Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 218

Jane Eyre and the Invention of the Self

Consider the selfie. By now, it’s a fairly mundane artistic tradition, even after a profusion of thinkpieces have wrestled with its rise thanks to the so-called Me Generation’s “obsession” with social media. Anyone in possession of a cheap camera phone or laptop can take a picture of themselves, edit it (or not), and share it with the world in a matter or seconds.

But before the selfie came “the self,” or the fairly modern concept of the independent “individual.” The now-ubiquitous selfie expresses in miniature the seismic conceptual shift that came about centuries ago, spurred in part by advances in printing technology and new ways of thinking in philosophy. It’s not that the self didn’t exist in pre-modern cultures: Rather, the emphasis the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century placed on personal will, conscience, and understanding—rather than tradition and authority—in matters of faith spilled over the bounds of religious experience into all of life. Perhaps the first novel to best express the modern idea of the self was Jane Eyre, written in 1847 by Charlotte Brontë, born 200 years ago this year.

Those who remember Jane Eyre solely as required reading in high-school English class likely recall most vividly its over-the-top Gothic tropes: a childhood banishment to a death-haunted room, a mysterious presence in the attic, a Byronic hero, and a cold mansion going up in flames. It’s more seemingly the stuff of Lifetime television, not revolutions. But as unbelievable as many of the events of the novel are, even today, Brontë’s biggest accomplishment wasn’t in plot devices. It was the narrative voice of Jane—who so openly expressed her desire for identity, definition, meaning, and agency—that rang powerfully true to its 19th-century audience. In fact, many early readers mistakenly believed Jane Eyre was a true account (in a clever marketing scheme, the novel was subtitled, “An Autobiography”), perhaps a validation of her character’s authenticity.

The way that novels paid attention to the particularities of human experience (rather than the universals of the older epics and romances) made them the ideal vehicle to shape how readers understood the modern individual. The rise of the literary form was made possible by the technology of the printing press, the print culture that followed, and the widening literacy that was cultivated for centuries until Jane Eyre’s publication. The novel seemed perfectly designed to tell Brontë’s first-person narrative of a destitute orphan girl searching for a secure identity—first among an unloving family, then an austere charity school, and finally with the wealthy but unattainable employer she loves. Unable to find her sense of self through others, Jane makes the surprising decision to turn inward.

The broader cultural implications of the story—its insistence on the value of conscience and will—were such that one critic fretted some years after its publication that the “most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre.” Before the Reformation and the Enlightenment that followed, before Rene Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), when the sources of authority were external and objective, the aspects of the self so central to today’s understanding mattered little because they didn’t really affect the course of an individual’s life. The Reformation empowered believers to read and interpret the scriptures for themselves, rather than relying on the help of clergy; by extension, this seemed to give people permission to read and interpret their own interior world.

To be sure, early novelists before Brontë such as Frances Burney, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Mary Shelley contributed to the form’s developing art of the first-person narrator. But these authors used the contrivances of edited letters or memoirs, devices that tended toward underdeveloped characters, episodic plots, and a general sense of artificiality—even when the stories were presented not as fiction but “histories.” No earlier novelist had provided a voice so seemingly pure, so fully belonging to the character, as Brontë. She developed her art alongside her sisters, the novelists Anne and Emily (all of them publishing under gender-neutral pseudonyms), but it was Charlotte whose work best captured the sense of the modern individual. Anne Brontë’s novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall contributed to the novel’s ability to offer social commentary and criticism, while the Romantic sensibilities of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights explored how the “other,” in the form of the dark, unpredictable Heathcliff, can threaten the integrity of the self.

One of the greatest testimonies to Brontë’s accomplishment came from Virginia Woolf, a modernist pioneer who represents a world far removed from that of Bronte’s Victorianism. “As we open Jane Eyre once more,” a doubting Woolf wrote in The Common Reader, “we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious.” Woolf continues, “So we open Jane Eyre; and in two pages every doubt is swept clean from our minds.” There is nothing of the book, Woolf declares, “except Jane Eyre.” Jane’s voice is the source of the power the book has to absorb the reader completely into her world. Woolf explains how Brontë depicts:

… an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently.

It is exactly this willingness—desire, even—to be “at war with the accepted order of things” that characterizes the modern self. While we now take such a sense for granted, it was, as Brontë’s contemporaries rightly understood, radical in her day. More disturbing to Brontë’s Victorian readers than the sheer sensuality of the story and Jane’s deep passion was “the heroine’s refusal to submit to her social destiny,” as the literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert explains. Indeed, one contemporary review complained, “It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength,” but the critic continues that “it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself.” In presenting such a character, the reviewer worries, Brontë has “overthrown authority” and cultivated “rebellion.” And in a way they were right: “I resisted all the way,” Jane says as she is dragged by her cruel aunt toward banishment in the bedroom where her late uncle died. This sentence, Joyce Carol Oates argues, serves as the theme of Jane’s whole story.

But Jane’s resistance is not the empty rebellion of nihilism or self-absorption (consider how current practitioners of “selfie culture” frequently weather accusations of narcissism). Rather, her quest for her true self peels back the stiff layers of conventionality in order to discover genuine morality and faith. As Brontë explains in the preface to the novel’s second edition (a preface necessitated by the moral outrage that followed the novel’s publication),

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last … These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world.

