Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 175

Why Zimbabwe Is Selling Its Wildlife

A drought and financial pressures have forced Zimbabwe to sell off some of its wild animals in an attempt to save them.

The country’s Parks and Wildlife Management Authority said Tuesday that Zimbabwe residents with enough land and “the capacity to acquire and manage wildlife,” should contact the agency about buying the animals. The country’s parks are well-known for keeping lions, leopards, rhinos, and elephants. Reuters reported:

Selling the animals would give some of them a new home and ease financial pressure on the parks authority, which says it receives little government funding and struggles to get by on what it earns through hunting and tourism.

“In light of the drought ... Parks and Wildlife Management Authority intends to destock its parks estates through selling some of the wildlife,” the authority said in a statement.

It asked interested Zimbabweans to get in touch and did not mention foreign buyers. Parks authority spokeswoman Caroline Washaya-Moyo would not say whether the animals could be exported or how many it wanted to sell.

The country’s drought has strained the resources of national parks and average people alike. Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has declared a state of disaster in the country’s rural parts, and more than a quarter of the country’s people are living with food shortages. The drought has killed at least 16,500 cattle, exhausted crops, and dried reservoirs.

While the Parks and Wildlife Management Authority didn’t say how many animals, what type, or at what price it planned to sell them for, it has drawn criticism in the past for similar acts. The country has about 80,000 elephants, and in July 2015 it sold 100 to China for about $38,000 each. In January, the wildlife agency announced its plan to sell China even more elephants.

Last year, a U.S. dentist was accused of luring away the well-known and much-loved male lion named Cecil from its home in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. He shot the lion for a trophy, triggering international backlash. Reuters cited a local report that said applications for hunting permits for lions have decreased since then, a trend that could contributed to financial losses for Zimbabwe’s national park system.

12 Years in Prison for Sheldon Silver

Sheldon Silver, the former speaker of the New York Assembly, was sentenced Tuesday to 12 years in prison for corruption.

BREAKING: Ex-New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, once one of state's premier powerbrokers, gets 12 years in prison.

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 3, 2016

Sheldon, a Democrat, was arrested in January 2015 and reluctantly resigned as speaker of the state Assembly, a position he’d held since 1994. A jury found him guilty last November on seven corruption charges.

The Times Union adds:

In documents submitted last month, prosecutors requested that Silver be sent away for a "greater than any sentence imposed on other New York State legislators convicted of public corruption offenses." The state record public corruption sentence length belongs to former Assemblyman William Boyland Jr., who received 14 years in prison following his 2015 conviction on bribery charges.

Silver's attorneys had sought a sentence below federal guidelines, "possibly coupled with home confinement and community service."

Based on federal guidelines, Silver could face more than 27 years in prison for his conviction on seven counts ranging from honest services fraud to extortion.

Silver, who was first elected to the state Assembly in 1976, was found to have taken $4 million in bribes and kickbacks.

A Pay Raise for Doctors in the Czech Republic

Sick of losing its health-care workers to other EU countries, the Czech Republic will raise the pay of doctors and nurses by 10 percent next year.

Milan Kubek, the head of the Czech Medical Council, said in March that of the 1,000 doctors who graduated last year in the country, 209 had left.  The departure of doctors and nurses has created a shortage in the county’s health-care system. As Reuters explains:

The Czech Republic has a universal insurance system that provides care to all citizens. But the costs have forced providers to keep salaries low, prompting many doctors to work in neighboring Austria and Germany or elsewhere in the European Union where they earn multiples of Czech salaries.

Czech doctors, on average, earn around $2,400 per month; the figure for nurses is about $1,140 per month, Reuters reports. Both professions pay twice as much in Germany, a favored destination. The average monthly salary in the Czech Republic is $1,208. The average monthly salary for doctors in Germany is around $5,700.

In 2010, amid harsh austerity measures, Czech doctors threatened a mass exodus if their wages were cut. The new measure, announced by Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka on Tuesday, will go into effect next January.

