Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 168

The Growing Divide Between Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin

The latest chapter from George R. R. Martin’s long-gestating novel The Winds of Winter, released on the author’s website yesterday, is typically tantalizing material. Like the rest his Song of Ice and Fire series, it’s told entirely from the point of view of a specific character—this time Princess Arianne Martell, the heiress to the kingdom of Dorne, as she ponders a new challenger to the Iron Throne of Westeros. It adds more context to two crucial stories and lends further depth to one of Martin’s most dynamic female characters. It also has nothing to do with the hit HBO series that the novels inspired.

Game of Thrones, currently in its sixth season, has largely diverged from Martin’s books, telling stories past their current end point in the completed novels as the annual demands of TV production outpace the author’s decades-long writing process. Fans have worried that the show, which creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have said will probably end after two more truncated seasons, will spoil Martin’s grand conclusion. But as every chapter released from The Winds of Winter shows, including this latest check-in with Arianne, there’s nothing to fear. Martin is telling tales of characters the show’s viewers will never meet, on quests that will never make it to the screen. And the show is actually beginning to work toward an ending, which leaves Martin free to do something else entirely.

Fans have also long accepted that Game of Thrones will finish before every chapter of A Song of Ice and Fire hits bookstores. Even if Martin had finished The Winds of Winter last year as he intended, he would have had to turn around the seventh and supposedly final entry within a year or two to beat the show. He hasn’t worked at that pace in a long time: The shortest turnaround between books was just under two years between the second and third novels in the series, and the last entry came out in 2011, the year Game of Thrones premiered. But when Martin announced to fans that Winds of Winter wouldn’t be done in time for season six of Game of Thrones, he tried to reassure readers. “Some of the ‘spoilers’ you may encounter in season six may not be spoilers at all ... because the show and the books have diverged, and will continue to do so,” he wrote.

The new Arianne chapter, which Martin has read aloud at fan conventions, is a perfect example of that divergence, coming at an opportune moment since the show has begun killing pivotal characters. Arianne, the heiress of Dorne, isn’t a character in the show at all—she was replaced by a male heir, Trystane, a minor character in the books. His elevation sparked outcry from fans who thought the show was losing a compelling female leader, but in Martin’s pages she endures, negotiating the future of her kingdom and reckoning with a new contender to the throne.

That character, the pretender Aegon Targaryen, also isn’t in the show. Neither is his companion Jon Connington, who’s discussed extensively in the new chapter. Martin has also released chapters about Stannis Baratheon and Barristan Selmy (both killed off by HBO last season), and Victarion Greyjoy (who doesn’t exist on the show and likely never will). As the show came closer to overtaking Martin’s books, he made more and more references to the “butterfly effect” of TV plotting, where Game of Thrones’s attempts to simplify the grander story arc would only lead to bigger differences between the books and show. What first felt like a cop-out now feels on point: Readers are no longer worried the show’s going to spoil the novels, just that it’ll move forward clumsily with its adaptation efforts.

Martin is telling tales of characters show viewers will never meet, on quests that will never make it to the screen.

Consider a semi-humorous Kickstarter campaign to “fix” the show’s Dorne plotline, which was largely dispatched in the opening episode of this season. In Martin’s books, Dorne is a powerful sector of Westeros under the rule of the infirm but wise Prince Doran, who’s scheming to position his children for greatness as the realm falls into chaos. On the show, Doran was an ineffectual fool, eventually betrayed and murdered by his brother’s paramour. His death scene, and the subsequent murder of his son, felt like Benioff and Weiss washing their hands of a plotline they never quite knew how to weave into the larger story. The Kickstarter campaign says it needs $20 million to replicate the show’s style and production value and shoot enough material to paper over the problem areas. The campaign’s creators probably aren’t going to make it (currently, backers have pledged almost $24,000), but their project captures just how strongly many readers feel about the show’s new direction.

