Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 192

When Musicians Boycott to Protest Politics

DURHAM, N.C.—Middle-aged men from across North Carolina were preparing to flock to Greensboro this past week the weekend to see Bruce Springsteen perform. Instead, the Boss announced on Friday that he was canceling the show as a protest of the state’s recently passed HB2, which bans cities from establishing LGBT nondiscrimination ordnances, enacting transgender bathroom accommodations, or raising local minimum wages.

Meanwhile, the Canadian singer Bryan Adams has canceled a show in Biloxi over Mississippi’s new “religious freedom” law, which allows businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples. (He’s not to be confused with Ryan Adams, the North Carolina-born Taylor Swift cover artist and alt-country great, who does not appear to have taken a position on the bill.) Gestures like this are a similar, and perhaps more direct, cousin to the practice of musicians demanding that politicians with whom they disagree quit using their songs at public events. And unlike the song demands, boycotts are enforceable.

Are such protests grandstanding or an effective tool? Do they work? Who takes the hit? Although performers have been using their power to appear—or not—to send political messages for decades, the efficacy of the gesture in fights over North Carolina and Mississippi’s laws remains unclear. But musicians played a very public role in fighting segregation in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa.

Other laws, including religious freedom-laws, have elicited similar protests. After George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder charges in the death of Trayvon Martin, Stevie Wonder promised not to perform in Florida or any other state with a stand-your-ground law. A wide range of musical acts announced plans to boycott Arizona after it passed an extremely strict immigration law in 2010. In 2015, Wilco canceled a show in Indianapolis after Indiana passed a religious-freedom law. The results are mixed. There haven’t been any stand-your-ground repeals. Arizona’s law stands on the books, though several provisions were struck down by the Supreme Court. But Indiana substantially reversed course after backlash, and Wilco went ahead with its show.

What these examples show is that simply canceling a concert is unlikely to ever bring about a policy change on its own. No musician, not even Bruce Springsteen, is powerful enough to do that. (Springsteen couldn’t even sway New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, on policy issues, even though Christie is an avowed fanboy.) Instead, they tend to function as part of a publicity push, adding their weight to efforts by business groups, corporations, and activists. In North Carolina, Paypal, Deutsche Bank, and others have announced plans to freeze job expansions, while—in a presumably more symbolic move—the porn site XHamster announced it would block IP addresses in the Tar Heel State. (Your correspondent has not explored whether the block is functional.)

But what are the mechanics of a musician boycott? Take the Springsteen case. The songwriter is one of the more politically outspoken progressives in the rock scene, so his stance on HB2 wasn’t really a surprise. Calculating the economic impact of the cancelation, however, is tough. The Greensboro Coliseum estimated it would lose $100,000, and people who would have been working that night didn’t make any money from it. The city’s mayor said she wasn’t sure how large the economic ripple effects might be.

One complaint in North Carolina has been that Springsteen’s boycott is punishing his own fans, who—according to this argument—are likely to oppose HB2 in the first place. The claim is debatable. As Christie’s fandom shows, there are plenty of conservatives who love Springsteen’s brand of everyman heartland rock. (For a 2004 concert in Cleveland supporting John Kerry’s presidential run, a chunk of Bush-backing Boss buffs bought tickets anyway and simply held up signs or yelled for Springsteen to lay off the politics and play the hits.) In any case, boycotts like this are more symbolic than punitive in purpose.

Nonetheless, a progressive group called “NC Needs You” has sprung up to argue against boycotts like Springsteen’s, arguing that engagement is more politically effective. The coalition writes:

Here’s how to help: Don’t cancel your show because of the bigoted policies of a few wrongheaded lawmakers and our governor. Instead, play the shows. Use the stage as a platform to make a statement. And donate any—or, better yet, all—profits to a coalition of nonprofits, lobbying groups, and grassroots organizations doing on-the-ground work to take North Carolina back. (We understand that times are tight for bands, so no pressure here.)

Comedian Joel McHale performed in Durham on Saturday and followed NC Needs You’s lead, donating his proceeds to the LGBTQ Center of Durham.

