plains. In 1868, Sherman and a peace commission signed the Fort Laramie Treaty with the Sioux and outlined for them a reservation. Part of the treaty also allowed the Sioux to hunt buffalo north of the Platte River––almost the same land where Cody and the New Yorkers would hunt three years later. Sherman hated the idea. He was “utterly opposed to that clause of the treaty,” wrote David D. Smits in The Western Historical Quarterly. “He was determined to clear the central plains region between the Platte and the Arkansas of Indians so that the railroads, stage lines, and telegraph could operate unmolested.”

Sherman knew that as long as the Sioux hunted buffalo, they’d never surrender to life with a plow. In a letter to Sheridan, dated May 10, 1868, Sherman wrote that as long as buffalo roamed those parts of Nebraska, “Indians will go there. I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all.”

By now the buffalo that once covered all the Great Plains were hewn into two giant herds––one in the north, and one in the south. Still, the brown herds could overwhelm, and when Sheridan asked a trader how many buffalo he thought lived in the southern herd, the man said 10 billion. Obviously, that was absurd. But if the Army planned to slaughter all buffalo and starve the tribes into submission, it’d take more time and men than Sheridan had. Still, there’s evidence he thought it the best option: In October 1868, Sheridan wrote to Sherman that their best hope to control the Native Americans, was to “make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them.”

Soon Sherman would have help. But along with the Fort Laramie Treaty, the U.S. had also signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty in 1867 with tribes in the south. So for the moment, The Indians Wars had paused.

In the lull, enlisted men like Cody found other ways to stay busy, and to make money. Cody had joined the Cavalry at 17, and he earned the name “Buffalo Bill” because in one 18-month stretch he claimed to have killed 4,280 buffalo. In 1870, a bull hide sold for $3.50. One frontiersman, Frank Mayer, figured if he spent 25 cents on each round of ammo, then “every time I fired one I got my investment back twelve times over.”

Buffalo were slow-grazing, four-legged bank rolls. And for a while, there were plenty. Then in 1873 an economic depression hit the country, and what easier way was there to make money than to chase down these ungainly beasts? Thousands of buffalo runners came, sometimes averaging 50 kills a day. They sliced their humps, skinned off the hides, tore out their tongues, and left the rest on the prairies to rot. They slaughtered so many buffalo that it flooded the market and the price dropped, which meant they had to kill more. In towns, hides rose in stacks as tall as houses. This was not the work of the Army. It was private industry. But that doesn’t mean Army officers and generals couldn’t lean back and look at it with satisfaction.

“I read that army commanders were even providing bullets to these hunters,” said Andrew C. Isenberg, author of The Destruction of the Bison, and a professor of history at Temple University. “The military looked at what the private sector was doing and they didn’t need to do anything more than stand back and watch it happen.”

Isenberg said though it was never official policy to kill buffalo in order to control Native Americans on the plains, the Army was certainly conscious about it. And at least in action, Isenberg said, “they were extremely explicit about it.”

“We were never able to control the savages until their supply of meat was cut off.”

Herds became harder to find. In some prairies, they’d completely vanished. The buffalo runners sent two men to Fort Dodge, Kansas, to ask the colonel there what the penalty was if the skinners crossed into the Texas Panhandle and onto reservation land. The Medicine Lodge Treaty said no white settlers could hunt there, but that’s where the remaining buffalo had gathered. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Dodge met with the two men, and one remembered the colonel say, “Boys, if I were a buffalo hunter I would hunt buffalo where buffalo are.” Then the colonel wished them good luck.

In the next decade, the hide hunters exterminated nearly every buffalo. Colonel Dodge would later write that “where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with a sickening stench, and the vast plain which only a short twelve months before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary desert.”

The wasteland was so scattered with the bones of dead animals and buffalos that all the prairie felt like a graveyard risen. One judge called it a “charnel house, with so many skulls staring at a man, and so many bones that newcomers felt nervous.”

During a hard drought, with no buffalo left, settlers and Native Americans hunted their bones, selling them for fertilizer. In Isenberg’s book, he tells about a reporter who asks a railroad worker, “‘Do the Indians make a living gathering these bones?’ Yes, replied a railroad inspector, “but it is a mercy that they can’t eat bones. We were never able to control the savages until their supply of meat was cut off.’”

Some men saw the future. And even before the buffalo runners had wiped out almost every animal and the U.S. Army had to protect the last remaining wild herd in Yellowstone National Park, conservationists lobbied Congress to pass a bill that’d save buffalo. It did not sit well with Sheridan. No record exists of his words, but one hide hunter later said Sheridan had defended the industry to legislatures by saying: “These men have done in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years.”

