Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 189

Five Arrested in Clemson University Racism Protests

Five students were arrested at Clemson University Thursday night, following sit-ins protesting racism on the South Carolina college campus. They were charged with trespassing after refusing to leave one of the buildings on campus before it closed at 5:30 p.m.

Clemson made national news Monday when students discovered bananas hanging from a sign on campus commemorating black history. The sign displayed the university’s plantation house. Although Jim Clements, the university’s president, in a campus-wide email called the action “hurtful, disrespectful, unacceptable,” and later released a three-page memo on improving inclusion, students demanded more.

#BeingBlackAtClemson means waking up to bananas hanging from a sign in front of the university's plantation house. pic.twitter.com/zjxQiyTioi

— See The Stripes [CU] (@TigerStripesCU) April 11, 2016

Student protesters held a sit-in at Sikes Hall overnight on Wednesday and remained in the building for much of Thursday before they were arrested. Earlier on Wednesday, more than 100 students protested at the administration building. There, Clements tried to address some of their concerns. “I don’t have all the answers, but I’m sitting with a bunch of smart people to help with those answers,” he said.

A large group of social media supporters dubbed those arrested the Clemson Five. The students, D.J. Smith, Khayla Williams, Ian Anderson, A.D. Carson, and Rae-Nessha White, were greeted by a cheering crowd following their arrests.

“As you can see, we are still sitting in at Sikes,” Smith told the group. “We might not be inside Sikes, but we are on the steps and we are not going anywhere anytime soon.”

See the Stripes, a campus activist group, this week released a statement with seven grievances and seven demands for the university. These included a new multicultural center and changing the names of buildings named after controversial figures, such as Benjamin Tillman, the white supremacist and former senator.

Protests continued outside Sikes Hall that night and will continue Friday. The five students who were arrested will appear before a campus municipal court later this month.

The New Name for the Czech Republic

Leaders of the Czech Republic think their country’s name is just too long and clunky. Instead, they say, call it Czechia.

The president, prime minister, and other top country officials announced this week they will ask the United Nations to officially recognize “Czechia” as an alternative name to the country, along with other foreign language equivalents—la Tchequie in French, and so on.

Milos Zeman, the nation’s president, has publicly talked about his distaste for the longer, official name for several years. In a 2013 meeting with then-Israeli President Shimon Peres, he said, “I use the word Czechia because it sounds nicer and it’s shorter than the cold Czech Republic,” .

Some in the country disapprove, saying they might be mistaken as the small Russian republic of Chechnya.

Going by a shortened name is a familiar practice around world. The Italian Republic is most commonly known as Italy, just as the French Republic is shortened to France.

The long “Czech Republic” name has been a headache for sports teams and marketing campaigns. The hockey team even displays the adjective “Czech” on the front of its jerseys, which would be as odd as the U.S. Olympic team displaying “American” on the front of its jerseys.

The Czech Republic was formed after Czechoslovakia split up in 1993, four years after the communist regime collapsed following the Velvet Revolution. Slovakia—fittingly and officially known as the Slovak Republic—was formed at the same time. More than two decades later, that country’s neighbor will finally be known as Czechia.

The Jungle Book: A Heartfelt Visual Marvel

I confess that when I first heard that Disney was planning a big-budget, live-action, CGI-heavy remake of The Jungle Book, I received the news with no small amount of dread. The studio’s 1967 animated classic was perhaps my favorite of all Disney films growing up, and the updated version sounded like yet another in the series of cynical, nostalgia-plying cash grabs that have so come to define contemporary Hollywood.

But then, I had presumed very much the same about Mad Max: Fury Road and about Creed, which turned out to be two of the most delightful cinematic surprises of last year. And like those movies—and, to a somewhat more conflicted degree, Star Wars: The Force Awakens—The Jungle Book is proof that even the crassest commercial imperatives can be transcended when imbued with love and creativity. The Jungle Book may or may not be a nostalgia-plying cash grab. But regardless it is a genuinely wonderful film, an almost overwhelming onrush of thrills, wit, and tenderness.

