Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 214

Burma’s Proxy President

The slow and, at times, hesitating movement toward democracy in Burma, otherwise known as Myanmar, has had some encouraging news lately.

In November, free elections were held for the first time in 25 years. Voters handed an overwhelming win to the National League for Democracy party (NLD), which is led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize–winner, who was previously imprisoned by the military junta that has ruled the country for five decades. And last month, hundreds of lawmakers were formally sworn into parliament and allowed to form a government and pick the president.

This week, however, the momentum hit a snag. After failing to convince the military to change a provision in the constitution that forbids anyone with a foreign spouse or children to become president (Suu Kyi’s late husband was British, as are her two sons), the NLD was forced to nominate another party member, Htin Kyaw, to stand for candidacy. Suu Kyi, who has spent 15 of the past 21 years under house arrest, is the most visible and popular politician in the country.

In announcing the nomination of Kyaw, a party loyalist and former political prisoner, it was emphasized that he would essentially be serving as a proxy for Suu Kyi.

“She will hold the post handling three institutions: the government, the Parliament and the party,” said a member of NLD’s executive committee, adding that, “If there was once the senior general in the country, she will be the senior president.”

Following the news, Suu Kyi, wrote a note to her supporters to apologize for “not fully fulfilling the people's desire” to have her become president. As Reuters notes, Kyaw still must be formally vetted by a panel that includes members of the military in order to stand for office. The presidential vote will held next week.

How ‘LOL’ Became a Punctuation Mark

This week, Kim Kardashian West did something she is wont to do: She posted a picture on Instagram. This particular posting, however, got a little more attention than the typical Kardashian selfie. That’s probably because it went like this:

When you're like I have nothing to wear LOL

A photo posted by Kim Kardashian West (@kimkardashian) on Mar 7, 2016 at 12:07am PST

So, yes. (Forgive me, Mr. Emerson.) But stop looking at the picture. Look, instead, at the caption Kim appended to her Insta: When you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL. Look, in particular, at that dangling “LOL.” Kim is doing a lot of things in the photo—snapping a selfie, gazing at her reflected image with a mixture of curiosity and wonderment, being naked—but laughing is definitely not one of them.

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And, you know, of course it isn’t. This is a person who takes her body very seriously, not just in the way most of us do, but also as a kind of Boorstinian media event and a means of capitalistic production. Kim’s “LOL” offers, instead of laughter, an ironic aaaaaand scene to the humblebrag she’s typed into her Instagram caption field. There is pretty much nobody in the world who is less likely to find herself with “nothing to wear” than Kim Kardashian West; her LOL acknowledges that. Her LOL is a wink, rendered as an acronym. Her LOL suggests the many threads of irony required to weave an outfit of black-rectangled censors. Her LOL functions as, essentially, a punctuation mark.

It’s been some time now since “LOL,” as deployed by mortals not named Kim Kardashian West, has meant by default what it originally did: “laughing out loud.” (Online chats I’ve had with colleagues who are sitting within earshot confirm that their typed-out “LOL”s are very rarely evidence of the real thing; since that suggests the failing either of “LOL” or of my jokes, full disclosure, I have kind of a vested interest in LOL’s fundamental unfunniness.) And, indeed: As early as 2001, the linguist David Crystal—the same man who is now trying to bring more LOLs to Shakespeare—was wondering, “How many people are actually ‘laughing out loud’ when they send LOL?” The linguist Gretchen McCulloch wrote, in 2013, “I’d argue that LOL (commonly without caps) barely indicates an internal, silent chuckle, never mind an uproarious, audible guffaw.”

It’s true. But it’s not just that LOL, the stuff of the Vintage Internet, has gone soft in its old age, suggesting hilarity that is politely introverted rather than raucously audible. It’s more that LOL, at this point, has pretty much lost its sense of humor altogether. While the term has certainly stopped meaning, literally, “laughing out loud,” it is has also ceased to indicate—to a large extent if not the full one—“laughter” of any kind at all. Last May, Facebook analyzed the ways people “e-laugh” (“haha,” “hehe,” the laughter emoji) on its platform. The analysis found that of the 15 percent of Facebook users who included some form of digital laughter in their posts during the week Facebook studied, the most common of these was “haha” (51.4 percent of laughter), followed by laughing emoji (33.7 percent) and “hehe” (13.1). As for “LOL”? It accounted for only 1.9 percent of Facebook’s digital chuckles.

