Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 219

Anti-Establishment Wave Misses Congress (So Far)

If anyone should fear the anti-establishment fervor that’s fueling the candidacies of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders, it should be incumbent members of the House and Senate. After all, it was the stunning primary defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor nearly two years ago—by one measure the biggest congressional upset in history—that served as the first warning sign of the populist revolt that has come to define the 2016 presidential race.

Yet, even as Trump and Cruz have swept all but one of the first 15 Republican primaries, that wave has yet to breach the Capitol. Not a single incumbent member of the House or Senate lost a primary in the dozen states that voted on Super Tuesday, despite several aggressive challenges.

There were a few close calls for high-profile members. In Texas, Representative Kevin Brady faced the fight of his 20-year congressional career just a few months after he replaced Speaker Paul Ryan as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. A reliable but not hard-line conservative, Brady needed to win an outright majority against three opponents to avoid a run-off election in May. The run-off rule is what conservatives in Texas used two years ago to knock off veteran Representative Ralph Hall, who at 91 was then the oldest member of Congress and one of its last veterans of World War II still serving. Brady ended up with 53.4 percent of the vote.

Long-serving Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama won with a wider margin, capturing nearly 65 percent and defeating his nearest competitor by 27 points. But that was only after the 81-year-old chairman of the Senate Banking Committee had well over $8 million and brought in staffers from the National Republican Senatorial Committee to help him in the race’s final days. On the House side, Representatives Martha Roby and Bradley Byrne, both Alabama Republicans, each won competitive primaries with more than 60 percent of the vote. In Texas, veteran Republican incumbents Lamar Smith, Louie Gohmert, Sam Johnson, John Culberson, and Pete Sessions won in similar fashion.

How do you explain these victories in states where Trump and Cruz won about two-thirds of the vote while running explicitly against Washington and the Republican establishment?

The place to start is always the power of incumbency. Congress’s approval ratings have been stuck near record lows for years—Gallup had it at 14 percent in February—but it’s still rare for voters to punish their representative even when they’ve had it with the institution as a whole. Members of Congress already spend countless hours fundraising to protect their seats, and losses like Cantor’s and Hall’s remain the exception rather than the rule. Cantor’s defeat to upstart Dave Brat in particular had a searing impact on Republican members of the House, who took it as a wake-up call that no matter how much influence they wielded in the Capitol, they could not afford to take voters back home for granted. Brat’s victory in Virginia was also the death knell for immigration reform in the House, over which he had attacked Cantor repeatedly.

In Alabama, Shelby took precautions beyond spending money, making sure he spent enough time in the state and highlighting his opposition to President Obama’s policies on immigration and health care. Seeking further distance from the administration and the taint of being too close to Wall Street, Shelby had used his chairman’s perch to postpone hearings on the president’s nominees to the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other regulatory positions, according to The Wall Street Journal. Some of those may go forward now that he has won his primary, since he is not seen as facing a competitive general election in November.

Democratic incumbents won, too, on Tuesday night, although there were fewer serious challenges—further evidence that the “political revolution” that Sanders is trying to summon has yet to extend much beyond his own base of support. The victories for stalwarts in both parties don’t necessarily mean that their colleagues can rest easy for the next few months; primary challenges can be late in developing, and the political environment certainly remains volatile. The Republicans who faced challenges on Tuesday were hardly centrists, either. By and large, their conservative voting records left little room for insurgents to hammer them from the right. Republican leaders in Washington are more worried about the effect a Trump or Cruz nomination will have on down-ballot races in November. Democratic House and Senate candidates have done better in presidential years of late, and the fear is that any lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton will be more than offset by a surge in turnout from a backlash to Trump or Cruz.

Yet those same Republican operatives are surely relieved at the congressional results from Tuesday, which demonstrated that a well-prepared incumbent—with a deep war chest of money—can withstand the undertow of 2016’s anti-establishment wave.

Stranded on the Macedonian Border

As migrants from across the Middle East and Africa continue to make the journey to western Europe by the thousands, the flow of refugees traveling the “Balkan corridor” is now being constricted. Austria and some Balkan states have recently begun to cap the number of migrants allowed to enter their borders, and further restrict who is allowed to pass. Macedonia is limiting the entry of refugees to several hundred per day, and allowing only refugees from Syria and Iraq to enter. The bottleneck has resulted in a swift buildup of approximately 10,000 refugees and migrants along the Greece-Macedonia border fence, with Greek authorities warning that the number could climb to 70,000 by next month. Frustrated migrants have staged numerous protests, in some cases tearing down fences and gates, to be met with tear gas and Macedonian riot police.

Such Ado: The Fight for Shakespeare’s Puns

Much Ado About Nothing is a play (and also, at this point, an opera, and a TV show, and a movie, and the source of many additional songs and shows and movies) with a very good title. It’s a little bit ironic, a little bit knowing, a little bit whimsical—but also, with its efficient quartet of words, suggestive of some of the primary themes of Shakespeare’s iconic comedy: gossip, the ceremonies of social drama, the wooziness of love. The title suggests more than that, though. In Elizabethan English, the word “nothing” was pronounced as “no-ting,” and it suggested our modern sense of “noting” as “noticing” (and even as spying)—so, yep, yet another theme in the play.

