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The Missing Piece of the Oscars’ Diversity Conversation

Since the Academy Awards nominations were announced earlier this year, it’s been largely impossible to read a story about the Oscars that didn’t also contain some mention of diversity. The list immediately amplified a discussion that drew widespread attention in 2015, after the Academy nominated the acclaimed Martin Luther King biopic Selma for Best Picture, but snubbed its director, Ava Duvernay, and its star, David Oyelowo. In response, the activist April Reign started the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, a term critics took up to challenge the awards’ persistent whiteness.

This year, film writers and cultural commentators adopted the hashtag once again to decry the exclusion of actors including Idris Elba, Michael B. Jordan, and Samuel L. Jackson, and the directors F. Gary Gray and Ryan Coogler, who were widely perceived to be contenders. The Academy’s president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, has promised reforms to its voting process, while this year’s host, Chris Rock has promised to address the diversity issue during the ceremony. Viola Davis advised people who were dismayed by the all-white slate to “plop your money down to see Race, to see Dope, to see Straight Outta Compton, to see Selma; to support directors like Ava DuVernay, Lee Daniels, Spike Lee.”

An Academy Awards that looked like this—that celebrated the tremendous work of artists like Coogler and DuVernay—would be a better, more interesting celebration than the one that’ll take place on Sunday. But even so, it would be only the barest hint of progress for an industry that still systematically leaves so many people out. No Asian or Latina actress has won an Oscar in over 50 years. Latinos make up only two percent of the Academy’s current membership, while the U.S. Hispanic population tops 17 percent. Asians and Native Americans together make up less than half a percent. Native Americans and indigenous people barely take part in major films produced in Hollywood, let alone at awards ceremonies. Meanwhile, the financial incentives for movies to cast more women and people of color are more pressing than ever—a new report from UCLA found that Hollywood’s diversity issues could be costing the industry billions of dollars.

If the industry’s answer to #OscarsSoWhite stops at filling the roster of Oscar finalists with only African Americans, Hollywood risks swapping one form of tokenism for another, letting one dimension of diversity stand in for an audience that deserves so many more. The industry isn’t close to doing justice to the wealth of talented black actors, directors, and writers within its ranks. But that’s merely where the problem begins.

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It’s worth rewinding for a moment to the 74th Academy Awards in 2002. Hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, the show saw Denzel Washington present an honorary award to Sidney Poitier, the first African American to win an Oscar for Best Actor in 1964. Later, Washington became the second black man to win the Oscar for Best Actor, and Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the award for Best Actress. “This moment is so much bigger than me,” she said in an emotional acceptance speech, in which she thanked Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Angela Bassett. “And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

This is the significance of the Oscars, a television program of dwindling popularity that nonetheless functions once a year as a metonym for all of Hollywood. As such, it’s a convenient yardstick for measuring how well the film world has kept pace with the evolving values of the country as a whole. Earlier this month, Berry reflected sadly on her Oscar win in an interview with BET. “To sit here almost 15 years later, and knowing that another woman of color has not walked through that door, is heartbreaking,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought that moment was bigger than me ... Maybe it wasn’t. And I so desperately felt like it was.”

The achievements of actors like Berry, Washington, and Poitier—as well as Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, Barkhad Abdi, Jennifer Hudson, and films like 12 Years a Slave—may inform the diversity discussion’s focus on black actors and filmmakers, but the reason is also much broader. “Throughout the long history of Hollywood and the history of the Oscars, there has been an ongoing conversation about racism that has often been framed in terms of black and white,” said Todd Boyd, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies race and pop culture. The current situation, he said, simply reflects that past.

Renee Tajima-Peña, a documentary filmmaker and professor of Asian American studies at UCLA who was nominated for an Oscar in 1987 for her work on the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?, said the civil-rights movement of the 20th century indelibly shaped how the country, and by extension, Hollywood, thinks about race. But it’s an anachronistic mindset. “Now, on the ground, when people think of race, they think of this whole range of white, black, brown, yellow, red, and all the nuances and layers,” she said.

