Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 183

A Four-Month Sentence for the Gyrocopter Mailman

A mailman who flew a gyrocopter and landed on the West Lawn of the Capitol was sentenced Thursday in a U.S. District Court to four months in prison. Doug Hughes, a 62-year-old from a town near Tampa Bay, Florida, had originally faced six charges, which could have landed him up to nine years.

He pleaded to just one, flying without a license, which is a felony. Back in April 2015, Hughes took off from Gettysburg and piloted the gyrocopter more than an hour to deliver a message of campaign-finance reform to U.S. politicians. At his sentencing Thursday, Hughes compared himself to activists like Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders.

The Tampa Bay Times wrote:

Hughes, who has no criminal record, apologized to law enforcement, citizens of Washington and his family for the "enormous uncertainty" his flight brought to their lives. But, he said, he didn't regret the flight. "It provided me a forum for my concerns."

Prosecutors asked the judge for 10 months. But in sentencing Hughes to four months – which his supporters said was still extreme for a stunt in which no one was hurt and no property was damaged – U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said there was "an important difference" between Hughes' flight and the nonviolent civil disobedience of people such as Parks and the Freedom Riders.

"Their civil disobedience was directly related to the laws they were protesting," she said. "His civil disobedience was totally unrelated to his political cause."

Hughes had carried with him on his flight––in mailman fashion––a bag of 535 letters for each member of Congress. He’d hoped the stunt would bring more attention to what he saw as the venality of campaign finance, and how lawmakers take money from corporations, which Hughes believed corrupts politics. Hughes had planned the the flight for 2 ½ years, and even told some friends about it. Somehow, the Secret Service found out, visited his home in 2013, and talked with him—but nothing came of it. When asked how he felt about the sentencing on Thursday, Hughes told reporters, “I’m certainly not totally pleased, nor am I terribly disappointed … ”

As part of his sentence, Hughes won’t be allowed to enter the White House, or the Capitol building, unless he receives special permission.

Semi-Automatic Rifles in a Colorado School

Security officers at schools in Colorado’s Douglas County School District will soon be armed with semi-automatic Bushmaster rifles.

The school district’s director of security, Richard Payne, spent more than $12,000 on the 10 semi-automatic rifles, a popular design of which comes with a 16-inch barrel that fires 30 rounds. Payne said he saw a need for the rifles because while his school-security officers trained “hand-to-hand” with sheriff’s deputies, he noticed his officers only carried handguns, while the sheriff’s office “used the larger weapons,” The Denver Post wrote.

A reporter with the paper found that security officers armed with the weapons are, at least for Colorado, pretty unheard of.

Calls to the other large school districts in the Denver area indicate that Douglas County's move is unique. Security workers in Denver, Aurora and Jefferson County school districts carry handguns, and security staffers in Cherry Creek are unarmed. The districts have school resource officers who are active members of law enforcement and carry police-issued weapons.

Some gun-rights advocates say weapons in schools and colleges is one way to keep students safe. In Texas, people can carry guns on public college and university campuses starting August 1. Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, and Wisconsin also allow people with a permit to carry guns on campus. Georgia and Tennessee could join them soon. But in plenty more states and school districts, police, deputies, security guards, even teachers, can be armed in class. This has been a reaction to campus shootings, like Virginia Tech in 2007, and Sandy Hook, where Adam Lanza shot 20 Connecticut elementary students with a Bushmaster rifle, the kind being bought in Colorado.

Payne told the Post officers would keep the rifles in their cars, but Ken Trump, a national school security consultant, pointed out that a semi-automatic in a school, with hallways full of kids, is “not something to do lightly. It better be well-thought-out.” The district school board wasn’t notified––probably because only purchases of $75,000 or more are brought before the panel.

