Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 171

The Politics of Confusion in Brazil

Brazil’s acting speaker, Waldir Maranhao, nullified Monday last month’s House vote to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, further throwing Latin America’s largest country into political uncertainty.

The House vote on April 17 had allowed the process to move to the Senate, which was due this week to vote on the impeachment motion. It is not immediately clear whether that vote will now move forward. “I don’t know the consequences,” Rousseff herself said in Brasilia. The Brazilian opposition is pushing to impeach Rousseff on allegations she doctored fiscal accounts to help her re-election in 2014. She has denied the charges.

Maranhao took over as speaker of the lower house last week after Eduardo Cunha, the speaker, was suspended by the country’s Supreme Court amid a corruption investigation against him. Maranhao had opposed the April 17 impeachment vote, and it’s not clear if his decision on Monday can be overruled. He has called for a new vote to be held.

The BBC :

Mr Maranhao said there had been irregularities during the lower house session in which its members voted in favour of the impeachment process going ahead.

He said members of the lower house should not have publicly announced what their position was prior to the vote.

He also said it had been wrong of party leaders to instruct their members how to vote.

For more on the political crisis in Brazil, go here.

Fort McMurray’s Fires and the ‘Dramatic Images’ To Come

Nearly a week after wildfires forced 88,000 people from their homes in Fort McMurray, hundreds of firefighters are still working to contain the growing blaze in and around the Canadian city in Alberta.

The Alberta government said in a statement Sunday that fire conditions remain “extreme,” with a total of 34 wildfires burning in the province. The blaze now covers 161,000 hectares, or about 398,000 acres—16 times its original size last week.

Dry conditions and high temperatures stoked the flames over the weekend. The forecast this week predicts cooler temperatures, with highs around 13 degrees Celsius, or about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. But the area badly needs rain to help quell the flames. The Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, where Fort McMurray is located, celebrated a brief rain shower Sunday morning:

It was only for a few minutes but the sight of rain has never been so good #ymmfire #FortMacFire pic.twitter.com/dp862ZWf1g

— RMWB (@RMWoodBuffalo) May 8, 2016

Several government officials, Fort McMurray’s fire chief, and reporters traveled to Fort McMurray Monday to survey the damage. Rachel Notley, the premier of Alberta, warned Sunday that “there will be some dramatic images coming from media over the next couple of days,” CBC News reported. “I want to reiterate mental-health supports are available for anyone who needs help,” she said at a press conference.

Winds blew the fire east on Monday, away from the city and toward Alberta’s border with Saskatchewan, according to CBC News. The flames are located more than 30 kilometers, or about 19 miles, from the border.

More than 1,500 firefighters are working to contain the wildfires across the province, according to Alberta’s government. Only emergency responders and disaster-relief workers are being allowed into Fort McMurray.

The Fort McMurray evacuation is one of the largest in Canadian history. The city’s residents are scattered across 12 centers in the province, where they have received food, water, clothes, and bedding. Alberta’s government said it will soon offer debit cards pre-loaded with $1,250 to adult evacuees.

Officials do not yet know when residents will be able to return to Fort McMurray. They have encouraged displaced parents to register children in other schools. Alberta’s culture and tourism office has waived admission fees at the province’s historic sites and museums for evacuees until September.

Related Video

Meet the members of Los Diablos, the only international firefighting crew in the U.S.

Game of Thrones: And All the Nights to Come

Every week for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz will be discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners are being made available to critics in advance this year, we’ll be posting our thoughts in installments.

Lenika Cruz: Jon Snow’s back ... and now he’s gone. “My watch is ended” may have had the delivery and feel of a mic drop, but it was a oddly triumph-free way to punctuate Jon’s departure from The Wall. There was a mixture of defeat, sadness, and disillusionment in Jon’s face as he strode out of Castle Black, leaving the wildlings and his remaining sworn brothers in his wake. I couldn’t help but think back to Maester Aemon’s words to him: “Kill the boy, and let the man be born.” At the time, “kill the boy” just seemed like a poetic way of saying “make the difficult, but right choice.” But, in a more prophetic sense, is “the boy” in Jon Snow officially dead? Could the newly reborn Jon, released from his vows and that fluffy fur cape, finally be the “man”—the prince that was promised, the one Melisandre saw in the flames fighting at Winterfell?

We don’t know—all we know now is that he’s visibly and profoundly traumatized by what he’s been through. (“I did what I thought was right, and I got murdered for it, and now I’m back. Why?”) It doesn’t help that he’s glimpsed the other side, only to see “nothing at all.” No surprise, then, that Ser Davos’s sincere but lackluster pep talk failed to jolt him out of his existential crisis. The most immediate consequence of his departure is his impending missed connection with Sansa, but I also wonder how the wildling-friendly Night’s Watch will do under the presumed leadership of Edd. Winter’s still coming, after all.

With “Oathbreaker,” the show slouched ever so slowly toward confirming a theory that might as well be canon for many fans at this point. Bran and the Three-Eyed Raven’s greensight took them a couple decades back to Dorne and the so-called Tower of Joy, bringing to life an infamous fight that book readers only witnessed in the form of a Ned Stark fever dream back in the first Song of Ice and Fire novel. It was perhaps too much to expect Game of Thrones to unravel the entire mystery of what happened in the tower that day (I’m willing to bet a collective groan resounded the moment it became clear Bran wouldn’t be following his father up the stairs this episode). It’s also hard to complain too much about getting a second Ned Stark appearance in two weeks, plus a look at the famed knight Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning and awesome-wielder-of-double-blades.

Next came Daenerys’s entry into Vaes Dothrak, which it appears will be far more complicated than her simply pottering about with the dosh khaleen until Jorah and Daario get around to rescuing her. If she’s lucky, she joins the crones and wears a dusty sack and glowers knowingly in darkened tents for the rest of her life—but it’ll be up to a council of khals to decide her fate. (I don’t even want to think about the worst-case scenario. Again, here’s a society where drinking a horse-heart smoothie is considered a real treat.)

In Meereen, Varys has taken the reins, relegating Tyrion to suffer through small talk with an Unsullied and a reserved handmaiden. (I wanted the scene to land better than it did, but all it did was make me wish Dany was around to fill the conversational vacuum.) Varys learned from a Sons of the Harpy conspirator that the masters of Astapor and Yunkai, along with some support from slavers in Volantis, are fueling unrest in the city—a problem whose only solution appears to be a great show of force by Meereen’s new leaders. With a weakened fighting force and no ships, I can only imagine (hope?) we’ll be seeing more of Viserion and Rhaegal, unless Daenerys and Drogon make it back very soon.

Could the newly reborn Jon, released from his vows and that fluffy fur cape, finally be the prince that was promised?

