Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 182

Will a $6 Million Tamir Rice Settlement Help Reform Cleveland Cops?

Seventeen months after a Cleveland police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, and five months after a grand jury declined to indict that officer, the city of Cleveland will pay $6 million to Rice’s family to settle a civil lawsuit.

In a settlement announced Monday, the city will pay $3 million each this year and in 2017. The lion’s share, $5.5 million, goes to Rice’s estate. His mother and sister will receive another $250,000 a piece. The settlement, under which the city admits no wrongdoing, forecloses a painful and acrimonious litigation process that could have stretched for years. But as The Plain Dealer notes, it also means there won’t be answers to some of the questions the civil lawsuit sought to address, including whether dispatchers passed along adequate information to officers, and whether the department erred in hiring Officer Timothy Loehmann, who fired the fatal shots.

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What Can the U.S. Do to Improve Police Accountability?

The huge settlement is not especially surprising, either for cases of wrongful death like this one, or for the Cleveland Police Department in particular. While police are seldom prosecuted and convicted by the criminal justice system in connection with brutality and death cases, cities and departments often pay large sums to victims or their families in connection with civil suits. Cleveland in particular paid out at least $10.5 million for a decade preceding Rice’s killing.

Yet the Rice settlement is unusually large, both for Cleveland and nationally, though it is in line with some of the more recent high-profile cases. The family of Laquan McDonald, an unarmed man killed by a Chicago police officer, received $5 million. The family of Freddie Gray, who was mortally injured while riding in a Baltimore police van just over a year ago, received $6.4 million. The size of the settlement may reflect in part the circumstances of Rice’s death. Video of an unarmed black boy being gunned down by police just seconds after they arrived on the scene sparked national horror. (Rice had been holding an Airsoft gun.) As more information about Rice’s killing emerged, it added fuel to the outrage. The officers on the scene, Loehmann and Frank Garmback, hadn’t delivered first aid, a role left to an FBI officer who happened to be nearby. Rice’s sister was kept from running to her wounded brother. Damaging revelations about Loehmann’s prior police career added to the fury. He had resigned from another Northeast Ohio department after a bad performance review, and had been rejected by other area departments, information the Cleveland department apparently did not turn up.

But in late December, after releasing a series of exculpatory reports about the officers’ handling of the incident, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty announced that a grand jury had opted not to issue indictments in the case. Activists accused McGinty of excessive friendliness to the police and of working to torpedo an indictment. McGinty lost his bid for re-election when he was defeated by a wide margin in the Democratic primary in March.

Mayor Frank Jackson told The Plain Dealer in 2015 that the pattern of settlements in the city did not prove a pattern of abuse, and said that some officers might not have been at fault. It is true that cities sometimes settle cases rather than risk lengthy or expensive litigation. But the U.S. Department of Justice disagreed, and in May of that year reached a consent decree with the city that requires a passel of reforms.

In a statement, attorneys for Rice’s family noted that “no amount of money can adequately compensate for the loss of a life." While the payout cannot do that, could it be a force for good, encouraging changes in policing in the Forest City, and guaranteeing that there are no future cases like Tamir Rice? Jackson’s disavowal of a connection between lawsuits and misconduct  points to the reality of civil lawsuits against police departments. As long as the criminal-justice system remains unfriendly to prosecuting cops—a situation many reformers are hoping to change—civil suits remain one of the few and best tools available for holding police to account. Just how good are they, though? Reaching a definitive answer is nigh unto impossible, but anecdotal and scholarly work alike have reached the conclusion that lawsuits are at best an inconsistent tool for police accountability.

In a 2012 paper, UCLA Law professor Joanna Schwartz studied how and what police departments can learn from lawsuits. Schwartz found that some departments have been proactive about studying what payouts show and trying to reform their departments. But she also pointed to a series of weaknesses of lawsuits as a corrective. For example:

Many people never sue and lawsuit payouts can distort the extent of a defendant’s responsibility. Lawsuits are resolved long after the underlying incident occurred and are generally focused on individual bad actors instead of the policy makers that could affect organizational change.

As Schwartz further noted, it’s unclear whether big payouts really do much to deter bad behavior in the future. “The deterrent signal is further skewed in police misconduct cases, where officers are almost certain to be indemnified and judgments against departments come from city budgets, not police coffers,” she wrote.

Some experts have pointed to that question of who pays as important in understanding whether lawsuits and settlements produce reforms. In cities where the police are insured by outside companies, the insurers can be a force for change, demanding that departments change practices in return for continued insurance, and working with cities to produce those changes. But many large cities are self-insured, including Cleveland. That means that the price of settlements like the Rice family’s come not from police in particular but from the city overall—and, in turn, from taxpayers. Paradoxically, that means that Cleveland citizens, who are most likely to be victimized by the city’s troubled police practices, are also those who bear the economic brunt of the settlements.

Not that the city of Cleveland hasn’t done its best to recoup revenues in the Rice case, too. In February, the city filed a claim in probate court, demanding $500 from Rice’s estate to pay for ambulance costs in his death. Jackson and others said the claim was made in error, and the city hurriedly withdrew.

Tamir Rice Settlement (PDF)


Tamir Rice Settlement (Text)

‘Deflategate’ Is Back

Updated on April 25 at 1:11 p.m. ET

The NFL’s four-game suspension of Tom Brady in connection with the “deflategate” scandal has been reinstated.

Here’s ESPN’s NFL reporter:

U.S. appeals court: "Our review of the record yields the firm conclusion that the Commissioner properly exercised his broad discretion."

