Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 193

Hear the Fear: The Rise of the Horror Podcast

Paul Bae discovered the devastating power of stories 17 years ago in his boss’s office. Then a high-school teacher in Vancouver, the current comedian and podcast producer was summoned by his principal, whose answering machine hosted a stream of irate complaints regarding one of his lessons. “She called me in, shaking her head, and told me she got some calls from parents about how their kids couldn’t sleep alone in their rooms that weekend,” Bae says. During an annual Halloween tradition called the Hour of Horror, Bae told a class of ninth graders the tale of a toilet with a dark history: If a brave soul ventured to the third-floor restroom and entered the middle of three stalls at exactly 3 p.m., the lights would flicker as “the shadow of a girl on a noose would swing over the stall.” The girl, a victim of bullying, had taken her own life.

Unfortunately, Bae wasn’t able to finish the story. “At the end of every Hour of Horror, I’d say, ‘And there’s one more thing you should know: nothing I said today ... is true,’” he says. “But for some reason, the bell rang during one of my answers, and the kids rushed out of the room to start their weekend. With a dawning sense of horror, it struck me: I forgot to tell them it was all made up.” His principal dismissed Bae with “a stern warning to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” but he apparently didn’t take those words to heart. His friend, the indie filmmaker Terry Miles, enticed Bae into the world of podcasting, and the pair now channel tales of the supernatural to 200,000 listeners a month with The Black Tapes. The podcast follows an affable journalist named Alex Reagan as she explores a series of terrifying cases—involving séances, demonic possessions, or apparitions—that have no apparent scientific or rational explanation.

Now in its second season, the podcast’s intertwining threads of demon kings, cryptic numbers, and sacrificial children have inspired a groundswell of online chatter. But Bae and Miles aren’t the only new storytellers to embrace the medium. Over the last few years, other horror podcasts have risen to the top of the iTunes charts. Spurred by the true-crime dramatics of Serial, series including Myths and Legends, Welcome to Night Vale, Limetown, and the alien thriller The Message have turned many smart phones and laptops into a new kind of campfire. Appropriately, podcasts like The Black Tapes and Lore are also a return to form as much as function—addressing exactly what scary stories are and why they exist.

The first horror stories, passed on in the oral tradition, served as a public warning system against the very real things that went bump in the night. In the ancient tales collected by early storytellers such as Pliny and Herodotus, grim legends stemmed from concrete threats. “The monsters of each region are clearly based on the real zoological predators or dangers of the local environment,” says Stephen Asma, a philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago whose explored the emergence of the modern boogeyman in his 2009 book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. “Monster stories are exaggerations that teach people, rightly or wrongly, to be careful and wary … [They] function as cultural preparation for living in a hostile world.”

The first horror stories, expressed orally, served as a public-warning system against the very real things that went bump in the night.

Since podcasting uses technology that doesn’t require years to master or fortunes to fund, it’s enabled a new generation of writers to reach audiences on a significant scale. A novelist-turned-podcaster, Aaron Mahnke was on the verge of retiring from storytelling before he launched Lore, a nonfiction podcast that pulls in an average 385,000 downloads a week. Like Bae, Mahnke got his start frightening kids in a classroom, though in his case he spooked his elementary school peers with a story of a pumpkin full of human bones. (Spoiler alert: The pumpkin patch was built on a graveyard.) Mahnke now outlines the history behind the most ubiquitous horror tropes and legends for his podcast. Over the course of 31 biweekly episodes (the show marked its one-year anniversary in March), Mahnke dissects the grimmer aspects of mythologies from around the world, exploring New Englanders who drank immolated-heart smoothies to ward off vampires and dolls that brandish kitchen knives against sleeping parents.

He tries to avoid more popular myths, instead looking for straightforward accounts that don’t shy away from the more malicious aspects of human history. Mahnke cites the story of a woman from Puritan Massachusetts named Mary Webster who was hanged by a mob for alleged witchcraft and survived. Rather than just being a sensational story, the legend sheds light on social ills that can transcend time and space—for example, violence against women and the use of religion as a political weapon.

The relative obscurity of what happened to Webster is what makes her tale more powerful from a narrative perspective, since multiple retellings can soften a tale’s original meaning, according to Mahnke. “Your mind’s never had a chance to work over this story before,” he says. “Those are the ones that I like.” It’s an approach that seems to work well: Lore is the 11th most popular podcast on iTunes, pulling in an average of 385,000 downloads per episode. It routinely beats out such veteran podcasts as WTF With Marc Maron, Comedy Bang Bang, and NPR’s All Things Considered.

Podcasts are one of the most accessible and democratic mediums.

That same underlying relevance exists in the works of Bae, Miles, and Mahnke—both on allegorical and literal levels. Even Bae’s provocative Hour of Horror yarn commented on a dire issue: bullying-related suicide. Lore also wraps each of its entries with commentary on what the most macabre tales say about humanity, whether it be xenophobia—another staple of Asma’s book—or isolation.

For a more recent example of how horror in particular thrives on tight word-of-mouth communities, look no further than the silver screen. Despite relatively small marketing and production budgets, horror films rely on a fervent base of vocal and socially active fans. Movies under the genre banner recoup huge returns from their modest investments; almost half of the 20 most profitable movies of all time fall under the slasher and supernatural umbrella. The game-changing film Paranormal Activity has netted over $89 million from a budget of $450,000—nearly a 200 percent return on investment.

* * *

The surge of popularity for horror podcasts in particular stems from a number of reasons. The most obvious? They’re short and free. A relatively brief 40 minutes of audio doesn’t require the commitment of reading 434 pages—the length of Stephen King’s most recent novel, Finders Keepers.

It’s also one of the most accessible and democratic mediums: A guy in his office with a $99 microphone and cardboard box can craft a top-20 podcast alongside a more elaborate production like The Message, which has the support of a $117 billion company and an advertising agency with 15,000 global employees. “The world of podcasting is a fairly even playing field compared to film or television,” says The Black Tapes’s Miles. “A company that makes $4 million episodes of television or $100 million movies is pretty much in the same situation as us when it comes to making a podcast. It’s just a mixing board, a journalist, and a microphone.”