In King’s Landing, Maester Qyburn is repurposing Varys’s flock of little birds of his own (presumably) dastardly ends, while the sadly ineffectual trio of Jaime, Cersei, and Ser Robert Strong can’t even crash a small council meeting without clearing the entire room. Meanwhile, Tommen’s chat with the High Sparrow (weird Mother’s Day subtext aside) suggested he won’t be switching into full Lannister-revenge mode quite yet, though I find his conversion into a Lancel-like true believer unlikely.

Across the Narrow Sea, a girl finally got the training montage that allowed us to skip through several more weeks of scenes of her getting thwacked bloody—gods be good! The further she advances in her quest to serve the Many-Faced God, the greater the tension grows between what is expected of her and her reasons for entering the House of Black and White in the first place. I think the common sentiment, which I share, is that as long as Needle remains hidden in the rocks outside, there’s still hope for Arya Stark to return.

The evening’s worst storyline turned out to be the one with the most to say about the state of the bigger story thus far. Season one began with the apparent coronation of Ned Stark as the Good Guy at the heart of Game of Thrones, a man who cautioned his sons not to look away when doing their duty, however ugly—values that Jon Snow years later still clings to. Fast-forward five seasons, and now the North is being run by a man who murdered his father only to ask “Why would I trust a man who won’t honor tradition?” And by another man who can carelessly spit, “Fuck kneeling and fuck oaths.” The Eddard Stark mythology—a narrative where courage and doing the right thing are what ultimately prevail—is an old and familiar one, echoed in Bran’s words to the Three-Eyed Raven before learning of his father’s dishonesty: “I heard the story a thousand times.” But tradition and oaths and loyalty have not been the primary currency of Game of Thrones for some time now. It’s precisely why it was so nice to see Brienne and Sansa swear vows to each other in the season opener.

When Lord Umber ripped the masks off the heads of Osha and Rickon and tossed the severed head of Shaggydog onto the table, I wondered how much further still Game of Thrones would be willing to go in the coming weeks to subvert tropes it has already subverted several times, often in brutal fashion. While I still find some kind of faint hope in the south-bound travels of Sam, Gilly, and little Sam to warmer and safer climes, I’m anxious about the fact that in this season, we’ve seen more of Ramsay Bolton than we have of Daenerys (who didn’t even appear in last week’s “Home”), or Sansa, or Margaery, or Theon. Because the story of unmitigated cruelty is also one that has been told a thousand times—I trust the show to know when viewers grow tired of hearing it.

Chris, last week you and Megan discussed the show’s ever-growing fascination with excessive violence that serves no larger purpose—do you see Winterfell’s endless cycle of torture beginning once again now that Osha and Rickon are in Ramsay’s clutches? And did you feel as underwhelmed as I did by the muted reaction of the wildlings and the Night’s Watch to the resurrected Jon Snow? (Seeing your good friend risen from the dead seems like a weird time to be making penis-size jokes, but maybe that’s just me.)

We will be updating this post with entries from Christopher Orr and Spencer Kornhaber.

Donald Trump's Economic Plans Would Destroy the U.S. Economy

On Thursday, Donald Trump's tweet about tacos was only the second-most-alarming message he sent to potential voters. Less open to humorous interpretation was his threat to default on U.S. debt in the event of a recession.

"I've borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts," he told CNBC. "I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”

This policy would be so disastrous that even its suggestion is dangerous. In the event of a recession, Trump would treat the full faith and credit of the United States to a capricious hair cut. As Josh Barro explained, this wouldn't just represent a historic default, putting the U.S. in the position of a country like Greece or Argentina; it could also spark an international financial crisis, as "investors would cease to see Treasuries as a safe asset and demand higher interest rates in exchange for risk.”

Trump has promised to make America great again. But a closer look his policy proposals, such as they are, suggests that within his first few years as president, he would more likely make American recessionary again.

The problem begins with his outspoken approach to Mexican immigration. His “plan” to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants would shrink the economy by about 2 percent, according to American Action Forum (AAF), a conservative and pro-business think tank. The sudden subtraction of 7 million workers would cause an immediate shock to thousands of businesses, triggering a GDP collapse ranging from $400 billion to $600 billion in production, AAF’s analysis found, with the worst of the slump occurring in industries like construction and hospitality. "The things Donald Trump has said are utterly unworkable," Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign and the forum's president, told Reuters.

Trump’s plan for a border wall could cost several billion dollars more. But as a financial matter, the wall is one of the least troubling aspects of his policy fantasies. By contrast, his tax plan would cut federal revenue by almost $10 trillion in the next decade, according to the Tax Policy Center. Meanwhile, he has no plans to cut spending on Medicare, Medicaid, benefits for veterans, defense, or Social Security, which, along with mandatory payments on the debt, collectively account for more than two-thirds of government spending. In fact, several of his proposals suggest he would raise spending on some of these measures, such as Social Security and veterans benefits. The deficit would, in short order, reach unprecedented peacetime, non-recession levels. (That’s not counting the revenue collapse from manufacturing a recession with mass deportations.)

Here is Trumponomics, in a sentence: Create an unnecessary economic downturn by deporting 7 million workers while cutting taxes for the rich and requiring the United States to borrow trillions of dollars from creditors, whom Trump has now threatened to stiff, if he feels like it. It would be the greatest, dumbest recession in American history.

Trump’s abandonment of economic common sense is, like so much of his appeal, not an outlier position in the GOP so much as an extrapolation of his party’s recent commitment to fiscal insanity. Republicans elites have responded to widening income inequality by proposing a series of escalating tax cuts for the rich. Paul Ryan, nominally the adult-elect of the party, rose to fame with tax-cut promises and draconian proposals to shrink the safety net. When interest rates were historically low and infrastructure spending was attractive, Republicans called for deficit reductions. When the recovery was still fragile, they played chicken with the debt ceiling by threatening a default until the president caved to their budget demands.

Trump’s economic ideas are so haphazard that, by their own merits, they scarcely deserve to be taken seriously or considered alongside each other. But given that he has managed to become the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, the media doesn’t have a choice. Like so much of his candidacy, those ideas are a joke—one that the country is civically obligated to take seriously.

How Capitalism Took Over Sports Movies

For decades, most sports movies were little more than variations of the same story: An athlete or team that’s never gotten a shot captures both victory and the respect of the masses, usually with the help of a wise old coach tormented by personal demons and past failures. Think Seabiscuit, Hoosiers, Major League, The Mighty Ducks, A League of Their Own, 42, Remember the Titans, Rocky, Slap Shot, and countless more. These films have been both noble and crass, and they’ve celebrated virtue and vice alike, but they’ve worked so well because they’re always, at their heart, stories about underdogs and redemption.