Prince: Gay Icon, Whether He Wanted to Be or Not

In 2008, the New Yorker writer Claire Hoffman asked Prince what he thought of social issues like gay marriage and abortion. Reported Hoffman of his response: “Prince tapped his Bible and said, ‘God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’”

This exchange caused one of the last great controversies in Prince’s career. The “homophobe” label attached itself to him, accompanied by the bitter shock of many fans. “The irony, it burns,” wrote the blogger Joe Jervis. “The pop star who made his name on his effete, androgynous ‘Is he GAY or not?’ persona—now he hates us.” Representatives for Prince would tell Perez Hilton that the New Yorker misquoted him: “What His Purpleness actually did was gesture to the Bible and said he follows what it teaches, referring mainly to the parts about loving everyone and refraining from judgment,” Hilton wrote. But the years after that saw Prince actively avoid talking about gay rights, and some writers saw subtle homophobia in a few of his later lyrics and actions.

The question of how someone whose art once seemed to preach the very idea of “sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever”—with magazines, etc.—could become so conservative is both fundamentally unanswerable and very simple. People change, and who knows why? Prince became a devout Jehovah’s Witness in the early 2000s, after which his performances often featured toned-down versions of the lyrics to his raciest songs. As he told Arsenio Hall in 2014, “When you’re 20 years old, you’re looking for the ledge ... You want to see how far you can push everything ... and then you make changes. There’s a lot of things I don’t do now that I did 30 years ago. And then there’s some things I still do.”

But whatever his later beliefs were, they pretty clearly don’t undo the earlier impact he had in widening popular notions about sex and gender, nor the fact that he made lots of people who weren’t heterosexual feel better about themselves. The remembrances of him that are flooding in after the news of his death at age 57 take the queer dimensions of his influence as settled fact. Here’s Dodai Stewart at Fusion, opening her meditation on his life:

Dig, if you will, a picture: The year is 1980. Many states still have sodomy laws. The radio is playing feel-good ear candy like Captain and Tennille and KC and the Sunshine Band. TV hits include the sunny, toothy blond shows Three’s Company and Happy Days. There’s no real word for “gender non-conforming.” But here’s what you see: A man. Clearly a man. Hairy, mostly naked body, cock bulging beneath a satiny bikini bottom. But those eyes. Rimmed in black, like a fantasy belly dancer. The full, pouty lips of a pin-up girl. Long hair. A tiny, svelte thing. Ethnically ambiguous, radiating lust. What is this? A man. Clearly a man. No. Not just a man. A Prince.

Stewart goes on to write about how even though Prince’s lyrical viewpoint was almost always heterosexual—his songs were about men wanting women and women wanting men—he was unafraid of being called feminine, gay, or perverted. “If I Was Your Girlfriend” was a fantasy of gender swapping and lesbianism. “Controversy,” famously, sniffed at the simplistic questions directed at him: “Am I black or white, am I straight or gay?” So did “I Would Die 4 U”: “I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something that you’ll never understand.” Even as recently as 2015, a Boy George joke about having had sex with Prince seemed so plausible as to be widely misunderstood as a serious confession.

The meaning of Prince’s provocations will be dissected for a long time, but there’s no debating that they had a concrete influence on queer people. One of the more poignant reactions to Prince’s death has come from the young R&B singer Frank Ocean, who has had perhaps the most famous coming-out of recent musical history. “[Prince] was a straight black man who played his first televised set in bikini bottoms and knee-high heeled boots, epic,” Ocean wrote. “He made me feel more comfortable with how I identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity.”

Of course, his earlier influence doesn’t necessarily excuse Prince if you find his latter day attitudes to be disheartening. But read back on the New Yorker piece from 2008, and you might get a more sympathetic picture of what Prince’s deeper intentions on the issue might have been:

“Here’s how it is: You’ve got the Republicans, and basically they want to live according to this.” He pointed to a Bible. “But there’s the problem of interpretation, and you’ve got some churches, some people, basically doing things and saying it comes from here, but it doesn’t. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got blue, you’ve got the Democrats, and they’re, like, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ Gay marriage, whatever. But neither of them is right.”

