Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 177

Protesters in Iraq's Parliament

Iraqi officials declared a state of emergency in Baghdad after protesters stormed the nation’s parliament building on Saturday.

Hundreds of demonstrators tore down parts of the concrete barricades ringing the heavily fortified Green Zone, home to numerous government buildings and foreign embassies in the Iraqi capital, to reach the legislative chamber.

Iraq protesters pull down concrete blast walls to enter Baghdad's Green Zone pic.twitter.com/gsEAqor28R

— W.G. Dunlop (@wgdunlop) April 30, 2016

Once inside, the protesters sat at legislators’ desks, unfurled banners and Iraqi flags, and reportedly began ransacking parliamentary offices. No injuries have been reported, and other government buildings and nearby embassies appear unaffected.

Saturday’s protests followed a series of mass demonstrations against corruption and political deadlock throughout Baghdad in recent weeks. The New York Times has more:

The protesters were mostly supporters of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has rallied his followers to push for demands and has largely supported [Iraqi Prime Minister Haidir al-Abadi]’s promises, still unfulfilled, to improve how the government works. The ease with which they penetrated the rim of the Green Zone suggested that security forces were supportive of the protesters, as there were no reports of shots fired.

The Parliament was stormed after a session that had been scheduled for Saturday was postponed because a quorum could not be reached. Mr. Abadi had been expected to introduce several new ministers as part of a promise to overhaul his cabinet and fill it with technocrats instead of politicians beholden to a party or sect.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Baghdad, his first in five years, on Thursday to urge Iraqi lawmakers and senior politicians to end the stalemate and focus on defeating ISIS.

The Kids’ Show That Taught Me to Ask “Why?”

Just watch the opening credits for this television show and tell me you are not totally, whole-heartedly pumped. All that action! That funky theme song! The counting backward!

If you were watching daytime PBS any time in the middle chunk of the 1980s, you might remember 3-2-1 Contact. Technically, it was a math-and-science show. But, practically, it was a documentary-adventure show. Viewers vicariously jumped out of airplanes, loop-de-looped on roller coasters, and went SCUBA diving and surfing. They learned about the physics of the perfect baseball pitch from the New York Mets and discovered techniques for best communicating with monkeys and computers.

A trip to a bubble festival became a way to explain surface tension. The thing is, a decent portion of that particular episode is just people playing with bubbles and talking about the ideal ingredients for the ultimate bubble solution. (Eventually they get around to the science behind a bubble’s spherical shape; but there’s a spirit of do-it-yourself experimentation throughout. “Sometimes you just have to try things out for yourself,” says one of the show’s hosts, a girl named Stephanie Yu.)

The show, a production of the Children’s Television Network, was built around removing classroom lessons from the school or lab environment. “Too many children think that scientists are all middle-aged white males in laboratory coats,” Edward Atkins, 3-2-1 Contact’s director of content, told The New York Times in 1983. “We want to introduce them to other kinds of scientists—women, minorities, people using science in daily life—without neglecting the middle-aged men in the laboratory coats.”

So instead of just listening to experts explain scientific concepts, the show’s hosts got to lead the way by asking questions—then interrogating what they’d learned by attempting experiments of their own. There were tips to salt-water marshes, recording studios, lava fields, a remote Australian river (“to study a platypus, you have to find one”), and archeological digs.  

There’s no doubt 3-2-1 Contact was an educational show, but it was open-ended in a way that made the world seem expansive and unstructured—pretty much the opposite of required educational tools like math flashcards and science textbooks. I remember as a kid thinking 3-2-1 Contact was just as good as Sesame Street but somehow much cooler. This was by design. 3-2-1 Contact has been described as “a sort of ‘Sesame Street Discovers Science,’” the Times wrote in 1983, but for older kids, aged 8 to 12. It was also a kin to Square One, the math-focused program which featured Mathnet, the memorable sendup of the detective show Dragnet. Naturally, 3-2-1 Contact had its own investigative subplot, in which members of the Bloodhound Gang solved serialized mysteries.  

The overarching goal among the show’s creators was to leave kids with “a changed perception of what science and technology are and what scientists do,'' Atkins said in 1983. Based on the impression it left on me, I’d say 3-2-1 Contact succeeded. I didn’t grow up to become a scientist, but I did shape my life around asking “why.” And my expansive views of science and technology today mirror the far-reaching views of science and technology that were at the heart of 3-2-1 Contact.  

The show taught me that trying to understand how things work is unequivocally thrilling. It was, in this way, a celebration of curiosity above all. Finding an answer can be satisfying, but asking questions often brings greater joy than the certainty of knowing.

Incidentally, at my first-ever real job, in a coffee shop outside Philadelphia, my boss, who was tired of my many queries, suggested gently that if I could someday make a living from asking questions, I should. I was 15, and he was perhaps teasing me a bit, but he was also echoing an idea that I’d encountered in 3-2-1 Contact so many years before.

And anyway. He was right. So I did.

Beyoncé's Lemonade: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Lemonade, Love, and Being a Black Girl Who Becomes a Black Woman

Amani Bin Shikhan | Noisey

“Lemonade is an ode to the movement of mountains, to the crack of hips. The birth of a black woman. In all her top tier, five-star, backseat lovin’ goodness. In her hair grown out to her feet, hands fused in prayer. During her menses and during the height of her orgasm. Your perfect girl. Your eeriest of dreams, draped in fur and bathed in blue-tinted garage lighting.”

Lemonade Is About Black Women Healing Themselves and Each Other

Morgan Jerkins | Elle

“Lemonade is more than a showcase of just one black woman’s humanity. It is a narrative of how black women’s healing is a communal art, not an individualistic act. Healing might arrive through singing as Beyoncé does while others dance around her, cooking food with one another, holding hands in solidarity, or simply standing in the presence of those who are sharing in the pain.”