Though some recent films including Creed, Race, and Eddie the Eagle hew to this model, the last few years have seen the emergence of a new kind of sports narrative. Thanks to the precipitous rise of fantasy sports and wildly lucrative video games such as the Madden NFL series, audiences are also seeing a slew of works that focus on the business side of the action. Movies such as Moneyball, Draft Day, and Million Dollar Arm, along with TV shows like Ballers, The Agent, and The League, have recast the principal characters of sports-themed stories. Suddenly it’s managers and owners, not players and coaches, who are the heroes.

This shift in narrative coincides with the increased focus on analytics in professional and amateur sports. It also echoes a more general cultural interest in charismatic, visionary entrepreneurs—consider the three movies made to date about Apple’s Steve Jobs, The Social Network, Joy, and the high public profiles of people like Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, and Mark Zuckerberg. As the model for success has shifted from teams to individuals, these new kinds of stories about sports seem to exemplify the essence of the American Dream, where glory and victory is about strategy, vision, and hard work rather than innate talent or ability. But they also celebrate a redistribution of power from the many to the few. In asking fans to root for the wealthy businessmen behind the scenes, these stories lose sight of the big-hearted, populist spirit that makes sports narratives so appealing to begin with.

* * *

Fantasy sports traces its origins to the 1950s, but didn’t come into its most current form until 1980, when the journalist Daniel Okrent created the Rotisserie Baseball League, which introduced the now-common fantasy draft. According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA), 500,000 people played fantasy sports in the U.S. and Canada in 1988, but by 2003, that number had skyrocketed to 15.2 million. After Congress passed a law three years later that defined online fantasy sports as games of skill (which were legal to bet on) rather than games of luck (which weren’t), the industry grew exponentially. As of 2015, the FSTA estimates that the total number of players participating in fantasy sports in North America has grown to 56.8 million. Sixty percent of fantasy players pay league fees, and in the past three years alone, the average amount each participant spends to play has almost tripled, to around $465 a year.

Suddenly it’s managers and the owners, not players and the coaches, who are the heroes.

The entertainment industry seems to have taken notice. The increasing dominance of fantasy sports in culture has been reflected in the rise of EA’s wildly successful Madden NFL video-game franchise, whose Draft Champions feature in the game’s 2016 edition gives players a chance to play fantasy football year-round. EA’s website promises the Draft Champions feature will deliver “the challenge and excitement of fantasy football draft night over and over again.” Players can draft and play actual games with their fantasy team, but these games have three-minute quarters (so as not to slow the real action down). Then there’s Connected Franchise Mode, which allows the player to “control every decision [the] team makes—from concession prices to relocation.” What EA Sports promises as the “complete NFL experience” feels more like SimCity than the Super Bowl, but that hasn’t affected its sales in the least: It’s still the most popular football game there is. In fact, its shift from simulating the experience of playing or coaching football to that of owning a team appears to be taking root elsewhere in culture, particularly in Hollywood.

As Hampton Stevens wrote in The Atlantic in 2014, the game has become an afterthought—if it’s shown at all—in this decade’s sports films. Stevens lamented that the ultimate outcome of showing less sports in sports movies was that it made the onscreen story more boring. But this trend also reflects a shift toward a culture that the management and banking researcher T.T. Ram Mohan describes in a piece for Quartz as “CEO-centric.” In this environment, the CEO isn’t just a number-cruncher but also a charismatic visionary. Movies including Moneyball and Draft Day seem to glamorize this kind of autocratic framework, lauding their GMs as lone geniuses and presenting players and coaches as obstacles to be managed.

In Moneyball, the Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) ignores the protests of his scouts, his coaches, and his players and uses statistical analysis to (cheaply) cobble together a playoff-bound team. Draft Day follows the Cleveland Browns’ general manager, Sonny Weaver, Jr. (Kevin Costner), through the day of the NFL draft as he races against the clock to get the players he wants and keep his job. If these descriptions make the films sound more like workplace dramas than sports movies, watching them doesn’t do much to discourage that impression. As far as these films are concerned, baseball and football are no longer sports, but businesses. Rather than show viewers the games, the films show them the money.

Both movies present their heroes (the managers of major-league sports teams, let’s remember) as underdogs fighting the system, even though both belong to the upper echelons of that system. Meanwhile, scouts are buffoons who can be replaced by computers, coaches are egomaniacs who are referred to as “babysitters,” and players are barely people. Moneyball reduces the latter to statistical formulae, rejecting qualities such as charm and star power. While rejecting the allure (and price tag) of a star player might seem to favor those who actually produce, that’s not the case in the film: A player becomes largely invisible once GM Beane acquires him. Draft Day similarly wants nothing to do with athletes. “Do not bother me with your shit,” the Browns general manager Weaver tells his starting quarterback. “I’m working here.”

As far as these films are concerned, baseball and football are no longer sports, but businesses.

It’s hard to get much further away from the values of the traditional sports movie. Fans seemed to notice that disconnect in Draft Day, which made a paltry $28 million at the box office (but seems poised for a healthy afterlife on cable). Moneyball’s $75 million gross didn’t make it a monster hit, but its six Academy Award nominations and critical acclaim elevated it to the level of a minor classic.

Both films twist themselves into knots trying to hide the fact that their heroes are one-percenters. Moneyball emphasizes that Billy Beane is a failed ballplayer managing the poorest team in baseball, magically making him a has-been looking to move from rags to riches and prove his worth. Draft Day chooses to portray Weaver as a guy who, despite being the GM of an NFL team, has never gotten his shot. “It was finally supposed to be my season,” he says in one scene. “I just want the team that I want one time.” Weaver may be choking up, but his speech has all the pathos of a billionaire complaining his McLaren will be delivered a week late.

Other stories have built on this businessman-as-hero narrative in different ways. In HBO’s Ballers, currently the network’s third most-successful comedy series ever, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays Spencer Strasmore, a charismatic player-turned-financial manager whose dreams of “laying people out” have been replaced with dreams “all about deals and dollars.” A viewer doesn’t need to have played sports to identify with the pressure Spencer feels to put up bigger numbers and keep his bank-account balance above $0. Spencer is so likable and relatable as the everyman struggling to get by that when the Miami Dolphins coach tells him early on that he’d “make one hell of a GM,” it’s easy for viewers to imagine themselves in his shoes and to relish the prospect.

Esquire’s documentary series The Agent follows four sports agents (“real-life Jerry Maguires,” the show brags) as they try to sign a new crop of clients before the NFL draft. Despite the show’s obsession with athleticism, The Agent actively reduces athletes to their stats and prospects: Each player’s rushing yards, 40-yard-dash times, and vertical reaches are dissected over and over again, which makes the show feel like an eight-episode scouting report for someone’s 2016 fantasy team.

The League offers insight into the ways in which people see fantasy sports as a way to feel empowered as the bosses of their own imaginary billion-dollar franchises.

