Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 197

How Much Does Bernie Sanders Know About Policy?

There’s little doubting Bernie Sanders’s core political convictions—he’s been saying the same things for decades, with remarkable consistency. But turning convictions into policy is the challenge, and the Vermont senator’s interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News raises some questions about his policy chops.

Throughout his interview, Sanders seemed taken aback when he was pressed on policy—and not just on the matters that are peripheral to his approach, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or interrogation of detainees, but even on bread-and-butter matters like breaking up the big banks, the Democratic presidential hopeful came across as tentative, unprepared, or unaware.

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Bernie in the Bronx

It’s striking that there hasn’t been more coverage of Sanders’s policy ideas so far during the campaign, even at this late date, with most of the primary season concluded. He’s even acquired a reputation as something of a wonk, the kind of guy who eschews soaring rhetoric for dry nuts and bolts on the stump—and gets people to love him anyway. The gaps uncovered by the Daily News are not just about pragmatism. (There have, of course, been plenty of accusations, not least from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that Sanders is offering a deeply unrealistic program. He tends to answer that they fail to grasp that he is building a political revolution.) The question here is not how Sanders would enact policies, but what those policies would be. If the Sanders campaign has shied away from deep dives into policy, this interview might be why: The candidate reveals himself as a far defter diagnostician than clinician.

The most glaring example came early in the encounter, during a discussion of the problem of “too big to fail” banks. There is disagreement among economists on the left over how important, if at all, it is to break up large financial institutions. The board granted Sanders’s argument and asked him how he’d do it, producing an excruciating cat-and-mouse game:

Daily News: Okay. Well, let's assume that you're correct on that point. How do you go about doing it?

Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.

Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?

Sanders: Well, I don't know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.

Daily News: How? How does a President turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the Treasury turn to any of those banks and say, "Now you must do X, Y and Z?"

Sanders: Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, make that determination.

Daily News: You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?

Sanders: Yeah. Well, I believe you do.

The conversation detoured sideways a bit, as the board asked about what would happen to employees and investors in big banks and Sanders said, not unfairly, that it wasn’t his problem. But then it was back to how to break up the banks, and Sanders still couldn’t offer a coherent answer:

Daily News: Well, it does depend on how you do it, I believe. And, I'm a little bit confused because just a few minutes ago you said the U.S. President would have authority to order...

Sanders: No, I did not say we would order. I did not say that we would order. The President is not a dictator.

Daily News: Okay. You would then leave it to JPMorgan Chase or the others to figure out how to break it, themselves up. I'm not quite...

Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.

Daily News: Okay. You saw, I guess, what happened with Metropolitan Life. There was an attempt to bring them under the financial regulatory scheme, and the court said no. And what does that presage for your program?

Sanders: It's something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.

The interview is full of vague comments like that one. For example, Sanders complains that executives implicated in the financial crisis haven’t been prosecuted. A board member asked him whether there are actually laws that could have nailed them. “I suspect that there are. Yes,” Sanders answered.

Daily News: You believe that? But do you know?

Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don't. But if I would...yeah, that's what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that's illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives.

Daily News: I'm only pressing because you've made it such a central part of your campaign. And I wanted to know what the mechanism would be to accomplish it.

Rather than learning the mechanism, the questioner earned a lecture about how Wall Street is built on fraud, since Sanders is comfortable talking about why he doesn’t approve of Wall Street’s M.O.

Sanders is the candidate of first principles. That’s a phenomenon that’s been on display repeatedly during the Democratic debates, especially on matters of foreign policy. On the one hand, there’s Hillary Clinton, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East, but also backed the war in Iraq, thus botching the most important foreign-policy decision since Vietnam. On the other hand, there’s Sanders, whose answers about the Middle East are often opaque—see his call for a “Muslim army” to defeat ISIS—but whose gut led him to the correct decision on Iraq. Democratic voters may have to choose whether they prefer Clinton’s poor judgment or Sanders’s ignorance.

The latter was on display at the Daily News during an exchange about the peace process. Could he describe the pullback of Israeli settlements in the West Bank he has encouraged? No: “I'm not going to run the Israeli government. I've got enough problems trying to be a United States senator or maybe President of the United States.”

A moment later, he was asked why he didn’t support Palestinians using the International Criminal Court to try to prosecute Israeli leaders. “Look, why don't I support a million things in the world? I'm just telling you that I happen to believe,” the exasperated senator replied.

That’s just the problem, though. It’s important for leaders to know what they believe in, and Sanders has been unusually consistent and forthright about that. But Sanders isn’t running for chief ideologue—he’s running for chief executive, and so it’s also important for him to know what policies he would use to turn those beliefs into practice.

Allen Iverson’s Crossover Appeal

If I close my eyes, I can still picture it, as vivid as day. The defender pulls up his shorts and enters a crouch, his arms stretching seven feet from Allen Iverson’s ankle to the passing lane to the right. Then, too quick to even notice, Iverson feints left and stops on a dime, putting the defender off balance for just a millisecond. By the time the defender is back in position, with his weight now on his left foot, Iverson does it. A lightning-fast hesitation move from left to right with the ball as far out as he can stretch turns the defender in the wrong direction. By the time he recovers, Iverson is already in his shooting motion. Pure.

That night in 1997 was the night I became an Allen Iverson fan. The six-foot-nothing rookie guard with the beginnings of a lollipop ‘fro that would soon become a maze of crop-circle zigzag cornrows couldn’t will his Philadelphia 76ers to a win, even with a 37-point barrage. But what he did to that defender, Michael Jordan, the greatest player of all time, made the box score an afterthought. He had done the impossible. He had made God bleed.

19 years later, Iverson was canonized in the same vaunted halls as some of the other basketball Goliaths he’d made fall. Along with a class of NBA giants including Shaquille O’Neal and Yao Ming, Iverson was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame yesterday. But with that induction comes a reflection. Perhaps more than any player––including Michael Jordan and LeBron James––Iverson has been at the center of a culture war that still consumes the sport.

I remember the first name brand pair of basketball shoes I owned. My grandmother, on a clandestine mission to skirt strict orders from my father, took me to the mall in her silver Cadillac. The display case at the front of the store had them, a puffy pair of white and red sneakers with thick air-filled bubbles in the heels. They were Iverson’s signature shoes, the title “Question” a play on one of his nicknames, “The Answer.” I begged my grandmother to buy me a pair, and even though the only pair available was two sizes too big, I packed them in my bag with a sock stuffed inside each shoe so I could change into them at school away from my father’s vigilant eye. And at school I stepped––quite literally––into the Iverson culture war.