There’s always a risk for an artist who speaks out. Conservatives pointed out that Bryan Adams made his move to cancel in Mississippi immediately after returning from Egypt, a society with more repressive gender norms. Springsteen has surely lost some fans over the years because of his politics. After his Greensboro cancelation, Representative Mark Walker called the singer a “bully” and vowed to go to other shows instead. “We've got other artists coming soon — Def Leppard, Justin Bieber," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "I've never been a Bieber fan, but I might have to go.” (Walker, rather than Springsteen, may bear the brunt of this decision.)

Globally, the movement to get musicians to boycott Israel over its handling of conflict with the Palestinians has been larger and more politically charged. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters has been perhaps the most vocal exponent of the movement, though composer Brian Eno and Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio have also been involved. The musicians’ boycott is closely allied with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement, which opponents like my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg say goes beyond simple criticism of the Israeli government’s policies toward Palestinians and into active anti-Israel agitation. Among BDS opponents, opinions about whether the musicians are intentionally backing that view or are simply misguided seem to vary.

Waters and others argue that they are acting in the spirit of the artists’ boycott of Apartheid-era South Africa. Convened and backed by the United Nations, those efforts are remembered today as having played a prominent role in bringing about the fall of the nation’s white-supremacist government and the end of Apartheid. Even that effort was not without controversy at the time, though, and it illustrates the tension between the impulse to boycott and to engage. In 1985, Paul Simon flew to South Africa to record Graceland, the hit album that featured Ladysmith Black Mambazo and other South African musicians. The album defied the UN boycott, and Simon was pilloried. When he traveled to Johannesburg, he was met by protestors. Springsteen sideman Steven Van Zandt, who organized the anti-Apartheid Sun City project the same year, says that he was shown an assassination list compiled by the radical group AZAPO that had Simon “at the top of it.” Simon’s defense was simply that his music was not political. Ultimately, several high-profile South African musicians, including Hugh Masakela and Miriam Makeba, defended Simon, mostly getting him off the hook. From 2016, Simon’s record seems like a model of engagement, though he’s also been accused of cultural appropriation.

Jazz bands also played an important role in protesting Jim Crow laws in the South. Swing bands began to integrate slowly after 1935, when white clarinetist Benny Goodman created a trio with black pianist Teddy Wilson and white drummer Gene Krupa. In 1938, Goodman’s rival Artie Shaw added singer Billie Holiday to his band. The presence of Holiday, a black singer who would record the iconic civil-rights song “Strange Fruit” the following year ,was a source of tension for the band, as John Szwed wrote in a recent biography. In some places, venues wouldn’t allow Holiday to appear on posters or on stage with Shaw, who was a huge star at the time. Rather than accommodate their preferences, Shaw simply played elsewhere.

But sometimes they, too, found that engagement worked better than boycotting. When hotels and restaurants balked at serving or housing Holiday, the biggest and burliest members of Shaw’s band would simply escort her in, effectively integrating the joints.|

The Brilliant Beginning of Catastrophe Season 2

In this era of anxiety about spoilers, certain aspects of any new TV show/movie/book/play/video game are generally thought to be beyond spoiling. For you to talk about or write about a TV show’s new season, for example, you have to be able to talk about the situation the characters find themselves in at the very beginning of that season, usually. And yet, though you can’t plan for it, there are still times when not knowing even that basic info ahead of watching a show can be a blessing.

Ignorance, if possible, is the best way to enter Catastrophe’s exceptionally funny second season. The show’s creators, Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, haven’t tried to hide the simple and fairly conventional decision they made about the premise of the second run of episodes for their filthy Amazon rom-com, even going so far as to reveal that premise when giving interviews about their first season. But somehow I missed the memo, and I’m glad I did, because it heightens the fun of the season’s opening scene—a scene that contains some of the best sitcom material this year.

Now, to spoil it while describing how great it is.