— Mike Reiss (@MikeReiss) April 25, 2016

The ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was 2-1. The AP adds:

The split decision by a three-judge panel may end the legal debate over the scandal that led to months of football fans arguing over air pressure and the reputation of one of the league’s top teams.

Last fall, a federal judge nullified the suspension handed to the New England Patriots quarterback over the alleged use of under-inflated footballs in the AFC Championship game in January 2015 between the Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. The NFL appealed the decision. On Monday, the appeals court backed the league.

The NFL said it was pleased by the court’s decision while the NLF Players Association said it was disappointed, adding it would “carefully review the decision, consider all of our options and continue to fight for players' rights and for the integrity of the game.”

NFL.com adds: “Brady still has legal recourse, and might seek a stay on the decision which would allow him to operate normally while the decision backs its way through the court system again.”

The Brussels Metro, After the Attacks

The Brussels metro station where an Islamic State suicide bomber killed 16 people and wounded dozens last month has reopened.

The city’s public transport agency, the STIB-MIVB, announced Monday that train service will resume at Maelbeek station. The agency also said operating hours, cut short after the attack, will be extended. Wire photos showed heavily armed soldiers patrolling Maelbeek Monday.

A memorial wall has been installed at the station, allowing people to write messages:

Francois Lenoir / Reuters

“I got out alive, R.I.P those who didn’t,” one message reads. “Never surrender,” another says.

Thirty-two people were killed and more than 300 were wounded in the March 22 terrorist attacks at Maelbeek station and the Brussels airport, where two other suicide bombers killed 16 people on the same day. Zaventem airport partially reopened earlier this month.

Brussels police have spent the last month searching for the attackers’ accomplices. Belgium’s Justice Minister Koen Geens on Monday asked European Union governments to help Belgian authorities collect data from social media in their investigation, the AP reported. Koen said “terrorists are using Viber, WhatsApp, Twitter, Skype or Facebook to communicate with each other,” and claimed social-media companies’ willingness to work with police has been “far from optimal.”

A Fairy-Tale Ending for the Game of Thrones Premiere

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

Kornhaber: Melisandre always seemed to harbor a secret, and now we know it’s that she, like someone in a Catfish episode or like many witches of centuries-old folklore, is secretly saggy. Only Thrones could pull off precisely this kind of fun, meta twist. After the show has spent so long jamming spears through handsome young prince heads in order to prove that it’s not reliant on fairy-tale tropes, it can occasionally shock simply by serving up some of the oldest magic tricks in the storybooks. What are we watching, after all, if not what the thoroughly demented Brothers’ Grimm might create on an HBO budget?

Though the hype for this episode ran even higher than usual due to Jon Snow’s stabbing and the fact that it opens the first season whose story has not yet revealed by George R.R. Martin’s books, a Game of Thrones season premiere is, in the end, a Game of Thrones season premiere. Which means this hour was always unlikely to rank among the show’s best episodes; there’s so much work to be done getting viewers up to speed and setting up future conflicts that the big plotlines don’t have time to move forward all that much. That said, “The Red Woman” managed to deliver a fair amount of action and intrigue in as it conducted a tour of the grave sites created by last season’s bloody finale.

Jon’s body was dealt with first, as is fitting for its fame. While the camera closed in on the yard of Castle Black, the direwolf Ghost’s howls were heartbreaking enough to nearly distract from the question of why Alliser Thorne’s gang just left their victim laying in the open. Seems like a sanitary liability, at the very least. Davos and Snow’s bros then sat shiva for their fallen leader and plotted mutiny against the mutineers. Edd—now promoted to being one of the few Night’s Watch guys whose names you need to know—advocated a suicide mission, but Davos suggested they improve their odds by enlisting allies who he did not name but whose designation probably rhyme with “mild things.” All involved seemed motivated by a strange and likely fatal desire to stand up for justice, but maybe a reality-checked version of Jon will preach pragmatism if the old lady in red decides to raise him.

The next corpse on display was that of Myranda, the kennelmaster’s daughter who will soon be kennel-denizen’s fodder. There is little precedent for the human sadness Ramsay displayed about her, but then again, there is little precedent for the human depravity she gleefully enabled. Ramsay’s desire for revenge would seem like enough of motivation for him to release the hounds on Theon and Sansa, but Roose upped the stakes with characteristically terrible parenting by implicitly threatening to revoke the family name Ramsay has dismembered so many people to earn. More interesting was Roose’s mention of potential war with the Lannisters; talk of battling houses is enough to induce nostalgia for Thrones’s early seasons, when the Iron Throne seemed worth sitting in.

Outside of Winterfell, Sansa and Theon practiced outdoors survival techniques, feebly. Even if her arrival was timed a bit too conveniently, it was nice that Brienne found them, if for no other reason than it allows their plotline to progress at a rate worth watching. The battle between her, Podrick, and the Bolton men was one of those classic Thrones skirmishes where the brutal choreography triggers well-earned fear that one of your favorite characters might die in random and ignoble battle. Instead, Theon’s re-humanization process continued at a rate that ensured Brienne and Podrick’s further survival. I was then moved by Sansa accepting Brienne’s offer of fealty—it felt like a well-earned moment of growing up for the Stark, and it meant the Tarth finally achieved something she set out to do.

What are we watching if not what the thoroughly demented Brothers’ Grimm might create on an HBO budget?