If the success of manager-oriented entertainment feels baffling compared to the universal appeal of team-centric stories, the appeal of identifying with bureaucrats over players is best illustrated by FX’s recently concluded sitcom The League. The show revolves around a group of friends so invested in fantasy sports that births, marriages, and deaths are treated less as pivotal life events than as existential threats to the titular fantasy league. Of course, The League is a satire, but when one character proclaims, “We play fantasy football, but let’s live a fantasy life,” it offers insight into the ways in which people see fantasy sports as a way to feel empowered as the bosses of their own imaginary billion-dollar franchises.

* * *

Why does this shift in perspective matter? Isn’t it ultimately better for moviegoers and TV viewers to empathize with heroes who embody entrepreneurial spirit rather than pawns on a chessboard? Isn’t it more fundamentally American to appreciate individual achievement over collective effort?

Yes, and no. 2015’s Concussion offers something of a counterpoint to the valorization of sports CEOs. The film chronicles the efforts of Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) to prove the link between the deaths of former NFL players and the repetitive head trauma they experienced during their professional careers. In their pursuit of the almighty dollar, the GMs and owners of the teams (some of them former NFL players) make every attempt imaginable to discredit Omalu and his research. (For the first time ever, the NFL finally admitted the link between football-related injuries and degenerative brain diseases in March—over a decade after Omalu presented his findings.) Concussion shows the human cost of the corporate business practices that Moneyball and Draft Day celebrate unquestioningly.

Several times in Concussion, Omalu praises the American Dream and extolls the virtues of democracy, and it’s in these moments where Concussion broadens (and sharpens) its critique of the CEO-centric culture. These speeches present the league as a threat not just to the safety of players on the field but also to America itself. Concussion doesn’t dwell much on the spectacle of the game, which explains why the only images from football games in the film are archival clips of players getting taken down. And while this strategy makes narrative sense, it’s also the reason why Concussion is a less-than-ideal antidote to CEO-centric sports narratives. Several characters, Omalu included, may comment on the “beauty and grace and power” of football despite its violence (one character even compares it to Shakespeare), but it’s hard to fall in love with a game that you can’t see onscreen.

Omalu’s speeches present the NFL as a threat not just to the safety of players on the field but to America itself.

Creed goes a step further by being completely indifferent to business. In an early scene, Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) quits a job at a securities firm to pursue his dreams as a boxer. After that, money is almost never mentioned: The film never discloses the purses for any of the fights, and it writes the all-important promoters out of the boxing world altogether. The only business-related issue that gets real attention from Adonis or his new mentor Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) is whether Adonis should take advantage of the fame and glory of his father, Apollo Creed, and fight under his last name. Adonis relents and becomes Creed (there’d be no movie if he didn’t), but the film makes it clear that the decision isn’t about money. It’s about getting the opportunity that he’s been training for—the shot that he, unlike Draft Day’s Sonny Weaver, has earned.

Even in a franchise known for its training montages, Creed stands alone (it’s essentially one long training sequence). The film is so focused on boxing itself that Creed’s first major fight plays out in one shot. This long take is the most exciting and artful sports scene in a decade, demonstrating how no fantasy roster on a screen can match the visual impact and rush of the game itself. The film ends in a way that no film about a GM ever could: with a crowd of fans chanting their hero’s name.

Creed is the rare contemporary film that finds a midpoint between the narratives of the all-powerful general managers and the traditional stories of team-centric success. Its hero is an individual whose success stems from his own extraordinary efforts, but he’s very much helped by others, including his underdog trainer. American business culture may make it seem as though power today resides high above the field in the front office. However, films such as Creed make abundantly clear that no matter how much influence the front office may have, the players still make the plays.

Can Bears and Humans Coexist?

It was 9:45 in the morning, high in the mountains of Flagstaff, Arizona, on a ranch road that runs alongside a dried-up lake named Dry Lake, when a bear wandered into town. The Arizona Game and Fish Department is responsible for managing wildlife, and sometimes that means killing them. For three hours last Friday, agents chased a black bear across roads, through thickets of pine trees, down hills, and over neighborhood fences. The bear was a male, three years old, and so considered an adult. A fatal category. Agents shot the bear with a tranquilizer near a busy highway, then they killed it.

It’s a precarious thing to live near the wild. Most people move to places like Flagstaff, known for its ponderosa pine forests and the red rock buttes to the south, precisely because of its proximity to nature––to be able to walk out the door and become lost in country that feels as raw as it did 200 years ago. But part of living so close to nature means living in wandering distance of animals that can kill, like mountain lions or black bears. After the agency killed the bear, it was not the town’s safety that concerned the most vocal residents. Instead, it started a conversation across the state that’s also come up recently in Los Angeles with a mountain lion named P-22, with wolves in rural Oregon and anywhere around Yellowstone National Park, and also with black bears in a gated community in central Florida. Can people, so comfortable to living unchallenged in the food chain, peacefully coexist with predators?

Except for being around humans, the bear posed no immediate threat. And Game and Fish said it hadn’t handled the bear before, so it’s not like it had a penchant for trips into town. Still, it’s the agency’s policy to kill adult male bears when captured, even if its the first time. Neighboring states have similar rules. Some, like Colorado, have a two-strike policy, which means the bear could only be killed if it’s been caught before.

And it’s not just states that regularly kill wildlife. The federal government has an agency almost entirely dedicated to killing animals, many of them predators. In 2014 the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division, which animal conservationists have called a “rogue agency,” killed 2.7 million animals, including 305 cougars, 322 wolves, 580 black bears, 796 bobcats, 1,186 red foxes, and 61,702 coyotes. As a writer for the magazine High Country News pointed out, that’s one dead coyote every eight and a half minutes.

It doesn’t take much to authorize an extermination. The agents with Arizona Fish and Game had no choice in the matter, because the agency’s policy requires it to kill captured adult bears. As for Wildlife Services, all it takes is a concerned rancher or homeowner to ask.

In response to the killing, a local citizen started a petition to change Arizona Game and Fish’s policy for killing bears, and just about every big newspaper in the state wrote about it. The petition calls for an “end to summary execution of male bears in Arizona,” saying that “living in Flagstaff, surrounded by National Forest, is a blessing and we accept the risk of encountering wildlife, including predators.”

The black bear is in no threat of dying out. Ursus americanus is the smallest species of bear in North America, and it lives almost anywhere with enough trees to hide in. Black bears can be found in Canada, the whole stretch of the U.S. East Coast and down to Florida, in the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and Mexico’s Sierra Madre. As was the case with the bear in Flagstaff, they’re not always black. Some are colored white, blond, cinnamon, light and dark brown, or a black so deep it’s almost purple. As omnivores, they eat berries and grass, fish and elk, and regularly roam 100 miles to find food. And sometimes in their wanderings, they come across humans.