Expanding the Oscars discussion beyond black actors and filmmakers doesn’t diminish them or the unique challenges they face. After all, their relative visibility hasn’t translated into anything close to decent representation throughout the industry. Though blacks are slightly over-represented in terms of Oscar wins in acting categories, for example, they’re under-represented in directing (especially black women), according to a USC study. As The Economist noted:

These are the numbers that critics of Hollywood should be most concerned about, along with the dearth of top roles for Hispanic and Asian actors. Best Actor nominations and wins—in which black actors have done decently, 2015 and 2016 excepted—seem to be the wrong target.

I spoke with several people of color who have worked for decades as producers, directors, writers, actors, and agents in the film industry to get a better sense of how they’ve dealt with Hollywood’s whitewashing problem over the years, and what they make of the situation today.

Involving all minority groups in the mainstream diversity discussion is necessary, but it also raises complicated questions about the merits and limits of solidarity. To what extent should people of color focus on increasing opportunities for all people of color, versus their own communities?

After all, the systemic issues in Hollywood that hurt black directors are the same ones that make it hard for Asian Americans to get top film roles, or for Native Americans to receive non-stereotypical portrayals. As Boyd told me, “When you say that Hollywood is overwhelmingly white and male that’s to the exclusion of everything else.” But blacks, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans also have different histories in this country, which means different challenges and advantages. Lumping everyone in the same category raises the real risk of ignoring those differences rather than better understanding them.

* * *

In the midst of the #OscarsSoWhite discussion, the Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez started a similar hashtag of her own—#MovementMondays. In an Instagram post praising the work of Oscar Isaac in Ex Machina, Rodriguez placed part of the blame for the lack of Latinos in Hollywood on Latino viewers themselves.

I am told time and time again, “Latinos don’t watch Latino Movies. Latinos don’t support each other,” and sadly that is true ... If you want to see us represented on film and TV, if you want to see Latinos nominated for Oscars, we NEED to support one another. The industry sees money, the excuse can’t be racism.

Asking Latinos to support the work of other Latinos is a noble and practical request: Relative to the U.S. population as a whole, Latinos go to the movies more than any other racial or ethnic group, and Hispanics in the U.S. boast roughly $1.5 trillion in buying power. But though the Latino population grew more than 43 percent from 2000 to 2010, there’s “a narrower range of stories and roles, and fewer Latino lead actors in the entertainment industry today, than there were 70 years ago,” according to a 2015 report from Columbia University.

The director Patricia Cardoso—who’s best known for her 2002 film Real Women Have Curves (which won a Sundance Audience Award)—recalls how she was passed over to direct seven different feature films, and each time, the job went instead to a white male director. “I think people are not willing to take a risk on a director like myself who is a woman and is Latina and doesn’t speak perfect English,” Cardoso said. This is despite the fact that executives “acknowledge that I’m a good director and that I have talent.”

Cardoso knows that she’s one of very few minority women directing feature films—one of the 1.3 percent, according to the Directors Guild of America. And yet the list of high-profile male Latino filmmakers includes huge names like Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Del Toro, and Alejandro Iñárritu, the latter of whom may win his second Oscar for Best Director in two years on Sunday. They’re infrequently mentioned in the broader diversity discussion for two main reasons, Cardoso said. For one, they’re Mexican, not Mexican American, so they’re seen by many as foreign directors, first and foremost. Secondly, “they’re not telling Latino stories,” said Cardoso, adding that it’s helpful that they’re men, unlike herself.

Cardoso thinks financial challenges, often unconsciously discriminatory hiring, and the inherent burdens of being outnumbered are to blame for the Academy Awards’ overwhelming whiteness. “So few minority movies get made that we don’t get as many chances to make mistakes,” she said. When she was voting for this year’s Directors Guild of America Awards, she said, out of the 587 films on the ballot, just a handful were from filmmakers of color.

George Takei, who’s a member of the Academy, said the same was true with the Oscars this year, using an imperfect metaphor to assert that voters can only acknowledge what exists, not what viewers wish existed: “You can’t complain when you go to a restaurant that the dishes are all American dishes and complain I don’t have sushi on the menu, because you walked into an American restaurant.”