In a letter to a friend, Bronte responded to her critics’ objections by declaring, “Unless I have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent ...”

The refusal of such a woman, who lived in such a time, to be silent created a new mold for the self—one apparent not only in today’s Instagram photos, but also more importantly in the collective modern sense that a person’s inner life can allow her to effect change from the inside out.

‘Do Not Come’: Europe’s Message to Illegal Economic Migrants

Europe is asking illegal economic migrants to stay away.

“I want to appeal to all potential illegal economic migrants, wherever you are from: Do not come to Europe,” Donald Tusk, the European Council’s president, said in Athens, the Greek capital. “Do not risk your lives and your money. It is all for nothing. Greece, or any other European country, will no longer be a transit country.”

More than 1 million refugees and migrants have entered Europe since the beginning of 2015. This year alone, some 124,000 people have taken the Mediterranean route to Greece. Of these, more than 55,000 are Syrians fleeing the five-year-long civil war in their country; more than 31,000 Afghan, more than 20,000 are Iraqis.

The Financial Times notes Tusk’s remarks are unlikely to affect those fleeing the war zones in Syria and Iraq, but they are likely to affect Afghans and others, whom the European view as not being in imminent danger if they return home.

Under the Geneva Conventions, countries cannot turn away asylum-seekers, but economic migrants—even if they are fleeing a restive country such as Afghanistan—enjoy no such protection. (For a difference between the terms, go here.)

Tusk’s comments in Greece on Thursday were made in advance of his trip to Turkey. The EU is trying to persuade them to stem the flow of migrants to the west. But both countries are struggling with the numbers of people fleeing the civil war in Syria and unrest elsewhere. Of the 4.8 million registered Syrian refugees, 2.7 million are in Turkey. Greece is coping with another problem. Some 25,000 migrants are stranded in the country because individual EU member states have passed restrictions on their entry. Additionally, some 2,000 people are entering the country each day.

“We ask that unilateral actions stop in Europe,” Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, said in comments with Tusk, who supports that view.

Those unilateral actions include daily quotas on how many people are permitted to enter. Austria, for instance, allows 80 people to enter each day. Balkan countries have imposed similar measures. Germany, which is the top destination for many of the migrants, has refused to impose such a quota, though the individual restrictions make Chancellor Angela Merkel’s desire for a unified policy toward refugees and migrants appear increasingly unlikely.

Tusk’s visit to Greece and Turkey are an attempt to forge some sort of consensus before an EU summit on the migrants on Monday. Reuters, citing unnamed EU officials, reported European governments want Turkey to reduce the number of migrants arriving in Greece to fewer than 1,000 a day. In exchange, they would take some Syrian refugees directly from Turkey, Reuters reported.

“If there were to be a target figure, it would be zero,” one EU official told Reuters, noting 1,000 people a day would mean more than 350,000 people would arrive each year in Greece—a number that is seen as unsustainable not only for Greece, but for the rest of Europe.

7 Ty Cobbs Found Safe at Home

Ty Cobb, the Hall of Famer and Detroit Tigers center fielder known as “the Georgia Peach,” remains a legendary name more than five decades after his death.

After all, he was baseball’s all-time hits leader for nearly 60 years, an American League batting champion nine straight times, and retired in 1928 with a lifetime batting average of .366, a mark that will almost certainly never be broken. Cobb was also widely considered to be an egomaniac and so it would no doubt please him to know his name is back in the news.

On Tuesday evening, the “miraculous” discovery of seven extremely rare Ty Cobb baseball cards was reported. The cards, get this, were found in an old paper bag in an attic by a family sifting through their deceased great-grandfather’s belongings in his dilapidated house. They were brought to Rick Snyder, a South Carolina dealer who was initially skeptical of the family’s claims.

“I doubted they were authentic because finding seven of these cards at one place at one time seemed almost impossible,” he told the AP.

They were next inspected by Joe Orlando, a collectibles expert, who appraised them, praised them, and explained just how rare they are:

As of February 2016, there were about 15 of these great rarities known … these cards have sold in excess of $150,000 in the past, making the card one of the most valuable cards—pound-for-pound—in the entire hobby.

Orlando concludes: “Seven cards worth well into seven figures … all found at the bottom of great grandpa’s old paper bag.”

The cards, which were from Cobb’s best years (1909-1911) and which were initially sold in packages with tobacco, read: “Ty Cobb—King of the Smoking Tobacco World” on the back. The cards are said to be in particularly good condition, given their age. The family who found the cards has chosen to remain anonymous.

Knight of Cups: A Pretty, Empty Hollywood Satire

Just five years ago, Terrence Malick delivered The Tree of Life, a staggering work that explored the mysteries of creation, mixed with deeply personal recollections of adolescence: an opus, in every sense of the word. Now, he’s serving up Knight of Cups, which amounts to two hours of amoral cavorting in Los Angeles. That’s a rather flip description, but this is a surprisingly flimsy film, charting the wanderings of a screenwriter (Christian Bale) adrift in Hollywood, reminiscing on his relationships with women and others (but mostly women).