Could 13 Stolen Paintings Be Buried Beneath an Old Mobster's Yard?

For 25 years, the FBI has searched for 13 paintings––including a Vermeer, a Flinck, a Manet, and three Rembrandts––stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, when two men dressed as police tied up guards and made off with the art. Twice, the FBI has searched the Connecticut home of Robert Gentile, a 79-year-old former mobster. And on Monday, agents searched a third time.

Gentile is awaiting trial on a federal weapons charge after agents raided his home in April 2015. He has been held without bail, so he wasn’t home as the FBI dug up his yard and tore apart his home. But the Hartford Current reported that his son and wife were there to watch:

Agents arrived in about 15 cars, with two search dogs and three trucks with heavy equipment. The U.S. attorney's office in Connecticut had no comment on the search, which covered the house and the entire yard.

By midafternoon, agents focused their attention on the west side of the house near the chimney. They tore what appeared to be a vent pipe off the side of the house and pulled off part of the siding. They also began digging on the lawn near the base of the chimney with shovels and rakes.

About a dozen agents and officials congregated around the spot until about 3 p.m. when agents strung a line and hung a plastic tarp to prevent onlookers from seeing the activity. It was unclear what they were searching for, but neighbors said there is an underground oil tank in the area where agents were digging.

The search began a third time, because a federal prosecutor told a judge in Connecticut that Gentile had mentioned to three people he had access to the paintings. The Boston Globe reported that federal prosecutors even said Gentile had offered to sell the paintings in 2015 to an undercover agent, for $500,000 each (a fraction of their combined $500 million value). This was after the wife of a deceased mobster told authorities her husband had handed two paintings to Gentile around 2004, when they met in the parking lot of a lobster house in Maine.  

Gentile’s nickname was “The Cook,” which he received because he often made the meals when he and his mob associates met at a garage in Hartford, Connecticut. His connection with the mob stretches to the 1950s, and he once worked as muscle. Now, he uses a wheelchair to get around, has diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. In 2015, when the FBI arrested Gentile on charges of selling a loaded revolver to an informant, The New York Times said Gentile “may be the last living person who can lead them to the masterpieces taken in the largest art heist in American history.”

Through his lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, Gentile has maintained he has no idea where the paintings are. “If they didn’t find them in the first two searches,” McGuigan told The Boston Globe, “how could they find them this time?”

‘Burn the Witch’: Radiohead’s Gorgeous and Scary Comeback Song

Radiohead’s music often works like a puzzle, and it’s not clear whether many people ever solved the one posed by their 2011 album, The King of Limbs, whose funereal swirl only fleetingly provided the beauty and pop payoff that defined the band’s previous work.

Today’s new Radiohead song, “Burn the Witch,” blessedly does not hide its power. Sonically novel yet viscerally moving, gorgeous yet terrifying, it is the sound of Radiohead returning to do what it exists to do. The video is a claymation retelling of The Wicker Man, in which a police officer arrives at a town that is—spoiler alert!—secretly preparing to burn him in a ritual sacrifice. Thom Yorke’s lyrics speak of the kind of mass action and complacency that allows such a crime and, the logic probably goes, many other cruelties committed by societies.

It’s an orchestral pop song, but the orchestra is taking cues from heavy metal, chugga-chugga-chugga-ing the entire time. No wonder: A room full instruments acting frenetically, insistently, and not quite in unison is as fitting an approximation for a bustling murderous mob as any music might provide. Radiohead’s post-Bends interest in fusing acoustic and electronic elements continues with a drum machine and big, dubby low end creating menace and groove. The multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood’s solo and soundtrack work has often sounded like this, but without the girding of a verse/chorus/verse/chorus or Thom Yorke’s spindly melodic sensibility. Perhaps the closest thing in the band’s catalogue to this song would be the similarly roiling and poignant chamber pop “Weird Fishes / Arpeggi” and “Reckoner,” off of 2007’s In Rainbows.