Congress passed the bill to protect buffalo in 1875, but President Grant refused to sign it. The peace treaties had failed, and in that same year, in what’s called the Red River War, the U.S. beat back the Comanche, the Kiowa, Cheyenne, and the Arapaho on the southern plains and forced them into reservations. Without buffalo, the U.S. government delivered cattle to some tribes. When the Oglala Lakota in the north mounted horses and killed the cows in ritual as they had the buffalo on their prairie hunts, the government stopped sending live cows and instead shipped meat from a nearby slaughterhouse. The Oglala Lakota burned the slaughterhouse down.

But that was all some time away. It’d be another four years before the buffalo-protection bill died, and the Native Americans resigned to reservations, from when Cody and the U.S. Army and the men from New York stood on the grassy hill, in that unusually warm September in 1871, above the Platte River in Nebraska.

Cody and the men had circled their horses around the herd until they were downwind. A buffalo can weigh 2,000 pounds, run 35 mph, and quickly pivot to fight with horns that can rip flesh like obsidian. When the men were close enough, Cody gave the signal to charge. He and the men from New York thundered toward the six buffalo, hoping to win the silver trophy, excited to kill. Of the moment, one man wrote:

“The buffalo, as usual, took one good look at their enemies, and then, wheeling around and stretching their tails straight in the air, set off, full gallop, in Indian file, at a pace that tested the best powers of the horses to surpass. Just as they started, our main body emerged from its concealment, and had a full view of the whole hunt, a most exciting and interesting sight to those new to the plains. On came the six huge buffalo, one behind the other, all running together as regularly as if kept in their places by some rule of drill, and close behind them the hunters, each horse doing his best, and now one leading and then another, as though in a hotly contested race.”

Money Monster: A Bear of a Wall Street Satire

Money Monster wants to be a film straight out of the ’70s, a snarling satire of media mores and capitalist villains, shot through with the profane fury of a Paddy Chayefsky script. At best, it’s a star vehicle from the late ’90s, a creakier, simpler tale of a hostage crisis at a facsimile of CNBC’s Mad Money, tied to the backs of two marquee idols—George Clooney and Julia Roberts. As its tense studio antics unfold, though, the sad truth becomes apparent: Money Monster is a movie-star vehicle that isn’t giving its movie stars anything to do.

That flaw is especially galling since it’s the fourth film directed by Jodie Foster, and her first since 2011’s The Beaver, a misguided but admirably demented attempt to restart Mel Gibson’s career. Foster has been an actor’s director in the past—Home for the Holidays is a bunch of great performances wrapped around a mediocre script—but she errs in Money Monster by handing the up-and-comer Jack O’Connell all the fun material. Beyond that, the film is existentially confused: It’s a media satire that isn’t humorous enough, and a hostage thriller that’s too light-hearted to maintain any real sense of danger.

Money Monster doubles as the name of the obnoxious stock-tip show hosted by Lee Gates (Clooney), a smiling can of hairspray who repeats Wall Street talking points under the guise of financial expertise. Despite Foster’s claims to the contrary, Lee comes off as an obvious parody of Mad Money host Jim Cramer, whose costume-and-sound-effect-heavy show suffered criticism after the 2008 financial crisis. To be sure, Money Monster’s script (credited to three writers) isn’t looking for subtlety: The financial industry is the villain, and Lee is a mass-media enabler, as well as an oblivious pawn in some larger fraudulent shell game orchestrated by a callous CEO (Dominic West).

Midway through a broadcast, Kyle (O’Connell), an errant viewer who lost his savings on a faulty tip, crashes the show with a gun and forces Lee to wear an explosive vest. Here, the stakes are set: Kyle wants justice for the systemic wrongs done to him and every other little guy, and it’s up to Lee and his trusty producer Patty (Roberts) to comply with his demands. At this point, Money Monster has to choose between being a nutty parody or a taut thriller, but the tone swings wildly back and forth. At one moment, Lee begs his viewers to buy a depressed stock to save his life and recover Kyle’s savings—a strange, clever nod to the back-patting arrangement between the financial industry and the softball shows that cover it. But minutes later, Kyle is shrieking expletives and firing shots at the ceiling.

Money Monster swings wildly back and forth between being a nutty parody and a taut thriller.

O’Connell is a fine young actor who first emerged on the British teen series Skins and gave a breathtaking performance in the 2014 prison drama Starred Up that seemed to announce him as a major talent. Since then he hasn’t quite clicked, starring in Angelina Jolie’s prisoner-of-war drama Unbroken and now Money Monster, saddled with an unfortunate American accent both times. If there’s hidden depth to Kyle, O’Connell doesn’t find it, spending much of his considerable screen time jamming his gun against Lee’s forehead and promising to blow his brains out. Despite all that, Kyle never registers as a real or interesting threat, dropping out of the action (which is largely confined to Lee’s studio) whenever other characters need to take center stage.