The story is the familiar one—loosely adapted from Kipling’s eponymous book of stories—of Mowgli, the “man-cub” raised by wolves in the jungles of India. Threatened with death by the tiger Shere Khan, Mowgli, accompanied by his paternal panther Bagheera, heads for a man village where he might be safe, along the way encountering such notables as Kaa the python, King Louie of the apes, and, of course, Baloo the bear.

But at every step, the director Jon Favreau and the screenwriter Justin Marks have enriched the narrative, deepened the themes, and ratcheted the tension and emotion alike to unanticipated levels. Mowgli’s journey is now a much more vivid transition from cubhood toward autonomy, his human “tricks” and tool-making cast in clearer contrast to the wildness of the jungle. Is there a place for him there, or does he truly stand apart?

Each of the animal principals, moreover, offer Mowgli a different path to follow. There is Bagheera’s plan for civic safety and Baloo’s Arcadian escapism, of course. But Kaa, too (cunningly voiced by Scarlett Johansson), offers a beguiling—if presumably short-lived—intimacy. (“You can be with me, if you want. I’ll keep you near,” she purrs, coils slowly tightening.) And thanks to the equally delicious casting of Christopher Walken as King Louie, his offer of “protection” attains another dimension altogether. Moreover this time out, Mowgli’s ultimate decision is both more satisfying and better in keeping with the temper of the times, the belated correction of a moral and cinematic flaw almost half a century old.

Ben Kingsley is such an obvious pick to voice the benevolent concern of Bagheera that it’s almost hard to imagine the filmmakers considering anyone else. Choosing Bill Murray for Baloo was a greater gamble, but rather than descend into schtick, he offers a gentle, almost wistful interpretation of the big bear. Shere Khan may have been trickiest casting of all, given the towering vocal performance with which George Sanders supplied the original film. But the choice of Idris Elba offers an ingenious alternative: a tiger less urbane and still more menacing, fearsome in his nonchalant physicality. Lupita Nyong’o, meanwhile, is remarkably moving in the expanded (though still small) role of Raksha, Mowgli’s wolf-mother.

The Jungle Book is perhaps the oddest of species: a movie nearly devoid of human beings, yet one bursting with humanity.

The CGI—which encompasses not only all of these characters, but the entire cinematic environment as well—is a modest revelation, once again extending the boundaries of the possible. (It’s a development about which I continue to have mixed feelings.) And as for virtually the sole human being in the middle of all this technological splendor, newcomer Neel Sethi is good if not exactly indelible as Mowgli. Perhaps inevitably for a boy inhabiting a universe that will be largely conjured around him after the fact, Sethi offers a performance that is less acting than embodiment—but he embodies Mowgli impeccably, right down to the floppy haircut and the red swaddle-diaper.

The visuals conjured by Favreau and the cinematographer Bill Pope are consistently first-rate, from the intense action sequences—a stunning stampede of water buffalo, more than one life-or-death encounter with Shere Khan—to the moments of quieter beauty: a frog wiping a raindrop off its head; a regal simian cityscape; a recently shed snakeskin large enough to sheathe a school bus. The enchantingly inventive credit sequence that concludes the movie is almost worth the price of admission all on its own.

Be advised: This Jungle Book offers a substantially darker, more frightening vision than its predecessor, one that might not be appropriate for all children. When Shere Khan asks Mowgli’s wolf pack “How many lives is a man cub worth?” he does not mean the question rhetorically. And “man’s red flower”—i.e., fire—plays a larger role as well, one as dangerous as any wild beast.

King Louie has likewise evolved from be-bopping orangutan to hulking Gigantopithecus. Gone is the goofy comic relief of the Fab Four-y vultures. And the trumpeting pretensions of the prior film’s cartoon elephants have been replaced with the awesome, silent majesty of a breed truly apart: the towering, god-like pachyderms who “created the jungle.”

That said, The Jungle Book is by no means humorless. If anything, its wit and tenderness set it apart more than its ferocity. Though not a musical per se, it includes alluring elements of more than one of its predecessor’s songs. And I would be remiss if I did not mention a wonderful cameo by Garry Shandling—the last performance before his death last month at age 66—as a porcupine, Ikki, who appeared in the Kipling stories but not in Disney’s earlier film.