Stripping away the editors, cinematographers, actors, and book distributors makes the story paramount. The Black Tapes, Lore, and their peers bring their listeners back to the intimate simplicity of the bonfire and offer a break from the glow of digital screens. And according to Asma, scary stories are also the best vehicle for empathy and putting listeners in someone else’s shoes. “We are understanding more about the empathic social brain and mirror neurons that simulate the pain or anxiety of another person," Asma explains. “This makes fear (and other emotions) contagious. An oral horror story is uniquely able to trigger those contagious feelings in the audience, because the voice and the face are the best communicators of emotion.”

Mahnke agrees that fear remains the key to effective storytelling, calling up the works of The Brothers Grimm. “Hansel and Gretel is an entertaining story about two kids who find a house made of candy and a witch who gets killed,” he says. “But it’s also a lesson that parents passed onto their kids about not going into strangers’ houses ... I think scary stories are unusually gifted at unlocking those doors and digging deeper into a listener’s mind.” And under that lens, a genre often associated with cheap thrills and sadism transforms into something far more valuable: a teaching tool passed from generation to generation, dressed up with vampires and demons.

Remembering Cecil the Lion

For the last decade, Brent Stapelkamp has been studying and photographing lions with Oxford University's Hwange Lion Research Project. The Zimbabwe group's work gained international attention after Cecil, a 13-year-old local favorite, was shot and killed by a Minnesota dentist last year. “Thousands of hours in the company of lions meant I got a unique perspective of their lives and the threats that they face,” Stapelkamp said. His images, which are currently on display at the Anastasia Gallery, are perhaps the best way to understand the the world that Cecil inhabited. Within the 5,657-square-mile national park, the lions in Cecil’s pride can be found hunting, playing, and resting within close proximity to human visitors. It was this exposure to tourists, Stapelkamp said, that made Cecil vulnerable to the hunters who were waiting just beyond the railroad that serves as a border to the park. “He was the biggest on the block,” Stapelkamp said, “that gave him a real confidence that people found mesmerizing.” The final photo in this series was taken the last time Stapelkamp saw him, a little more than a month before Cecil was killed.

Sanders and Cruz Gain Ground

Updated on April 9 at 10:11 p.m.

It’s a good day for the insurgent candidates in both presidential races.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders won his eighth victory out of the last nine Democratic contests in the Wyoming caucuses on Saturday. In the nearby Rocky Mountains, Texas Senator Ted Cruz locked up all of Colorado’s GOP delegates on Saturday, as he tried to slow frontrunner Donald Trump’s march to the Republican nomination.

Sanders’ victory continued his lengthy winning streak in the West, following landslide triumphs in Idaho, Utah, and Washington in recent weeks. The Vermont senator carried Wednesday with 56 percent of the vote to frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s 44 percent on Saturday afternoon.

The close result, however, won’t affect Clinton’s 200-plus lead in pledged delegates. Only 14 of them were at stake in Wyoming, the fewest of any state in the Democratic race. And, in an appropriate outcome for the Equality State, both candidates will take home seven delegates each.

Instead, the Sanders campaign hopes to build momentum ahead of the pivotal New York primary on April 19, where a surprise victory could upend Clinton’s march to the nomination.

On the GOP side, Colorado offered only 37 delegates—a modest sum compared to upcoming contests in Pennsylvania and New York. State GOP officials also reduced the contest’s profile last August by canceling the presidential preference poll in the caucuses held on Super Tuesday. Without a poll to bind the eventual selection of delegates, the process became a byzantine free-for-all among party loyalists.

First, at the precinct-level caucuses on March 1, registered Republican voters elected representatives to the county-level assemblies held throughout the rest of March. Then those assemblies chose their own delegations to Saturday’s state GOP convention, as well as conventions in each of Colorado’s seven congressional districts. Finally, attendees at those conventions elect 34 delegates to the party’s national convention in Cleveland in July, in addition to the three who serve ex officio. It’s hard to imagine a less favorable process for Trump, whose troubled campaign has often suffered from a lackadaisical ground operation and poor delegate outreach.

The labyrinthine route through multiple tiers of party stalwarts instead favored Cruz, who claimed a clean sweep of the 21 delegates chosen in congressional district conventions over the past week, before picking up all of the 13 delegates allocated at Saturday’s state convention. Trump walked away with six of the alternates. Both the Texas senator and large segments of the Republican hierarchy hope to deny Trump the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the convention’s first ballot.

The People v. O.J. and the Snap Pack: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

The People v. O.J. Simpson Will Be With Us Forever

Vinson Cunningham | The New Yorker

“We enter now into the myth’s adolescence, the time of miracles and hoaxes, retellings and revisions. Think of the knife as the fraudulent tooth or fingernail of a popular saint, and of The People v. O.J., perhaps, as a crucial near-contemporary codex, an early attempt to force the imperatives of art—narrative, coherence, harmony of action, and meaning—onto the strange and unsettling tragedy that was the truth.”

Move Over, Rat Pack and Brat Pack: Here Comes the Snap Pack

Katherine Rosman | The New York Times

“Even as they grasp that their postings can draw scorn, the Snap Pack seems unable to relinquish the habit of social media, and the illusion of image control it affords. ‘I look good in pictures I take of myself,’ Ms. Matisse said as the group settled in for dinner at Vandal.”

How Not to Talk About African Literature

Ainehi Edoro | The Guardian

“The history of modern African fiction is essentially 100 years of branding disaster. In marketing African fiction, the conventional practice among publishers both in Africa and the West has been to simply tag a novel to a social issue. ‘Such and such a novel explores colonialism.’ Done ... African fiction is packaged and circulated, bought and sold not on the basis of its aesthetic value but of its thematic preoccupation.”