Neither of them is right. In politics, as in so many things, Prince was trying to transcend the binary. This led him to a stance on queer people that, at best, can be described as confusing. Perhaps he saw that the conversation on the issue had become too rote, too obvious, with much of the transgressive edge behind calls for liberation drained away by the simple march of progress. It was progress he helped cause, regardless of how he later felt about it.

A Voting-Rights Victory in Virginia

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe will restore voting rights to more than 200,000 people with felony convictions on Friday, all but erasing a Jim Crow-era measure in the state constitution aimed at suppressing black electoral power.

The New York Times has more details on the governor’s move:

Mr. McAuliffe, who took office in 2014 and campaigned to restore voting rights to felons, said that he viewed disenfranchisement as “a remnant of the poll tax” and that he had been “trying to figure out what more I can possibly do.” He has been working with his legal team for months to live up to his campaign promise. His action Friday will not apply to felons released in the future; the governor’s aides say Mr. McAuliffe intends to issue similar orders on a monthly basis to cover more people as they are released.

“People have served their time and done their probation,” Mr. McAuliffe said. “I want you back in society. I want you feeling good about yourself. I want you voting, getting a job, paying taxes. I’m not giving people their gun rights back and other things like that. I’m merely allowing you to feel good about yourself again, to feel like you are a member of society.”

Virginia’s state constitution bars people with felony convictions from casting a ballot “unless his civil rights have been restored by the Governor or other appropriate authority.” Although various forms of felon disenfranchisement have existed throughout American history, Virginia’s restriction was added in 1906 as part of a broader effort by state lawmakers to enshrine white supremacy and weaken black voting strength.

McAuliffe’s Republican predecessor, Bob McDonnell, also took steps to curtail one of the strictest felon-disenfranchisement regimes in the country, signing an order in 2013 to restore the vote to 10,000 nonviolent ex-felons. Across the Potomac to the north, the Maryland General Assembly also overrode Governor Larry Hogan’s veto to restore voting rights to about 44,000 Marylanders with felony convictions in February.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War: The Bizarre Camp Classic That Almost Was

Charlize Theron as the archetypal wicked stepmother, resplendent in the tackiest golden-feathered dress this side of Donald Trump. Emily Blunt as an evil snow queen, a shameless grown-up knock-off of Elsa from Frozen two years after she was cool. Chris Hemsworth as an axe-wielding huntsman and Jessica Chastain as his bow-wielding ex-wife, both sporting hammy Scottish brogues. On the surface, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, a bizarre fantasy epic hitting theaters this weekend, had all the trappings of a camp classic, but as the film quickly reveals, it has none of the fun.

Why the movie, which seeks to continue the (very much concluded) tale of Snow White’s triumph over her mirror-obsessed stepmother, exists at all is one of those big Hollywood quandaries. It nominally follows Snow White and the Huntsman, the 2012 surprise hit that turned the classic fairy tale into a CGI-laden military brouhaha, but its title character (played by Kristen Stewart) is absent. Without Stewart, it’s pretty unlikely this entry will turn much of a profit; beyond that, it struggles to justify its own existence from the most basic story perspective. Franchises may be Hollywood’s current obsession, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a viewer desperate to learn the origin story of Snow White’s helpful Huntsman.

But learn it you do! The Huntsman: Winter’s War is not only a sequel, but also a sort of prequel, filling in the backstory of Hemsworth’s titular character, who spent most of the first movie toting two hand-axes and flashing the camera with an occasional wicked grin. It turns out he was a child soldier enlisted to the cause of the wicked ice queen Freya (Blunt), sister to Ravenna (Theron), the evil queen who eventually met her end at Snow White’s blade. Confused? You should be. The ice queen’s inclusion seems like a lame gimmick, and a misuse of Blunt’s extensive talents on a role that’s both familiar to audiences (thanks to Disney’s Frozen) and firmly in the public domain (Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”).