In King’s Landing, Lena Headey earned yet another episode-MVP title simply for the shot in which her face turned from naive excitement to despair to hardened anger while watching Jaime arrive sans Myrcella. I’ve been dreading this particular corpse-centric plotline the most, simply because even Cersei doesn’t deserve to have to face another child’s death. But she took the news pretty well, all things considered, chalking Myrcella’s fate up to the witch’s prophecy that we saw in flashback at the beginning of season five. The lack of blame for Jaime was, from a viewer’s standpoint, exciting—Westeros’s weirdest couple can finally get back to collaborative scheming. Question: Since the prophecy said that Cersei’s three gold-haired children will die, does that mean she’s resigned to King Tommen becoming toast? A Cersei that’s resigned to anything bad happening to her children would be a whole new character.

If the numbness subsides and Cersei decides to go to war over Myrcella’s death, she will have newly energized enemies in Dorne thanks to Ellaria’s coup. The Dornish scenes have always seemed ported in from some other show where the writing is a little cornier and the plotting a little sloppier than Thrones usually is, and this episode did not fix the problem. Ellaria killing Doran makes enough sense, but the two Sand Snakes feistily confronting Trystane does not—why were they on the ship in the first place? I’ll admit I laughed at one of the assassins calling the other a “greedy bitch,” but it was mostly because the line seemed so out of place for this show.  

The banter between Tyrion and Varys as they toured Meereen, on the other hand, felt like the logical extension of rapport established earlier. And Daario and Jorah’s exchange about hoping to live to see Daenerys’s world domination was a nice reminder of the stakes of their quest, even if we know the elder of the two guys will be—at best—quarantined in Old Valyria by the time Khaleesi reaches Westeros. Her travails with the Dothraki were tough to watch; we saw lots of this sort of sexist abuse in season one, though I do appreciate that the point here is that she’s having to reconquer her past as some sort of allegorical test. But why, oh why, didn’t she lead all of her encounters with the braided bunch by saying she was Khal Drogo’s widow? Even if it meant being banished with the other Khal widows, it would have gotten her out of physical bondage sooner, which seems to be a big Daenerys priority. Maybe that the assumption that dragons will bail you out at some point changes your decision making.

Over in Braavos, Arya, now blind, will receive that thing we’ve long wanted Arya to get: More training! Just kidding; this entire show’s run has been taken up with Arya being trained for things. Of course her cockiness about that training is what has led her to the beggarly situation she finds herself in—like Dany, she has to go back to go forward. The Faceless school, happily, hasn’t given up on her entirely, even though their version of continuing education includes stick-hits to the face that Arya still very much possesses. If the Jaqen H’ghar won’t eventually teach her how to restore her youthful visage, maybe she can complete a course with Melisandre.

Lenika, Chris, how’d you enjoy our first hour back in Westeros and Essos? Do you have anything to confess, whether of a Margaery-level sin or a Melisandre-level secret?

We will be updating this post with entries from Lenika Cruz and Chris Orr.

A Cruz-Kasich Alliance to Stop Trump

Updated on April 25 at 1:16 a.m.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich announced plans Sunday night to collaborate against Donald Trump in three upcoming state primaries, formalizing an 11th-hour effort among some Republicans to deny their party’s front-runner the nomination through a contested convention.

First, the Cruz campaign said in a late-evening press statement it would abandon its efforts to win the Oregon primary on May 17 and the New Mexico primary on June 7.

“To ensure that we nominate a Republican who can unify the Republican Party and win in November, our campaign will focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Gov. Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico, and we would hope that allies of both campaigns would follow our lead,” Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe said.

The Kasich campaign then issued its own statement announcing it would cede the May 7 Indiana primary to Cruz, citing the winner-take-all system of delegate allocation there. “We are very comfortable with our delegate position in Indiana already, and given the current dynamics of the primary there, we will shift our campaign’s resources West and give the Cruz campaign a clear path to Indiana,” Kasich campaign chief strategist John Weaver said.

On Twitter, Trump responded to his rivals’ announcements in his usual manner.

Wow, just announced that Lyin' Ted and Kasich are going to collude in order to keep me from getting the Republican nomination. DESPERATION!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 25, 2016

Both campaigns cited the need to block Trump from amassing enough delegates he needs to win the party’s nomination on the first ballot. Anti-Trump conservatives have repeatedly urged other Republican candidates to coordinate their efforts against the real-estate mogul since his victories on Super Tuesday.

But the two camps fell far short of a formal alliance in Sunday night’s statements. Cruz’s team suggested their collaboration might not extend beyond the three contests named on Sunday. “In other states holding their elections for the remainder of the primary season, our campaign will continue to compete vigorously to win,” Roe said.

The current delegate math offers both promise and peril for all three candidates. To win the Republican nomination, one of them needs the support of at least 1,237 delegates during the July convention in Cleveland.

Trump has the upper hand for the first ballot at the convention. He currently holds a substantial lead in delegates, with 847 pledged to support him according to the AP’s estimate. And neither Cruz nor Kasich can win enough of them in the remaining contests to reach the magic number.

But Trump’s advantages fade with each successive ballot, thanks to the GOP’s complex state-by-state rules for pledged delegates. The Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe explains the process:

When the presidential nomination vote is held at the convention, 95 percent of the delegates will be bound to the results in their states for the first vote, giving Trump his best shot at security a majority.

But if Trump falls short, the convention will cast a second ballot in which more than 1,800 delegates from 31 states—nearly 60 percent of the total—will be unbound and allowed to vote however they want. By the third round, 80 percent of the delegates would be free, sparking a potential free-for-all that could continue for several more rounds.

With large segments of the Republican Party either uneasy with Trump’s candidacy or openly hostile to it, Cruz and Kasich each hope to persuade those delegates, as they come unbound, to nominate them instead.

