Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 198

One Person, One Vote, Eight Justices

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously turned back a legal effort to reinterpret the “one person, one vote” constitutional rule Monday, ruling that states may rely on total population when drawing their legislative districts.

The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, was brought by two Texas voters, Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger, who challenged the apportionment of Texas Senate districts. With the exception of the U.S. Senate, every American legislative body is apportioned by total population under the “one person, one vote” rule first outlined by the Court in the 1960s.

Evenwel and Pfenninger argued that counting non-voters—children, the mentally disabled, disenfranchised prisoners, and non-citizens—broke that rule and diluted their political power in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Cause. Many observers, including my colleague Garrett Epps, noted that Evenwel’s interpretation would redraw the American political map in favor of a whiter, older, and more conservative electorate.

“In agreement with Texas and the United States, we reject appellants’ attempt to locate a voter-equality mandate in the Equal Protection Clause,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority. “As history, precedent, and practice demonstrate, it is plainly permissible for jurisdictions to measure equalization by the total population of state and local legislative districts.”

The Supreme Court first forced states to draw their legislative districts with roughly equal populations inside them in two landmark decisions: Baker v. Carr in 1962 and Reynolds v. Sims in 1964. The two decisions enshrined the one-person, one-vote rule in American constitutional law.

Transforming those precedents into a requirement that states use eligible voters instead of total population went too far, the Court ruled. “Adopting voter-eligible apportionment as constitutional command would upset a well-functioning approach to districting that all 50 States and countless local jurisdictions have followed for decades, even centuries,” Ginsburg wrote. “Appellants have shown no reason for the Court to disturb this longstanding use of total population.”

But, she noted, Monday’s decision did not address whether states could use voter-eligible apportionment when drawing legislative districts, only ruling that states were not required to do so. In his concurrence with the Court’s judgment, Justice Samuel Alito seized on this distinction to hint that a future case could allow apportionment methods beyond the status quo.

“Whether a State is permitted to use some measure other than total population is an important and sensitive question that we can consider if and when we have before us a state districting plan that, unlike the current Texas plan, uses something other than total population as the basis for equalizing the size of districts,” he wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas went even further in his own concurrence. “In my view, the majority has failed to provide a sound basis for the one-person, one-vote principle because no such basis exists,” he wrote. Instead of continuing the “misguided search” for one, Thomas instead urged his colleagues to leave the question of apportionment to the states themselves. “There is no single ‘correct’ method of apportioning state legislatures,” he concluded.

Evenwel was the latest brainchild of the Project on Fair Representation, a conservative legal nonprofit that specializes in mounting legal attacks on the legislative pillars of the American civil-rights movement. The group’s highest-profile victory was in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It also filed an amicus brief in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project last year, urging the justices to strike down a key part of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. (In the end, Justice Anthony Kennedy joined with the liberals to save it.)

The group is also part of Fisher v. University of Texas this term, which targets affirmative-action policies in higher education. A ruling in that case is still pending.

The Names in the Panama Papers

Documents leaked Sunday from a Panama-based firm, which sells offshore shell companies, purport to show corruption and questionable business practices of the world’s politicians, billionaires, entertainers, athletes, drug barons, and others.

At the heart of the nearly four decades of records from Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm, are the names of people in more than 200 countries and territories. The 11.5 million records reveal the offshore holdings of 12 current and former leaders—among them the Saudi king, the pro-Western president of Ukraine, and the leaders of Iceland and Pakistan.

The papers appear to show Mossack Fonseca helped its clients launder money, dodge sanctions, and avoid paying taxes. Offshore services are not always illegal, but the documents released Sunday appear to reveal a clandestine web of shell companies, their real owners concealed under layers of secrecy, and connections to firms in different tax havens. The individual or group behind the leak is unknown, but the documents were published 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.

Here are some key takeaways:

—A close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Bank Rossiya, a Russian bank that has been blacklisted by the U.S. and the EU, laundered hundreds of millions of dollars, the documents allege. The associate in question is Sergey Roldugin, a classical cellist and conductor who is a childhood friend of the Russian president. “The records show Roldugin is a behind-the-scenes player in a clandestine network operated by Putin associates that has shuffled at least $2 billion through banks and offshore companies,” the ICIJ alleges. “In the documents, Roldugin is listed as the owner of offshore companies that have obtained payments from other companies worth tens of millions of dollars. … It’s possible Roldugin, who has publicly claimed not to be a businessman, is not the true beneficiary of these riches. Instead, the evidence in the files suggests Roldugin is acting as a front man for a network of Putin loyalists—and perhaps for Putin himself.” The Russian president is never named in the files. A Kremlin spokesman denied the allegations as “a series of fibs.” Roldugin, ICIJ said, did not respond to questions about his alleged actions.

—Among the world leaders named in the papers is  Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s pro-Western president. The documents allege that at the height of Russia’s invasion of his country in 2014, Poroshenko “scrambled to find a copy of a home utility bill for him to complete the paperwork to create a holding company in the British Virgin Islands.” A representative for Poroshenko denied the move was connected to “any political and military events in Ukraine.” The firm was not included in Poroshenko’s financial disclosure that year—a move his financial advisers said was because the holding company didn’t have any assets. “They said that the companies were part of a corporate restructuring to help sell Poroshenko’s confectionery business,” ICIJ reported.

—Also named is Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, Iceland’s prime minister, who was elected after that country’s financial collapse. The documents 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. The prime minister denies any rules were broken, but he is facing calls for his resignation.

—The documents also reveal offshore companies linked to the family of Xi Jinping, China’s president who has cracked down on corruption in the country. Mossack Fonseca, the papers allege, has “serviced enough Middle East royalty to fill a palace. It’s helped two kings, Mohammed VI of Morocco and King Salman of Saudi Arabia, take to the sea on luxury yachts.” The papers also appear to show secret offshore companies linked to the families and associates of Hosni Mubarak, the former Egyptian president, Muammar Qaddafi, the former Libyan leader, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

For further reading:

—Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption

—The Power Players

—Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts

—What Can We Do With Our Shell Companies?

The Walking Dead and the Cheapness of Death

Every week for the sixth season of AMC’s post-apocalyptic drama The Walking Dead, Lenika Cruz and David Sims will discuss the latest threat—human, zombie, or otherwise—to the show’s increasingly hardened band of survivors.

David Sims: After all that build-up, all that pointless meandering, and all of that media hype, there could not have been a more perfect closing shot for this season of The Walking Dead. The camera faced the new villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as he slammed a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire down on top of somebody’s head, with blood running down the screen. The point-of-view angle was designed to keep the dead cast member a mystery until next year (fuel for the endless online-gossip mill that keeps the show in the news during its off-season). But it had another, perhaps unintended, effect: Making the viewers feel like they’re the real victims. In short, we suffered through this whole season just to get beaten over the head.