The magic of the song is in large part from how it starts intense but still finds ways to intensify. The anxiety-making central sonic engine keeps thrumming along as the dynamics shift dramatically—higher, lower, quieter, louder. In the second verse, string melodies swoop in to play beautiful counterpoint to Yorke, who’s as mushy-mouthed but strangely catchy as ever. Everything froths together for a nightmarish crescendo at the end, where the video portrays the attempted human sacrifice. Mercifully, a coda in the clip shows the cop surviving. The relief he feels surely is shared by Radiohead fans, glad to have the band back with such an enjoyable and forward-thinking song.

The Lorax and Literature’s Moral Obligation

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

Doug McLean

Lydia Millet, the author of Sweet Lamb of Heaven, knows that good books are all about ambiguity, and that nothing breaks the spell like an explicit preaching session. But she also seems to feel that novels should reflect—even take a stand on—the urgent social challenges of their time. After all, if scientists agree we’re veering towards a man-made calamity of unprecedented scale, what kind of writer would remain silent?

In a conversation for this series, Millet discussed The Lorax, Dr. Seuss’s personal favorite among his books, an overtly environmentalist fable that also manages to tell a haunting truth about the destructive power of greed. Maybe the Lorax—that bossy, pedantic guilt-tripper—fails to deliver a convincing message, but the book succeeds where the character fails. We discussed how writers can embrace activism without compromising artistry, and what it means to build a compelling moral vision.

The narrator of Sweet Lamb of Heaven leaves her controlling, menacing husband, fleeing with her infant daughter all the way from Alaska to coastal Maine. She’s also hearing voices: Strange messages and mystic pronouncements fill her ears, though only when her daughter is awake. She isn’t crazy—this character coldly and clinically researches her symptoms, and consults doctors who say nothing is wrong. But she knows something isn’t right, either, as her conviction grows that her husband will stop at nothing to find her.

Lydia Millet is the author of novels including Mermaids in Paradise, Love in Infant Monkeys, and Magnificence. She has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. She spoke to me by email and by phone.

Lydia Millet: You remember the Lorax. Not the Lorax of movies—he’s only a distant cousin—but the original Lorax of paper and ink. He was a Dr. Seuss creature, a fanciful animal-person who was “shortish and oldish and brownish and mossy,” and talked in a voice that was “sharpish and bossy”—in short, an environmentalist. As a writer who’s been working with activists for 20 years now, I’ve met a lot of Loraxes.

We were a Seuss family. As a child I read almost all of his books, but the one I loved best was The Lorax. It’s a fairy tale of failure—the shade of defeat and the shine of hope. All of us who came up with the Lorax (I was born three years before he was) were raised on a tragic fail. The story goes like this: In a dismal blue-and-brown landscape, a small boy seeks out a tale-teller who lives alone in a shabby tower—a tale-teller whose face we never see. In exchange for some whimsical tokens dropped into a pail, the hermit tells his story. This is the aging Once-ler, who came to a beautiful place when he was young and turned it into a wasteland. He chopped down its lovely grove of Truffula trees to make thneeds, “which everyone, everyone, everyone needs.” He drove out the bears and the birds and the fish, ignoring the Lorax’s angry warnings. And when the last tree fell to the axe, and the factory shuttered, the Lorax left too, lifted away through a hole in the smog. Only the Once-ler remained in the promised land he’d destroyed. And a dilapidated sign that read: “The Street of the Lifted Lorax.”

One of my favorite verses comes near the end of the book:

And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with the one word … ‘UNLESS.’ Whatever that meant, well, I just couldn’t guess. That was long, long ago. But each day since that day I’ve sat here and worried and worried away. Through the years, while my buildings have fallen apart, I’ve worried about it with all of my heart.