The Huntsman, also known as Eric, falls for a salty warrior named Sara (Chastain). But Freya, her heart hardened by her own personal tragedies, splits them up and exiles Eric, who thinks Sara’s dead. The film, clunkily written by Craig Mazin and Evan Spiliotopoulos, then endeavors to remind viewers of the last entry’s story as it cuts several years ahead, reuniting Eric and Sara as they seek to take down Freya and reclaim her sister’s magic mirror, which still holds her vicious essence. The plot should really be beside the point—whatever audience this film has is watching for the loopy visuals and surprisingly stacked cast, not the hodgepodge, remixed fairy tale being told.

But this strange prequel/sequel approach is so belabored, it continually grinds the film to a halt trying to explain just who everyone is and what they’re doing there. Many questions go unanswered—why are Chastain and Hemsworth Scottish? Why do we get only four dwarves (two played by the excellent British comic actors Nick Frost and Rob Brydon, utterly wasted) this time around? Just why does this film take so long to bring Theron back into the mix when she’s clearly its ace card, the only one who knows how to have any fun amidst all the boring action sequences? Like its predecessor, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a cartoonish creation set in no particular time or place, but its CGI embellishments do nothing to lend it any real character.

Snow White and the Huntsman was goofy, but it had its charms, mostly hinging on Stewart’s strange brand of superstar stoicism, Theron’s amped-up supervillainy, and some nicely surreal visuals (the magic mirror was an anthropomorphic pile of golden glop that would spill out onto the Queen’s lush carpet). The Huntsman: Winter’s War is directed by the last film’s visual-effects supervisor, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan. As a VFX master, he’s clearly a top-notch hire, but this is his first directing gig, and it shows ... painfully. Blunt is a tremendous actress, but she seems lost at sea amid the green screen. Chastain and Hemsworth, two of Hollywood’s most charming performers, have all the romantic chemistry of two people who literally just met.

Perhaps The Huntsman: Winter’s War was intended to start a new franchise, one that smashed together every available children’s story into a complicated universe of Oscar nominees cashing big paychecks. It fails, not even providing satisfying action or arresting visualizations of magic in its nearly two-hour running time; beyond that, it doesn’t give its talented cast much to work with. When people gripe about Hollywood’s reliance on sequels and cheap franchise cash-ins, this is the kind of movie they mean: no Grimm’s Fairy Tale, but a grim tale nonetheless.

Purple Tears

A day after Prince died, peopled danced all night at block parties. Stadiums and city halls offered tributes and celebrated a man who could be identified not in name, but by symbol, and by color. He was loved equally by mothers and rebellious sons, someone who kneaded together rock, funk, R&B, and made it his own.

Prince died at 57 in his Minnesota compound, Paisley Park. Police found him unconscious in his elevator Thursday, and declared him dead at 10:07 am. A coroner completed his autopsy Friday, but the results won’t be released for days, possibly weeks. Almost instantly after his death, Prince’s albums “The Very Best of Prince,” “Purple Rain,” “The Hits/The B-Sides,” “1999,” hit iTunes Top Albums chart. By the afternoon, his sister, Tyka Nelson, walked outside his compound to a crowd clutching balloons, raising signs with words of condolence, flower bouquets. Nelson stopped long enough to tell the mourners that her brother “loved all of you. Thank you for loving him back.”  

As it rained in his home city of Minneapolis, where he was born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958, his fans and adorers gathered at First Avenue, the venue where he often played, and that was also the set for the movie Purple Rain. Then the music began. Billboard magazine wrote:

And so it was: part tribute, part jam, all Minnesota Nice as the Heavy Metal boys with long beards and leather coats stood shoulder-to-shoulder with girls in purple bell bottoms, men with purple feathers in their hair, a kid with a sign that read “Free Hugs,” young moms swaying with their children in their arms, middle-aged couples holding hands and reminiscing about the time they waited 5, no 7, no 14 hours in line for a last-minute concert …

In south Los Angeles, middle-aged mourners and toddlers paid tribute to The Purple One. Women sobbed in the Leimert Park wearing purple caps and Prince T-shirts. An older man breakdanced on the concrete while a woman swung near holding a lit purple candle. They remembered Prince as an unapologetic non-conformist, someone who could “mix the masculine and the feminine,” a man named Erick Johnson told the Los Angeles Times, adding that “for a black man to do that and still have all the women, all the beautiful women, that says that you are really, truly yourself.”