This finale is certainly the end of my relationship with this show, a decision that was solidified by me catching the first few minutes of Talking Dead (the after-show debriefing that airs every week on AMC) and seeing the comic-book creator Roger Kirkman promise that Negan would drive The Walking Dead’s story for “several seasons” to come. This is no hit on Negan himself, who was quite an agreeable psychopath in his 10 minutes of screen time, and quite well played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. It has more to do with the miserable bunch he had at his mercy in the final act of “Last Day on Earth,” who spent 90 minutes (yes, this was an extra-long episode) stumbling toward the trap he had set for them in the most predictable way possible.

The episode had only one thing to do: Introduce Negan, who’s been so hyped that he got a special poster announcing his arrival on the show. He showed up 80 minutes in, after Rick and his group (Abraham, Glenn, Carl, Eugene, Aaron, and Sasha) stumbled around in the wilderness trying to get medical help for Maggie. By the way, this is clearly why Denise got killed off a couple weeks back—to justify Rick’s decision to strike out onto the road, after provoking war with Negan’s Saviors. It still felt flimsy. Rick’s RV ran into elaborate road blocks over, and over, and over again: A bunch of zombies tied together, an armed gang, or a burning pile of logs. Still they didn’t get the message, and they were eventually herded into a clearing where Negan’s men surrounded them, and the big boss finally emerged and proclaimed victory, saying he’d kill one of the group and make the rest work for him.

The viewers knew that was coming, which made the rest of the episode such a bore to watch. Along with Rick’s wandering, a side-plot involving Carol’s solo odyssey on the road and Morgan coming to rescue her was frankly confusing. Morgan broke his no-killing rule to execute a man trying to kill Carol, but if that moment was supposed to be loaded with philosophical weight, well, it just wasn’t. Everything was pointed toward Negan’s introduction, and I cannot deny that scene was tense. When a show’s entire cast of characters (Daryl and Michonne, taken prisoner last week, were there too) are lined up and one of them is threatened with gruesome death, it’s almost impossible not to be frightened.

We suffered through this whole season just to get beaten over the head.

The only way for the show to blow the moment was to overplay its cliffhanger, to leave the audience with nothing as it cut to black for another six months. Viewers knew Negan was coming; we didn’t know who he’d kill off. Well, we still don’t know, and frankly I don’t care to know at this point. Watching “Last Day on Earth,” I realized it didn’t really matter to me who Negan picked for death—I was just steeling myself for the gory violence that would result. When a show’s cast is facing execution, and you’re not worried about losing any of them, then it’s time to say goodbye. Goodbye, Walking Dead. It’s been a wild six years, but it’s long past time to bid farewell, and a baseball bat to the head is as good a way as any.

Lenika Cruz: The stress and thrill of waiting for the next big character to die is a burden viewers accept when they commit to a certain kind of drama series (ahem, Game of Thrones). There are usually, though, plenty of other good reasons to keep watching. Unfortunately, this last season of The Walking Dead points to the sad fact that the show views the question “Who will die?” as its only narrative currency, and ironically, The Walking Dead’s excessive dependence on death hasn’t elevated it, but has instead cheapened it. By extension, this approach has cheapened the lives of everyone on the show, especially the most beloved characters.

I spent years getting to know and genuinely love characters like Carol and Glenn and Maggie and Michonne, despite the show’s ups and downs. “Last Day on Earth” was a whole lot of filler leading up to a climactic 15-minute ending, but I still felt my stomach lurch and my heart pound in my ears when Negan’s moment to choose his victim came. But even worse than the idea of (the really excellent) Negan brutally killing someone was the realization that, whoever died would’ve been killed off in one of the worst hours of the series, after a pair of awful lead-in episodes. The reality was even worse that: Yes, someone died, but we have no idea who.

The Walking Dead’s excessive dependence on death hasn’t elevated it, but has instead cheapened it.

I’m sure there’ll be plenty of viewers who, though upset by this cliffhanger, will tune in next season anyway. And I’m sure when the network gleefully announces its ratings for this finale, the numbers will be astronomical. Good for AMC, I guess. But more than just being a not-so-great show, The Walking Dead has turned into an aggressively cynical series that seems to care far, far less about giving viewers a good story than it does about getting them to watch at all costs. And if that means pretending to kill a major character and then playing coy for four episodes, or advertising a supposedly wild 90-minute finale that’s largely fluff plus commercials, or killing a mystery character onscreen but making fans wait half a year to find out who (while hyping the hashtag #WhoIsIt?)—then that’s fine by the showrunner Scott Gimple and co.

But it’s not fine by me. Like you David, I’m ready to stop watching this show for good, and I suspect many others are too. I’ve been tempted to quit at different points in the past, but I always stuck with it—either because I loved too many of the characters, or because The Walking Dead would come out with an episode good enough to convince me to stick around a while longer. Quitting a series after years of dedication isn’t an easy thing to do. But also like you, David, after catching a good chunk of The Talking Dead immediately following the finale, I’m even more certain that it’s the right call, at least for fans like myself who’ve been growing increasingly disillusioned.

For me, the telling point came when Gimple and Robert Kirkman actually tried to make the case to Chris Hardwick that this episode wasn’t technically a cliffhanger. The reason? Because the story they were trying to tell this season was one of Rick’s downfall, while the issue of who died is meant to be the main story for next season. Hearing them try to explain away this disaster of a finale on the basis of artistic integrity felt like another barbed-wire-covered-bat thwack to the face. If they can’t see why this kind of thinking is deeply unfair to the viewer (and disingenuous), why continue to trust their judgment? More cheap and cowardly moments like the one that capped “Last Day on Earth”  are almost definitely in store in the future. The best I can do moving forward is to make sure I won’t be around to witness them.

What Are the Panama Papers?

Updated on April 3 at 9:58 p.m. EST

News organizations from around the world have published investigations based on a massive trove of leaked documents they say reveal corruption and questionable business dealings of world leaders, politicians, sports stars, and others.

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said Sunday it received encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based company that sells offshore shell companies around the world, from an anonymous source more than a year ago. The leak amounts to approximately 11.5 million documents—or 2.6 terabytes’ worth of data—on 214,000 shell companies spanning a period between the 1970s and 2016.

The documents, which have been dubbed the “Panama Papers,” contain mostly emails, PDF files, and photo files belonging to Mossack Fonseca, one of the largest providers of offshore financial services. They may represent the world’s biggest-ever leak of classified information.