By the time its evolution is complete, The Jungle Book has proven itself a minor Darwinian miracle, perhaps the oddest of all species: a movie nearly devoid of human beings, yet one bursting with humanity. The very last line uttered in the film is “I could get used to this.” Me, too.

Jokes About Erdogan Aren't Funny in Germany

Updated on April 15 at 9:10 a.m. ET

Chancellor Angela Merkel gave German authorities the go-ahead to pursue action—if they choose to do so—against the satirist on charges of personal defamation and insulting a foreign head of state—both illegal under German law. If the case proceeds and he’s found guilty, Böhmermann faces up to six years in prison on both charges.

At a new conference announcing the move, Merkel said the decision: “means neither a prejudgment of the person affected nor a decision about the limits of freedom of art, the press and opinion.”

Here’s Deutsche Welle explaining the background to the case:

Böhmermann read his sexually explicit poem about Erdogan two weeks ago during his comedy show on German public broadcaster ZDF. The poem was supposed to illustrate what would not be allowed in Germany, in contrast to an earlier satirical song that poked fun at Erdogan with milder language.

Merkel previously defended the satirical song as being protected by the right to freedom of expression, but she later criticized Böhmermann poem as “deliberately offensive.”

The sexually explicit poem that got Böhmermann into trouble makes references to the size of Erdogan’s penis, as well as the Turkish leader’s supposed sexual proclivities, his alleged predilection for child pornography, and his actions against Turkey’s minorities, including the Kurds. Needless to say, the Turks weren’t happy. Pressure was being placed on the German chancellor who not only had to defend freedom of speech at home (she said Friday the government would move to repeal the law on insulting a head of state), but negotiate with Erdogan’s government over the implementation of an agreement to resettle some refugees in Turkey. Merkel visits Turkey next week to discuss that issue.

Brussels Attack: Exit, Belgian Transport Minister

Jacqueline Galant is alleged to have ignored repeated warnings over security flaws at Zaventem airport, one of two sites that were struck by ISIS militants.

The Wall Street Journal provides the background:

Those concerns were underscored by the resignation earlier this week of the senior civil servant in Ms. Galant’s ministry, Laurent Ledoux. In comments to Belgian media, Mr. Ledoux harshly criticized Ms. Galant’s working methods and claimed that she ignored calls for extra funding for security monitoring at the airport.

At a hearing in the Belgian Parliament on Thursday, Ms. Galant was also criticized by lawmakers for her failure to prevent a walkout by air-traffic controllers. That walkout, triggered by a pension dispute, led to severe disruptions at Brussels Airport on Tuesday and Wednesday, just over a week after the hub reopened.

In the immediate aftermath of the Brussels attacks, Interior Minister Jan Jambon and Justice Minister Koen Geens both offered to resign, but Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel declined their offers—something he did not do on Friday with Galant. Belgian authorities have arrested several people in connection with the attacks, including the so-called “man in the hat” who was seen at the airport, but the ISIS operation in the heart of Europe has raised questions not only about the group’s ability to strike at apparent ease in Europe (it struck in Paris last November), but also to the extent to which homegrown terrorism is a problem in Belgium.  

Woe Is the Washington Metro

On Wednesday, the chair of the Washington Metro Board of Directors told lawmakers at a congressional hearing that the Rosslyn tunnel—the one that runs under the Potomac River between the District of Columbia and Virginia—poses one of the transit system’s biggest problems. The “Rosslyn bottleneck,” Jack Evans called it. He asked for federal funding that would go, in part, toward building a new tunnel there.

A day later, a train traveling along this track became stuck outside its next station stop in Rosslyn. The rain lost power, and all passengers aboard were forced to evacuate, according to the ones who had enough phone service to tweet about it.

Metro says more than 100 passengers were stuck for about an hour on a train outside the Rosslyn station in northern Virginia after the train became disabled by a mechanical problem.

Here’s a look inside:

Now being herded to front of train. pic.twitter.com/tq4PDriJYX

— Jesse James Helfrich (@abbajabanana) April 14, 2016

Metro spokesman Dan Stessel told the AP the train broke down shortly after 2 p.m., stopping 100 feet from the platform. Between 100 and 200 passengers were stuck for about an hour before they were evacuated, he said. Crews have removed the disabled train and service has resumed.

