Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 200

Aaron Sorkin and the Broadcast of Live Theater

There have been rumors about it since 2014. And now, it’s confirmed: Aaron Sorkin will adapt A Few Good Men, his stage play-turned-Oscar-winning-feature film, into a live event. It’s currently set to air on NBC in 2017. Start prepping your “I want the TRUTH!” jokes now.

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The new Good Men will mark Sorkin’s first return to NBC since his time on The West Wing, The Hollywood Reporter notes. (Sorkin will write the teleplay adaptation—based on his original stage version—and he’ll also help to executive-produce the event overall.)

What the show will also mark, though, is a new era for the Live Televised Event, which has traditionally—at NBC, as at other networks—involved musicals. Peter Pan Live! The Wiz Live! Grease Live! It’s hard to imagine that the latest entry into the growing televised-theater genre will be named A Few Good Men Live!—not only because the name has probably been claimed, already, by a whimsical Vegas revue, but also because Sorkin’s play will not, like its predecessors, be a musical. It will be live, but not, alas, Live!

In that sense, you could look at A Few Good Men Live, soberly lacking in exclamatory embellishment, as a sign that we’re moving into an age that doesn’t need to rely on the antics of the musical to sell its properties. A Few Good Men, as a stage play and a film, is a perfectly serviceable military-legal drama. It has attained a broader cultural status by way of Internet imps and their “you can’t handle the truth!” memes. Its live-broadcast adaptation will likely be, like its predecessors, witty and electric and nuanced and dramatic and all the things that a good Sorkin production will be. It will not, however, feature jazz hands.

Sorkin’s play will not, like its predecessors, be a musical. It will be live, but not, alas, Live!

Instead, Sorkin and his fellow creators will be relying on something more subtle as their sell: the kinetic energy of live theater. The subtleties of expression and emotion between actors. The sense that anything could happen at any moment, from the deliciously disastrous to the artistically sublime. And the creators will also be relying, of course, on a live audience that will simultaneously be watching and tweeting and otherwise consuming and reacting to their work. In any live event, televised or not, there is an implied fourth wall: a sense of audience inclusion. A Few Good Men—a play, a movie, a beloved meme—will, as it were, stand guard on that wall.

In that sense, A Few Good Men suggests a new iteration of the Live TV Event: the normalization of it. The idea that anything—not just a dance-happy, sing-song-y musical—can benefit from the live-broadcast treatment. Certainly, networks (and NBC, in particular) have experimented with live TV in the past. Awards shows, live reality-TV finales, gimmicky live broadcasts of sitcoms—the recent versions have been, among other things, attempts to reclaim the commercial benefits of “appointment television” in the era of streaming and cord-cutting. A Few Good Men will be that, too. But it will also suggest a new twist on the old formula: a live production that sees live-ness itself as a selling point. No jazz hands, or exclamation points, necessary.

U.S. Women's Soccer: Better Than Men's in Every Way But Pay

Five members of the U.S. women’s national soccer team filed a complaint Thursday with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), demanding that the women’s team––who have outperformed their male counterparts in just about every metric possible in the past couple years––be paid just as much as the men.  

The players who signed the complaint against the U.S. Soccer Federation, the governing board of U.S. soccer, are some of the biggest names on the team, and in American women’s sports: Carli Lloyd and Becky Sauerbrunn, who are co-captains, goalkeeper Hope Solo, midfielder Megan Rapino, and forward Alex Morgan.

A statement from their lawyer (sent to Sports Illustrated) said the men’s team earns almost four times more than the women’s squad. The New York Times broke that disparity down even further. Women on the team make a salary, and like men, are eligible for bonuses. And that’s about where similarities stop. A man makes $5,000 for a loss; women make nothing for a loss or a tie. Men earn as much as $17,625 for a win, The Times reported. Women make $1,350 for one.

The debate over pay mirrors a similar argument being played out in international tennis. Earlier this month, Raymond Moore, the CEO of Indian Wells Tennis Garden, appeared to deride women’s tennis, where the Grand Slams and some major tournaments offer equal prize money.

“You know, in my next life, when I come back, I want to be someone in the WTA [Women’s Tennis Association] because they ride on the coattails of the men,” Moore said. “They don’t make any decisions, and they are lucky. They are very, very lucky. If I was a lady player, I’d go down every night on my knees and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal were born because they have carried this sport. They really have.”

He subsequently resigned amid the backlash, but his views are shared by at least some top men’s players. Novak Djokovic, the world’s No. 1 men’s player, suggested that professional tennis should pay men more because they attract high viewership. That argument notwithstanding, pay equality in tennis, as my colleague Adam Chandler reported, “isn’t a cut-and-dry issue. In Grand Slam tournaments, men have to win three sets to advance while their female counterparts have to win two.”

But that’s clearly not the case with soccer. For starters, both men’s and women’s games are 90 minutes long. Then, by most measures, the women’s team is not only more accomplished, but also more popular. The women have won three World Cups and four Olympic gold medals. The men have not come anywhere near that. And last July, the Women’s World Cup final set a record for TV viewers––for women’s soccer, and men’s.

The players’ lawyer, Jeffery Kessler, said the complaint with the EEOC, which handles workplace-discrimination issues, is as strong as he has seen, “because you have a situation where not only are their work requirements identical to the men’s requirements—the same number of minimum friendlies they have to play, the same requirements to prepare for their World Cups—but they have outperformed the men both economically and on the playing field in every possible way the last two years.

“So this isn’t a case where someone can come in and say the reason the men are paid more is because they are more economically successful or the men outperform the women or they’re not comparable in the same way,” he said.

