Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 179

Why Finland’s Mail Carriers Are Mowing People’s Lawns

These days, the snail-mail business is, gently put, not very lucrative. In a world of email and text messaging, and an enormous array of mobile-communication apps, national mail providers have had to get creative to make money as mail volume shrinks and commercial delivery companies beat them to the front door.

For Finland, one new strategy involves delivering something other than mail. Starting next month, Posti, the country’s postal service, will start mowing their customers’ lawns.

“We believe many customers will be happy to outsource lawn mowing when we make it convenient for them to do so,” said Anu Punola, the director at Posti, in a statement announcing the pilot program last week.

Postal workers will mow Finns’ lawns on Tuesdays “due to the lower volume of advertisements and publications distributed on that day” between mid-May and August this year. Customers can order the service online and must provide their own lawnmower. Thirty-minute lawn-mowing sessions cost 65 euros, or about $74, per month, and 60-minute sessions are 130 euros, or about $147, per month. The icing on the cake: It’s tax-deductible.  

Punola said the idea for the service came from postal workers themselves, who sound like they don’t have as much to do now that fewer people are using direct mail.

“Posti has developed new home-delivered services to add more work to mail delivery operations,” the statement said. “Traditional mail volumes are falling, but mail routes nevertheless reach some 2.8 households on every weekday.”

Posti, like mail providers in other countries, is losing money each year; last year, the agency reported losses of 75 million euros, or about $85 million. The advent of digital communication, it said, has now driven overall delivery volumes to levels seen in the 1960s.

Posti also has two other pilot programs in the works. One program, in partnership with a health-services company, sends postal workers to the homes of people with disabilities, where workers help with chores, warm up meals, and provide support in other daily activities. Another, in partnership with a security company, brings workers to two central Finnish towns to carry out “security services.”

In India, the national postal service launched a program last August that would help farmers sell their good. India Post dispatched workers to villages to get information about produce farmers want to sell and then upload it online for traders to see. The postal service would then charge the buyers a fee to deliver the purchases.

In the United States, the national postal service partnered with Amazon.com to deliver groceries in 2014. Earlier this year, the U.S. Post Office reported its ninth consecutive billion-dollar loss—$5.1 billion in 2015. This month, the price of U.S. stamps decreased from 49 cents to 47 cents as part of a deal struck with Congress that allowed the postal service to increase the price by 3 cents back in 2014 to help it boost revenue. The reduction, said Megan Brennan, the postmaster general, will lead the agency to  lose approximately $2 billion.

Why Beyoncé Is Embracing Her Own Backlash

Beyoncé is selling t-shirts and phone cases that say “BOYCOTT BEYONCÉ” at her current tour, which kicked off last night in Miami. The slogan’s swiped from calls by some law-enforcement organizations to shun her after her “Formation” video and Super Bowl performance. Now, for $45, you can confuse all who encounter you as to whether you’re a cop or a Beyoncé fan with a sense of irony, or both.

Beyoncé is selling "Boycott Beyoncé" shirts on her Formation tour.https://t.co/uIJ49U2GaE pic.twitter.com/9aO8IuhaP5

— The FADER (@thefader) April 27, 2016

Beyoncé is one of the most popular singers in the world, and the notion of her as someone who’s defined by controversy would have seemed strange until recently. Her acclaim was so unanimous that in 2014 SNL aired a sketch about the Beygency, a shadowy group that punishes anyone who dared criticize her. But part of what’s been fascinating about her 2016 PR campaign is the way it has encouraged and capitalized on the notion of her as someone whom everyone can’t agree on. It’s a maneuver that recognizes the drawbacks of her previous model of uber-popularity, fits in with pop culture’s love of conflict, and frees her to be a more politically pointed artist.

You could tell she was up to something different from the opening lyrics of the surprise single “Formation,” which shouted out the sole group that Beyoncé at that point could reliably refer to as “haters”: people who think she and the rest of the cultural elite are members of an evil secret society. Madonna and a number of rappers more known than Beyoncé for their divisiveness have already previously used the conspiracy theorists for musical fodder. Now Beyoncé has helped herself to the psychic payoff that comes with delivering a diss that can’t miss: “Y’all haters corny with that Illuminati mess.”