For all the complaints from hardcore fans, Benioff and Weiss are working with admirable intent this year, and they’re wise to point Game of Thrones toward an ending. Dorne may be an intriguing location in the books, but it never worked for the show, so it had to go. Characters like Stannis, Barristan, Roose Bolton, and others were compelling figures who weren’t indispensable to the show’s outcome, so it’s no surprise they were all killed off in typically bloody HBO fashion.

Martin, on the other hand, may never even finish his grand opus. When he began writing A Song of Ice and Fire in 1991, it was planned as three books. The fourth book turned into a volume of unpublishable length and was split into two, taking over a decade to be released. Martin still swears there are only two more entries left in the series. His plot meanderings across his fictional continents may frustrate some readers, but the approach is also why so many were drawn to the detailed world he created in the first place. For fans dissatisfied with the show’s pared-down move toward an endgame, there’ll be no shortage of richness in the books to come—as long as they don’t mind waiting several more years.

The First Infantry Women of the U.S. Marines

The U.S. Marine Corps has allowed two female service members to join the infantry, marking the first time women will hold jobs in the combat force.

The Marines have approved one woman to become a rifleman and another to become a machine gunner, The Military Times reported Monday. Both women requested the jobs.

“The Corps applauds the time and efforts of those Marines who volunteered,” said Captain Philip Kulczewski, a Marine spokesman at the Pentagon. More from The Military Times:

Since no women have graduated from the service’s Infantry Officer Course, female Marine or Navy officers assigned to infantry battalions will serve in support roles. The 30th female Marine to attempt IOC left her class on April 21 after she was unable to complete two hikes. She has the opportunity to attempt the course again in July.

The Marines did not release the women’s names. Under the service’s gender-integration policy, two female officers will be assigned to the infantry unit 90 days before its new members arrive.              

The U.S. military announced in December it would open all combat jobs in every branch of the armed forces to women starting this year. “They’ll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers, and everything else that was previously open only to men,” U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said at the time.

Carter approved the Marine Corps’ gender integration plan in March, making 233 women who graduated from infantry training and other military occupational-specialty schools eligible to apply for combat jobs.

The U.S. military will see several firsts for female service members this year. The Army announced last month that 22 women would be commissioned as infantry and armor officers for the first time. A female staff sergeant will attempt the six-week course of the Marine Corps’s special-operations command this summer; if she completes training, she could become the first female critical-skills operator. The Navy has begun collecting applications for SEAL training from men and women, but no women have applied as of this month.

Related Video

Long before the Pentagon's announcement, women were already embedded in the front lines of Afghanistan.

Harriet Tubman Was My Wonder Woman

I’d like to say my 12-year-old son Justice was enjoying every second of the American history lesson my wife and I were giving him. It was Independence Day weekend last summer, and we were driving up Jefferson Davis Highway from Richmond, Virginia. I pointed out the Confederate road markers along the way to teach my son about the Civil War. My wife and I took turns Googling the names and landmarks mentioned on the monuments and summarizing out loud. Justice was also on his iPhone, but not paying us much attention—I could tell by the way his fingers kept rapidly tapping the touchscreen that he was playing one of his games. I even tried the very Dad approach of using pop-culture references to grab his attention—“So Justice, this spot over here was like the Confederate Army’s no flex zone—you know, like Rae Sremmurd?”—to no avail.

For a second, though, I thought perhaps it wasn’t my corny presentation that was turning Justice off, but rather the macabre details about war and slavery. But he disabused me of the notion when I brought it up—he didn’t feel threatened, likely because the reality of growing up black in America today is in many ways much scarier than the tales of rebel generals of yesteryear. That’s not to say the stories of the ghosts of Confederate militants and Klan vigilantes aren’t also haunting, or disturbing, in their own right. Despite my brief misgivings, I’d never hesitated before then when it came to sharing the ugliness of America’s racial history with my son. That’s probably because I wasn’t spooked by these kinds of stories growing up, just as my parents hadn’t been unnerved about exposing me to them.