Kaytranada Is Reaching 100 Percent

Alex Frank | The Fader

“Though Kay seems relieved to be finally making his truth known, he still expresses a stilted caution borne of life in the uber-straight world of a tiny suburb of Montreal or a traditional immigrant community ... As for the rest of the world, he says, he’s treating this interview in part like the rip of a Band-Aid. He’s talking to me so he won’t have to go through the painstaking process of coming out to every single person he knows.”

Four Years a Student-Athlete: The Racial Injustice of Big-Time College Sports

Patrick Hruby | Vice

“The game will be the culmination of another successful season for a cash-rich campus athletics industry—and thanks to the NCAA’s longstanding amateurism rules, which apply to college athletes and no one else in America, the lion’s share of that money will flow from the former group to the latter. From the jerseys to the suits. From black to white.”

A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Show Isn’t as Revolutionary as It Seems

Rebecca Onion | Slate

“Acknowledging that the show may have the power to interest kids in the history of the Revolutionary era because of the way its major roles are cast, Monteiro asks: ‘Is this the history that we most want black and brown youth to connect with—one in which black lives so clearly do not matter?’”

Surgery With a Mouse Click

Logan Hill | Vulture

“Until recently, vain actors were limited to makeup, flattering lighting, corsets, plastic surgery, Botox, crash diets, personal trainers, steroids, muscle suits, color grading, lenses and filters, body doubles, and spray-on abs. Now they also have software: Zits vanish with a click. Wrinkles ­disappear. Abs harden. Jawlines sharpen. Cellulite vanishes.”

The Pleasure of Their Pain

Batya Ungar-Sargon | Aeon

“We do no wrong by consuming the storylines starring these would-be celebrities, for haven’t they themselves asked to become part of a ridiculous spectacle for our amusement? But the fact that we commit no moral offence by indulging in these franchises fails to explain the greater mystery, which is the pleasure this experience offers, a pleasure that stymies even as it delights.”

The Queens of Nonfiction: 56 Women Journalists Everyone Should Read

Ann Friedman | The Cut

“The male bylines I scrolled past in decades-old tables of contents were familiar, either because those men are still working their prestigious jobs today, or because they have been anthologized. Most of the women nonfiction writers of previous eras, I discovered after some Googling, had short-lived journalistic careers. And the excellent work they did produce has escaped every curator of the past several decades. We simply haven’t remembered them. And it’s time we start.”

The Girlfriend Experience: Love in a Cold Climate

Early in the first episode of The Girlfriend Experience, Christine (Riley Keough) briefly describes how to please prospective clients and benefactors. “You just say their own words back to them,” she tells a friend, flatly. “It’s what they want.”

In that moment, she’s attending a job fair at her law school, and explaining why she’s spent so much time memorizing obscure medical-product jargon (so she can recite it to the recruiters looking for interns and persuade them how passionate she is about their painfully boring work). But the statement could just as easily apply to Christine’s philosophy regarding another job she’s mulling by the end of the episode: high-class escort. Ostensibly, The Girlfriend Experience (named for the customized, extremely expensive service Christine provides) is a show about a young woman pursuing a career path in the highest echelons of sex work, but really it’s an examination of the human desire for power, which looks remarkably similar as it manifests in boardrooms and bedrooms throughout the series.

The show is executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, and based on his 2009 indie film of the same name, which notably starred the adult-film actress Sasha Grey in the role of Christine. That movie, set in New York as the financial crisis of 2008 was beginning to percolate, was fixated on money, and used Grey’s character (also named Christine, and also known to her clients as “Chelsea”) as a lens through which to consider the pursuit of wealth. The TV series shares much of the movie’s sense of anxiety, as well as an aesthetic obsession with the trappings of the very rich, rendered in sterile, glossy high definition (there are scenes upon scenes of hotel suites and expense-account restaurants, filtered in Soderberghian blues and grays). But its primary currency is distinct. Keough’s Chelsea, struggling with debt at the beginning of the series, certainly profits from her new career, but the fulfillment it gives her seems to be harder to quantify.

Soderberg has described Christine as a superhero, and the debut season of The Girlfriend Experience functions remarkably well as an origin story (girl discovers her powers, girl struggles to master those powers, girl battles antagonists and quickly ends up out of her depth). In the first few episodes it’s far from clear how she feels about the profession she’s eyeing, and in many ways she seems passively swept along by a handful of women looking to profit from her. Her friend from law school, Avery (Kate Lyn Sheil), is staying in a McMansion owned by a vastly wealthy married man; Avery invites Christine to join them for drinks with another male friend, then hands her an envelope full of cash in the ladies’ room. “You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to,” Avery adds, but Christine’s face as she’s left alone with her date is a picture of internal conflict.

Later, Avery introduces Christine to her booker, Jacqueline (Alexandra Castillo), who sets Christine up with a photographer, and provides the security deposit for a luxurious apartment Christine will have to work to pay for. There are initially hints that she’s being unwittingly trapped, but it becomes obvious instead that she’s found her calling. Christine’s detached efficiency—the quality that makes her a capable intern at the law firm she works at by day—leads her to build a stable of well-paying regulars whom she keeps notes about on her BlackBerry, and whom she’s able to fascinate with her languid detachment.

This being a premium-cable show, there are plenty of scenes featuring “Chelsea” in bed with her clients. But the series is equally compelled to portray the intricacies of a seemingly tedious patent dispute being handled by her law firm, Kirkland & Allen, and by her shark of a boss, David (Paul Sparks). It later emerges that a female partner at the firm (Mary-Lynn Rajskub) has slept with a client to keep an account, prompting viewers to consider whether Christine is in fact just an honest player in a very complicated game. More to the point, it’s obvious that being an escort gratifies her on more than one level.

This isn’t a Pretty Woman-style fantasy of a lovable naif redeemed by a cynical man, nor is it a glamorous portrait of an age-old profession.