Thursday’s incident is the latest in series of mishaps for Metro this year. Last month, an electrical fire broke out in the tunnel near the McPherson Square station. The fire prompted Metro to make the decision to shut down all operations for a full day—the first time that happened in the transit system’s 40-year history. Workers spent the next day conducting safety checks of hundreds of electric cables as regular Metro commuters turned to buses, bikes, and sidewalks to get to their destinations.

Washington’s Metro has undergone years of regular service disruptions associated with repair and maintenance work, largely in response to the 2009 crash that killed nine people and injured 90 others when two trains collided. In recent years, electrical fires and derailed or disabled trains have tested the patience of the system’s hundreds of thousands of customers.

P.J. Harvey vs. Humankind

The question of whether PJ Harvey’s new album is a misguided work of poverty tourism would not be worth debating if the music itself were as forgettable as politically minded art can sometimes be. But, alas, the sound of the indie-rock icon’s The Hope Six Demolition Project keeps rattling in my head, whether because of the the gothic swells of guitar and horns on “Ministry of Defence,” the deceptively chipper singalong of “The Community of Hope,” or the steadily climbing vocal melody on “Orange Monkey.” Harvey’s sound has shifted shapes over her career, but her talent rarely wavers: She sings with a mix of steely remove and gasping rawness, and she conjures arrangements that snuggly envelop listeners before deeply freaking them out. You cannot quite ignore this album, which means you cannot quite ignore what she is saying.

The recording sessions for The Hope Six Demolition Project were held in public in London, and the lyrical inspiration came from Harvey visiting Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington, D.C. with the photographer Seamus Murphy. Controversy over the D.C. expedition then framed most of the ensuing discourse about the album. After receiving a tour of the poorest parts of the American capital from an unwitting Washington Post reporter, Harvey wrote the album’s lead-off track “The Community of Hope,” which referred to D.C.’s Ward 7 as “just drug town, just zombies.” The local non-profit that shares the song’s name criticized its lyrics as insensitive, and a former D.C. mayor called the tune “inane.” Blistering reviews portraying Harvey as a privileged exploiter of an underclass have followed.

There are many unanswerable questions about Harvey’s intentions with the album—she’s not doing interviews—but the barest bit of benefit of the doubt would grant that the “zombies” line is not to be taken at face value. It reads, in full, as this: “OK, now this is just drug town, just zombies / But that's just life.” This is in all likelihood a smart woman trying to sound a bit stupid. The song is not about Ward 7 but rather about someone not from Ward 7 being driven around it searching for, and perhaps not quite finding, understanding. The accompanying video begins in the backseat of the tour guide’s car, and the lyrics very clearly weave in the notion of subjectivity, distance, and miscomprehension. Benning Road, she sings, is “a well-known pathway of death—at least that’s what I’m told.”

Much of the album is, in fact, about what she’s been told. The stupendous and terrifying “Ministry of Defence” opens with stop-start guitar chords before Harvey enters in a high and unsettled voice; the effect is a bit like Black Sabbath. The ensuing landscape of a bombed-out buildings and children who “balanced sticks in human shit” would certainly fit with Ozzy Osbourne’s lyrical preoccupations, and song climaxes much like T.S. Eliot describing post-war ruins long past: “This is how the world will end.” But amid all the drama, when Harvey mentions banalities like bus depots and soda, a man’s accented spoken words echo her. It’s surely another tour guide.

But his presence doesn’t mean Harvey is simply witnessing and documenting misery and strife. She is aestheticizing those things, as art necessarily does to its subjects. The meta aspects of the albums—the open creation process and the references to her own perception—indicate that she is aware that she is doing this, and in fact she wants to make her own responses part of the art. The people and places she sings about, despite Harvey having visited them, are mere surfaces to her, and they shall be surfaces to their listeners. But this should not—and if you want art that engages with the real world at all, cannot—disqualify her from having something to say about complacency, despair, and power.