I admire this passage for its succinctness of nostalgia and remorse, its simple and straightforward assertion of the phantoms of possibility and powerlessness alongside each other. I’ve wanted, in much of my own fiction, to echo this child’s parable, call forth a ghostly Lorax and adult unless: a gesture of momentum, in the context of story and interior monologue, that entertains the necessity of a continued presence in the world of forests and pupfish and elephants, not only for their own sake but for ours.

What makes The Lorax such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve.

Isn’t that a subject worthy of novels? Shouldn’t the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature? And yet, despite the fact that most Americans support the work of saving species from winking out, and increasingly support strong action to curb climate change, the highly rational push for the preservation of nature and life-support systems often appears in the media—and certainly appears in most current fiction—as a boutique agenda. Climate change is shifting that marginalization, but not fast enough.

What makes The Lorax such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve. This is commonplace and accepted in children’s stories, but considered largely undesirable in literary fiction. In fact snarkiness and even snobbishness can be brought to bear by some critics if they believe they’ve sniffed out a whiff of idea-mongering in fiction. When it comes to philosophy—just say no! Politics? Heaven forfend! If adults wish to put themselves in the path of notions about right and wrong, the theory seems to go, they can darn well seek out a house of worship or a counselor. Maybe even an AA meeting. They shouldn’t go to a book, unless it’s holy scripture or a self-help manual. Fiction should be an ethically safe space, free of fancy ideas. It should be dedicated modestly to relationships or escapism or the needs of luscious voyeurs.

But I happen to believe in the urgency of now. I don’t accept the proposition that ours is a historical moment like any other, that we can handily shrug off our duty to the future by placing ourselves in an endless, linear continuum of progress that makes its share of errors but is finally, comfortingly self-correcting. Rather I follow the strong evidence for the singularity of this human era, its unique power to make or break that future, directly linked to tipping points associated with climate catastrophe and the irreversibility of extinction. I cleave to science and the need to communicate science, or at least the products of science. Beyond and within science, love: not the love we have for ourselves, but that greater love we forget or take for granted in daily life, the love of otherness. The desperate need for otherness. And I suspect there’s no place, in art or journalism or politics, that isn’t ripe for that discussion.

I rarely write a book where I’m not trying to approach some idea or set of ideas that I think is of interest in the cultural moment. Some of my books touch on the loss of animal and plant life and what that means to people; my new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, is partly about the use of religious belief in politics and the intersection of that use with the diminishment of diversity, cultural and linguistic as well as biological. In approaching these ideas in a fictional vein I’ve had to wrestle, on the technical side, with the trickiness of balancing the aesthetics of contemporary writing (grounded in the subjective and averse to the didactic, committed to the personal and hostile to the general) with what might unfashionably be called a moral vision.

In fiction, philosophical, political, or religious ideas tend to be most convincing when they arise organically out of a character.

There are a few ways to know whether something I’ve written succeeds in achieving this balance, the tension of being properly subjective yet also conveying a more expansive sense of right and wrong. If I find myself repelled by the text, pulling away from something that’s meant to be read philosophically, that’s a good sign that someone else will feel that way, too. In fiction, philosophical, political, or religious ideas tend to be most convincing when they arise organically out of a character. And the only way I know how to make characters is by voice, the texture of personality inside a narrative. If you can establish a voice that can get away with being somewhat abstract, that’s part of the battle. And part of it is simple charisma.

It’s also about pulling back and allowing ambiguity—enough that the reader can decide his or her own relationship to what’s being encountered. You have to establish a certain authority for the reader to suspend disbelief, but there’s great fluidity in fiction: You don’t need to be representing your own position, indeed you don’t need to be representing any real position. You’re not a historian and you’re not a journalist. You can write whatever you want, however you want, and it can be read however the reader wants to read it. That’s the risk and the excitement. Two private minds in conversation.