* * *

Most critics lauding the strides Asian Americans have made in Hollywood recently will likely point to television (Elementary, Fresh off the Boat, Quantico, Dr. Ken, The Mindy Project). With the exception of animation, film remains a tougher arena. In the last year, Cameron Crowe and Ridley Scott have faced criticism for whitewashing characters of explicitly Asian descent in their movies. January’s horror film The Forest was only the latest example of Hollywood’s long history of mediating Asian stories and characters through a white lens (a trend that certainly extends to other people of color).

Like Cardoso, Renee Tajima-Peña found success as a filmmaker despite significant challenges. Years before she got her Oscar nomination, she couldn’t even land an unpaid internship after graduating from Harvard. “Even in the [public-broadcasting system] there were hardly any Asian Americans with decision-making abilities. So in the studios and networks? Forget it,” she told me. (Even today, film studio heads and TV studio/network heads are  94 and 96 percent white, respectively.) As a result, Tajima-Peña said she and other filmmakers of Asian descent chose to go the independent route. “We just made our own movies. We made our own institutions.”

Other filmmakers and producers of different backgrounds I spoke with similarly commented on how independent cinema offers more of a creative refuge for people of color.“I moved away from Los Angeles and came to live in San Francisco, where there was an independent film scene that was more embracing,” said the Mexican American screenwriter Lourdes Portillo, whose film Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo was nominated for a best documentary Oscar in 1986. Meanwhile, her son, who’s also a filmmaker, has told her about the explicit discrimination his friends have faced trying to get their projects about black or Navajo characters considered by studio executives.

In mainstream film, Asian Americans have their own versions of Cuarón and Iñárritu in the form of Justin Lin and Ang Lee, both directors of Taiwanese descent who have enjoyed critical and commercial success. “They’ve transcended the perception of even being Asian,” Kevin Iwashina, a former agent with Creative Artists Agency and the founder of Preferred Content, told me. “Ethnicity sort of becomes irrelevant once they’re at that point [of success].” Like M. Night Shyamalan, Lin and Lee are proof of how far Asian American directors can rise making movies that aren’t about Asian American people or experiences.

“Asian American” often conjures up the attendant stereotypes about “model minorities,” which may be one odd reason there’s little serious discussion about Asians in Hollywood. “I don’t think we’re considered a disadvantaged minority,” said Iwashina, who emphasized that he was expressing a deeply personal opinion. “There is this idea that minority status is one thing, but then another thing is: Are you a disadvantaged minority?” “Asian American” is often a rhetorical mask that hides a demographic reality: Not all groups that fall into that category are equally prosperous, educated, or respected in the U.S. But as long as the “model minority” perception endures, the feeling that Asian Americans are doing well in this country won’t be dimmed much by the fact that the last time an Asian actor won an Oscar was in 1985.

* * *

It’s when discussing the state of Native Americans in Hollywood that the concept of “looking out for one’s own” takes on a particularly pointed meaning. To explain the state of Native Americans and indigenous people in the industry, the film and TV director Chris Eyre recalled his initial reaction to the attention surrounding the Nat Turner biopic film The Birth of a Nation, which sold for a record $17.5 million after premiering Sundance this year. “I was thinking to myself, ‘If this is where the conversation starts, at this ‘Birth of a Nation,’ then there are births out there that no one’s recognizing,” said Eyre, who belongs to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. “There’s a history of this nation that happened before slavery.”

Eyre’s words reminded me of something Parul Sehgal wrote in her New York Times Magazine piece about the word “erasure”: “Our identities and our privileges are not static but deeply contextual. We who are silenced may yet silence others.” More so than other minority groups, natives in the industry hardly register in the comprehensive studies meant to quantify their exclusion (take the big 2015 UCLA report on diversity in Hollywood for example, in which Native Americans don’t even appear in charts showing the demographic breakdown of different areas of representation).

Given this, it’s easy to understand Eyre’s resistance to what he calls “trickle-down cinema.” “I’m not believing that because we all band together as minorities that we’re going to have the same translation of success, because our story is different,” Eyre told me. Whereas the Asian and Hispanic populations in the U.S. are often discussed for either their growth or their sizable presence, Natives are regarded as a tiny part of the country’s demographics. The American Indian and Native Alaskan population makes up an estimated 1 percent of the country (2.9 million), which jumps to 1.7 percent (5.4 million) when combined with other races (this doesn’t count federally unrecognized tribes or indigenous peoples of other regions). But focusing on their relatively small numbers leans on the assumption that the other 98 percent of the country isn’t interested in seeing more Native Americans in their popular culture.