From there, she earned a more influential class of haters by aligning herself with Black Lives Matter in her lyrics and at the Super Bowl. Political commentators on the right and some police-union leaders immediately took umbrage and made, yes, calls for boycotts. SNL sent up the backlash in another sketch, this one about white people realizing suddenly that Beyoncé is black. “Anyone who perceives my message as anti-police is completely mistaken,” she later explained in Elle. “I have so much admiration and respect for officers and the families of officers who sacrifice themselves to keep us safe. But let’s be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice. Those are two separate things.”

In the end, a full three dissenters showed up to a highly publicized anti-Beyoncé event in New York City, and her Miami tour opener was reportedly fully staffed by law enforcement. From a brand-management perspective, the amount of noise without significant action is a bonanza for Beyoncé. The Blaze’s TV commentator Tomi Lahren recently said she declined the pop star’s request to take 30 seconds of Lahren’s on-air rant about Beyoncé’s Super Bowl show and use it on the Formation tour. Selling pro-boycott merchandise is the same idea—call it, well, turning lemons into Lemonade.

Boycott calls are usually directed at large and important institutions—recognizing this controversy means recognizing her power.

This news circus is a microcosm of a more meaningful shift in Beyoncé’s music. The 12-track album and hourlong art film released Saturday night is far more about struggle than triumph, and struggle, of course, can only arise with opposition. In the universe of the album, that opposition is both one man’s suspected infidelity—and a larger cultural burden that has weighed on black women for centuries. As moving and widely relevant as Lemonade’s storyline is, it is not the sort of shiny pop product designed for just anyone to insert themselves into. The “generic” tag cannot apply anymore, if it ever did; people finally have something to argue over regarding Beyoncé other than whether her music lives up to the hype or not.

By selling “Boycott Beyoncé” merchandise, she’s on one level simply helping herself to the joyful and cheeky rock tradition that includes such self-deprecating titles as The Who Sell Out and “Refused Are Fucking Dead.” She is also directly acknowledging the people she’s alienated and telling them she doesn’t want them to come back. What she stands for is what she stands for. There’s also the fact that boycott calls are usually directed at large and important institutions—recognizing this controversy means recognizing her power. As a bonus, a hint of embattlement has long reliably cinched the tie between fans and their idols ever-tighter, and here it’s also being used to sell more product. Beyoncé said it at the end of “Formation”: The best revenge is your paper.

The Perils of Choose Your Own Adventure Books

I should probably start by saying that I’m bad at decisions. Lots of people say that, I know. But most people have never agonized so deeply over which of two New York City apartments to take that they had a full-fledged panic attack and lost both of said apartments because the landlords decided they were a weirdo. Most people have never debated so deeply a chance to spend a year after college teaching in Greece that when they arrived in Athens after months of agonizing, the school didn’t expect them because they had changed their mind so many times.

I can attribute my decision problems to many things: anxiety, my type A-wanting-to-get-everything-right-ism, a journalistic tendency to know all the info before I chose anything. I also attribute a very small part of these problems to Choose Your Own Adventure.

Published from 1979 to 1998, Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children’s books, many of which are still circulating around libraries and used bookstores everywhere. Told in the second person, the books make the reader the main character and ask You to dictate the path the story takes. In the very first Choose Your Own Adventure, for example, The Cave of Time, You are exploring a cave in Snake Canyon when You suddenly realize the sun has set and you are lost. Do you try to go back home? If so, turn to page 8. Or do you stay where you are for the night? Then turn to page 10. Turning to page 8 may take you to another cave or a medieval kingdom or may lead you to meet Abe Lincoln. (Seriously. In The Cave of Time, you can end up on a train with Abe Lincoln.) Turning to page 10 could lead you to another dimension entirely, or maybe you could end up stuck as a fisherman in the year 980.

Choose Your Own Adventure ostensibly asks the reader to take stock of her surroundings and make the best-informed choices possible. But perhaps because they were written in the 1970s and 1980s, the Choose Your Own Adventure books have no shortage of bad endings. In fact, just about every judgment you make can lead to death or ruin. Choose incorrectly, and you turn the page, and there they are, beneath a block of text, the bone-shaking words The End. You die. Sometimes in horrible ways. There’s even a blog, You Chose Wrong, documenting all the grisly ways these books end.

The Choose Your Own Adventure books terrified me because they made it so clear that choices are either right or wrong. In the book Inside UFO 54-40, for example, the wrong choice leads you to solitary confinement on a spaceship until you become disoriented by the “incredible loneliness of outer space” and lose “all will to survive” (The End). In House of Danger, you can be devoured by a pack of snarling chimpanzees. In The Cave of Time, a misstep can transport you to the middle of a war, with bombs exploding all around. You could awake to a boa constrictor wrapped around your neck, or sink with the Titanic.