We shouldn’t forget that literary fiction is part of the now, part of social discourse. It’s not a medium for polemics, but it is clearly a medium for speculation. And for the examination of collective choices as well as individual. This is nothing new; it goes back well before Dickens or Hardy or Eliot. My feeling is that the struggle to write well is also the struggle to write honestly, even when they seem to be at loggerheads. And that candor—elusive and sometimes rudely naked—shouldn’t be just the easy honesty of me but a more ambitious honesty of us. Not the sole purview of children’s books, but the purview of any book at all.

In the end, I think a bit of shamelessness is called for.

Leicester City, the Unlikeliest of Winners

Much to everyone’s disbelief, the Leicester City soccer club was crowned the champion of the English Premier League Monday.

The team’s chances last summer were small, to say the least. Back then, William Hill, a British betting group, put the odds of the Foxes of Leicester City, a fledgling team based two hours north of London, of winning at 5,000-to-1. Essentially, the team had a .0002 percent chance of being the best team in the league of 20. Except for the 25 people who bet a combined total of just $243 on the team through William Hill, no one expected this from Leicester City.

Here’s some perspective: William Hill once put the odds of Elvis being found alive and well at 2,000-to-1 and an acknowledgment by the U.S. government that the first moon landing was faked at 500-to-1.

And some more perspective, from ESPN:

Not only did the Foxes have a 13-game winless run last season, they were only six points from being relegated to a lower level of competition. Leicester City wasn’t even in the Premier League two years ago. The club earned promotion to England's top soccer league starting in the 2014-15 season for the first time in 10 years.

In the world of overused sports tropes, declaring a victory “one of the biggest upsets in history” is a frequent sin. But in this case, this is the biggest upset in modern sports history.

When Holly Holm beat reigning Ultimate Fighting Championship titleholder Ronda Rousey last November, she shocked the sporting world. But Rousey was only an 8-to-1 favorite to win that match. A bigger shocker in the fighting world happened in 1990 when Buster Douglas beat 42-to-1 favorite Mike Tyson for the heavyweight boxing championship.

In 2004, the Greek national soccer team came from nowhere and won their first European Championship. But they were at 150-to-1 odds. “The Miracle Mets” had an even better shot at a championship, with 100-to-1 odds of winning the World Series in 1969.

Even the Miracle on Ice wasn’t this big. The U.S. Olympic hockey team had 1,000-to-1 odds of beating the Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics. The Soviets were clear favorites, having won eight of the last nine gold medals in hockey. The U.S. team of college students lost 10-3 in a game against the Soviets just days before the Olympics started.

The closest upset to Leicester City’s championship? When American Rulon Gardner won the gold medal in the 2000 Olympics in Greco-Roman wrestling. At 2,000-to-1 odds, he beat Russian Alexander Karelin, a three-time Olympic champion who hadn’t lost an international match in 13 years.

One fan The New York Times interviewed described the upset as “like a Canadian Football League team winning the NFL.” Sports Illustrated wrote that “perhaps the best comparison is the Milan (Ind.) High basketball team immortalized in Hoosiers.”

Michael Shapiro, a professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, told me it would be like today’s Brooklyn Cyclones, a single-A minor league baseball team, beating the champion 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers.

To put it another way, when everyone expects you to lose—and lose big—you usually do.  The odds of former NBA player and professional loudmouth Charles Barkley winning last year’s American Century Celebrity Golf Championship was 5,000-to-1. He finished second-to-last in 90th place, two positions behind Larry the Cable Guy, who had 2,500-to-1 odds.

Leicester’s win means William Hill will pay out on a 5,000-to-1 shot for the first time—about $4.4 million. The betting firm said last week it would be more careful before offering such odds again.

“In hindsight, we were idiots offering odds of 5,000-1,” the company said.

Why Native American Inmates Can't Wear Their Hair Long in Alabama

The U.S. Supreme Court will not consider a case from Native American inmates in Alabama prisons who want to wear their hair long in accordance with their religious beliefs and tradition.