Keough’s Christine is fascinatingly inscrutable, and the 26-year-old actress (Elvis’s granddaughter, incidentally) carries the series with her chilly poise and enigmatic composure. The show, written and directed by Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, offers no exposition whatsoever, rather following Christine from scene to scene and only occasionally abandoning her when plot necessitates it. But the show’s 30-minute episodes (rare among dramas) benefit from brevity—there’s little of the sagginess that tends to plague many streaming series—and it makes for compulsive viewing. (Starz is making all 13 episodes available to subscribers on Sunday, April 10, then airing one each Sunday for the duration of the season.)

Christine herself is a cipher perhaps because not even she knows quite who she is or what she wants; it’s strongly hinted that she might lack normal levels of humanity, even though she’s strangely loyal to Avery and has a photo of her and her mom on her cellphone’s homescreen. “I just don’t enjoy spending time with people,” she tells her sister, a district attorney, at dinner. “I find it a waste of time, and it makes me anxious ... I don’t have the same kinds of feelings or reactions about the way things are supposed to be.” One of her clients jokingly refers to her as “a female Ted Bundy.”

But does that make her a sociopath, or does it make her honest? The series declines to answer. Nor does it offer a moral framework within which to judge her, given that her clients are mostly married men whom it’s far easier to condemn. Christine looks a lot like a wide-eyed ingenue (Dakota Johnson in 50 Shades of Grey comes to mind as an obvious doppelganger), but she’s infinitely more astute—when she kisses her first client, she indeed keeps her eyes open. This isn’t a Pretty Woman-style fantasy of a lovable naif redeemed by a cynical man, nor is it just a glamorous portrait of an age-old profession: In one scene, Christine’s portly older client explains that he’s keeping his socks on because of a nasty foot fungus. Instead it’s very much a tale of empowerment, but a particular kind that presumably very few viewers will want to emulate.

Great News For Wolverines, and a Lashing For U.S. Fish and Wildlife

The wolverine––also called the mountain devil, the quickhatch, the carcajou, the skunk bear––is a cantankerous, and sometimes vicious animal about the size of a small labrador retriever. It is the largest land dweller in the weasel family, and an an odd fit to be at the vanguard in the debate of how climate change threatens animals and what should be done about it.

In the lower 48 states, there are believed to be only some 300 wolverines left, and the Rocky Mountains are one of their few remaining American homes. Snow there has been thinning, which researchers blame on climate change. So in 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed the animal receive threatened status under the Endangered Species Act, saying that “climate warming over the next century is likely to significantly reduce wolverine habitat,” and that without interventions its survival “is in doubt.”

Then in 2014, the agency backtracked on its proposed decision, calling the science it’d used inconclusive. Conservationists filed a lawsuit against the reversal, arguing Fish and Wildlife had ignored solid scientific data. Backing the agency were snowmobile associations, farmers, the states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, as well as oil and fracking companies.

On Monday, Chief Judge Dana L. Christensen of the U.S. District Court for Montana handed down an 80-page—and at times harsh—judgment in favor of the conservationists. Christensen ordered Fish and Wildlife to reconsider its position, saying the agency had “unlawfully ignored the best available science by dismissing the threat to the wolverine” due to “immense political pressure.”

“The reality is that, in some instances, species conservation is a political issue as much as it is a scientific one,” Christensen wrote in his decision.

The court’s decision is a major victory for conservationists on two levels. Not only have environmental groups tried to get the animal listed for 20 years, but the status would set a sort of Endangered Species Act precedent. Listing the wolverine would show that animals at risk of extinction because of climate change––however tangentially–– deserve protection that comes with the federal listing.

It’s not unusual that industry and the states that profit from them should side against listing an animal under the Endangered Species Act. Big Industry is often loathe to support an animal’s listing, because that means more regulation. A similar battle played out with the greater sage grouse, a wild bird the size of a chicken that lives among the West’s grasslands and sage––prime fracking territory. In the grouse’s case, it was not granted protection.

For wolverines, the debate came down to the animal’s dependency on snowpack, and whether or not climate change posed a significant enough threat to snow levels to risk the animal’s future.

Wolverines live in the world’s northern hemisphere, in boreal forests and alpine tundra. It is a solitary animal, and one male may mark off a territory up to 600-square miles (half the size of Rhode Island), breeding with several females in its range. Those females raise their children in the spring, in the heavy snowpack, sometimes no lower than 8,000 feet high in the mountain peaks.

A strong and sometimes deceptively fierce animal, the wolverine weighs around 40 pounds, but can claw and gnash down an elk, and even fight off wolves and bears. Specialized to live in high, arid, and freezing climates, it has wide flat feet like snow shoes, and its fur is frost resistant, which made it prized among trappers. Early hunting by trappers, as well as their inclination to be loners, has made them a fragmented and isolated animal, one with a small population poorly adapted to survive in today’s ever-anthropocentric world.

Fish and Wildlife argued the science around snowpack decline was still shaky, and that because there’s a debate about why wolverine mothers den in snow, knowing how the species would react to the loss of snow would be impossible. Thus, the agency’s argument went, climate change’s impact on wolverines is unknowable. More specifically, the agency questioned the findings of a study––one it admitted was the most sophisticated on the subject––that predicted huge declines in future wolverine populations because of climate change.

As support for their argument, the agency’s Mountain-Prairie regional director, Noreen Walsh, also submitted a memo full of research contrary to conservationist thought that’d been collected by one of the agency’s regional assistant directors, Stephen Torbit. But the judge wasn’t having it. “The Court views Torbit's comments as nothing more than an unpublished, unreviewed, personal opinion, elicited by Walsh in the eleventh hour to back fill her foregone conclusion to withdraw the Proposed Rule,” Christensen wrote.

Fish and Wildlife director Dan Ashe said he could not “disagree more strongly” with the judge, adding that he’d made “a sweeping statement about political interference for which there is not a shred of evidence.”