Laura Snapes at Pitchfork has proposed that after 2011’s Let England Shake explored Harvey’s home country’s history with war, The Hope Six Demolition Project is the sequel that deals with America. This seems correct. In placing desperate parts of Afghanistan and Kosovo next to desperate parts of Washington, D.C., Harvey draws attention to how a prosperous nation’s stated humanitarian goals have gone unmet domestically and abroad. “Medicinals” recounts the herbal plants that once grew where the National Mall is, and closes with a description of a wheelchair-bound Native American woman in a Redskins hat drinking alcohol. Some listeners have found this undeniably heavy-handed image offensive on the woman’s behalf, but what’s probably more provocative about the song is its attitude toward America’s existence.

Wisely, perhaps, Harvey is not too narrow, too politically pin-downable, in her indictments. Rather than asking whether the United States is a force for good, she asks whether all of civilization is. This happens explicitly over the Tom Waits-inspired gallop of “A Line in the Sand”: “What I’ve seen—yes, it’s changed how I see humankind—I used to think progress was being made, that we could get something right” (on the page it’s wonky, but in the ear it’s pretty). This naked and broad hopelessness is perhaps more typical of death metal than literary rock. Harvey doesn’t totally commit to it, later singing that she reserves some hope for the future even after describing a camp where refugees gnaw on horse hooves for sustenance.

In the context of this flirtation with nihilism, the controversial “The Community of Hope” seems even more complicated. The title and chorus refers to the name of a housing project, and another catchy refrain in the song goes, “They’re gonna put a Walmart here,” which is something Harvey’s guide said. The sarcasm of the presentation, the implication that hope and redevelopment are just Orwellian lies, is partly why the song has triggered backlash. After all, surely there is hope in the community she’s singing about, and that Walmart really might help the neighborhood’s lot (though this particular planned megastore never got built). But surely it’s valid to feel suspicion in the light of a history littered with narratives of uplift, improvement, and perseverance told by powerful institutions about the people they’ve helped keep powerless.

Sandy Hook Lawsuit Moves Forward

A state Superior Court judge in Connecticut on Thursday refused to throw out a lawsuit against Bushmaster Firearms, the gun manufacturer that makes the rifle used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings that left 28 people dead in late 2012.

The families of the victims, which included 20 children and six school staff members, sued the gun manufacturer, arguing the AR-15 rifle Adam Lanza used in the shooting should never have been sold to civilians. This is a potentially devastating blow to the gun industry, which has been protected by federal law from being held liable for crimes committed with its products.

Mark Obbie, writing in The Atlantic in February, says as the case goes forward, the families will attempt to use the gun industry’s marketing tactics against it:

Those tactics, never tested before under [Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act], dominate the allegations spelled out in the plaintiffs’ complaint. It quotes several advertisements from a catalog aimed at civilian gun buyers that is adorned with action photos of camouflage-clad soldiers and police in body armor. One reads, “Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered.” Other images tout the rifle’s “military-proven performance” and call it “the ultimate combat weapons system.”

With that type of marketing, the Sandy Hook families claim, “The Bushmaster Defendants attract buyers by extolling the militaristic and assaultive qualities of their AR-15 rifles.” The complaint alleges that while the weapon is suitable for the military and for law enforcement—where it’s used for combat and limited police purposes—in civilian hands, the high-caliber, rapid-fire rifles are essentially killing machines.

The judge on Thursday ordered both sides of the case to meet again April 19 as the lawsuit moves forward into uncharted territory.

The Triumph of the Serial

Thursday brings the launch of Julian Fellowes’s new novel. It’s called Belgravia, and it reads, from its description, as extremely Downton Abbey-esque: “Set in the 1840s when the upper echelons of society began to rub shoulders with the emerging industrial nouveau riche,” the announcement goes, “Belgravia is peopled by a rich cast of characters.” There will be secrets and intrigue and, if Downton is any guide, much Drama.

Related Story

Serial Thriller

The most notable thing about the novel, though—apologies to its rich cast of characters—is the fact that it is only very loosely a “novel.” Though the book version of Belgravia will be available for purchase in June, the project being released this week is an app—which tells Fellowes’s latest story of upper-crusty intrigue via both via and audio. (There will also be videos and “other bonus features” that will be “hidden within each episode.”) The 11-week series is available via subscription for $13.99 (this includes both text and audio versions of each episode), or for $1.99 an episode. An installment will land (“air,” in the book’s parlance) on its purchaser’s device of choice every Friday until the end of June.