The justices’ refusal to hear their appeal lets stand an appeals-court decision from last summer that ruled in favor of the Alabama Department of Corrections and its grooming policies, which require male inmates to keep their hair short, defined as “off neck and ears.” The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in August upheld prison officials’ argument that long hair posed hygiene and security risks, and could be used to conceal weapons or contraband or could help escaped inmates change their appearance. That decision is now the final word in the case.

The inmates’ lawyer said Monday that “their sacred and ancestral core religious traditions are at stake,” according to the Associated Press.

The lawsuit, Knight v. Thompson, was first filed in 1993. The Eleventh Circuit, which has ruled on the case four times, explained in a 2013 ruling that while many other jurisdictions allowed long hair, it could not force Alabama to observe the same policies:

In the end, Plaintiffs ask us to hold that because many other prison systems have chosen to accept the costs and risks associated with long hair, the [Alabama Department of Corrections] must accept them as well. This we cannot do. Although many well-run institutions have indeed decided that the benefits of giving inmates more freedom in personal grooming outweigh the disadvantages, the [Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons] does not prevent the ADOC from making its own reasoned assessment. Allowing male inmates to wear long hair carries with it established costs and risks, and the RLUIPA does not require the ADOC to embrace them merely because other institutions have.

The ADOC may, of course, decide in the future that these costs and risks might be worth absorbing, especially in view of the high value that long hair holds for many religious inmates. And the ADOC might also find persuasive James Madison's admonition that “[i]t is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him,” and “[t]his duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”

Most state prison systems allow for religious exemptions on prison grooming policies, including for long hair. The 10 prison systems that ban long hair are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, according to the Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides legal assistance to Native American tribes and people.

The Supreme Court in February ordered the Eleventh Circuit to reconsider its 2015 decision after the Court’s ruling in a case involving inmates and grooming policies a month earlier. In that case, Holt v. Hobbs, the Supreme Court sided with a Muslim inmate in Arkansas who wanted to grow a ½-inch beard in accordance with his religious beliefs, and ruled that the state prison system had violated religious rights by prohibiting inmates from growing beards.

Silicon Valley’s Sad Ballad of Start-Up Success

Silicon Valley has always been a comic high-wire act, mixing a highfalutin satire of the costs of failure and success in the start-up world with the crudest imagery and most foul-mouthed monologuing. The visual tableau at the end of Sunday’s episode might have been the show’s platonic ideal: Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) realized his revolutionary software was being turned into a hacky piece of business tech while watching two thoroughbred horses mate in his CEO’s stable. As Silicon Valley begins its third season, it’s become an even more insidiously clever tale of the perils of “scaling” in the business world, where good ideas get turned into lifeless multi-billion-dollar companies, but it’s not above using the simplest visual metaphor in the world to get that across.

In the previous seasons, Silicon Valley charted Richard’s journey from programmer drone to business titan as he created innovative data-compression software and beat back the efforts of massive conglomerate Hooli (the show’s analogue for Google) to steal it away from him. Now, Richard is finally free to pursue his own vision for his creation, Pied Piper, with millions of dollars of start-up cash at his disposal. But with that comes a new set of expectations: Silicon Valley is, at its core, a caustic long-form portrayal of the mediocrity at the heart of the American dream. Richard has finally found success, freedom, and fame, but the only reward he gets for it is the last thing he’s interested in: money.

As the two horses copulate (in graphic detail) behind him, Richard talks to his new CEO Jack Barker (Stephen Tobolowsky), an experienced hand brought in to help grow Pied Piper into a gigantic company. Richard lays out his dream for his software to Jack: a world where Pied Piper could grant super high-speed Internet to the poorest, most remote areas on Earth, all while turning a profit. Jack gently corrects him. “The product isn’t the platform, and the product isn’t your algorithm either, and it’s not even the software. Do you know what Pied Piper’s product is?”