And it’s not just pay from U.S. soccer that is unequal. For a long time, the women’s team has complained that everything from the referees who call their matches, to the fields they play on, don’t compare with the men’s. Last December, the women canceled a game against Trinidad and Tobago in Hawaii because the artificial turf, they said, was peeling and laden with rocks.

One of the reasons @ussoccer canceled today's game in Hawaii. #USWNT pic.twitter.com/uKJUMmOCA5

— Julie Foudy (@JulieFoudy) December 6, 2015

U.S. Soccer said in a statement, sent to ESPN, that it hadn’t seen the specifics of Thursday’s complaint, but that it’s disappointed.

“We have been a world leader in women’s soccer and are proud of the commitment we have made to building the women's game in the United States over the past 30 years,” the statement said.

Relations between the two sides have been fraught in recent years. In February, two months after the incident in Hawaii, U.S. Soccer sued the union that represents the women’s team in federal court, arguing the terms it agreed upon for its players, and that expired in 2012, should still be valid. The union says it doesn’t.

On Thursday morning, four of the players appeared on NBC’s Today show. Lloyd, one of the team’s captains, and who was also named the best player in last year’s World Cup, said, “I think that we've proven our worth over the years.”

"It's about equality. It's about equal rights. It's about equal pay." -@HopeSolo pic.twitter.com/YBNs2L8drh

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) March 31, 2016

It is unclear how long the EEOC will take to resolve the complaint, but the process will loom over the team’s preparations for the Rio Olympics in August, where the women are the favorite to retain their Olympic gold.

The Nest: A Tale of Family, Fortune, and Dysfunction

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s agent sent her novel to publishers the Monday after Thanksgiving. As readers who had likely spent long weekends with their own dysfunctional families, he told her, they would be especially receptive to her book’s dysfunctional Plumb clan. The plan worked, and the 55-year-old’s debut landed a seven-figure advance. The Nest, Ecco was plainly betting, will have a certain mirror-like appeal not just within the literary precincts of New York that Sweeney satirizes, but also among readers well beyond them. The Plumb family dynamic, old-fashioned though it may sound, is astutely timed for our stagnant, post-recession age: The siblings in Sweeney’s foreground are busy making a mess of an inheritance they’ve long been fantasizing about.

In a prologue made for the screen (champagne, hand job, speeding Porsche), the drug-addled, sex-driven Leo Plumb stars as a predatory Prince Charming to a too-trusting, too-young Cinderella, Matilda Rodriguez, a waitress at the evening’s fancy Long Island wedding. Instead of a glass slipper, the events of the night leave her with an amputated foot and a pile of hush money. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Leo also faces an expensive divorce. To pay out the enormous sums he owes Matilda and his ex-wife, Leo draws down the reserves of a shared trust fund set up by his late father, Leonard, and administered by their distant mother, who will disburse it when the youngest Plumb child turns 40. His siblings, Jack, Bea, and Melody (who is nearing 40), are, to put it mildly, dismayed.

They have, you see, let anticipation get the better of them. Market forces and the shrewd management of a second cousin charged with overseeing the fund—which Leonard Plumb had, once upon a time, conceived of as “nothing so vast as to be truly significant”—have conspired to inflate “The Nest,” as the siblings refer to it, “to numbers beyond their wildest dreams.” And there lies the rub: The now-truly-significant resources they’d begun to count on for children’s tuition and home payments, business and personal solvency, is, just like that, on the brink of disappearing. Leo promises his finger-pointing siblings he’ll find a way to pay them back and, through rotating third-person perspectives, a romp of light-hearted social mockery ensues.

It’s worth pausing for a moment on the larger premise of Sweeney’s plot. The Plumbs, like so many Americans—with or without expectations of financial inheritance—find themselves in a world in which wealth is at best unpredictable and at worst illusory. Money taunts them by swelling when it’s out of reach and then disappearing right before they counted on enjoying its bounty. All the while, the things they intend to do with their money become more and more expensive. Early 21st-century New York makes an ideal backdrop for a gentle parody of the sort of self-pity such travails inspire among a relatively privileged set.

Sweeney, who wrote The Nest in L.A. after decades as a copywriter in New York, is adept at setting the scene, putting the players in place, and knowing when to step back. What her voice lacks in distinctiveness, it makes up for in confidence and direction, as she capitalizes on the nostalgic yearnings inspired by a city with already-astronomical, steadily rising rents—yearnings felt especially acutely among its more creative careerists, subject to fiscal ups-and-downs.

Sweeney’s urban portrait turns on real estate, the nest that everybody can gloat over, or resent. A literary agent, an old friend of Leo and Bea Plumb’s, bought her townhouse in Brooklyn at the end of the Giuliani era, “only weeks after 9/11 during what would turn out to be the tiniest of real-estate dips.” And who wouldn’t grudgingly respect the editor—Bea’s boss and would-be lover—who bought an entire building “before the Dumbo section of Brooklyn became DUMBO” because it “reminded him of Soho back when Soho had energy and grit”? Meanwhile, Jack Plumb, an antiques dealer who failed to mount “the real estate carousel at the right time,” feels New York “mocking him and his financial woes” at every turn. And poor Melody, in rejecting the “grime and cacophony” of city life, which she fears will corrupt her daughters, has burdened herself with a giant mortgage in a quaint upstate town. The city becomes a symbol of innocence lost.