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Hide Your Fires: On Shakespeare and the ‘Noted Weed’

But! There’s another pun, too. Wordplay-happy Elizabethans often used “nothing”/“no-ting” as a euphemism for ... “vagina.” (There’s no thing there, get it?) Which means that the title Much Ado About Nothing, on top of everything else, also suggests Much Ado About … yeah.

So: Four little words, with three layers of meaning. A pun parfait, in the title of the play! Today, the fashionable reaction to a pun is to roll one’s eyes and/or groan—except, of course, when the pun in question is used in the service of what we have deemed to be Poetry, in which case it is treated as a tool of literary “ambiguity.” Some of the credit/blame for that belongs to Shakespeare—who, despite and because of being perhaps the greatest poet ever to wield the English language, was also an inveterate punster. The bard of Avon took advantage of rhymes and doubled-up (and occasionally tripled-up) meanings to turn his plays and poems into interactive riddles.

Per one estimate, 96 of the 154 sonnets credited to Shakespeare contain rhymes that have since been lost to linguistic history.

As performed, that made for plays that pulsed with life for their audiences. A groundling at the Globe may have been illiterate, but he might have chuckled—or at least nodded along in historically inscribed sexism—when King Lear chided his daughter that “nothing can come of nothing.” There, right in the middle of Shakespeare’s great tragedy about parents and children and the human condition ... a joke about ladyparts.

In the 400 years since Shakespeare made his bawdy puns, though, the evolution of language—and of pronunciation, in particular—has eroded many of the embedded bits of wordplay that would have been obvious to Elizabethan ears. “Prove” and “love,” in most English dialects, no longer rhyme. This is unfortunate for Sonnet 166, also known as the “marriage sonnet,” and its now-only-semi-rhyme: “If this be error and upon me proved/ I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” Same with “hour” and “whore,” which colluded to make Maria’s now-outdated pun in Twelfth Night: “My lady takes great exception to your ill hours.” Same with “ace” and “ass,” formerly homophones that allowed Demetrius, playing a card game at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to mock a fellow player with the following observation: “No die, but an ace for him, for he is but one.”

What all that means is that contemporary audiences, often taught to approach Shakespeare’s work with the hushed reverence of ceremonial celebration, can also miss its jokes—and, as a result, can miss its full range of ambiguity and meaning. And also, quite often, its fun. David Crystal is a linguistics scholar who has pioneered an “original pronunciation,” or OP, approach to reading and performing Shakespeare. He has made a study of how much of Shakespeare’s original meaning has been, well, (p)undone. And according to Crystal’s research, at least 96 of the 154 sonnets credited to Shakespeare contain rhymes that have since been lost to linguistic history. For the plays, which together form a much larger corpus, the number is likely much higher.

There, right in the middle of Shakespeare’s great tragedy about parents and children and the human condition … a joke about ladyparts.

Which is a shame. Romeo and Juliet’s mention of “the fatal loins of these two foes,” for example, is much richer if you know that, for Shakespeare, “loin” rhymed with “line.” Line! Written words, stellar constellations, bloodlines, inheritance, the behind-the-scenes workings of theater ... all of those, and more, come into play with the new—and old—pronunciation.

So Crystal, for his part, is trying to bring back some of the plays’ and poems’ original linguistic depth. Later this month, his lengthy reference on the matter—The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation—will be published. It’s a book, a guide to Shakespeare’s first folio, that Crystal has been working on for 12 years (on and off, because, as he notes, “it’s deadly boring” to put a dictionary together). That work involved, essentially, linguistic sleuthing: Crystal started by looking at the words that might have originally rhymed, based on rhyme schemes and the words’ current pronunciations, and then cross-referenced them against other appearances of those same words in Shakespeare’s corpus.

The resulting dictionary is meant, he explains, as a resource for anyone who wants to understand Shakespeare’s plays and poems not as amber-frozen relics of literary history, but as works that have evolved along with English itself. “I’m not suggesting for a moment that Original Pronunciation replaces other approaches to Shakespeare,” Crystal says. “It simply is an extra tool in the kit that you use when you’re putting on a play.”

Original Pronunciation combines the dialects of Cornwall, Somerset, Ireland, Lancashire, Australia, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

And OP doesn’t simply add dimensions to Shakespeare’s work (or, for that matter, to Marlowe’s, and Jonson’s, and Webster’s). It can also help modern audiences simply to parse the plays, to tease out basic meanings that have been eroded in time. In Henry IV Part I, for example, Falstaff tells Hal, “Give you a reason on compulsion? If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.” The line would seem, Crystal points out, to make very little sense—unless you understand that “reason” was pronounced, in Shakespeare’s English, as “raisin,” and that “raisin” was a synonym for “blackberry.” (Sorry for doubting you, Will. The heart has its raisins, and all that.)

OP also helps to explain this otherwise baffling exchange in Twelfth Night:

Sir Andrew Aguecheek: What is “pourquoi”? Do, or not do? I would I had bestowed that time in the tongues that I have in fencing, dancing, and bear-baiting. O, had I but followed the arts!

Sir Toby Belch: Then hadst thou had an excellent head of hair.

Sir Andrew: Why, would that have mended my hair?