If Foster was aiming for the edgy, vibrant energy of great hostage thrillers like Spike Lee’s Inside Man (in which she appeared), she missed what makes those kinds of movies great—characters. Kyle is a meaningless cipher, a stand-in for the “working man” who does a disservice to the film’s overall message by barely feeling like a person at all. Lee should be more of a fun foil for him—Clooney is agreeably dumb in the film’s early scenes, but this is an actor who has turned buffoonery into an art form for the Coen Brothers time and time again. Money Monster’s plot demands he snap into competence too quickly to register a real story arc. Roberts, largely trapped in the booth keeping things under control, deploys restraint and star wattage in equal measure, though her talents are largely wasted on her barking orders at everyone to remain calm.

There’s plenty of hand-wringing about the death of the movie star in Hollywood, as comic-book franchises and CGI spectacles that any young actor can be plugged into become the norm for big studios. It’s an overblown concern, but Money Monster is exactly the kind of film to inspire that worry: If a sub-par script like this can attract names like Clooney, Roberts, and Foster, maybe audiences really are doomed. Just a few more script drafts, some visual verve, and a tighter focus on the film’s satirical elements could have turned Money Monster into the 1970s throwback it wants to be. As it is, it’s destined for the drugstore bargain bin.

Schools Are Put on Notice to Respect Transgender Rights

The Education and Justice Departments will send a letter Friday to every public-school district in the country notifying school administrators that discrimination against transgender students violates federal civil-rights law.

In the letter, which offers the most detailed federal guidance yet for educators on transgender students and their rights, the departments interpret anti-discrimination laws to apply when a parent or guardian tells school administrators about their child’s gender identity.

From there, the departments outline how Title IX forbids discrimination on the basis of gender identity in a variety of school functions, including housing, athletics, and single-sex classrooms. Other activities, including graduation ceremonies and yearbooks, are also covered.

The letter also strongly sides with transgender students on the issue of restrooms and locker rooms, which have become a flashpoint nationwide in debates about transgender rights. In the guidance letter, schools are told not to discriminate against students who choose to use restrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

While the letter itself does not carry legal force, it notifies teachers and administrators that discrimination against transgender students could bring sanctions, including the painful loss of federal funding.

Under the Obama administration, federal agencies have increasingly considered transgender discrimination to be a form of sex discrimination. The Education and Justice Departments first explicitly stated that Title IX covers transgender discrimination in 2013, although Friday’s letter is the strongest effort yet to apply that interpretation nationwide.

The letter caps a historic week for federal protection of transgender rights. On Monday, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against North Carolina targeting HB2, the state’s controversial bill requiring—among other things—transgender individuals to use bathrooms that don’t correspond to their gender identity. In an impassioned press conference, Attorney General Loretta Lynch described the statute as “state-sponsored discrimination” and implicitly compared it to Jim Crow laws.

“You have been told that this law protects vulnerable populations from harm. That is just not the case,” Lynch said. “What this law does is inflict further indignity for a population that has already suffered far more than its far share. This law provides no benefit to society, and all it does is harm innocent Americans.”

More Fallout From the Iran Sailor Incident

The U.S. Navy announced Thursday it had fired the commander of 10 U.S. sailors briefly detained by Iran in January after their ship entered Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf.

The Navy Times has more:

Cmdr. Eric Rasch, who at the time of the Jan. 12 incident was the executive officer of the Coastal Riverine Squadron 3, was removed from his job by Capt. Gary Leigh, head of Coastal Riverine Group 1, for what a Navy Expeditionary Combat Command release said was “a loss of confidence” in his ability to remain in command.

"Capt. Gary Leigh, commander, CRG-1, made this determination following his review of a preliminary investigation into the incident near Farsi Island in the Arabian Gulf, Jan. 12-13, involving 10 CRS-3 Sailors," the release said. "Rasch was assigned as the executive officer of CRS-3 during this time-frame."

Cmdr. Gregory Meyer, who was commanding officer at the time of the incident, is currently with Coastal Riverine Group 1, and has been put on “administrative hold,” meaning the Navy will not transfer him out of the unit, while a high-level review of the Navy’s investigation into the incident continues, said two officials familiar with internal deliberations.

Rasch is the first officer formally disciplined for the incident. Navy investigators completed their investigation into what went wrong in April and forwarded their report to top Navy officials. Its findings have not yet been made public.