* * *

Last fall saw the publication of another first novel about New York, also preceded by news of a hefty advance for its author. Though Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire is far longer, and has a very different flavor, it contains many of the same ingredients—and some of the same sour notes that begin to creep into The Nest. The intergenerational inheritance drama, the awesome power of New York real estate, and the rueful nostalgia are set, in that novel, primarily in the seedy ’70s, before Wall Street power or 9/11 trauma-and-recovery steered the city in its present direction. Hallberg, as Louis Menand wrote in The New Yorker, is a romantic; his novel is almost entirely devoid of satire.

With some money, tempered ambitions, and, yes, a little grand-finale romance, the Plumbs can have their cupcakes and eat them too.

It turns out that Sweeney is more of a romantic than she perhaps realizes. That becomes clear in her subplots, which feature New Yorkers on the lower end of the economic spectrum whose lives the often-oblivious Plumbs disrupt. Making room for the perspective of the city’s other half is important, given the Plumb siblings’ self-involvement. (Leo, his conscience cleansed by the knowledge that he’s made Matilda a millionaire, has “buried her deep, deep in a tiny box in some remote corner of his brain.”) But the artificial neatness of the downstairs storylines dilutes Sweeney’s irony. When these minor, and morally superior, characters end up amply rewarded with authorial acts of kismet—if not for the accident, Matilda would never have met her fellow-amputee love interest in rehab—the effect feels more like absolution for the Plumbs than like a true critique of their ways. Sweeney gets to cluck at the fumbling siblings without giving them too stinging a slap on the wrist.

The Plumbs are ridiculous, and it’s fun to pass judgment and worry on their behalf as they nervously eye their bank accounts and learn to live with one another as adults. But Sweeney can’t quite seem to decide what she wants us to take away from their foibles. Is some level of entitlement excusable, or even endearing, as long as we can take a step back and see it for what it is? (What might such a step back look like?) Are we to lament, as Leo does, that New York has “completely lost its edge,” or should we be relieved? When all is said and done, is it money that matters, or family? Ultimately, Sweeney wants to have it all ways. With some money, tempered ambitions, hard work, strengthened relationships, and, yes, a little grand-finale romance, the Plumbs can have their cupcakes and eat them too.

That’s a luxury not everyone gets to enjoy these days. But The Nest shies away from facing squarely the greater ironies of a city in which it is all too clear that a lot depends on where on the economic spectrum you start out, and on luck that can often seem skewed. “Part of the city’s magical beastliness,” the essayist Meghan Daum has written, “is the fact that you can show up with the best of intentions, do what’s considered to be all the right things, actually achieve some measure of success, and still find yourself caught inside a financial emergency.” Without some improbable, romantic twists of fate, though, that story wouldn’t make a very good novel.

Birth of the Uncool

Quick: Name an adjective you associate with Miles Davis.

You picked “cool,” right? Even in settings where the late trumpeter’s music is far out of mind, he pops up as a symbol of cool: Gap ads. Indie-rock songs. Adam Sandler vehicles. Davis’s iconic coolness and his status as the most famous star in his genre make him a tempting subject for filmmakers—perhaps the most tempting, though not the first jazz musician to get the treatment. Make a movie about a famous jazzman and you get glamour, smoky nightclub scenes, sharp suits, and drugs. But it’s hard to capture what made these people great musicians, since practicing ii-V-I progressions doesn’t really make for great footage.

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Viewed from a certain perspective, jazz is a high-drama form: A group of musicians get together, often with only a melody and a set of chords, and then the players are expected to take turns producing fresh improvised solos on the spot. It’s flying without a net. There’s a real tension to that, but it’s difficult to convey, especially to a non-jazz obsessive, and jazz is a form that is infamously prone to obsessives and closed to outsiders. Sit through an hour-long set by even the best jazz groups and you’re likely to get a few moments of transcendence, an occasional instant of disaster, and long stretches where musicians are trying to work things out with middling success. The natural choice for a filmmaker is to focus on the coolness and the pathos, and push the music a little bit to the side.

One of the strengths of Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s excellent new Davis biopic, is the way it rejects that approach, capturing its subject’s musical genius while still delivering a quick-paced plot. It achieves that in part with a gonzo, fictionalized storyline involving a stolen reel of tape, high-speed car chases, and gunplay. But it also does by avoiding the easy path. Instead of focusing on Davis at the height of his powers—say, at his Brooks Brothers-clad apogee in the 1950s, when he’d kicked heroin and was recording the top-selling jazz record of all time—it depicts him at his lowest moment.

In the late 1970s, after driving hard into a psychedelic, electric direction, Davis quit music, entering a reclusive haze of debauchery, pornography, cocaine, and dissolution. (Don’t take it from me, or from Cheadle. Davis described it unblinkingly in his autobiography.) Cheadle’s Davis is bitter, violent, coke-addled, physically spent, and has let his chops go so far that he can’t really play his horn. Jheri-curled, balding, and sporting a wardrobe that is (generously) an amazing period piece, he lounges around his darkened apartment, haunted by memories of his ex-wife Frances (Emayatzy Corinealdi), who left him over his violent abuse and endless philandering. It’s not cool at all.

Reaction to Miles Ahead has focused, sometimes critically, on the fictionalized elements of the movie. The plot circles around attempts by an invented Rolling Stone reporter, played by Ewan McGregor, to interview Davis about a supposed comeback, and Davis’s attempts to recover the stolen recording. The inventions aren’t as crazy as they might seem. Davis was shot at while driving around Brooklyn in 1969; he was also famously violent.

Make a movie about a famous jazzman and you get glamour, smoky nightclub scenes, sharp suits, and drugs. But it’s hard to capture what made these people great musicians.