Lemonade Is Beyoncé’s Body and Blood

Clover Hope | Jezebel

“There’s an invisible cape of protection around her. Though we know the caretaker, black and powerful, herself needs protecting. This is the reality and fantasy of Lemonade: a beautiful blur of truth and fiction, sacred and profane, strength and weakness, shrewdness and art. Inherited burdens and, finally, salvation. It’s the story of, and for, the tossed-aside black women whose fury makes us strike and for those who bottle it up.”

Warsan Shire: The Somali-British Poet Quoted by Beyoncé in Lemonade

Rafia Zakaria | The Guardian

“The migrant and the Muslim woman may be the most marginal figures of our divided and suspicious present, their realities dulled into the monochrome of submission and desperation, to elicit pity or polemic. In Warsan Shire’s poetry they speak for themselves, its vivid literary exploration of their inner lives adding the depth and complexity that grants them a full and realized humanity. Here is rebellion in verse … ”

“Isn’t This Funnier?” New Girl Creator Liz Meriwether Recalls the Making of the Prince Episode

Liz Meriwether | Vulture

“His voice was … I don’t need to tell you what his voice was like. Soft. Strong. A whisper that sounded like it was booming out over a loudspeaker. He spoke, and the street I was standing on opened up. It’s possible I was having a full-on panic attack … But I knew, all the way in Minnesota, Prince could tell he was speaking to a person who had, moments ago, spit a dumpling out of her mouth.”

Prince: A Eulogy

Greg Tate | MTV News

“It’s only in our mourning that we realize we know more about your furtive, mysterious, cunning, and offstage publicity-shunning fantasy life and psychic haunts than any black cat in history, famous, infamous, or even family. Yet the deepest thing about you in retrospect, my ninja, is also the most obvious. That like every other big-tent playa-pimp impresario we’ve ever known, you lived and died by that most basic rule: Give ‘em everything you’ve got in spades, but always leave ‘em grieving for more.”

I Can Tell You All About Lemonade

Laur M. Jackson | Complex

“I will give you names. Names of black women. Not a be-all list. But a good start if this is new to you. If anybody thinks this is an everybody project. Black women’s work. Black women’s magic. Black women who have chosen to gift the world knowledge that even themselves contain secrets deliberately unnoticeable by you who may never need get it.”

Beyoncé, Hillary, Michelle, and the Business of American Marriage

Josie Pickens | The Daily Beast

“Beyoncé’s art and Hillary Clinton’s real life reckoning, played out before the public, are presenting us with new commentary on wives and cheating husbands: The reason a woman chooses to stay in a marriage after her partner’s affair may have changed from financial dependency, or unyielding loyalty, or societal constraints, to staying because (most importantly) it’s good for business and her whole life trajectory.”

Why Won’t Hollywood Cast Asian Actors?

Keith Chow | The New York Times

“Such facts reveal Hollywood’s dirty little secret. Economics has nothing to do with racist casting policies. Films in which the leads have been whitewashed have all failed mightily at the box office. Inserting white leads had no demonstrable effect on the numbers. So why is that still conventional thinking in Hollywood?”

Prince, Cecil Taylor, and Beyoncé’s Shape-Shifting Black Body

Hilton Als | The New Yorker

“Butler is the dominant artistic force in the movie version of Lemonade. Shot by various young filmmakers, ranging from Kahlil Joseph to Melina Matsoukas, the movie is accompanied by lyrics that chronicle the anxiety of infidelity and resolution—no love, let alone any coupling, is perfect—but it’s the black female body, Butler’s great subject, that struggles against and sometimes breaks free of Beyoncé’s pop perfection.”

Australia’s Controversial Migration Policy

The first boat people to arrive on Australian shores were from Vietnam who’d navigated the seas with a map torn from a school atlas. It was April 1976, and they fled the scars of the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon on a 65-foot wooden fishing boat. The migrants were called boat people quite simply because that’s how they came to Australia. Over the next five years, 2,054 more would follow.

Most Australians at the time wanted to let these Vietnamese migrants stay in their country, so the newcomers were given refugee status. But that changed. The next wave of boat people came in 1989, and each year, for 10 years, about 170 of them floated to Australia, many from Cambodia. Unlike a decade before, the Australian government first detained these migrants, then processed them through the courts. The third major wave of boat people came from the Middle East, and by 2001 three-quarters of Australians wanted them turned away.

The country’s policy today toward asylum-seekers who arrive by sea is much different: It places them in offshore-detention facilities on two Pacific Island nations, Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG), and processes their asylum claims while keeping them there.  Human-rights advocates and refugee organizations say the country’s policy is cruel. It sets no bail, no time limit to their stay, and on average asylum-seekers will spend a year in camps, they say. PNG’s supreme court apparently agreed. This week it ordered the country’s government to close the Manus Island center, calling the facility a violation of the migrants’ personal liberties. The PNG government said it would comply.

But Australia’s Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, responded by saying Canberra’s “position is very clear, and that is we are not going to accept people who have sought to come to our country illegally by boat, they will not settle permanently in our country.”

Australia’s refugee policy has been a test in how a country balances the rights of the world’s dispossessed with its own right to determine who enters. And it was one year, 2001, that Australia set itself apart, and one incident, the “Tampa affair,” that brought its policy to the fore.  It was an election year in Australia, and Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal Party, which holds a conservative ideology, was trailing in the polls. But on the policy-launch day of his election campaign, Howard made his stance on immigration clear: “We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.” His ideas on immigration shaded him a strong leader and is credited in part with his party’s election victory that November.