The incident occurred on January 12, when the sailors were traveling in two small riverine craft from Bahrain to Kuwait through the Gulf. Along the way, they reportedly drifted into Iranian territorial waters, where two Iranian vessels intercepted them and detained the crew. No gunfire was exchanged.

A frantic diplomatic effort between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammed Javad Zarif, led to the release of the sailors and their boats the following morning.

The timing proved awkward for both countries, with President Obama scheduled to give his State of the Union address on the night of the incident and Iran only days away from receiving long-awaited sanctions relief as part of the nuclear accord it struck with six world powers.

Five Questions About Donald Trump's Racist Butler

Jeeves would be appalled by the lack of discretion.

Thursday was a pretty good day for Donald Trump—he swept into Washington for his meetings with Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republican leaders, and left town with a conciliatory statement from Ryan, a downright cordial one from Senator Lindsey Graham (who once compared nominating him to being shot), and warm statements from others.

Yet some of the attention for those meetings is being stolen by a series of appallingly racist comments made on Facebook by Trump’s longtime butler at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Anthony Senecal. Here’s a sample, caught by Mother Jones (and apparently since deleted):

To all my friends on FB, just a short note to you on our pus headed "president" !!!! This character who I refer to as zero (0) should have been taken out by our military and shot as an enemy agent in his first term !!!!! Instead he still remains in office doing every thing he can to gut the America we all know and love !!!!! Now comes Donald J Trump to put an end to the corruption in government !!!!

In addition to calling for the military to stage a coup and execute Obama, he also called for lynching the president:

I feel it is time for the SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION !!!!! The only way we will change this crooked government is to douche it !!!!! This might be the time with this kenyan fraud in power !!!!! ...[W]ith the last breath I draw I will help rid this America of the scum infested in its government--and if that means dragging that ball less dick head from the white mosque and hanging his scrawny ass from the portico--count me in !!!!!

David Corn has some more examples. Even if the posts have been deleted, Senecal didn’t deny them. In fact, he expanded on them to NBC’s Alex Jaffe:

In intvu w @ajjaffe, Trump's butler calls for Obama to be "hung from the portico of the White Mosque," calls Obama daughters "rent-a-kids"

— Beth Fouhy (@bfouhy) May 12, 2016

(What does “rent-a-kids” even mean?)

Senecal’s statements should inspire, in addition to a million “Clue” jokes, a few questions about Trump. The two men are close—a New York Times profile in March missed the racism but did capture the tightness of Senecal’s relationship with the entertainer, for whom he’s worked since 1985. (Senecal say he’s been at Mar-a-Lago since about 1959.)

Who’s lying about Anthony Senecal? Trump’s campaign, in response to the revelation of Senecal’s Facebook posts, disavowed them and said that he had not worked for Trump for years. But Senecal told both Mother Jones and the Times—whose reporter, Jason Horowitz, roamed the grounds at Mar-a-Lago with him—that he continued to work there. Senecal says Trump specifically asked him to stay on staff as a historian-in-residence, even as he retired from butler duties. Someone’s not telling the truth, and Trump’s campaign is the more obvious culprit. Which brings up the next point:
What kind of populist has a butler? OK, this one actually isn’t that tough a question. FDR was wealthy, too! For Trump, his wealth and implausible Horatio Alger self-image make him an aspirational figure for many supporters, rather than a symbol of elitist entitlement. Still, there’s something rich (pardon the phrase) about the fact that, as Olivia Nuzzi put it, “Romney's car elevator made him unelectable in 2012 but Trump's psychotic racist butler is just another Thursday in 2016.”
When exactly will Trump start hiring the best people? Trump’s answer to many staffing questions is that he’ll hire the best people. It’s his answer to why his administration will work so much better than previous ones, and it’s his answer to why voters needn’t worry about his lack of experience in government, defense, foreign policy, economic policy, etc. When, precisely, does he expect to start doing that? The fact that Senecal has been such a longtime, trusted employee ought not to fill anyone with confidence. And his comments follow, for example, the saga over campaign manager Corey Lewandowski grabbing and manhandling a reporter, than lying about it despite video evidence.
Why did Trump manage to denounce Senecal so much faster than David Duke? Remember when former KKK leader David Duke voiced his support for Trump back in February, Trump initially played dumb. “Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke,” he told Jake Tapper. “OK? I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don’t know.” That was implausible—he’d criticized Duke as far back as the 1990s—and he of course reversed himself eventually, blaming (again, implausibly) an earpiece problem. Now comes the case of Senecal, when Trump’s campaign issued a statement quickly, saying, “Tony Senecal has not worked at Mar-a-Lago for years, but nevertheless we totally and completely disavow the horrible statements made by him.” Trump noted he had never met Duke; not so with Senecal. Perhaps the faster response is evidence that Trump really is changing his approach, and pivoting toward the general election. However ...
What’s up with all the racists who support Trump’s campaign? One needn’t accuse Trump of bigotry—though there’s ample evidence to do so—to be perturbed by the number of people with repellent views who are ardent Trump backers. Meanwhile, minority voters hold overwhelmingly unfavorable views of Trump, for some reason. Does this perturb the Trump campaign?