On the East Coast, in New York, Jennifer Hudson and the Broadway cast of––coincidentally––“The Color Purple,” sung a Sunday-spiritual rendition of “Purple Rain.”

In Brooklyn, some 1,000 people came to filmmaker Spike Lee’s home, where like a conductor he stood on his stoop in a purple shirt and orchestrated a party filled with young and old, parents and babies, dogs and their owners. They danced well into the night.

Singing at Spike Lee's tribute for Prince in Brooklyn. pic.twitter.com/XtIyz8FxQq

— Justin Michael (@JstnMchl) April 22, 2016

Those who knew him personally, the celebrities and musicians who grew up around him, or grew up listening to him, tried to describe a man that everyone conceded had changed music and culture in ways that were indescribable. Questlove, drummer for The Roots, reacted to news of his idol’s death by saying:

I can't fucking breathe right now

— Questlove Gomez (@questlove) April 21, 2016

"'A strong spirit transcends rules,' Prince once said—and nobody's spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative." —President Obama

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 21, 2016

It was Raspberry Beret. I was 4 years old. Yes, 4. I remember that I instantly loved it. "Mommy, who is that singing?" Seems weird but it's true. More than a "once in a lifetime" artist... Just a ONCE IN FOREVER ARTIST. I'm still in shock as I write this and I feel this overwhelming grief. But, we should all turn away from that and HONOR this musician that changed all of our lives, our perspectives, our feeling, our whole being. From another planet? Probably. Royalty, for sure. Us worthy..? Laughable. They say don't meet your idols... That they let you down. But, some of my greatest, funniest (yes, he was hilarious), and most prolific encounters and conversations about music came from the moments that I spent with him. It would be silly to say that he has inspired our music... It's beyond that. He's somewhere within every song I've ever written. I am sad, but I will smile when I think of every second that I had the fortune of being in his company. We have lost our greatest living musician. But his music will never die. Prince, NOTHING COMPARES... #RIPPrince

A photo posted by Justin Timberlake (@justintimberlake) on Apr 21, 2016 at 11:04am PDT

I LOVED him, the world LOVED him. Now he's at peace with his Father. Rest in power, @prince, my brother. pic.twitter.com/ZN6cc3WWuF

— Chaka Khan (@ChakaKhan) April 21, 2016

Niagara Falls glowed purple Thursday evening, though it was reportedly not for Prince, but to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday. Purple may be the color of royalty, but on Thursday that color meant only one thing.

Rising Suicide Rates

Suicide rates in the United States are the highest they have been in three decades, increasing 24 percent between 1999 and 2014, according to a new study from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics released Friday.

The study’s key findings show:

The percent increase in suicide rates for females was greatest for those aged 10–14, and for males, those aged 45–64.

The most frequent suicide method in 2014 for males involved the use of firearms (55.4%), while poisoning was the most frequent method for females (34.1%).

From 1999 through 2014, the percent increase in the age-adjusted suicide rate was greater for females (45% increase) than males (16% increase).

Suicide rates had been falling in the U.S. between 1986 and 1999, but appear to rising again. The report shows that though suicide is one of the biggest causes of death for young people, suicide rates are increasing for middle-aged Americans, as well. The authors of the study found that distress related to jobs and personal finances were linked to that increase. Additionally, the study found that the suicide rate rose the most among Native Americans—89 percent for women and 38 percent for men.

Jake Arrieta’s No-Hitter

Jake Arrieta wasn’t even throwing his best stuff last night. The Chicago Cubs pitcher even said “it felt sloppy.” But sloppiness be damned. Arrieta threw the first no-hitter of the 2016 season, as the Cubs beat the Cincinnati Reds 16-0.