“The data provides rare insights into a world that can only exist in the shadows,” Süddeutsche Zeitung said in its report. “It proves how a global industry led by major banks, legal firms, and asset management companies secretly manages the estates of the world’s rich and famous.”

Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the information with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news outlets in nearly 80 countries. Almost 400 journalists have combed through the documents over the past year.

Some of the products of that research were published Sunday. The BBC reported the leak reveals information about 72 current or former heads of state, including Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak, and Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi. It reported Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson stored millions of dollars of investments in Iceland’s major banks in an offshore company. The Guardian reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s associates secretly moved as much as $2 billion through offshore accounts. Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported Juan Pedro Damiani, the Uruguayan lawyer who is president of the country’s most popular soccer team and a FIFA ethics expert, managed companies through which FIFA members may have received bribes.

Owning an anonymous shell company is not illegal. It’s also pretty easy to set one up, as Fusion’s Natasha Del Toro showed Sunday, when she reported she had opened one in Delaware, a state known for its corporate-friendly privacy laws, for an anonymous owner—her cat. Shell companies allow their owners to hold assets that are subject to minimal governmental oversight. Some are used to dodge taxes—especially in tax havens, the name given to countries that offer foreign businesses little or no tax liability—and other criminal activity.

The reports published Sunday only scratch the surface of the leaked material, which eclipses in size the WikiLeaks dump of American diplomatic cables in 2010 and Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013. An untold number of stories emerged from those leaks and continue to pour out today. The first reports from the Panama Papers mark the beginning of a steady drip of potentially incriminating information.

The Road to Recovery in Brussels

The Brussels airport that was the site of a deadly terrorist attack last month has reopened.

Zaventem airport partially reopened Sunday, nearly two weeks after suicide bombings killed 16 people and injured scores others at the check-in area. Sixteen others were killed and more injured in a separate attack in a Brussels metro station the same day. At least 270 people were wounded in the attacks.

The passenger flights, operated by Brussels Airlines, left Zaventem Sunday, bound for Athens, Turin in Italy, and Faro in Portugal.

“These flights are the first hopeful sign from an airport that is standing up straight after a cowardly attack,” said Arnaud Feist, the CEO of Brussels Airport Company.

Feist said the number of flights will gradually increase in the coming days. Passengers are being advised to arrive at least three hours before their flights, and will be checked in at a temporary area constructed in the wake of the attacks. Some foreign airlines have said they will not return to the airport for weeks or months, citing security.

Airport officials hope to return to normal operations by the end of June or beginning of July. Repairing the damage caused by the blasts could take months.

The Brussels metro system reopened last weekend, but Maelbeek station, where the attack occurred, remains closed.

Brussels remains on edge after the deadly attacks, which were claimed by the Islamic State. The victims included students, commuters, and travelers, ranging in age from their 20s to their 60s. About half were Belgian; others came from China, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Belgian officials have not released an official list of the victims, but the Associated Press and others have compiled stories told by their families and friends. Dozens of the wounded remain hospitalized.

Belgian authorities last week lowered the country’s terror alert level from the highest level, four, to three, which means the threat of an attack remains high. Police are conducting raids across the country in search of a suspect in the attacks; three perpetrators died in the explosions. They have detained several people on terrorism-related charges.

Last week, the Belgian justice and interior ministers offered their resignations—which the prime minister rejected—after evidence emerged that suggested Belgian officials failed to act last year to detain one of the suicide bombers in the airport attack. The perpetrator, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, was detained in June 2015 near Turkey’s border. Turkish officials say they warned their Belgian counterparts that el-Bakraoui, a Belgian native, had terrorist ties. Turkey deported him to the Netherlands, where he was released when Belgian and Dutch authorities could not determine proof of his involvement with jihadists.

In France, police continue to search for suspects in similar Islamic State attacks that killed 130 people in Paris last year. French and Belgian officials have not officially linked the Paris and Brussels attacks. But Belgian prosecutors said last week that the other airport attacker, Najim Laachraoui, was an associate of Salah Abdeslam, one of the plotters of the Paris attacks who was captured by police in Brussels just days before the assault on the Belgian capital. Both men were Belgian natives.

Belgium has long been known as Europe’s hotspot for Islamist radicals. More Belgians have joined the Islamic State as a proportion of the population than any other Western nation.

The Chicago Cubs and the New Baseball

In baseball, spring is the time for either optimism or expectation. Historically put-upon teams and their fans get to convince themselves that the upcoming season will bear better results. Wealthy clubs that spent the offseason importing talent, meanwhile, get to look at their rosters and picture a summer full of clean, excellent play, a six-month charge into record books. Everyone has hope, but the types of hope differ, and they hurt in different ways if unfulfilled.

The Chicago Cubs hope in just about every way you can think of. Most obviously, they are dynastic losers, having failed to win a World Series in the last 107 years or even to appear in one in the last 71. They serve as shorthand for every malady from bad luck to institutional backwardness to supernatural curses. So the team and its fans alike, judging by press conferences and conversations, seem to be wishing for a change in fortune in that guarded way that allows for maximum protection from disappointment while leaving the possibility of euphoria just open.

But the Cubs are also this year’s preseason favorites. Casinos in Las Vegas have given them four-to-one odds of taking home the Commissioner’s Trophy in October, more than twice as good as those of any other team, and the predictions of the sports media have largely echoed the sentiment. Chicago’s status is the result of a promising 2015—with one of baseball’s youngest squads, they won 97 games before falling in the league championship round of the postseason—and a winter that saw them add a number of highly sought-after free agents to their roster. They are at once underdog and front-runner: history’s David and this year’s Goliath.

What’s most interesting about the Cubs on the eve of Opening Day, though, is the way their makeup reflects the game’s evolution. Their hard luck has its origins in the early 1900s, but their ideology belongs squarely to the present day. They are baseball’s presumptive best team, and they look entirely different from the way a team with that title would have looked just a handful of years ago. If they become the story of the season, they will not only end more than a century of Chicago angst but also further solidify the sport’s new doctrine, one that values flexibility over outdated brawn.

* * *

Theo Epstein, Chicago’s president of baseball operations, has helped break a bad streak before: Epstein was the general manager for the Boston Red Sox when they ended their own 86-year World Series drought in 2004. In its construction and style of play, that team exemplified the bold era of the ’90s and aughts. Its stars, the sluggers Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz and the pitchers Pedro Martinez and Curt Schilling, had all started their Major League careers elsewhere and been brought to Boston via the plundering that was common among the game’s richest clubs. They played baseball the way action heroes drive cars. The batters hit booming home runs, and the pitchers piled up strikeouts; they had little use for the relative nuances of sharp baserunning or tidy defense.