At the time, many migrants and refugees sailed and floated to Australia across the Indian Ocean to Christmas Island, an Australian territory 1,200 miles from the mainland, but only a three-day boat trip from Jakarta, Indonesia. Near the end of August 2001, 433 asylum-seekers, mostly Afghans, lost their way at sea on a wooden fishing boat called the Palapa and sent a distress signal. They were picked up two days later by MV Tampa, the Norwegian freight liner. What followed was a game of chicken. Typically, a captain will sail people rescued from the water to the nearest port that will have them. In this case, that would have been Christmas Island, the Australian territory where the refugees had wanted to go, and where they could be processed for asylum in Australia. But Howard refused them entry. A port 12 hours away in Merak, Indonesia, would take the ship, but the asylum-seekers were dehydrated and sick, and they included children and pregnant women. Some of those on board threatened suicide if returned, and the captain doubted whether his crew of 27 could make that far of a trip with the additional 433 passengers. So he sailed toward Christmas Island, and Howard dispatched the military.

As the deadlock became international news, Howard tried to pass a bill in Parliament that’d grant the government power to remove foreign ships from its waters, but he didn’t get the votes. International media, human-rights groups, and world leaders pressured Australia to do something, and after eight days, Howard worked out a deal in which the Australian Navy would take the refugees to Nauru, a Pacific island nation, where they’d be kept in camps while they waited for the government to process their asylum applications. These offshore camps would become central to Howard’s immigration policy, called the “Pacific Solution,” that Australia would pass in 2001.

The new immigration policy changed where a noncitizen could apply for Australian protection. Until then, Australia’s migration zone, as this is known, stretched to its territories of thousands of islands—like Christmas Island. But under the change, Australia excised those from the migration zone, making it so only people who reached the mainland could claim asylum. Australia’s navy was also given the power to stop migrant boats in the ocean, and the country officially started offshore migrant-processing camps in Nauru and PNG.

Over the next two years, Australia deported or diverted 1,544 asylum-seekers to the detention camps, and paid to operate the camps in both countries. It gave Nauru an extra (roughly) $20 million in aid, which at the time was around one-third of its GDP.

As intended, Howard’s immigration plan drastically reduced the boats making it to Australian shores. In 2002 one asylum-seeker reached Australia, and in the next five years, 57 people each year did. Then in 2007, Australia had a change in government.

The center-left Labor Party won the election, and Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister, kept his campaign promise to do away with the offshore-processing camps. It would not last long. In 2009, 60 boats arrived in Australia with 2,726 asylum-seekers; the next year it was 134 boats with 6,555 people; then 69 boats with 4,565. And with those rising numbers came rising refugee deaths as leaky boats or wooden vessels shattered against the rocks in the choppy waters. The Liberals, now in opposition, blamed Rudd’s policy for the increased migration, for the deaths, and for supporting the human-smuggler economy. Rudd resisted critics, but soon found himself losing a party leadership vote to Julia Gillard, who succeeded him as prime minister.

Under her government, in May 2013 Australia excised even the mainland from its migration zone, which basically meant migrants could be sent to the offshore detention facilities wherever their ships landed. Until then, even under Howard’s policies, those who reached mainland Australia could not legally be sent to Nauru or PNG. The asylum-seekers now stay in the camps while their claims are processed. But even if they are found to have valid asylum claims—as 90 percent of them are—they are not allowed to settle in Australia. Instead, they may be settled on Nauru or PNG. Four even went to Cambodia, for which Australia paid the country about $42 million.

The camps remain contentious, and refugee groups say they violate human rights. In 2014, asylum-seekers at the Manus Island detention center protested and security responded with violence, killing a 23-year-old Iranian. That same year, a former Associated Press reporter described the Manus Island center to the BBC like this:

The refugees live in shipping containers, there's water everywhere, lights not working, the heat is oppressive, no windows. There was a (detainee) with a bandage over his eye... asking for help in this stinking, hot compound.

Women and children complain of sexual abuse. And recent numbers put the average stay at 450 days, though almost one-quarter of asylum-seekers spend more than two years in the camps.

On Tuesday, as representatives from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees toured the Nauru center, an Iranian asylum-seeker reportedly said, “This is how tired we are, this action will prove how exhausted we are. I cannot take it anymore.” Then he lit himself on fire—and died Friday. Also Wednesday, five more refugees attempted suicide.

Dutton, the Australian immigration minister, said: “if people think that through action of self-harm or harming a member of their family that that is going to result in them coming to Australia and staying here permanently, that will not be the outcome.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull added: “We cannot be misty-eyed about this. We have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose. ... We must have secure borders and we do and we will, and they will remain so, as long as I am the prime minister of this country.”

To be sure, it’s not that Australia has an issue with refugees––in fact, it has agreed to resettle 12,000 Syrians, atop the refugees it typically takes through its Humanitarian Programme. It granted 13,800 refugee visas between 2013 and 2014, and 20,000 between 2012 and 2013.

But the arrivals by sea seem to prompt anger. One reason for this could be that migrants and refugees who try to reach Australia by sea are, in fact, coming illegally. Those that are being resettled through its Humanitarian Programme, meanwhile, are registered refugees being accepted under Australia’s international obligations. The two main parties also contend that its policies deter human-smuggling.  

The problem seems only to be when Australia discusses migration by boats, said António Guterres, the former UNHCR Commissioner, “and there, of course, we enter into a very, very, very dramatic thing. I think it is a kind of collective sociological and psychological question. They receive, I think, 180,000 migrants in a year. If you come to Australia in a different way, it’s fine but if they come in a boat it is like something strange happens to their minds.”

On the 35th anniversary of the year those five young Vietnamese men docked their boat in a northern Australian harbor, a reporter caught up with one of the original boat people, a man named Lam Tac Tam, who now lives a mile from where he first landed. He told the reporter they had no destination when they left Vietnam, and during their trip they talked of sailing to the the island of Guam. It was a U.S. territory, and the U.S. had helped Vietnam in the war––Tam’s brother even knew someone who lived there. “So we were thinking to go there,” Tam told the reporter.

But while in Malaysia they docked next to a ship carrying timber. The captain was from Australia, and he told Tam and his brother Australia was a nice place, big, but with a small population and lot of friendly people. And it was close.

“You should go there,” Tam remembered the captain say, “take a chance there.”

So they did.