Will any of this hurt Trump? Past experience says no—he seems to just keep rolling, though it’s true that open white supremacy and calls for the president’s death tend to turn off even the most forbearing ally. Trump has managed to shift expectations so far that the revelation of comments such as these seem like simply the latest in a parade of inanities (which they are), rather than a shocking shift away from normal (which they also are). All in all, it’s an embarrassing situation for the Trump campaign. Senecal told the Times that Trump’s mood could be reliably gauged by the color of his hat—red meaning ornery, white meaning pleasant. It’s a good bet that Trump will be donning the red cap this evening.

Kenya’s Anti-Doping Crisis

The world’s anti-doping authority has declared that Kenyan national athletics do not comply with international standards, putting the country’s participation in the Rio Olympics this summer at risk.

The World Anti-Doping Agency announced the recommendation from its independent review committee Thursday afternoon on Twitter:

The #WADA CRC has made the unanimous recommendation that #Kenya be declared non-compliant with immediate effect.

— WADA (@wada_ama) May 12, 2016

The CRC cites issues with #Kenya's legislation which it says is not in line with the World Anti-Doping Code.

— WADA (@wada_ama) May 12, 2016

The legislation WADA cites was approved last month. Facing pressure from WADA to crack down on cheating in sports, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta signed an anti-doping bill that created a national agency that would fine and imprison athletes who are found to be guilty of doping, according to the BBC.

The committee’s recommendation must be ratified by WADA’s board, The Guardian reports. The decision to ban Kenya from participating in the summer games is up to the International Olympic Committee.

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the global governing body for athletics, investigated doping allegations in Kenya last year. Dick Pound, the former president of WADA and chair of its independent committee, said in November that it is “pretty clear that there is a lot of performance-enhancing drugs being used” in Kenya. Pound led the investigation of Russian athletics that in November alleged widespread doping by athletes and corruption among officials. In response, the IAAF suspended Russia’s membership in the association. WADA officials were sent Russia to overhaul its anti-doping practices in time for Rio, and IAAF will decide on Russia’s membership in June.

Runner’s World detailed last year the reports of alleged cheating among Russian and Kenyan athletes:

Between 2001 and 2012, some 146 Olympic and world championships medalists in running and walking events 800 meters and longer had blood test results that were grounds for suspicion of performance-enhancing drug use, according to German TV station ARD’s new documentary Doping–Top Secret: The Shadowy World of Athletics, and simultaneous reporting by the Sunday Times.

Fifty-five of those said to have suspicious blood results were gold medalists. More than 80 of the suspicious medals were won by Russians, and 18 were won by Kenyans. In a 5,000-athlete database maintained by the International Association of Athletics Federations, 800 were judged by two Australia-based experts to have blood values that suggested illegal drug use, mainly indicative of the blood booster EPO.

Kenyan athletes won 11 medals in the 2012 Olympic Games in London, nearly all in track events. Russia won 18.

Can Chelsea Handler Break the Late-Night Format?

For all the downsides of binge-watching and serialized storytelling, Netflix has done much to revitalize many moribund TV genres with its original programming. The comic-book show, the grownup cartoon, and the network sitcom have all found surprising new angles thanks to the streaming service. But its new offering Chelsea—hosted by Chelsea Handler—is tackling an even steeper challenge: turning the late-night talk show, the most staid, old-school television format around, into something fresh and exciting. The series makes a noble effort, but from the look of its first episodes, it hasn’t yet figured out a way to stand out from its competitors.

Handler is a veteran at the talk-show game, and her long-running series on E!, Chelsea Lately, was more anarchic than her network-TV rivals, with its permanent roundtable of L.A. comedians riffing on pop culture and reality TV. Her Netflix series, which will release episodes every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, applies that freewheeling conversational style to more serious topics—education reform, tech innovation—while retaining some of the medium’s classic formatting. But more often than not, the combination is awkward rather than transformative.