Season one ended with Sharon and Rob having a horrible fight interrupted when her water broke. Cut to credits. Season two opens with the couple in bed and Sharon appearing quite pregnant, which should trigger some cognitive dissonance on the viewer’s part. Taking in that image, three possibilities occur: Sharon was mistaken about her water breaking, the show has jumped ahead in time and Sharon is with child again, or the show is flashing back to a time during the duration of the first season. In any case, the viewer’s factual confusion should quickly falls aside as they get caught up in the main action of the scene, which consists of Sharon and Rob being really horrible and funny.

They’re watching a reality-TV competition. Sharon finds it an acceptable replacement for Mad Men and Game of Thrones not being on; Rob wants to turn it off and have sex; she seems open to the idea but only on the condition that she gets to first watch the beginning of the next show. Perhaps sensing that this verdict is a letdown for Rob, Sharon puts her legs onto his—an imposition, yes, but  potentially also a sign of affection. He’s not having taking it as one. After asking her to move her legs, he does it for her with a not-so-gentle fling. And then we’re off into a fight.

Those initial, pre-war moments of TV viewing are the defining mode of communication in a relationship: a negotiation. It’s about free time, it’s about sex, and it’s conducted mostly in code. The director, Ben Taylor, keeps his camera static for the close shots of the husband and wife talking to each other, but brings Sharon and Rob alternatively in and out of focus depending on who’s driving the tension of the moment.

The way the negotiation escalates into a fight is illustrated in a kind of nonsense verbal ping-pong match where the same words are hurled back and forth with increasing intensity: “That was just really aggressive.” “It wasn’t aggressive.” “You’re so aggressive!” “I’m aggressive!?” “‘AGGRESSIVE, AGGRESSIVE’—it was even aggressive the way you said that, Mark Wahlberg!” Horgan and Delaney, who write the show as well as star in it, have a knack for dialogue that is funny on the level of joke-construction but even funnier on the level of pure sound. “Don’t loom over me,” Sharon chides Rob.

It’s an argument about arguing, as which is perhaps the most universal kind of argument there is, spanning international peace processes and marriage. Sharon says she feels threatens; Rob responds with the un-PC question of whether she’s going to blog about feeling threatened by him. She’s horrified, but, you can tell, also a little amused by the line—a glimpse of the sick humor that brought them together in the first place.

The most important thing here is that everything that’s happening in that bedroom is circumscribed by the sturdiness of a loving relationship—they will spar, but they will not draw blood. When Sharon tells Rob to go take a walk to calm down, she’s taken aback that he’s going to actually go do it. When he returns immediately, realizing she’s parked the car somewhere without his knowledge, it’s a reminder of the concrete reality of their relationship: They’re so bound up that storming out isn’t an option.

In bed, facing away from each other, Rob says that he’ll scream if she comes near him. The camera is close on Sharon’s face when he makes that threat, and she breaks a smile. This week, NPR’s Linda Holmes published a spot-on analysis of the use of laughter on this show, which helps explain why this moment is so winning:

The frequent deployment of in-scene laughter in Catastrophe solves a common problem with relationship comedies, which is their tendency to feel transactional. People seem to be performing the relationship more than being in it, and contrary to every close relationship — romantic or otherwise — scenes generally either sit in one spot to make a point or they move along a straight line. Either any given scene is loving, or it’s playful, or it’s an argument, or it’s a scene where people make up according to predictable rhythms of apology and forgiveness.

Sharon’s amusement, in this case, allows what was an argument caused by not having sex into an occasion for frantic, thumping sex. This being Catastrophe, even the raunchy happy ending has a punchline: Rob asks her to put her finger in his asshole, but she can’t seem to reach it.

Then another punchline: A little kid walks in the room.

Oh, right—three minutes into the episode, the show had allowed you to forget how weird it is that Sharon is pregnant. Comedy is in surprise, and the surprise of seeing their son appear is quite high, or at least it was for me. Of course, anyone who’s read press coverage of this season knows that Catastrophe has used the now-classic sitcom maneuver of the time jump, skipping the infancy of their first child so as to portray settled domestic life and a second pregnancy. And the chronological copping suggests that Catastrophe has the tantalizing potential to become a 21st-century, streaming-TV, post-Apatow version of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise series. If future installments are set even further ahead in the timeline of Sharon’s and Rob’s lives, let them open with a scene as uproarious and as insightful as this one was.