Arizona’s policy today––although it’s been updated several times since––is based in part on a black bear attack in 1996. Before then, Arizona Game and Fish would catch bears who wandered into towns or campgrounds, tranquilize them, then turn them loose in another area. But in the previous two years leading up to the attack on the girl, the Tucson Citizen reported eight other times bears had come into camps or towns or mauled people. The attack that changed the state’s policy toward bears involved a 16-year-old girl who’d fallen asleep in a Boy Scout campground in Coronado National Forest, a mountainous park at the state’s southern end. She’d gone back to the tent with the smell of s’mores on her face, and a bear poked its head into her tent, bit her shoulder, her thigh, and swiped at her head. A headline in the Tucson Citizen a day after the bear attacked the girl read: “Some bears may be exiled, killed.” And from the article it seemed Game and Fish would not only change its policy regarding bears, but that in the days after the attack, agents would pursue and “destroy” some bears living in the national forest.

I spoke with Arizona Game and Fish agent Shelly Shepherd, who says killing bears is quite rare. In the past 15 years there’ve been around 10 bears attacks in the state, and almost certainly all of them were euthanized. She could not say, at the time, how many the state had killed, who, like the bear last week, had just wandered into an area where people lived. Her biggest frustration with the petition, and with much of the criticism she heard from people around the state––from around the country, even––was that everyone wanted to know why Game and Fish couldn’t relocate the bear. It’s partly because, she said, any adult male bear and any “category-one” animal on their predator list, which includes mountain lions, has to be killed according to the agency’s policy. And the reason for that policy, in part, is because as Arizona’s population expands into its deserts, its forests, and all the places people choose to live precisely because of they’re proximity to wild and natural places, there are fewer areas to relocate bears.

“It’s difficult,” she said. “We’ve talked with ranchers and they say, ‘No way, I don’t want you to put that bear anywhere near my property.’”

State and national parks won’t take a bear either, Shepherd said, because if they did and it attacked someone, they’d be liable. Even Bearizona, a 160-acre park without cages that lets people drive cars through its managed bear country of Ponderosa Pines, won’t take adult male bears because they’re too aggressive.

“There’s such mixed feeling about wildlife and the proximity to people,” Shepherd said. “Some people want it, and some don’t.”

In the hills of Los Angeles this March, a mountain lion living in the same park as the Hollywood sign snacked on a koala from the nearby Los Angeles Zoo. Surveillance cameras caught the lion, radio-collared and tagged as P-22, sneaking into the zoo the night before the koala disappeared. And in the days after, the people of Los Angeles questioned if it was safe to have a mountain lion so close to people. While there wasn’t discussion of killing, they wondered both for their own safety, and for P-22’s.

Some, like city councilman Mitch O’Farrell, said the mountain lion may need to be relocated. Others contemplated the same question those in Arizona had after its Game and Fish agents killed the black bear: Can people and predators co-exist?

In Arizona, the state predicts its population will double from the current 6.7 million to 12.1 million by 2050. Across the West—or anywhere in the U.S. where people move to feel frontier nostalgia—small towns are turning into cities, and cities into metropolises. In Flagstaff, not far from where people first reported seeing the black bear, there are new luxury condos going up in the forest. The homes circle a golf course, a private park, and a creek stocked with rainbow trout. Go ahead, the development’s website entices, “take a walk on the wild side.”

Roy Moore's Last Stand?

Roy Moore, Alabama’s quixotic chief justice, faces removal from the bench once again.

The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission charged Moore with six counts of violating judicial ethics Friday evening for issuing an order in January that blocked marriage licenses for same-sex couples statewide.

In its 32-page complaint on Friday, the state’s disciplinary board for judges said Moore had “flagrantly disregarded and abused his authority” by issuing the order and “abandoned his role as a neutral and detached chief administrator of the judicial system.”

Moore struck a defiant note in response to the charges, which he blamed on local LGBT activists. The Montgomery Advertiser has more:

In a statement Friday, Moore said the JIC “had no authority” over administrative orders related to probate judges.

“The JIC has chosen to listen to people like Ambrosia Starling, a professed transvestite, and other gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals, as well as organizations which support their agenda,” the statement said. “We intend to fight this agenda vigorously and expect to prevail.”

Moore called the complaints “politically motivated” at an April 27 presser conference. His attorney, Matt Staver, said the orders reflected "a disagreement between state and federal courts on an issue.”

Moore’s January order followed a complex legal battle over marriage equality in Alabama. First, a federal district court struck down Alabama’s bans on same-sex marriages in February 2015, but stayed its ruling while U.S. Supreme Court considered the issue in Obergefell v. Hodges. The following month, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the marriage bans in a separate case and ordered the probate judges in the state to comply with them.

After the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Obergefell last June, the district court lifted the stay on its own ruling and blocked the probate judges from denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples. At the same time, the Alabama Supreme Court asked both sides of its marriage-equality case to file briefs on how Obergefell affected its previous orders.

Six months later, while the Alabama Supreme Court continued to deliberate, Moore intervened through his administrative role as the state’s chief justice and ordered the probate judges to enforce the marriage bans on January 6. Moore justified the order as an effort to end “confusion and uncertainty” among the probate judges. But since the district court had already struck down the bans, Moore’s order amounted to an act of defiance against the federal judiciary.

The Alabama Supreme Court eventually dismissed the case in March with a one-sentence order, to which Moore attached a 94-page dissent in which he described Obergefell as “immoral, unconstitutional, and tyrannical.”

With formal ethics charges filed, Moore is automatically suspended from his position as chief justice pending a hearing by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. The court can impose a range of sanctions on judges for misconduct, including censure and removal from office.

Such a fate already befell the staunchly conservative jurist once before while serving as Alabama’s chief justice. In 2003, Moore defied a federal judge’s order to remove a two-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the state supreme court building. The Court of the Judiciary responded by removing him from office for violating Alabama’s judicial-ethics canon. Voters narrowly returned him to the position again in 2012.

Britney Spears and Sad Girls: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Is Britney Spears Ready to Stand on Her Own?

Serge F. Kovaleski and Joe Coscarelli | The New York Times

“The disturbing images seem so distant now: the pop-star-turned cautionary tabloid tale—head shorn, face twisted, umbrella gripped like a police baton as she bashed a paparazzi SUV window. More than eight years after her meltdown, Britney Spears, at 34, appears to be thriving.”

Why Do These White Women Look So Sad?

Laura Barcella | Pacific Standard

“You don’t have to be an expert on the trend to see that most Sad Girls are a pretty homogeneous bunch. Often white, young, and waifish, many of the more visible Sad Girls are conventionally beautiful. Though not all are women of means  ... their look does telegraph a leisure-time fantasy about people with depression that isn’t necessarily accurate. Most women who are clinically depressed do not, it turns out, look like 19-year-old Urban Outfitters models.”