Sir Toby: Past question, for thou seest it will not curl by nature.

It’s jibberish, essentially, unless you realize two things: 1) “tongue” was pronounced, in OP, as “tong,” and 2) a “tong” in Elizabethan England was a rudimentary flat iron, a tool people used to straighten their hair. Aha. Sick burn, Toby.

OP’s ability to serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone for Shakespeare is partly why recent years have seen a rising movement to produce plays using its pronunciations. The Globe in London did Romeo and Juliet in OP. The Shakespeare scholar Eric Rasmussen put on an OP production of Hamlet. (Crystal’s son, Ben, also a Shakespeare scholar and actor, served as the production’s artist-in-residence.) Troilus and Cressida and Midsummer and Twelfth Night and Cymbeline—they’ve all gotten the OP treatment, in the U.K. and in the States. Beyond simply highlighting the wordplay of the original works, Crystal points out, OP also helps modern audiences to parse the plays as oral presentations. “It’s just like any dialect,” Crystal says, and it sounds like a hodgepodge of several different modern accents, among them the English spoken in Cornwall, Somerset, Ireland, Black Country, Lancashire, and Australia. There’s also a dash of the English spoken in Pirates of the Caribbean. In some ways, it’s closer to American English than to British.

In all that, OP helps to reclaim Shakespeare for modern audiences—to demystify his words, and to democratize them. Olivier’s Hamlet, Branagh’s Benedick, McKellen’s Richard III, all with their posh British accents—“people think that’s how Shakespeare should be done,” Crystal says. But those accents are accidents of history. And they are pretty much as far removed from Shakespeare’s own way of speaking as an American accent, or an Australian, or a Sparrowian, is today. Shakespeare sounded like all of us, and none of us. Given the ado made about his words and works over the past 400 years—and given the ado that will likely be made over the next 400—that’s well worth noting.  

Ted Cruz's Alaska Win

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz is projected to have won the Republican presidential caucuses in Alaska.

With all the precincts reporting, Cruz narrowly defeated Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, 7,973 votes (36.4 percent) to 7,346 (33.5 percent), according to the Associated Press.

Alaska will send 28 delegates to the Republican convention in Cleveland on July 18. The win gives Cruz 12 delegates. Trump, who had secured the support of Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor, will take home 11. Marco Rubio, the U.S. senator from Florida, who finished third in the state, will get five. Alaska Dispatch News reported that, in all, 21,930 votes were cast.

Cruz won in 24 of the state’s 40 legislative districts. Trump won 15. Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, took one; Rubio none.

His second-place finish in Alaska notwithstanding, Donald Trump had a very super Tuesday. He won in seven states, including much of the South. Cruz won three, including his home state of Texas, and Oklahoma. Rubio was projected to win in Minnesota.

Trump now has 285 delegates; Cruz has 161; Rubio 87. The first to secure 1,237 delegates will win the presidential nomination.

You can read our full coverage of Super Tuesday here.

Uncovering Decades of Sexual Abuse in a Pennsylvania Diocese

On Tuesday, two days after a film about a massive Catholic sex-abuse scandal in Boston won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Pennsylvania’s attorney general released a grand jury report chronicling “staggering and sobering” accounts of sexual abuse in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnston.

The report alleges that, dating back to the 1970s, “hundreds of children have fallen victim to child predators” in abuse cases that involved over 50 priests and religious leaders in the area:

As wolves disguised as the shepherds themselves—these men stole the innocence of children by sexually preying upon the most innocent and the most vulnerable of our society and of the Catholic faith.

But there at the heart of the report isn’t just the criminal behavior, but criminal callousness in the desire of high-level officials to “avoid public scandal” by keeping abuse quiet and even allowing known predators to remain in commission as members of the clergy.

The information uncovered by the report had previously been kept in files to which only top diocese leaders had access. The documents show that several priests were reprimanded, reassigned, or otherwise briefly sent off to treatment programs or vacations, only to return to serving their original communities or new ones. Others retired and a few were eventually kept from the ministry.

As the Catholic News Service notes, the report, which includes testimony from victims, initially came about after the state’s attorney general was approached by “local law enforcement officials and district attorneys of several counties” with information about the abuse.

Last month, a commission created by Pope Francis to combat such abuse declared it “a moral and ethical responsibility” to report suspected incidents to authorities outside the church, eschewing a longtime dynamic by which denials by clergy have been taken at face value and matters have been kept internal.

But given the prevalence of these scandals and the cover-up culture, it’s difficult to imagine that Altoona-Johnston will be the last community to have this kind of reckoning. On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane reiterated that the grand jury report into the diocese was just a first step and that investigations are ongoing.

McConnell Puts the Ball Into Obama's Court

Rarely has a White House meeting between the president and congressional leaders seemed, on the surface, so pointless.

President Obama on Tuesday convened Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley in the Oval Office, ostensibly to discuss his plans for nominating someone to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. (Vice President Joe Biden, Minority Leader Harry Reid, and Grassley’s Democratic counterpart, Senator Patrick Leahy, also sat in to provide some balance.)

Yet was there really anything to talk about?