The Cost of North Carolina's HB2

The German banking giant joins PayPal, other companies, as well as musical acts who are boycotting the state over a law that ends protections for gays, lesbians, and transgender people.

#DeutscheBank freezes job expansion plans in #NorthCarolina due to state-wide legislation #HB2 https://t.co/34hh3v1sVg

— Deutsche Bank (@DeutscheBank) April 12, 2016

“We take our commitment to building inclusive work environments seriously” says $DB’s Co-CEO #JohnCryan. #HB2 pic.twitter.com/xhMFXBmTIj

— Deutsche Bank (@DeutscheBank) April 12, 2016

#DeutscheBank joins @HRC @PayPal @Springsteen and many other voices in opposition to #HB2 in #NorthCarolina pic.twitter.com/2fkK3hKNPR

— Deutsche Bank (@DeutscheBank) April 12, 2016

Deutsche Bank already employs about 900 people in the state, The Wall Street Journal reports.  

The so-called bathroom bill requires people to use the bathroom corresponding with the gender listed on their birth certificates. The measure sailed through the state’s legislature last week and was signed into law by Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican—but it prompted a massive backlash almost immediately. PayPal announced last week that it was no longer opening a global operations center in Charlotte, costing North Carolina 400 jobs, and the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau says HB2 is also hurting the local economy.

The Child Suicide Bombers of Boko Haram

Boko Haram, the Islamist militant group that operates in Nigeria and other West African countries, is increasingly using children to carry out suicide attacks, Unicef, the UN children’s organization, said in a new report.

Nearly one-quarter of all Boko Haram’s attacks carried out in 2015 were by children, mostly girls, some as young as 8, said the report, which was released Tuesday. In all, child suicide bombers carried out 44 attacks for Boko Haram last year, an 11-fold increase from 2014.

Boko Haram has kidnapped, robbed, and torched entire villages around Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon. It has had a devastating effect on the people and local economies. Since May 2013, the Unicef report said Boko Haram has displaced 2.3 million people. Its attacks on towns has also forced farmers and herdsmen to abandon their fields and flocks. That, combined with the insecurity the group creates, and a food shortage, has contributed to severe, acute malnutrition in about 50,000 children, Unicef said.

The study is titled “Beyond Chibok,” a reference to the mass kidnapping of 276 girls from the Nigerian town of that name in April 2014. In the two years since the abductions, the Nigerian military’s operations against Boko Haram has scattered and frustrated the group. As a result, Boko Haram stepped up its bombings from 32 in 2014, to 151 last year. The majority occurred in Cameroon, where girls aged 13 to 15 are the most common attackers, the report says. The New York Times reported that people who’ve escaped Boko Haram say the group has a suicide training camps for women and girls.

In the past couple years, the Nigerian military––with support from other nations, including the U.S.–– has freed many of the kidnapped women, though there are reports that Boko Haram has brainwashed some of them to fight on its side. Boko Haram sometimes marries off its young captives to its male fighters, which has made return even more difficult, Unicef said.

“Many women who return to their families are viewed with deep suspicion either because they are carrying the children of Boko Haram fighters,” the report noted, “or because of the fear they may turn against their own communities.”

But these women and children should not be viewed as enemies, said Manuel Fontaine, Unicef’s regional director for West and Central Africa.  

“Let us be clear: these children are victims, not perpetrators … This suspicion towards children can have destructive consequences; how can a community rebuild itself when it is casting out its own sisters, daughters and mothers?” he asked.

Despite the Nigerian government’s efforts, Boko Haram still carries out deadly and effective attacks. Just last month, two women carried out a suicide attack inside a mosque in Nigeria, killing 24 people.

A ‘Brexit’ Warning

The International Monetary Fund says an exit could hurt both the U.K. and Europe.