Here is a naked Kim Kardashian, talking about having no clothes. That is not “haha” funny. It is LOL funny.

And yet! LOL is still so common! There it remains, peppering WhatsApp chats and Slack conversations and Twitter posts and Facebook updates and the Instagram captions of Kim Kardashian West. There it is, as palindromic and seemingly popular as ever. There it is, still suggestive of “hahas” and “hehes” and Face With Tears of Joy. And there it is, too, ready to be deployed when you’re not quiiiiiite sure whether that Tinder guy you’ve been texting with was joking about Trump or (ohhhhhhh nooooo) very much not. There it is, ready and willing—like the tilde and the ALL-CAPS and the ironic emoji—to destabilize language, productively. There it is, doing its part to cloak digital communications in a warm blanket of interpersonal ambiguity.

So it’s not that LOL, strictly speaking, has gone the way of “ROFL” and “fleek” and “bae”—it’s not that LOL, as The Awl bluntly declared in writing about the Facebook study last year, has died. On the contrary: It is still vital. It is still common. It has simply, like so many other pieces of Internet slang, evolved to encompass more than its original meaning. As the linguist John McWhorter summed it up in 2013: “LOL isn’t funny anymore.”

McWhorter gave, in his essay on the matter, the example of Jocelyn and Annabelle, two friends who are texting with each other. “Jocelyn texts ‘where have you been?’” McWhorter wrote, “and Annabelle texts back ‘LOL at the library studying for two hours.’ How funny is that, really?” (Not very.) Instead, McWhorter argued, the “LOL” in the women’s exchange is standing in as, effectively, a marker for empathy. It is replacing the things that can be achieved in an in-person conversation—the nodding of the head, the contact of the eyes, the tiny gestures that together lend the “L” to the “IRL”—with a three-letter symbol. “LOL,” McWhorter put it, “no longer ‘means’ anything. Rather, it ‘does something’—conveying an attitude—just as the ending ‘ed’ doesn't ‘mean’ anything but conveys past tense. LOL is, of all things, grammar.”

“LOL” replaces the tiny gestures that put the “L” in the “IRL”—nods, winks, sighs—with a three-letter symbol.

So back to—the place where all things will probably wind up, in the end—Kim Kardashian West. Her “LOL,” on the one hand, is functioning in just the way McWhorter predicted: It is acting as a punctuation mark. It is transcending verbal meaning, and also reveling in it. It is expressing the kind of meta-emotion that is very easy to make clear in in-person conversations and very difficult to make clear in other kinds.

Kim’s LOL, however, differs from its predecessors in a significant way. The LOL she has deployed in her Instagram caption is not about empathy, really; that would defeat the purpose of her broadcast-driven, demi-goddessian relationship with her fans and her followers. Instead, her LOL suggests a kind of ironic ambivalence: It’s a winking acknowledgement that what she is saying about herself is, indeed, a joke. Not in the “this will make you laugh” sense, but in the deeper, more shadowed, more ironic sense. Here is a naked Kim Kardashian, talking about having no clothes. That is not “haha” funny. It is LOL funny.

Which is also to say that Kim Kardashian West—with her naked selfie and her naked self—have done what centuries’ worth of writers have failed to do: create punctuation that suggests, in its winking way, sarcasm. The 19th-century poet Alcanter de Brahm proposed a point d’ironie—a piece of punctuation that resembled a backwards question mark. It failed to catch on. The 20th-century novelist Hervé Bazin tried to revive Brahm’s suggestion—again, to no effect. Ambrose Bierce offered the “snigger point” (a horizontal parenthesis, or “”) to punctuate “every jocular or ironical sentence.” Nabokov suggested “a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket.” A father-and-son team in Michigan, in 2008, filed a patent for the “SarcMark”—“the official, easy-to-use punctuation mark to emphasize a sarcastic phrase, sentence, or message.” You can guess how that went [insert SarcMark here].