In the decade-plus since Epstein’s first triumph, baseball has undergone significant changes. Sluggers are rarer, to begin with, due to tougher performance-enhancing drug testing in response to the excesses of the steroid era. Strategies have shifted as well. The tactics once used by less affluent teams as a means of making up economic disadvantages—acquiring younger and cheaper players through the amateur draft, paying attention to skills subtler than home-run power and batting average, privileging adaptability over sheer accumulated talent—have spread throughout the game. On the field and in the front office, baseball has become cleverer and quicker.

The Cubs are at once underdog and front-runner, history’s David and this year’s Goliath.

Epstein’s second try at saving a storied but star-crossed franchise therefore involves a more varied cast of characters than his first. Many of the Cubs’ key players—the 2015 Rookie of the Year Kris Bryant, the shortstop Addison Russell, the homer-swatting left field duo of Kyle Schwarber and Jorge Soler—were either drafted by the club or acquired as minor-leaguers. Others, like the 2015 Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta and the stalwart first baseman Anthony Rizzo, were pinched from other teams early in their big-league careers and have since blossomed in Chicago. Serving as the manager for this precocious squad is Joe Maddon, a jocular, white-haired seer in thick-rimmed glasses who came to prominence not by steering one of baseball’s bluebloods but by leading one of the game’s poorest teams, the Tampa Bay Rays, as they spent much of the late 2000s besting organizations that outspent them by orders of magnitude (Epstein’s Red Sox included).

Maybe most representative of the new tenets of team-building, though, are a pair of players the Cubs added during the offseason with the goal of jumping from contenders to champions. Jason Heyward hit a modest 13 home runs last year, but he plays the best right field in baseball, gliding in every direction, making difficult catches seem ordinary by the precision of his routes. Ben Zobrist, last seen helping the Kansas City Royals win the World Series, will usually play second base but is comfortable almost anywhere on the diamond. This versatility, combined with an abbot’s patience at the plate, earned him Maddon’s admiration in Tampa, where Zobrist began his career. A short while ago, these two players might have been pet favorites of baseball’s burgeoning intelligentsia, their quieter skills mostly overlooked in an era when money and acclaim generally followed the ability to hit a ball high and hard. This winter, the Cubs signed them to contracts worth nearly a quarter of a billion dollars combined.

* * *

Even fans without a particular interest in the historical aspect may well find themselves enamored with this Chicago team as the 2016 season unfolds, owing to its approach instead of its potential streak-ending significance. The Cubs offer something for nearly every preference. The pitching aficionado will enjoy the work of Arrieta, whose grim stare and heavy black beard brings to mind a hardened Arctic sea captain and who pitches in a manner that fits the image. Devotees of the long ball in its current, post-steroidal form will have something to watch every time the Cubs’ batting order nears the middle, where Rizzo and Bryant wait to bash any pitcher’s error into the Wrigley Field bleachers. Defense, too, figures to be on display, with Zobrist and Russell teaming up for clever double plays and Heyward snaring balls that looked like sure hits leaving the bat. And for the type of fan inclined to obsess over lineup orders, positional platoons, and defensive shifts, the ever-tinkering Maddon will make a fine stand-in.

On the field and in the front office, baseball has become cleverer and quicker.

The task of a club is not to pursue balance, of course; it is to win. In putting together the 2016 Cubs, Epstein no more honored the game’s variety than he did when assembling those comparatively one-note 2004 Red Sox. He simply tried to make his team as good as it could be, and in the present climate, the best teams tend to be the most resourceful.

Regardless of intention, this Chicago team does reflect a new health in certain recently ignored areas of baseball aesthetics. Where there was once a dichotomy—the rich teams loading up on power, the rest trying whatever guerrilla tactics might let them compete—there’s now a fully filled-in stylistic spectrum. Last year’s World Series was contested by the Royals, who trade in base hits and abundant speed and team defense, and the New York Mets, driven by a cavalcade of variously gifted young starting pitchers. Had a couple balls bounced differently over the course of October, the Series might have featured teams built on prodigious infield play or the now-retro homer-hunting model. More than at any point in the 21st century, baseball is awash with distinct approaches, all stemming from a common commitment to valuing a player’s contributions in whatever form they may take.

It’s fitting, then, that the team predicted to be this year’s best should have versatility as its benchmark. If the Cubs look strong through the summer, the talk among baseball fans will inevitably center on thwarted curses and realized dreams, and if they advance deep into the postseason, that talk will spread to most everyone with access to a newspaper or television. The stakes are of the sort that can set a team apart even among the company of fellow champions. The fun of these Cubs, though, is much the same as the fun of baseball as a whole in this blooming, curious period. They are bold and nuanced, audaciously talented and carefully built. They’ll crush late-inning homers and work quiet walks. They’ll play the game any way you like.

Kristi Yamaguchi and Cornbread: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

What I Learned From Kristi Yamaguchi

Nicole Chung | The New York Times Magazine

“Representation, when you finally get it, can be life-changing, allowing you to imagine possibilities you never entertained before. If you’re seen as irrelevant, on the other hand, or rarely seen at all—if your identity is reduced time and again to a slickly packaged product or the same tired jokes and stereotypes—it can be harder to believe in your own agency and intrinsic worth.”

Why Does Sugar in Cornbread Divide Races in the South?

Kathleen Purvis | The News & Observer

“La’Wan’s corn muffin and Lupie’s cornbread are humble things. But they represent something deeper: The dividing line between black Southerners and white ones. As examples of one of the defining staples of Southern food, they also are a marker of food history that speaks volumes about origins and identity, about family and what we hold dear.”

Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?

Jia Tolentino | Jezebel

“This type of writing can be essential as an act of artistic catharsis, but it has never functioned as official denunciation—as it did for many women who had been waiting for it, and in practice, for Iowa too—until now. VIDA did not ask us to hold their post to a journalistic standard, but they wanted the post to stand with journalistic strength. And they are not alone in blurring the line between activism and journalism.”

Soul Survivor

David Remnick | The New Yorker

“What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. ‘Respect’ is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase.”

Will Commercialit Ruin Great Fiction?

Tom Leclair | The Daily Beast

“All of these novels have at least one character who is either an English teacher or a writer, the existence of whom in the text implies that the novel must be literary. But the literariness of the four is a patina of fictional sophistication scumbled over conventional and therefore commercial components. Even if the characters don’t end up well, at least some readers do—entertained, unthreatened, and pleased to feel they’ve not been reading commercialock: commercial schlock.”