Christensen agreed with the plaintiff’s argument that snowpack decline at high elevations would have a huge impact on wolverines. He even went as far to write that wolverines require snow to reproduce. When it came to the Fish and Wildlife questioning that point because science had not proven what part snow played in the denning process, he said their logic “borders on the absurd––if evidence shows that wolverines need snow for denning purposes, and the best available science projects a loss of snow as a result of climate where and when wolverines den, then what sense does it make to deny that climate change is a threat to the wolverine simply because research has yet to prove exactly why wolverines need snow for denning?” The emphasis was his.

In his conclusion, Christensen called Fish and Wildlife’s reversal “arbitrary and capricious.”

If the wolverine is deemed threatened by the agency, it could open the gates for other animals to win similar status based on climate-change claims. The label would be further evidence that humans, in their pursuits to profit from the land, have irreversibly altered it, and consequently that wolverines are worse off for it––to the point that they deserve special legal protection.

A White House Concession on Fast and Furious

Remember Fast and Furious? No, not the series of vehicle-themed Vin Diesel and Rock vehicles. The bizarre “gunwalking” scandal, in which the ATF let straw buyers purchase guns to traffic to Mexico, but intercept the firearms before they reached Mexico, snagging criminals.

It's been mostly out of the news for the last four years, but on Friday, the White House announced it would drop claims of executive privilege and turn over a cache of documents to Congress related to Fast and Furious, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein first reported. The decision follows a court defeat in January for the Obama administration. Gerstein explains:

In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not turn down Obama's privilege assertion on the merits. Instead, she said authorized public disclosures about the operation in a Justice Department inspector general report essentially mooted the administration's drive to keep the records secret.

Related Story

Eric Holder, Contempt of Congress, and Fast and Furious: What You Need to Know

That’s the latest round in an ongoing battle between the White House and congressional Republicans over the operation. Almost inevitably, Fast and Furious was a fiasco. It didn’t snag any big fish, and the ATF lost track of 2,000 guns, including two that were found after the 2010 murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The dispute is not over whether Fast and Furious failed, but over who is to blame. The Obama administration and the Department of Justice pinned the blame on the local ATF office in Phoenix. Republicans suggested that higher-ups—including the Attorney General Eric Holder or even President Obama—might have known.

The two sides engaged in an increasingly tense standoff in the summer of 2012, right in the heat of the presidential campaign and Obama’s election bid. The House Oversight and Government Committee demanded documents from the administration. The White House refused, saying that it had already turned over enough material and made Holder available for hearings. Obama granted Holder the right to invoke executive privilege, infuriating the committee’s Republicans. In an unprecedented move, the House held Holder in contempt, the first time a sitting attorney general had been chastised in that way.

Now, nearly four years later, the story is back in the news. The scandal has lost its political intrigue—Obama is in the home stretch of his presidency, and Holder left the administration last year. But perhaps the documents will finally allow a clear picture of whether there was a vast conspiracy to cover up Fast and Furious or whether, as the White House insists, this was only ever the story of a few rogue agents.

The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet

The 2016 presidential election could be the most scandal-plagued match-up since James Blaine’s allegedly corrupt business deals squared off against Grover Cleveland’s alleged illegitimate child in 1884. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is poised to win the nomination, bringing with her a train-car’s worth of baggage. But the Republican front-runner is at least as saddled with controversy as Clinton is—and while many of the Clinton cases involve suspicion and shadowy links, many of Trump’s are fully documented in court cases and legal proceedings.

The breadth of Trump’s controversies is truly yuge, ranging from allegations of mafia ties to unscrupulous business dealings, and from racial discrimination to alleged marital rape. The stretch over more than four decades, from the mid-1970s to the present day. To catalogue the full sweep of allegations would require thousands of words and lump together the trivial with the truly scandalous. Including business deals that have simply failed, without any hint of impropriety, would require thousands more. This is a snapshot of some of the most interesting and largest of those scandals.

Racial Housing Discrimination

Where and when: New York City, 1973-1975

The dirt: The Department of Justice sued Trump and his father Fred in 1973 for housing discrimination at 39 sites around New York. “The government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,’” The New York Times reported. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.” Trump called the accusations “absolutely ridiculous.”

The upshot: The Trumps hired attorney Roy Cohn, who had worked for Joe McCarthy and whom Michael Kinsley once indelibly labeled “innocent of a variety of federal crimes.” They sued the Justice Department for $100 million. In the end, however, the Trumps settled with the government, promising not to discriminate and submitting to regular review by the New York Urban League—though crucially not admitting guilt.

Read more: The New York Times, The Washington Post

Mafia Ties

Where and when: New York and Atlantic City, 1970s- ?

The dirt: Trump has been linked to the mafia many times over the years, with varying degrees of closeness. Many of the connections seem to be the sorts of interactions with mobsters that were inevitable for a guy in the construction and casino businesses at the time. For example, organized crime controlled the 1980s New York City concrete business, so that anyone building in the city likely brushed up against it. While Trump has portrayed himself as an unwitting participant, not everyone agrees. There have been a string of other allegations, too, many reported by investigative journalist Wayne Barrett. Cohn, Trump’s lawyer, also represented the Genovese crime family boss Tony Salerno. Barrett also reported a series of transactions involving organized crime, and alleged that Trump paid twice market rate to a mob figure for the land under Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Michael Isikoff has also reported that Trump was close to Robert LiButti, an associate of John Gotti, inviting him on his yacht and helicopter. In one case, Trump’s company bought LiButti nine luxury cars.

The upshot: Though Trump has been questioned in court or under oath about the ties, he’s never been convicted of anything. A New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement report after Barrett’s 1992 book on Trump generally found no mafia-related wrong-doing on Trump’s part. Trump Plaza was fined $200,000 for keeping black employees away from LiButti’s table, at his behest, and for the gift of the cars, though Trump personally was not penalized.