“It’s different for us than it is for other groups in terms of people of color,” said Heather Rae, a producer, director, and actress of Cherokee ancestry. “There’s such an investment on the part of the psyche in this country to avoid the reality of how this country was formed.” Touching on a similar point, Eyre recalls the words of Roger Ebert, who saw Eyre’s second movie Skins when it premiered at Sundance. “The thing that he said that stuck with me to this day is: ‘When it comes down to Native Americans in movies, most Americans can’t differentiate what they see from how they see it.’” Which is to say the existence of natives in film is a deeply passive one: They are a people used to having their stories and history told by others, with few exceptions. (Eyre’s first feature, 1998’s Smoke Signals, being one: It was the first film written, co-produced, directed, and performed by Native Americans.)

Of all the films Hollywood’s currently enamored with, there’s one that stands out to Eyre as being particularly deserving of praise for its depiction of Native Americans: The Revenant. He noted how Leonardo DiCaprio’s character ’s son was a native person audiences could identify with, and in a piece for Indian Country Today, Leo Killsback called the film a “game-changer” for its fair, humanizing portrayal of American Indians. The film’s Oscar nomination comes more than 40 years after the actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather appeared at the Academy Awards on behalf of Marlon Brando, who boycotted the ceremony in part to protest the industry’s mistreatment of Native Americans.

The Revenant was directed by Iñárritu, which resurfaces the ways in which people of color can and do engage with the deeply specific tales of others. Even in acknowledging their own particular challenges as Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, or African Americans, the filmmakers I spoke with brought up their admiration for the work of other people of color. Rae held up Steve McQueen, Nate Parker, and DuVernay as directors unafraid to confront an ugly past, and went on to lament how little Americans know about, say, Guatemalan American stories. Or Comanche American stories. Or Vietnamese American stories. A sign of how, she said, “We really don’t know about ourselves as a nation.”

The people I spoke to also, unsurprisingly, expressed varying degrees of optimism for the future of people of color in film. Most recognized that, all things considered, Hollywood is a less white world today than it used to be. But nearly everyone remarked on how little the composition of those in positions of power has changed. Yes, the U.S. will have a plurality of racial and ethnic minorities in just a few decades, but there’s no reason to believe this will automatically change Hollywood on a structural level. Boyd, along with Tajima-Peña, pointed to the  whiteness of U.S. political institutions. “If you got a table, and there’s 10 seats at the table and 40 people who need to sit down, you’ve got two choices,” Boyd said. “You can either get a bigger table, or somebody’s got to get up.” He, for one, doesn’t see many people being eager to volunteer their seats.

Some recent comments from well-established white figures in Hollywood help illustrate why Boyd and others don’t see progress as inevitable. For instance, many critics (and even ostensible allies) have framed the push for diversity as an existential threat to excellence. Michael Caine urged frustrated non-white actors to “be patient” and argued that, “You can’t vote for an actor because he’s black ...  You have to give a good performance.” Charlotte Rampling, who was nominated for her role in 45 Years, has said of #OscarsSoWhite, “Perhaps the black actors did not deserve to make the final list.” Joel and Ethan Coen have said they feel diversity, not the Oscars, is important, but took offense at the idea that they, as artists, should shoehorn characters of color into their films. Joel elaborated in an interview with The Daily Beast:

You don’t sit down and write a story and say, “I’m going to write a story that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog,”—right? That’s not how stories get written. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything about how stories get written.

Coen’s sentiment seems to boil down to the idea that the story must come first, and the (racial) identities of those characters should be secondary. But buried somewhere in this idea is a delusion shared by many: that diversity and artistry are somehow at odds with one another. Hollywood’s persistent failure of imagination, its unwillingness to consider the infinite ways in which a really great story can emerge with a person of color already there, not squeezed in at the casting stages, is yet another reason why #OscarsSoWhite.