Is Friends Still the Most Popular Show on TV?

Adam Sternbergh | Vulture

“The world of Friends is ­notable, to modern eyes, for what it encompasses about being young and single and carefree in the city but also for what it doesn’t encompass: social media, smartphones, student debt, the sexual politics of Tinder, moving back in with your parents as a ­matter of course, and a national mood that vacillates between anxiety and defeatism. (Not to mention the absence of any primary characters on the show who aren’t straight or white.)”

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Foolishness, Happiness, and Josh Chan

Linda Holmes | NPR

“It really is a story about happiness. It's using serialized television in an ambitious way to explore what it means to try to be a happy person. Those are the stakes. Not national security, not violence, not war — the stakes are individual quests to be happy within ordinary lives. And the show has been willing, along the way, to make everybody seem unappealing at times, and also unappealing to each other.”

The People vs. O.J. Simpson as Historical Fiction

Nicholas Dames | Public Books

“The People v. O.J. is candy-colored pulp, not above playing for jokes, and has no glamour. The taupes and pastel pinks of its sets; the lime green and pale yellow shirts, the wide, baroquely patterned neckties; the beige-toned sofas, bloated French Country furniture, and boxy, disposable-looking cars—all of that mid-1990s ephemera seems cheap even when it’s expensive, and more than a little embarrassing, a bottle of Zima instead of Don Draper’s Old Fashioned.”

The Next Big Thing in American Regional Cooking: Humble Appalachia

Jane Black | The Washington Post

“It’s all part of Milton’s grand plan to use food to ignite economic development in the region and end, once and for all, the pervasive stereotype of Appalachians as a bunch of toothless hillbillies … It’s a scrappy, intelligent way of cooking that, out of necessity, embraced preserving, canning, fermenting and using every part of the animal long before all that was trendy.”

When Movie-Sequel Relationships Fail

Is it possible to make a sequel to a romantic comedy? Sure, there are a few examples—Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Sex and the City 2—but the pickings are slim enough that a Quora thread on the subject includes the children’s movie Ice Age 2, for its relationship between ... a squirrel and an acorn. The reasons for this are simple enough: New love is inherently sexier than long familiarity, and the basic contours of boy-meets-girl stories make for easy writing. And by sheer attrition there will always be more moviegoers who can relate to the first year of a relationship than the 30th.

Into this relative void comes My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, the sequel to the 2002 sleeper hit, offering one more precious datum in Hollywood’s conspicuously limited study of romantic love beyond the heady days of meet-cutes and dramatic gestures. To its credit, Greek Wedding 2 does go far beyond the first date: Toula (Nia Vardalos, who wrote both this film and its predecessor, and oversaw the short-lived TV spinoff My Big Fat Greek Life) and Ian (John Corbett) have been married long enough to raise a daughter who’s about to graduate from high school. With the stress and boredom of middle age setting in, the couple is trying to rekindle the romance that brought them together, while Toula comes to terms with her daughter’s desire to move away for college.

Greek Wedding 2 is the rare romantic comedy that dares to stray from pure romance into the more complicated forms of love that can blossom in later life. This long view can be attributed at least in part to the fact that both films are largely inspired by Vardalos’s own life—the first by her marriage to the actor Ian Gomez, and the second by years spent raising their daughter.

But must viewers depend on a very slow drip of indie autobiographies to provide glimpses of a couple growing into a family? Define “family” however you like—strip away marriage and children, pick partners of any gender—and in every possible arrangement there remains the opportunity for lovers to commit to each other for the long haul rather than just for now. Without insisting that anyone ought to make that commitment, one can still observe that many do, and yet that transition is grossly underrepresented on the big screen, across all genres. For a society obsessed with love, American pop culture could stand to pay a little more attention to how all these courtships play out.

It must take tremendous willpower not to throw Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in a room together and call it Swipe Left in Seattle.

Each genre that celebrates romantic love—rom-coms hardly have a monopoly on it—has its own way of abandoning relationships just as they’re getting interesting. Among romantic comedies, the most common solution is to simply not make sequels—to bury Jerry Maguire under Yucca Mountain and let its fiery passion cool into domestic routine far from public view. Which, frankly, is as impressive as it is disappointing: In an industry where intellectual property is increasingly recycled and warmed over, it must take tremendous willpower (or tremendous deference to young audiences’ tastes) not to throw Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in a room together and call it Swipe Left in Seattle.

Far more egregious, however, is what happens when couples do return for a sequel, as they often do in action movies and nominally non-“romantic” comedies. On the rarest of occasions, these relationships are fleshed out and allowed to grow in entertaining ways—I’ll return to the few successes in a bit. Far more often, however, filmmakers simply reset a film’s central relationship so that one or both members of the couple can go through the motions of falling in love all over again. This can take two forms.

The first is introducing a new love interest: Call it the “When Harry Met Someone Else” approach. Sometimes an actor is unable or unwilling to return for a sequel; sometimes filmmakers just prefer new blood. In either case, the sequel ditches one lover in favor of the other, setting him or her—usually him—on the path to falling in love with a new character. A recent example of this is Zoolander 2, which kills off the title character’s wife Matilda Jeffries (Christine Taylor) in a tragicomic accident in the film’s first few minutes, clearing the way for a much less compelling postscript of a romance between Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) and Valentina Valencia (Penelope Cruz). In a classic, more extreme instance—Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me—Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley) literally self-destructs to make room for Powers (Mike Myers) to fall in love again with Heather Graham’s Felicity Shagwell. For other serial monogamists, see: Bond, James; Jones, Indiana; Wayne, Bruce; the Ted movies, the Missions Impossible, and plenty of others.

The second method is artificial estrangement, or when couples who once attained marital or premarital bliss have suffered some falling out between movies—but who maintain enough grudging affection for each other that they spend their sequel falling back in love along more or less the same narrative lines as in the previous film. A relatively recent example is 2013’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which pits Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) against his wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) in pursuit of a coveted promotion. In no time at all, they’re reenacting the bitter rivalry that was already exhaustively explored in the first film, and round two falls flat. Other movies to follow this pattern include Wayne’s World 2, Spider-Man 3, and my personal favorite, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, which features a characteristically chipper Nicolas Cage breaking and entering into the home of his ex-girlfriend Abigail (Diane Kruger) in order to steal her National Archives ID card—you know, just regular breakup stuff.