If You Are What You Eat, America Is Allrecipes

Nicholas Hune-Brown | Slate

“And at a time when readers of aspirational food websites are used to images of impossibly perfect dishes—each microgreen artfully placed by some tweezer-wielding stylist—Allrecipes offers amateur snaps of amateur meals ... It is all, Kimball and his ilk would agree, extremely disappointing. It’s also perhaps the most accurate, democratic snapshot of American culinary desires.”

The Self-Conflict Zone

Hua Hsu | The New Yorker

“In the past, the impassive outlaw rapper and the gushing doe-eyed singer crossed paths only as a way of combining their genres’ respective charms for a hit single. Drake cracked the code: He collapsed the distance between these archetypes, seeming equally comfortable rhyming about dodging bullets and baring his insecurities in a come-hither hook.”

The Complete History of ‘Becky With the Good Hair,’ From the 1700s to Lemonade

Jennifer Swann | Fusion

“Some of us recognized it as the ultimate dig, a critique that is ambiguous yet sharply acute. Becky is white. Becky is basic. Becky is bitchy. Nobody likes her. We don’t need to know exactly who Becky is to understand the weight of the insult. Maybe she’s Rachel Roy or Rita Ora, as the tabloids have suggested, or maybe she’s a combination of women, or pure artistic fiction.”

Meet the First Superstars of the Beyoncé Generation

Jada Yuan | The Cut

“Chloe and Halle are a little new to the rhetoric—they pause when I ask if they consider themselves feminists, before Chloe answers, ‘Well, we’re women, so yeah!’—but perhaps that’s because they’ve grown up so soaked in the declarative independence OF Beyoncé that they don’t even recognize it. They are the first wave of young women raised with that believe-in-yourself-and-make-it-happen swagger. For them, female empowerment isn’t a choice they have to assert, and the record industry’s historical sexism feels like NBD. “

Why Jazz Will Always Be Relevant

Greg Tate | The Fader

“Because critics were so quick to label the album a black protest psalm, Butterfly hasn’t yet been fully recognized as the Bitches Brew of our time—an artist’s nuclear meltdown of this era’s dominant musical tropes into a definitive abstract-expressionist statement—one that We The People can feel, call and respond, rally around, freely quote, space out, get our wiggle on to, etc., etc.”

I Love Serial Entertainment and So Can You

Juliet Lapidos | The Awl

“The most demanding part of any narrative art form is the beginning, when everything—the style, the plot, the characters, perhaps even the universe in which the characters operate—is new. You must ask yourself: ‘What is this place? Who are the people? What are they after?’ Series minimize that period of difficulty relative to the total experience. You do the work once, and then you’re free and easy for aforementioned dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment.”

California Notes

Joan Didion | The New York Review of Books

“I see now that the life I was raised to admire was infinitely romantic. The clothes chosen for me had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, the medieval. Muted greens and ivories. Dusty roses. (Other people wore powder blue, red, white, navy, forest green, and Black Watch plaid. I thought of them as ‘conventional,’ but I envied them secretly. I was doomed to unconventionality.)”

A Witness for Abbie: How Genre TV Systematically Lets Black Women Down

Angelica Jade Bastién | The Village Voice

“But in genres that rely on imagination and fresh perspectives the way that science fiction and fantasy do, what does it say that writers can’t imagine the interior lives of their black female characters, even when they’re the leads of the show? Television has the appearance of greater diversity than Hollywood films, but what’s going on behind the scenes in terms of who is writing, directing, and running these shows is instructive as to why this pattern persists.”

One Thing Considered: Why Is Panera Selling Us Dirty Lettuce?

This is the second installment of "One Thing Considered,” an occasional attempt by Conor Friedersdorf and Megan Garber to talk through cultural artifacts that tickled their brains. In this edition, the artifact at hand is a Panera Bread ad called “Should Be"—one of a series of spots the fast-casual bakery-cafe has put out this year. Here’s the commercial:

* * *

Megan Garber: So I’ve been seeing these Panera ads for awhile now—print versions are posted on bus stops around my neighborhood—and I find them both weird and fascinating. I’m trying to figure out why, exactly … is it the moralism they suggest when it comes to food and eating? The idealized vision of the “American table” they present through their visuals? The vaguely William Carlos Williams-reminiscent style of the video ads’ voice-overs?

Wait, though, I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the text of one of those voice-overs:

Food should be good.

People should dance.

Strawberries should sing.

Good bread makes a sandwich;

Good soil makes a salad.  

Lettuce should be dirty; dressing, clean.

Sweet should never be fake.

Manners, never minded.

Debate should be healthy. Hatchets, buried.

Forks on the left, knives on the right. Hands should be used regardless.

Bellies should be rubbed; tables should be full.

And good food should be good for you.

We’re not saying these are the rules we should all live by;

But it’s a good place to start.

Panera: food as it should be.

Weird, right? Or maybe it’s not? Conor, what do you think? What do you make of an ad that, in the name of selling sandwiches and salads, invokes soil and sweetness and singing strawberries? Is it strange that one of Panera’s “rules”—not “rules to live by,” but a “good place to start”—is that manners should never be minded? Is it revealing that the word “should” shows up 12 times in a minute-long spot? What is Panera trying to accomplish with an ad that sells “food as it should be”?

Conor Friedersdorf: Megan, that ad is weird. Its images and tone are familiar. We’ve all seen ads with a similar aesthetic. And if “Should Be” were on in the background as I made dinner I might not notice anything amiss. But the words kill this spot.

Ad Week wrote about what they were trying to accomplish. More consumers are eschewing fast food, “choosing to eat better, even if it costs more, based on the promise that they’ll feel better and be happy.” If you try to get to a local farmer’s market, or prefer a burrito bowl––hold the dairy––to a burger and fries, maybe Panera can get you eating in their stores or carrying out their food for family dinner.

The ad immediately reminded me of “Thrive,” an ad campaign that Kaiser Permanente, the health insurance company, launched in 2004. Their market research that suggested “people want to be as happy and healthy as they can be at every stage of life.” So they decided that while their competitors “stood for health care,” they would try for a different brand association: “Kaiser would stand for health.”

Like Panera, Kaiser’s ads featured a narrator playfully riffing off warm, slice-of-life moments. Now watch the health insurer’s first “Thrive” ad and notice what’s different:

We stand for broccoli, Pilates, and dental floss.

We believe in the treadmill and its sibling the elliptical.

In SPF 30 we trust.

We believe in seat-belts and stopping HIV. And that fruit makes a wonderful dessert.

We're for laughter-as-medicine and penicillin.

All hail cold turkey, the gum, and the patch.

We are anti-addiction and pro antioxidant.

And we believe health isn't an industry, it’s a cause.

We are Kaiser Permanente, and we stand for health.

Live long and thrive.

The ad copy makes sense!