One of the ways they introduced me to these stories was through comic books, though not the kind my son reads today. The comics of my youth weren’t from the DC or Marvel universes: The first graphic novels I ever encountered were about black figures from history, courtesy of the Golden Legacy comics first published by Bertram A. Fitzgerald, Jr. in the 1960s and ’70s. None of my peers or friends got the same introduction to comics I did, but my parents were pretty mindful about the media I consumed as a child. I guess they figured if I were going to lay eyes on storyboards filled with graphic violence, they might as well have been about black history, which itself has no shortage of savagery.

I was probably in the 4th grade when my mother started bringing the books home from a five-and-dime store in the city. Each Golden Legacy comic was basically an animated biography of figures such as the early D.C. urban planner Benjamin Banneker and the arctic explorer Matthew Henson. (I’m pretty sure I read the whole series.) At risk of sounding all Coolie Hotep High, it’s thanks to those books that the first comic superheroes I ever knew were Crispus Attucks, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass.

Of course, I knew who Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were, though mostly from cartoons. Those narratives were cool, but not one scene from any of their story arcs resonated with me like the scene from Golden Legacy’s The Saga of Harriet Tubman “The Moses of Her People” where a slave-master struck Tubman in the head with an iron weight. The illustrations weren’t super pulpy, but they didn’t skimp on the violence either. The artist was able to convey in that scene just how painful the iron blast was: The nasty gash it left on her face made me wince like nothing from Superman did.

Yet the artist also illustrated the narrative in a way that subtly suggested the crushing blow somehow knocked supernatural powers into Tubman that allowed her to envision things many of her enslaved loved ones couldn’t—like freedom. In my mind, those scenes were like the spider bite to Peter Parker. As Tubman led group after group of enslaved black people through the Underground Railroad to liberation at the end of the book, she became the only Wonder Woman that made sense to me.

The first comic superheroes I ever knew were Crispus Attucks, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass.

After that, I didn’t want to read anything about slavery that didn’t feature Tubman’s heroic triumphs. The Golden Legacy comic Crispus Attucks and the Minutemen had the same effect on me, with its portrayal of how the Revolutionary War jumped off with a black man and his clan at the front. And after I’d read the two-part Golden Legacy series on Frederick Douglass, you couldn’t tell me I didn’t know everything that I needed to know about the Civil War.

But, of course, there was much more for me to learn; the Golden Legacy comic books were only my entry point into a deeper well of knowledge. My father, an avid reader, stacked plenty of books about black history around the house that I was more than happy to gormandize as I grew older. These works were filled with the thoughts and ideas of black men like Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and John Henrik Clarke—all of them looking to correct the historical doctrines that sought to paint slavery as an otherwise benign and painless institution. The racial-violence quotient in this literature was far beyond anything I read or saw in the Golden Legacy stories.

In a recent conversation, my father told me he wasn’t really ever worried about my young exposure to such weighty and morbid accounts of racism. Having grown up without his own father around, he said, he thought it was important that I rummage through those books to understand “the lay of the land” so I could raise questions about what I learned. “Whatever you were exploring back then, if you came to me, I welcomed it as a necessary conversation,” he told me. “And I was more than happy to entertain that and to tell you that this is what you need to know for survival.”

My mother also said she had no anxiety about my exposure to America’s racial past. I can’t remember a time in my youth when she didn’t keep a healthy crop of Ebony magazines around the house, and there was a time when I saw, in one issue, the infamous open-casket funeral picture of Emmett Till with his swollen, chewed-up face. I learned from reading the article that Till had been beaten to a pulp and lynched by two white men in Mississippi who accused the black teenager of flirting with a white woman. The story shook me up pretty badly, but it didn’t cause my mother to start stashing the Ebonys away. When I spoke to her about this recently, she told me she was more concerned about me reading the Encyclopedia Brown series, because of “all those ghouls and monsters” in the books.