Relationship resets aren’t inherently bad, but they do carry several risks. First and foremost, mishandled sequels cheapen the better movies whose worlds they expand. This is a risk of all sequels and prequels (cough, midi-chlorians), but still worth noting. When Vanessa Kensington is revealed to be an evil fembot in The Spy Who Shagged Me, it doesn’t just undo the core relationship of the first film—it undoes the hero and his entire journey. At the end of the first film, Austin Powers was shown to be raunchy and self-obsessed but ultimately a good and capable man. In the first minutes of the sequel, he becomes a fool so pathetic that he could fall in love with—and marry! and alter his worldview for!—a weaponized sex doll.

Likewise for Wayne’s World 2. In the first film, Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers again) is scrappy and humble but so full of creative energy and love that Cassandra Wong (Tia Carrere) can’t help but fall in love with him. In the second film, he’s transformed into an inattentive and jealous boyfriend, an unappealing turn for fans.

Austin Powers becomes a fool so pathetic that he could fall in love with—and marry! and alter his worldview for!—a weaponized sex doll.

On a related note, relationship resets unhealthily conflate early romantic courtship and last-ditch efforts to avoid a breakup. Wayne’s World is a good example of this, as is National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Does Hollywood produce unrealistic movie relationships because the movie-going public has unrealistic expectations for love, or do audiences have unrealistic expectations for love because they see unrealistic movie relationships? It’s a little chicken-and-egg, but popular entertainment reinforces social mores and affects the choices audiences make after they leave the theater. Diversifying the relationships in films beyond new lovers on first dates enriches audiences’ understanding of love. Plus, the possibilities for diversity in family arrangements are literally endless.

A convincingly evolving relationship, furthermore, is the difference between a sequel and a “universe.” Even if the current mania for cinematic universes turns out to be a fad, it’s shone a bright light on the weaknesses of conventional sequels, which for far too long have gotten away with telling basically the same story again and again. That strategy doesn’t work very long in an ever-growing narrative milieu, although even Marvel Studios, which ushered in the universe craze, is testing the limits of repetition with its ever-growing stockpile of Infinity MacGuffins.

Speaking of Marvel: Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) enjoy exactly the kind of relationship Hollywood should embrace more. This is captured nowhere better than in an early scene in The Avengers, when Tony and Pepper are shown in their previously implied domestic life together, somehow flirting even as they bicker. This transformation from mere “couple” to long-haul “family” is no accident—the film’s director, Joss Whedon, knows the storytelling potential of the family, and fought to keep it in Avengers: Age of Ultron. As he scrambled to keep an overstuffed film grounded, Whedon said Marvel forced him to drastically trim one of two scenes: the farm interlude introducing Hawkeye’s wife and children, or Thor’s expositional vision quest in the cave. Whedon favored the farm scene—which, anchored by the tender banter between Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and his wife Laura (Linda Cardellini), was widely regarded as a highlight of the film.

Fortunately, a handful of non-“universe” sequels have also risen to the task of expanding rather than repeating their central relationships. Such movies offer a road map for tomorrow’s filmmakers, by employing the seemingly obvious tactic of exposing their characters to new circumstances. Richard Linklater’s charmingly unconventional rom-com Before Sunset fits this description, if only because the years that Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) have spent apart were a very real possibility at the end of Before Sunrise, rather than a hasty revision as in Zoolander 2, Anchorman 2, and their ilk.

Credit is also due to 2005’s The Legend of Zorro, sequel to 1998’s The Mask of Zorro. In that film, Zorro—aka Alejandro de la Vega, aka Antonio Banderas—has married Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones), and together they’ve raised a son who is inspired by Zorro’s heroism but disappointed by his aristocratic father, unaware that the two men are one and the same. All three are fearless and make for a powerful team by the end of the film, though they slog through a period of artificial estrangement before fully joining forces.

A convincingly evolving relationship is the difference between a sequel and a “universe.”

The Legend of Zorro, though, is really just borrowing from a template set by The Greatest Sequel Ever Made: 2001’s The Mummy Returns (yes, the one starring Brendan Fraser). The Mummy franchise, with its swashbuckling 1930s archaeologists, will probably always be remembered as a pale, CGI-heavy imitation of Indiana Jones, or, more generously, as a deliberately campy homage. While The Mummy Returns isn’t the greatest movie ever made, it’s quite plausibly the greatest sequel, qua sequel. The film could have driven a temporary wedge between Rick O’Connell (Fraser) and Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz), who were last seen riding off into the sunset together at the end of The Mummy, or swapped Evelyn out entirely for some new heroine. Instead, The Mummy Returns doubles down on Rick and Evelyn, who are reintroduced as the O’Connells—happily married, and the proud parents of precocious 8-year-old Alex.

While Anchorman 2 and National Treasure 2 waste time with bitter breakup fights, Rick and Evelyn hit the ground running, arguing over the best way to pry open the sarcophagus at hand. Meanwhile their son is clever, bold, and handy with a slingshot. These three family members are shuffled through all possible combinations—two working together, all three on their own—which livens up an otherwise straightforward rescue mission.

The first Mummy did well enough to warrant a sequel, but The Mummy Returns was a bona fide phenomenon. It briefly held the record for single-day box-office gross, and spawned the spinoff The Scorpion King, an animated series, and eventually another sequel. In every subsequent outing, its heroes return as a family. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that when Indiana Jones returned in 2008’s The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indie himself was saddled with an adventurous wife and a precocious son.

As Hollywood relies more and more on sequels and spinoffs and reboots, the industry is needlessly throwing away endless narrative opportunities, insisting on running all of its characters through the same handful of romantic beats. It’s not hard to find moviegoers exhausted by the recent glut of comic book movies; linger in the theater lobby a while longer and you’ll find others similarly sick of uninspired sequels. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: To paraphrase Tolstoy, all one-off movie couples are alike, but each couple allowed to become a family can be entertaining in its own way.

Bernie in the Bronx

BRONX, New York—Mercer Jabul sat quietly at the very top of a hill at St. Mary’s Park, huddled underneath a hooded white coat as she waited, with an estimated 18,500 others, for Bernie Sanders to arrive in the South Bronx. A black woman in her 60s, Jabul is devoted to Sanders and said she has plans to vote for him in New York’s April 19 primary. But she wasn’t positive she was going to vote at all. It had been quite a while.

“I haven’t voted since Mayor Lindsay!” she told me. That would be John Lindsay, the long-ago New York mayor who made unsuccessful bids for president and Senate. He left City Hall in 1973, and the last time he appeared on a ballot was 1980. He died in 2000.

Jabul is a retired social worker who grew up in Harlem and now lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Part of her affinity for Sanders stems from the fact that she has seen him more than most New Yorkers in recent years: She owns a second home in Vermont. “Bernie hasn’t changed for decades,” Jabul said. “He’s just a fighter.”