Broccoli, seat belts, and nicotine gum are very different, but all are in service of the clear conviction the ad expresses: “We are Kaiser Permanente, and we stand for health.”

What does Panera stand for? Its ad seems like it doesn’t want to be pinned down. It throws out a bunch of words and images, only to tell us, “We’re not saying these are the rules we should all live by.” And no wonder: some rules seem contradictory. “Forks on the left, knives on the right” suggests adherence to traditional manners. But “manners” should “never” be minded suggests the opposite ethic.

The last thing I want on a salad or sandwich is dirty lettuce! Lettuce should be crisp, nutrient-rich, and triple-washed.

Others are unclear. “Good bread makes a sandwich.” Does that mean healthy bread? Tasty bread? “Debates should be healthy.” What does that have to do with Panera? “Strawberries should sing.” What does that even mean? And the worst line: “Lettuce should be dirty; dressing, clean.” The last thing I want on a salad or sandwich is dirty lettuce! Lettuce should be crisp, nutrient-rich, and triple-washed.

My reaction may be tied to being a writer. Watching big budget Hollywood movies, music videos, or ads like this one, it’s often evident that huge amounts of money were paid to highly talented visual and auditory talent who executed highly professional set design, lighting, film editing, voiceover work, etc. But the high standards were abandoned when it came to the writing. In a half hour, you and I could write copy ten times better than what Panera broadcast. Did they make a big mistake? Or are TV ads a visual medium where substance doesn’t matter?

Garber: Conor, thank you, and bless you, for highlighting precisely why this ad has troubled me, and stuck with me, for lo these many months. It makes no sense! And: It purposely, aggressively, but also totally nonchalantly makes no sense!

It’s not just that strawberries don’t sing; it’s that “Should Be” seems to be trying to let Panera have things both ways, to frame itself at once as proper and also insouciant, as casual and also messy, as principled but also not a jerk about it. I’d agree that part of what’s likely happening involves the writing getting short shrift—the ad equivalent of screenwriters getting no love or credit, of When Harry Met Sally being “a Rob Reiner movie” when it owes so much of its charm to Nora Ephron’s screenplay.

But perhaps another thing is going on, too: Maybe “Should Be” is tapping, intentionally or not, into a moment of supreme confusion when it comes to what food, yes, “should be.”

Food is such an intimate thing—culturally, nutritionally, even spiritually. And it’s also, in its way, such a universal thing. And yet, the world moving at the speed it does, it can be challenging to do that simplest of things: be a consumer, in every sense, of food.

Food involves basic questions about our bodies, our lives, and our planet. But we are all too often, it seems, unsure of the answers.

There’s so much that’s whiplash-y when it comes to the various “shoulds” of eating. Health-wise, is fat good, or bad? Carbs? Coffee? Wine? Is Paleo legitimate? Will red meat kill us or make us stronger? Is Bulletproof coffee a fad, or a buttery existential truth? And on and on, with things that are conventional wisdom about “healthy eating” one year totally reversing themselves the next. (Hi, margarine, I am looking at you.)

And then! Same goes for the moral “shoulds” of eating. Is almond milk terrible for the environment? What kind of fish is “sustainable”? (What does it actually mean for something to be “sustainable”? ) What’s up with GMOs?

It’s all a little overwhelming and frustrating and, occasionally, scary. These are basic questions about our bodies, our lives, and our planet. And we are, it often seems, unsure of the answers. I think a cumulative effect of it all is this widespread confusion among people who want to be good, and who want to be responsible, and who also would like to just sit down and have a damn sandwich without having to do a massive cost-benefit analysis about the whole thing. And maybe that’s what Panera is getting at, and selling: food as it should be, not as an edict, but as a reassurance. “We figured it out, so you don’t have to.” “Our food will not be revealed to be toxic, to you or to the environment.” “There, there, everything’s going to be okay. Here, have some Chicken Orzo soup and a Power Kale Caesar Salad.”

Maybe Panera is betting it can win over consumers who never imagined they could afford “farm to table” … but still like feeling that their food is “good,” both morally and culinarily.

That reading, to be clear, doesn’t make me like the ad more; it might, though, make it slightly more legible. And it might be another reason, now that I think about it, that “Should Be” has stuck with me: Its internal contradictions, in their wacky way, ring true. There’s something wonderfully post-modern about singing strawberries and dirty-clean salads and the suggestion that “hands should be used regardless.” And there’s also something wonderfully revealing about a company detecting all the confusion and anxiety in the air out there and deciding to do the same thing that Kaiser did: offer not just insurance, but reassurance. If Kaiser “stands for health,” then Panera stands for “health.” And also, apparently, dancing and belly-rubbing.

Or: Maybe? What do you think?

Friedersdorf: You’re so right that it’s confusing out there for food consumers. The restaurant critics at the Tampa Bay Times, Laura Reiley, recently published an investigative article showing that dozens of restaurants in her city that bill themselves as “farm to table” were deceiving their customers about the provenance of meats, poultry, fishes, and even vegetables. “This is a story we are all being fed. A story about overalls, rich soil and John Deere tractors scattering broods of busy chickens. A story about healthy animals living happy lives, heirloom tomatoes hanging heavy and earnest artisans rolling wheels of cheese into aging caves nearby,” she wrote. “More often than not, those things are fairy tales.”

My friend Megan McArdle––Atlantic alum, economics writer, food connoisseur, and home chef extraordinaire––subsequently observed that while many perceive virtue in “eating local,” the reality is that few are willing to pay to do it. As she put it:

Food grown locally, on small-lot farms without modern chemical assistance, is really expensive. The complex modern food-supply chain that ensures restaurants and food processors can get the same consistent mix of staple ingredients year-round also relentlessly beats down the price of food, sourcing wherever supply is cheapest, redistributing temporary local abundance to a steady global diet of everyday low prices.

This is also not such a terrible way to eat; it is the foundation of much of our modern prosperity. But it is not local, artisanal, organic. It is global, industrial, indifferent. It has to be, both because organic inputs are much more expensive, and because trying to separate and track all the food so that restaurateurs can be sure of provenance and process would mean abandoning many of the efficiencies that  make the stuff so cheap.

As a chain aiming for a prices just north of fast food, one that must compete with Cosi and Starbucks and El Pollo Loco, Panera can’t even pretend to be locally sourced. But maybe they’re betting they can win over consumers who never imagined that they could afford “farm to table” or hot new foodie bistros … but still like feeling their food is not just healthy, but “good,” both morally and culinarily.

On a visit to a Panera Bread in Marina Del Rey, I sensed a desire to appeal to what we might call aspirational foodies. For $11.64 with tax, I had a half-sized Chopped Chicken Cobb Salad with Avocado & Dressing––the lettuce was thankfully clean––paired with a half Napa Almond Chicken Salad Sandwich. The food was better than I expected. But what struck me most, reading all the copy adorning wall posters and printed on “take one” fliers, was that few if any food purveyors at that price point go so far in treating customers like members of a creative class.