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Malick used to be the most inscrutable, reclusive legend in Hollywood, making only five movies (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life) in 38 years, all of them tremendous, poetic works. In recent years, he’s stepped up his output, although he’s personally just as inaccessible. But while it’s fascinating to see Malick take steps into uncharted territory—Knight of Cups is his first fully contemporary, urban film—it’s unsettling to see a filmmaker who’s known for thoroughness work with such underdeveloped material. Bale’s journey through L.A. life has the spiritual overtones and detached voice-over narration viewers might expect from Malick, yet the film’s deeper meaning falls short of grand.

Like The Tree of Life (which focused on a 1950s Texas childhood like Malick’s) and his 2012 film To the Wonder (which echoed his marriage to and divorce from a French woman), Knight of Cups feels like it might be broadly autobiographical. Rick, the aimless screenwriter at the center of the film, seems to be a success, though it’s not entirely clear why. He’s taken aside on studio lots by executives and told what a bright future he has. He mingles among recognizable Hollywood faces at an opulent party in a California mansion. But half the time, Bale is craning his neck to gaze off-screen, or trying to wriggle out of someone’s grasp, perhaps to get to something more interesting.

The film is divided into thematic chapters, each inspired by a card from the tarot deck. The Knight of Cups (Rick himself) is an artistic spirit, bored and listless, constantly in need of new stimulation, which Rick certainly gets. The chapters largely correspond to different romantic encounters in his life, though there are darker interludes centered on a suicidal brother (Wes Bentley), an overbearing father (Brian Dennehy), and a devilish playboy (Antonio Banderas, who lights the movie up the minute he enters and leaves far too quickly).

Knight of Cups is steeped in symbolism and Malick’s unique visual allure, but lacks any true emotional impact.

But mostly, the sections focus on the women—the free spirit Della (Imogen Poots); Rick’s intelligent ex-wife Nancy (Cate Blanchett); an aloof model named Helen (Freida Pinto), a stripper named Karen (Teresa Palmer); and Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who just may be the love of his life. There’s more to these characters, but not much. Each chapter is impressionistic, consisting of some or no dialogue, much of it overheard. Malick’s camera (he has reunited with the Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) swings around and around, taking in the soulless glass-filled apartments and chintzy décor of Los Angeles, sometimes visiting strip clubs, other times lavish manses.

The plot doesn’t go anywhere in particular, but Knight of Cups does eventually gain some momentum. Some critics have called the film Malick’s Entourage, which is basically accurate. The point here is that Hollywood is a draining, disorienting, empty place, where even the freest creative spirits can get lost. That doesn’t feel quite as profound or revelatory as some of the insights into the human condition Malick has made in the past, but it’s a message fully received as viewers bounce from party to photo shoot to bedroom escapade.

Knight of Cups is Malick’s second noble failure since The Tree of Life, and shares much in common with To the Wonder. Both are gorgeously shot, feature an all-star cast giving performances one could generously describe as “confused,” and muse on matters of the heart in ways that feel at once esoteric and deeply, deeply personal. The director has two more features in post-production right now, and I’m still excited to see each of them—even in this diminished state, there’s nothing quite like a Malick movie. But once viewers have contemplated the mysteries of the universe itself, perhaps anything else will feel like a step down. Knight of Cups certainly does.

What Mitt Romney Really Thinks of Donald Trump

Mitt Romney is letting Donald Trump know what he really thinks.

The Republican presidential nominee in 2012 is expected to call the GOP presidential front-runner in 2016 a “phony and a fraud.” The remarks are the strongest by the Republican establishment, and an apparent attempt to slow Trump’s momentum, after his sweeping victories on Super Tuesday in which he won seven states and put himself on a course to secure the party’s nomination.

Romney had been teasing his sentiments about Trump on Twitter for days, calling on the billionaire to first release his tax returns and then repudiating Trump’s non-answer on support from a KKK leader. Excerpts from a speech Romney is scheduled to deliver later Thursday were obtained by Bloomberg News.

BREAKING NOW: 1st excerpts from Thursday @MittRomney speech on @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/FREhAFiTLs

— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) March 3, 2016

Romney went on to criticize Hillary Clinton, the presidential front-runner on the Democratic side, saying her policies while secretary of state “diminished” U.S. interests “in every corner of the world.” Yet, he pointed out, “Trump relishes any poll that reflects what he thinks of himself. But polls are also saying he will lose to Hillary Clinton.”  

From the excerpts released Thursday morning it’s unclear if Romney is urging Republicans to vote for anyone other than Trump because Clinton, in his view, is far too dangerous to be president; nor is it clear if he will ultimately decline to vote for Trump if the front-runner secures the Republican nomination.

“A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president,” Romney is expected to say. “But a Trump nomination enables her victory.”

Trump responded almost immediately.

I am the only one who can beat Hillary Clinton. I am not a Mitt Romney, who doesn't know how to win. Hillary wants no part of "Trump"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2016

Why did Mitt Romney BEG me for my endorsement four years ago?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2016

He then went on NBC’s Today show to amplify those views:

"Mitt Romney is a stiff." -@RealDonaldTrump declares on TODAY https://t.co/Qdv0vooUjm

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) March 3, 2016

The relationship between the two men is complicated. BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins chronicled in 2012 Romney’s tortured attempt, during his presidential campaign, to win the support of the Republican base, which, in his campaign’s view, ran through Trump.

When the campaign decided to go for it, they went all out. Staffers and surrogates lobbied their contacts in Trump’s office, and senior campaign strategist Stuart Stevens called a person close to the Celebrity Apprentice star and asked what they could do to win him over.