But then, after all those efforts from the masters of language writ large, comes Kim Kardashian. A reality star armed with nothing but a penchant for selfies, a massive Instagram following, and a sentence—“When you’re like I have nothing to wear”—that is punctuated with nothing but a “LOL.” Of course, though, it’s not just Kim. Her LOL comes on the heels of every other LOL that has, on platforms large and small, questioned and sarcasmed and #sorrynotsorry-ed and otherwise made words richer and fuller with its presence.

Kim’s LOL is ironic, to be sure; it whiffs, slightly, of lolnothingmatters, that most nihilistic of post-modern catchphrases. But her LOL is also, in its way, optimistic, and telling of the times: The LOL in when you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL occupies the spot where, in more formal English, a period would be. And it swaps that ancient mark’s suggestion of finality with one of suggestive invitation. Kim’s “when you’re like” suggests the framework of the meme, communal and conversational and vaguely conspiratorial; her “LOL” seals the deal. Kim, a human who is also a piece of media, is welcoming you to reply to her. She is in fact daring you to reply to her. Her “LOL” replaces the logic of the period with the logic of the ellipsis. Her “LOL” is, much more than her photo, seductive. It suggests that Kim’s caption and her picture and her self are similar, in their way, to language: mysterious, compelling, and never, thank goodness, quite finished.

Mysteries Abound in the Game of Thrones Season Six Trailer

For too long now, Game of Thrones viewers have been separated into two distinct camps, as unlike each other as Lannisters and Starks: There are those who’ve read the books, and those who haven’t. Promotional material for new seasons has historically been greeted with rabid excitement by newbies, and satisfied nods from smug readers who knew what was coming down the pike. But with the upcoming sixth season, we’ve finally evolved beyond these petty divisions. We can unite and watch the new trailer in awe together, wondering which characters will perish, who will be usurped, and whether Jon Snow is really dead or not.

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Scored to a cover version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” by James Vincent McMorrow, the trailer is full of action and bombast, but delivered at a strangely mournful tempo. That makes sense considering the abject misery most of the cast was in last year: Khaleesi Daenerys deposed from her throne in Slaver’s Bay, Queen Cersei forced to do a nude walk of shame through King’s Landing by religious zealots, Arya blinded by a guild of assassins, and Jon stabbed to death by his compatriots in the Night’s Watch. The trailer keeps things vague, but it’s nice to see Daenerys, Arya, Cersei, Sansa, and others all on their feet again, looking to avenge past wrongs.

With all five of Martin’s enormous tomes bled dry of material at this point, though, the show will now start pointing itself towards its own inevitable conclusion, guided only by story outlines Martin gave to the show’s creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. There’s a little bit from the novels left to cover: A power struggle among the Iron Islanders, who we glimpse in the trailer, and Arya’s continued life in the guild of assassins she joined in Braavos.

Everything else looks completely new. Daenerys is back with the Dothraki, the horse-lords who started her rise to power. Cersei is pushing back after her downfall from power, helped by a titanic Frankenstein monster of a bodyguard. Bran Stark, who didn’t make an appearance in the fifth season, appears to be hanging out with the scary White Walker king who Jon Snow did battle with last year (though, like so many of these briefly-glimpsed visuals, that could be a vision or a fantasy).

As for Jon Snow himself? We only see his cold corpse lying in repose, but it’s still hard to believe that last season’s betrayal was it for the character, who had so many unsolved mysteries to uncover, including his own parentage. The show’s creators, and the actor Kit Harrington, have repeatedly claimed that Jon’s gone for good, but the fans aren’t having it, citing evidence that Harrington was filming the show’s sixth season in Ireland with the rest of the cast. Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson, an expert on such matters, pinpointed a brief flash of footage on Twitter with a very familiar figure riding around in the background.

We’ll know soon enough. Game of Thrones is back on HBO on April 24th, premiering alongside new seasons of Veep and Silicon Valley. Until then, these 90 seconds of footage will have to do.

Europe's Latest Proposal for the Refugee Crisis

As European leaders continue to work on ways to resolve the continent’s migration crisis, Turkey has ratcheted up its demands to help limit the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war in Syria and Iraq from crossing over to Europe.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday outlined a tentative plan whereby EU countries would settle one refugee from Turkey in exchange for each refugee EU countries have returned to Turkey, a major transit country for migrants. Officials hope that such an arrangement would curtail the incentive to migrate illegally to Europe and without proper screening.