McConnell has made it abundantly clear that he won’t allow the Senate to even consider a nominee in the final year of Obama’s term—no hearings, no vote, not even a courtesy meeting. And in case anyone thought he would buckle under a hard sell from the president, the Kentucky Republican reiterated his stance Tuesday morning on the Senate floor, in a speech to House Republicans, and in an op/ed on the website of a local TV station. He said he hoped instead to discuss other issues before the Senate, beginning with legislation to address the opioid crisis.

Publicly, Democrats insist that McConnell’s position will be politically unsustainable once Obama makes his pick, which he is expected to do in the next couple of weeks. Senate Republicans, including Grassley, up for reelection in November have already taken hits over the hard-line stance, and a few have broken with McConnell to suggest that the Senate should at least grant the forthcoming nominee a hearing and maybe a vote.

“We killed a lot of time talking about basketball,” Reid said.

The White House meeting took place as voters in a dozen states headed to the polls on Super Tuesday, and the long shadow of Donald Trump loomed over the discussion. McConnell is pushing for “the next president”—a Republican, he hopes—to pick Scalia’s replacement. And yet, as Democrats are increasingly pointing out, the Republican who is most likely to have that chance is a man who more and more of the party’s lawmakers are vowing never to support. The New York Times reported on Saturday that McConnell himself told his Senate colleagues they would drop Trump “like a hot rock” if he imperiled their electoral chances this fall.

Obama didn’t even bother to make a few perfunctory comments at the top of the meeting, when photographers were ushered into, and then quickly out of, the Oval Office to snap pictures of the men for the traditional photo-op. And needless to say, the meeting didn’t last long. Barely 40 minutes later, Reid stepped to the microphones in front of the White House to confirm that McConnell hadn’t budged.

“They’re going to wait and see what President Trump will do, I guess,” Reid told reporters in an attempt to needle the Republicans. “There wasn’t much said at the meeting,” he added. Obama offered to seriously consider candidates put forward by Republicans, but neither McConnell nor Grassley would name any.

So if the Supreme Court talk didn’t go anywhere, what did they discuss? “We killed a lot of time talking about basketball,” Reid said.

What One Year of Space Travel Does to the Human Body

Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko have done a lot this past year.

In the 340 days they spent on the International Space Station, the American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut orbited Earth 5,440 times, conducted hundreds of experiments, and floated out in space in bulky suits, secured only by a tether, to maintain one of humanity’s most sophisticated pieces of engineering.

There are also some things they didn’t do, like walk or shower, or feel the wind against their skin, or sleep in a bed that didn’t hang from a wall, or drink water that wasn’t recycled urine and sweat.

“Even after I’ve been here nearly a year, you don’t feel perfectly normal,” Kelly said in a press conference last week. “There’s always a lingering something you feel. It’s not necessarily uncomfortable, but it is a harsh environment. For instance, having no running water. It’s kind of like I’ve been in the woods camping for a year.”

Kelly and Kornienko return to Earth late Tuesday night (or very early Wednesday morning in Kazakhstan, where their Soyuz capsule will land). Their stay was twice the usual tour of duty on the ISS, a joint operation of the two countries. For the United States, it was record-breaking: Kelly’s mission marks the longest spaceflight of an American astronaut. The Russians hold the world record; Valery Polyakov spent nearly 438 days on the Mir space station in the 1990s. The last time anyone spent a year in space was in 1999.

The goal of the yearlong expedition is to better understand how the human body reacts to microgravity for long durations. Researchers say they hope the data acquired in this mission will help them figure out how to send humans on even longer missions, like one to Mars, which would take two-and-a-half years, roundtrip.

These days, scientists know generally what astronauts should expect when they leave Earth’s atmosphere. The most common physiological changes result from the lack of gravity. When astronauts first experience weightlessness, their sensorimotor system becomes immediately disrupted.

“Your inner ear thinks you’re tumbling: the balance system in there is going all over the place … Meanwhile your eyes are telling you you’re not tumbling; you’re upright,” Leroy Chiao, a retired NASA astronaut who flew three shuttle missions and spent six months on the ISS in the mid-2000s, told Charles Fishman in The Atlantic last year. “The two systems are sending all this contradictory information to your brain.” Cue nausea that takes a few days to subside.

Without the forces of gravity to help circulate air inside the orbital laboratory, the carbon dioxide its residents exhale can form an invisible cloud around their head, which can lead to headaches. In weightlessness, the fluids in the human body float upward and clog the sinuses, making astronauts’ heads feel congested and their faces appear puffy. Their skeletons become useless; bones don’t need to support muscles in microgravity, so they start losing minerals and regenerating cells at a slower pace. Astronauts can lose 1 percent of their bone density a month. Back on Earth, it takes a year for aging men and women to lose the same amount of bone mass. In a environment that requires little strength to move around and work, muscles atrophy, their fibers shrinking.

These effects can be remedied. Astronauts wear compression cuffs on their thighs to keep the blood in their lower body from pooling upward, and take vitamin D supplements. They maintain muscle and bone strength by exercising for two-and-a-half hours a day, six days a week, guided by strength coaches. (In 2014, Mike Hopkins posted on YouTube some workouts that put Crossfit to shame.) The station’s fans help spread the exhaled carbon dioxide around.