“You think you a rapper with them Jordans on?” My gym teacher pointed to my shoes, which I had already explained were Iversons and not Jordans. Like most gym teachers I’ve ever had, he was a burly, brash, drawling white man whom I suspect played football somewhere at some point. He pointed again. “That’s what’s wrong with sports.”

By the time Iverson was drafted in 1996, the short shorts and white socks of basketball past had been replaced.

I don’t remember my response, but I remember my profound feeling of unease, standing there as I was, examined by my white gym teacher in front of mostly white classmates. I’ve loved basketball and hip-hop for as long as I can remember, and the idea that one could be corrupting the other left me with the impossible task of trying to decide which piece of me I loved more.

Basketball itself was wrestling with the same dilemma. Iverson’s rise to fame––and my childhood as a basketball fan––came during a sort of uneasy armistice between the NBA, black culture, and its most evident popular incarnation in hip-hop. Jordan’s marketing came on the wings of hip-hop, and his shoe line has become an integral part of the art’s DNA. By the time Iverson was drafted in 1996, the short shorts and white socks of basketball past had been replaced, Phi Slama Jama alumni were winning rings, and Scoop Jackson was raising hell at SLAM magazine. Hip-hop––some version of it––was very much at the center of basketball and has been since.

But there were lines and taboos that relegated hip-hop expression to its most sanitized form in the NBA. The league’s marketing displayed the popular elements of hip-hop while scrubbing clean much of the racial animus and social commentary that constitute its soul. Basketball was black––but not too black. Jordan’s brand was propelled by hip-hop, but he kept a distance from it himself and maintained a studied sense of apathy toward most cultural issues. The NBA, then as now, steered clear of big social concerns and crises. Party rap was all fun and good, but as more and more musical ground was ceded to hardcore tales of life in the American wastelands, mirroring the country’s obsession with incarceration and violence, the cracks began to show.

Iverson’s generation of artists and athletes represented the first group of black people who had been raised entirely on the phenomenon of hip-hop in all its diverse forms, and their emergence on the scene made those cracks chasms. His contemporaries—Shaq, Kobe, Chris Webber, Ron Artest—all represented some aspect of this new paradigm, but Iverson, with his durags, tattoos, baggy clothes, jewelry, braids, and crossovers, embodied it in a form that couldn’t be denied. It was impossible to pay attention to Iverson and ignore the deep history of poverty and inequality that animated his every step. His flashy superhero alter ego of “AI” was glitzy gold over sandpaper, a facade of panache and pride laid over a foundation of pain. Iverson was the avatar of the tough gristle of black America that the NBA machine couldn’t digest.

Perhaps more than any player, Iverson was at the center of a culture war that still consumes the sport.

The isolation-driven, flashy merger of basketball and hip-hop in streetball showed up in his game, and like many of his peers (and many black youth, including me) he even tried his hand at rapping in 2000. The result was terrible––a profane, misogynistic, homophobic blur of clumsy lines. The NBA was horrified, and pressure from its then-commissioner David Stern got the subsequent album canned. There were other things too. An ugly history of possible domestic abuse and neglect, drinking problems, and money problems. But, as is true for all hip-hop fans, my fanhood of Iverson was a careful, surgical resection of the resplendence from the reprehensible. For me and for many people like me, he was the scowling specter of a secret identity that had to be buried in order to succeed. Despite his considerable and numerous warts, Iverson was an icon to some part of us. Not a role model, but a persona who represented a kind of freedom to be that we may never have.

That freedom had become a full-on liability by 2005. After the infamous “Malice at the Palace,” in which multiple players fought each other and fans in an extended brawl, the league needed to change its image. Lingering unease about the “thuggishness” the NBA promoted via hip-hop spilled onto talk radio. Iverson wasn’t present at the brawl, but in the eyes of many, his presence seemed to hang over it. The subsequent dress code the league passed seemed to be directly targeted at him. No jerseys, no durags, no jewelry. And so the NBA closed the book on Iverson. I felt like it had closed the book on a part of me as well.

That dress code would in some ways hand official ownership of the NBA’s image to LeBron James, who’s been much more socially active than Jordan, but has adopted much of his careful balancing act between owning the PR advantages of hip-hop while keeping his distance from its rougher elements in wider society. The NBA today is a machine, a fully realized version of the American consumerist relationship with black culture. The deep roots of marginalization have tied blackness, basketball, and hip-hop together as tightly as soccer and samba in Brazil’s favelas. And just as soccer federations mine the global sport of poverty and marginalization for immense profit, so the NBA extracts, purifies, and sanitizes black culture and talent for a wider audience. Iverson was the diamond it couldn’t quite polish.

The NBA extracts, purifies, and sanitizes black culture and talent for a wider audience. Iverson was the diamond it couldn’t quite polish.

More than a decade after the NBA unofficially denounced Iverson, his legacy is being reconsidered. Iverson was ostensibly inducted into the Hall for his basketball ability, his prolific scoring, and the way in which he boosted a threadbare Sixers team to the Finals. But the moments I remember most are those that blend sports and culture, and that can’t be so easily quantified. I remember the crossover, the shooting sleeves, the tattoos, the braids, the shoes, the “practice” rant, and the Tyronn Lue stepover more than any game results or last-second winning shots.

Is the enshrinement a validation of the full legacy of Allen Iverson, or––like the current consumerism of the NBA––is it an attempt to digest parts of a phenomenon while ignoring others? Given that Iverson has been granted basketball’s highest honor, it’s a nitpicky question to ask, but it remains a question, nevertheless. Is it possible to celebrate a player—one with no championship rings and a ball-hogging, shot-happy game that history looks on less and less kindly—for what he did without celebrating what he meant?

I ask this as I think back to those games in that middle-school gym. I think we lost most of them; it turns out I am, and have always been, an absolutely awful basketball player. But what I remember most is the joy of emulation and the thrill of defiance. Basketball and hip-hop were my secret gardens, and Allen Iverson highlights watered that garden. There was the electricity of doing what I loved how I loved, a treat stuffed into school days of scouring my language of vernacular and preparing for a public life half-lived. I would reach down and touch my shoes after each game. I’ve always had my answer.

Panama Papers: Iceland’s Prime Minister Resigns

Updated on April 5 at 11:44 a.m. ET

Iceland’s prime minister, faced with massive protests calling for his resignation following revelations about him in the , stepped down Tuesday after President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson declined to immediately dissolve Parliament and pave the way for snap elections.

Ingi Jóhannsson, the minister of agriculture and fishing, told RUV, the broadcaster, that Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson had resigned as prime minister.