For its part, Turkey would receive an additional $3.3 billion, visa-less travel within Europe for its citizens, and expedited consideration for entry into the European Union. In return, Turkey will accept the return of all migrants who illegally cross into Greece, an EU nation, from Turkey.

European leaders, who are desperate to stem the flow of people, said they welcomed a possible deal, although as debate carried into Tuesday, there were some notable dissents among countries like Hungary that want to strictly limit immigration and others that object to Turkey’s linking of EU membership to the crisis.

External criticisms of the deal, which could potentially put Syrian refugees at risk of being returned to war zones, were particularly harsh. Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees, questioned its legality under international law. Others noted that migrants themselves would likely protest this arrangement heavily.

Doctor Without Borders, in a statement on Tuesday, said that Europe’s leaders “have completely lost track of reality” and characterized the potential agreement as cynical. It added, “This crude calculation reduces people to mere numbers, denying them humane treatment and discarding their right to seek protection.”

The deal also would also Turkey a boost amid an unprecedented crackdown on free speech and media, which includes the recent government takeover of Turkey’s largest daily newspaper and an uptick in charges brought against citizens for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Last week, Donald Tusk, the European Council’s president, warned people not seeking asylum against making the often dangerous journey to Europe.

“I want to appeal to all potential illegal economic migrants, wherever you are from: Do not come to Europe,” he said. “Do not risk your lives and your money. It is all for nothing.”

A Small Victory for Prosecutors in the Freddie Gray Case

For the first time in a while, Marilyn Mosby had a good day in the Freddie Gray trial.

The Maryland Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ruled Tuesday that Officer William Porter must testify against several other Baltimore cops charged with involvement in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray. The win for Mosby, the Baltimore city state’s attorney, is essentially procedural, but it is a boon to her bid to convict the police officers involved in Gray’s death.

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Gray, 25, was arrested by Baltimore police on April 19, 2015, and put in a police van. By the time Gray was removed from the van about an hour later, his spine was nearly severed. After a week in a coma, Gray died, sparking widespread demonstrations and riots. Mosby, the local prosecutor, quickly announced charges against six officers, including depraved-heart murder against one of them.

The first to be tried was Porter. But Porter’s trial ended in a hung jury in December, as a panel couldn’t decide whether Porter was at fault. While prosecutors vowed to retry Porter, the decision sent the carefully choreographed prosecution off kilter. Prosecutors had hoped to convict Porter, then have him testify against the other officers, but with Porter’s case still pending, his attorneys argued he should not be compelled to testify unless he was granted immunity, lest his testimony incriminate himself.

The Court of Appeals rejected that argument. It did so in terse orders that did not offer any explanation. The AP reports that a fuller opinion is forthcoming. Attorneys could appeal to the Supreme Court. Porter’s testimony cannot be used against him in his own retrial. He, like the other five officers, has pleaded not guilty.

The Ongoing Rebellion Against Rock-and-Roll Harassment

When the rock publicist Heathcliff Berru resigned and went to rehab earlier this year following public accusations of sexual assault, one takeaway that I and others noted was the simple fact that words can create change. More specifically: The music world, where drinking and macho swagger and transgression of decorum are often part of the appeal, has long been a place where for many women enduring harassment is just part of the terrain. But if the paradigm were to shift toward one where harassment was regularly called out and sanctioned, some men might think twice before doing or saying pigheaded things.

It’s an idea that’s being put into action more and more. Of course, women who speak out face risk—threats of reprisal, criticism, legal fights, and further harassment. But just today, there are two fascinating examples of women speaking out about experiences that might have previously gone unmentioned—and getting a response.