If she makes her long-awaited return to the voting booth, it’ll be for Bernie, “or Trump,” she told me, “to let the whole system implode.” But not Hillary  Clinton. “Definitely not Hillary Clinton at all. Never Hillary Clinton.” Jabul’s list of grievances with the former New York senator is long—from her “pandering to black people,” her start as a Goldwater Girl in the 1960s, her past support for three-strikes-and-you’re-out incarceration policies, and the Libya tragedy, which occurred “on Hillary’s watch.”

It would be difficult if not impossible to gather 18,000 people for a rally in the Bronx and not have it called diverse. Compared with Sanders’s base of young, white college kids, this event was unrepresentative just by how representative it was. “There’s this whole talk about the Bernie Bro. I just don’t see it,” joked the campaign’s state director, Nadya Stevens, as she warmed up the crowd. “Apparently, all of you are white,” the actress Rosario Dawson said to cheers. “There must be something wrong with my eyes.”

Certainly not everyone there shared Jabul’s visceral distaste for Clinton, and many Sanders supporters said they would vote for the former New York senator over Donald Trump if it came to it. But this was no undecided crowd. The thousands who gathered around the main stage in St. Mary’s and the thousands more who stood in an adjacent overflow area were not there merely to get a look, to size up a political curiosity. They were all in for Sanders, chanting his name and frequently booing Clinton’s.

“She’s not honest,” said Tracy Moore, a 25-year-old Afro-Cuban New York University graduate who lives in the Bronx. “People in communities like this can’t trust her.” Moore said she was unemployed and described herself as politically apathetic before this election. “I love how authentic he is,” she said of Sanders. “He seems like the old man in his kitchen who will bang his hand on the table and really talk about these issues.”

Others in the crowd looked and sounded more like the young, white, politically liberal, and economically distressed voters who have helped propel Sanders across the country. Jessica Moisa, 28, is a waitress who works two jobs on Long Island, both of which pay less than the minimum wage and offer no benefits. “It’s really a no-brainer,” she said. “He’s the only one who actually cares about the real issues.” Clinton, Moisa said, was “a puppet. I don’t think she cares about changing any real problems.” She was at the rally with, Brett Polera, 22, a student at Suffolk Community College who noted that Clinton was “under investigation” and repeated a Trump canard that she “might not be allowed to run.” “I don’t know exactly what’s true,” Polera said.

* * *

When Sanders made it to the stage shortly after 7 p.m., he followed Dawson, Spike Lee, and the Grammy winner Residente. His voice was hoarse—he had actually spoken first to the overflow crowd down the other side of the hill. He paused frequently to gulp from a bottle of water, and each time the crowd chanted his name, as if doing so would keep Sanders from losing the rhythm of his speech. “I am, as you know, the very proud United States senator from Vermont,” Sanders began, “but I am very proud that I was born here in New York City.” The crowd roared.

Sanders often sounds as if he’s on autopilot, and his fans have taken to finishing his most famous lines. Thursday night was no different. The South Bronx wanted to hear the classics, and Sanders gave it to them. “What this campaign is about is creating a political revolution,” he said. “You are the heart and soul of this revolution.” He mentioned the unacceptably high asthma rates among children in the Bronx, and he made sure to beef up his sections on criminal-justice reform and immigration. But the speech was pretty much the one he has given dozens of times before. When he talked up his pledge for a $15 minimum wage, he cited California and the many cities that had passed it into law. He didn’t bother to note that New York was on the verge of doing the same. Sanders did catch himself when he told the New Yorkers, as if they weren’t already aware, that Goldman Sachs was “one of the largest financial institutions.” The crowd booed loudly. “I gather you know about Goldman Sachs,” Sanders joked.

“I am, as you know, the very proud United States senator from Vermont, but I am very proud that I was born here in New York City.”

It’s no surprise that the Sanders campaign is aggressively contesting New York. Trailing Clinton by a significant number of delegates, he can’t afford to cede any more states, and the Empire State’s 247 delegates (allocated by congressional district) are one of the biggest hauls remaining. Sanders put the stakes in stark, if somewhat exaggerated, terms on Thursday night: “If we win here in New York,” he said, “we are going to make it to the White House.”

As a former senator, Clinton has the more recent and substantive claim of favorite-daughter status in New York. But Democrats in the state have veered away from the establishment since she left the Senate. In 2013, Bill de Blasio upset City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to become New York’s mayor, and the following year, Zephyr Teachout captured a surprising 34 percent of the vote against incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary. A Quinnipiac poll released on Thursday showed Clinton up by 12, a much narrower margin than earlier surveys.

The Clintons have spent the week fortifying what they hope is a New York firewall. The campaign released an ad targeting Trump and celebrating the state’s diversity and inclusiveness. And while Sanders is banking on younger and disengaged voters to swamp the polls, Clinton is enlisting the party regulars and doubling down on her establishment support. A day after Hillary Clinton rallied with Chuck Schumer and Charlie Rangel at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Bill Clinton hit four separate union halls in Manhattan to mobilize a labor-backed voter-turnout machine.

The Clinton campaign has been masterful at playing the expectations game in previous primaries and caucuses. But the former president dispensed with all that spin in New York. Losing here is perhaps the only thing that could reverse the trajectory of a primary campaign that remains strongly in Hillary’s favor, and Bill Clinton made clear it was a state she had to have. “The New York primary and the psychological impact it will have on the rest of the country and the rest of this race is not...” he said before trailing off during a speech to the Building and Construction Trades Council. “I can just tell you that, for her, it will mean more than you will ever know.”

The contrast between the crowds that Bill Clinton addressed in Manhattan and those that Bernie Sanders spoke to in the Bronx could hardly have been greater. Collectively, the union workers in Manhattan were racially diverse—mainly African American and Latino women at the Service Employees International Union’s Local 1199 and older white men in the trades council. But they were there for marching orders, not inspiration. Clinton dug into the details of health-care policy, immigration, and banking reform. And he grew frustrated at the thought that Democrats didn’t appreciate the differences between Sanders and his wife. “It really matters. The details matter,” he told SEIU, jabbing the lectern with his fist. “I know people think they don’t, but they really do.”

The “enemy” in New York, Clinton said, was turnout. Because the state only holds a presidential primary in the spring, not as many people show up as would if local and congressional races were also being decided. In 2008, New York’s record primary turnout was still far lower than it was in Illinois, despite its vastly larger population. “We have to work to make people understand that this is an important race,” he said.