Jóhannsson said Gunnlaugsson would remain the chairman of the center-right Progressive Party, and Jóhannsson himself would assume the prime minister’s post. The move still needs the approval of the prime minister’s coalition allies in the Independence Party as well as the president.

Gunnlaugsson becomes the first victim of the Panama Papers, a day after he refused to step down following the release of the documents.

, the Panamanian law firm at the center of the leaks, allege Gunnlaugsson hid millions of dollars of investments in his country’s banks in an offshore company. Gunnlaugsson and his wife, Anna Sigurlaug Palsdottir, bought the company in 2007, but he failed to declare his interest in it when he entered parliament two years later. The documents show Gunnlaugsson later sold half the company to his wife for $1. Owning a shell company is not in itself illegal, and indeed Gunnlaugsson has denied he broke any rules. But when asked in 2009 if he ever had an offshore company, he replied: “Myself? No. … Well, the Icelandic companies I have worked with had connections with offshore companies.”

On Tuesday, the pressure mounted. Reuters reports that opponents of the prime minister allege a conflict of interest because Gunnlaugsson’s center-right government “is involved in striking deals with claimants on” Icelandic banks that went bankrupt after the 2008 financial crisis. The opposition demanded a vote of confidence on Gunnlaugsson’s government. The ruling coalition controls 38 of Parliament’s 63 seats, and it was unclear if the Independence Party, a coalition ally of the ruling center-right Progressive Party, would support Gunnlaugsson. In the end, it didn’t matter.

In a Facebook post earlier in the day, Gunnlaugsson said he was “proud of [his] work in politics” and not afraid to put it to the electorate. “I am also proud of my wife and the integrity and self-sacrifice that she has always shown,” he added.

President Grimsson, after meeting Gunnlaugsson, said he would make a decision on dissolving Parliament only after discussing the matter with other parties.

“I need to determine if there is support for dissolving (parliament) within the ruling coalition and others,” he said. “The prime minister could not confirm this for me, and therefore I am not prepared at this time to dissolve parliament.”

The issue of banking and banking secrecy is a sensitive one in Iceland, which has only recently recovered from the financial crisis caused by implosion of the country’s banking sector in the global recession of 2008. Icelanders blame the country’s politicians for that fiasco. Gunnlaugsson entered national politics in 2009 and was elected prime minister in 2013.

“If this was a comedy it would be funny but this is actually our head of state,” Birgitta Jonsdottir, the head of the Pirate Party, one of Iceland’s largest, wrote in Newsweek Europe on Tuesday. “This is not what Icelanders are like and this is not what Iceland is.”

How Jewish Designers Helped Invent Preppy Fashion

The recurrence of some unmistakably preppy outfits in the recent fall collections conjured up memories of The Official Preppy Handbook, Lisa Birnbach’s satirical 1980 how-to manual on the art of pink Polo shirts, twinsets, and Brooks Brothers blazers. But the real origin story of preppy fashion actually goes back much further. It’s a tale as old as American fashion itself: the unlikely history of how Jewish American designers descended from immigrants helped transform WASP style into an international uniform that endures today.

The most recent chapter in this story is illustrated by Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History, a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Surprisingly, it’s the first time the museum has devoted a show to a fashion designer, though Jews have always been the backbone of the American garment industry. In the mid-19th century, the Lower East Side was settled by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Many were experienced tailors and seamstresses, if only by default—since the Middle Ages, Jews in that region had been barred from owning land, which led to many congregating in urban centers and cultivating trades. Early arrivals such as Levi Strauss and Lane Bryant (a.k.a. Lena Himmelstein) founded apparel empires that are still thriving today.

But success came at a price. Tenement sweatshops offered employees low wages, long hours, and horrific working conditions. The catastrophic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911—the worst of many industrial accidents during that period—forced drastic changes in the 1920s and ’30s. The result was a more modernized and professionalized industry, which migrated uptown to a new, purpose-built complex of fireproof workshops and showrooms on Seventh Avenue. The largely Jewish labor force adapted with it: Hattie Carnegie (born Henrietta Kanengeiser), Adrian (Adrian Adolph Greenberg), Mollie Parnis (Sarah Rosen Parnis), and Norman Norell (Norman David Levinson) all made the leap from sweatshops into the rarefied world of high fashion.

At the outbreak of World War II, most American women—and journalists—still looked to Paris for guidance. Manufacturers were complicit in this exchange, paying French couture houses for the right to knock off their designs. But with the Paris fashion industry paralyzed by the war, New York was freed from its dictates. A new generation of designers seized the chance to define American style on their own terms.

Conservative in both its appearance and in its staunch resistance to change, WASP style was exclusive and democratic at the same time.

Americans had never put much stock in fashion pedigrees. “In Europe, they fetishize the old names,” the fashion historian Valerie Steele says in the Mizrahi exhibition catalogue. “In America we want the next new thing.” Instead of looking abroad, American designers began to explore closer to home, finding inspiration in the athletic, informal, and practical category of clothing known as sportswear. This typically American style quickly went global. Even today, says Mizrahi, “if you look at all the best European designers, their clothes reflect this American ideal.”

From the beginning, American style was synonymous with WASP culture. Sportswear was the uniform of the prep school, the Ivy League, the yacht club, the golf course—institutions that had historically been closed to Jews. Conservative in both its appearance and in its staunch resistance to change, WASP style was exclusive and democratic at the same time. “To me, being a WASP has nothing to do with religion or money,” wrote the design author Susanna Salk in A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style. Instead, it signifies “an ideal combination of intellect, grace, and joie de vivre.” It wasn’t about what you wore but how you wore it; nevertheless, certain garments were easily identifiable as “preppy.”  

Ralph Lauren once addressed this cultural tension: “People ask how a Jewish kid from the Bronx does preppy clothes. Does it have to do with class and money? It has to do with dreams.” Lauren, born Ralph Rueben Lifshitz, was a yeshiva boy, the son of Ashkenazi immigrants from Belarus whose mother dreamed that he would become a rabbi. But young Lauren didn’t fit in at school, so he worked to stand out, copying the impeccably tailored look he saw in Hollywood movies, another dream factory where Jews played a prominent role. Fashion was his defense mechanism against his poor immigrant upbringing, and his adopted moniker functioned in the same way. Unlike his contemporary Arnold Isaacs, who reversed the letters of his last name to create the pseudo-Italianate label Scaasi, Lauren didn’t change his name solely to succeed in the fashion business. He was still a teenager at the time, and simply tired of being teased.