But scientists are still learning. Astronauts have complained of vision problems since the first missions in the 1970s, but it was only in the last decade that scientists discovered such problems were an occupational hazard. In 2009, two NASA astronauts noticed they started having trouble seeing things close up. Eye exams and high-tech cameras revealed their eyeballs had become a bit squashed and their optic nerves had swelled, leading to farsightedness that persisted post-mission. Researchers suspect the change in vision is caused by cerebrospinal fluid in the skull, free from gravity, pushing on the back of the eyeballs, but they don’t know for sure. NASA keeps the ISS stocked with glasses just in case.

Still, scientists have managed to figure out how to keep humans alive and relatively well for months at a time, a remarkable feat that now appears routine to those watching from the ground. But on a trip to Mars, it’s distance from Earth, not duration of spaceflight, that becomes the bigger enemy. The ISS orbits about 200 miles away, just within Earth’s protective magnetic field. There, astronauts receive 10 times the usual amount of radiation, high-speed particles from the sun or other parts of the galaxy that tear through DNA molecules, that increase their risk of dying from cancer. Farther out, the exposure would get much worse.

Human bodies were not made for outer space. Neither were their minds, which is why NASA astronauts talk to psychologists once every two weeks, and write in their personal journals at least three times a week. The living and working quarters of the ISS are about the size of a six-bedroom house—spacious by manned satellite standards, but certainly very, very cozy (see for yourself in this panoramic tour). On a voyage to Mars, no amount of Instagramming could stave off the potentially harmful effects of months of confinement with only handful of people in an environment so isolated from the rest of humankind it would make Sartre cringe.

Scientists have until the 2030s—when NASA wants to send humans to Mars—to figure out how to keep long-distance spacefarers alive. Kelly and Kornienko spent a year undergoing a barrage of cognitive, visual, and medical tests before they launched to the ISS last year. They conducted more tests during their 340 days aboard, and will receive even more in the year after they return—all in the name of space exploration’s latest moonshot. When the last test is over, Kelly said he’s going to go home and jump into his pool, where water doesn’t float around in big globs.

Why the ‘Low’ Oscar Ratings Shouldn’t Matter

In 2004, the Oscars handed 11 trophies, including Best Picture, to the most commercially successful film of the previous year, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. No surprise then, that the ceremony’s TV ratings jumped 30 percent from the previous year, with 43.6 million people tuning in. Viewership has fluctuated since then, but in 2014, it was roughly the same as the year The Lord of the Rings won big. The Best Picture winner in 2014? Twelve Years a Slave, a film that domestically grossed about 85 percent less than The Return of the King. In other words, viewers tune into the Oscars for many reasons, and the relative popularity of the winning films is just one of them.

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Is Creative Television Bad for Business?

But that hasn’t stopped pundits from partaking in the typical doomsday talk that accompanies a down year. Sunday’s Oscar telecast attracted 34.3 million viewers, an eight percent decline from last year, though not the lowest on record (2003 and 2008 were worse). Writing in The New York Times, Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply attributed this decline to a loss in black viewership, the host Chris Rock’s apparent lack of fame, the lower profile of the nominated films, and the hypothesis that “soapbox moments to espouse causes—and there were plenty on Sunday—have historically turned off viewers.” Heaven forbid. The “cause” this time was the Academy’s need to diversify its membership, in hopes of avoiding another year with an all-white slate of acting nominees. But bluntly confronting that onstage was necessary, and blaming Rock’s performance for a slight ratings dip is short-sighted.

It’s clear where the drumbeat of criticism for Sunday’s ceremony is coming from inside the industry. A story in Variety suggests that ABC, the network that airs the ceremony, is pushing for more creative control as it renegotiates its TV contract with the Academy. Right now, AMPAS gets to pick the producer and the host, and set the overall tone for the ceremony. According to Variety, the Disney co-chairman Ben Sherwood (who recently engineered the resignation of ABC’s well-regarded head of programming Paul Lee) is using declining ratings as leverage to seize control. The article’s anonymous sources called Sunday’s ceremony “lackluster,” pointed to the Golden Globes as “a pretty slick show” that the Oscars could look to emulate, and decried Rock for “going back to the same theme” of Hollywood racism throughout the night.

The idea that anyone who watched 2016’s Golden Globes ceremony and saw something worth imitating is laughable. It was an absurdly messy affair that featured a comedically tone-deaf hosting job by Ricky Gervais, run-on speeches from drunken winners who seemed as confused as the viewing audience, and Mel Gibson as a presenter. As for its ratings? It drew 18.5 million viewers—down from the previous year. By comparison, while this year’s Oscars certainly had their own tone-deaf moments (the gag with Asian children dressed up as accountants being one example), they also gave Rock free rein to criticize Hollywood’s systemic racism in his opening monologue, while the Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs made a sterling on-air appeal to members and the viewing audience to help forge a path to a more inclusive future.

Yet according to Barnes and Cieply, “Nielsen data reflecting quarter-hour segments of viewership indicates that Sunday’s show appeared to lose viewers as glamour (and movies) increasingly took a back seat to activism,” noting that “Sunday’s ratings fluctuated and then fell more steadily in the show’s last hour, as issues of sexual assault, environmentalism, and gay rights were put forward by presenters and award recipients.” This seems like a false equivalence: Lady Gaga’s performance and Leonardo DiCaprio’s speech were among the most-discussed moments of the night, and the idea that the ceremony’s ratings declined as it ran well into the night (wrapping at around midnight EST) and viewers went to bed seems much more logical.