Here’s more from the IMF’s latest outlook, which was released Tuesday:

A British exit from the European Union could pose major challenges for both the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. Negotiations on postexit arrangements would likely be protracted, resulting in an extended period of heightened uncertainty that could weigh heavily on confidence and investment, all the while increasing financial market volatility. A U.K. exit from Europe’s single market would also likely disrupt and reduce mutual trade and financial flows, curtailing key benefits from economic cooperation and integration, such as those resulting from economies of scale and efficient specialization.

Britons vote on June 23 on whether to remain in the European Union. The polls show a close race. Prime Minister David Cameron is championing continued EU membership, but he is facing intense scrutiny over revelations in the Panama Papers that he benefited from an offshore trust set up by his father—revelations that have led to calls for his resignation.

Make Rock and Roll Great Again?

Gene Simmons, the KISS bassist, has become the champion of a particular version of what “rock and roll” means. “A few people decide what’s in and what’s not, and the masses just scratch their heads,” he said in a 2014 interview with Radio.com. “You’ve got Grandmaster Flash in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Run-D.M.C. in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? You’re killing me. That doesn’t mean those aren’t good artists. But they don’t play guitar. They sample and they talk. Not even sing.”

The members of N.W.A., on the occasion of their induction into the hall of fame, have given a much broader definition of rock. “Rock ‘n’ roll is not an instrument, and it’s not singing,” Ice Cube told The New York Times. “Rock ‘n’ roll is a spirit. N.W.A. is probably more rock ‘n’ roll than a lot of the people that [Simmons] thinks belong there over hip-hop. We had the same spirit as punk rock, the same as the blues.” Taking the stage at the induction ceremony in Brooklyn on Friday, MC Ren said, “I want to say to Mr. Gene Simmons that hip-hop is here forever. We’re supposed to be here.”

Here is one of the most unkillable debates in pop-culture history. Simmons is correct that some uncountable portion of “the masses” agrees with him that rap does not fall under rock’s umbrella; according to the comments sections on any general-audience publication’s coverage of Kanye West, in fact, some folks don’t think of rap as music at all. N.W.A., meanwhile, can claim to have the actual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its side, as well as critics and listeners who construe rock as a mentality or social force rather than a particular sound. Declaring who’s “right” here would be like declaring who’s right among believers in different religions: Rock and roll is not a scientifically defined concept, and it has certainly never been a stable cultural designation. But in the divide between the two camps, you can see disagreements that seem familiar in the context of broader national conversations in 2016.

“Respectfully—let me know when Jimi Hendrix gets into the hip-hop hall of fame,” Simmons tweeted at Ice Cube after Friday’s induction ceremony. “Then you’ll have a point.” There’s no hip-hop hall of fame right now, and if Simmons is in favor of the creation of one it’s likely not because he wants a celebration of hip-hop but rather because he wants a partition from it. “Separate but equal” is a tempting bomb of a phrase to throw into the discussion, but Simmons’s comments typically do not indicate that he sees hip-hop as equal. Regardless, what’s at issue here theoretically isn’t worthiness but walls. Guitar music belongs in one place; rap in another.

Some of the implications to such an insistence on boundaries are obvious. Fully embracing Simmons’s definition of rock would in all likelihood lead to a whiter and more male hall of fame than the one that exists now—which is saying something.

But a perhaps the more fundamental feature of the Simmons worldview is that it professes to serve rock and roll by making it smaller. In fact, Simmons has drawn the genre’s borders so small as to remove it from existence. “As far as I’m concerned, rock is dead,” he has said. “There ain’t no new bands. Foo Fighters, I love ‘em, but they’re a 20-year-old band. These are long-in-the-tooth bands: Nirvana, Pearl Jam. They’re old bands.” According to this line of thought,  an ideal hall of fame is one that posits rock and roll as totally decrepit.