Read more: Wayne Barrett, Michael Isikoff, Time

Trump University

Where and when: 2005-2010, online

The dirt: In 2005, the Trump announced an eponymous “university” to teach his real-estate development secrets. Students ponied up as much as $35,000—some after being suckered in by slick free “seminars”—to learn how to get rich. One ad promised they would “learn from Donald Trump’s handpicked instructors, and that participants would have access to Trump’s real estate ‘secrets.’” In fact, Trump had little to do with the curriculum or the instructors. Many of the “students” have since complained that Trump U. was a scam. At one time, it had some prestigious instructors, but over time the “faculty” became a motley bunch of misfits. (It was also never really a “university” by any definition, and it changed its name to the “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative,” because as it happened, the school was violating New York law by operating without an educational license.)

The upshot: The school shut down in 2010, but the litigation continues. New York is suing Trump, alleging the Trump U. bilked students out of $40 million. He’s also the subject of two class-action suits in California. Meanwhile, Trump appears to have been trying to intimidate plaintiffs, including countersuing one for $1 million (a favorite Trump litigation tactic) and refusing to let her withdraw from the suit. (The countersuit was thrown out.) His lawyers have cited positive reviews, but former students say they were pressured to give those.

Read more: Tom McNichol, Steven Brill, National Review

Tenant Intimidation

Where and when: New York City, 1982-1986

The scoop: In 1981, Trump scooped up a building on Central Park South, reasoning that the existing structure was a dump, but the land it was on would be a great place for luxury condos. Trump’s problem was that the existing tenants were—understandably and predictably—unwilling to let go of their rent-controlled apartments on Central Park. Trump used every trick in the book to get them out. He tried to reverse exceptions the previous landlord had given to knock down walls, threatening eviction. Tenants said he cut off heat and hot water. Building management refused to make repairs; two tenants swore in court that mushrooms grew on their carpet from a leak. Perhaps Trump’s most outlandish move was to place newspaper ads offering to house homeless New Yorkers in empty units—since, as Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal, he didn’t intend to fill units with permanent residents anyway. City officials turned him down, saying the idea did not seem appropriate. Typically, Trump also sued tenants for $150 million when they complained.

The upshot: Trump gave in. He settled with tenants and agreed to monitoring. The building still stands today, and his son Eric owns a unit on the top floor.

Read more: Trump himself, CNN Money, The Washington Post

The Four Bankruptcies

Where and when: 1991, 1992, 2004, 2009

The dirt: Four times in his career, Trump’s companies have entered bankruptcy.

In the late 1980s, after insisting that his major qualification to build a new casino in Atlantic City was that he wouldn’t need to use junk bonds, Trump used junk bonds to build Trump Taj Mahal. He built the casino, but couldn’t keep up with interest payments, so his company declared bankruptcy in 1991. He had to sell his yacht, his airline, and half his ownership in the casino.
A year later, another of Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, the Trump Plaza, went bust after losing more than $550 million. Trump gave up his stake but otherwise insulated himself personally from losses, and managed to keep his CEO title, even though he surrendered any salary or role in day-to-day operations. By the time all was said and done, he had some $900 million in personal debt.
Trump bounced back over the following decade, but by 2004, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts was $1.8 billion in debt. The company filed for bankruptcy and emerged as Trump Entertainment Resorts. Trump himself was the chairman of the new company, but he no longer had a controlling stake in it.
Five years later, after the real-estate collapse, Trump Entertainment Resorts once again went bankrupt. Trump resigned from the board, but the company retained his name. In 2014, he successfully sued to take his name off the company and its casinos—one of which had already closed, and the other of which was near closing.

The upshot: Trump is very touchy about any implication that he personally declared bankruptcy, arguing—just as he explains away his campaign contributions to Democrats—that he’s just playing the game: “We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. We’ll use those. But they were never personal. This is nothing personal. You know, it’s like on The Apprentice. It’s not personal. It’s just business. Okay? If you look at our greatest people, Carl Icahn with TWA and so many others. Leon Black, Linens-n-Things and others. Henry Kravis. A lot of ‘em, everybody. But with me it’s ‘Oh, you did—’ this is a business thing. I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt.”

Read more: The Washington Post, William Cohan

The Undocumented Polish Workers

Where and when: New York City, 1980

The dirt: In order to construct his signature Trump Tower, the builder first had to demolish the Bonwit Teller store, an architecturally beloved Art Deco edifice. The work had to be done fast, and so managers hired 200 undocumented Polish workers to tear it down, paying them substandard wages for backbreaking work—$5 per hour, when they were paid at all. The workers didn’t wear hard hats and often slept at the site. When the workers complained about their back pay, they were allegedly threatened with deportation. Trump said he was unaware that illegal immigrants were working at the site.

The upshot: In 1991, a federal judge found Trump and other defendants guilty of conspiring to avoid paying union pension and welfare contributions for the workers. The decision was appealed, with partial victories for both sides, and ultimately settled privately in 1999. In a February GOP debate, Marco Rubio brought up the story to accuse Trump of hypocrisy in his stance on illegal immigration.

Read more: Michael Daly, The New York Times

Alleged Marital Rape

Where and when: New York City, 1989

The dirt: While married to Ivana Trump, Donald Trump became angry at her—according to a book by Harry Hurt, over a painful scalp-reduction surgery—and allegedly forcibly had sex with her. Ivana Trump said during a deposition in their divorce case that she “felt violated” and that her husband had raped her. Later, Ivana Trump released a statement saying: “During a deposition given by me in connection with my matrimonial case, I stated that my husband had raped me. [O]n one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

The upshot: When The Daily Beast reported on the incident, Trump’s right-hand man Michael Cohen threatened reporters and claimed—incorrectly—that a man cannot legally rape his wife. The case is one of several cases where Trump has been accused of misogyny, including his comments about Megyn Kelly early in the primary campaign or his fury at a lawyer who, during a deposition, asked for a break to pump breast milk. “You’re disgusting,” Trump said, and walked out. (Wayne Barrett collects some lowlights here.)