People watch the Oscars for many reasons, and the popularity of the winning films is just one of them.

As for the relative unpopularity of the nominated films, it’s hard to understand what snubbed hits should have been nominated to somehow guarantee a ratings victory. Star Wars: The Force Awakens was well-represented in the nominations, but its secrecy-shrouded Christmas release rollout basically precluded its chance at major awards attention because it couldn’t even screen for voters. While the Academy overlooked the glut of superhero films and sequels that dominated the box office this year (as it has in most recent years), big hits like The Martian, The Revenant, and Mad Max: Fury Road were all Best Picture nominees. If the argument is that Jurassic World and Furious 7 should have been included as a nod to their big ticket sales, that seems facile in the extreme.

Yes, in the years that the Oscar favorite is also a bona-fide phenomenon, like Titanic, there’s a clear ratings boost—the 1998 ceremony’s record 57.3 million viewers will likely never be beaten. But the rest is statistical noise, further confused by a changing TV audience that includes younger cord-cutters and the increasing prevalence of streaming television. According to Variety, ABC made a handy $110 million in advertising from last year’s ceremony despite similarly down ratings, and it’ll likely clear about the same this year. Why mess with what clearly still works?

The simple fact is that the Oscars’ creative independence is important. This year’s telecast producer, Reginald Hudlin, is a respected African American director and executive who gave Rock the room to take on #OscarsSoWhite as he saw fit, and gave Isaacs the airtime to respond to criticism. Those are the kinds of things ABC, or any major network given control, would meddle with. For better or for worse, the Oscars still stand apart from the year’s other awards ceremonies. Robbing them of their autonomy would take away a major reason for tuning in—and that’s the only ratings argument that should matter.

Will the Worst Attack of ‘the Troubles’ Go Unprosecuted?

On August 15, 1998, some four months after the Good Friday Agreement set a fragile peace in Northern Ireland, a bombing on a crowded street in the town of Omagh killed 29 people and wounded more than 300 others.

It was the worst attack in the history of the decades-long conflict known as “the Troubles.” Local police, responding to a warning elsewhere in the town, had directed civilians in the direction of the blast, caused by 500 pounds of explosives that had been packed in a stolen red Vauxhall Cavalier and detonated by a remote trigger.

On Tuesday, more than 17 years after the attack threatened to unravel the peace agreement, the charges against the one remaining suspect in the bombing were dropped by prosecutors who concluded “the available evidence no longer provides a reasonable prospect of a conviction.”

According to Agence France-Presse, a key witness in the pre-trial hearings had delivered inconsistent and contradictory testimony. The suspect in the case, Seamus Daly, was one of the four men who was sued in a 2009 civil case, which awarded the relatives of the victims some $2.2 million. That money has never been paid.

Daly, a 45-year-old bricklayer and member of the Real IRA dissident group, has been held for nearly two years in prison in connection with the bombing and other terrorism-related charges. A group advocating for Daly’s release expressed relief in the wake of the decision.

The case against Seamus Daly has been flawed from the beginning. The British Government along with the prosecution proceeded against Seamus with no tangible evidence.

Meanwhile, families of the victims expressed disappointment. “We have been failed once again by the police service, by the prosecution service, by the government and by the criminal justice system,” said Michael Gallagher, whose son was killed in the attack.

The fallout from the Troubles, in which 3,500 people died, continues to loom over Northern Ireland. Writing in The Atlantic last month, Lyra McKee chronicled the high rate of suicides among the Ceasefire Babies, those born after the Good Friday Agreement.

Can Writing Be Both True and Beautiful?

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

Doug McLean

For Ethan Canin, the author of A Doubter’s Almanac, Saul Bellow’s short story “A Silver Dish” is a masterwork. The protagonist is a businessman named Woody Selbst who’s unsure of how to mourn his con artist father. Pop didn’t just abandon the family when Woody was a teenager. He tricked his son into becoming an accomplice in his escape—a cruel ruse that permanently thwarted Woody’s ambitions in the process.

In our conversation for this series, Canin explained that his favorite part comes at the very end. As Pop pulls off one last con on his deathbed, Woody’s coming-to-terms is expressed in a simple final sentence: “That was how he was.” We discussed how Bellow infuses five ordinary words with such uncanny power; why endings should make us feel, not think; and what “A Silver Dish” teaches about dialogue, plot, and character.

A Doubter’s Almanac is a family saga about the destructive power of genius, and like “A Silver Dish” it concerns a complex father/son legacy. It’s the story of a groundbreaking mathematician from northern Michigan, whose brilliance is only equaled by his capacity for betrayal and violence. A cast of long-suffering characters support the celebrated work, including the son who fears he’s inherited his father’s gifts and penchant for self-destruction.

In 1998, Ethan Canin left medicine to teach fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he was my professor). The best-selling author of the story collections Emperor of the Air and The Palace Thief, and novels including America America and For Kings and Planets, his fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories. We spoke at a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan.