This belief obviously not only excludes hip-hop; it excludes younger guitar bands. “My question is where’s the new Beatles, and where’s the new Elvis?” Simmons has said. “What’s the answer? Tame Impala? I don’t think so.” This crisis in guitar rock seems, he seems to think, should be blamed less on today’s rockers than on their competition. Another Rolling Stone quote from Simmons: “I am looking forward to the death of rap ... I’m looking forward to music coming back to lyrics and melody, instead of just talking.” For his genre to rise again, the intruders from hip-hop must fall. Music is a zero-sum culture clash.

What’s at issue here theoretically isn’t worthiness but walls.

The opposing way of looking at the entire situation sees rock as an inclusive and growing nation rather than an isolated and dying one. In the Times, remember, Ice Cube referred to rock and roll as a “spirit,” one shared by hip-hop and blues and punk. He didn’t explicitly define what that spirit is, but you can venture some guesses. In a blistering piece at The Guardian this year, the writer David Bry argued that it all comes down to iconoclasm—rebellion, defiance, overthrowing the past, making something new. It’s a definition that should ensure rock exists forever, placing it at the forefront of cultural change.

There is some irony to the Hall of Fame being the cause of a debate like this, given that few people at any end of any ideological spectrum seem happy with what the institution represents. Bry’s column about iconoclasm was actually an argument to torch the hall; the new inductee Steve Miller spent his time at the induction ceremony criticizing the the hall’s business practices and treatment of women. But when you think about the many competing lines of thought on what its mission should be, it’s worth noting that the hall of fame does seem to take a side, as compromised as it may often seem. By allowing for an expansive definition of rock and roll, it allows for greatness in the past, present, and future. People like Simmons, meanwhile, write off the present, arguing that only through exclusion can rock and roll be made great again.

David Cameron Answers for the Panama Papers

In the continued fallout after the release of the Panama Papers, British Prime Minister David Cameron faced a barrage of criticism Monday from the House of Commons over revelations that his late father set up an offshore trust that Cameron then benefitted from.

Cameron admitted earlier this weekend he botched his response to questions over his family’s involvement in offshore companies, telling Conservative Party members, “I could have handled this better.”

The appearance marked Cameron’s first remarks to members of parliament about the Panama Papers, a massive leak of internal documents from a Panama-based law firm that revealed earlier this month the offshore business dealings of world leaders and politicians.

The Panama Papers showed that Cameron’s father created an investment company offshore that did not pay British taxes. Cameron said he did financially benefit from selling his shares in his father’s company in 2010, but said his involvement was within the law. He also said he was “angry about the way my father’s memory was being traduced.”

On Monday, Cameron proposed new measures that would go after British corporations that do not crack down on tax evasion through offshore accounts, making tax avoidance a criminal offense.

Cameron also announced funding for a new task force that will take “rapid action” in addressing tax evasion. He noted as well that starting in September, “law enforcement will be able to see exactly who really owns and controls every company” in British territories like the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Isle of Man, and Isle of Jersey, which have traditionally been tax havens. “We want everyone with a stake in fighting corruption, from law enforcement, civil society, to the media, to be able to use this data and help us root out and deter wrongdoing,” Cameron said.

Cameron faced sharp criticism from members of the opposition Labour Party, including from its leader Jeremy Corbyn, who said the United Kingdom was at “the heart of the global tax avoidance industry” and that Cameron still had to answer further questions about his family’s wealth.

“How can it be right that street cleaners, teaching assistants, and nurses work and pay their taxes, yet some at the top think the rules simply don’t apply to them?” Corbyn said. He also argued that the new task force couldn’t be trusted, seeing as the results will be reported to “members of a party funded by donors implicated in the Panama leaks.”

The chamber devolved into yelling and jeering during much of Monday’s debate, as can happen in the British parliament. Dennis Skinner, a Labour member, was thrown out of the House of Commons for the day for calling the prime minister “dodgy Dave” several times, which the speaker of the House of Commons deemed was “unparliamentary language.”

Several top British government officials have agreed to release their tax returns after Cameron released his own returns for the last six years after the Panama Papers news broke. Cameron said he wants the U.K. to “lead the international agenda on tax evasion,” and that their efforts will now go even beyond some states in the United States.