One of the original authors of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Edward Packard, ended up writing a book for adults called All It Takes: The 3 Keys to Making Wise Decisions and Not Making Stupid Ones. (The three keys: Have the right state of mind, think clearly, and keep decisions under surveillance.) But in the actual books, it’s almost impossible to know, before you turn the page, what is a wise decision and what isn’t. In The Cave of Time, for instance, you’re stuck as a fisherman in medieval times, when you hear about a cave in the bottom of a lake where a monster lives. If you decide to seek it out and dive to the bottom of the lake (because it might lead you back to your time), you end up safe and sound back where you began at Snake Canyon. If, as any sensible person would do, you decide not to dive to the bottom of a lake that houses a monster, you end up devoured by the Loch Ness monster. How is any child going to learn about rational choices from that sequence of events?  

It probably wasn’t reasonable of me to take away such deep life lessons from a book like The Cave of Time, which has both a spaceship and cavemen on the cover.

Of course, one of the best parts about Choose Your Own Adventure was the ability to cheat. Turn down the corner of a page that asks you to make a tough choice, and then, if those terrible words, The End, pop up when you turn the page, just go back and choose the other thing. In this way, young readers learn that no decision is final, and that if you don’t get what you want, you can always go back and have a do-over. I distinctly remember keeping my finger on one page and going over all the various ends until I found the one that I thought was best. Perhaps this gave me  unreasonable expectations for getting it right every single time, or trained me to think that I had more control over my life than I actually did.

The Cave of Time / Bantam      

To be sure, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were works of fiction, and it probably wasn’t reasonable of me to take away such deep life lessons from a book like The Cave of Time, which has both a spaceship and cavemen on the cover. But as a child who read a lot of books, including Holocaust stories in which the wrong choice could indeed be fatal, I learned to face every choice with the knowledge that there are terrible outcomes possible. “There is never a day in which you are not confronted with choice. Some seemingly small choices can determine the path of the rest of your life,” one of the Choose Your Own Adventure authors, R.A. Montgomery, has said. No pressure or anything.

Today’s young(ish) people have a lot more choices than our parents did: We don’t have to marry to come up with enough income to make a life, and we can live wherever we want and fly back home with the aid of cheap plane tickets, and keep in touch thanks to the Internet. But with those choices come risks. And if Choose Your Own Adventure taught me anything that continues to be relevant today, it’s that the more choices you make, the higher the chance that you’re going to screw something up—a recently defined phenomenon known as decision fatigue.

My neuroses from Choose Your Own Adventure aren’t directly related to the outcomes in the book. I know, rationally, that if I choose a certain apartment, I’m (probably) not going to end up in medieval Europe or pursued by angry chimpanzees. But I do miss the way Choose Your Own Adventure books allowed me to look into the future and see what happens with one choice or another. That was a crutch that I learned from reading the books that, unfortunately, doesn’t exist in real life.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to remember that most of the lessons I learned from Choose Your Own Adventure books are hogwash. There are no strictly right or wrong choices. The Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist. Decisions are just about picking something based on the evidence you have available, and making the best out of it. And there is no turning back. End up stuck in solitary confinement in outer space? Don’t flip back and see where you went wrong. Move forward, making the best out of the things you chose. In reality, they very rarely lead to The End.

John Boehner on Ted Cruz: 'Lucifer in the Flesh'

Former House Speaker John Boehner seems to be enjoying his retirement—and wouldn’t you, after what he went through in Washington? One reason for his buoyant mood, besides the chance to cut grass, is the opportunity to stay far, far away from Senator Ted Cruz.

Asked about Cruz during an appearance at Stanford University on Wednesday, Boehner called him “Lucifer in the flesh,” according to the The Stanford Daily.

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“I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” Boehner added. He said he would not vote for Cruz in a general election, though he would vote for his fellow tangerine-tinted Republican Donald Trump.

It’s not news that Boehner doesn’t like Cruz, whom he has previously called a “jackass” and a “false prophet,” nor is the source of their bad blood a mystery: Cruz helped rally revolts against leadership, particularly in the House, that led to the 2013 government shutdown, and his attempts at undermining Boehner made the speaker’s life impossible, eventually driving him to retire. Temperamentally, they’re opposites, too—the sentimental, irreverent, wine-loving Ohioan and the sanctimonious, ambitious Texan.