“Pairing flavors for the way they get along together,” one brochure stated, “is every bit as exciting as playing matchmaker … and when it all works out and you’re sitting there at the wedding telling everyone how you just knew they were meant to be? Finding the perfect Panera pairing feels just as satisfying.” To illustrate a “perfect Panera pairing,” the copy suggests a Steak & Arugula Sandwich with Broccoli Cheddar soup. “At first glance this pair may seem like an overly indulgent choice,” the text says, but I can have a half-serving of both, consume less than 500 calories, and revel in the fact that “the bright flavors found in the sandwich––the tang of the sourdough and the vibrant pickled onions––give it a lightness that works to offset the sharp cheddar and thick, velvety texture of this heavier soup.”

This oversells all the items, but no one at McDonalds is trying so hard to sell anything. And even with all the hyperbole, when I reflect on the menus at pricier L.A. dining options, Panera can make a credible claim to relative forthrightness and transparency, at least if they truly abide by their published list of “no no ingredients,” their calorie counts, and their ingredient lists, which are all posted ubiquitously.

For me, living in a city full of cheap, delicious food from nearly every country on earth, Panera remains a tough sell. But If I weren’t living in the world’s best food city? It might well be the best healthy food option near its price point. I might eat there twice a week. It would be easy to be health-conscious while doing so. I’d be left with just one complaint: for a place that calls itself Panera Bread, shouldn’t the bread sing?

Mine was just meh.

Garber: Conor, no! I've been with you until now, but you are sorely mistaken: Panera’s bread is awesome. At least, okay, the sourdough they use to make their bread bowls—my favorite menu item, apologies to the chain’s caesar salad and its Power Kale—is awesome. It’s flaky and crispy and its scooped-out innards are just the right consistency for soaking up broccoli cheddar soup. I demand a correction.

Beyond that, though, I’m glad you pointed out the food that is, after all, the upshot of the “Should Be” spot. The ad may be weird, but it sells something that is probably a net good, not just for Panera’s customers, but for the food system it influences as it participates in it: food that is fast, but that is not technically “fast food.”

In many places, you're right, that food can be really—outrageously—hard to find. I recently spent a few days with my family in suburban/fairly rural Ohio, and guess where we ended up eating literally twice in one day? Yep, the land of the dancing berries. The only other eating-out choices where we were staying, beyond the traditional sit-down restaurants, were pretty much all of the “local” fast food chains. And as close as Arby’s is to my heart (and only partially because of the cholesterol in a Beef ‘n Cheddar), not everyone in the family will want to eat there.

So Panera, when we didn't have time for a long, sit-down meal, was the compromise choice. It had something for everyone: For one meal my grandmother got a grilled cheese, my aunt got a salad, my mom got a “broth bowl” (basically an Asian-style soup), and I got a salad-and-soup combo. We each got something we were happy with, if not super-excited about—whereas if we’d ended up at Arby’s, I'd have been thrilled, but others would’ve been disappointed (and, possibly, confused).

Which … makes me think, weirdly, of Clay Christensen, the Harvard professor who first defined the “disruptive innovation” that has become so popular in the business world. He has another theory: the jobs-to-be-done approach, aka “milkshake marketing.” Christensen, several years ago, was studying a fast-food chain that wanted to improve its milkshake sales; his analysis suggested that, oddly, 40 percent of the chain’s milkshakes were sold first thing in the morning—to commuters. People weren’t ordering the shakes, Christensen realized after talking with them, for the reasons you’d think: as sweet treats, desserts, snacks, etc. They were buying them because they wanted a fast and portable breakfast they could have in the car, one that would keep their hands clean, one that wouldn’t get crumbs all over their work clothes. The milkshake was simply the best option available for accomplishing that job.

Maybe Panera is selling itself to groups of people who come to a given meal with varied palates and nutritional needs—people like my family, and like so many others.

Panera’s food, too, is doing a job for the chain’s customers. But it’s not primarily commuters who are hiring it; it is instead (I’d wager, based on my time in Panera and on its marketing efforts) families. People who come to a meal with varied palates and nutritional needs—people like my family, and like so many others.

So that’s another way that Panera’s maybe-awkward marketing makes sense: The chain is selling itself not just to people, but to groups who, because of cost and geographic availability and the fusion of the two, don’t have another way to get food that is fast and fresh and otherwise as it should be. Panera’s “clean pairings” menu and its “dirty lettuce” and its “good bread” are all doing a job, which is to provide meals that families—parents, in particular—can feel good about, from a cost and a speed and a health and a general “keep everyone happy” perspective.

I grew up in California—where some of the family members visiting Ohio with me still live—and there’s a very good chance the lettuce I had in the salad I ate with them was from California, too. It’s weird to think that the people I was lunching with in that Panera in Ohio made roughly the same journey as the leaves in our bowls. But at least we got some salad, you know? (And the lettuce was, for the record, as clean as you’d want it to be.)

Sadiq Khan's Historic Win in London

Updated on May 6 at 7:50 p.m. ET

Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants to the U.K., won a historic victory in the London mayoral race, defeating Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative candidate and wealthy scion of a billionaire banker, to become the first Muslim mayor of a major European city.

Labour's @SadiqKhan is new Mayor of Londonhttps://t.co/xfZJdXU5dy pic.twitter.com/l3DtdC2gxf

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) May 6, 2016

Khan reclaimed the mayoralty for his Labour Party, succeeding Boris Johnson, the incumbent, who isn’t running.

“My dad would be so proud that the city he chose to call home has chosen one of his children to be Mayor,” Khan said after he was officially named the winner of the race.

But the congratulatory messages had begun long before the official results were declared, coming from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, and others.  

Congratulations @SadiqKhan. Can't wait to work with you to create a London that is fair for all! #YesWeKhan pic.twitter.com/FqRjfY1xNT

— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) May 6, 2016

(Corbyn, the Labour leader, showing with that hashtag that he Khan’t resist a bad pun.)  

The result are a boost for Corbyn, the Labour leader who has steered the party to the left. His opponents within the party had hoped that a poor performance by Labour in the local elections would force Corbyn’s resignation—but despite losing ground in Scotland and Wales, Labour did better than expected in council races in England.  

“We have done actually far better than any of the media were predicting we were going to do,” Corbyn told reporters.

In Scotland and Wales, it was another matter.

The new political map of Waleshttps://t.co/UCpEwnSQzD pic.twitter.com/ptRznfOXyB

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) May 6, 2016

The new political map of Scotland.

SNP fail to win majority & will "work with other parties"https://t.co/cihzmEFZrt pic.twitter.com/yVdpHGUpAl

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) May 6, 2016