“Is it me?” Richard asks, as inspirational music builds behind him. “Oh, God! No! No!” Jack shrieks. “Pied Piper’s product is its stock. Whatever makes the value of that stock go up, that is what we’re going to make.” And with that, he returns to his stallions. Richard’s efforts throughout the first season of Silicon Valley were all geared toward avoiding an acquisition by a big company, since it would corrupt his utopian vision. The lesson of the show this year is that the tech industry’s start-up model makes those evils unavoidable. Richard needs money and resources to make his software globally available, a situation that leaves him handcuffed to a mundane business he never wanted.

Silicon Valley is, at its core, a caustic long-form portrayal of the mediocrity at the heart of the American dream.

Jack is the perfect villain for that narrative: a benevolent, avuncular steward for the company’s depressing “business-facing” goals. Richard wants Pied Piper to be like Dropbox, a free piece of software anyone can use with profits coming from premium features for businesses. Jack lends these ideas a sympathetic ear before quietly quashing every one of them, telling Richard the tech bubble could pop again at any moment and it’s better to just make money fast, selling software straight to businesses and leaving the general public out of it.

The delights of each episode of Silicon Valley are mostly in the beautiful creativity of its bad language. Richard, his programmers Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Bertram (Martin Starr), and his advisers Erlich (T.J. Miller) and Donald (Zach Woods) find new, incredible ways to insult and undermine each other every week. But the show’s larger plotting can be more frustrating. Dorky testosterone jousts are always amusing to watch, but Richard is such an idealistic wet blanket that the early struggles of Pied Piper were too halting and pathetic to really root for. The show works much better with Richard as a successful figure: His aspirations are the same, but they may not be enough to halt the compromising tide of money that comes with success.

Richard’s Sisyphean efforts to be “different” in an industry where being different has been turned into its own homogenous concept are the tragic heart of Silicon Valley. Its creators, Mike Judge, John Altschuler, and Dave Krinsky, have managed to squeeze that sad narrative of the American business model into a show that also features explicit horse sex and whole scenes devoted to masturbation algorithms without missing a step. This season will certainly feature many more such antics, as Pied Piper’s ship of fools sail ever closer to multi-billion-dollar success, but without losing the pathos of Richard’s fight to keep his integrity.

That challenge might seem minor compared to those of Silicon Valley’s sister shows on HBO (the continental power clashes on Game of Thrones and the deadlocked presidential race of Veep), but as Richard’s face crumples before those thoroughbreds, it feels like a matter of life and death. Better than that, it’s a challenge that feels deeply rooted in every ongoing discussion about technology, and the question of whether there’s a place for more idealistic enterprise not purely tied to profit and corporate control. Silicon Valley thinks the answer is no, but at least it sees the dark comedy in that.

Moqtada al-Sadr's Return

The man who went from being described as a “pest” to “the most dangerous man in Iraq” is back—though Moqtada al-Sadr and his supporters are likely to say he never went anywhere in the first place. The Shiite cleric’s supporters stormed Baghdad’s supposedly secure Green Zone on Saturday and took over Parliament, demanding improved public services and an end to corruption. They left Sunday, on Sadr’s orders, after ISIS attacked an Iraqi city. Their departure avoided further destabilizing the predominantly Shia government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, but the protests not only raised questions about whether the government can stand, it also showed that Iraq’s turmoil has sources beyond Sunni-Shia sectarian divisions.

The roots of Iraq’s current parliamentary crisis lie in the quota system set up in 2003, after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which guarantees some minimal level of representation to each major ethno-sectarian faction. The idea was such a system would prevent any one of Iraq’s various ethnic factions from dominating the others. Iraq is majority Shia, but has a significant Sunni minority, as well as a large number of Kurds and others. Under Saddam, the Sunnis dominated government and many Shiites and others complained of discrimination. The new system was designed to curb such divisions, but, as Ibrahim al-Marashi, an assistant professor at California State University, San Marcos, wrote on Al Jazeera, “the quota system … empowers politicians based solely on their ethno-sectarian background.”