The Rare Vin Scully

Long ago, when the world was new and the cement wet in Los Angeles, I found myself staring down the longest row of stairs I’d ever seen to a vanishing point called home plate. An iced box strapped around my neck, I began to walk down from the sky, it seemed, into a cavernous bowl radiating heat. I was 12 years old, selling frozen chocolate malts at the Los Angeles Coliseum, on the first day of my first job. Descending into the 72,140 baseball fans at the game that day, I was afraid. Until I heard a familiar voice.

The voice seemed to come out of the earth. It was cooling in the heat, a sort of collective whisper that I felt was heard by my ears alone. It was Vin Scully. How could this be? Many a night, a sleepless asthmatic, I’d heard Vin’s voice through a transistor radio held to my ear in bed, with his lilting call of a Dodger home run—“Back goes Mays, a-Way Back, to the wall, SHE—IS—GAWN!” And I knew two things: a Dodger home run was a woman. And my lungs would unstick themselves at the roar of the crowd and Vin’s voice. I would awake the next day, the grill of the transistor imprinted on my cheek.

But in the Coliseum that day—it was August 16, 1961, and 100 degrees—I didn’t have a transistor. So where was the voice coming from? Looking around, the source of it hit me. Not hot dogs, nor beer, nor peanuts were held as near as tens of thousands of little radios at the ear. Everyone was listening to Vin, even as they watched the game in person.

To put this plainly, Dodgers fans in the early years in Los Angeles couldn’t believe their eyes, unless they heard it. That’s how powerful Vin Scully’s rendering of baseball was. It was better than seeing.

And is. If only for one more year. This 2016 baseball season will be the timeless 88-year-old redhead’s 67th season broadcasting for the Dodgers, stretching back to 1950. Why did Vincent E. Scully last so long with one team, and why is he so lionized? The answer, I think, partly lies in the nature of Los Angeles itself, spread across 502 square miles seeking a center, and its long-suffering life without baseball. Baseball is America’s oldest professional sport, dating back to 1869, but for nearly a century, it was an Eastern sport. However, in 1958, after a wrenching breakaway from Brooklyn (for which Brooklynites have never forgiven them), the Dodgers touched the Pacific. Baseball, the country, and children’s ears would never be the same.

* * *

Los Angeles—with the rest of California—was founded by Hispanic Franciscans. For a long time it was a sparsely populated, agricultural society compared to the industrial colossus of the East. But that began to change, first with the advent of trains and the mass production of cars, then motion pictures, and finally the war economy of World War II. The wonders of Western sun didn’t hurt, either. When Eisenhower built the interstate highway system in the ’50s that linked both coasts by road, the die was cast for a huge westward swing of American culture. Baseball—in the form of the Dodgers and later New York Giants (who went to San Francisco, shifting an ageless rivalry to the Pacific coast)—came with Vin. And Angelenos latched onto him like a long lost cousin, a unifier the burgeoning town of suburbs desperately needed. New York had the Empire State building. Los Angeles had a voice. The voice.

If it’s true that place and circumstance create a hero, there’s also the matter of just who Vin Scully is, which of course influenced greatly who he became. First and foremost comes his love of language, born of being a Literature major at Fordham. An American poet once called Scully “our Yeats,” and another writer has compared him to Homer. Both are certainly exaggerations, but what bounty came from frustration, both in poetry and baseball. Scully was a no-stick center fielder at Fordham, and, hanging up his cleats at age 20, he decided “to talk a good game.”

That he did. Out came cascading metaphors (“the butter-and-egg man”), internal rhyme (a line drive “whacked into the gap”), euphony, electric verbs, alliteration (“a lamb chop to a lion” for a perfectly centered 3-0 pitch to a home run hitter), allusions to poets like Pope and Shakespeare, and personifications of everything from dirt clods to a lazily hit ball (“a room-service fly”). Scully’s elephantine memory of the history of the game intertwined with the high and low points of the country is certainly unprecedented and will probably never be duplicated. His sheer love of the game, of doing what he is doing, and the excitement in his voice climbs right along with the ball. Scully rarely refers to the Dodgers as “we.” He brings to his enthusiasm a hard-nosed journalist’s objectivity and preparation, one reason why his call is treasured across the nation.

Angelenos latched onto Vin like a long lost cousin. New York had the Empire State building. Los Angeles had a voice. The voice.

Then there’s the music. The Los Angeles Times columnist Chris Erskine (no relation to Carl) recently compared Scully’s voice to a horn that can “make musical the specter of grown men mostly standing around for three hours,” and that contains such elements as “swing, moxie, and sonic opulence.” The University of Southern California professor Jeffrey Allen describes the voice as “a virtuoso instrument.”

Scully would probably run for the nearest beer at such dissection, but the USC musicologist Chris Sampson insists that the voice “starts with a dominant chord (that) has some tension to it that’s leading to a resolution.” (He has actually done sheet music on the last out call of the 1965 Sandy Koufax perfect game: “Two and two to Harvey Kuenn. One strike away.”) It scans poetically, too—trochaic pentameter actually—urgent, even insistent, with a double-stressed spondee (“One strike”) before ending with a teasing iamb, keeping us hanging in the air. Sampson calls this unconscious music Scully’s “claw mark”—what makes Sinatra Sinatra, Lennon Lennon, Flack Flack—and no one else.

The Voice has been more than mimetic—it has catalyzed, and not just fans. Angelenos never tire of the myth of Kirk Gibson, the crippled Dodger who hobbled off the bench in the last inning of the first game of the 1988 World Series—angered at hearing Scully’s radio voice in the locker room attesting that he would “not see any action tonight, for sure.” Gibson hit a stumbling, one-handed home run to win the game, rounding the bases while cocking the air as if it were a rifle. “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened,” Scully exclaimed, after 67 seconds of silence, or rather crowd roar. In a crazy sort of way, Scully had goaded, even caused Gibson’s heroics.