Read more: The Daily Beast

Breaking Casino Rules

Where and when: New York and New Jersey, various

The dirt: Trump has been repeatedly fined for breaking rules related to his operation of casinos. In 1990, with Trump Taj Mahal in trouble, Trump’s father Fred strolled in and bought 700 chips worth a total of $3.5 million. The purchase helped the casino pay debt that was due, but because Fred Trump had no plans to gamble, the New Jersey gaming commission ruled that it was a loan that violated operating rules. Trump paid a $30,000 fine; in the end, the loan didn’t prevent a bankruptcy the following year. As noted above, New Jersey also fined Trump $200,000 for arranging to keep black employees away from mafioso Robert LiButti’s gambling table. In 1991, the Casino Control Commission fined Trump’s company another $450,000 for buying LiButti nine luxury cars. And in 2000, Trump was fined $250,000 for breaking New York state law in lobbying to prevent an Indian casino from opening in the Catskills, for fear it would compete against his Atlantic City casinos.

The upshot: Trump admitted no wrongdoing in the New York case. He’s now out of the casino business.

Antitrust Violations

Where and when: New Jersey, 1986

The dirt: In 1986, Trump decided he wanted to expand his casino empire in Atlantic City. His plan was to mount a hostile takeover of two casino companies, Holiday and Bally. Trump started buying up stock in the companies with an eye toward gaining control. But Bally realized what was going on and sued him for antitrust violations. “Trump hopes to wrest control of Bally from its public shareholders without paying them the control premium they otherwise could command had they been adequately informed of Trump's intentions,” the company argued.

The upshot: Trump gave up the attempt in 1987, but the Federal Trade Commission fined him $750,000 for failing to disclose his purchases of stock in the two companies, which exceeded minimum disclosure levels.

Condo Hotel Shenanigans

Where and when: New York, Florida, Mexico, mid-2000s

The dirt: Trump was heavily involved in condo hotels, a pre-real-estate crash fixation in which people would buy units that they’d only use for a portion of the year. The rest of the time, the units would be rented out as hotel rooms, with the developer and the owner sharing the profit. For a variety of reasons, condo hotels turned out to be a terrible idea. The result has been a slew of lawsuits by condo buyers who claim they were bilked. Central to many of these is the question of what Trump’s role in the projects was. In recent years, Trump has often essentially sold his name rights to developers—he gets a payoff, and they get the aura of luxury his name imparts. But in some of the condo-hotel suits, , only to realize he was barely involved. (Similar complaints have been made about his involvement in a multilevel marketing scheme.)

The upshot: In the case of Trump SoHo, in Manhattan, Trump’s partners turned out to have a lengthy criminal past. Trump said he didn’t know that, but—atypically—settled a lawsuit with buyers (while, typically, not admitting any wrongdoing). Another, Trump International Hotel & Tower Fort Lauderdale, went into foreclosure, and Trump has sued the complex’s developer. In 2013, he settled a suit with prospective buyers who lost millions when a development in Baja Mexico went under. Trump blamed the developers again, saying he had only licensed his name.

Read more: Los Angeles Times, , ibid., The Wall Street Journal

Corey Lewandowski

Where and when: Jupiter, Florida, 2016

The dirt: Trump picked Corey Lewandowski to manage his campaign, despite a relatively short resume. For a long time, that seemed to work well for both—Trump soared to the lead in GOP polls. But Lewandowski hit a rough patch in early March. As Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields tried to ask Trump a question after a press conference, Lewandowski reached out and wrenched her out of the way. Lewandowski and Trump insisted the incident had never happened and that Fields was “delusional,” even though witnesses attested to having seen it.

The upshot: Surveillance footage acquired by Jupiter Police from Trump National, site of the press conference, clearly showed what had happened. Lewandowski has been charged with battery. Trump has said he may have been the one in danger, since Fields’s pen could have been a bomb.

Suing Journalist Tim O’Brien for Libel

Where and when: New York City, 2006-2009

The dirt: In 2005, then-New York Times reporter Tim O’Brien published the book TrumpNation, in which he reported that Trump was actually only worth $150-250 million, not the billions he claimed. Trump, incensed, sued O’Brien for $5 billion. (That’s one way to become a billionaire.)

The upshot: Trump’s suit against O'Brien was tossed. More recently, O’Brien has mocked Trump’s current claims about his net worth. Trump, meanwhile, has said on the campaign trail—and, mindblowingly, in an interview with the Washington Post editorial board—that he wants to make it easier to sue for libel.

Read more: O’Brien’s original report, O’Brien in 2015, William Cohan

Catastrophe: The Realest Rom-Com

The traditional rom-com formula goes, basically, like this: Couple meets; couple likes each other; couple also sort of hates each other; couple, soon enough, comes to love each other; couple, however, has an impediment that presents a challenge to them being together; couple overcomes that impediment to live, according to their respective rom-coms’ definition of “happy,” happily ever after. The specifics will vary, of course, but the implied ending, and upshot, of the whole thing is marriage, or a version of it. Most rom-coms leave their audiences to assume that, given the ups and downs of the courtship in question—the love shared and the difficulties overcome, often at an airport—the union will be blissful. Happily ever after is an aspiration, maybe, but it’s also an assumption.

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Catastrophe, the Amazon show now entering its second season, is technically a rom-com—it is a comedy that deals with romance—but it’s one that thoroughly subverts that now-tired, old formula. Most obviously, it takes out all of the lead-up to the happily ever after by preventing its characters from having any kind of courtship at all. In season one, Sharon Morris (Sharon Horgan), an Irish school teacher, and Rob Morris (Rob Delaney), an American advertising exec, meet in a bar while he’s in London for a business trip. They have a great fling. But: That fling ends in a pregnancy, and they’re both in their 40s, and they really like each other, if they don’t yet fully love each other, and Rob likes London, and doesn’t really like Boston, and so they decide to stay together and give it a go as a family. They get married.