Part of the problem is Handler’s insistence that she’s doing something radically different. “I’ve learned that I don’t want to do a monologue anymore,” she said in the first episode’s monologue, delivered to a laughing audience. “I know it seems like a monologue, but this is not a monologue. It’s an explanation. And if you don’t know the difference, then you can log out, or log off, or fuck off, or whatever ... I’m a late-show host that doesn’t want to be tied down by time, or television, or even hosting.”

That’d make more sense if Chelsea didn’t feel like such a classic late show, through and through. After her opening monologue, which disses the idea of an opening monologue, Handler transfers to a desk and makes a few jokes about the upcoming election, before cutting to a pre-taped sketch poking gentle fun at her new network. There’s nothing here viewers haven’t seen before—but that’s not entirely Handler’s fault. The late-night talk show really only hinges on two things: It airs late at night, and its stars and guests talk about current events, be they frivolous or weighty. What’s there to revolutionize?

Chelsea feels like a classic late-night show, through and through.

As with many Netflix shows, the biggest difference the viewer might immediately notice in Chelsea is the lack of ad breaks. With network shows, commercial breaks have come to inform the structure of each episode: They demand that a guest fit an anecdote into six minutes, or that the viewer sit through five ad breaks before watching the musical performance or stand-up set they might have tuned in for. Not so with Chelsea. Bored by the opening sketch, but interested in Handler’s discussion with Education Secretary John King? Just skip ahead to that. If a panel runs a little longer than expected, the show can keep it all in, since running times don’t matter much (episode one is 37 minutes long, episode two is 33). Meanwhile, even premium-cable talk shows like HBO’s Last Week Tonight, which also don’t have to worry about ads, still have to fit within a half-hour block.

Chelsea is also notable for its “near-live” status (it records the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of each week it airs), while all other network talk shows, from Stephen Colbert to Jimmy Fallon to Trevor Noah, tape hours before they air. Since joining Netflix, Handler has talked about how bored she got with the demands of her E! show and the necessity of discussing the latest life updates of reality stars and hot items from gossip blogs. She envisions Chelsea as 60 Minutes but “faster and cooler,” and the first two episodes of the show try to accomplish that by throwing wonks like King or TED Talks founder Chris Anderson together with celebrities like Drew Barrymore and Gwyneth Paltrow. It provokes some insightful moments—and some wince-inducing ones, like Handler’s attempt to freestyle rap with Pitbull minutes after he tearfully talked about the educators who had an impact on his adolescence.

Late night has strict formatting for a reason: The whiplash between straightforward comedy and insightful, honest interviews can otherwise be too much for audiences. Still, few talk shows know from the start how to nail the tone they’re aiming for. Fortunately, Handler has time to figure that out—the show will air 90 episodes this year, three per week, throwing together eclectic groups of guests. Chelsea may be off to a shaky start, but for those who want to wait for the show to find its feet before checking out some episodes, there should be an interesting backlog of segments in a few weeks. It might not exactly overhaul the late-night format, but few shows are in a better position to do so.

Ding Dong, Azealia Banks Is off Twitter

Even the biggest fans of the rapper Azealia Banks’s music—I’d count myself among them—have to admit, by now, that her larger ongoing cultural significance stems from her tweets rather than her music. At a time when sensitivity—or “political correctness”—is a hot topic, Banks has played the unique role of reminding people that there’s no partisan monopoly on hatefulness. She supports Trump but also parts of far-left ideology; she’s flung hate speech at nearly every identity group imaginable, with her latest flare-up slurring the singer Zayn Malik for being Pakistani and the actress Skai Jackson for being young. This time, the results are that she’s been dropped from a U.K. music festival and—this is big, though possibly coincidentally timed—suspended from Twitter.

It feels like satire come to life that her long-awaited reckoning would come only after insulting an insanely popular ex-boy-bander like Malik. The racism and homophobia on display wasn’t new for her; the lesson would seem to be that the one group you never want to offend is One Direction fans. If you want to find a deeper lesson, though, you can: Banks’s final (for now) Twitter tirade was a perfectly incoherent masterclass in showing how we end up with so many people spewing hate speech at strangers online.

The incident began with Banks posting a side-by-side comparison on Instagram of Malik’s new music video with an old one of hers. The point was that he was jacking her aesthetic, though the picture of skinny shirtless Malik next to Banks in a bra seemed like a wink that she wasn’t being all that serious. Ditto for the caption: “I’m not mad about this though. Zayn is a cutie pie.”

Soon after, Malik tweeted “I see you reaching but I don’t care” and “My @’s too good for you.” He might have been referring to Banks but he might not have been. She assumed he was, replying, “dude, I make better music than you. Simmer down with that fake white boy rebellion and that wannabe beiber swag.”

She reached for the cruelest weapon available.