Australia's Controversial Migration Policy

The first boat people to arrive on Australian shores were from Vietnam who’d navigated the seas with a map torn from a school atlas. It was April 1976, and they fled the scars of the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon on a 65-foot wooden fishing boat. The migrants were called boat people quite simply because that’s how they came to Australia. Over the next five years, 2,054 more would follow.

Most Australians at the time wanted to let these Vietnamese migrants stay in their country, so the newcomers were given refugee status. But that changed. The next wave of boat people came in 1989, and each year, for 10 years, about 170 of them floated to Australia, many from Cambodia. Unlike a decade before, the Australian government first detained these migrants, then processed them through the courts. The third major wave of boat people came from the Middle East, and by 2001 three-quarters of Australians wanted them turned away.

The country’s policy today toward asylum-seekers who arrive by sea is much different: It places them in offshore-detention facilities on two Pacific Island nations, Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG), and processes their asylum claims while keeping them there.  Human rights advocates and refugee organizations say the country’s policy is cruel. It sets no bail, no time limit to their stay, and on average asylum-seekers will spend a year in camps, they say. PNG’s supreme court apparently agreed. This week it ordered the country’s government to close the Manus Island center, calling the facility a violation of the migrants’ personal liberties. The PNG government said it would comply.

But Australia’s Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, responded by saying Canberra’s “position is very clear, and that is we are not going to accept people who have sought to come to our country illegally by boat, they will not settle permanently in our country.”

Australia’s refugee policy has been a test in how a country balances the rights of the world’s dispossessed with its own right to determine who enters.  And it was one year, 2001, that Australia set itself apart, and one incident, the “Tampa affair,” that brought its policy to the fore.  It was an election year in Australia, and Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal Party, which holds a conservative ideology, was trailing in the polls. But on the policy-launch day of his election campaign, Howard made his stance on immigration clear: “We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.” His ideas on immigration shaded him a strong leader and is credited in part with his party’s election victory that November.

At the time, many migrants and refugees sailed and floated to Australia across the Indian Ocean to Christmas Island, an Australian territory 1,200 miles from the mainland, but only a three-day boat trip from Jakarta, Indonesia. Near the end of August 2001, 433 asylum-seekers, mostly Afghans, lost their way at sea on a wooden fishing boat called the Palapa and sent a distress signal. They were picked up two days later by MV Tampa, the Norwegian freight liner. What followed was a game of chicken. Typically, a captain will sail people rescued from the water to the nearest port that will have them. In this case, that would have been Christmas Island, the Australian territory where the refugees had wanted to go, and where they could be processed for asylum in Australia. But Howard refused them entry. A port 12 hours away in Merak, Indonesia, would take the ship, but the asylum-seekers were dehydrated and sick, and they included children and pregnant women. Some of those on board threatened suicide if returned, and the captain doubted whether his crew of 27 could make that far of a trip with the additional 433 passengers. So he sailed toward Christmas Island, and Howard dispatched the military.

As the deadlock became international news, Howard tried to pass a bill in Parliament that’d grant the government power to remove foreign ships from its waters, but he didn’t get the votes. International media, human rights groups, and world leaders pressured Australia to do something, and after eight days, Howard worked out a deal in which the Australian Navy would take the refugees to Nauru, a Pacific island nation, where they’d be kept in camps while they waited for the government to process their asylum applications. These offshore camps would become central to Howard’s immigration policy, called the “Pacific Solution,” that Australia would pass in 2001.

The new immigration policy changed where a noncitizen could apply for Australian protection. Until then, Australia’s migration zone, as this is known, stretched to its territories of thousands of islands—like Christmas Island. But under the change, Australia excised those from the migration zone, making it so only people who reached the mainland could claim asylum. Australia’s navy was also given the power to stop migrant boats in the ocean, and the country officially started offshore migrant-processing camps in Nauru and PNG.

Over the next two years, Australia deported or diverted 1,544 asylum-seekers to the detention camps, and paid to operate the camps in both countries. It gave Nauru an extra (roughly) $20 million in aid, which at the time was around one-third of its GDP.

As intended, Howard’s immigration plan drastically reduced the boats making it to Australian shores. In 2002 one asylum-seeker reached Australia, and in the next five years, 57 people each year did. Then in 2007, Australia had a change in government.

The center-left Labor Party won the election, and Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister, kept his campaign promise to do away with the offshore-processing camps. It would not last long. In 2009, 60 boats arrived in Australia with 2,726 asylum-seekers; the next year it was 134 boats with 6,555 people; then 69 boats with 4,565. And with those rising numbers came rising refugee deaths as leaky boats or wooden vessels shattered against the rocks in the choppy waters. The Liberals, now in opposition, blamed Rudd’s policy for the increased migration, for the deaths, and for supporting the human-smuggler economy. Rudd resisted critics, but soon found himself losing a party leadership vote to Julia Gillard, who succeeded him as prime minister.

Under her government, in May 2013 Australia excised even the mainland from its migration zone, which basically meant migrants could be sent to the offshore detention facilities wherever their ships landed. Until then, even under Howard’s policies, those who reached mainland Australia could not legally be sent to Nauru or PNG. The asylum-seekers now stay in the camps while their claims are processed. But even if they are found to have valid asylum claims—as 90 percent of them are—they are not allowed to settle in Australia. Instead, they may be settled on Nauru or PNG. Four even went to Cambodia, for which Australia paid the country about $42 million.

The camps remain contentious, and refugee groups say they violate human rights. In 2014, asylum-seekers at the Manus Island detention center protested and security responded with violence, killing a 23-year-old Iranian. That same year, a former Associated Press reporter described the Manus Island center to the BBC like this:

The refugees live in shipping containers, there's water everywhere, lights not working, the heat is oppressive, no windows. There was a (detainee) with a bandage over his eye... asking for help in this stinking, hot compound.

Women and children complain of sexual abuse. And recent numbers put the average stay at 450 days, though almost one-quarter of asylum-seekers spend more than two years in the camps.