The launch of the app marks something of a new era for book—or, perhaps better, “book”—publishing. And it is in some sense yet more evidence of media’s back-to-the-future tendencies. There’s a telling paradox at the heart of Fellowes’s attempt at serialization, and of the many existing attempts that it joins: Digital capabilities, in theory, obviate the need for episodic storytelling. Yet, by way of digital capabilities, that form of storytelling is flourishing.

Serialization, as a form and as a formula, avails itself of a very old and very human emotion: the delicious agony that comes with suspense.

We live in an age of streaming and unlimited scroll. Digital space is effectively unlimited; publishing itself, the conversion of words into media, can take place at the click of a button. And yet: Serialization is enjoying a renaissance online and on screens. A big-name writer—even a writer who admits to being “not at all techno-thingummy”—is experimenting with the form, via technothings. That is in part because publishers are always trying to find new forms and “platforms” for their creators’ work; it is also, however, because serialization, as a formula, avails itself of a very old and very human emotion: the delicious agony that comes with suspense. The tension that builds when one is forced—and forced, and forced … aaaaaaaaaaaand forced—to wait.

That we tend to enjoy that stress as much as we tend to hate it helps to explain why the novel as we conceive of it today derives much of its internal formulaic assumptions—its focus on plot, its emphasis on the primacy of “tension”—from the serialization of the past. The novels of Dickens, Tolstoy, Thackeray, Eliot, James, Hardy, Conrad, and many, many other denizens of the current canon began their lives as installments in periodicals (including, yes, The Atlantic Monthly).

In part,  that was because book-printing, when the novel was rising as a form, was expensive; periodical installment was a relatively cheap way to determine whether a given story would capture the public’s attention and merit that kind of investment. But the waiting also amounted to a savvy marketing tactic. When Dickens finally released the ending of The Old Curiosity Shop, in 1841, the result was the stuff of book publishers’ dreams: In New York, a mob desperate to know what would become of the tale’s protagonist, Little Nell, stormed the wharf to await the arrival of the ships whose contents carried the answer.

* * *

Belgravia is certainly not alone in its current desire to translate that old tension into new commercial success. There’s traditional television, obviously, which serializes not only out of technological necessity, but also out of a recognition of the power of the cliffhanger. And podcasts (and not just the revealingly titled Serial). Novels, too—YA works, in particular—have embraced the productive tension that can result when “series” collide with “serialization.” There’s the Harry Potter franchise, which, when it was live, kept fans eagerly awaiting the next installment at near mob-on-the-wharf frenzies. And Twilight. And The Hunger Games. Etc. There’s also the fact that a small but significant chunk of humanity is still waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish The Winds of Winter. (Let us know if we can help, sir.)

There’s also a reason that the experiments with serialization have been, to this point, fairly limited—particularly when it comes to books. It can curtail—ironically, given its format—authors’ capacity for narrative revisioning. (As the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld pointed out, “I imagine serializing would force me to commit to certain plots even if I subsequently decided they were weak.”) And, in books and on other platforms, there’s a nice user-friendliness to time-shifting, whether that capability is afforded by DVR or the launch of entire seasons of TV shows at a single time. House of Cards and Catastrophe and the like—shows that eschew serialization for its logical counterpoint, the binge—are analogous to the traditional novel (or, at least, the most recent form of the “traditional novel”): They’re holistic units that are divided into chapters. And they are meant to be consumed, most importantly, at the consumer’s leisure.

When Netflix beckons us to binge, serialization presents a tidily plated meal. When Amazon says to “watch it whenever!” serialization offers a set air time.

Yet the anything-goes capabilities of the binge can be unsatisfying, for a host of reasons. For one thing, they take away the possibilities for social watching that “appointment viewing” usually entails. (It’s much harder, from a scheduling perspective, to live-tweet an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, whose entire season is released in bulk, than it is to live-tweet Scandal, which airs at a given time, for a given hour.) Binge-oriented production can also take writers’ focus away from the tension that makes the serial format—and, indeed, the novel format overall—so compelling. “Since the loss of compelling plot is one of the things that readers most often complain of in the modern novel,” the critic Adam Kirsch noted, “it might be a salutary discipline for novelists to have to go back to Dickens, or even James, to learn how it’s done.”