Underpinning all the comedy—and Catastrophe offers much to laugh at; it is perhaps one of the most cleverly and subtly written sitcoms currently on offer—is, from the very beginning, a sense of anxiety. Can these two make it, really? Can a relationship that begins in this haphazard way survive the various romantic inconveniences of Real Life? In an era of algorithmic matching and years-long courtships and years-longer searches for The One, can two people whose fates collided by way of their genes really make it as married couple, with all of marriage’s ups and downs?

The challenge the couple faces is not, per the formulaic edicts of the traditional rom-com, one big one; it is the accumulation of the small.

Basically: Is their relationship evidence of serendipity, or of, indeed, catastrophe?

The show’s first season gets much of its dramatic pathos from those questions, and the second season—with, remarkably, even more subtlety, and frankness, and wit—does the same. Now, though, the tensions are sharper, because they don’t just involve Sharon and Rob; they involve the two new people their union has created. The show’s six new episodes start with Sharon and Rob—having had their son, Frankie, prematurely, three years before—preparing for the birth of their second child, a girl. (Later episodes will get a lot of comedic mileage out of the fact that the couple give her a traditionally Irish name—Muireann—whose Celtic diphthong none of the show’s American characters, the girl’s father included, is able to pronounce.)

And things, for the most part, are going well for Sharon and Rob! They’re parents. (Not just to Frankie and Muireann, but to a dog whose presence they seem to tolerate rather than appreciate.) They’re living in a lovely, eclectically decorated house. They have wacky friends and trying families, yes—Sharon’s father is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s; Rob’s mother (Carrie Fisher) resents his marriage and, seemingly, his children—but for the most part, the two people who randomly met in that bar in London are still very much in love.

The question, though, is whether that’s enough. One of the accomplishments of the new season is to suggest that the daily trials of marriage might be too much even for a pair who have the kind of obvious chemistry that Sharon and Rob do. While season one presented the couple with One Big Challenge, season two offers diffusive difficulties: Sharon, missing her job while she’s on maternity leave; Rob, hating his but feeling obligated, as the family’s breadwinner, to keep it; Sharon, dealing with the slow-burning fear that she won’t love her daughter as much as she loves her son; Rob’s alcoholism; their families, who are by turns demanding and uncaring; their small group of friends, who are the same; their differing levels of interest in postpartum sex; all of these amounting to a looming threat of infidelity.

There are other, smaller things, too—small fissures that threaten to accumulate into cracks that can break the whole, tenuous thing. Sharon never opens the mail when it comes. Rob doesn’t like the way they’ve celebrated their anniversary. Neither much likes their dog. And also: As new parents, they’re exhausted all the time. They’re threatened with money troubles. They don’t get a lot of emotional support outside of their relationship with each other. (In one particularly well-realized series of scenes, Sharon undergoes that most modern of humiliations: being dumped by a friend.) Sharon is sometimes kind of rude to their babysitter. Etc.

What all this amounts to is a continuation of what made the show’s first season so remarkable: its insistent frankness. Its remarkable subtlety. And, above all, its realness. Horgan and Delaney, who are both married (to other people) with children, write the show as well as star in it, and Catastrophe reflects that synergy. With the result that, instead of the shininess and fuzziness of the traditional rom-com, the show offers a grittier—but much more charming, and much more relatable—vision of what romance is all about. Catastrophe is a rom-com that finds its “com” in the daily doings of marriage that are not traditionally explored on TV and film. A romantic trip to Paris, not long after Muireann’s birth, is nearly ruined when Sharon forgets her breast pump. (“My tits hurt!” she moans, when they’re having dinner at nice restaurant.) Sharon, at one point, complains about her husband, “All Rob does is get me pregnant. What are we, farmers?” During Muireann’s birth, Sharon asks Rob, “Oh no, am I shitting myself now?” (He replies, gallantly: “Barely!”)

In one particularly well-realized series of scenes, Sharon undergoes that most modern of humiliations: being dumped by a friend.

The emphasis on marriage’s mundanities is by design. “We wanted the characters to have real problems, not sitcom problems,” Horgan recently told The Evening Standard. And the show’s new season accomplishes that. The challenge the couple faces are the accumulations of the daily ups and downs—the kindnesses and slights, large and small—that together constitute marriage.

And for Sharon and Rob, the thing that has proven, again and again, to be their saving grace—the thing that has kept Sharon and Rob together so far, and also the thing that has kept their show so consistently engrossing—is the exceptional rapport they have with each other. It’s a question, at the end, how much saving that chemistry can do. But it is, for the moment, the thing that allows everything else they share—their blunt honesty, their wry humor, their ability to fight one moment and cuddle the next—to make sense. The two, toward the end of Catastrophe’s new season, have a blunt conversation about infidelity. Rob asks Sharon whether she’s cheated on him. She laughs and replies, “Are you kidding? I can’t show this fanny to anyone. It’s got all this scar tissue. I don’t even want to look at it.”

She pauses, and then delivers a line that, in the context of the show, is possibly the most romantic thing she could say, at that moment, to the man she has, against all odds, built a life with: “The only person I can show this fanny to is you.”

Brussels Attacks: Arrests in Belgium

Updated on April 8 at 3:55 p.m. ET

Belgian prosecutors say among those arrested Friday was Mohamed Abrini, a suspect in the Paris attacks of November. But they wouldn’t confirm—as Belgian state-run broadcaster RTBF and others are reporting—if Abrini is the “man in the hat,” the third attacker last month at Zaventem airport.

Prosecutors also said at a news conference Friday that of the several men arrested in Belgium one is being investigated in connection with the attack on the Brussels metro.

On Thursday, Belgian federal police released new video of the third attacker:

Have you seen the 3rd attacker of Brussels Airport during his escape? https://t.co/XbIevWS1qB #brusselsattack pic.twitter.com/d9pWM7mzdc

— Police Fédérale (@PolFed_presse) April 7, 2016

If Belgian media’s reporting that Abrini, the Paris suspect, and the “man in the hat” are the same person is accurate, then it would add another piece of evidence linking the attacks in Paris and Brussels and point to ISIS’s apparent ease at striking Europe’s major cities.