The Suicide Emergency Among Canada’s First Nations

An indigenous community in Canada’s northern region of Ontario has declared a state of emergency after 11 people there attempted suicide on Saturday night.

The Attawapiskat First Nation is a small subarctic community of 2,000 people, located near the Hudson Bay and more than 300 miles from the nearest city. The community’s chief, along with leaders of the Attawapiskat parliament, voted unanimously late Saturday night to declare a state of emergency.

One member of parliament, Charlie Angus, said the Attawapiskat community and the First Nation people lack resources typically available to others in Canada.

When “a young person tries to commit suicide in any suburban school, they send in the resources, they send in the emergency team. There’s a standard protocol for response,” Angus said. “The northern communities are left on their own. We don't have the mental-health service dollars. We don’t have the resources.”

Attawapiskat has high rates of poverty, and five years ago it made Canadian national news because of a lack of housing that forced some families to live in unheated trailers and tents. In 2013, the Attawapiskat’s chief at the time, Theresa Spence, starved herself of solid food for six weeks in a hunger strike to demand more aid from the government, and to force Canadian officials into a discussion with indigenous leaders.

The declaration of a state of emergency means that a nearby hospital will send a crisis team of social workers and mental-health nurses to the community. Ontario’s Health Ministry also sent an emergency team that includes two mental-health counselors.

Saturday’s suicide attempts came after 28 people tried to kill themselves in March, Reuters reported. Since September of last year, more than 100 people there have attempted suicide, the youngest being 11, and the oldest 71, with one person dying as a result. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called this weekend’s attempts “heartbreaking.”

The news from Attawapiskat is heartbreaking. We'll continue to work to improve living conditions for all Indigenous peoples.

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) April 10, 2016

This recent wave of suicides began last September, after five girls in the community tried to overdose on an unknown medication, CBC reported. The community’s current chief, Bruce Shisheesh, told CBC that overcrowding, with as many as 15 people living in one home, bullying, drug addiction, and the emotional damage of physical and sexual abuse have driven the high rates of depressions and suicide among the Attawapiskat.

Suicide is the leading cause of death for indigenous young people and adults up to 44, according to Health Canada. Indigenous youth are five or six times more likely to kill themselves compared to non-indigenous youth. Those statistics are similar in Native American population of the United States. About one-quarter of Native American children live in poverty, and the high rates of addiction and abuse have led to a suicide rate among Native American teens that is the highest of any population in the country.

Fear the Walking Dead: Zombies on the High Seas

In the premiere of Fear the Walking Dead’s second season, the mysterious yacht owner Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) gives a succinct rundown of the new world order to his stowaways, whom he rescued from the zombie apocalypse. “Let me explain the rules of the boat,” he says. “Rule number one, it’s my boat. Rule number two, it is my boat. If there remains any confusion about rules one and two, I offer rule number three: It’s my goddamn boat.” And with that, Strand illustrates how simple and arbitrary “laws” can become at the end of the world—and how willing people are to abide by them if it means they’ll be safe.

Related Story

The Real Villains of Fear the Walking Dead

The Walking Dead, AMC’s long-running hit and Fear’s parent show, began with a world already overrun with zombies. Despite occupying quasi-prequel territory, Fear the Walking Dead is compelling for the way it actually portrays the slow, painful breakdown of society. In the first season, a Los Angeles family watched as zombies started to pop up in their city, normal life collapsed, and the military started to herd people into camps before being overrun. In the second season, the surviving characters have huddled onto Victor’s yacht and set sail for open waters, where even more new, nebulous laws are taking hold.

It’s only been one season, but Fear the Walking Dead is already doing a better job than the original of examining how civilization—rather than a small band of survivors—reacts to and evolves during the crisis. The Walking Dead, directly based on an ongoing comic book by Robert Kirkman, is a simpler tale of survival that has turned into a grim (if wildly successful) slog. Around the corner is either another awful villain or a wall of flesh-eating zombies, and efforts to rebuild society in the show always revolve around protection, isolation, and bonds of deep trust forged by years of bloody battles. Anytime some semblance of community is built, the show simply tears it down again.