There’s another, broader, benefit, too. (Perhaps even, yes, an existential benefit.) And it has to do with the 24-7, seamless, sometimes limitless world that the logic of the binge-watch both derives from and suggests. We get so many of our stories, now, not in the tidy packages of the past, but rather through feeds and flows and occasionally floods—via limitless scrolls, via Facebook pages that never end, via, all in all, a sea of undifferentiated stuff. We live in an age that is bringing, by way of so many of the media platforms that shape how we understand the world, an end to endings.

That is, for the most part, immensely liberating; it can also be, however, overwhelming. And serialization offers a slight counter to it. When Netflix beckons us to binge, serialization presents a tidily plated meal. When Amazon says, breezily, to “watch it whenever!” serialization offers a set air time. Serialization takes the anything-goes chaos that has been one of the consequences of Internetted media and injects just a tiny bit of order back into the world. It fights against the broad end of endings by way of—an irony Dickens surely would have appreciated—lots of little ones.

Why All Movie Theaters Should Ban Cellphones

It’s become a sadly common experience at this point: a night out at the movies, a fortune shelled out on tickets and snacks, suddenly ruined by someone in the audience taking out their phone. Some theater chains recognize how annoying this problem is for viewers: The Alamo Drafthouse has a zero-tolerance policy and will eject any patron distracting viewers with their light-up screen. But not every company is following suit—according to the new CEO of the theater chain AMC, the battle against moviegoers who use their phones has already been lost.

“When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow,” Adam Aron said in an interview with Variety. “You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.” You heard him: The youngsters simply can’t sit still for two hours without checking their phones, so we might as well abandon hope. But one of the chief advantages of the theatrical experience is being removed from such distractions, and in a time when cinema chains are being threatened by expanded home-viewing options, they should try to promote that distinction, rather than abandon it.

The biggest problem with cellphone use in a theater is that it doesn’t just distract someone’s seat-mates; the annoyance of a screen lighting up is unavoidable to anyone in the rows behind the phone user as well. I’ve watched someone go through their emails for a good 10 minutes while I was sitting 10 rows behind them, and all I could do was wait for someone nearby to tap them on the shoulder. At a recent viewing of Zoolander 2, I sat next to someone who excitedly took out their mobile device, opened their Notes app, and wrote down the name of every celebrity cameo in the film. (If you haven’t seen Zoolander 2, it has a lot of celebrity cameos.) The film writer Matt Singer recently recalled someone taking pictures of the screen during a 3D movie, perhaps unaware that their phone didn’t also have 3D glasses on.

As cellphone use has proliferated, movie theaters have divided into two camps: Smaller businesses like the Alamo Drafthouse that make a point of strictly enforcing behavioral rules for its theatergoers, and larger chains like Regal and AMC that remind viewers to turn off their phones before the movie stars but pay no real heed after that. When Aron, who became CEO of AMC four months ago, opines on encouraging texting, he’s acknowledging the truth that unchecked phone use is already rampant in cineplexes around the country.

Aron’s argument is largely generational. Millennials love their phones, and they experience and document all their media experiences with them, so why deny them that right? “We’re going to have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t disturb today’s audiences,” he acknowledged. “Today’s moviegoer doesn’t want somebody sitting next to them texting or having their phone on.” Today’s moviegoer doesn’t, but according to this 60-something CEO, tomorrow’s does, and that’s a reality to be lived with, not challenged.

One possibility, raised by Variety’s Brent Lang, is to have “a certain section” of the theater reserved for texting; Aron also suggests making “specific auditoriums” texting-friendly. One can only imagine such a nightmarish environment, as Batman v Superman plays on the big screen while much tinier screens light up every other second around you. In a perfect world, such a ticket would be available at rock-bottom prices, but Aron is probably imagining the opposite: yet another surcharge to help float the revenue stream of the struggling theater industry. Whatever generational gulf might exist on this issue, Aron is still taking the most patronizing approach. A film is objectively less enjoyable, for you and everyone around you, if you look at your phone while it plays; telling “Millennials” that they don’t have the discipline to keep their phones in their pockets for two hours doesn’t change that fact.