Arrieta’s catcher, David Ross, called him an “animal” Thursday night. And indeed that’s the way Arrieta has been performing lately. Over the past 16 starts, he has a 15-0 record, threw two no-hitters, and has an ERA of 0.53. He’s one of the best pitchers in the game right now, and well on his way to another historic year, after winning the National League Cy Young Award last season.

It was the 15th no-hitter in Cubs history. Arrieta is also the only player in Cubs history to throw a no-hitter two seasons in a row.

Winding up to throw his 119th pitch of the night, Arrieta popped up the Reds batter to right field to end the game. As Ross ran toward him, he kept yelling, “Thank you, thank you,” in Arrieta’s ear. This was the first no-hitter that Ross caught, one of his dreams fulfilled in his last season in the majors, the 39-year-old said.

Despite the high pitch count going into the late innings, Manager Joe Maddon said he felt Arrieta could go for the no-hitter around the sixth inning. As to not get in Arrieta’s head, he didn’t warm any pitchers up, nor did he ask him how he was feeling.

“You never want to interfere with somebody’s greatness,” Maddon said. “And that’s really special for him and the organization to have another no-hitter being thrown. As a manager, you try to stay out of the way of those moments.”

Arrieta struck out six and walked four. This was the first time the Reds were no-hit in 7,109 regular season games—the longest streak in the league.

His dominant pitching actually overshadowed an impressive offensive game for the Cubs, as the team went yard five times, including a grand slam from Kris Bryant. Arrieta himself had two hits.

The Cubs, at 12-4, have the best record in baseball, giving Chicago fans unfamiliar—though admittedly uncomfortable—confidence in the team’s chances at winning a World Series for the first time since 1908.

In the era of testing for steroids, pitchers are once again dominating the game, harping back to the days before the MLB lowered the pitcher’s mound and the designated hitter was added. That, among other reasons, is why we’re more likely to see more no-hitters in recent years. Arrieta joins a small group of 28 pitchers, including Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax, that have multiple no-hitters in their careers.

That doesn’t take away from the specialness of Arrieta’s pitching last night. The odds of throwing a no-hitter is still 1 in 1,548, according to a 2012 post on the Minitab Blog.

Arrieta threw his last no-hitter against the Los Angeles Dodgers in a 2-0 win on August 30, 2015, one of only seven no-hitters across the league last season. Max Scherzer of the Washington Nationals threw two no-hitters that year.

How Rugrats Made Me Feel Comfortable in America

Growing up in south London, and then in the largely Catholic town of Manhasset on Long Island, I didn’t encounter many families who looked, sounded, or behaved like mine. In England, my experiences were limited to either my mother’s family, who were all Orthodox Jews, strictly observing the Sabbath and keeping kosher, and to the families of my classmates, who were invariably all gentiles. In Manhasset, I didn’t even have the Orthodox to relate to. So one of my main comforts in both places came from the Pickles family, who—with its big-haired, neurotic, doting mother and its old-world, Yiddish-mumbling grandparents—instantly made me feel at home. It also helped that I could spend time with the Pickles family whenever I wanted; after all, they were on TV.

The Pickles family was the centerpiece of Rugrats, an incredibly popular cartoon series that ran throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s on Nickelodeon. Spanning nine seasons and three movies, the series followed the adventures of Tommy Pickles, his slightly older cousin Angelica, and Tommy’s fellow baby friends as they wreaked mischief and discovered the wide world around them. Outside of the babies’ antics, the cartoon also focused on the life of the extended Pickles family, a modern American interfaith family.

Rugrats was unique in its time for bringing to American audiences, and American children in particular, a portrayal of American Jewish life. Although the family was largely Christian (or as Christian as celebrating Christmas makes a family), Didi Pickles, Tommy’s mother, was the classic Jewish matriarch. Didi’s parents, Boris and Minka, were perfect stand-ins for my grandparents, blending the shtetl wisdom and Yiddishkeit of my maternal grandparents with obsessive nurturing of my paternal grandparents. The three characters together ensured that Rugrats had a consistently Jewish tone throughout its run.