Gibson’s gimpy homer has been voted the greatest sports moment in Los Angeles history, but it wasn’t Vin’s, by his own reckoning. His was not of a Dodger at all; in fact, it took place during a Dodger loss. It was the middle of Watergate, April 8, 1974, almost four months to the day before Richard Nixon would resign the presidency. Henry Aaron was at the plate, tied with Babe Ruth for the all-time record in home runs (714), facing the Dodgers’ Al Downing. Aaron took the first pitch, low, below his knees. And then: “Fastball, high drive to deep left center field. Buckner goes back, to the fence—it is GAWN!” Scully later recounted that he took the headphones off, went to the water cooler for a drink, and let the crowd’s ecstasy and fireworks fill the nation’s ears. “Scully made his greatest contribution by saying nothing, thank you,” he told a benefit audience honoring him in February 2016. But that is not true. Here’s a condensation of what he said when he returned to the mike:

What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta, for the country and the world! A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South. And it is a great moment for all of us, but particularly for Henry Aaron who is met at home plate not only by every member of the Braves, but by his father and his mother, who came running across the grass, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him for all she was worth. As Aaron circled the bases, the Dodgers on the infield shook his hand. And for the first time in a long time that poker face of Aaron’s shows the tremendous strain and relief of the past seven months. It is over, at 10 minutes after nine o’clock in Atlanta, Georgia. Henry Aaron has eclipsed Babe Ruth. You could not get two more opposite men—the Babe, big and garrulous, oh so sociable, immense in all his appetites—and then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama, slender. Ruth, as he put on the pounds and the paunch, the Yankees put their ball players in pin striped uniforms because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pin stripes for Henry Aaron. And now you can hear Georgia around the world.

Aaron was a better export that year than lies and tapes. You can see other Vin virtues here: his reverence for people (he’s a devout Catholic), knack for story and character detail, but also, his sense of pathos. It’s in that “tremendous strain” on Aaron’s face. As Bart Giamatti once said, “[Baseball] is designed to break your heart.” But Scully caught another kind of tragedy: the racism Aaron endured that year as he got closer to 715 homers. It was hardly a magic number for him. His home was attacked, death threats were delivered.

Scully lets the crowd speak in peak moments, partly out of his own (temporary) wordlessness, but also because of a sense of the greater whole. As a kid in a fifth floor flat in the Bronx, he would put his head on a pillow under the radio stand to listen to a game and “let the crowd noise come down like water out of a shower head.” The boy Scully liked “getting goosebumps long before I saw them on my skinny arm.” In one of the few interviews he’s given over the years, he mentioned that the baseball faithful does more for him than he does for them. It’s an actor’s bow, perhaps. It is certainly humility. But it is something else. At 5, he watched his father die of pneumonia. “I hardly knew him,” he later said. According to The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Scully lost his first wife Joan to an accidental overdose of prescribed medicine; she went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up; she was 35. He was 45 and left to raise three young children. “From the first day I can remember, I was brought up thinking about death,” he would recall years later. “It’s a constant companion in our religion. Tomorrow is so uncertain.”

It was a born gift, yes, but the voice that raised L.A. was also loss-made.

That dark year, he’s said, “I felt like I would jump off a building.” But before long, he married Sandra Schaefer, the secretary to the owner of the L.A. Rams, adding her two children to his three, and then later one more of their own. Scully loves kids. He points out children in the crowd doing goofy things like painting their faces with chocolate, trying to feed their feet into the mouth, or attempting unsuccessfully to high five. In 1994, shortly after the Northridge earthquake, his son Michael was killed in a helicopter crash at the age of 33 while inspecting quake damage. After that, quakes seemed a part of life.

Beauty comes from loss (and as Keats reminds us, there’s truth involved). You can’t earn it outright or even attract it. That clear, dulcet tenor, with its occasional tremor, was Scully’s gift from his red-haired, “excitable” Irish mother, as he described her. You couldn’t teach it, any more than you could teach Ruth and Aaron to hit baseballs far from home, to go home. (Baseball, after all, is about going home.) It was a born gift, yes, but the voice that raised L.A. was also loss-made.

That blistering day in 1961 I also learned something about loss—it sold frozen malts. The Dodgers were shut out twice that day, 8-0 and 6-0, by the Cincinnati Redlegs (renamed during the ’50s’ Communist “Red Scare,” soon to return to just plain Reds). As the heat climbed and the people sweated, the malts practically flew out of my box. Save one. That one I savored alone, positioning myself right behind home plate, at the last out, and as his voice got fainter, I looked up behind me at the open booth above where the man with hair like a flame and the voice we all loved removed his headphones, took off his glasses, and went to the water cooler. I wished I’d kept one for him.

* * *

Baseball is terror. It is also courage in the face of it, grace, speed, remarkable timing, long history, chess with human bodies on a board of grass and sand. To its detractors, it is infinitely slow. But in some fundamental way, it is terror.

There is no ball in sports as hard as a baseball, 5 and a quarter ounces of tightly wrapped yarn around a rubber and cork center sheathed in red-stitched cow hide, nor one shot as fast (with the possible exception of hockey’s 6-ounce puck of vulcanized rubber). Pure fear took me out at the age of 13, the youngest player on a Pony League team, and takes out most young players, even promising ones. There’s a reason for the common refrain that hitting a 100 mph fastball is the hardest single action in sports.