Boehner’s comments come at an interesting time in the presidential campaign, and they seem to illuminate the moment. Earlier in the race, Republicans who’d encountered Cruz hated him so much that they seemed to prefer Trump. (“Why do people take such an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? It just saves time,” one quipped to Frank Bruni.) Then Trump went a little too far for their tastes, right around the time of his flirtation with David Duke, the white supremacist and former KKK leader, and they started to uneasily slouch toward Cruz.

The limitations of that embrace have become clear. While it seemed likely a couple weeks ago that Trump would fall short of what he needed to clinch the GOP nomination, producing a contested convention—O brave new world, in which such chaos is Republican leaders’ fondest hope!—Trump’s April 26 Northeastern sweep has shifted the ground. The entertainer now has the nomination nearly within reach. Cruz has resorted to Hail Mary strategies, including  naming Carly Fiorina his “running mate” on Wednesday—a remarkable move, given that Fiorina was herself a weak candidate; that Cruz is highly unlikely to win the nomination; and that even if he captured it at convention, he might not be able to pick his running mate.

Boehner’s comments show why Cruz’s attempts to rally the Republican Party have been futile, even though his opponent is a widely loathed misogynist, ex-Democrat, loose cannon, and race-baiter. Not everyone is willing to be as blunt as Boehner, but other GOP leaders’ feelings are no secret. (Boehner said he golfs with Trump and called him a “texting buddy,” while he offered somewhat fainter praise for his fellow Ohioan John Kasich.)

The problem is that many top Republicans have already written off this presidential race, expecting that Hillary Clinton will win the White House. Amid such resignation, there’s no incentive for them to back the man they’ve served with and despise. It isn’t so much that the top GOP figures are backing Trump; he still has barely any endorsements from officeholders, and Trump’s base is an entirely different group of people. Instead, they’re just backing away slowly. Better to quietly avert your eyes from the devil you don’t know than embrace the devil you do.

A Controversial Therapy Law in Tennessee

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed legislation Wednesday that allows counselors and therapists to turn away clients based on the practitioners’ “sincerely held principles,” a move criticized by professional organizations and LGBT-rights groups alike.

House Bill 1840, also known as Senate Bill 1556, shields counselors from being required to provide services to clients if providing those services would clash with the counselors’ personal values. (Earlier versions of the bill phrased it as “sincerely held religious beliefs” instead.)

Those counselors cannot be sued, charged with a crime, or penalized for their refusal, although they must coordinate a referral with the client to another counselor or therapist. The protections do not apply if a patient is at risk of imminent harm.

My colleague Emma Green recently discussed the bill alongside a flurry of similar legislation proposed throughout the country:

This legislation is part of a wave of religious-freedom bills that have been introduced and passed in the past year or so, almost all inspired by objections to homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Some of these measures are just for show—pastors could never be legally compelled to perform a gay-marriage ceremony in the way some bills have suggested, for example. But some represent a relatively novel approach to religious-freedom legislation: They offer legal cover to people of faith who don’t want to provide certain goods or services to LGBT people, especially when doing so might seem like a tacit endorsement of their relationships and sex lives.

Haslam defended his decision to sign the bill, saying it had met his concerns about patients not receiving necessary care.

“The substance of this bill doesn’t address a group, issue or belief system,” he said in a statement. “Rather, it allows counselors—just as we allow other professionals like doctors and lawyers—to refer a client to another counselor when the goals or behaviors would violate a sincerely held principle. I believe it is reasonable to allow these professionals to determine if and when an individual would be better served by another counselor better suited to meet his or her needs.”

Professional organizations sharply criticized the bill as it worked its way through the legislature, calling it an intrusion into their field. “HB 1840 is an unprecedented attack on the American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics, something to which nearly 60,000 counselors abide,” the association said on its website. “It is also an unwanted and unnecessary blow to the counseling profession and those who benefit from the services of a professional counselor.” The organization’s state-level counterpart also condemned the bill.

LGBT rights organizations also criticized the measure, which they viewed as a thinly veiled means by which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Tennesseans could be denied counseling and therapy.

“[T]his bill would allow licensed counselors in private practice to use their own religious beliefs as an excuse for terminating care or referring away clients because of moral objections to how they identify,” the Human Rights Campaign warned in February. “This law could negatively impact LGBT people in Tennessee, particularly those living in one of the 63 areas in the state that are currently underserved by mental health providers.”

A Police Shooting Over a Fake Gun in Baltimore

Police in Baltimore shot a 13-year-old boy who was carrying a fake gun late Wednesday afternoon. The boy sustained non-life-threatening injuries.