There’s also drug use—a staple of jazz biopics, from the 1972 Billie Holiday film Lady Sings the Blues, or the 1988 Charlie Parker homage Bird, in which the saxophonist’s heroin habit takes center stage, undermining his brilliant career and ultimately bringing about his untimely demise. Filmmakers, along with critics and listeners, have tended to treat this kind of dissolution as romantic and glamorous. “He was the essence of cool,” one critic wrote of Parker in his review of Bird, a role Miles has overtaken since his death. Forest Whitaker’s Bird was a doomed hero, fitting “the paradigm of the jazzman-as-victim,” as Janet Maslin put it, quoting Nat Hentoff.

But drugs never becomes the focus of Miles Ahead, perhaps because coke—which Cheadle’s Davis eagerly sniffs—isn’t an especially romantic drug. (A one-time heroin addict, the trumpeter kicked the habit in 1954, locking himself in a room at his father’s house and going cold turkey. He was forthright about his continued cocaine use later. ) If Miles Ahead’s subject is a victim, it’s only of his own paranoia, misogyny, and anger: Begged to return to music, he withdraws farther. (Davis did return to live performance in 1981, producing a series of interesting though often bad records influenced by contemporary pop until his death in 1991, at 65.)

Freed from the need to embody coolness, and eschewing real events in search of a higher truth, the film is able to capture a great deal of the Davis who emerges from his autobiography and the accounts of his friends and sidemen. It’s also able to offer a glimpse into the creative and improvisational magic of jazz. “Our attempt with this movie was to try to externalize an internal process,” Cheadle told me. “It’s inherently non-dramatic.” In one particularly effective moment, set during recording sessions for Porgy and Bess, Davis sits with the arranger Gil Evans and works out some changes to the score.

“One of people’s favorite scenes is the scene where he works on the recording session,” Cheadle told me. “That’s just cool because that scene was improvised. There’s just a line in the script that says, ‘Miles works on “Gone.”’ I said I wanted musicians, not actors. I wanted charts. When you’re looking at the movie, you feel the authenticity there.”

Later, when a fictional young trumpeter named Junior tries to pick something up from the purloined reel-to-reel, Davis—who’s been rude and abrasive to the young man throughout the film—suddenly softens, carefully directing the younger player how to voice a chord to great effect. (Davis’s real-life sidemen weren’t always as lucky as Junior. Herbie Hancock told Cheadle about his first time playing with Davis’s band. Having received few instructions, he asked the trumpeter what he should play. Davis responded bluntly, using his favorite epithet: “Piano, motherfucker.”)

If Miles Ahead’s subject is a victim, it’s only of his own paranoia, misogyny, and anger.

Cheadle learned to play trumpet for the film, the better to mimic Davis’s fingers moving over the valves. At other points in the movie, actors portray the members of Davis’s second great quintet, with Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter. The film’s closing sequence is a strange fantasia, an imaginary concert scene where late-period Davis plays with the real-life Hancock and Shorter, plus a host of younger musicians like Robert Glasper and Esperanza Spalding.

As Cheadle has recounted many times, his involvement in the project began when Davis’s nephew (and former drummer) Vince Wilburn Jr. told reporters that a biopic was in the work and Cheadle would play the lead—the first time the actor learned about it. More important to the movie’s success, perhaps, is a different member of Davis’s family: Frances Taylor, his first wife. Cheadle told me he first met Taylor in the 1990s when she was a hostess at Hamburger Hamlet in Los Angeles. At the time, he had no idea who she was. You might expect this involvement could lead to a film that pulls its punches on less savory elements. It’s possible it had the opposite effect.

The story of Davis’s courtship and stormy relationship with Taylor is told through flashbacks. She appeared on several of his album covers in the 1950s and 1960s—a bold move at a time when white eye candy was more common on commercial releases like his. In the film, Davis agrees to sign a couple records for a Columbia University student selling him cocaine, but confiscates a copy of Someday My Prince Will Come with Taylor’s face on it. A talented professional dancer who ended her career at Davis’s demand, Taylor left him after a decade, afraid for her life. In 2006, as a different Miles biopic was under development, she told The New York Times, “There’s got to be full treatment of his genius, as well as his shortcomings.” Miles Ahead meets that mandate.

Race was never far from Davis’s mind. He was a victim of police brutality—a version of a famous clubbing by a cop outside Birdland is in the film—and believed, often correctly, that he was deprived of recognition due to racist mores. It’s interesting to imagine what Davis would have thought of the addition of the McGregor character. He was often vituperative about white people, but his closest collaborator was Evans, and he mentored white musicians from throughout his career, from Bill Evans to John Scofield.

Still, it seems ironic that Miles Ahead is entering wide release just a week after Born to Be Blue, Ethan Hawke’s biopic about Chet Baker. Baker, a white trumpeter and singer, affected a similar vibrato-less tone to Davis and played some of the same ballads. Davis was harsh about it in his book. “What bothered me more than anything was that all the critics were starting to talk about Chet Baker ... like he was the second coming of Jesus Christ. And him sounding just like me—worse than me even while I was a terrible junkie,” he wrote. “Both him and me knew that he had copied a lot of shit from me.”

More than enough jazz musicians have imitated Miles. Future jazz-biopic directors could stand to emulate Miles Ahead.

There’s a superficial similarity between Miles Ahead and Born to Be Blue. Both portray famous trumpeters. Both focus on periods of exile. In Baker’s case, he was attacked, possibly during a drug deal, in 1968 and had to be fitted with dentures, then relearn his horn. In both cases, the leading men love and lose a beautiful woman because of their lack of self-control. Both films also go out of their way to include historical figures whom only obsessives will recognize: Davis’s producer Teo Macero, and Baker’s producer Richard Bock. Davis even appears in Born to Be Blue, (mostly) characteristically dismissive of Baker.