From there, she underwent a pretty dramatic devolution. The next tweet called him a “curry scented bitch,” leading the online Desi community to quickly turned #curryscentedbitch into a pride slogan. The one after: “imma start calling you punjab you dirty bitch.” Imma start—in other words, she’s choosing to go there. She’s reaching for the cruelest weapon available. Unvarnished racism blended with attempts at a wider critique as her tweets lectured him that he’d only ever been a token in One Direction: “Do you understand that you are a sand nigger who emulates white boys’ renditions of black male hood?”

She later posted a textbook non-apology for her freakout—“Remember that offense is never given, it is only taken. I apologize to everyone who TOOK offense.” More interesting was her longer explanation:

I said what I said to Zayn because I was angry. He felt as if he was too good to acknowledge me yet not too good to copy my creativity. I had to remind him that we’re both in the same boat in this industry and people of color by reminding him that no matter what you may think of yourself, the world still sees you as “other,” as they see me.

This might have made sense if she hadn’t been the one employing disgusting slurs in exactly the way that the racists she was supposedly exposing might use them. The first two lines, suggesting she turned to hate speech out of anger and powerlessness, seems like as good an explanation as anyone is going to get for what leads someone to send so many mixed (and horrifying) messages over the years. Twitter has made it easy for her and others to air their ugliest feelings with the ugliest words possible; it hasn’t ever seemed to make those feelings go away. For now it’s doing the next best thing, which is taking her words offline.

Who Is Left at Guantanamo?

On January 20, 2016, Mohammed Ali Abdullah Bwazir stood with shackles on his ankles, wrists, and waist at the bottom of a ramp leading up to a U.S. Air Force cargo plane. The plane was going to take him, along with two other Guantanamo Bay prisoners, to an undisclosed southern European nation. Bwazir, who is either 35 or 36 and is from Yemen, had been cleared for release after spending 14 years in the U.S. prison in Cuba.

He refused to get on the plane.

“He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t acting out. He was very calm,” Army Colonel David Heath, the Guantanamo prison warden, later recalled to Carol Rosenberg, the Miami Herald reporter who has been covering the prison since it first opened. Bwazir’s lawyer, John Chandler, told The New York Times the man was depressed and feared living in a country where he had no family. Bwazir wanted to go to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Indonesia, where he has a mother, brothers, uncles, and aunts. Faced instead with a new life in Europe, he chose to return to his cell.

Bwazir’s case highlights the complexities of emptying the prison opened after 9/11 to house dangerous terrorism suspects. The potential release of its captives carries a host of legal, political, and diplomatic implications. They illustrate why two presidents have been unsuccessful in closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, despite criticism of the treatment, including waterboarding, that some of the inmates underwent.

About 780 inmates have been held at Guantanamo since it opened in 2002. Today, 80 remain.

Most have not been charged with any crimes, according to a comprehensive database maintained by The New York Times. All are men, mostly in their 30s and 40s. The youngest is about 30 or 31; the oldest is 68. Most have been there for more than 13 or 14 years. Some have gone on hunger strikes and were force-fed with liquid nutrients through nasal tubes.

The inmates come from 17 countries and the Palestinian territories. The majority of inmates—43—are from Yemen. Eight are from Afghanistan, and six each from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The rest are from Tajikistan, Tunisia, Iraq, Algeria, Indonesia, Kenya, Libya, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Russia, and Somalia. One inmate’s native country is unknown.

At least 26 inmates, including Bwazir, have been cleared for release; a review board system President Obama created by executive order in 2011 has determined they no longer pose a security threat to the United States. This week, the board cleared for release Salem Ahmed Hadi, a suspected jihadist who left Yemen for Afghanistan before 9/11 and arrived at Guantanamo in its second week of existence. It was his fifth time before the board, which had previously rejected releasing him.

At least 43 inmates are being held indefinitely and have not been recommended for release by the review boards. These indefinite detainees are known as the “forever prisoners,” the captives deemed too dangerous to release but who have not been charged with any crimes. Indefinite detention without trial is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, but the Bush administration argued that international laws did not apply to the “unlawful enemy combatants” who were taken to Guantanamo.

Seven inmates have been charged with war crimes in Guantanamo’s military commissions, the judicial system set up by the Bush administration and tweaked by the Obama administration. They include Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged organizer of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and his four alleged co-conspirators. The others are Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi detainee charged for allegedly organizing the bombing of a U.S. Navy destroyer in Yemen in 2000 that killed 17 sailors, and Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, an Iraqi detainee who allegedly led al-Qaeda’s military operations from 2002 to 2004.