The terror isn’t just for the batters, including two major leaguers who died after a “beaning,” or a fastball at the head. Between 2008 and 2013 alone, 10 pitchers were seriously injured, some with fractured skulls, when they were struck by balls batted back as fast as 120 miles per hour (Albert Pujols’s bat speed). In May 1957, the Cleveland Indians’ Herb Score was temporarily blinded when his right eye took a bullet hit by Gil McDougald of the Yanks who was so shook up he ran to the mound rather than first base.

We went through the years watching and listening to the delightful terror with Vin. In 1961, a journeyman Dodger catcher named Norm Sherry famously told Sandy Koufax, then still mixing his brilliance with wildness, “Take the grunt out of your fastball.” It calmed and focused him. He also added a devilish “twelve-to-six-o’clock” curve ball (Vin’s phrase). I listened in awe to Vin’s call of Koufax’s perfect game in 1965, his fourth no-hitter in five years (a concentration that has never been matched, though Nolan Ryan in a career nearly three times as long as Sandy’s recorded seven no-nos). Here’s part of the last inning against the Giants, which is not just Sandy’s masterpiece, but Scully’s, too:

It is 9:41 PM on September the 9th. There are 29,000 people in the ball park and a million butterflies. In the Dodger dugout, Al Ferrara gets up and walks down near the runway, and it begins to get tough to be a teammate and sit in the dugout and have to watch. Sandy back of the rubber now, toes it. All the boys in the bullpen straining to get a better look as they look through the wire fence in left field. A lot of people in the ball park now are starting to see the pitches with their hearts … Two-and-two the count to Chris Krug. Sandy reading signs. Into his windup, 2-2 pitch: fastball got him swinging! Sandy Koufax has struck out twelve. He is two outs away from a perfect game … Koufax with a new ball, takes a hitch at the belt, and walks behind the mound. I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world.

Sandy, fussing, looks in to get his sign; 0-and-2 to Amalfitano. The strike-two pitch to Joe: fast ball, swung on and missed, strike three! He is one out away from the promised land. And Harvey Kuenn is coming up. The time on the scoreboard is 9:44. Sandy into his windup and the pitch: fastball for a strike. He has struck out, by the way, five consecutive batters, and this has gone unnoticed. Sandy ready, and the strike-one pitch: very high and he lost his hat. He really forced that one.

That was only the second time tonight where I have had the feeling that Koufax threw instead of pitched, trying to get that little extra, and that time he tried so hard his hat fell off. He took an extremely long stride to the plate, and Torborg had to go up to get it. You can’t blame the man for pushing just a little bit now. Sandy backs off, mops his forehead, runs his left index finger along his forehead, dries it off on his left pants-leg. All the while, Kuenn is just waiting. Now Sandy looks in. Into his windup, and the 2-1 pitch to Kuenn: swung on and missed, strike two. It is 9:46 PM. Two-and-two to Harvey Kuenn. One strike away. Sandy into his windup. Here’s the pitch: swung on and missed, a perfect game! [Crowd roar washes over.]

Koufax and Scully were a duet from the start. In 1995, the 1965 perfect game was voted the greatest game ever pitched by the Society for American Baseball Research. Scully’s call of the milestone “read like a short story,” wrote Gary Kaufman in Salon. “It had tension, rising and falling drama, great turns of phrase. It was, and still is, the best piece of baseball writing I’ve ever seen.”

And it wasn’t writing, though it’s been anthologized in essay collections. As Kaufman noted, “It came off the top of his head.” Larry Stone, a writer for The Seattle Times, remembered listening to the Koufax’s perfect game while helping his father fix a bathtub faucet. As the game progressed, Stone and his father “did less and less work, finally stopping altogether to sit on the side of the bathtub and listen to Vinny’s magnificent call of the ninth inning.” When the last man struck out, Stone “ran around the house waving a wrench over my head in triumph.”

* * *

What happens when the music stops?

“I’m not going to bring me on tour like I’m some Stradivarius or whatever,” Vin Scully told reporters before a March spring training game. When it was revealed the major networks and CNN wanted him to do a few innings nationally as a swan song this year, he recoiled: “No, no, no, I don’t belong there. I belong in Dodger Stadium in the booth, that’s where I belong. That’s where I lived, that’s where I’ll stay till it’s over. I love this game and I don’t want to get in front of it.”

On April Fools’ Day, Vin drifted more, as he seems to be doing in this sayonara year, wistfully, during the first “Freeway Series” exhibition game against the Angels. Contemplating the dangerous hitter Albert Pujols, he remembered as an 11-year-old in the Bronx playing a prank, calling up a tobacco store and asking, “Do you have Albert in a can?” The reply, “Yes, I do.” And the kids shouted into the phone receiver, “Would you please let him out?!”

After my year-long attempt to secure an interview with him for this story failed, just after New Year’s I saw a message on my cell phone: Restricted. Listening, my ear widened: “Hi, this is Vin Scully trying to reach Or-FA-la. Mr. Or-FA-la, I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to reply to your letter. Things are getting a little hectic this time of year for me and the family. But anyway, I just wanted to say hello and wish him well and acknowledge the fact that I certainly appreciate his lovely letter. Again, my regrets it took so long, but I send along my warmest wishes. Thank you.”

Vinny has 16 grandchildren. That “hectic” may hide some pique. It may also hide a lot of joy. It sure gave me some. I’ll hold that warmest on a cold night.

“I’m not going to bring me on tour like I’m some Stradivarius or whatever,” Scully told reporters before a March spring training game.