The friend’s advice: “Flattery goes a long way with Mr. Trump.”

And so, in September 2011, the candidate himself paid a visit to Trump Towers in New York City. Other GOP contenders had already made the journey to kiss The Donald’s ring — including Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry — but Romney was considered the most serious candidate at that point. Rather than hold a big press conference outside the building like others did, Romney slipped in and out of a back door, dodging the photographers lurking nearby.

No one knows what was said behind those closed doors — only Romney and Trump were present — but whatever it was, the candidate had “charmed” him, according to a source who spoke to Trump afterward. The source added that Trump had seriously considered backing Perry, but Romney’s meeting put him over the edge.

“I think it’s a rich-guy thing,” Trump’s friend told BuzzFeed.

Romney remarks are scheduled for 11:30 a.m. ET at the University of Utah.

Ben Carson Admits That His Campaign Is Over

Ben Carson has been beating the odds throughout his life. Raised by an illiterate single mother in Detroit, Carson rose to become a Yale student, a doctor, the youngest head of a division at John Hopkins, and a pioneer in neurosurgery. Things that should have been impossible seemed to simply melt away in the face of his intellect, ambition, and luck.

It’s easy to imagine that Carson expected the same to happen in his run for president. But after he briefly topped the polls in November 2015, Carson’s standing nosedived. Bedeviled by staff tumult and his own unpreparedness as a candidate, he was unable to win any nominating contest. The Washington Post reports that Carson does not see a “path forward” in the race. In a suitably weird end finish to what has been an odd candidacy, Carson won’t suspend his campaign on Wednesday after barely registering in Super Tuesday balloting. Instead, he will skip Thursday night’s Republican debate and give a speech as scheduled on Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in D.C.

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The apparent end of the road for Carson caps his improbable journey. The retired neurosurgeon was once a popular figure in the black community, particularly in Baltimore. He was mentioned on The Wire, and my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates has recalled how Carson was a role model to African Americans in Charm City. But Carson seems to have given little thought to electoral politics.

All of that changed in February 2013, when Carson spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. It wasn’t his first appearance there—he'd done the same in 1997—but it was very different from the previous turn. Standing next to President Obama, Carson unleashed an unexpectedly political speech. He complained about political correctness, worried about the national debt, and blasted Obama’s health-care overhaul.

The speech was an instant hit. Conservative opinionmakers ecstatically lauded Carson as a fresh voice on the scene, and The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial titled, “Ben Carson for President.” It didn’t hurt that at a time when conservatives felt they were accused of racism at every turn, they now saw a black man standing up and voicing the same concerns as him. And he seemed like a more promising prospect previous African American Republican hopes—more charisma than Alan Keyes, none of the personal baggage of Herman Cain. His views meshed well with the religious, socially conservative wing of the GOP too.

The idea of running for president had apparently never occurred to Carson before, but it captivated him. It also captivated others, including Armstrong Williams, a longtime black conservative macher and personal business manager to Carson, and John Philip Sousa IV, the great-grandson of the bandleader. Williams began grooming Carson for a run, while Sousa launched a draft Carson effort and political action committee. The doctor began preparing for a run, and declared his candidacy officially in May 2015.

But conservatives would come to discover that while Carson had conservative instincts, he was unpredictable, both in the rhetoric he employed and in the policies he advocated. He called Obamacare “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery” and suggested progressivism was acting in the U.S. in much the way Nazism did in Germany. Later, he likened ISIS to the Founding Fathers and blamed the Holocaust on gun control. At other times, he advocated for national control of the school system, anathema to conservatives.

Between Carson’s erratic views, soothingly expressed in his sleepy, husky, tenor, and the fact that no non-politician had won a major party’s nomination since the war hero Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, led most commentators to discount Carson’s chances in the race. They overlooked three factors. The first was the strong desire for an outsider among Republican voters, which also lifted Donald Trump. The second was the appeal of Carson’s low-key demeanor, which seemed for a time like a pleasant antidote to Trump’s bluster. The third was Carson’s incredible ability to raise money for his campaign.

It was the money that was most impressive. Carson’s campaign raised more than any other Republican, though some of them enjoyed greater super PAC backing—pulling in almost $60 million. Carson managed to do that with very little high-level backing. Instead, he was lifted by a deluge of small-dollar grassroots contributions. That method quickly raised objections. Despite the huge hauls Carson was bringing in, his campaign was plowing much of it right back into fundraising, using it to pay for expensive direct-mail and telemarketing efforts. As a result, he was spending very little on building a sustainable campaign infrastructure or on advertising, even as the campaign paid huge fees to companies owned by or closely tied to his aides.

Critics worried that Carson’s campaign was effectively a grift, redistributing the hard-earned money of naive small-dollar donors to the pockets of big marketing companies. Others accused him of using the political campaign as a book-marketing tour, a charge he denied. Carson’s aides insisted that they were building up the base for a sustainable operation later down the line. As the campaign dragged on, Carson's burn rate remained high, even as his standing in the polls declined. That made it much harder to believe that everything was on the up-and-up. By late February, even Carson was implying that the campaign had perhaps been a scam perpetrated by ex-aides.