On Tuesday, as representatives from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees toured the Nauru center, an Iranian asylum-seeker reportedly said, “This is how tired we are, this action will prove how exhausted we are. I cannot take it anymore.” Then he lit himself on fire—and died Friday. Also Wednesday, five more refugees attempted suicide.

Dutton, the Australian immigration minister, said: “if people think that through action of self-harm or harming a member of their family that that is going to result in them coming to Australia and staying here permanently, that will not be the outcome.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull added: “We cannot be misty-eyed about this. We have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose. ... We must have secure borders and we do and we will, and they will remain so, as long as I am the prime minister of this country.”

To be sure, it’s not that Australia has an issue with refugees––in fact, it has agreed to resettle 12,000 Syrians, atop the refugees it typically takes through its Humanitarian Programme. It granted 13,800 refugee visas between 2013 and 2014, and 20,000 between 2012 and 2013.

But the arrivals by sea seem to prompt anger. One reason for this could be that migrants and refugees who try to reach Australia by sea are, in fact, coming illegally. Those that are being resettled through its Humanitarian Programme, meanwhile, are registered refugees being accepted under Australia’s international obligations. The two main parties also contend that its policies deter human-smuggling.  

The problem seems only to be when Australia discusses migration by boats, said António Guterres, the former UNHCR Commissioner, “and there, of course, we enter into a very, very, very dramatic thing. I think it is a kind of collective sociological and psychological question. They receive, I think, 180,000 migrants in a year. If you come to Australia in a different way, it’s fine but if they come in a boat it is like something strange happens to their minds.”

On the 35th anniversary of the year those five young Vietnamese men docked their boat in a northern Australian harbor, a reporter caught up with one of the original boat people, a man named Lam Tac Tam, who now lives a mile from where he first landed. He told the reporter they had no destination when they left Vietnam, and during their trip they talked of sailing to the the island of Guam. It was a U.S. territory, and the U.S. had helped Vietnam in the war––Tam’s brother even knew someone who lived there. “So we were thinking to go there,” Tam told the reporter.

But while in Malaysia they docked next to a ship carrying timber. The captain was from Australia, and he told Tam and his brother Australia was a nice place, big, but with a small population and lot of friendly people. And it was close.

“You should go there,” Tam remembered the captain say, “take a chance there.”

So they did.

Drake's Excellent New Sad-Sack Cellphone Love Song

After a few listens to the hour-and-a-half long weather report that is Drake’s new album Views, the third track, “U With Me?”, has begun to stand out for nailing queasy aspects about our era in the way that only Drake can. Toward the beginning of the song (currently available only through Apple), the 29-year-old Toronto rapper says the following:

I group DM my exes

I told ‘em they belong to me, that goes on for forever

And I think we just get closer when we’re not together

This is demented stuff, no? The last two lines are something that a stalker says. The first line confesses to a behavior that not even the most frightened think-pieces about millennials would claim is a presently accepted use of social media. Taken all together, gulp, we might have a rom-com premise on our hands.

As is always the case with Drake’s many moments of semi-self-aware monstrousness, there’s relatable truth here. In the era where Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat serves as individual trophy rooms for human connection, terminated relationships can linger in the consciousness, suspended in eternal animation, more easily than ever before. Noreen Malone nailed this phenomenon in a 2013 New York essay that traced how George Strait’s “all my exes live in Texas” (a song referenced by Drake himself) became for, many people, “live in texts.”

Drake’s ongoing relevance owes to the fact that he is a mascot for so many trends, and this is one of them. He is the bard of what smartphones have done to dating; if you wanted to argue for the existence of a trilogy spanning from his song “Marvin’s Room” to “Hotline Bling” to, now, “U With Me?,” no one would send you a snotty tweet about it, hopefully. This song starts with an unanswered phone ring (and a DMX sample), and to depict the sketchiness of a relationship where neither party will commit, Drake mines the minutiae of text messaging: “3 dots, you thinkin’ of a reaction still,” “All that grey in our conversation history,” “LOLOL I’m glad you find this shit amusin’.”

The fact that he’s (even in exaggeration) DMing multiple exes suggests that he thinks of them less as individual human beings than as a conceptual category. For the first two-thirds of the song, his passive-aggressive drawling could indeed be directed at a generic “you”—surely more than one suitor has heard that his pool parties are like Mardi Gras, and ideally you would never look someone in the eye and use a cornball simile like “You toyin’ with it like Happy Meal.” The chorus refrain—“is you wit’ me or what?”—is basically mumbled; he’s playing it casual, though no one makes a song like this about feeling casual. A muffled thump and melancholic keyboards, courtesy of the producers Kanye West and Noah “40” Shebib, keeps the mood feeling bummed-out but even, steady, numb.

Then for the final verse, there’s a surge of emotion. The beat changes with a swarm of metallic skitters, and Drake soon after not only starts singing—he also takes his voice to a place higher and more plaintive than he usually goes. What’s he so upset about? Memories of a luxury-hotel stay; “you runnin’ your fingers through my curls;” the thought of professional concerns that have kept him wary of settling down. This is pure, uncut yearning for a physical connection that’s lost to distance, time, and technology; it’s the sound of fully remembering who’s behind the three dots. Melodramatic, hypocritical, and self-pitying as it may be, it’s one of the more shattering moments that popular music has offered this year.

Keanu: A Very Long Key & Peele Sketch, With a Kitten

I’ll say this for Keanu: The cat is cute. If it weren’t, the whole endeavor would have fallen apart in the opening scene, where an underground drug operation is raided by two merciless gangsters, and an adorable tabby kitten, the titular hero, pops its head out of a pile of dollar bills and makes a break for freedom. Keanu is the first feature film starring the comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, who electrified the sketch-comedy genre with their show Key & Peele. While they certainly lend to the movie’s overall charm, the whole violent, loony caper wouldn’t make a bit of sense—nor would it be nearly as delightful—without the darn cat.