And both films grapple with drugs. Davis also wrote that the press focused too much on the drug problems of black musicians like himself and Parker while ignoring white junkies like Baker and the saxophonist Stan Getz. No one will lodge such an objection against Born to Be Blue. The movie shows Baker trying—and, for a time, with the help of his girlfriend—kicking heroin. But at the end of the film, on the cusp of a high-pressure comeback gig, Baker flinches and relapses. His career is back, but his woman leaves. (The trumpeter died in 1988 after falling out of an Amsterdam hotel window. He had been using cocaine and heroin.)

Hawke does an impressive job physically impersonating Baker, a haunted man. And he conveys how important music was to Baker: In one scene, the trumpeter spits blood as he sits in a bathtub, trying to relearn how to play with the dentures. But you don’t get any sense why critics (well, some of them) regard Baker’s music so highly. The audience never sees much more than Baker playing through a melody. Could he improvise? Who knows! Born to Be Blue is a good movie, but it’s a movie about heroin addiction that uses jazz as a vehicle. Baker is just another doomed, romantic hero—the jazzman as victim.

That’s what makes Miles Ahead a triumph. It shows Miles Davis as a flawed human, but not a tragically flawed archetype. And it shows him as a consummate artist engaged in the hard work of music—not just a guy who happened to play trumpet, or an dreamy artist savant. More than enough jazz musicians have imitated Miles. Future jazz-biopic directors could stand to emulate Miles Ahead.

Hillary Clinton Returns 'Home' to New York

NEW YORK—Hillary Clinton returned home on Wednesday.

Well, to be more precise, she returned to one of her homes. Over the course of her 68 years, she’s had a few. There was Illinois, where she was born and raised. Then there was Arkansas, where she and her husband launched their careers and raised their only child. There’s also Washington, D.C., which you might call her professional home for most of the last 25 years and where she’s owned a house for the last 15.

New York, however, is Hillary Clinton’s political home. The distinction is an important one both for the primary election she faces on April 19 and likely for the general election campaign she’ll wage in the fall. By dint of birth and unmistakable accent, her main competitors for the presidency have equal if not greater claim to favorite-son status in the Empire State. Unlike Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, she was neither born nor raised here. But it is a place where she, and only she, has twice won statewide election.

Clinton’s last victory in New York was a decade ago, and while she and Bill still reside in Westchester, her homecoming rally at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on Wednesday afternoon was a mix of reunion and reintroduction. Before she arrived, the man who in 1999 prodded her to run for Senate, Representative Charles Rangel (now 85 and about to retire) danced slowly across the stage, eliciting cheers from the older members of a crowd he’s served for 45 years. Clinton’s shepherd and validator was New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, who offered up a greatest hits of her eight years in the Senate and reminded the audience that of all the places where Bill Clinton could pick to open an office after he left the White House, he chose Harlem. (It wasn't because his wife was already running for Senate there. Definitely not that.)

“She may not always tawk like we Brooklynites tawk, but when she speaks out she changes minds, she changes hearts, she moves to action, and she changes outcomes.”

Schumer played an effective surrogate, hitting hard on the theme that while Clinton’s unnamed opponents might talk a big game, she actually has a record of progressive victories. “She delivers,” Schumer said. Then the Brooklyn-born senator deliberately exaggerated his already thick accent, in a knowing nod to that other Brooklyn-born senator who now represents Vermont. “She may not always tawk like we Brooklynites tawk,” Schumer said as the crowd whooped, “but when she speaks out she changes minds, she changes hearts, she moves to action, and she changes outcomes.”

Much of the Harlem rally felt like a flashback to 2008, to a time when Bill Clinton was still “the first black president” and Hillary was Senator Clinton, not Secretary Clinton. Both Schumer and Clinton spent more time bashing George W. Bush than praising Barack Obama, and there was barely a mention of the four years Clinton spent globe-trotting as secretary of state. “Trickle-down economics,” Clinton said in one rhetorical blast from the past, “made life harder for people in our state.” The dramatic arc of Clinton’s speech centered on 9/11, which occurred just eight months after she was sworn in as senator. She recalled her efforts, working alongside Schumer, to secure recovery funds for the city and to pass the Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. “New Yorkers took a chance on me, and I will never forget that,” Clinton said. “There were some hard times, weren’t there? But we pulled together.”

She wove the attacks into her three-part test for a president: Can he or she deliver results that improve people’s lives? Can he or she keep America safe? Can he or she bring the country together? And it was here that Clinton shifted from her New York nostalgia tour to a sharpened version of her 2016 stump speech, one in which she positioned herself against Sanders on one side and Trump and Ted Cruz on the other. She hit Sanders for siding with the NRA on gun control and for touting policies that she described as impractical. “Now some folks may have the luxury of holding out for the perfect,” Clinton said. “But a lot of Americans are hurting right now, and they can't wait for that. They need the good, and they need it today.”

“Most of my peers and most of my Facebook network are supporting Bernie. But I’m staying strong.”

She attacked Trump and Cruz for their policies on immigrants, especially Trump’s call for banning Muslims from entering the country and Cruz’s push for police to surveil Muslim neighborhoods. “It doesn’t make them sound strong,” Clinton said. “It makes them sound in over their head.”