The misperception that advocates for diversity in Hollywood care only about awards and optics—about adding a few black or brown faces here and there—allows those with clout to trivialize the problem and deny their ability to fix it. It allows influential individuals to pay lip service to diversity as an abstract virtue, to insist the problem is “important” but ultimately one that’s not theirs. And it creates an environment where a profoundly impoverished “conversation” about race—one where millions of minorities are regarded as afterthoughts—can be applauded as “progress.”

A Decision on the ‘Jungle’ in Calais

A French court has ruled that authorities can evacuate and demolish part of the so-called “Jungle,” the makeshift encampment outside the port city of Calais that is home to thousands of refugees and migrants from Syria and other restive parts of the world.

Estimates of the number of migrants affected by the order range from 1,000 to more than 3,400. The operation won’t touch public places in the camp such as places of worship and schools.

French authorities had originally told migrants to evacuate the 17.5-acre southern half of the camp last week. The evictions were postponed after two humanitarian groups working in Calais, Help Refugees and L’Auberge des Migrants, reported that 3,455 people live in the section of the camp slated to be demolished—over three times the number French officials had estimated. The unofficial census counted more than 300 unaccompanied minors, the youngest of whom is 10. In response, British and French NGOs, along with more than 200 migrants living in Calais, filed an appeal requesting that the court delay demolition until adequate living situations were found for all of the evacuees.

Thursday’s decision in France will be watched closely in the rest of Europe, which is seeing the most-severe refugee crisis since the end of World War II. More than a million people have entered Europe since 2015, fleeing civil war in Syria and unrest elsewhere. Predictably, the influx has raised tensions within individual EU countries and among EU members, who have been unable to agree on a formula on how to equitably distribute the newcomers among the bloc’s member countries.    

“It's obviously a complex situation and there are a lot of problems with the way that responsibility for asylum claims is distributed within the EU right now,” Susan Fratzke, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said about Thursday’s decision. “[But] there’s a need to uphold the rules under which the asylum system is supposed to be functioning. Having large, very visible camps tends to undermine the public’s trust in the government’s ability to really manage arrival and take care of people.”

Perhaps the most infamous refugee camp in the EU, the Calais Jungle has become a source of frustration for the French government and tension with local residents. The camp held 6,000 migrants at its peak this summer; French authorities estimated it now holds around 3,800, though the census released this week puts the number at 5,497. As Simon Cottee noted in The Atlantic last August, the proximity of Calais to the English Channel has made it an unofficial destination for migrants looking to illegally enter the U.K. Most of them arrive in Calais through Greece, crossing through Eastern Europe by bus, by train, or on foot.

Few migrants make it to the U.K., especially now that police presence has increased. Barbed-wire fence surrounds the camp and police have used tear gas to combat the near constant attempts by Calais residents to cross the Channel Tunnel into England, often by attempting to jump aboard trucks on the nearby highway. But the U.K. and France have an agreement under which Britain conducts all border controls on the French side of the border. This makes it difficult for migrants to enter the U.K. illegally.  

For migrants in Calais, the U.K. is their best chance to rebuild a normal life. Many of them speak at least a little English, and some have relatives in Britain. Others believe their chances of finding employment are better in the U.K. than in France, and that the environment is generally more welcoming to refugees.

As an unofficial refugee camp, the Calais Jungle has been largely neglected by the French government—though similar camps in other locations in the city have previously been closed by French authorities. Media reports and volunteers have described slum-like conditions: piles of garbage and raw sewage, overcrowded tents, infestations of rats, contaminated food and water, and infections and injuries that go untreated. Many migrants live in homemade shelters of wood and tarp that offer little protection from rain or the near freezing temperatures this winter.

A September 2015 report by researchers from the University of Birmingham and Doctors of the World called conditions in the camp “perilous,” adding that “the shortcomings in shelter, food and water safety, personal hygiene, sanitation and security are likely to have detrimental long-term health consequences.”

But conditions have improved somewhat in recent months, as a flow of volunteers organized systems of delivering aid. Several NGOs, including Medecins Sans Frontieres, have dug latrines, distributed tents and sleeping bags, and provided other services. Though the camp remains squalid, it has also grown into a makeshift city, with small stores, restaurants, and bars, as well as mosques and churches.