Perhaps in an homage to the mercurial Hollywood icon it’s named after, Keanu is a zany comic take on the Keanu Reeves-starring John Wick, only this time, all the gangsters are doing battle over a kitten instead of a photogenic beagle. It’s also a take on the phenomenon of “code switching,” digging into Hollywood’s one-dimensional take on African American masculinity with occasional sharpness as two nerdy protagonists are drawn into a world of gun-toting and drug-dealing stereotypes, and struggle to blend in. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Key & Peele sketch, which in the end is its undoing; even with a 98-minute running time, the premise just can’t sustain a madcap full-length effort. But the charm of its stars—and their furry on-screen partner—is enough to at least keep things entertaining as the film delivers a sharp spoof of Hollywood’s often empty-headed blockbuster tendencies.

Keanu begins with the aforementioned shoot-out, which introduces the kitten as an L.A. drug lord’s pet who seems to long for a simpler life. How else to explain Keanu’s mad bolt for freedom at the beginning of the movie into a gentler suburb, where he runs into Rell (Peele), a nerdy stoner recovering from a break-up. The two hit it off, but the film unfortunately fast-forwards through their bonding to the moment of Keanu’s kidnapping by a rival gang, which draws Rell and his straight-laced pal Clarence (Key) into an intricate web of mistaken identities and cartoonish violence. Keanu is that obscure object of desire, hunted by the cartel he escaped, prized by Cheddar (Method Man), the gangster who kidnapped him, and pursued by two anonymous assassins (also played by Key and Peele) who get drawn into the comedy of errors. It’s implied (but never explained) that the cat’s primary value to everyone involved is its cuteness—a hilariously simple and effective device that allows Rell and Clarence to infiltrate a world they don’t understand.

Rell and Clarence bear some physical similarity to the two assassins cutting a bloody swathe through town, which is enough to grant them entry to Cheddar’s gang. With that, the genre spoofery begins—Keanu is a light-hearted parody of a slew of L.A. gang movies like New Jack City and Boyz n the Hood while incorporating Key and Peele’s own brand of subversion. Clarence, a happily married business consultant who blares George Michael in his Honda minivan, taps into some buried font of stereotypical masculine posturing and is exhilarated. The film’s best side-plot, which could have done with more exploration, sees him gleefully teaching Cheddar’s gang about team-building skills and delighting in their improvements during a climactic shootout (“They’re communicating!” he yelps with glee).

Keanu has all the hallmarks of a classic Key & Peele sketch, which in the end is its undoing.

Rell is exposed to the nastier side of gang life as he tries to win the respect of Cheddar’s lieutenant Hi-C (Tiffany Haddish), which is where the film tends to drag. Haddish, a comedian who also appears on NBC’s brilliant Carmichael Show, is Keanu’s most luminous human star, but she’s too often pushed into a dull enforcer mode as things get darker and more violent and Rell and Clarence struggle to keep up. The mistaken-identity trope gets old quickly—Key and Peele’s “gangster” personae are worth some laughs in the first 20 minutes of the film, but are too flimsy to drive Keanu’s overly complex plot. After an hour, it’s hard to believe that anyone would buy these guys as hardened assassins, even in such a heightened comedy.

Keanu’s core premise is a sharp one: that even though the gangster façades Clarence and Rell slip into are silly and reductive, there’s something appealing in their simplicity and in the bloody mayhem that ensues. Anytime viewers are enjoying the film’s high-octane action excess (competently directed by Key and Peele’s TV collaborator Peter Atencio), then the joke is on them. When Keanu seems like it’s pandering to the lowest common denominator, one recalls a spate of purportedly serious action dramas that do the same with zero self-awareness. The joke wears out sooner than it should, but the stars of Keanu (including, yes, that terrific cat) do a decent job distracting from that.

Caught Doping

Miami Marlins second baseman Dee Gordon was suspended Friday by the MLB for 80 games for using performance-enhancing drugs.

Gordon, who last season led the National League in hits and stolen bases, and also had a remarkable .333 batting average, will miss about half of the baseball season for using two banned substances: exogenous testosterone and clostebol, an anabolic steroid.

In a statement released Friday, the two-time All Star denied he doped on purpose:

Though I did not do so knowingly, I have been informed that test results showed I ingested something that contained prohibited substances. The hardest part about this is feeling that I have let down my teammates, the organization, and the fans. I have been careful to avoid products that could contain something banned by MLB and the 20+ tests that I have taken and passed throughout my career prove this. I made a mistake, and I accept the consequences.

The announcement of his suspension happened just hours after driving in the tying run in Thursday night’s game against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Marlins organization “a huge disappointment and a huge loss for our team.”

This was the second suspension in just over a week tied to performance-enhancing drugs. Last Friday, Chris Colabello of the Toronto Blue Jays also received a 80-game suspension, and also said he didn’t realize he was using banned substances.

Inside Amy Schumer, Guns, and Comedy’s Fifth Wall

Last night came the airing of Amy Schumer’s long-anticipated show about gun-control. Things kicked off with “Welcome to the Gun Show,” which found Schumer playing the role of an HSN-style stuff-seller, all smarm and schlock and pseudo-mullet. First, she and her co-stuff-seller hawked Steve Irwin commemorative coins. But, then, they moved on to guns. They sold the virtues of guns—“make perfect stocking stuffers,” “they’re great for every age group,” etc.—and pointed out that anyone can get a gun on the Internet or at a gun show. (Even a guy with “several violent felonies” and “a suspected terrorist on the no-fly list.”) Act fast: don’t think about it, a chyron encourages.

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Things (d)evolved in pretty much the way you’d expect from a Schumer sketch (think a display gun might discharge accidentally?). But the fictive sketch also ended tellingly: with a scrolling list of the (very real) United States congresspeople who receive the most money from the gun lobby. Throughout the sketch, a phone number—(888) 885-4011—was displayed onscreen: not a fake one for Schumer’s HSN-style network, but rather one that, if you called it, would connect you to a message from the gun-control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. The message in question provides instructions on “exactly what to say to support gun control,” and helpfully offers to connect callers to the office of their member of Congress.