Two officers saw the boy and what looked to be a weapon, and chased him. One officer soon after shot him. The Baltimore Sun reports:

[Police Commissioner Kevin] Davis said he had “no reason to believe that these officers acted inappropriately in any way,” saying the officers did not know whether the weapon was a gun or a replica. Davis also confirmed that the boy’s mother was taken in for questioning. He told reporters at the scene that “she knew” that he had left their home with the replica weapon.

On the other side of the city, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and others were gathered to mark the one-year anniversary of protests that erupted after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. Wednesday’s shooting also occurred amidst a spike in violence in Baltimore. Justin Fenton of The Sun reports that in the last three days, 16 people have been shot and nine killed in the city.

The shooting comes just days after the city of Cleveland reached a settlement with the family of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by police in 2014 while carrying a toy gun. On Monday, officials announced the city agreed to pay $6 million.

Zika-Proof Olympic Uniforms?

Zika virus is now influencing fashion standards at the Olympics.

The South Korean Olympic committee has found a way to infuse mosquito-repellent chemicals into the team’s uniforms for this summer’s Games in Rio de Janeiro. All outfits, which are worn during ceremonies, training sessions, and in the Olympic Village, have long pants and long-sleeve shirts. The provisions will apparently prevent South Korean athletes from being bitten by mosquitoes that may be infected with the virus that’s been linked to birth defects.

But South Korean officials are going even further to protect their athletes, as the Associated Press notes:

A team of South Korean government and Olympic officials visited Rio de Janeiro earlier this month to inspect Olympic venues and local hospitals. The Korean Olympic Committee said it expects to soon provide guidelines to Olympic athletes and others traveling to the games about how to protect themselves from Zika.

While all athletes will be able to use mosquito-repellent spray during the competitions, their sporting uniforms won’t have special protections  “because of strict rules and performance concerns,” reports the AP.

U.S. Olympic officials have expressed deep concern over the Zika virus in Brazil, but they have not changed uniforms just yet. During the closing ceremony, both the men and women will wear Ralph Lauren-designed shorts. Still, U.S. Olympic Committee officials did tell leaders of U.S. sport federations in a call in January that some athletes should consider not going to the Games if they are concerned with their health.

Reuters reports:

Federations were told that no one should go to Brazil "if they don't feel comfortable going. Bottom line," said Donald Anthony, president and board chairman of USA Fencing.

Green Room: Escape From the Nazi Punks

The main takeaway of the film Green Room is simple: There are few situations more hellish than being trapped for 16 hours in a music venue by a gang of murderous neo-Nazis in the Oregon backwoods. The story follows the members of the hardcore band The Ain’t Rights—Pat, Tiger, Reece, and Sam, whose lean names befit their means. Low on gas, money, and energy, the band reluctantly agrees to one final gig, the catch being it’s at a white-supremacist club just outside of Portland. The musicians aren’t thrilled, but at least Pat (Anton Yelchin) recognizes what may be the only upside to their situation: How often does a band get the chance to cover the Dead Kennedys song  “Nazi Punks Fuck off” in front of a crowd of actual Nazi punks?

But the fun doesn’t last: Minutes after their set ends, the band witness a brutal crime and realize their odds of getting home have just dropped dramatically. The venue’s owner, Darcy (played by Sir Patrick Stewart), mobilizes his most devoted foot-soldiers to take care of the outsiders. What follows is a tense gore-fest, one that’s as grimy and claustrophobic as the titular room. But scrape off the scum, and you’ll find Green Room full of visual artistry, dark humor, smart writing, and glints of humanity. The film’s bleakness and B-movie trappings won’t appeal to everyone: The violence reaches demented heights, and having the antagonists be neo-Nazis may come off as lazy storytelling. But there’s a cool, macabre charm to the whole effort. In short, Green Room has all the makings of a cult classic—one likely to find enthusiastic fans sooner rather than later.

Saulnier’s third feature film, Green Room bears many of the same sensibilities and characteristics as the director’s first two works, 2007’s slasher comedy Murder Party and the infinitely improved, Kickstarter-funded drama Blue Ruin, which was the indie success story of 2013. The latter—a Coen Brothers-esque tale about a man seeking vengeance for his parents’ murders—revealed Saulnier’s deftness at both writing dialogue and cultivating silence, at knowing the exact moments to hold back or to let the action spill forth. On the surface, Green Room has more in common with Saulnier’s messier debut, but it retains the cinematic flair and self-assuredness of Blue Ruin.