Three inmates have been convicted of war crimes, but the conviction of one was overturned on appeal. Majid Khan, a Pakistani native who once lived in Baltimore, pleaded guilty to war crimes in 2012, acknowledging he returned to Pakistan after 9/11 to work for Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Ahmed Muhammed Haza al-Darbi, a Saudi citizen, pleaded guilty in 2014 over the 2002 al-Qaeda attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al-Bahlul, a Saudi citizen accused of being Osama bin Laden’s “media secretary,” was convicted in 2008 of conspiracy, terrorism-related charges, and other charges. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in 2013, saying the crimes of which he was convicted were not recognized as war crimes at the time he committed them.

The White House’s push to shutter Guantanamo for good began a decade ago. In May 2006, President George W. Bush said he wanted to close the detention center. Two years later, Obama made the closure of the prison one of his campaign promises. In his first days in office, Obama issued an executive order to close the prison within a year. He has since vowed to shut it down before he leaves office.

The Bush administration released about 540 detainees without charge. The Obama administration has released 158. Detainees have gone to countries willing to accept them, 58 nations in all, according to the Times database. Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia have accepted the most at 203 and 134, respectively. Pakistan has accepted 63. Five Taliban detainees were released in the swap that freed Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from five years of captivity in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nations on six continents have accepted Guantanamo’s prisoners. Nine have died in the camp, five of them by suicide, according to U.S. officials.

Detainees do not choose where they are released. “We’re not a travel agency,” Lee Wolosky, the State Department’s special envoy for the Guantanamo closure, told the Herald’s Rosenberg, after Bwazir asked to be taken back to his cell earlier this year. “We’re not here to fulfill every wish and desire of a resettlee.” The U.S. no longer transfers detainees to Yemen because of the worsening political and security climates and an active a-Qaeda affiliate in the country. U.S. law restricts transfers to countries whose security situations are considered unstable, including Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia. In February, Saudi Arabia agreed to accept non-citizens from Guantanamo for the first time.

Since 2009, Obama has sought to transfer detainees to detention facilities in the U.S. But congressional Republicans have repeatedly blocked those attempts, passing legislation that prohibits the use of government funds to transfer prisoners to American soil and the construction of facilities to house them. Only two detainees have been transferred to the United States: Yaser Esam Hamdi, in April 2002, and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani in June 2009. Hamdi, who is a citizen of both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and was born in Louisiana, was held at a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina, until October 2004 when he was repatriated to Saudi Arabia. Ghailani, a Tanzanian, was transferred to the U.S. in 2009 and remains at the federal super-maximum security prison in Fremont, Colorado.

In February, the administration, in a final proposal to Congress for Guantanamo’s closure, proposed sending detainees to 13 potential sites on U.S. soil but did not identify the facilities. Last year, Pentagon officials surveyed potential candidates, visiting federal prisons in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Charleston, South Carolina, as well as state and federal facilities in Florence, Colorado.

Opponents of closing Guantanamo argue detainees return to terrorist activity when released. Top Republican lawmakers and foreign-policy hawks, including Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, say 30 percent of freed detainees become terrorists. Bu Congress-mandated reports from the administration’s intelligence officials show the rate of confirmed recidivism is about 17 percent. Obama has said Guantanamo serves as a “recruiting tool” for other extremist militant groups, like the Islamic State, but experts who study jihadist propaganda say the camp is not featured prominently in jihadist materials.

The first 20 prisoners of Guantanamo Bay arrived in Cuba on January 11, 2002. In the short months after Bush declared a war on terrorism, the U.S. military had captured 45 fighters from al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Middle East, and it needed a place to put them. Officials ruled out Guam after its citizens raised concerns about the presence of terrorism suspects, and settled on the U.S. naval base on Cuba’s southeastern tip—“the least worst place we could have selected,” as former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once described it. Back then, the base was capable of housing 100 detainees, and the first captives were held in the steel-and-wire cages as the detention center was expanded.

More than a decade later, the sprawling camp has enough facilities to house hundreds of prisoners. Military personnel vastly outnumber captives. The annual cost to taxpayers of maintaining the camp was $454 million in 2013.

The last known arrival to the prison was Muhammed Rahim al-Afghani in 2008, an Afghan described as a high-level al-Qaeda operative. The latest release was in April of this year, when nine Yemeni prisoners were transferred to Saudi Arabia.

In 2013, Rosenberg, the Herald reporter, told Poynter she was assigned to report the Guantanamo story “start to finish.” She doesn’t expect Obama to meet his self-imposed deadline. “I thought it would be closed when Obama was elected, but as it stands, it could be that we will just be waiting for the last guy to die before it closes,” she said.