On Facebook, the metal band Baroness posted a link to what, they said, was “the WORST review we’ve ever gotten,” adding, “WE WANT YOU TO READ IT!”  The article was by Rosie Solomon for Red Brick. She said that she attended a Baroness concert, the first concert she’d ever gone to alone, and ended up getting followed around by some guy who kept shoving his crotch on her. It’s a gross story and one that also, for many, probably isn’t shocking: Lots of female music fans have similar tales. The crux of Solomon’s piece was answering the question of what to do about it:

What convinced me to write this article is the fact that, if [the police] manage to identify this man, I am planning to take him to court. I’m going to give a victim’s statement, and I hope he'll get the punishment he deserves. I wanted to write this article to encourage anyone to do the same. My friends have told me about being grabbed in a club, called out to on a street, being pressed up against on a crowded bus, or even cases where I’ve heard a man masturbating over a friend on public transport. The sheer volume of these stories is horrific, shocking, upsetting and frankly unacceptable.

Baronness broadcast the statement on Facebook to their fans, adding their support:

I promise, not one person amidst the Baroness tour-party would show sympathy for the man in this article. We do not condone and we do not tolerate any form of sexual aggression or intolerance, nor will we ever. The man detailed in this article, whoever you are, if you read this post, stay the fuck away from Baroness and our audience. We don’t need you at our show, we don’t want you in our audience

At Spin, the journalist Rachel Brodsky found herself in very different circumstances from Solomon but took similar action. When interviewing the Last Shadow Puppets members Miles Kane and Alex Turner (also of Arctic Monkeys), she wrote, Kane seemed to be hitting on her. At one point, he invited her to his room (adding that he was just kidding after his publicist spoke up); at another, she said, he responded to her offer of a goodbye handshake by pulling her in and kissing her on the cheek.

The piece she wrote begins as a relatively straightforward profile of a band with a new album, but midway through shifts in to her own discomfort and whether to speak out about it:

As I recounted the exchange with Kane to friends, co-workers, and my fiancée, I witnessed a spectrum of reactions: Some people twisted their faces in disdain and said stuff about lines being crossed. Others looked annoyed but shrugged it off with one word: bands.

Bands will be bands. Boys will be boys. Women years deep into their music careers have thrown this just-put-up-with-it rationale at me, and it has not been isolated to this one experience. In total honesty, I’m still grappling with how to feel about an interview that takes this undesirable direction. Plenty of people in my position will chalk this up to the occasional occupational hazard, not all that far removed from waking up hungover on a weekday after a late-night show. But the more just-kidding-but-not-really come-ons I absorb, the more I understand that unlike getting too sloshed at a show, this particular hazard is mostly limited to one gender.

Before Brodsky’s story was published, Kane sent her an apology for the “silly remarks I made during our interview” and said that he was “mortified.” In the piece, Brodsky replies, “Instead of apologies, I’d like to see a little more foresight and a lot more professionalism toward women in the music industry.” By writing the article, she may have helped make progress toward that state of affairs.

Netanyahu Snubs Obama One Last Time

When future historians dissect the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the 21st century, it will be impossible not to remark on the cruelty of fate that placed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama in each other’s paths for the majority of each other’s terms.

Ten years after being voted out, Netanyahu started his second premiership in late March of 2009, just two months after Obama took office. And while relations didn’t immediately devolve, when they did—over Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s settlement policy, tactical differences in foreign policy, and beyond—they cratered hard.

The latest evidence comes in the form of a White House visit that Netanyahu was slated to make later this month while in town to speak at a conference for the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. But the AP reported Monday night that Netanyahu had canceled his trip to Washington, D.C., and that the White House found out through the press.

“We were looking forward to hosting the bilateral meeting,” said a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council. “We were surprised to first learn via media reports that the prime minister, rather than accept our invitation, opted to cancel his visit.”

One Israeli cabinet member suggested that Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, had warned his counterpart ahead of time about the possible cancelation. When asked for a reason why Netanyahu would cancel a meeting with his country’s most important ally, one Israeli official offered this rationale: “It’s a tumultuous primary season in the United States ... we don’t want to inject ourselves into that tumultuous process.”

Over at The Washington Post, Daniel Drezner isn’t buying it:

The claim that Netanyahu is super-concerned about influencing American domestic politics is absurd on its face. Four years ago, any such concerns did not stop Netanyahu from meeting with Obama and addressing AIPAC in person. Oh, and just a quick FYI: That speech happened on March 5, 2012, which just happened to be the day before Super Tuesday, so it’s not like the GOP nomination was completely settled at that point.