It’ll be a winning line for Democrats nationwide, and it worked particularly well at the Apollo, where the crowd reflected the diversity not only of Harlem but of Clinton's broader coalition. If the recent polls giving Clinton a comfortable lead over Sanders are correct, she probably doesn’t need to step foot in New York to win the state. But delegates in New York are awarded by congressional district, and Clinton needs to pad her margin in the city to offset rural areas where Sanders might have an advantage. Clinton’s campaign packed the stage behind her with young women who carried signs that said ‘Welcome Home’ and who chanted, “I’m with her!” and “Madam President!” But the many young faces in the Harlem crowd also highlighted Clinton’s challenge: In New York, the voters most likely to tilt to Sanders are ones who are scarcely old enough to remember Clinton’s tenure as senator.

Michael Tosto, 26, has been backing Clinton from the start. But his friends aren’t. “None of them. That’s the sad thing,” he said after the rally. “It’s the brainwashing of the student loans and the revolution thing.” The same was true for Sam Ackerberg, a law student from Brooklyn. “Most of my peers and most of my Facebook network are supporting Bernie,” he said. “But I’m staying strong.”

As she tries to keep Sanders from threatening her delegate lead, Clinton needs supporters throughout her adopted home state to stay strong for her, too. The next primary might be in Wisconsin on Tuesday, but she’s rallying even closer to home in Westchester on Thursday while Bill Clinton hold events with union members in Manhattan. Sanders will be in the South Bronx on Thursday evening, and then Clinton heads upstate to Syracuse on Friday.

“We’re on the right track,” Clinton said as she tallied up her advantage in votes over both Sanders (2.5 million more) and Trump (1 million more) at the start of the speech. “But I don’t have to tell you this is a wild election year. I’m not going to take anything, or anyone, for granted,” she added. It’s a line she’s used before, but it carried extra meaning in the one state that all three of them have called home.

Colombia’s Slow March Toward Peace

Colombia will begin peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), the country’s second-largest rebel group, that, if successful, would end the Latin American country’s five-decade-long conflict with the armed Marxist guerrilla movement.

ELN leaders and representatives of the Colombian government made the announcement in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, where the two sides had been holding informal talks. Official talks will start in Ecuador, and will then move to Brazil, Chile, and Cuba, El Colombiano, the Colombian newspaper, reported. It’s unclear when the talks will actually begin.

“From the start of my time in office, I have said that we have to put an end to this conflict, and if the ELN joins in with these efforts, then we’ll have a more stable and lasting peace, which is what all Colombians want,” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on national television.

These will be the first formal negotiations between the two sides, and the announcement came nearly two weeks after ELN released two hostages. The announcement also included six points of discussion, among them how guerrillas would surrender their weapons, and “guarantees to exercise political action,” El Tiempo, the Venezuelan newspaper, reported.  

ELN was formed in 1964 after the decade-long civil war, which ended in 1958, and amid the fervor of Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in Cuba. One of the group’s early and more prominent leaders was Camilo Torres Restrepo, a Jesuit priest, who famously said: “If Jesus were alive today, he would be a guerrillero.”

The group attracted left-wing academics and poor farmers. But since its inception, it has battled for attention, fighters, and territory with the far larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), another Marxist guerrilla group. ELN never grew to FARC’s size or prominence, but both groups, which began as left-wing uprisings against the state, devolved into criminal enterprises, with links to drugs, extortions, and kidnappings. They often operate in the same areas of Colombia and have fought each other.  

Wednesday’s announcement came as the Colombian government is nearing a final peace deal with FARC. Those talks are now centered on how FARC’s rebels will disarm—an issue that is likely to come up with ELN, too. Analysts see the prospect of a peace deal with ELN as a sweetener to FARC to disarm and reach an agreement with the government.

More than five decades of fighting in Colombia involving the government, left-wing, and right-wing paramilitary groups has killed more than 200,000 people.

Colombia's Slow March Toward Peace

Colombia will begin peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), the country’s second-largest rebel group, that, if successful, would end the Latin American country’s five-decade-long conflict with the armed Marxist guerrilla movement.

ELN leaders and representatives of the Colombian government made the announcement in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, where the two sides had been holding informal talks. Official talks will start in Ecuador, and will then move to Brazil, Chile, and Cuba, El Colombiano, the Colombian newspaper, reported. It’s unclear when the talks will actually begin.

“From the start of my time in office, I have said that we have to put an end to this conflict, and if the ELN joins in with these efforts, then we’ll have a more stable and lasting peace, which is what all Colombians want,” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on national television.

This will be the first formal negotiations between the two sides, and the announcement came nearly two weeks after ELN released two hostages. The announcement also included six points of discussion, among them how guerrillas would surrender their weapons, and “guarantees to exercise political action,” El Tiempo, the Venezuelan newspaper, reported.  

ELN was formed in 1964 after the decade-long civil war, which ended in 1958, and amid the fervor of Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in Cuba. One of the group’s early and more prominent leaders was Camilo Torres Restrepo, a Jesuit priest, who famously said: “If Jesus were alive today, he would be a guerrillero.”

The group attracted left-wing academics and poor farmers. But since its inception, it has battled for attention, fighters, and territory with the far larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), another Marxist guerrilla group. ELN never grew to FARC’s size or prominence, but both groups, which began as left-wing uprisings against the state, devolved into criminal enterprises, with links to drugs, extortions, and kidnappings. They often operate in the same areas of Colombia and have fought each other.  

Wednesday’s announcement came as the Colombian government is nearing a final peace deal with FARC. Those talks are now centered on how FARC’s rebels will disarm—an issue that is likely to come up with ELN, too. Analysts see the prospect of a peace deal with ELN as a sweetener to FARC to disarm and reach an agreement with the government.