Ethan Canin: When I went for my medical school interview, I had an old paperback of Henderson the Rain King in the pocket of my coat. I was wearing the best clothes I had, a pair of cords and a sport coat—but when I got to the office, all the other interviewees were lined up in their black suits. As they stood there talking about whether they preferred intravenous versus oral chemotherapy, I thought, “Oh my god, I’m about to get myself into the wrong line of work.” But when I went in for the interview, the guy noticed I had a book in my jacket pocket. He asked what I was reading, and when I took it out, he said, “Oh, that’s my favorite book.” All we did was talk about Henderson the Rain King. I think that’s how I got into medical school.

I think Bellow’s the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I’m in awe.

One of my favorite works is the great short story “A Silver Dish,” a story not too many people seem to know. It ends with, for me, one of the most memorable lines in fiction:

That was how he was.

There are five words in that sentence, each one essentially meaningless: That was how he was. Two of them are the same word: “was” and “was.” Hardly any sounds even, in those words, there’s no tilt, no break, no angle to the rhythm—just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Of all those words, only “he” and perhaps “was” have any sort of meaning. “How” is technically an adverb the way it’s used here but feels more nounish to me, in the sense that I get a little visual spark when I read it, entirely from what has come before in the story. The whole sentence uses only seven distinct letters, and contains only 15 letters total: three a’s, three h’s, three w’s, two s’s, two t’s, an o, and an e.

It’s an amazingly restrained line from Bellow, who was a poet of the first order. I think he was intentionally restricting his palette. Compare it to some of his other great sentences, like the famous first line of The Adventures of Augie March:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

You can open that book up to page 400 and find the best sentence you’ve ever seen. It’s an astonishing, volcanic eruption of ideas and language. Or take this section from “A Silver Dish,” when Woody takes a streetcar ride that leads him to the story’s culminating moment:

What he heard and saw was an old red Chicago streetcar, one of those trams the color of a stockyard steer. Cars of this type went out before Pearl Harbor—clumsy, big-bellied, with tough rattan seats and brass grips for the standing passengers. Those cars used to make four stops to the mile, and ran with a wallowing motion. They stank of carbolic or ozone and throbbed when the air compressors were being charged. The conductor had his knotted signal cord to pull, and the motorman beat the foot gong with his mad heel.

That passage is full of visceral, Anglo-Saxon words, and every single one of those words means something instantly. I think that’s what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

But the last line of “A Silver Dish,” is nothing like that. I can’t tell you what any single one of those words means. Imagine you’re a lexicographer and you have to define the word that, or how. And on top of this, there’s none of Bellow’s typical play with rhythm and language—it’s almost a non-sentence. And yet, when I get to it in the story, I weep. I’ve read the story three times in the past few weeks, and each time I arrived at that sentence, tears came to my eyes.

How does Bellow pack so much emotion into those five ordinary words?

I think it’s their very blankness that allows them to channel so much emotion. Because they don’t bring anything specific to mind, they allow us to feel without thinking. At the end of a story or novel, you do not want the reader thinking. Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion’s enemy. It’s the writer’s job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel. You’ll often see this in the final moments of a film: The camera tilts up, and the movie ends with a non-distinct image of the sky, or the sea, or the coast. Something the eye can’t quite focus on, which allows you to focus on everything that’s come before. That’s how “that was how he was” works, too. It brings nothing else to mind. This sentence would be a non-sentence if it began the story—but, placed at the end, it’s packed with the charge of everything that precedes it. Each of those non-words is nitroglycerin, and the story that precedes it is the fuse.

At the end of a story or novel, you do not want the reader thinking. Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion’s enemy.

To me, this line also shows that content trumps style. I have a theory about writing, which is that you cannot simultaneously write something true about character and, at the same time, write something linguistically beautiful. There are too few words to express both truth and beauty, so most empathetic—or another way to say this might be character-driven writers—tend to naturally reserve their beautiful constructions for when the content is less urgent. You’ll see Bellow get poetic when he’s writing about the scenery, like when Woody and his dad take that streetcar ride. But when he’s trying to write something that really gets to the narrator’s deep emotional experience, the prose is mostly very simple: That was how he was. Five plain words. At the crux of the story it pays to write what’s true, rather than try to write what’s true and then dilute that by making the prose beautiful. It’s a continuum, of course, but I don’t think you can be at both ends of the continuum.  

For me, I should also say, this story answers almost every question a young writer could have about fiction writing.

That dialogue is conflict, for instance. Bellow doesn’t write down a word of dialogue unless people are fighting. As I always say to my students about dialogue in fiction: If you can’t say something nasty, don’t say anything at all.

Or that any story about death must be a story about life.

Or how to approach one of the most difficult things for literary writers: plot.

In a way, plot is very simple: You have someone do something wrong. You don’t plan out a plot. You have somebody do something wrong, and that engenders other bad behavior. Behavior—especially bad behavior—is what forces character to emerge.

When “A Silver Dish” begins, it’s remarkably static: Woody, pierced by the sound of church bells all over Chicago, is mourning his father, a lifetime of old memories and impressions washing over him. But the story snaps into sudden focus when he recalls one of his father’s transgressions, a betrayal that’s haunted the younger man all his life. It’s that individual transgression—that memorable instance of bad behavior—that gets the story rolling.

I think of that moment as the story standing up. The moment when the black lines on the page suddenly become a story.