What that system fostered is chronic corruption. Indeed, the country is ranked 161 out of 168 in Transparency International’s admittedly flawed corruption index even as it wrestles with ethnic and sectarian divisions, as well as a challenge from the Islamic State. Low oil prices have not helped. Revenues from the sector were supposed to rebuild Iraq after years of war that followed international sanctions imposed during Saddam’s rule, but now, with oil prices near multiyear lows, salaries have gone unpaid and Iraq’s problems seem magnified. Emma Sky, a former civilian adviser to the U.S. military in Iraq, wrote in  Politico: “The greatest threat to Iraq thus comes not from the Islamic State but from broken politics, catastrophic corruption, and mismanagement.” It is these circumstances that have resulted in massive anti-government protests and calls from Sadr for more, and presumably more honest, technocrats in Iraq’s government.

The role of anti-corruption campaigner is a relatively new one for Sadr, the son of a revered Shiite cleric. The younger Sadr built his reputation in the years following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as an anti-American firebrand. His powerful Mahdi Army, which fought the Americans and the Sunnis, disbanded in 2008, has given way to the Peace Companies, militias that are engaged in the fight against ISIS. Sadr’s Al-Ahrar political bloc won 34 parliamentary seats out of 328 in the most recent elections, and is part of the ruling coalition. The cleric has positioned himself as less of a sectarian leader than as an anti-corruption campaigner. It is in this role that he demanded that Adabi, the U.S.-backed prime minister, name a Cabinet of technocrats, a move that, in effect, would have imperiled the quota system upon which the Iraqi political establishment is built.   

In theory, the technocrats could lead to better governance and less corruption, but in practice what they will most certainly do is diminish the influence of the various parties, especially the Shia ones. Still, Abadi, who like Sadr is Shiite, agreed with the demands. He named several well-respected Iraqis to his Cabinet, only to see the Shiite-dominated Parliament reject the names. In response, Sadr’s supporters first began protests and then stormed the Green Zone, once impregnable, to take control of Parliament. There, they shouted anti-government slogans—“you are all thieves”—as well as chants against Iran. They left Sunday, but vowed to return if their demands were not met. Although it’s tempting to be sympathetic to Sadr’s demands—after all, who doesn’t want clean government?—the issue is made more complicated by the role of Iran, Iraq’s neighbor that is keen on maintaining Shiite dominance in Iraq.

Iran supports the idea of Shiite unity in Iraq, so long as it enhances Iran’s own influence in the country. Sadr, however, portrays himself as an independent Iraqi Shia nationalist. “Ultimately the deadlock has benefited Sadr's political standing,” Marashi wrote on Al Jazeera. “By fomenting a protest movement and delivering an ultimatum to Abadi, Sadr has successfully pitted his two Shia political rivals, the Dawa Party of the prime minister, and the politicians of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) in parliament, against each other, undermining Iran’s overarching goal of maintaining a unified Shia alliance in Iraq.”

Abadi’s political future appears secure for now, a fact that is possibly a relief for the U.S., which orchestrated his ascent to the premiership. His predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, had lost Washington’s support due to policies that were seen to discriminate against Iraq’s minorities. Indeed, Joe Biden, the American vice president, made a surprise visit to Baghdad last Thursday in an attempt to bolster Abadi’s government. But The Guardian points out: “Sadr’s re-emergence as a powerful national leader may have some advantages for Washington. Despite three years spent in voluntary exile in Iran, his newly minted nationalist stance makes him a potential bulwark against Tehran’s influence, which has become all-pervasive since the US left. There are sharp tensions between Sadr and rival Shia factions, and Sadrist militia have clashed with the Iranian-backed Hashd.”

But Sadr’s ultimate aims are anyone’s guess: The Wall Street Journal reported that the Shiite cleric made an unannounced stop Monday in Iran. No other details of the trip were released.