Green Room is very much the kind of film where each new development seems to dare the audience to think, “Well, it can’t get any worse than this,” before proving them wrong. As the full weight of their situation begins to sink in, The Ain’t Rights grow increasingly desperate, making dumb decisions as often as they make smart ones. Green Room keeps total hopelessness at bay, though, by making everything feel like a puzzle to be solved.

Saulnier doesn’t rely on character backstories or arcs to build empathy—he operates entirely on the assumption that seeing ordinary people trying to beat extraordinary circumstances is enough to make viewers care whether they live or die. A risky approach, but it works, turning Sam, Pat, Reece, Tiger, and their new companion Amber into audience proxies. It’s easy to care precisely because of how un-special they are. The realistic, often clumsy ways they try to outsmart the latest machete-wielding maniac or killer dog inspires white-knuckled viewing or a nauseated groan when things go wrong.

Scrape off the scum, and you’ll find Green Room full of visual artistry and dark humor.

The film wouldn’t have worked half as well without the stellar performances of its cast. As Pat, Yelchin (Alpha Dog, the Star Trek reboot) lurches between defeated and defiant, and turns out to be the closest thing the band has to a leader. Imogen Poots (28 Weeks Later, Frank and Lola) is unreasonably charming as Amber, the band’s new ally, and Alia Shawkat (yep, Maeby Funke from Arrested Development) plays up Sam’s levelheaded cool amid chaos. The skinhead lackey Gabe (the delightful Macon Blair, Saulnier’s longtime collaborator and friend) goes about fixing his boss’s problem as though it’s just another crappy day at the office. Meanwhile, Stewart takes a Gus Fring approach to his role as the neo-Nazi leader—trading a louder caricature of evil for quieter, matter-of-fact menace.

After a certain point in the film, it becomes clear there are only a couple possible endgames. But despite the apparent narrowing of options for the film’s heroes, Green Room delivers one little surprise after another and maintain its frenetic pace. There are much-needed respites scattered throughout, too. The camera occasionally leaves the harshly lit, industrial interiors of the venue to sweep over the soft lushness of the Oregon outdoors. And there’s a good supply of black comedic moments, deadpan retorts, and scenes that become just absurd enough to defuse the ever-building tension. (“I can’t die here with you,” Pat tells Amber at one point. “So don’t,” she replies.)

Saulnier revels in every part of his film—the minimally stylized violence, the hardcore soundtrack, the vulnerability and resourcefulness of his characters—in a way that suggests a deeper personal connection. Indeed, after a screening in Washington, D.C., Saulnier talked about growing up in Alexandria, Virginia, making zombie movies in the streets and later becoming part of the punk-rock scene (The Ain’t Rights are from the nearby city of Arlington). The crowd was filled with old friends, family, and acquaintances, many resembling the tattooed or mohawked or leather-jacketed characters onscreen. A strange tenderness comes through in Green Room, as if the film were a kind of love letter from Saulnier to his younger days.

The movie’s raw appeal, though, stands on its own. Green Room doesn’t traffic in symbols or deeper meanings. There is only survival and death, and the film reminds audiences of how productive the tension between the two can be without much narrative decoration. While queasier types should stay away, fans of gritty siege movies or stripped-down horror will probably find Green Room to be one of the more memorable movies of the year.

A 15-Month Sentence for Dennis Hastert

Updated on April 27 at 2:05 p.m. ET

Describing the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House as a “serial child molester,” a federal judge in Chicago sentenced Dennis Hastert to 15 months in prison on Wednesday for lying to investigators and evading federal banking regulations as part of a scheme to cover up decades-old sexual abuse.

Judge Thomas Durkin also imposed two years’ supervised release, a $250,000 fine, and attendance in a sex-offender treatment program. Hastert faced five years in prison for the charges under federal sentencing guidelines. Prosecutors had requested a maximum of six months, while the former politician’s defense team asked for probation, citing his age, 74, and health woes.

Before entering politics, Hastert taught high school in Illinois and coached a wrestling team between 1965 and 1981. At least four members of the team have now accused him of sexually abusing them; one of them filed a lawsuit for $1.8 million in compensation on Monday.

The court heard stunning testimony during the hearing from Scott Cross, previously known as “Individual D” in court filings, before the judge handed down his sentence. Cross testified publicly for the first time that Hastert molested him decades earlier as a teenager. “As a 17 year old boy, I was devastated,” he told the court. “I felt intense pain, shame, and guilt.”