And this time last year, Netanyahu traveled to Washington to bash the U.S.-led negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program in front of Congress, a visit the White House hadn’t approved.

Following Monday’s report, some in the Israeli media were’t so forgiving either.

Netanyahu’s cancelation is unprecedented, writes Raphael Ahren at The Times of Israel. “There is no public record of an Israeli prime minister ever previously rejecting an invite to meet a president at the White House,” he says.

Ahren also quotes a befuddled Israeli expert on the U.S.-Israel relationship, who pours this glass of cold water on Netanyahu: “When an American president invites you, you have to go. Sometimes you invite yourself even when the president doesn’t want to see you. But when he invites you, you can’t say no.”

What’s at the heart of this snub isn’t clear. Residual bitter grapes from the Iran deal? Residual bitter grapes in general? Israel, still wary of and smarting from last year’s nuclear accord, is also in the midst of negotiating a military aid package with the United States.

This latest episode comes just as Vice President Joe Biden was touching down in Israel for a visit amid a surge in Palestinian attacks on Israelis. As we noted in October 2014, both Netanyahu’s previous visit to the White House and Biden’s previous visit to Israel were marred by the announcement of settlement expansions.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Tuesday brushed aside speculation that the White House was insulted by Netanyahu’s decision, but said Israel should have notified the U.S. directly, because “it’s just good manners.”

“I’m merely suggesting that if they weren’t able to make the meeting, they should have just told us before they told a reporter,” he told reporters.

Mexico Isn’t Buying Donald Trump’s Wall

There is “no scenario” in which Mexico will pay for Donald Trump’s wall, says the country’s president.

Enrique Peña Nieto’s remarks, published Monday in the Excelsior newspaper, make him the latest Mexican official to condemn the wall that the Republican presidential candidate has proposed building along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of his immigration plan.

Peña Nieto told Excelsior that Trump’s brand of politicking and his “strident expressions” tended to pose “very easy, simple solutions to problems that, of course, are not so easily solved.” He also said Trump has abused and misdirected people’s economic frustrations––just as Hitler and Mussolini had done.

“There have been episodes in human history, unfortunately, where these expressions of this strident rhetoric have only led to very ominous situations in the history of humanity.” Peña Nieto said. “That’s how Mussolini got in, that's how Hitler got in, they took advantage of a situation, a problem perhaps, which humanity was going through at the time, after an economic crisis.”

Peña Nieto is the highest ranking Mexican official to call out Trump. Although former Mexican presidents have been even more scathing, like Felipe Calderón, Peña Nieto’s predecessor, who said the Mexican people won’t “pay any single cent for such a stupid wall!” The president before Calderón, Vicente Fox, said simply: “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall.”

Mexican politicians have been pretty unified in their disavowal of Trump’s plan. Mexico’s finance minister, Luis Vinegary,  said it’ll never happen, calling it an “idea based on ignorance and has no foundation in the reality of North American integration.” Last week, lawmakers in Mexico City voted to request that the federal government ban Trump from visiting the country.

But unlike his colleagues, whether past presidents or legislators, Peña Nieto isn’t entirely free from the political ramifications of his words––should Trump win the presidency. Mexico is a close trade partner with the U.S.,  and the fact that the country’s leader has compared Trump’s political strategy to those of two of history’s most homicidal fascists may make for a strained relationship with a potential Trump administration.

That was something that Peña Nieto acknowledged, saying that he hoped to have a good relationship with whomever won the presidency, and “build bridges of understanding,” but he was quick to remind readers that the U.S. president has not yet been determined.

Trump has said his wall could cost around $10 billion, and that Mexico should cover the bill. His supporters like that idea, so much so that at a recent rally in Florida one person dressed up in spandex as a wall. Trump has said one way he might make Mexico pay for it would be to raise the trade tariffs on products the U.S. buys from Mexico. And despite many people questioning the feasibility of building such a wall, or the possibility that Mexico would pay for it, he’s defended the idea, comparing it to the Great Wall of China.

After former president Fox said he did not support Trump’s wall, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Trump at a debate how he planned to make this wall happen.

“I will,” Trump said, “And the wall just got 10 feet taller.”