The Jewishness of Rugrats extended beyond just Jewish mothers and Yiddish accents, though. In 1994, the cartoon aired a Passover special, in which American audiences were introduced to the seder and learned the story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. The special was unique enough to warrant media attention—The New York Times reviewed the episode, remarking, “If not a first, it certainly is a rarity: a cartoon series devoting an episode to a Jewish holy day.” The series followed up two years later with the first-ever animated televised Hanukkah special, teaching viewers about the miracle of the Temple menorah and the Maccabean uprising.

Rugrats was alone in offering American Jewish children like myself a consistent portrayal of members of my faith.

It may seem small, but those holiday specials and the general Jewishness of Rugrats were groundbreaking for television at the time. Despite the leading role Jews have played in the entertainment industry, proudly Jewish characters have historically been a rare presence on the small screen. In children’s television in particular, Rugrats was one of the few shows I remembering seeing that acknowledged the existence of Jews. The only other notable example was Hey Arnold!—also a Nickelodeon series—that featured an episode about a member of Arnold’s friend group, Harold, having his bar mitzvah. Even in Hey Arnold!, though, Harold’s Judaism was never mentioned in an episode either before or after the bar-mitzvah episode. Rugrats was alone in offering American Jewish children like myself a consistent portrayal of members of my faith.

If I had sought out relatable characters in adult programming in the 1990s, I would have faced a challenge there as well. Jeffrey Shandler, a professor of Jewish culture at Rutgers, has argued that television has created a cast of “crypto-Jews”—“characters who, ‘while nominally identified as having some other ethnicity or religion, are nonetheless regarded [by some viewers and even some creators] as Jews in disguise.’”

This masking of Jews was prominent in some of the most popular shows of the ‘90s. One could argue that Seinfeld, with its deep roots in Jewish humor and its occasional references to facets of Jewish life, was proudly Jewish. But even in that series, George Costanza—the avatar for Larry David, who himself is an avatar for the American Jewish man—was passed off as being vaguely Italian, at least in part due to criticism the original pilot faced for being “too New York, too Jewish.” Friends, another show set in New York City, included infrequent references to Monica, Rachel, and Ross being Jewish in some way, with the most blatant example being an episode in which Ross attempts to teach his son about Hanukkah. Beyond fleeting call-outs, though, the ethnoreligious identity of the titular friends was firmly secular and/or Christian. Fran Drescher succeeded in unapologetically portraying a New York Jew in The Nanny, but that was only after receiving pressure from CBS to make the show less Jewish, according to an interview with Drescher in Stars of David. Rugrats, then, made choices that even the most popular comedies at the time were nervous to make.

I realized, as I aged out of children’s television, that I kept seeking shows that also offered affirmative models of American Jewish life.

That Rugrats did choose to proclaim its Jewishness, and to offer children such as myself an affirmative model of American Jewish life, was an essential step in making me feel included in American society. Most American television for children didn’t acknowledge my existence at all, and when it did, it marginalized me within the larger schema of Christian America. Rugrats showed me I was equal and ordinary in society. And whereas other series masked their Jews or only acknowledged them in reference to Christian or secular traditions, Rugrats told me that my faith and traditions were equally as exciting and important as those of mainstream America.

Of course, poor representation in American media isn’t an issue that has been unique to Jewish Americans. Whereas Jews have finally become more or less visible on TV, the same still cannot be said for Hispanic Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans, among other groups. While gains certainly have been made in bringing racial and ethnic diversity to the small screen—Jane the Virgin, Black-ish, and Fresh Off the Boat have all gone a long way toward normalizing ethnic experiences in America—people of color continue to face the marginalization and masking of identity that affected Jews until recently.