Maybe these childhood experiences were why I had no qualms last summer about pulling over on Jefferson Davis Highway to take my son to view one of the Confederate memorials up close. I risked scaring or scarring him by providing the context for what we were examining: the lynchings, the whippings, the Fugitive Slave Act, the drapetomania enslaved blacks were diagnosed with when they tried to run away from it all.

Justice didn’t seem traumatized at all, though. In fact, it seemed to finally be piquing his interest, possibly even piloting some small rage in him. After all, my son was coming up in the age of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and the Charleston Nine. In the end, there’s very little I can do to shield him from those graphics. The ongoing chronicles of American racial terror are something few, if any, black families have the luxury of avoiding.

Italy's Civil Unions Battle

Italian legislators voted to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples on Wednesday, spurning fierce resistance by the Roman Catholic Church in favor of a growing consensus on LGBT rights in Western Europe.

The Italian Chamber of Deputies voted 372 to 51 in favor of the bill, with 99 legislators abstaining. The Italian Senate previously approved it in February. The New York Times has more details:

At the Trevi Fountain in Rome, people with rainbow flags gathered to celebrate.

It was a historic occasion for a nation that is still dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, which opposed the measure, and where traditional family norms are still strong. It was also a victory for Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who supported the bill.

Nearly every Western country has legalized same-sex marriage or some form of civil union for gays and lesbians. Italy was perhaps the most prominent exception, and the issue has generated significant controversy.

To compel allied legislators to vote for the bill, Renzi connected it to a motion of no confidence in his government, which he won.

Wednesday’s vote was a significant victory for gay and lesbian Italians, but not a sweeping one. Opposition from Catholic clergy pushed legislators to water down some of the bill’s protections. As the Guardian noted, the final version has numerous shortcomings:

A draft article that would have granted gay couples the right to adopt their partners’ biological children was dropped. While adoption has not been ruled out, family judges will decide on a case-by-case basis.

Amid concern that civil unions would be too similar to marriage, references to a need for faithfulness were removed. Gay couples will be able to take each other’s names and inherit each other’s residual pension rights, but critics say the new rules fall short of the legal protection offered to same-sex couples in other European countries, as well as Canada and the U.S.

Another influential factor in the bill’s passage was the European Court of Human Rights. The supranational tribunal ruled last July that by not offering legal protections to civil unions or marriages by gay couples, Italy was in violation of Europe’s human-rights convention.

Missouri's First Execution of 2016

Missouri executed Earl Forrest on Wednesday night by lethal injection, marking the state’s first execution in 2016.

A Missouri Department of Corrections spokesman said Forrest was executed at 7:10 p.m. local time at a state prison in Bonne Terre. He was pronounced dead eight minutes later.

Forrest received a death sentence in 2004 for the 2002 slayings of Harriet Smith, Michael Wells, and Dent County police officer JoAnn Barnes. St. Louis Public Radio has more details:

According to court documents, Forrest went to Smith's house to demand she buy a mobile home and a lawn mower for him, in exchange for his introducing her to someone who could provide her with methamphetamine. He fatally shot Wells in the face during the confrontation, then shot Smith six times, killing her.

Forrest later killed Deputy Barnes during a shootout at his home with law enforcement. He also shot his then-girlfriend, Angela Gamblin and Dent County Sheriff Bob Wofford during the standoff. Wofford and Gamblin survived.

In his final filing to the U.S. Supreme Court, Forrest challenged his death sentence as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. The petition cited Justice Stephen Breyer’s lengthy dissent last year in Glossip v. Gross urging the court to reconsider the death penalty’s constitutionality.

“The death penalty has outlived any conceivable purpose,” the filing stated. “It is imperfect in application, arbitrary in result, and serves no legitimate penological purpose.”

Missouri officials stood by Forrest’s death sentence. “Earl Forrest callously murdered three people, including a deputy sheriff, over a box of methamphetamine,” Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said in a statement after the execution. “Missouri’s law enforcement officers put their lives on the line every day.  They need to know that we will fight just as hard for justice for them and their families.”