Meanwhile, the heroes of Fear the Walking Dead aren’t soldiers, and as they strike out into the ocean in the second season, they’re still learning how to adapt to life without traditional systems of authority. The first season was a surprisingly hard-edged, political work that cast the U.S. military as the primary villains, ones who quickly turned against the people they were supposed to protect as the world around them fell apart. As the season ended, the blended family of Madison (Kim Dickens), Travis (Cliff Curtis), their children, and their neighbor Daniel (Ruben Blades) fled the military’s quarantine camps for Strand’s boat, a luxury yacht parked in the Pacific Ocean that he claimed to own.

In the first season, Fear the Walking Dead’s tension derived from the military’s secrecy and soldiers’ erratic behavior (eventually, it was revealed they planned to flee and wipe out everyone they left behind). In the second, the power is suddenly in the hands of the main cast, especially Victor, which proves an equally terrifying prospect. Victor is friendly enough, but he won’t allow any other survivors onto his boat, which leads to many wrenching scenes of desperate dinghies petitioning for help and being ignored. Fear the Walking Dead could easily feel claustrophobic, but the show uses its setting to its advantage, ratcheting up the paranoia as the survivors begin to wonder about Victor’s background and his plans for the future.

The most recent season of The Walking Dead was riddled with pointless cliffhangers and featured a drawn-out plot involving a new supervillain too cartoonish to take seriously. Fortunately, Fear the Walking Dead’s second season manages to maintain the great momentum of the first, even as it transitions to a new arc. It’s also much more fun than it sounds (even though half of the cast is made up of angsty teenagers), as the show takes typical story tropes and manages to smoothly mix them with zombie-horror adventures. If the first season was a domestic drama, focusing on Madison and Travis’s blended family as they tried to keep everyone together, this second season is a naval adventure, as the group bands with new, darker allies to fight off pirates and monsters on the high seas.

In Sunday’s episode, Daniel darkly refers to Victor as “Ahab,” and indeed Victor’s edicts do sometimes echo the dictatorial madness of Herman Melville’s famous creation. Domingo, a Tony-nominated actor and playwright, is giving a command performance this year, a fascinating portrait of the kind of authoritarian whom society reforms around after being blown apart. It’s heartening to see the show take the chance to build that kind of a character from the ground up and invest the audience in his decisions going forward. It might be a comic-book show spinoff, but Fear the Walking Dead is proving that it won’t settle for a story with easy heroes and villains.

Recognizing America’s Nuclear Past in Japan

With the Genbaku Dome, one of the only surviving buildings of the atomic blast that devastated Hiroshima in 1945, in the background, Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday became the most senior U.S. official to visit the Peace Memorial Park commemorating the bomb that ended World War II. The purpose of Kerry’s visit was not for the U.S. to take blame for the deaths of more than 200,000 people in Hiroshima, and Nagasaki three days later, but more to underscore the need to “rid the world of weapons of mass destruction,” as Kerry said in an earlier meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida.

Indeed, a desire to eliminate nuclear weapons from global arsenals has been a priority of the Obama administration since the president’s 2009 speech in Prague, where he declared nuclear weapons “the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.” According to The New York Times, some Japanese officials have urged the president to visit Nagasaki next month for a G7 meeting to underscore that policy, and become the first U.S. president to visit the city.

Kerry’s visit to the site was an attempt to underscore the alliance between Japan and the U.S. Since the end of the war, the two countries have become strong economic and military allies. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, said “by strengthening the Japan-U.S. alliance, we’ll strengthen deterrence and that will contribute to peace and stability in the region, not just Japan.” Indeed, the U.S. still has 50,000 troops in Japan—a presence that has become increasingly important with China’s ambitions in the South China Sea.

While Kerry’s visit is a recognition of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, he did not apologize for the act. He said in Hiroshima on Monday, the visit was “not about the past,” but looking ahead to a possibly nuclear-free world—even though the U.S. has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world.