Ralph Lauren’s designs, as

seen in his Polo Ralph Lauren

men's 2001 Spring collection. (Mike

Segar / Reuters)

Lauren began his career behind the counter at Brooks Brothers, where he could study WASPs in their natural habitat. Though he had no formal design training, he realized that the most effective way to sell clothes was to sell an entire lifestyle. In 1967, he launched Polo, named for the ultimate Anglophile sport. Lauren’s personal aspirations turned out to be the aspirations of many—not just second-generation immigrants striving to “think Yiddish, dress British,” but also go-getting Reagan-era Yuppies and nostalgic WASPs who’d seen their way of life crumble in the anti-establishment tumult of the late 1960s and early ’70s. Suddenly, anyone could buy what had once been an elite birthright—it was no longer how you wore it, but what you wore.

Like Lauren, Mizrahi was a yeshiva boy seduced by Hollywood. Born in 1961, he consumed fashion through pop culture from an early age. Mary Tyler Moore and Jackie Kennedy “shaped . . . America’s whole taste level,” he declared in Unzipped, the 1995 documentary that unleashed his unfiltered charm on the world. Raised in Brooklyn’s tight-knit Sephardic Jewish community, Mizrahi also struggled to fit in at school. His father, who worked in the garment industry, helped Mizrahi buy his first sewing machine. At 13, when most of his classmates were having their bar mitzvahs, he made his first garment: a wool skirt for his mother to wear for the High Holidays. A teacher spotted his theatrical flair and encouraged him to apply to Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts, followed by Parsons School of Design.

Mizrahi was still in school when he landed an internship with Perry Ellis, described by New York magazine as “a well-to-do southern Wasp who didn’t need to create an old-money image” the way his rival Lauren had. Ellis habitually wore blue oxford-cloth shirts, khakis, and Top-Siders; slept on pure linen sheets; and posed for ads “on the dock of his home on Water Island, his long hair blowing in the wind. He looked pensive and brooding—a Seventh Avenue Hamlet who suddenly found himself contemplating such distasteful issues as whether to sell, or not to sell, designer jeans.” Like Bill Blass and Lilly Pulitzer before him, Ellis was an American aristocrat who seemed to have wandered off the tennis court and into the fashion business.

Isaac Mizrahi’s sketch for his Extreme Kilt,

from the fall of 1989 (Richard Goodbody / The

Jewish Museum)

Mizrahi’s first job would prove to be as formative an introduction to WASP style as Lauren’s stint at Brooks Brothers. Ellis built his label around modern classics that looked as if they had stepped straight out of the pages of a Seven Sisters yearbook. His 1978 debut show even recreated a college football game, complete with bleachers and a cast of Princeton cheerleaders and football players modeling garments with names like the “Bryn Mawr Coat” and the “Vassar Suit.” The New York Times reported that “the clothes hardly look store-bought, but rather as if they were borrowed from an older brother or boyfriend.” It was meant as a compliment.

Because Ellis imagined that his clients came from his own rarefied world, he was surprised when the Bonwit Teller president Kal Ruttenstein told him: “Stand outside Temple Emanu-El on a Saturday and you’ll see Perry Ellis with Bulgari jewelry and Gucci handbags.” It had never occurred to Ellis that anyone but white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants might want to wear his clothes. While Lauren succeeded by selling his dreams, Ellis struggled to see past his own reality; he lacked what the literary critic M.H. Abrams called the “outsider’s eye” of the Jewish American experience.

A model for Marc Jacobs’s fall 2001

collection (Reuters)

By the time Ellis died in 1986, Mizrahi had launched his own label, and his former Parsons classmate, the 25-year-old Marc Jacobs, took over Perry Ellis. Jacobs “is for today’s young preps what Ralph Lauren was for their 1980s counterparts,” Vogue declared in 2001. Irreverence is the outsider’s prerogative, and the Jewish Jacobs brought a subversive sensibility to the label’s classic WASP-y style. But not everyone was in on the joke. Jacobs once told Vogue of a chance meeting with a WASP-y couple at the Mercer Hotel: “Even he didn’t realize at first that the wife’s conservative costume was, in fact, head-to-toe Marc.” (In his Spring 1993 “grunge” collection, Jacobs famously took the joke too far and got himself fired.)

Mizrahi, too, absorbed his mentor’s patrician design vocabulary. “With its optimistic colors, elegantly smooth lines, and sensible materials, [WASP style] is as timeless as a box of Crayola crayons,” wrote Salk. She could have been describing Mizrahi’s oeuvre: vibrant tartans and ginghams, full skirts belted over button-down shirts, Fair Isle sweaters, slouchy duffle coats, and sharply tailored blazers.

Unlike his predecessors, Mizrahi has always deployed preppy tropes ironically: He once sent a model in a hot pink dress down the runway walking a dyed-to-match poodle. His “Pow Wow Dressing” of 1991 was a kitschy riposte to Lauren’s earnest embrace of Navajo patterns and fringed shearling, “fusing the American West with the [Jewish] American immigrant,” as the assistant curator Kelly Taxter writes in the catalogue—a subtle critique of Lauren’s Anglicization of Seventh Avenue’s Jewish history. Similarly, Mizrahi’s talent for mixing high and low (“ball gowns with combat boots”) alludes to what Salk calls “the paradoxical presence of frugality and grandeur” in WASP culture, from genteel collegiate squalor to Grey Gardens. (When his label folded in 1998, Mizrahi made this paradox literal, simultaneously designing for Target and Bergdorf Goodman.)

A model presents a creation from the Isaac Mizrahi Spring 2010 collection during New York Fashion Week in September 2009. (Eric Thayer / Reuters)

Mizrahi, who describes himself as culturally Jewish if not observant, incorporates witty references to Judaism and great Jewish designers like Norell and Sonia Delaunay into his work. He once offered advice on what to wear for the High Holy Days. But for every Star of David belt buckle in An Unruly History, there are six kilts, peacoats, and Peter Pan collars.

Indeed, it’s been a long time since preppy style was the exclusive province of WASPs, if it ever was. Industry insiders were surprised when, in 2014, Brooks Brothers named Zac Posen as its new creative director—not because he’s Jewish, but because he made his name with exquisitely constructed, ultra-feminine red-carpet gowns. The young, celebrity-friendly designer seemed to be an odd fit for a legacy purveyor of daywear and suiting to the polo and pearls crowd. Nevertheless, Posen won praise for putting a youthful spin on classic American chic. “The last thing you’d expect to see walking into a Zac Posen-designed presentation just might be loose, silken separates in a tropical print,” Vogue opined of his first Brooks Brothers show. “It read Nantucket for sure, but by way of Mr. Posen’s posh atelier.” If you wanted to locate the essence of American style, the intersection of Hollywood and Nantucket would be an ideal place to start looking.