The Republican Party Decides to Settle

There was a time—long, long ago—when the Republican Party was afraid of Donald Trump, but it truly loathed Ted Cruz.

They hated him. They couldn’t stand him. They might have thought Trump was a huckster, they might have thought he didn’t have any idea what he was doing, and they might have thought he was a bigot, but at least he wasn’t as insufferable as Ted Cruz, the man who had gone out of his way to wreck the party’s plans in Congress, and had called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar. Forced to choose, party elders tended to shudder and lean Trump. Lindsey Graham was particular piquant in his criticism. He was very clear he didn’t like Cruz, who he said was no better than Trump and whom he accused of McCarthyism. He cracked, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”

A lot can change in a couple weeks. Graham made his joke about murdering Cruz way back on February 26, which makes it all the more surprising to hear from the South Carolina senator these days.

“I can work with Ted Cruz,” Graham said. “I know what I’m getting with Ted Cruz.”

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it’s something. Graham may be the most prominent Republican coming around on Cruz, but he’s not the only one. One implication of the “#NeverTrump” movement is that anyone is more acceptable—especially Cruz, who is at least a Republican. On Tuesday night, on the eve of his state’s primary, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant announced his endorsement of Cruz. It’s telling that at this late stage in the campaign Cruz still hasn’t received the blessing of a single sitting member of the body in which he serves. The shift, however tentative and awkward and pained, by Republican officeholders toward Cruz is something to behold, nearly as surprising as Trump’s own collection of a few establishment backers.

It isn’t too hard to guess what’s driving people toward Cruz. The last two weeks have seen Trump’s bizarre flirtation with David Duke—first disavowing the former KKK leader’s backing, then refusing to do so, then implausibly blaming it all on a faulty earpiece. They have also seen the near disintegration of Marco Rubio's campaign. Many Republicans seemed convinced that any minute now, the big money was going to arrive to take out Trump, and Rubio was about to start soaring. The big money isn’t here yet—though we keep hearing it’s almost here—and Rubio has more or less run out of time for his big reveal. For months, his campaign effectively controlled expectations, saying they didn’t want him to peak too soon. But after a series of disappointing finishes, particularly on Super Tuesday and Super Saturday, even the true believers are losing hope.

For the first time, many Republicans seem to be realizing that they may in fact have to choose between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. In that case, with apologies to John Boehner, they may decide: better the “jackass” you know than the one you don’t.

How will this affect Cruz? He’s expressed delight at hatred from these party loyalists. He mentions it all the time. It’s just proof of his outsider bona fides. Recently, he’s been assailing Donald Trump for being a member of the establishment. Can he keep that up if he keeps winning plaudits from the likes of John McCain’s best friend? Or maybe it doesn’t matter at this point, and in a two-man fight against Trump it’s better to have as much firepower as possible, regardless of who’s manning the battle stations.

Or maybe gunfire is the wrong metaphor.

“If you nominate Trump and Cruz, I think you get the same outcome,” he said in January. “Whether it’s death by being shot or poisoning doesn’t really matter. I don’t think the outcome will be substantially different.” But if has to choose his method of execution, Graham seems to have decided poisoning doesn’t sound so bad.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither Is an Unsettling Literary Surprise

Writing in the Irish Times last February, the novelist Joseph O’Connor raved about the “exhilarating strangeness” of Sara Baume’s novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither. “It’s hard to imagine a more exciting debut novel being published this year,” he announced. “This book is a stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness.”

With British critics swooning too, you might well think it’s time for an American backlash—but the book, now out in the U.S., is indeed an unsettling literary surprise of the best sort. This first novel’s voice is singular in its humility and imaginative range.

Baume (who is also a graphic artist) proceeds like a collagist, but here are the basics. Ray, the narrator, is a 57-year-old man who lives alone in a coastal Irish village in what he still thinks of as “my father’s house.” His father is dead, a sausage segment having “stoppered his windpipe” at breakfast one morning several years earlier. But he remains very much a presence in the otherwise solitary life of his son. Ray wears his father’s ill-fitting slippers around the house; he hangs two towels in the bathroom.