Carson’s political fortunes were harmed less by questions about fundraising than by his own shortcomings as a candidate. His political identity was premised mostly on a powerful personal narrative of overcoming barriers. Some of the parts of that story became subject to harsh scrutiny. Carson claimed he had been offered a full scholarship to West Point, but on closer inspection it became clear that he’d never actually been appointed to the academy, and that all cadets are on full scholarship. One important turning point in his life, he said, was when he tried to stab a friend, only to hit his belt buckle. Carson said that moment caused him to reassess his future, but reporters couldn’t find any evidence the incident had happened, and classmates described Carson as an affable, driven, well-adjusted young man.

Early on, Carson’s lack of interest or involvement with policy was clear, but his steady, soft-spoken demeanor seemed to appeal to many voters who didn’t seem to care that his answers to substantive questions were often meandering, vague, or superficial. That seemed to change after the November 2015 attacks in Paris, when a new sense of urgency about security gripped the Republican field. Carson seemed out of his league on terrorism questions, and he offered odd statements like claiming Chinese troops were involved in Syria.

In mid-November, The New York Times spoke with one foreign-policy adviser, a former intelligence officer implicated in Iran-Contra named Duane Clarridge, who said, “Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East.” The campaign tried to disavow the comments and attacked the newspaper for speaking to Clarridge. The Times noted that they’d been directed to Clarridge by Armstrong Williams.

That moment turned out to crystallize the weaknesses of the Carson campaign. First, there was a general ignorance of policy and a reliance on unreliable advisers. Second, there was a clear split between the aides Carson had hired to run his campaign and Williams, who seemed to be running his own shadow campaign, often at odds with the official campaign. Those tensions came to a head around the end of 2015. Carson strongly hinted at a staff shakeup, then reversed himself, but several top aides left anyway, criticizing Williams sharply on the way out.

By then, however, Carson was already sinking in the polls, and the departure of the few experienced political hands on his staff meant it would be nearly impossible to reverse the trends. In Iowa, where he had once led, Carson came in fourth in the caucuses. He lashed out at Ted Cruz, accusing the Texas senator’s aides of spreading a rumor that Carson was dropping out to encourage his supporters to back Cruz instead. The charge turned out to be true—Cruz apologized—but by then Carson was hardly a factor anyway. He didn’t draw more than 10 percent in any of the following states.

What will Carson’s legacy be in the campaign? It’s hard to think of a single policy idea that Carson championed, and that another candidate could now adopt. Even on health care, he failed to make much impression. If Republicans hoped that Carson would win over minorities to the GOP, that doesn’t seem to have happened either. In the last few weeks of his campaign, Carson was talking about race issues, but as a way to consolidate conservative support, not to win over new voters. He seems to have squandered some of his good standing in African American communities. Carson is also mentioned repeatedly as a potential Cabinet member, but it’s worth recalling that he twice turned down appointments to the most logical post, surgeon general, from George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Instead, Carson seems more likely to return to what he was doing before: giving motivational speeches and writing bestselling books. For many people, running for president is a transformative, life-changing experience. For Carson, it seems to have been an exciting way to spend the last two years, but otherwise only a brief distraction from the peaceful retirement he’d envisioned before that fateful speech at the National Prayer Breakfast.

The Real O’Neals: Daring, Disguised as Ordinary

For years, ABC has been the home of the gently quirky family comedy, with each entry putting some new tilt on the nuclear unit: Modern Family, The Middle, Black-ish, The Goldbergs. Starting Wednesday, the latest addition to that crop of shows is The Real O’Neals, in which a seemingly perfect Catholic family in Chicago have their lives upturned by a series of shocking revelations in the pilot episode. This is a show dealing with darker issues than its network brethren, but presented in the same bouncy, upbeat style. It’s a weird clash of styles that shouldn’t really work, but somehow does.

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The show was originally pitched as an autobiographical tale about the adolescent years of the famed columnist Dan Savage, though it changed enough in the development process to be considered more “loosely inspired” (Savage is listed as an executive producer). But the uneven pilot episode focuses mostly on the teen-aged Kenny (Noah Galvin), the family’s golden boy who is struggling to come out of the closet. His mother Eileen (Martha Plimpton) is overbearing and religious, his father Pat (Jay R. Ferguson) seems in a perpetual daze, and too much of the opening half-hour is dedicated to undermining their perfect family façade. But after that, The Real O’Neals seems to get a better handle on the more challenging material that helps it stand out from other usual sitcom fare.

The bombshells: Eileen and Pat are divorcing, Kenny’s older brother Jimmy (Matt Shively) confesses to an eating disorder, and his younger sister Shannon (Bebe Wood) is a kleptomaniac who’s questioning her faith in God. Still, the biggest news is Kenny coming out, and The Real O’Neals is smart to keep its focus on him in the following episodes, exploring the fascinating tension at the heart of a modern, but devout family. The Real O’Neals gently mocks the paradoxes of religion, though not with the same vitriol with which the Family Research Council attacked the show and demanded ABC cancel it before it even aired.

But the series isn’t provocative in the way such a reaction might suggest. Yes, a laid-back Jesus appears to Kenny in a vision at one point, but it seems more like a sign of Kenny’s own internal conflict as he comes into his own as a young man. Though the other family dramas play out as B-stories, judging from the early episodes, The Real O’Neals is really about coming out as a teenager, and what happens when your mother can’t reconcile that with her faith.