The Final Legal Chapter of the BP Oil Spill

Nearly six years after hundreds of millions of gallons of oil started to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, creating the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, a federal judge has formally approved the largest environmental settlement in history, which was determined in July of last year.

BP will pay roughly $20 billion over the course of the next decade-and-a-half to local, federal, and state entities, including Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas. This payout is the last in a series that also includes settlements with businesses and residents upended by the 87-day disaster.

As the AP reported, BP claims that between settlements, clean-up efforts, and penalties, the company will pay more than $53 billion for the spill.

Monday’s approval appears to be the beginning of the final chapter in the legal saga that followed the disaster. But, in addition to the financial impact of the spill and its still-unknown ecological ramifications, is the possibility that it could all happen again. As my colleague Clare Foran noted in 2014, BP’s business ventures continue in the Gulf of Mexico and, as National Journal’s Jason Plautz wrote last year, BP is anxious to prove that the area has fully recovered, despite a scientific consensus that would suggest otherwise.

Air France Faces Headwinds Over Headscarves

The opening of business and diplomatic ties between Iran and a number of Western countries following last year’s nuclear deal hasn’t come without its share of cultural complications.

In January, charges of appeasement rang out across Italy after nude statues were mysteriously covered up at a museum during a state visit by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. “When in Rome, do as the Persian do,” read one contribution to a viral critique of the episode on social media.

That same week, French President François Hollande canceled a lunch with an Iranian delegation over an objection to the requisite serving of wine at the meal. “Nobody should constrain anybody to drink or not to drink,” griped France’s ambassador to the United States on Twitter. (France later offered a breakfast truce, but Iran rejected it.)

This week, France has encountered another diplomatic crisis with the Islamic Republic after Air France flight attendants protested a rule that would force female workers to wear headscarves upon arrival in Tehran, where the French national carrier is starting thrice-a-week route later this month. The requirement, which conforms to Iran’s religious-modesty standards, would also oblige female flight attendants to wear a long-sleeved jacket and pants, eliminating the option of a knee-length dress.  

“It is not our role to pass judgment on the wearing of headscarves or veils in Iran,” said Flore Arrighi, the head of France’s flight crews union, over the weekend. “What we are denouncing is that it is being made compulsory. Stewardesses must be given the right to refuse these flights.”

The carrier’s flights to Saudi Arabia already require female flight attendants to wear long robes in the country, but not the headscarves demanded of its female citizens. The debate over veils and headscarves has long caused controversy in France where, as Shadi Hamid noted in The Atlantic last year, 62 percent of citizens recently said the removal of religious headscarves is “necessary” for integration into French society.

In negotiations with the French government on Monday, union representatives received assurances that flight attendants who opt against flying to Tehran would not be subject to disciplinary measures. But as the lines continue to open between Iran and Western countries, it’s unlikely the detente, even on a cultural level, won’t come with its share of turbulence.

Why Superhero Movies Are Headed in the Wrong Direction

The release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which was greeted with negative reviews, a huge opening weekend at the box office, and then a precipitous drop, has inspired a new wave of hand-wringing about the state of superhero movies. With that in mind, a refreshing cultural nugget surfaced online Monday: a conversation between two of the most influential comic-book directors, Richard Donner and Christopher Nolan, on the appeals and challenges of the genre. The easiest thing to take away from it? Hollywood’s superhero trend, like so many fads the industry previously embraced, is headed in the wrong direction.

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Batman v Superman’s Empty Obsession With Grimness

Nolan, of course, directed three Batman films that helped revive critical interest in the comic-book hero (along with Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man). But Nolan says his Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) were deeply indebted to Donner’s 1978 film Superman, a landmark work in the superhero genre. Their 25-minute conversation is an extra on the DVD box-set for Nolan’s Batman trilogy and is hosted online at Dailymotion. Most importantly, the two discuss the difficulty and rewards of shooting “practically” (with special effects largely done in-camera without CGI assistance), a method that’s been quickly abandoned in the new superhero economy, to the detriment of fans.

The parallels between the approaches of Donner and Nolan are fascinating, especially considering the vast time gap between their films. Donner worked in a pre-CGI world, where special effects had to be accomplished with miniatures, stunt-work, matte paintings, and optical effects that could insert stationary shots of the actor Christopher Reeve over moving backgrounds to make it look like he was flying. By Nolan’s era, digital effects were the norm, but he insisted on using them only to slightly embellish his visuals. “I looked back at the ’70s blockbusters like Superman and felt like there was a tactile quality to what you see that you could really believe,” Nolan says. “I just think that you can tell the difference between animation and real photography.”

In 1978, Superman was the most expensive film ever made, at a budget of $55 million ($200 million in today’s dollars). Donner’s innovations included realistic front-projection photography to make its hero soar through the sky—as the film’s tagline went, “You’ll believe a man can fly.” In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, directed by Zack Snyder (at the cost of around $250 million), there’s hardly a minute that isn’t swept up in a cacophony of computer-generated effects, from apocalyptic dream sequences featuring giant dragonfly soldiers to an epic showdown with a gigantic alien monster called Doomsday that shoots lasers from his roaring face. When Snyder’s Superman (played by Henry Cavill) flies, he blasts into the air with a sonic boom; it’s all very impressive, but doesn’t land with much weight.

When one CGI creation (Superman) is doing battle with another (Doomsday) in a landscape that’s largely created in post-production, it’s hard to get a handle on what’s really happening on screen. There are some benefits though: CGI does make the movies easier to shoot, and places less strain on the actors involved, which is essential for the franchise approach that Marvel has pioneered and that Warner Bros. is now attempting to replicate with its DC-branded heroes. Batman v Superman will lead into a Wonder Woman and Justice League movie, both out in 2017, with several more films planned for the coming years.

In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, there’s hardly a minute that isn’t swept up in a cacophony of computer-generated effects.

That kind of rapid production schedule necessitates cutting corners wherever possible, and helps explain away the fairly bland visuals of the Marvel movies, which favor coverage and quick, choppy editing over the grand master shots and practical set-pieces used by Nolan’s Batman films. The biggest action moment in The Dark Knight involves a truck flipping 180 degrees in the air, and it was all accomplished in one massive shot. It’s smaller-scale, but a thousand times more memorable than the planetary lunacy that’s become the superhero norm. Practically every Marvel movie ends with a portal opening in space and a thousand aliens or robots pouring out of it, while Snyder’s first Superman movie, Man of Steel (2013), saw his hero level an entire city while fighting the villain General Zod.