The U.S. Supreme Court denied the last-minute request for a stay of execution on Wednesday with no recorded dissents. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon also issued a statement declining to grant clemency to Forrest hours before the scheduled execution.

Forrest was the 14th person to be executed in the U.S. this year and the 1,436th person executed since the Supreme Court revived capital punishment in 1976.

Colorado Planned Parenthood Shooter Ruled Not Fit for Trial

The man who allegedly killed three people and injured nine others last year at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs is not fit to stand trial, a Colorado judge ruled Wednesday.

Robert Dear, who said that he would be greeted at the gates of heaven by aborted fetuses, has admitted to the deadly, six-hour standoff with police last November. Dear used four Soviet-style SKS semi-automatic rifles, a shotgun, a rifle, and two handguns in the shooting. Dear said he attacked the Planned Parenthood in an attempt to prevent women from obtaining abortions.

Judge Gilbert Martinez ordered Dear to be sent to the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo. A doctor had previously testified that Dear suffered from delusions. Local CBS affiliate KKTV reports:

Surveillance video of Dear drinking out of his toilet was shown in court. [The doctor] says that could be linked to his suspicion that he is being poisoned, which Dear loudly concurred with during the testimony. The doctor concluded that Dear's rational understanding of the case is interwoven with his delusion that the FBI is after him. Dear made several outbursts in court, including a rant about the bad things that happened to people who “made fun of Obama.”

Wednesday’s ruling delays the case against Dear, who has been charged with 179 criminal counts, including murder and attempted murder, until he is found competent to stand trial. Martinez said he would issue a written review of the case on August 11.

The Jian Ghomeshi Legal Saga Ends

Jian Ghomeshi, the former Canadian radio star,  apologized Wednesday to a woman who accused him of sexual assault and signed a peace bond as part of an agreement with prosecutors, ending a two-year legal saga that roiled Canadian media and sparked a national conversation on sexual assault.

The charges stemmed from allegations made by Kathryn Borel, who worked alongside Ghomeshi at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Prior to the allegations against him, Ghomeshi was one of the most prominent figures in Canadian media and had a substantial international following.

The peace bond avoids a second trial for Ghomeshi that had been scheduled for June. The Toronto Star has more on the allegations and his apology:

Ghomeshi, 48, stood before a judge and read an apology to Kathryn Borel for his “sexually inappropriate behaviour” in the workplace.

“I now recognize that I crossed boundaries inappropriately,” Ghomeshi said, speaking in the court for the first time since entering his not-guilty plea. “I didn’t appreciate the damage that I caused… the incident was thoughtless and I was insensitive to her perspective and how demeaning my conduct was towards her.”

The court heard that while they were working late at the office one night in 2008 Ghomeshi approached Borel from behind as she leaned over her, “held her waist and pressed his pelvis back and forth repeatedly into her buttocks” while they were both fully clothed, according to the facts supporting the peace bond. The incident lasted several seconds.

Outside the courthouse, Borel told reporters she wanted the ordeal to end and considered his apology to be “an acknowledgement of wrongdoing.” She also criticized the CBC for ignoring her complaints when she raised them in 2008.

Borel was not the only woman to accuse Ghomeshi of sexual abuse. In March, an Ontario judge acquitted him of four counts of sexual assault and one count of “overcoming resistance by choking.” The charges stemmed from accusations by three women, though more than 20 women came forward with allegations of violence and abuse after his departure from the CBC in 2014.

Toronto police filed charges against him later that year. Prosecutors chose to try Borel’s allegations separately from the other charges because it occurred at their workplace, whereas the other incidents occurred at his home.

Peace bonds are a staple of the Canadian criminal-justice system, with resemblances to probation and restraining orders in the U.S. system. Under the bond, Ghomeshi will not be allowed to contact Borel in any way and must “keep the peace” by not committing other crimes. Violating the bond could result in a months-long jail sentence. Agreeing to a peace bond also does not legally count as an admission of guilt.