Rugrats also had a profound impact on the television that I sought out as I got older. I realized, as I aged out of children’s television, that I kept seeking shows that also offered affirmative models of American Jewish life. That’s why I fell in love with CW’s The O.C., a teen soap opera that I normally would have despised if not for the outward nebbishness of Seth Cohen. (Interestingly, like Rugrats, The O.C. also focused on an interfaith family.) I also felt myself irresistibly drawn to New Girl, in which the character of Schmidt frequently drops Yiddish phrases and has joked about the particularities of hooking up with Orthodox girls. And, of course, it’s no coincidence that two of my favorite comedies—Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend—both star strong, loud, Jewish women, their even louder mothers, and, in the case of the latter show, a JAP (Jewish American Princess) rap battle that requires Yiddish translation. Each of these shows, like Rugrats, proudly announces its Jewish identity and claims that Jewish identity as an integral part of American culture and society. As Rugrats did for me as a child, these shows let me know that to be a Jew in America is to belong.

Why Would Hillary Clinton Pick a Female Running Mate?

What’s more historic than the first major female presidential nominee? The first two-woman presidential ticket, of course.

If it happens. But according to Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, it’s a distinct possibility. “We’ll start with a broad list and then begin to narrow it. But there is no question that there will be women on that list,” he told The Boston Globe. To be fair, this isn’t the first time Clinton or her aides have mentioned the idea. In January, she told Rachel Maddow she would “absolutely not” rule out a female running mate. Some of the names that are circulating: Senators Elizabeth Warren (of course), Claire McCaskill, Jean Shaheen, and Amy Klobuchar; and Governors Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire (an unlikely choice, as she’s running for U.S. Senate) and Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island.

It’s tough to say just how serious a possibility the two-woman ticket is. After all, Clinton is simply not ruling things out, and there’s a long time to go until she has to make the final choice. But what would she stand to gain by picking a woman as her running mate?

One reason could be that historic angle. In 2008, Clinton didn’t make as much of her role as a woman as she might have. In part, that’s because the “historic candidacy” argument didn’t really cut in her favor in a race against Barack Obama. But Clinton set the tone for her 2016 run when she bowed out of the 2008 race, when she said, “Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it.” This time around, she’s been more willing to put gender front and center—speaking repeatedly about her roles as a mother and grandmother, for example.

But Clinton’s ability to capitalize on that is somewhat undercut by her own unpopularity. Voters might be interested in the idea of a woman president, but they’re not necessarily excited about the idea of this particular woman president. Adding another woman to the ticket might help encourage the urge to vote for an historic ticket. Emphasizing the woman angle might be especially effective against Donald Trump, should he win the nomination, given his long history of demeaning comments (and allegations of worse) against women.

On the other hand, Trump already polls extremely poorly among women—in a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent had an unfavorable impression of him. Meanwhile, Clinton beats him handily among women in head-to-head general-election polling. (She also beats Ted Cruz by a healthy but slimmer margin.)

The importance of a running mate is a matter of dispute among political scientists and observers. One matter of consensus is that it’s not very much use to choose a vice-presidential candidate in order to win his (or her!) home state. Even nationally, the effect is negligible—in a study of elections from 1968 to 2010, two political scientists found that the running mate had a net effect of at most 1 percent of the total vote, not enough to sway hardly any election. (Sorry, Al Gore.) Vice-presidential candidates seem to often have the most effect when they drag a ticket down. (Sorry, John McCain.)

There was a time when a female vice-presidential candidate seemed revolutionary, to say nothing of a female presidential candidate, but that time was 1984. Eighty percent of Americans say the country is ready for a female president, and that number has climbed steadily in recent years. In summer of 2008, it was closer to two-thirds of the population. As the idea of women as top politicians becomes normalized, the idea that a presidential ticket could be comprised of two women comes to seem less like careful (or, more darkly, cynical) political calculation and more like an obvious move. Forget asking why Hillary Clinton might choose a female running mate. Maybe a better question is this: Why wouldn’t Hillary Clinton consider a female running mate?