“What CGI is incredible for is if you photograph something and then you manipulate it. But if you ask the CG artists to produce things whole-cloth ... to me as an audience member your brain can always tell the difference,” Nolan says. Donner spends much of the interview picking Nolan’s brain about particular images in his Batman movies—the waterfall of the Batcave, the plane hijacking in The Dark Knight Rises, and that film’s use of New York City’s bridges in its climax. His question is always the same: How much of that was real? The answer is almost always: most of it, with a little bit of computer enhancement. Donner’s gasp of astonishment at learning that Nolan’s team dammed up a river for weeks to achieve the proper waterfall flow is the most delightful moment of the conversation.

Nolan had a minor hand in Man of Steel (he was listed as a producer), but Snyder is a director who favors CGI (using it heavily for films like 300 and Watchmen), and he’s taken the lead on establishing Warner Brothers’ burgeoning comic-book franchise. It’s likely an approach Nolan or Donner couldn’t have pulled off anyway—Donner was fired from the set of Superman II after clashing with producers over the film’s creative direction, and Nolan always takes two to three years in between his epics, pursuing original screenplays like Inception and Interstellar. The franchise approach, churning out two to three films a year, embraces heavily serialized storytelling and a crammed cast of characters; Donner and Nolan’s films were spare by comparison. But watching the directors talk, it’s hard not to feel like the newer superhero movies would be more creative and engrossing—if only more filmmakers today felt the same way they do.

What Is Mossack Fonseca, the Law Firm in the Panama Papers?

Jürgen Mossack was already a citizen of the world when he first hung his shingle in Panama City in 1977. Born in Germany and raised and educated in Panama, the twenty-something had gone to London to work as a lawyer in 1975, but he returned two years later and began practicing. Since then, the firm he founded has become a global behemoth—hundreds of employees spread around the world, with special expertise in creating tax shelters for wealthy global elites. The firm is also, according to documents in the “,” deeply involved with all manner of unsavory and possibly illegal practices across continents; though Mossack Fonseca itself has strenuously denied any allegations of wrongdoing.

The enormous document leak, reported by Süddeutsche Zeitung, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and others worldwide, offers a new view of Mossack Fonseca, the firm that Jürgen Mossack established. The leak consists of a stunning 2.6 terabytes of data, dating back to 1977. The documents purport to show Mossack Fonseca’s dealings with world leaders, company officers’ internal discussions about court cases, and communication about sheltering money obtained through crimes.

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The Panama Papers put a much greater focus than ever before on a firm whose stock in trade is maintaining opacity for its clients—a strategy it has pursued for itself. Even within the world of attorneys who create shell corporations, Mossack Fonseca has been described, by The Economist in 2012, as “tight-lipped.” But a silhouette of the firm’s history can be drawn from reports and court cases over the years.

Mossack himself reportedly comes from a colorful family. His father, Erhard, moved the family to Latin America after World War II. The ICIJ reports that Erhard Mossack served in the Waffen-SS during the war. According to the ICIJ, U.S. intelligence files show he offered to spy for the U.S. government, possibly simply to shield himself. He later offered to spy for the CIA, from Panama, on Communists in Cuba. Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service declined to hand over documents relating to Erhard Mossack due to possible security risks.

Jürgen Mossack’s practice only became Mossack Fonseca in 1986, when it merged with the tiny firm run by Ramón Fonseca, a Panamanian novelist, lawyer, and politician.

“Together,” Fonseca once reportedly told a journalist, “we have created a monster.”

That same year, 1986, according to the Panama Papers, Mossack learned he was involved in a front company for men who had robbed 3.5 tons of gold—£26 million at the time, and more now—from a Brink’s-Mat depot near London’s Heathrow Airport in 1983. “The company itself has not behaved illegally,” Mossack wrote in a memo copied to Fonseca. “But it could be that the company invested money through bank accounts and properties that was illegitimately sourced.” Instead, MF served as legal advisers to a new shell company created for Gordon Parry, who was on the lam and later served 10 years in prison for laundering money from the robbery. London’s Metropolitan Police had seized shares in the previous shell company, but under Mossack’s tutelage, The Guardian reports, Parry was able to outfox police by diluting the seized shares, then reconstituting the company.

That trick involved “bearer shares,” which seem to have become something of a MF specialty. A bearer share grants control of an instrument or company directly to whoever possesses a physical certificate. The ownership is not recorded or registered anywhere else. Bearer shares are banned in some countries because of the high potential for fraud and money laundering.

One place where MF took advantage of the possibilities posed by bearer shares was the British Virgin Islands. MF first expanded there in 1987; the BVI are now home to 40 percent of the world’s offshore companies, according to some counts. According to the Panama Papers, MF’s use of the tool grew steadily through the 1990s. But in 2005, the BVI cracked down on bearer shares, so MF simply switched that business to Panama. While MF’s use of bearer shares spiked sharply at home around that time, it since appears to have declined significantly.

MF has always been relatively open about its work creating tax havens. On its website, the firm advertises expertise in jurisdictions including “Belize, The Netherlands, Costa Rica, United Kingdom, Malta, Hong Kong, Cyprus, British Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Panama, British Anguilla, Seychelles, Samoa, Nevada, and Wyoming (USA).” (Nevada and Wyoming are notorious among U.S. states for their loose regulatory regimes; in 2011, a professor told Reuters, “Somalia has slightly higher standards than Wyoming and Nevada.”)

In 2001, Ramses Owens, a top MF lawyer, spoke on the Isle of Man—itself a tax haven—to drum up business. “I would maintain that Panama is one of the world's best kept secrets in terms of its long established and sophisticated financial regulatory system,” he said. “Because Panama has much to offer, I decided to set the record straight and embark on a series of presentations.” Owens spoke along with an MF lawyer based on the isle and another based on the Channel Island of Jersey—yet another tax shelter. (“Ramses also likes to break into a little salsa to liven up the proceedings,” a reporter with the Isle of Man Courier noted.)

MF has had its share of legal and regulatory troubles abroad, even before the wave of investigations likely to follow on the Panama Papers. In 2012 and 2013, BVI regulators fined the company for violating money-laundering protections on several occasions, including one involving the son of toppled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. In the mid-1990s, MF helped the tiny South Pacific atoll of Niue establish itself as a magnet for offshore companies. “Importantly, Niue offered registration in Chinese or Cyrillic characters, making it attractive to Chinese and Russian customers,” ICIJ notes. But after the State Department suggested Niue was a center for money laundering and several banks quit doing business there, MF’s relationship with the government cooled.

Even as it encountered problems overseas, MF remained in good stead at home—a fact that wasn’t simply a product of its size or legal acumen. The company also had close political ties through Ramón Fonseca. Fonseca is something of a renaissance man: In addition to this work as a lawyer, he has also published several novels, two of which won the Ricardo Miró Prize, a national literary award. When Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela entered office in 2014, Fonseca was named an adviser. He was also acting president of Varela’s political party.