Ross Porter, 78, who paired up with Scully for 28 years and now announces for California State University at Northridge’s baseball team, admits that Vin “is universally considered the best baseball announcer of all time, and the most popular individual in Southern California. But what is not known by people who don’t know him is his worth as a human being.”

Porter recalls seeing Scully in numerous encounters with fans “who could be considered annoying. Asking for an autograph, requesting a photo with him, delaying his entry into the press box to tell a personal story, and other inconveniences. Yet I have never seen Vin Scully rude to one person.” Porter also notes that Scully was once approached by political people asking if he’d run for governor. He declined and later told Ross, “They didn’t know I was in the other party.”

Bob Costas, who couldn’t wait as a boy to get to Vinny’s voice when his family moved cross country from New York to Los Angeles, has said that Vin Scully “never overstays his welcome.” On April 12 this year (opening day at Dodger Stadium), we got an eerie taste of what it would be like without that voice. For the first batter Jean Segura of the Arizona Diamondbacks, the television was totally silent. Three pitches and Segura hit by the ball and nothing. Barely a crowd murmur. We looked at each other at my home in a panic. Suddenly, the voice of Vin poured out, “The stairs get steeper here at Dodger Stadium and anyway here we are. And Jean Segura is hit by a pitch.” Segura was standing on first. We all exhaled, as if we’d been on that stairs, too.

Perhaps the reigning baseball voice after Scully retires, Costas wrote to me, “Vin Scully was one of the very first baseball voices I ever heard, along with Red Barber and Mel Allen. All of Vin’s contemporaries are gone and yet he continues, at least for one more season, a voice that encompasses well over half of the modern history of baseball. If you are of a certain age, and you listen to a game Vin broadcasts, it is simultaneously present and nostalgic.”

Scully’s fellow Angeleno, the author and former Nation columnist Max Holland admitted that Vin not being “a homer,” or a booster of the home team, bothered him as a child: “Instead he imparted the lesson of objectivity, no small thing, as it requires empathy or grudging appreciation of the other.”

At that April Fools’ Day game, after Corey Seager flubbed an easy pop fly, Scully went back a half century to Red Barber commenting, “Even Pee Wee Reese dropped ‘em.” And then back even further, 300 years, to Alexander Pope, “To err is human.” He lets you, merciful listener, complete the rest.

Making Matzo in the Lower East Side

Last year, Streit's closed its 90-year-old matzo factory on the Lower East Side of New York City. The Rivington Street location that produced unleavened bread for the Passover holiday had been a hallmark of the one-time Jewish enclave, alongside mainstays like Russ & Daughters and Katz's Deli. Filmmaker Michael Levine documented the family-owned company's final year in their original location, capturing the unique ovens, odd architecture, and personalities before the matzo makers moved to their new Rockland County location. His film, Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream, premieres this week and to mark the occasion, he has shared select images from the company's archive with The Atlantic.

Can Veep Keep Up With the 2016 Election?

In the new season of Veep, President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) battles for reelection after an electoral college tie. She gets a new boyfriend, a rich Wall Street lobbyist, and weathers public scrutiny over his influence in the Oval Office; she has a Twitter mishap where she sends the whole world a message intended to be private; there’s some business with a poor makeup job for a stress pimple. It’s the same brand of political farce the HBO show has excelled at for five years, but the jokes feel a little off, the verbal barbs tamer than before. Which prompts the quest: Is Veep losing its edge? Or has the world of politics just gotten too crazy for the spoof version to keep up?

It might be a cliché at this point to note that the 2016 election cycle has been so ludicrous that it transcends parody. Saturday Night Live can’t deliver a Donald Trump impression that comes close to nailing the outsize bombast of the man himself. Similarly, if Veep had tried to present the political success of a Trump-type or a Bernie Sanders clone in previous years, it would have felt unrealistic and goofy. Not so much anymore. The show’s fifth season is still sharp, well-plotted, and peppered with laugh-out-loud moments of obscenity. But like so much current satire—from SNL to The Daily Show to Scandal’s Donald Trump analogue—it’s struggling to match the unpredictable political pulse of the moment.

It’s perhaps a surprising turnaround after last year’s season, the first to feature Meyer as the President (after her boss resigns over a health issue). That shift gave Veep a surge of energy just as it was beginning to get into a familiar story rhythm. While the first three seasons delighted in the obscurity of the vice president’s role and the incompetence of Meyer’s staff, the fourth season had much higher stakes. Suddenly, their political decisions actually mattered, and their screw-ups could have real global impact. Meyer and company could still be blundering fools, but the satire felt all the more caustic as a result.

Since season four, the Veep creator Armando Iannucci (a titan of British TV comedy who worked on shows like The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge, and The Thick of It) has departed to new projects, leaving the show in the capable hands of his writing lieutenants. But the loss is still deeply felt. In the first four episodes provided to press, Meyer’s screw-ups feel a little more basic, and their real-world influences a little more obvious. The mis-sent tweet is blamed on anonymous Chinese hackers, recalling Congressman Anthony Weiner’s flailing attempts to distract from his sexting scandal. Episode-long stories about pimples or a misbegotten juice cleanse, which troubles the press secretary Mike McClintock (Matt Walsh) in one episode, lack the narrative intricacy this show often excels at.

More importantly, there’s a little less humanity to this season, something that Iannucci and his cast (who improvise much of the show’s dialogue) really tapped into once Meyer became president. Her relationship with the embittered veteran Chief of Staff Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn) had an emotional grounding beyond their profane interchanges of dialogue; robotic factotums like Sue Wilson (Sufe Bradshaw) and Kent Davison (Gary Ross) finally served a purpose beyond simple exposition. Most fascinating were the arcs of Dan Egan (Reid Scott) and Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky), veterans of the VP’s office suddenly thrust into the world of lobbying; this year, they’re both back on the inside and all the more cynical for it.