“I don’t remember doing that, but I accept his statement,” Hastert said when asked about Cross’s allegations during Wednesday’s hearings.

Scott’s brother, Tom Cross, served as the Illinois House GOP leader for 11 years and was a political protégé of Hastert during his political career. According to the Chicago Tribune, Hastert asked his former friend and ally to write a letter of support for his sentencing; he received no response.

Hastert has not faced criminal charges for the acts, which now fall outside the statute of limitations. None of the acts occurred during his 30-year career in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The court also heard from Jolene Burdge, whose brother, Stephen Reinboldt, had told her about repeated instances of abuse. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1995. From the stand on Wednesday, she demanded Hastert admit what he had done to her brother and “tell the truth.”

Hastert addressed the court last and apologized for “mistreating athletes.” When Durkin pointedly asked him whether he had sexually abused them, Hastert simply answered, “Yes.”

The 74-year-old former politician’s downfall came not from the allegations of sexual abuse themselves, but from his efforts to cover them up:

In or about 2010, according to the indictment, Hastert—a former high-school teacher and coach—met with an unnamed individual from Yorkville, Hastert’s hometown. They “discussed past misconduct by defendant against Individual A that had occurred years earlier.” In effect, Hastert fell victim to blackmail, the indictment alleges: He “agreed to provide Individual A $3.5 million in order to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A.” (Since leaving the House, Hastert has become a highly paid lobbyist.)

[…]

After the 2010 meeting with Individual A, Hastert allegedly began withdrawing cash from his bank accounts to pay to the individual. But federal laws require financial institutions to report transactions greater than $10,000, and Hastert made a series of them. In April 2012, the indictment alleges, employees of Hastert’s bank questioned him about the withdrawals, and he promptly reduced his withdrawals to smaller amounts, to escape the requirement. Authorities were already watching, however, and they began investigating Hastert for structuring currency transactions to evade federal requirements—itself a crime.

Federal prosecutors indicted Hastert last May for lying to FBI agents and evading banking regulations on cash withdrawals. He pled guilty in October.

How Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell Lives on Today

What do David Bowie’s macabre short film for Black Star, the cover of Michael Jackson’s album Dangerous, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy all have in common? Each owes a creative debt to the medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch, whose art has enjoyed a recent resurgence in pop culture and has adorned all manner of trendy items: leggings, Doc Martens, skateboards. Metallica, Marilyn Manson, the TV show South of Hell, and popular horror franchises like Silent Hill have also riffed on Bosch’s images, specifically his depictions of hell, which have variously featured lakes of burning sulfur and rat-kings, demonic sadists, and castration via a giant razor blade.

Bosch’s vision of hell, first committed to canvas in the late-15th century, has come to be known by scholars and the public alike as the most famous scene of the underworld in Western art—first pictured in The Last Judgment and later cemented in the terrifying scenes in The Garden of Earthly Delights. Unlike the works of his contemporaries, Botticelli and Hans Memling, Bosch’s hell isn’t limited to art-history classrooms or museums. Perhaps more than any other artist of his time, including Leonardo da Vinci, Bosch’s inferno has become ingrained not only in pop culture, but also in the broader Western conception of hell as a place of torture, monstrous creatures, and never-ending suffering.

To understand how Bosch’s hell became so influential, it’s worth looking back to what spurred him to paint these images in the first place. Born Jeroen van Aken around 1450, the artist later changed his name to the more regal-sounding Hieronymus Bosch to attract patrons and distinguish himself in a family of painters. His birth coincided with the Age of Discovery, when Western Europe began its global mapping of the world, and Christianity was undergoing a movement that anticipated the Protestant Reformation. Jos Koldeweij, an art-history professor who led the Bosch Research and Conservation Project, has said these earlier reforms called for making the Christian life one’s own, rather than relying on the church’s strict interpretations. “Each individual had to confront the permanent choice between good and evil,” Koldeweij said.

In this new spirit of independence, Bosch decided to abandon the Bible’s version of hell, which emphasizes fiery punishment and destruction, and create a more fantastical underworld that more closely resembled a battlefield. He invented sword-wielding monsters with lion-heads and an androgynous birdman who vomits nothing but dice, along with scenes where women are savaged by dogs and groups of men are raped by demons. Like the unremitting Saint Augustine, Bosch believed that hell was the result of man’s ultimate sin: an attachment to the pleasures of earth. A member of a skull-and-bones religious order, the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady, Bosch saw hell as a physical world eternally separated from God. The idea was to render hell as a place so unthinkably foul that people would fear God and live according to the Gospels. This follows the narrative in The Garden of Earthly Delights: Adam and Eve are in the presence of God in the left panel and, after encountering the pleasures of earth in the center, are ultimately exiled from the heavenly realm as a result of their selfishness.