During the preliminary hearing Tuesday, the lawyer for the appeal argued that the camp offered its residents “psychological support, medical care, places of worship, a school, a legal advice centre … Nobody wanted this shanty town, but it is there now and we cannot simply remove it. Shelter alone—a bed—is not enough. These are people who are already very vulnerable; we must now take the time to offer proper, serious alternatives.”

Evacuees would either move into shipping containers nearby or be relocated to migrant shelters elsewhere in France. French officials have called these accommodations more humane than the current living situation in Calais. Humanitarian groups believe these plans are insufficient, arguing that the government has underestimated the number of people who will require new housing.

Black-ish and How to Talk to Kids About Police Brutality

There are disappointingly few shows on network television right now that could air the kind of episode Black-ish aired on Wednesday. Not only did “Hope” consist entirely of black voices discussing police brutality, the shootings of unarmed civilians, and a legal system that seems geared toward protecting bad cops; it also managed to be a funny sitcom at the same time. This was despite the fact that it took place in one room and bore the marks of a “very special episode,” the kind of preachy material that frequently graced American televisions in the ’80s and early ’90s. “Hope” was a special episode done right.

Related Story

The Heartening Success of The Carmichael Show

The ABC sitcom, now in its second year, is not the only show on network TV that grapples with these issues. Scandal’s “The Lawn Chair,” in 2015, reflected the nightmare of Ferguson in a powerful episode; NBC’s wonderful sitcom The Carmichael Show structures itself every week around an issue affecting the African American community, including a fantastic episode titled “Protest” that used a fictional instance of police violence against an unarmed suspect as a jumping-off point. But The Carmichael Show, where the youngest characters are in their 20s, focused more on generational divides, while Black-ish’s “Hope” saw its protagonists talking out the issues with their confused, angry, and thoughtful children.

The show’s creator Kenya Barris told The New York Times he was inspired to do the episode after watching protests over Eric Garner’s death and debating how to frame the debate, and answer the questions, of his young children. In the episode, Andre (Anthony Anderson) and Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross) are divided over how honest (and bleak) a picture they should paint for their kids, including their teenagers Zoey (Yara Shahidi) and Andre Jr. (Marcus Scribner), and their younger twins Jack (Miles Brown) and Diane (Marsai Martin). The show is usually an airy family comedy that pokes at Andre’s relative affluence compared to his tougher self image; but while it frequently includes issues of race in its sitcom plotting, “Hope” dealt with its subject matter with uncommon seriousness.

The episode’s format was, as Barris put it, like an “overheard conversation,” taking place in the living room as the family watched the news to see if a police officer would be indicted. While the case was fake, the family members invoked many real names in their discussions: Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray. Part of their overall despair came from the increasing difficulty of keeping so many distinct travesties of justice straight. Andre tended toward pessimism (his typical lane on the show) while Bow worried about tarring every cop with the same brush. Still, their divides felt emotional rather than ideological, focused on the most truthful ways to talk about the protests and shootings with their children, which kept the entire half-hour from getting too didactic.

Like The Carmichael Show (a laugh-track sitcom much more in the classic Norman Lear style that is very much worth seeking out), there was also plenty to be mined from different generations’ perspective. Andre’s father Earl (Laurence Fishburne) grunted that cops were just thugs, while Junior started talking about larger structural racist systems in place, inspired by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates. The episode included video footage of Coates speaking on TV, and Barris said that while the usage was cleared with him, the clip wasn’t recorded specifically for the show—“The footage we used worked perfectly because this is something that has happened time and time again,” he told The Times.

Eventually, the episode’s arguments began to ping-pong a little too smoothly—Bow’s defenses of the justice system grew a little too vociferous, perhaps in an effort to make sure every side of the discussion was fairly represented. But “Hope” ended on a monumental note, as Andre reminded his wife of the family’s pride at watching President Obama take office, balanced against their fear that he’d be taken away by an assassin’s bullet even before his inauguration had finished, dashing the hopes they dared have for their children. It was a theatrical speech that could have landed poorly, but Anderson managed to sell it completely with genuine heart. Just as powerful was his daughter Zoey’s confession that she felt hopeless in the face of so much dialogue about seemingly never-ending tragedies—an acknowledgement from the show that no matter how much talking happens, real change never seems to come.