More than five decades of fighting in Colombia involving the government, left-wing, and right-wing paramilitary groups has killed more than 200,000 people.

Obama's Clemency Bucket List

President Obama on Wednesday commuted the sentences of 61 federal prisoners, more than a third of whom were serving life sentences, as part of his administration’s push for changes to decades-old sentencing laws, particularly for nonviolent, drug-related offenses.

Most of the individuals are low-level drug offenders “whose sentences would have been shorter if they were convicted under today’s laws,” Obama said in a Facebook post.

The announcement brings Obama’s total number of commutations during his tenure to 248. He has also issued 70 pardons.

The president met Wednesday afternoon with formerly incarcerated individuals whose prison sentences were commuted by him, and his two immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. A video posted on Facebook showed Obama shaking hands and hugging the men and women and asking them to lunch.

Obama has vowed to change laws adopted during the nation’s war on drugs in the 1980s and ’90s that led to a dramatic increase in the U.S. prison population. Bipartisan legislation years in the making that would significantly alter federal sentencing laws is idling Congress, facing opposition from some Republican lawmakers.

Neil Eggleston, the White House counsel, pointed out Wednesday that Obama has commuted the sentences of more people than the previous six presidents combined. Until about 2014, Obama had used his clemency powers more sparingly than his predecessors; at the time, one in seven of his pardons had been issued for Thanksgiving turkeys. That year, he commuted 22 sentences in March and 46 in July, most of which were for nonviolent drug crimes. His largest, one-time use of clemency came in December, when he commuted the sentences of 95 prisoners, most of whom received lengthy sentences for cocaine trafficking and possession in the 1990s.

The White House said more commutations and pardons will follow in the months left in Obama’s presidency. Unlike some other items on the president’s bucket list—closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, a new Supreme Court justice, anything having to do with gun laws—granting clemency is comparatively easy. As my colleague Matt Ford wrote in December 2014, at the start of an uptick in Obama administration commutations:

Few presidential powers are as unconstrained as the pardon. Neither Congress nor the courts need be consulted, and neither branch can override its application. President Lincoln, the pardon's most prolific wielder, liberally exercised the power of mercy. “Gen. Joseph Hooker once sent an envelope to the president containing the cases of 55 convicted and doomed deserters,” wrote one historian. “Lincoln merely wrote 'Pardoned' on the envelope and returned it to Hooker.”

A recent policy change stands to have far more impact on existing life sentences than sweeping executive clemency in the next few months. In 2014, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the federal agency that established sentencing policies for federal courts, voted to reduce sentencing guidelines for most federal drug-trafficking offenders. The new rules could be applied retroactively, which meant more than 40,000 incarcerated individuals could be eligible for a reduction in their sentences.

Presidential clemency powers only apply to the federal prison system, which houses 196,144 inmates. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates 3,278 people are spending life in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. And many more individuals are denied commutations than are granted them; in January, the Obama administration denied 745 applications and approved three.

The Department of Justice has 9,115 pending clemency applications from federal prisoners, according to The Washington Post.

James Corden and Late Night’s Viral Future

Since it debuted a little over a year ago, The Late Late Show With James Corden has averaged about 1.2 million viewers a night, a respectable figure that puts it solidly in the middle of the crowded world of late-night television. By comparison though, Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” segment with Adele, a 15-minute odyssey that touches on the singer’s love for the Spice Girls and Nicki Minaj, has been watched 90 million times since it was posted in January. Corden remains an up-and-comer for U.S. TV audiences, but in the viral world of YouTube, he’s already a superstar—and that’s far more crucial for his future.

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James Corden Exemplifies Late Night’s Cheerful New Generation

Perhaps that’s why his network, CBS, decided to cash in on the popularity of “Carpool Karaoke” with a primetime special that sliced together some of its greatest hits with new footage, including a ride with Jennifer Lopez that culminated in Corden taking her cellphone and sending a text to Leonardo DiCaprio. The crucial appeal of “Carpool Karaoke” is the same quality that’s helped popularize other late-night viral sensations, like Jimmy Fallon’s lip-sync battles or Jimmy Kimmel’s mean-tweet readings. They’re staged events with celebrities that strive for authenticity, sweeping aside the creaky sit-down chat for something that actually has the air of spontaneity, while sacrificing any attempts at satire.  

Near the end of her “Carpool Karaoke” segment, J. Lo held her phone’s screen triumphantly up to the camera, astonished that Corden had the temerity to send DiCaprio a funny text. The stunt was for real—eagle-eyed reporters  analyzed her buddy list to verify it—but it’s hard to know just how organic it was. Off-the-cuff moments are what make Corden’s videos seem special: Whether or not his rides are totally improvised, they feel relaxed, in contrast to the scripted banter of a typical late-night chat. The crucial moment from Adele’s segment involves her reciting a verse from Kanye West’s “Monster.” And Justin Bieber’s mellow appearance, one of the first to explode on Corden’s YouTube page (which now has more than 4 million subscribers), helped rehab the singer’s image ahead of his new album release.

A certain pre-planned quality was part of the appeal for hosts like David Letterman, who always maintained a cautious distance from his guests (all the better for gently mocking the ones he didn’t like). His was an era of snark, of healthy disrespect for fame and the beatific glow it could bestow on the lowliest celebrity. Jay Leno, slightly more of a schmoozer with his guests, was similarly irreverent in his attitude toward the American public, whom he’d mock with segments like “Jaywalking.” Corden has upended that approach too, with another viral segment where he arrives at someone’s home to deliver a pizza … often with celebrity guests in tow.