In exchange, prosecutors dropped the charges against him, avoiding a second trial scheduled for June. Canadian criminal-defense lawyer David Butt noted in The Globe and Mail that the bond could suggest trouble with the prosecution’s case:

Peace bonds are daily fare in criminal courts, with two distinct patterns of use. The first is to clear minor flotsam and jetsam off our chronically crowded court dockets. Neighbour stomp on your tulips? Peace bond. Throw a drunken ineffectual punch at a sports bar when someone dissed your team too hard? Peace bond. Common-sense prosecutors use peace bond in minor cases when the wake-up call of just being charged is lesson enough, and more serious matters await.

The second pattern of use of a peace bond is altogether different. Whenever a serious charge is resolved with a peace bond, the unstated message is that the case was on life support. In serious cases, a peace bond is an all-but abject surrender by the prosecution, a face-saving measure just shy of a complete abandonment of the case.

Speaking to reporters after the court proceedings, Borel said she supported the prosecutors’ decision to seek a peace bond and said the ordeal would not be over until Ghomeshi “admits to everything he’s done.”

“In a perfect world, people who commit sexual assault would be convicted for their crimes,” she said in her statement. “Jian Ghomeshi is guilty of having done the things that I’ve outlined today. So when it was presented to me that the defence would be offering us an apology, I was prepared to forego the trial. It seemed like the clearest path to the truth.”

Chicken as Payment in Uzbekistan

One school district in Uzbekistan is running so low on cash it’s paying its teachers in freshly-hatched chicks.

Officials in Nukus, a town in the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, say the chicks are worth $2.50. However, according to the BBC, that’s twice what chicks are worth at local markets. One teacher told Radio Ozodlik:

“Last year they paid us with potatoes, carrots and pumpkins. This year they are forcing us to take newborn chickens instead of our wages. If we need chickens, we can buy them from a market at a much cheaper rate.”

Uzbekistan, the former Soviet republic that borders the south of Kazakhstan, continues to face cash shortages and struggles to pay government workers, despite its steady economic growth in recent years. The BBC reports that public employees in Tashkent, the capital, haven’t been paid in two months. President Islam Karimov has had an authoritarian grip since coming into power in 1989.

Google: Payday Loans Are Too Harmful to Advertise

Imagine you find yourself in a bit of a financial crisis: Rent is due but your car broke down a few weeks ago, eating up few hundred dollars. Now you’re short. You know your family and friends can’t help, so you type the phrase “can’t make rent” into your browser, to see if the Internet has any wisdom to share. You start seeing ads for companies that say they can help. After quickly typing in your information, a company offers you a $500 loan. Painless! But a few weeks later, you can’t pay it back. You spend more money to push back the due date, and now you’re getting solicited by other lenders too, encouraging you to take out another loan if you’re feeling financially squeezed.

It’s a stressful—but totally plausible—scenario, and one that Google is trying put an end to.

On Wednesday, the search engine announced that it would ban ads for payday lenders (and similar services) starting on July 13. In a statement, David Graff, the company’s director of global product policy wrote:

We will no longer allow ads for loans where repayment is due within 60 days of the date of issue. In the U.S., we are also banning ads for loans with an APR of 36 percent or higher. When reviewing our policies, research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that.

Graff added that the new policy “is designed to protect our users from deceptive or harmful financial products,” and will still leave room for companies to advertise mortgages, car loans, student loans, and credit cards.

A report from Upturn, a technology-focused consulting firm, outlines why the use of ad targeting for this specific product is particularly harmful. The report details how an action as simple as searching the term “need money to pay bills” can start a dangerous cycle, in which information about an individual’s location, bank accounts, income, and financial health can be collected by lead generators and then dispersed through a more opaque process that can result in fraud, targeted high-priced loans, and harassment from multiple high-cost lenders. The report concludes that online payday lending is ridden with weak privacy policies and abuses of basic consumer protections.