Hearing all that, you might find it hard to believe that “Hope” was a funny episode of television, but it was, somehow mixing all of this debate with the zippy banter the family engages in every week (mostly involving Dre’s hilarious mother, Ruby, played by Jenifer Lewis). Black-ish’s continued presence on the small screen, and ABC’s willingness to let it talk about more charged issues in depth, is a strong reminder of why network television needs more families that look like the Johnsons on screen. This kind of episode doesn’t need to air every night—but they don’t air nearly often enough.

New York City's Crusade Against Sodium

A judge ruled that New York City could go ahead with its first-in-the-nation initiative requiring all restaurants with 15 or more national locations to place a salt-shaker icon on menus beside items that contain 2,300 milligrams of sodium or more, the recommended daily allowance. The regulation, which had been challenged in court by the National Restaurant Association, was given the green light on Wednesday.

Biohazard? (NYCDOH)

“If your meal has so much sodium that it merits a salt shaker on the menu, then—for the sake of your health—order something else," Mayor Bill de Blasio said after the ruling.

The mayor, who was infamously once pictured eating a sodium-heavy sausage-and-moz pizza with a knife and fork, was the warning’s leading proponent. The Department of Health estimates that the warnings will apply to 10 percent of all menu items.

While the regulation technically went into effect in December, restaurants will be fined $600 for non-compliance starting next week. The responses initially varied: Applebee’s quickly complied while Panera and Subway pledged to comply. McDonald’s made a point of noting that none of its items exceed the limit.

That’s not to say the regulation is popular. Opponents quickly chalked the regulation up to a wasteful manifestation of the Nanny State akin to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s failed efforts to ban large sodas in the city. But there are more reasons to take the regulation with a grain...of skepticism.

First, a question: What do New York City’s fanciest restaurants, hippest food trucks, brightest supermarkets, and humblest bodegas all have in common? Under the Big Apple’s newest regulation, they can serve all the sodium-laden food they want without warning and never be charged with a salt.

OK, it’s a terrible joke, but the regulation is terribly inconsistent. And if history is any precedent, sodium warnings will be ineffective. In 2008, New York City pioneered the required listing of calorie counts on the menus of chain restaurants. Researchers quickly discovered the counts made no difference in consumer-ordering habits and, in most cases, even made them worse. These findings were confirmed a few years later and then once again on the five-year anniversary of the regulation.

But perhaps worse yet, the science behind the regulation is inconclusive. A week before the judge’s ruling, the National Restaurant Association received some good news in the form of a paper by two influential Columbia University professors and one former board member of the New York City Department of Health. The study, a meta-analysis of more than three decades of sodium studies, concluded no scientific consensus has coalesced around the hypothesis that lowering one’s salt intake had “population benefits.”

After vetting these 249 reports for bias, the paper noted that “54 percent were supportive of the hypothesis, 33 percent were contradictory and 13 percent were inconclusive.”A recent survey of The Atlantic reflects the same discord, again, and again.

Accordingly, part of the NRA’s case was predicated on a free-speech argument; namely that the city was forcing businesses to post information with which they disagreed.

“Some people love salty food and are just going to eat those salty foods regardless of whether there's a salt icon next to it,” said Supreme Court Justice Eileen Rakower in issuing her ruling. “I believe information is power.”

In an Wednesday evening email to The Atlantic, a NRA spokesperson decried the ruling:

Today's decision by the court to uphold this arbitrary, onerous and costly mandate is a blow to small businesses owners-- the franchisees that own and operate New York's restaurants.

The Association advocated for a national federal menu labeling standard to provide consumers with uniform nutritional information when dining out. The decision by the DoH to arbitrarily mandate warning labels for an essential nutrient, despite the fact that the information is available upon request under the federal guidelines is not only unnecessary, it undoes the very uniformity we worked for.

The statement added the group would pursue its legal options going forward.

A Deadly Storm Hits Virginia

A storm system that spun off deadly tornadoes and killed three people in the South, moved up the East Coast and by Thursday morning left four more people dead.