Fallon is the acknowledged master of the “celebrity buddy” genre, tapping friends old and new (from Justin Timberlake to Bruce Springsteen) to pal around on his set. There’s a collaborative feeling to his mainstay sketches (Lip Sync Battle, Wheel of Musical Impressions, Evolution of Dancing) that harkens back to his days on Saturday Night Live, where a celebrity guest host is brought in to brainstorm sketch ideas every week. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who’s far more openly indebted to Letterman, allows celebrities to embrace their meaner side by letting them clap back at rude tweets; his “Lie Witness News,” which asks invasive questions of strangers on the street, has an air of Leno’s “Jaywalking.”

Not everyone in late night is going the celeb-heavy route. Seth Meyers seems to be making a play for Jon Stewart’s audience, with his “A Closer Look” series focused on political stories. Conan O’Brien tapped into a huge new audience with his brilliant “Clueless Gamer” series, where he plays video games with staffer Aaron Bleyaert. The segments play off O’Brien’s general disinterest in gaming, using his generational malaise to his advantage. At 52, he’s now one of the oldest late-night hosts, after spending decades as one of the youngest—a sign of just how drastic the changeover has been. With Stewart, Letterman, and Leno all now retired, even Fallon is practically the old guard, when five years ago he was an upstart and late-night shows were actively resistant to putting clips on YouTube for fear of lost revenue. These days, those page views can help pay a star’s salary.

Late-night hosts are like Supreme Court justices: Once appointed, they can be on the bench for decades, so when there’s turnover, the changes can feel drastic. Watching one of Corden’s videos, I’m reminded of the comedian Andy Kindler’s keynote address at the Montreal Just for Laughs festival, a satirical stock-taking that’s become an annual tradition in the industry. “You’ve gotta be able to do a potato-sack race with Cameron Diaz,” he joked in 2015, bemoaning the brave new world of celeb-friendly late night. There probably are only more sack races to come.

A Near-Epiphany at the Supreme Court

In a 5-3 decision in Luis v. United States on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court forbade the government from seizing legitimate funds defendants could use to hire a lawyer of their choice. Along the way, the justices came close to asking a more troubling question: Does America’s underfunded public-defender system meet the Sixth Amendment’s standards for adequate legal counsel?

The case itself had nothing to do with public defenders, at least on the surface. Sila Luis, who brought the appeal before the Court, was indicted for federal health-care fraud to the tune of $45 million in 2012. Luis had $2 million in assets when a federal grand jury indicted her; she said she hoped to use the funds to pay for her legal defense.

But prosecutors sought a court order barring her from using any of her funds—even those wholly unconnected to the crime—in hopes of acquiring them after conviction for restitution and possible criminal penalties. Luis argued that seizing those untainted funds would violate her Sixth Amendment right to seek assistance of counsel of her choice. Lower courts disagreed, so she appealed the order to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case last year.

Five justices agreed on the ruling itself: The Sixth Amendment forbids the government from seizing untainted assets before trial when defendants need those assets to hire lawyers of their choice. Four of them, led by Justice Stephen Breyer, ruled the right to counsel of choice outweighed the government’s interest in restitution and fines. Justice Clarence Thomas supported the result but saw a clear command from the Sixth Amendment instead of a balancing act.

In his plurality opinion, Breyer expressed alarm at the right-to-counsel implications in the government’s position. “How are defendants whose innocent assets are frozen in cases like these supposed to pay for a lawyer—particularly if they lack ‘tainted assets’ because they are innocent, a class of defendants whom the right to counsel certainly seeks to protect?” Then he made an interesting divergence. Indeed, what would happen if Luis and others like her could no longer afford to pay for a lawyer?

“These defendants, rendered indigent, would fall back upon publicly paid counsel, including overworked and underpaid public defenders,” he continued. “As the Department of Justice explains, only 27 percent of county-based public defender offices have sufficient attorneys to meet nationally recommended caseload standards. And as one amicus points out, ‘[m]any federal public defender organizations and lawyers appointed under the Criminal Justice Act serve numerous clients and have only limited resources.’”

“The upshot,” Breyer concluded, “is a substantial risk that accepting the Government’s views would—by increasing the government-paid-defender workload—render less effective the basic right the Sixth Amendment seeks to protect.”

Breyer’s logic is worth following to its endpoint. He acknowledges that throwing Luis and others like her to the public-defender system would weaken her Sixth Amendment rights to effective counsel. But what does that say about the constitutional rights of poor defendants who have no other choice?

The question has national implications. Underfunding and understaffing in state public-defender systems weakens the quality of legal representation they can provide to clients. Virtually all of Kentucky’s public defenders exceeded the American Bar Association’s recommended caseload in 2015. Minnesota’s public defenders took on almost double the ABA standard in 2010—170,000 cases for fewer than 400 lawyers—and spent only an average of 12 minutes on each case outside the courtroom.

Some states face even greater crises. In cash-strapped Louisiana, where 8 out of 10 defendants cannot afford a lawyer, the system is on the verge of collapse. The state’s 2017 budget includes a 62 percent cut in state funding for public-defender system, with 11 of the state’s 42 offices in danger of shutting down by October. In one office, a waiting list for legal representation had more than 2,300 names on it in March. Defendants often languish behind bars, separated from employment and family, while they wait.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a dissent joined by Justice Samuel Alito, said the question of adequate representation was beyond this case’s scope. He also appeared to recognize the logical conclusion of Breyer’s point. “Given the large volume of defendants in the criminal justice system who rely on public representation,” he wrote, “it would be troubling to suggest that a defendant who might be represented by a public defender will receive inadequate representation.” A troubling suggestion, indeed.