On the one hand, this is unremarkable: A jokey sketch about a very serious thing is at this point standard issue for contemporary comedy. Contra the observational fare that peaked as Jerry Seinfeld did, in the ’90s, today’s jokes—as told by Schumer, and Key & Peele, and John Oliver, and Sam Bee, and pretty much every other comic who is currently Having a Moment—tend to come with a point, and a message. What is remarkable, though, was that the point of Schumer’s gun-control episode was not just to say something about the world, but to change it: to move people not just to amusement or anger, but to action. Schumer’s HSN sketch was followed by a series of other segments—all of them somehow connected to gun violence—that were meant to spur people to action.

Schumer broke comedy’s fifth wall—by insisting that viewers of her show are not simply a passive audience, but rather potential agents of change.

So while the fourth wall has long been a component of comedy—Schumer and many of her fellow Having a Moments regularly exploit the knowledge audiences have of them, via Instagram and Twitter and Vulture and Us Weekly, to get irony-laden laughs—Schumer’s gun control efforts suggest, instead, a fifth wall: the plane that is off in the distance, beyond the screen and the stage. One that marries not just performer and audience, but performer and audience and society-at-large. The fifth wall is an outgrowth of a culture that blends the capacities of Internet activism with the morally indignant legacies of The Daily Show and The Nightly Show and Last Week Tonight: It’s a broad recognition that comedy can bring not just laughs, but also change.

Schumer, Thursday night, broke comedy’s fifth wall—by insisting that viewers of her show are not just passive viewers, but potential agents of activism. It called her audience to arms, sometimes literally. (888) 885-4011.

She’s been breaking the wall in other ways, too, of course. Schumer’s work has long treated “we can change this, you guys” as an upshot to her comedy, whether it’s “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” or the recent sketch that found a bunch of dudes in suits acting as her OB-GYN. She has gone to Washington to meet with her cousin, Senator Chuck Schumer, to strategize ways to curb gun violence. She gave an emotional interview to Vanity Fair about a shooting that took place in a screening of Trainwreck last July. (Her publicist told her about the shooting, she recalled, “and then I put on the news. I was by myself in a hotel, and I was just like, ‘I wish I never wrote that movie.’”)

Schumer “really stood up and became a leader in the gun-violence prevention space,” Brina Milikowsky, the chief strategy officer for the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, told Entertainment Weekly of Schumer’s embrace of politics. “This is a really important fight to improve public safety and help save lives in America. We do need to use every tool that’s at our disposal. The ability to use comedy to reach new audiences is incredibly powerful.”

If comedy is experimenting with moralism, its power will rely on the same thing comedy always has: the ability to make people laugh.

Indeed. Which is partially why Schumer brought Milikowsky into last night’s episode for an “Amy Goes Deep” segment. Schumer asked Milikowsky to share information about gun violence (“What is the most disturbing statistic?”) and about the NRA (“So you meet a guy in a bar, and he gives you his card, and it says that he’s an NRA member. What does that do to you and your vagina?”). Schumer also, blending the topics she has until this point been most politically vocal about—gun control and feminism—made a point of adding another statistic to the mix.

Schumer: So a lot of people don’t know that gun violence really is, heavily, a woman’s problem.

Milikowsky: Mm-hmm.

Schumer: Can you talk about that a little bit?

Milikowsky: American women are 11 times more likely to be murdered with guns than women in other countries. I mean, the majority of mass shootings are actually instances of family or domestic violence, where an abuser gets a gun and kills his family, or his ex and her friends. So what American women are really at risk of is being shot to death.

Schumer: By a spouse! Or a boyfriend! Or, like, a casual hookup!

Schumer paused. “Do you want to say anything?” she asked Milikowsky.

“You guys should go to everytown.org,” the advocate replied. “You can sign up to join our email list and learn how to get involved in your community. And you need to vote. It’s an election year, and it’s really important that more Americans get out there and vote for candidates who are going to stand up for this issue and fight to end gun violence.”

Schumer, unsurprisingly—and savvily—bookended the episode’s advocacy by live-tweeting the show’s proceedings, making liberal use of hashtags in the process.

Put on #InsideAmy now on @ComedyCentral use the hashtag for the show and #EndGunViolence please. We can do it! @Everytown can help!

— Amy Schumer (@amyschumer) April 29, 2016

All real names https://t.co/DUWQI9NLpb

— Amy Schumer (@amyschumer) April 29, 2016

Want to help #EndGunViolence?



--> #WearOrange <-- on June 2nd. @amyschumerhttps://t.co/yH7OUFnrMe

— Everytown (@Everytown) April 29, 2016

This @amyschumer sketch should be played on every news show on a loop. Fox News, I dare you. https://t.co/WJVYdZ3VIJ #endgunviolence #genius

— Mike Birbiglia (@birbigs) April 29, 2016

Thank you @amyschumer for using your voice to promote gun safety. #EndGunViolence pic.twitter.com/fT1DQsNsJf

— Everytown (@Everytown) April 29, 2016

Thank you @amyschumer for your hard work to try to #endgunviolence and sharing this information. pic.twitter.com/0qG4ph6jgN

— Kevin Cotta (@kevc1980) April 29, 2016

It’s a tense balancing act Schumer is engaging in—because not everyone, certainly, wants comedy with a side of politics. Especially when the politics is so stridently partisan. But the small miracle that Schumer pulled off? The episode still managed to be very, very funny. Schumer made her point; she also made me, at least, laugh. That’s a crucial accomplishment: If comedy is experimenting with moralism, its power as a moral force will rely on the same thing comedy always has: the ability to bring about lols.