In her role as Eileen, Plimpton is excellent and helps keep the show together in its shaky early moments. She’s the toughest character, since pretty much everyone else in the family is a lovable dope of some sort. But Plimpton has excelled at playing hard-edged but sympathetic matriarchs for years, including in Raising Hope, one of the most criminally underrated family sitcoms of the last 10 years. There, she was a working-class oddball; here, she’s an overbearing type-A monster. In both cases, it’s hard as a viewer not to root for her.

Galvin, who has never worked in TV before, is a revelation as Noah. Ferguson, who was the adorably bearded Stan Rizzo on Mad Men, slides comfortably into the archetype of the goofy American dad, trying to navigate the idea of life without the woman he’s been married to for his whole adult life. Like The Middle or The Goldbergs, the show is a sunny, single-camera comedy with occasional flights of fancy, but like Black-ish, it’s not afraid to go after tougher issues in a funny way. (For example, the show’s third episode deftly deals with a gay slur in a way that’s neither overly dramatic or dismissive.)

These themes may seem ill-fitted to the sitcom’s conventional presentation, but the mismatch may serve a deeper purpose. The premise of every episode of The Real O’Neals I saw revolved around something serious (losing one’s virginity, school bullying, questioning the existence of God), but in each case, Eileen tried to hold the controversy at bay and present a friendly face to the public. Inevitably, something goes wrong, and everything she’s trying to hide spills out into view—an outcome made all the more meaningful because of the clash between form and content. With the recent departure of its head of programming, ABC may be changing, and these kinds of quietly subversive sitcoms might be on the way out. All the more reason, then, to see what more The Real O’Neals has left to offer.

The Death of Chesapeake Energy's Aubrey McClendon

Aubrey McClendon, the former CEO of Chesapeake Energy who was charged Tuesday with rigging bids for oil and natural-gas leases, has died in a car crash in Oklahoma City, police said Wednesday. He was 56.

The crash occurred just after 9 a.m. Wednesday when McClendon’s car sped into the wall of an overpass bridge.

“He pretty much drove straight into the wall,”  Captain Paco Balderrama of the Oklahoma City Police Department said at a news conference. “The information out there at the scene is that he went left of center, went through a grassy area right before colliding into the embankment. There was plenty of opportunity for him to correct and get back on the roadway, and that didn’t occur.”

McClendon was accused Tuesday of making deals between oil and gas companies so they wouldn’t compete for bids on leases in Oklahoma. He denied the charges.

McClendon was a major proponent of fracking, a process that built his company into one of the largest sources of U.S. gas. But in the past three years, McClendon’s reputation took a hit. He was forced out as Chesapeake’s CEO three years ago soon after Reuters reported he’d been running a $200 million hedge fund on the side. The news agency reported McClendon traded on the same oil and gas commodities his company produced, which would have given him insider knowledge of the market. That’s considered illegal in the commodities business if it is accompanied by price manipulation—an allegation made Tuesday against McClendon by the government.

“While serving as CEO of a major oil and gas company, the defendant formed and led a conspiracy to suppress prices paid to leaseholders in northwest Oklahoma,” Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division said in a statement.

But McClendon denied the charges.

“Anyone who knows me, my business record, and the industry in which I have worked for 35 years, knows that I could not be guilty of violating any antitrust laws,” McClendon said Tuesday.

McClendon was also part owner of the Oklahoma Thunder, the NBA team.

What Happens When the Clinics Close?

At one point during the Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt oral arguments on Wednesday, Justice Stephen Breyer asked a question that strikes at the heart of the trade-off Texas women and doctors face.

“If you suddenly had at least 10,000 … women who have to travel 150 miles to get their abortions,” he said, “are there going to be more women or fewer women who die of complications?”

In other words, Texas can either have state-of-the-art, hospital-like abortion clinics that meet the strict requirements laid out in House Bill 2, the 2013 law that sparked the case, and have fewer of these clinics overall. Or, it can have a greater number of modest facilities—ones providers say are more than adequate—that are easily reachable by most.

The two sides of this case have not just two very different views of abortion, but also different takes on the existing abortion landscape in Texas. The briefs filed for the state suggest that abortion clinics are a lawless frontier in which reckless doctors operate on frightened women and dump them in hospital ERs if anything goes wrong. The plaintiffs, meanwhile, say abortion is already very safe—much safer than childbirth and any number of other procedures. They believe tales of botched abortions are overblown by pro-lifers as a propaganda tactic, that the requirements for their clinics have no medical purpose, and that the real intent of the law is to make abortion more difficult to access.

“She got far enough that she couldn't get an abortion in Texas.”

If HB2 is not struck down, all abortion clinics would have to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers. Abortion providers would be required to obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. Proponents say these measures are necessary to protect Texas women. A group of physicians who have experience treating women in rural settings, for example, wrote in a brief that many parts of Texas have either no ERs or no obstetricians. Having abortion providers serve as impromptu ER doctors, if something does go awry, helps ensure continuity of care for patients.

Another brief filed by a group of pro-life doctors points to inspections of Texas abortion facilities that show poor sterilization practices, including employees who were handling bodily fluids without gloves on. A group of 3,348 women gathered together by a conservative group called The Justice Foundation all said they had been “injured by abortion”—though it’s not clear where and when all of these injuries occurred. One woman named Cindy said she had four abortions between 1978 and 1980 in West Texas. After the second one, she experienced severe bleeding but didn’t call the hospital because her abortion provider told her not to, she said. With stricter rules for abortion clinics, Texas state authorities say, there would be fewer Cindys.