The father, readers discern, was a rather absent presence (or worse) during his life as well. He spent his days working in a factory Ray never saw and, by keeping mostly quiet on the matter, led Ray to believe that his mother’s death was linked to his birth—in other words, that he was guilty of doing inadvertent harm to others from the get-go. Because his father thought Ray “wasn’t a right-minded little boy … wasn’t all there,” he never sent his son to school. The late-middle-aged Ray whom readers encounter in these pages has had lots of practice feeling like a pariah, and decades of social exile have taken their toll. He’s stopped going to church and keeps to himself amidst his mountains of books (“spines and spines and spines, raised to towers on the coffee table, queued into rows along the skirting boards”). He goes into town once a week, briefly, to run essential errands.

It is only when Ray impulsively adopts a grisly, one-eyed dog that he’s able to see his life more clearly for what it is, only then that he dares push beyond its unspoken boundaries. After One Eye (as Ray names him) attacks another dog, the two misfits flee. They embark on a rambling car trip culminating, predictably, in a kind of catharsis. Man rescues dog; dog rescues man. Queue the violins.

The plot isn’t the novel’s claim to originality. What gives Baume’s book its startling power—despite several (or more, depending on your tolerance) near-misses with sentimentality—is her portrait of an unexpectedly protean mind at work. This isolate, it turns out, isn’t trapped in himself. He’s attuned to others in a thoroughly unusual way.

“Don’t you ever wonder,” Ray asks One Eye, “what exactly people do, all day long, every day?” Ray is constantly wondering, not just about people but also about birds and badgers and river creatures, and, of course, about the dog. He asks One Eye, with genuine curiosity, what the dog thinks of classical music. “You seem to be listening,” he observes, “but I can’t be sure.” Baume uses the second person so much that at times the “you” ceases to be the dog and becomes you, the reader, collapsing the distance between story and life. And yet by reinforcing the subjectivity of “you” as distinct from that of “I,” she underscores the solitary essence of Ray’s way of being; it’s the very existence of so many unknowable yous that makes his I so painfully lonely.

They embark on a rambling car trip culminating, predictably, in a kind of catharsis. Man rescues dog; dog rescues man. Queue the violins.

Shut off from the world, Ray has had to school himself on its workings, an endeavor that has made him more incessantly aware of the limits and possibilities of subjective experience than most people could ever manage to be. He doesn’t, perhaps can’t, simply take for granted the truth that every mind registers experience differently. For him, that idea is always in the foreground. Dogs can see only certain colors and understand only a couple hundred words. Badgers keep trying to cross the road the way they always have, even though they keep winding up “dead as the dirt they’ve been splattered by.” Ray says he’s “always noticed the smallest, quietest things,” but that’s only the start. It is a hard-won habit of his to also remember to wonder about all that he does not notice—beginning with the fact that, even in the lives of others, even when he can’t see it, “everything just goes on and on and on. Regardless, relentless.”

In fact, Ray depends on his awareness of those other minds—even if he can’t quite parse the meanings of what they say, or see things as they do—for his very survival. “The outer noises,” he says, “are important to me. It doesn’t matter what form they take or how loud they are, but I need to keep them always sounding.”

The result is that his world, blinkered though it may look from the outside, is anything but. A diagnostic term like Asperger’s syndrome may well flit into readers’ minds, but would never make it into the prose of the novel, which explodes conventional notions of textbook symptoms. In many ways, Baume’s book resembles another debut novel, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). Like Ray, Haddon’s protagonist has a single father who’s concealed crucial details of his mother’s death from his son. The unexpected intervention of an unassuming dog helps both characters find their way to a better understanding of their families and themselves. But where Curious Incident takes its narrative cues from a logical, rule-bound perspective on an overwhelming reality, Spill Simmer Falter Wither does the opposite. Baume’s novel revels in aesthetic leaps and dives, embracing the poetry of sensory experience in all its baffling beauty from the title onward.

Curious Incident, which starts with a dead dog, is about a boy on a solo journey toward maturity. This novel draws its strength from One Eye’s unpredictable, spirited aliveness, the physical proof that each creature harbors perceptive abilities all his own. With his “maggot nose” and that missing eye, he is a testament to the concealed depths—mostly ignored—beneath every surface. Baume’s prose makes sure we look and listen. Her book insists we take notice.