Bosch’s extreme portrayals of agony are more than just analogies—they reflect the horrors that humankind have committed and endured since biblical times.

It didn’t take long for other artists to recognize the distinct power of Bosch’s work. In 1562, almost 50 years after Bosch’s death, the Renaissance master Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Fall of the Rebel Angels, which features a battle of decapitations and monsters smeared in blood and feces. Known to his peers as “a second Bosch,” Bruegel also painted The Triumph of Death, which shows a nihilistic hell on earth and today hangs in Madrid’s Prado museum directly across from Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Both artists had their works collected by Philip II of Spain, who became fascinated by depictions of human-animal transformations.

Today, Bosch’s representations of hell have relevance for both the religious and the secular. For Christian believers, it’s a nauseating reminder that they’ll be asked to account for the way they’ve lived and to, potentially, suffer the consequences. For the non-religious, who make up roughly 23 percent of the U.S. population according to the Pew Research Center, hell can function as a powerful metaphor for the fact that all humans are judged in life under the law. And for both groups, Bosch’s extreme portrayals of agony go even further than analogies—they reflect the horrors that humankind have committed and endured since biblical times.

On that note, Bosch certainly drew from his own life. According to Charles de Mooij, the museum director who has organized a landmark exhibition in the Netherlands to celebrate 500 years since the artist’s death, Bosch “painted as a realist.” The Last Judgment resembles a battlefield, but it’s not simply an imaginative backdrop. Bosch was born at the tail end of the Hundred Years War in which over three million people were slaughtered and Joan of Arc was burned alive; he had a profound sense of his age’s barbarity. In many ways, the hell he imagined is a crystal ball of the bloody fight between Catholics and Protestants a century later, where during the Spanish Inquisition heretics were tortured using breast rippers and knee splitters.

The lust for war in recent times is no less obscene than it was during the Middle Ages. After the carnage of World War I, surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte helped spur a renewed interest in Bosch. These artists weren’t only drawn to his bizarre sex scenes (see Dalí’s The Great Masturbator), but they also saw him as the quintessential modern artist whose renderings of hell mirrored the suffering and deaths of millions. Modern life itself was misery: poison gas, dysentery, shell-shock, and bandaged amputees staggering through a treeless wasteland. The French philosopher Simone Weil reflected on the war’s devastation when she soberly noted, “We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.”

Bosch’s imagery may have been diluted for children’s books, as in Pish Posh, Said Hieronymus Bosch, but it’s far more than fodder for wallpaper.

Since the rise of photography and cinema in the 19th century, it was also possible to transmit horrifying images around the world via newspapers and television. It’s no surprise then that the savagery Bosch painted also resonated with a culture that was experiencing the horrors of Vietnam during the 1960s and ’70s—a scholarly debate played out regarding Bosch’s moralism on violence and the hippy notion of freedom through sex. His art seems less outlandish than what unfolded during the My Lai massacre: Soldiers set fire to huts and killed women and children with machine guns, while others mutilated their victims with barbed wire, poisoned food stocks, and shot cattle and dogs for sport.

Bosch’s hell also closely parallels modern forms of torture, such as those suffered by prisoners at the hands of U.S. soldiers in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib. The images that came from the prison were absurd, but real: the smiles of soldiers standing over piles of naked bodies, collared men pulled along the floor among pools of blood, a hooded figure wired to receive electric shocks. Bosch’s imagery may have been diluted for children’s books, as in Pish Posh, Said Hieronymus Bosch, but it’s more than fodder for wallpaper. It also offers a window into the evils of ISIS, who sing from the doomsday hymnal of beheadings, sex slaves, and the destruction of sacred monuments.

Beyond its visceral resonance, another reason Bosch’s hell has continued to fascinate over the centuries is that the artist himself left no paper trail explaining the rationale behind his reinvention. The lack of diaries or letters has perhaps helped keep the appeal of his dark imagery alive, encouraging new generations of artists and museum-goers to interpret him anew, and to think about how his works continue to bear on culture today. Even if the world looks different than it did in the 16th century, Bosch’s art offers a painful but necessary reminder that much still remains the same.