Pretty much anyone who has used the Internet during the past several years has had an uncomfortable experience with targeted ads. A quick search can lead to constant sales pitches for tangentially related products on a myriad of sites. These ads—which companies target at the demographics most likely to buy their products—are generally just annoying, and somewhat creepy. But in some cases their use can be much more dubious. Google has decided that ads for payday loans constitute one of these pernicious uses.

That judgement is understandable since there’s been a growing sentiment that payday loans are more harmful than they are helpful. The loans are very short term, and carry interest rates that can skyrocket to well over 100 percent if users cannot pay on time and continually roll their loans over (which about 80 percent do, according to the CFPB). It’s also true that these rollovers come with additional fees. Already, the users of payday loans are predominantly low-income, minority households without college degrees or extensive financial education—one reason why payday storefronts are disproportionately located in poor communities of color. These are people who often can’t turn to friends or family for $200 to pay for groceries or a bill if they’re a little short this month.

But by many estimates, the damage done by online payday lenders is much worse. Combining these already-treacherous products with nebulous (and sometimes illegal) practices of lead generators can allow lenders to further target an already vulnerable group and charge them more for services. My colleague Rebecca Rosen once explained the specific danger of targeted ads in these instances: “Consumers are not perfectly rational, as the field of behavioral economics has demonstrated over and over. This leaves them vulnerable to persuasion to make decisions that are counter to their own self-interest,” she wrote. “When corporations purposely seek out a consumer's vulnerabilities and use them to direct her dollars back to them, that is a violation of that person's autonomy.”

This isn’t the first time that Google has waged war on advertisers it deems dangerous. In 2014, the company removed over 500 million ads and banned more than 200,000 advertisers from its search results, some of which were for high-cost, short-term loans. But that’s often not the end of the story. Keeping track of such companies and the growing number of ways they collect data and post ads is a continuous and exhaustive process, one that requires not only vigilance from companies like Google, but also from state leadership, lawmakers, and regulators. That makes the task of consumer protection an even harder one. In some states, payday loans are banned outright. Others are much more permissive, and policing the actions of lenders, lead generators, and their affiliates is daunting.

Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, thinks that though this isn’t the first effort Google has made to curb what it deems dangerous advertising (even within the financial sector) it’s a substantial one that will have an effect for both consumers and payday lenders. “It’s one thing to have a bunch of lawmakers take a stand. It’s quite another to have the main search engine not carry ads,” Calo says. “It has a signaling function. Google advertises all kinds of things, but to say, ‘No, not this,’ it’s really taking a stand.” And being excluded from Google’s ads will hurt these lenders’ in real ways. “The reason Google is such a large, powerful lucrative company is because displaying ads alongside search results works,” he told me. Still, he is cognizant that some fear that Google is overreaching, and that by removing these ads they are wading into paternalistic territory. But Calo argues that in this case, that fear isn’t founded. “There’s a big difference between deciding not to carry payday lending ads and downgrading links [in search results],” he says.

Google’s move to a stricter policy follows one of Upturn’s suggestions on how to combat predatory online lending practices: banning payday loan advertising outright, as Facebook has also done. The group additionally suggests that other platforms could strengthen consumer protections by committing more resources to the task of identifying and weeding out dangerous products or preventing the delivery of payday-loan ads according to state laws. Another option is for the Federal Trade Commission and CFPB to institute stronger and more direct oversight of large lead generators. While Google’s ban is a powerful statement, the company won’t successfully root out predatory financial practices alone.

U.S. Laws Will No Longer Sound Like a Vaguely Racist Uncle

Congress unanimously passed a bill Monday to remove the last pockets of archaic racial terminology such as “Oriental” or “Negro” from federal law, replacing them instead with more modern terms.

The law targeted two anti-discrimination subsections of the U.S. Code that used outdated language to describe racial groups. In one section of the Department of Energy Organization Act, “a Negro, Puerto Rican, American Indian, Eskimo, Oriental, or Aleut or is a Spanish speaking individual of Spanish descent” will be replaced with “Asian American, Native Hawaiian, a Pacific Islander, African American, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Native American, or an Alaska Native.”