During Wednesday’s oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito said some of the Texas regulations didn’t seem that onerous. Meaning, couldn’t the clinics comply with them if they really wanted to? “I was surprised by how many are completely innocuous,” he said, singling out one rule on doorway widths.

But arguments and evidence from the other side suggest that some of the so-called TRAP laws are not so harmless. Ten other states have admitting privileges requirements, and some two dozen have the ambulatory surgical rules in place.

Already, in Texas, the number of abortion clinics in Texas has shrank from the 40 it had before the law was enacted. If the law is upheld, abortion providers say just 10 clinics would remain. They would all be located in the state’s four largest metropolitan areas, with none west of San Antonio.

Ironically, one reason abortion providers have had trouble gaining admitting privileges is that abortion is too safe. Some hospitals require doctors to admit a certain number of patients in order to get admitting privileges. The cost to upgrade to the standards of a surgical center, meanwhile, ranges from $1.7 to $2.6 million.

More women would have to drive for hours, pay for a hotel and childcare so they can wait the mandatory 24 hours, and then drive back, missing out on hundreds of dollars in wages.

In a call with reporters, Amy Hagstrom Miller, the CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, said she heard from a working mother in Lubbock who “was eight weeks in, trying to figure out how she was going to drive 350 miles multiple times and pay for the procedure and take time off work.”

“After talking with her more than six times,” she said, “she was pushed into the second trimester, and inevitably she got far enough that she couldn't get an abortion in Texas.”

The state’s abortion providers say some women are already waiting three weeks for an appointment, and the delay would only grow longer as more clinics went out of business. Remaining providers would have to increase their patient case-loads four-fold, the clinics say.

Waiting longer for an abortion increases the likelihood of complications. In their brief for the clinics’ side, a group of doctors and gynecologists write, “The mortality rate for abortions occurring prior to 13 weeks of gestation, the period during which most abortions are performed, is no more than 0.4 per 100,000. The mortality rate increases significantly, however, throughout the second trimester.” Studies have shown that the number of second-trimester abortions have risen in Texas since the law went into effect.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, widely considered to be the crucial deciding vote in the case, said during the arguments, “This law has increased the number of surgical procedures as opposed to medical procedures, and this may not be medically wise.”

If clinics become more sparse, some women will likely attempt to induce their own abortions. According to a pair of studies recently released by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Texas, between 100,000 and 240,000 Texas women between the ages of 18 and 49 have already tried to end a pregnancy by themselves.

“We've had women who called us and said, ‘Can you tell us how to do my own abortion with medication in my cabinet or cleaning supplies I have under my sink?’” Hagstrom Miller said.

Some women in the western half of the state, where there are no abortion clinics, will inevitably travel to New Mexico. In an interview, one 19-year-old El Paso woman named Stephanie said she drove for 12 hours, round-trip, for an abortion in New Mexico when she was 17 weeks pregnant because she struggled to find enough money in time for her procedure. The only Texas clinic near her home would perform abortions only through 15 weeks of pregnancy, she said, and New Mexico clinics were more lenient. When her friends asked what happened, she told them she had a miscarriage. (The Atlantic found Stephanie through the West Fund, a Texas-based abortion fundraising group.)

When presented with the New Mexico option at the hearing, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it seemed counter to the spirit of the law. “Texas says, to protect our women, we need these things. But send them off to New Mexico … and that’s perfectly alright?”

Jaclyn Skurie contributed reporting to this article.

Against the Video-Game Canon

It all started with that one spreadsheet: a trifle to amuse myself between bouts of frenzied editing and marathon writing sessions. It was called “the Database”—an inside joke shared by me and no one else—and it was my attempt at listing every video game I had ever played in my life.

At first, I thought it insurmountable; the kind of self-ordained project that I would sink a few careless hours into before consigning to the same dustbin shared by my teenage projects. After all, I had spent most of my life playing video games, or at least what felt like it. How could I possibly account for all those hours, days, months that now congeal in my memory like raindrops on glass?

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But it wasn’t insurmountable. I would hesitate to even call it difficult. It took a few nights of sifting through wikis, databases, and old cardboard boxes, but soon enough I came to something resembling to a final approximation. And it was just a small fraction of the estimate that had rattled in my head since I first started delving. Frantically, I searched, and scrounged, and scavenged. And though the count nudged northward ever so slightly, my disposition remained the same. All those worlds conquered, castles plundered, tales eternally retold—when tallied up into one small sum, they no longer seem larger than life. Rather, our lives seem smaller than them.

Some may find this sort of ludic anxiety odd, even inexplicable. People engage with games for many different reasons, but for most of us, the titles that line our shelves are there chiefly to amuse us; surely wondering “am I playing the right games?” constitutes a contradiction of the first order. Despite this, such thoughts seem to strike many players with alarming regularity—that is, if message boards, chatrooms, and other such net ephemera are to be trusted. Even the salaried critics, arguably the group best-situated to fully burrow into gaming’s ample trove, lament the wealth of titles left unplayed at every turn. The phenomena, it seems, is endemic. Worse still, this question can beget other, more latent anxieties. If one had just found more time to play, would the dreaded backlog stack quite so high? And then there’s the matter of the games one did get around to—were they explored as fully as one could muster, or is there some deep dungeon worth the hours it would take to plumb its final depths?