Still, authorities were scrutinizing MF around the world. In a 2014 feature for Vice, Ken Silverstein traced the bank’s connections to Rami Makhlouf, a wealthy Syrian businessman and a cousin and close associate of President Bashar al-Assad. From 2000 to 2011, MF was the registered agent for Drex, a shell company Makhlouf used in the British Virgin Islands. MF also dealt with alleged “bagmen” for dictators including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the late Muammar Qaddafi of Libya.

In 2015, MF’s cozy links to several large banks became troublesome. HSBC CEO Stuart Gulliver admitted he had put some of his money in a Panamanian shell company created for him by Mossack Fonseca, a move he said he undertook for privacy. German authorities raided homes and an office of Commerzbank in Frankfurt in spring 2015, and reportedly told journalists they were considering charges against MF employees over tax evasion.

And in the U.S., MF was caught up in another arcane battle. An American hedge fund has been seeking to recoup billions from Argentina after a government default in 2001. (That story, involving escapades like the seizure of an Argentine naval ship in Ghana, is worth reading up on as well.) Tracking down allegedly laundered money, the plaintiff hedge funds ended up in Nevada. The plaintiffs sued MF and its local affiliate, MF Nevada, seeking information. But the Panamanian parent company claimed—somewhat laughably—that MF Nevada was not affiliated with it but simply engaged in business with Mossack Fonseca. MF Nevada’s primary employee was Patricia Amunategui, a former cocktail waitress.

The Panama Papers show Mossack Fonseca employees speculating worriedly about whether Amunategui was capable of testifying without giving up the game. In the end, a judge ruled in favor of the hedge funds and against MF.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, MF is caught up in the corruption scandal that threatens to topple President Dilma Roussef’s government. In that scandal, dubbed “Operation Car Wash” or “Lavo Jato,” contractors are alleged to have conspired to drive up the price of contracts from Petrobras, the powerful state oil company, while paying kickbacks to politicians and executives. MF is alleged to have helped some of the defendants set up operations to launder their money from the scheme. In March, Fonseca resigned his posts as presidential counselor and party chair, vowing to defend his honor.

Now, with the huge leak of the Panama Papers, Fonseca and Mossack will have a much greater task ahead of them in mounting that defense. It seems Fonseca was right that the two lawyers had created the monster. Now they will have to find a way to keep it from devouring its creators.

The Political Fallout From the Panama Papers

Updated on April 4 at 3:57 p.m. ET

Disclosures from the are rocking the global political elite, with calls for the resignation of Iceland’s prime minister and protestations of innocence from the children of Pakistan’s leaders.

The documents were published Sunday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper, and several news organizations around the world, including the BBC, after a yearlong investigation. The actions described in the documents are not necessarily illegal, but some of the documents reveal a clandestine web of shell companies, their real owners concealed under layers of secrecy, and connections to firms in different tax havens.

Here’s a summary of the fallout from the leaks so far:

Iceland: Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson is refusing to step down amid calls for his resignation. , the Panamanian law firm, allege Gunnlaugsson hid millions of dollars of investments in his country’s banks in an offshore company. Gunnlaugsson and his wife, Anna Sigurlaug Palsdottir, bought the company in 2007, but he failed to declare his interest in it when he entered parliament two years later. The documents show Gunnlaugsson later sold half the company to his wife for $1. He denies any rules were broken. When asked about it by Swedish media, here’s how he reacted:

There have been calls in Parliament for a no-confidence vote against the prime minister. It’s worth pointing out here that it’s not clear if Gunnlaugsson did, in fact, break any laws. Avoiding taxes, long a strategy of the world’s wealthy, is perfectly legal in many places, even if evading taxes is not. Icelandic opposition leaders have called on the prime minister to resign, citing a conflict of interest, but his allies are defending him. When asked about the scandal, Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson, the minister for foreign affairs and external trade, said: “There is nothing strange there.”

Still, if there is to be a fallout anywhere in the world from the disclosures, it is likely to be in Iceland, which ranks 13th in Transparency International’s admittedly flawed ranking system. Here are protests Monday in the capital:

Gunnlaugsson may not have broken any rules, but he appears to have dissembled when asked in 2009 if he ever had an offshore company. “Myself? No,” he said. “Well, the Icelandic companies I have worked with had connections with offshore companies.”

Argentina: President Mauricio Macri, his father and brother were directors of an offshore firm from 1998 to 2009. According to the papers, Macri did not disclose his ties to the firm in 2007 and 2008 when he was mayor of Buenos Aires—though he did list other offshore accounts during that time. A spokesman told ICIJ the president did not list the company in the filings because though he was occasionally its director, he was not a shareholder. Opposition lawmakers, Reuters reports, say Macri may not have committed a fiscal crime, but “he should address Argentines' concerns about his role at an offshore company.”

Pakistan: The documents allege that three of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s four children—Mariam Safdat, Hasan Nawaz, and Hussain Nawaz Sharif—used shell companies to buy property in London. Speaking to Geo TV, Hussain Nawaz Sharif said: “Those apartments are ours and those offshore companies are also ours ... There is nothing wrong with it and I have never concealed them.”

Allegations of corruption have swirled for years against the Sharifs, one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families. But it’s unclear if these alleged actions are illegal, or if the Sharif children, who live overseas, are even covered by Pakistani law. Although lawmakers called for an investigation into the prime minister’s wealth, it’s unlikely to make any headway. Several Pakistani politicians and business owners were among those named by the documents, including the family of the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose members now form a part of the country’s opposition.

Azerbaijan: The allegations—as well as the reaction—in the Central Asian state is similar. President Ilham Aliyev’s wife and their children are named as the owners of offshore companies. The family has financial interests in several sectors of the energy-rich former Soviet republic’s economy. A government spokesman told the BBC the practice alleged by the Panama Papers “is not banned by any law.”

Ukraine: Opposition lawmakers have called for President Petro Poroshenko to be impeached. The documents allege that at the height of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Poroshenko created a holding company in the British Virgin Island—one that wasn't included in his financial disclosure. The impeachment motion, which requires a three-quarters majority in the 450-seat parliament, is unlikely to pass. Poroshenko's faction controls 136 seats. His lawyers maintain the holding company had no assets, and so didn't need to be disclosed.

Investigations: Authorities in Austria and Australia have launched inquiries since the documents were released Sunday night. In Austria, authorities are investigating whether two banks broke the country’s laws on money laundering. Authorities in Australia are investigating 800 people, all residents of the country named in the Panama Papers.  