Another section of the bill erases “Negroes, Spanish-speaking, Orientals, Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts” from a 1976 public-works act and adds “Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islanders, African American, Hispanic, Native American, or Alaska Natives” in its place.

The legislation now goes to President Obama for his signature. Representative Grace Meng, a Democrat from New York who proposed the changes, also previously led a successful initiative to ban the word “oriental” in government documents in the Empire State.

“The word ‘Oriental’ is a derogatory and antiquated term and the passage of this legislation will soon force the United States government to finally stop using it,” Meng said in a statement Tuesday after the Senate approved the bill. “Repealing this term is long overdue. ‘Oriental’ no longer deserves a place in federal law, and very shortly it will finally be a thing of the past.”

Congress’s changes reflect how America’s mercurial taxonomy of race and ethnicity can entrench itself through the law, surviving long after culture and society have changed around it. Other parts of the government also undertake similar revisions from time to time. The U.S. Census Bureau frequently tinkers with its racial categories on the census forms, often by adding, subtracting, dividing, or renaming entire groups:

According to the census graphic, the 1790 survey offered just three racial options for a household: "free white females and males," "slaves" and "all other free persons." By 1850, the available categories were "black; mulatto" or "white." Native Americans do not show up on the form until 1860 — as "Indians" — the same year "Chinese" first appears. People whose ancestry traces to India don't have an option until 1920, when "Hindu," a religious identity and not an ethnic one, appeared for the first and only time.

There are no Latino or Hispanic options on the questionnaire until 1930, when "Mexican" appears. But that option went away after that survey, and all Latino/Hispanic choices completely disappear from the form for the next several decades. They don't show up again until 1970.

In one of its more prominent changes, the bureau announced in 2013 it would no longer use the word “Negro” on its forms after almost a century of use.

Terms like “negro” and “colored” can still be found in the U.S. Code, but usually only in proper names like the United Negro College Fund or in old proclamations. An interesting exception is 7 U.S.C. § 323, a provision of the Second Morrill Act of 1890 that forbids racial discrimination in land-grant colleges but allows for the creation of “separate colleges for white and colored students.”

The first Morrill Act of 1862 established land-grant colleges throughout the country, but black students could not attend them in states with segregated higher education. Congress passed the 1890 law to force states to either desegregate their land-grant colleges or create separate ones for black students. Many Southern states chose the latter option. Those schools evolved into some of the major historically black universities, including Florida A&M University and Virginia State University.

Beyond the halls of Congress, some state legislatures also retain archaic racial terms in their statutes. New Jersey’s education code instructs school-district superintendents to include “the history of the Negro in America” in the curriculum. Mississippi’s statutes provide for a 4-H camp at a state university “for the purpose of teaching the Negro boys and girls of Mississippi standards of better farm and home making.” New York’s domestic-relations code includes a section requiring sickle-cell anemia tests “to each applicant for a marriage license who is not of the Caucasian, Indian or Oriental race.” (The genetic blood disorder is most commonly found among people of African descent.)

Most states have applied a level of uniformity to their racial categories. Others rely on a medley of terms from one chapter of their legal code to the next. A section on equal opportunity in apprenticeship programs in Pennsylvania’s statutes defines a minority as “one of four major ethnic groups other than Caucasian, namely Negro, American Indian, Oriental and Spanish American.” A separate section establishing the state’s Minority Business Development Authority instead uses “Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Spanish-speaking Americans, American Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts” while defining “socially or economically disadvantaged people.”

Other parts transcend the archaic into the awkward. Pennsylvania’s housing anti-discrimination statute, for example, cites “Caucasian, Negroid, Chinese, Asian Immigrant, French Hawaiian, Arab, Oriental, African-American, Irish, and the like” as language forbidden in housing advertisements.