There’s still fun to be had. Louis-Drefyus’s Selina Meyer is one of the funniest characters of TV’s last decade, and she can still convey so much emotion (usually negative emotions) with a look. Dan and Amy’s on-again, off-again romantic tension is a surprisingly strong narrative hook for the first part of the new season, and there’s real drama in the vagaries of ballot-counting laws. Following on from a 269-269 electoral college deadlock, the show’s first arc concentrates on a recount in Nevada that could swing victory Meyer’s way; like every political drama in TV history (from The West Wing to Scandal), Veep is sure to satisfy anyone looking to indulge in some speculative election fiction.

That arc, which sees the gangly Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) suddenly forced to take a backseat to his assistant, the nerdy Richard Splett (Sam Richardson), who turns out to have a doctorate in electoral law, is a funny new twist. Other new plotlines, including the introduction of a barmy political veteran played by Martin Mull, fall flatter—the twist involving his character is almost instantly obvious. Hugh Laurie’s Tom James, the annoyingly competent vice presidential candidate on Meyer’s ticket, is disappointingly backgrounded early on. An ongoing plotline in which Meyer’s daughter Catherine (Sarah Sutherland) begins filming everything around her as a purported documentary project bodes poorly from the start, and doesn’t feel imaginative from a storytelling perspective. Veep’s trademark insults remain as creative and cruel ever, and there’s still plenty of White House fantasy fun. But if the show wants to stay relevant, it’s going to have to get even crazier—or the real world will soon be leaving it behind.

Prince and Lifetime’s Revolution: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Prince, Blackness, and Sexuality

Dodai Stewart | Fusion

“To watch him perform was to be in his thrall; to be stunned into barely breathing or even blinking as he stroked his long purple instrument like he was rubbing his cock, the guitar solo transformed into masturbatory act, his head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth open, each note building on the next into an explosion of indecent abandon.”

Prince: Nothing Compared 2 Him

Rob Sheffield | Rolling Stone

“At a time when pop was cowed by the past, Prince was the guy who refused to concede a thing to nostalgia, determined to go up against all the giants of pop/rock/R&B history and top them all, doing the twist a little bit harder than they did in ’66, a little bit faster than they did in ’67, to shut up everybody who wanted to surrender to the past.”

In a Special Sky: How Prince Escaped From Time

Brian Phillips | MTV News

“As a young man, he radiated a supernatural maturity; as an older man, he possessed a supernatural youth. In between, he lived a life that seemed to have infinite room—room to saturate the culture and room to vanish, room to stage intractable avant-cool experiments in audience alienation and room to overload pleasure centers until the whole planet got up and fucking danced.”

How Lifetime Became One of the Best Places in Hollywood for Women

Laura Goode | BuzzFeed

“Critics have unfairly dismissed Lifetime as ‘trash TV,’ but at its best, Lifetime has blended conventions of high and low art to challenge the lazy condescension of ‘trash’ itself. Lifetime’s library serves as an anthology of gender as genre, one that is distinct from other modes of filmmaking, rather than a less successful iteration of them.”

My Writing Day

Hilary Mantel | The Guardian

“Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves. This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely.”

Earning the ‘Woke’ Badge

Amanda Hess | The New York Times Magazine

“‘Woke’ feels a little bit like Macklemore rapping in one of his latest tracks about how his whiteness makes his rap music more acceptable to other white people. The conundrum is built in. When white people aspire to get points for consciousness, they walk right into the cross hairs between allyship and appropriation.”

Nas, the Narrator: On Publishing & Hip-Hop Storytelling

Mensah Demary | Electric Literature

“If presented with a choice, I’d rather discuss classic hip-hop albums than short story collections: the former evokes warmth, my need to consecrate my life to a certain fidelity and pure aural bliss channeled into nighttime sessions in the bedroom, lights off, completely enveloped by sound, while the latter invokes the image of a bottomless pit.”

Imagine There’s No Outrage: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Dreams of a Post-Identity Comedy Utopia

Sonia Saraiya | Salon

“Buried within some snark about creators’ relationship to their largely anonymous online critics is a much sweeter ideal—one of performance art’s ability to communicate, include and transform. Ideally, Titus’s art would not need the packaging of advertisement or stated intentions—his performance would just flow to his audience, without any need to entice viewers or turn a profit. Ideally, no one would ever misunderstand a good intention.”

Sailing Back to Cuba

Cuba will now allow people born on the island to return by boat, reversing a Cold War-era policy that would have prevented Cuban-Americans from traveling to Havana next month on cruise ships.

According to The New York Times:

The decision, another softening of Cuba’s Cold War stance toward the United States, came after Carnival Cruise Line, under political pressure, said it would delay its inaugural cruise to Cuba from Miami, scheduled for May 1, because the government would not relax a law prohibiting people born on the island from traveling there by ship. In response to the change, Carnival said that the cruise would depart as scheduled, making it the first American cruise ship to visit Cuba in 50 years.

On Monday, Carnival announced that despite the restriction, the cruise line would still offer spots on its maiden voyage to Havana to Cuban-Americans, going against the Cuban government policy. Allowing Carnival, and other cruise lines, to move ahead with planned trips will bring significant business to the island, a factor the Cuban government surely considered. This will also allow Cuban-Americans to travel back to Cuba by yacht, as well—key for many in Miami.