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For the Love of Bad Art

The Spanish village of Borja, population 4,931, has experienced an unexpected tourist boom of late. But the estimated 30,000 annual visitors aren’t there to seek out the town’s medieval architecture, or its archeological museum, or even the region’s emerging local wines. Instead, they’re in Borja to see Ecce homo, a fresco in the town’s Sanctuary of Mercy church that was famously botched in a 2012 restoration.

In an unexpected turn of events, one of the most notable failures in art history has revitalized Borja’s economy by turning it into a tourist destination. Ecce homo (Behold the man), a 1930 fresco depicting Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, became a global phenomenon four years ago when it was discovered that one of the church’s parishioners, the octogenarian Cecilia Giménez, had attempted to repair the aging artwork by touching up the paint. The result of her work, the BBC correspondent Christian Fraser reported, was that the painting now resembled not the son of God, but a “crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey.” Ecce homo was soon dubbed Ecce mono (Behold the monkey), and became known colloquially as “Beast Jesus.”

Initial responses to Giménez’s handiwork were confused at best. The descendants of the artist who painted the original work, Elias Garcia Martinez, were unhappy that his painting had been destroyed. The Center for Borja Studies first reported the news as an act of vandalism, describing it as an “unspeakable deed.” Giménez, threatened with legal action by the city council, had an anxiety attack and took to her bed. But inevitably, as Ecce homo evolved from local news into a viral Internet meme, both the artist and the town have seen the upside of embracing their unlikely mascot. An image of the work now appears on the city’s lottery tickets. Borja has recently opened a cultural center dedicated to the painting. Giménez has struck a deal allotting her a share of the profits. And visitors have flocked to the town from all over the world in order to see one of the most epic art fails of all time.

Only a few years ago, Ecce homo might have merited a listing or two in regional guidebooks at most. But its appearance coincided with a cultural moment wherein extraordinary failures have become victories on their own terms, thanks to the Internet. #Fail is no longer the pejorative it might once have been—if anything, it’s a kind of hallmark of success. Failed works of art, in particular, subvert notions of what art should or shouldn’t be, offering humor in the form of painterly mishap and exposing the human fascination with screwing up.  

Seeing Ecce homo in person is an act of witnessing a singular piece of Internet culture in its native, spiritual habitat.

Lea Boecker, a researcher at the University of Cologne who studies social cognition, has examined why people love to watch other people fail. In a 2015 study, she found that German test subjects smiled more when watching videos of unsuccessful penalty shots by Dutch soccer players than successful shots from German players. “You feel better. You feel lifted up in comparison to the other person,” she told Nautilus.

Giménez’s work conjures the same emotional response—this combination of empathy and schadenfreude—that brings hundreds of millions of visitors to videos of people attempting to charge their phones in the microwave, or accidentally burning off their hair, or falling off a segway. But it also taps into a popular Internet tradition of approaching art—particularly holy art—with something less than total reverence.

Ecce homo is more than just an ugly face. The painting, and its subsequent memification, fall within a broader category of Jesus-centric memes. According to the scholar Christopher M. Duerringer, putting familiar images in unexpected situations through the “vernacular rhetoric” of memes tends to “extend and subvert the fundamental assumptions and practices associated with iconic images”—in other words, “Beast Jesus” brings the face of Christianity back to his oh-so-human origins. And insomuch as it embodies the modern preoccupation with #fail, it’s only part of a larger tradition of making fun of bad art.

Virgin and Child by Quentin Matsys, worthy of inclusion on the Ugly Renaissance Babies Tumblr (Wikimedia)

There are countless blogs devoted to poking fun at paintings and sculptures that otherwise would have been forgotten: The Ugly Renaissance Babies Tumblr is an addicting compendium of paintings featuring babies that look like old men, worms, creepy dolls, and Gollum. Other blogs like All This Shitty Art and The Weirdest, Worst Art pay homage to the myriad amateur artists publishing their work on the Internet (to Tumblr users’ amusement and dismay). The Delusional Artists reddit is a place to collectively laugh and scratch your head at the confusing ways artists sometimes express themselves: One post earnestly asks, “How do you tell a delusional artist that they are delusional without seriously offending them?” And of course, Beast Jesus is the star of his own Tumblr.   

There’s even an art gallery dedicated to the subject. The Museum of Bad Art, founded in 1994 in a suburban Boston basement, is a bona fide institution dedicated to “building the finest bad art establishment in the world.” Sloppy brushwork usually doesn’t merit inclusion in the museum’s collection—the curator Michael Frank told me he prefers “pieces that exhibit good technique used to create images of questionable taste or meaning.” He points to the aptly named Spewing Rubik’s Cubes as a prime example. The oil painting depicts the toy emanating from the mouth of a “jester gargoyle” against a backdrop of blue—an image, he writes in the work’s description, that “can only be described as puzzling.”

Spewing Rubik’s Cubes, by K. Koch, was acquired by Michael Frank at a thrift store in Boston, MA. (Museum of Bad Art)

Bad art doesn’t always prompt an amused response, though, especially when it’s taxpayer-funded, or when public figures are involved. The $470,000 “Big Blue Ring” in Calgary was dismissed as “awful” by the city’s mayor, and David Batchelor’s Skip in the U.K., a dumpster rimmed with neon lights commissioned as part of a £95,000 grant, was declared to be proof that “modern art IS rubbish.” Lucian Freud’s infamously divisive portrait of Queen Elizabeth II was hailed by some for being boldly honest—The Guardian’s art critic called it “a painting of experience”—while others were shocked at the portrait’s unflattering nature. The British Art Journal’s editor declared that Freud’s severe representation of the Queen made her look like “one of the royal corgis who has suffered a stroke.”

In 2013, another botched restoration attempt, this time of several frescoes in a 270-year-old Buddhist temple in Chaoyang, China, led to two government officials being fired. The paintings, which once depicted a series of traditionally dressed figures, are now brightly colorful, but not in a good way—“Cartoons drawn by my daughter are better than this,” one blogger told NBC.

One of the restored frescoes in China’s Yunjie Temple (AFP / Getty)

But when the stakes are low, bad art is just another amusing reminder of human fallibility. The popularity of the Borja cultural center and the Museum of Bad Art nods to a deeply human quirk: taking pleasure in, and empathizing with, others’ mistakes. Seeing Ecce homo in person is an act of witnessing a singular piece of Internet culture in its native, spiritual habitat, but it’s also, oddly, an act of faith in the predictable human trait of screwing up. Much of the popularity of bad art stems from this contradiction—and perhaps also points toward the inability of paint to adequately express the nuances of humanity, in all their rich and complex glory.