These are unfair questions, of course; as useless to the asker as they are unanswerable. However, like most unfair questions, they sometimes have the power to reveal something about the people they vex so utterly. Here, the three entwine to form a familiar inquiry—one that lurks in the minds of both enthusiasts and newcomers alike, and that those in the community cannot begin to pry themselves from—“am I playing wrong?”

Despite its prevalence, this brand of negative thinking is hardly specific to gaming. The choice-focused aesthetics of some interactive media certainly exacerbate it, but the phenomena has its roots not in any sort of media discipline, but in the “soft” science of behavioral economics, a psychology-heavy sub-field focusing on how people make decisions in a controlled environment rather than the chaos of the open market. In 1979, Daniel Kahneman, one of the field’s pioneering minds, authored a paper that first identified the concept that would later be called the “sunk cost fallacy.” Eschewing the traditional model, which posits absolute rationality as the linchpin of economic decisions, Kahneman’s work suggests that the average person is far more sensitive to a loss of one dollar than they are to a gain of the same amount. Or, put forth more broadly: People have a tendency to be far more concerned with perceived loss than their actual gain. Perhaps that’s why some of us struggle for the laundry list of titles we touched in the past year while never ever forgetting that one gem we missed—in my case, The Witcher 3 (2015).

Is there some deep dungeon worth the hours it would take to plumb its final depths?

While bouts of this sort of self-flagellation crowd comments sections and forums the Internet over, perhaps the most visible examples of it occur at the end of the year, when small-time blogs and big sites alike convene their award jamborees, dedicated to honoring their perceived best games of the year. And though these events can produce some surprising results, more often than not editors will find themselves settling on the heavy favorite simply because it’s the only one everyone actually got around to. That’s not to say that they should be expected to play every “notable” game that comes out—such a demand would be unreasonable—but when a system so clearly privileges the sort of big-budget megagame that dominates the press cycle to the detriment of smaller, perhaps more deserving games, it’s probably time to consider what exactly we intend for it to do.

What’s so beguiling about the continued tradition of the institutional top-10 list is that it feeds and continues the same cycle of anxiety and doubt that many players find themselves falling into. With few exceptions, these lists compound upon each other to present the whole of gamedom as a set of tiers delineated by opaque criteria—an elite one you must play, an abysmal one you must laugh at, and nothing but forgettable slush in-between. Yet, despite the recent explosion of disparate and challenging independent games onto the scene, that “elite tier” is still populated with the same crop of blockbusters that strive so hard to say nothing at the loudest possible volume. This annual tradition apparently constructed to showcase the vibrancy of the medium now seems a testament to Kahneman’s sunk cost—an army of editors shrugging at the masses of games overlooked.

Perhaps this is too harsh; even in this time of transition, it’s easy to feel as if the changes that one would like to see aren’t happening nearly quickly enough. And it’s not the list-making impulse in itself we should find fault with, as it has existed for far longer than any of us. The idea of such a “canon” dates back to at least Aristotle. The concept seems sound enough. But while such lists can sometimes serve as useful guides to the uninitiated, their construction is often rife with the worst trends in media, such as elitism and unapologetic bigotry of all stripes. Such rampant gatekeeping has produced a backlash against the concept, with some labeling it the domain of the “deadest whitest men.”

The standardized measuring stick that critics once used has shattered, taking a wealth of old assumptions with it.

Still, even firm advocates of this canonizing impulse can recognize the limitations of the current approach. By definition, these lists bind themselves to the cultural now, allowing one-time classics like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (1999) and Klonoa 2 (2001) to slip into the cultural void. The more comprehensive catalogs rarely do much better, reproducing the same biases and blindspots of the top-10 lists they so rely upon. No matter the crop of games, some always wield hyperbole like a weapon, taking care to only strike the title with the most cultural currency. And, worst of all, this focus on the present overall allows us to turn a blind eye to the same systemic faults that rear their ugly heads year after year.

For now, this is what it means to be well-played—to doggedly cling to a list of mass-approved titles included more for their historical value than their actual quality; to accept the latent mechanical hegemony assumed by the critics of yesteryear; to allow oneself to be swept up in the anxiety and secondhand hype for the sake of someone else’s curricula. No one guided us to this definition. No, we were driven to it, by the same creeping insecurity that shook me as I desperately tried to quantify my own sunk cost.

Regardless of whether or not we admit it, there is no denying that the world of video games has left these archaic constructs behind. What was once niche now tops the Steam sales charts, and what was once sub-niche can still draw enough to support a modest Patreon. Game makers like Increpare and Christine Love continue to push the boundaries of the medium, sparking the sorts of messy conversations that help both creators and critics alike come to terms with their own aesthetics. The standardized measuring stick that critics once used to measure every game against another has shattered, taking a wealth of old assumptions with it. And while it’s easy to nod our heads in acknowledgement of it, altering the course of this rudderless ship has proved to be a task more laborious than any would have thought. We call this a time of opportunity, but few seem keen on leading it. So, if there’s nothing keeping you here, jump out and swim toward your own destination. Where you’re going, you don’t need a map.

This post appears courtesy of Kill Screen.