* * *

There are times when the Clinton-Sanders divide seems quite simple, and no different in New York than anywhere else. Clinton supporters like Juanita Perkins, a 59-year-old from Harlem, believe in her pragmatism and worry that Sanders is offering things that he can’t deliver. “When you’re young, a lot of promises sound good,” Perkins told me. But what Sanders doesn’t often talk about is exactly how he expects to get his ideas through Congress. “I just don’t want to put our eggs in that basket and get disappointed all over again,” Perkins said.

Sanders’s supporters, by contrast, are more likely to believe they’ll be disappointed either way. “No matter what politician makes it in, it’s going to be difficult,” Brett Polera said. And then there’s Mercer Jabul, who just might actually cast a vote for Sanders, even if she isn’t sure he can achieve the change she’s seeking. “I want to see him make the fight,” she said. If nothing else, “he would raise the political consciousness of this country.”

Remembering Zaha Hadid

A year after Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004, she told The Wall Street Journal that her work as an architect had changed entirely. Winning the Pritzker, she said, opened the door to clients who might otherwise have judged her designs to be too alien, too exaggerated, and, perhaps, too feminine.

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Hadid, who died of a heart attack at 65 on Thursday, shattered many glass ceilings in the field of design. She was the first woman and Muslim to win the Pritzker, and the first woman and Muslim to earn the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize. She was anointed by and Glamour alike. For better and for worse, Hadid was the world’s first woman starchitect.

Hadid pushed theory to the forefront of global practice. The Iraqi-born British architect was a respected voice in design well before Zaha Hadid Architects completed its first major commission. More than any other architect’s work, her curvilinear designs and laser-sleek geometry marked the transition from the 20th to the 21st century. Hadid’s later and most significant works—some of which are still underway—pushed the field toward notoriety.

Zaha Hadid’s Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, pictured on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan (Carlos Osorio / AP)

She met the world with an agnosticism that made her a lightning rod. One of Hadid’s signature accomplishments, the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan, raised sharp questions about the propriety of visionary architects accepting commissions from regimes known for human-rights abuses. Hadid’s swelling curve of a concert hall, which was named the Design of the Year for 2014 by London’s Design Museum, was preceded by forced evictions and expropriations, according to a report from Human Rights Watch.

“The totality, the whiteness, the speck of a single person walking down it, the sheer spectacle of it—you have to throw out those English morals and weedy thoughts about world problems: Here is architecture as ultimate statement of theatre,” wrote Peter Cook in Architectural Review.

Hadid resisted the criticism that trailed her work, defending and delineating her role in problematic projects. In 2014, she told The Guardian that it was “not my duty as an architect” to take action over the deaths of migrant workers in Qatar in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup. (Hadid designed Al-Wakrah Stadium, the centerpiece for the tournament.) In disavowing personal responsibility for labor conditions in the Persian Gulf, she drew fierce denunciations. Hadid sued the architecture writer Martin Fuller after he wrote a column in The New York Review of Books that suggested that 1,000 workers had died building her project—a claim that Fuller was compelled to retract. Just last year, she walked off a BBC program after the host challenged her on migrant-worker deaths.

Renderings for Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar (left) and National Stadium in Tokyo (Zaha Hadid Architects)

Excess attended many of her late projects. Last summer, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that Tokyo would not build Hadid’s design for the stadium at the center of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Before it was scrapped, that design drew Hadid into direct conflict with a generation of Japan’s most gifted architects—among them her fellow Pritzker laureates Toyo Ito and Fumihiko Maki—who criticized the scale of her exuberant design.

Hadid’s response was bombastic. “I think it’s embarrassing for them, that’s all I can say,” she told Dezeen. “I understand it’s their town. But they’re hypocrites.”

Her willingness to condemn her critics publicly, combined with her reputation in the industry as a difficult manager, may have accelerated the “diva” tag that followed her throughout her career. It was always inevitable: She frequented the Delano in Miami and she dressed head to toe in Issey Miyake. But The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries formally assigned her the label in 2004, in one of the first major profiles of her work. It is not a flattering profile, and not something anyone would write about a man.

Zaha Hadid offers a moist, limp hand to shake. She’s coming down with the flu. This is a disappointment. Where is the vibrant monster I’d been promised from previous interviews? Where’s the ball-breaking harridan barking abuse in Arabic into her mobile as she wafts into her north-London studio in vertiginous heels, before snarling unpleasant things to her staff in terrifyingly idiomatic Anglo-Saxon?

The profile goes on to mention “the C-word, one that only the boldest use in Hadid’s presence”—meaning Cardiff, where a planned opera house by Hadid fell through, but plainly intending the other C-word, as well. A new book by Despina Stratigakos, Where Are the Women Architects?, devotes an entire chapter to the sexism that Hadid met at every turn.

Characteristically, Hadid placed no central importance on her status as a woman architect. “I used to not like being called a woman architect. I’m an architect, not just a woman architect,” she told CNN in 2012. And yet: “Guys used to tap me on the head and say, ‘You are okay for a girl.’ But I see the incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it could be done, so I don’t mind that at all.”

Hadid’s “Nova Shoes” for United Nude, on view at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in 2014  (Pavel Golovkin / AP)

Some of her most important designs are under construction or have yet to be built, including a breakthrough residential skyscraper in Miami, the One Thousand Museum tower, and the Iraqi Parliament Building in Baghdad, where she also designed Iraq’s Central Bank. Her only New York project, 520 W. 28th Street, is slated to open in 2017. Her studio will no doubt continue under the leadership of her partner, Patrik Schumacher. (He coined the term “parametricism” in a manifesto describing how Zaha Hadid Architects’ use of new form-finding technology amounted to a stylistic departure for architecture.) Nevertheless, Hadid leaves behind a tight body of work—a fact that perhaps stands at odds with her “diva” status.

Were Hadid truly the egotist that her detractors claimed her to be, she might have taken a very different path in architecture. Certainly the option was available to her to expand drastically, over-extending her studio with commissions across the globe, as another prominent new voice in architecture has done. Hadid might have been well on her way to fast-fashion collaborations with Target and appearances on The Simpsons. She may be a household name, but Hadid elected not to become a household product.

Instead, with no professional model and few technical precedents to follow, she pursued iconic form relentlessly. Hadid never strayed from a path of elegance, focus, and an unyielding unwillingness to compromise. Her contributions to the built environment may be mixed, and they will be judged. But they are undeniable—and they amount to more than a long series of firsts.

Pictured in Paris in 2007, a murderer’s row of architects (from left): Thom Mayne, Rem Koolhaas, Christian de Portzamparc, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster, and Zaha Hadid (Eric Feferberg / Reuters)



Hadid stands in front of her design for the Port Authority in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2012. (Virginia Mayo / AP)

This post appears courtesy of CityLab .