I’ve heard [the Deadwood creator] David Milch say (though I might be butchering it slightly) that it’s easier to plot your way into an idea than it is to idea your way into a plot. And I think a lot of writers start out making the mistake of trying to write a novel about something. Novels are discussed as though they are intentionally about something, but they’re not. They’re stories. We’re taught to think about them that way by literary critics, or by English teachers, who are, in their defense, generally trying to teach you to write a paragraph rather than a novel. But to be a writer, I think, you have to abandon the idea that fiction is “about” something. This concept is bad enough in your reading life. But it’s fatal in your writing life.

I’ve seen plenty of students come in and say, I want to write a novel about blah blah blah. But you just can’t do it. You can only write a novel about a character who does something wrong, and see what happens from there. Novels are compendiums of bad behavior, and literature is the gossip about it.

In other words, if you’re writing a piece of fiction, I’d urge you not to try to show anything—instead, try to discover something. There’s no way to write anything powerful unless your unconscious takes charge.

I think of that moment as the story standing up. The moment when the black lines on the page suddenly become a story.

The biggest problem for young literary writers, besides plot, is how to characterize: how to make a character seem like a real human being. One of the more subtle ways, which Bellow does beautifully, is to have a character describe other people. The trick is that when characters describe other people, it’s they themselves who are being revealed. In this section of “A Silver Dish,” Woody’s description of his father, gives a sense of his own diction, articulation, and philosophy:

Pop, as he took his sheepskin off, was in sweaters, no jacket. His darting looks made him seem crooked. Hardest of all for these Selbsts with their bent noses and big, apparently straightforward faces was to look honest. All the signs of dishonesty played over them. Woody had often puzzled about it. Did it go back to the muscles, was it fundamentally a jaw problem—the projecting angles of the jaws? Or was it the angling that went on in the heart?


It’s physical description and self-contemplation and contemplation of others, all at the same time. As Woody meditates on his father’s inherently crooked appearance, we get a sense of Woody, too: that he is in some ways an upright, noble, kind man but also has a sense of his own unworthiness, his own brutishness—a sense that he himself is as crookedly bent as his father.

Writers tend to think that their own prose is the compelling thing. You have to strangle that off, I think. Talk about killing your darlings. It’s not just about killing your good scenes, it’s about killing your instinct to try to impress with witticism and handsome phrasing—becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way. The less present you can be, the more you can be the character you’re trying to write about. Some of the writers I admire most—like Philip Roth or Alice Munro—they’re beautiful prose stylists in the sense that their sentences are lovely, but as I read them I’m not thinking about the prose. I’m thinking about the truth. I’m lost in their ability to make me into another human being. That, to me, is the compelling thing.

With characterization, you have to let go. You’ve got to release yourself from your grandiose intentions, your ambitions, your ideas about humanity, literature, and philosophy by focusing on the being-another-person aspect of it—which, by the way, is freeing, delightful, and one of the few real joys of writing. Stop worrying about writing a great novel—just become another human being.

I should add that, to a remarkable degree, it’s a physical thing. I try to do it by pausing for a moment before I begin writing, by taking a few seconds at the beginning to let my self drop away.

I also find that restrained bits of physical activity help. I have a standing desk—which I have to say, I built myself long before it became fashionable. That works for me. I also put in one of those mini elliptical trainers below it, the kind without handrails, so that I have to concentrate a little to not fall off. I’ll start to walk. And as I try to balance, trying not to topple to the side, I’m starting to type—somehow the slight physical activity takes the brakes off. In the same way, I often get good ideas when I’m driving a stickshift car: The shifting requires just enough concentration that it unglues your inhibitions. It allows your unconscious to bubble up.

With characterization, you have to let go. Stop worrying about writing a great novel—just become another human being.

Ultimately, I read for the sensation of being another character. That’s how I know a book is good, when I can no longer tell that I’m reading a book, when I become not a reader but another human being. I read for that sensation of transport, and I write for that sensation, too.

I had this weird experience once. I was on stage, I think at the Kansas City Public Library. Some kind of on-stage conversation. And the first question the interviewer asked me was: What’s the purpose of literature? Imagine getting that question unannounced. And out of my mouth popped: “It’s a rehearsal for death.” I’d never thought about that before I said it, but in some ways I think it’s true. Fiction’s about running through other people’s lives, running through the great and terrible things that happen along the way, and especially the thing that lies at the end, experiencing it over and over and over. Whether or not a novel actually contains death, it’s often about the highlights of a life. Literature allows us to experience thousands of lives, to understand how we might want to live our own.

But back to “A Silver Dish.” There’s a little mystery in this story: Twice, Bellow slips out of third person and into first. “He wanted me like himself, an American,” the narrator says, at one point. Is it some sort of meta-fiction, as if Bellow anticipated the current trend of narrators having the same names as their authors? I don’t know what to make of those two little shifts in point of view, unless they’re little tacit admissions that this story is indeed about him. Some kind of winking admission that this is I, Saul Bellow, and not Woody.

Whatever it is, “A Silver Dish” gives us profound access to the life of another. For me, that’s what great fiction is: the window through to someone else’s days on earth. That was how he was. It’s all of literature, isn’t it? Or pretty damn close.