“You know, people are like, ‘Ewwwww, we don’t like it when celebrities get involved in politics,’” Schumer said during a recent stand-up show. “And I hear you, and I feel the same way.” But then she talked about meeting the families of young victims of gun violence. She talked about their pain, and their frustration. She shared how they asked her to join their cause. “They were like, ‘Will you help us? ‘Cuz no one listens to politicians. They listen to you idiots.’”

The Voter-ID Fight in Missouri

There is a variety of origin stories for why Missouri is known as “the Show-Me State.” But if Republicans in the state legislature get their way, it could take on new meaning for voters headed to the polls—as in, “Show me your photo ID.”

The state senate, which is overwhelmingly Republican, is considering a double-barreled proposal. One part is a joint resolution that would place a ballot measure before voters to create a constitutional amendment requiring voters to show photo identification to vote. The other part governs how the requirement would be enforced if approved; in particular, it would require the legislature to fund programs to help get voters who don’t have some form of ID a card. If there’s no money, the requirement wouldn’t go into effect. The House already passed both halves in January. Senate Republicans brought the issue up Wednesday, but Democrats filibustered until 2 a.m., and the issue was temporarily set aside.

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Democrats have repeatedly obstructed attempts to pass the measures. Republicans are expected to bring it up again before the end of the session on May 13, and may use procedural measures to try to end the Democratic filibuster. If they succeed, Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, could veto the the bill, but his veto would likely be overridden. He can’t veto the joint resolution.

Missouri is one of several states to bring up tighter voting-related laws over the last few years. The bill under consideration is one of the stricter laws to come up since North Carolina passed a passel of rules to tighten voting regulations in 2013, including shortening early voting, eliminating same-day registration, and a photo-ID requirement. That law, in turn, has been described as the nation’s strictest since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder eliminated a requirement that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination pre-clear new voting laws with the Department of Justice, which had effectively blocked most stricter laws. The North Carolina law is subject to a court challenge. A federal judge on Monday ruled against plaintiffs challenging the law, but the decision has already been appealed, and the Fourth Circuit said Thursday it would expedite the case. Many experts expect the Supreme Court to have the final say.

The arguments in Missouri are familiar from North Carolina and elsewhere: Republicans argue that voter-ID laws are essential to preserve the sanctity of elections, lest fraudulent votes be cast. Besides, they say, state-issued photo ID is required for a range of normal activities, like driving a car. Is it really so much to ask people to produce one before they vote?

Democrats and other advocates respond that such laws are simply tools of voter suppression. They point out that there are next to no documented cases of voter fraud, and describe bills like this as a solution in search of a problem. They also note that driving a car, unlike voting, is not a fundamental right, and point to the fact that studies have shown that such laws are most likely to affect poor, young, and minority voters. (For example, Missouri’s changes would exclude photo ID from state universities.) It’s no coincidence, they say, that those are blocs that overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

In some states, Republican lawmakers have slipped up and said just that. “Now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well,” U.S. Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin said earlier this month. In 2012, the Republican leader of the Pennsylvania state house said voter ID was “gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” (Instead, a judge blocked the law and Obama won the state.)

“Missouri is one of those swing-ish states where you’ve got Republican control and the thinking is that this could make a difference, like North Carolina,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law of the University of California, Irvine, and election-law expert. Barack Obama narrowly lost the state in 2008, and while it might not be on the map in 2016, there is a Senate race, too.

Missouri voters already have to show some form of ID to vote, but the requirement is liberal—accepted documents include an expired license, an out-of-state license, a student ID, utility bills, paychecks, and more.

“This is a piece of discrimination,” state Representative Joe Adams, a black Democrat from St. Louis, said in January. “It is Jim Crow in its worst form. And I would be embarrassed if I voted for this piece of legislation. I would be embarrassed to look at my children.”

In 2014, Secretary of State Jason Kander, a Democrat, released a report on the effect such a law would have and estimated that 220,000 voters could be disenfranchised under the law, though it’s not entirely clear how Kander calculated that number:

Among the hundreds of thousands of eligible Missouri voters that could be kept from voting by HB 1073 are students with current school-issued photo ID’s, senior citizens who no longer drive, Missourians who rely on public transportation, and women who have changed their last names due to marriage or divorce.

State Senator Will Kraus, one of the leading backers of the bill—and a Republican candidate to succeed Kander, who is running for U.S. Senate—has pointed to a few cases. “There’s over 16 people in the state of Missouri who have been convicted of some type of voter fraud. That shows people in the state of Missouri are trying to cheat elections,” Kraus said in January. But as PolitiFact noted, the cases that Kraus pointed to are all cases of fraud in registration—not cases of voter impersonation, which is ostensibly what voter-ID laws combat. Kander’s 2014 report stated, “There has not been a single case of voter impersonation fraud reported to the Secretary of State’s office.”

In Missouri, not only are the arguments familiar—the fight is, too. Republicans have been trying unsuccessfully to tighten the state’s laws for a decade now. A 2006 attempt was passed and signed into law, but the state supreme court struck it down as an unconstitutional infringement on the right to vote, in part because it forced citizens to assume the cost of obtaining ID.

In 2011, Governor Nixon vetoed another attempt. There were not enough votes to override him. The following year, state Republicans tried again, this time using a constitutional amendment to sidestep the supreme court ruling. But a judge ruled that attempt unconstitutional, too, and it was excluded from the ballot.

Voter-ID laws tend to do well on the ballot. One notable exception is in Minnesota, where Democrats mobilized and blocked a constitutional amendment in 2012. Doing that might be harder in Missouri, a redder state.

As conservative-leaning states work to impose stricter voting laws, liberal ones are working to make it easier to vote. On Thursday, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed a law that automatically registers citizens to vote—when they sign up for a driver’s license or state ID, Missouri Republicans might archly note. Vermont is the latest in a string of states to adopt automatic voter registration. It’s a sign of how polarized the U.S. has become that in a nation founded on the premise of democracy that red and blue states increasingly are so divided even on that fundamental right.