In a small town of 2,000, set in the peanut-growing fields of Waverly, Virginia, a tornado carved a more than five-mile path. By the afternoon on Wednesday, winds had reached 60 mph and tore down several buildings. Two men, ages 50 and 26, as well as a 2-year-old chid, were killed when the storm ripped them from their mobile home. Their bodies were found 300 yards away.

One man in the town, Timothy Williams, told the Associated Press that power lines exploded into a “big ball of  fire” and the tornado had picked a car “right off the ground, and put it right back on the ground.”

To the northeast of Richmond, Virginia, in Appomattox County, a funnel from the storm killed another man in his home and injured seven others. As it continued north, it toppled homes, crushed cars, and by nightfall Virginia’s governor had declared a state of emergency for the worst-hit areas.

The storm would leave dozens more injured in cities and towns across the state. By Thursday, rescuers were still pulling some people from the wreckage of their homes.

The storm would later bring quarter-sized hail and powerful rains and a tornado watch to states as far north as New Jersey.  CNN reported that it left more than 200,000 houses on the East Coast without power.

The death toll from the storms now stands at seven. It began in Louisiana and Mississippi on Tuesday, where tornados destroyed nearly half of the homes in a trailer park an hour outside of New Orleans. There, two people died. A 73-year-old-man was killed in Mississippi. Then, the storm swept east to Alabama and Florida, then headed north toward Virginia.

By Thursday, the severe winds had calmed. But a flood warning remained for some of the areas in the East Coast states that were hit worst.

Should Obama Appoint Brian Sandoval to the Supreme Court?

Waving off Republican senators who say they won’t consider any Supreme Court nominee, President Obama is forging ahead with vetting candidates to nominate as the next justice, replacing Antonin Scalia. Some of the names widely suspected to be on the list are liberals: Judges Sri Srinivasan, Patricia Millett, and Merrick Garland of the D.C. Circuit Court, and Judge Paul Watford of the Ninth Circuit, for example. There are a few more out-of-the-box picks, too, being bandied about, from Attorney General Loretta Lynch to Senator Amy Klobuchar. And on Wednesday, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reported that Brian Sandoval, the moderate Republican governor of Nevada, is being vetted. Does that mean he’s in serious consideration? Of course not. But what if he is? What would a Sandoval pick look like? Matt Ford and David Graham try to talk it through the way they like best: argument.

Matt Ford: First off, as a full disclosure, I’m a Nevadan with the same alma mater as Sandoval. I admit having a fellow Nevadan on the Supreme Court would be thrilling in its own ways, but I think this would be a strong choice for other reasons. First, he puts pressure on GOP senators to actually respond to the nomination. A liberal-leaning judge from a federal appeals court is easy to dismiss; a popular Republican governor isn’t. Second, Sandoval is relatively moderate. He’s pro-choice enough that it’d be hard to see him overturn Roe v. Wade and he almost certainly wouldn’t pose a threat to Obergefell v. Hodges or other gay-rights decisions. He wouldn’t be a William Brennan or Sonia Sotomayor, of course, and many liberals wouldn’t be happy with Obama for that. But replacing Scalia with Sandoval would still move the Court significantly closer to the center.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Sandoval would provide a much-needed boost to the Court’s diversity. Most of the focus here will be on his Hispanic heritage, of course. As a Westerner, he’s also from outside what Adam Liptak cleverly termed the “Acela Circuit” that currently dominates the Court. He’d also be the first justice who’s held elective office since Sandra Day O’Connor retired. As a result, he’d be the only justice who actually knows how campaign-finance laws work in practice. He’d also join Elena Kagan as the only justice who doesn’t come from the federal appeals courts. Sandoval’s presence would make the Court a less cloistered and monastic institution, and align it closer to Americans’ lived experiences.

David Graham: Hey, listen, Brian Sandoval seems like a prince of a guy, and I’m glad to hear he’s well-educated enough to work at The Atlantic—though the Supreme Court is a different matter, I suppose. But I think you’re getting ahead of yourself in most of this argument. I’m not qualified to judge what kind of justice Sandoval would be—I don’t know enough about him, and there have been some high-profile cases of justices acting differently on the bench than the presidents who nominated them hoped. (We can talk more about that later if you like.)

But I can easily see why many progressives might be chagrined, at best, by a Sandoval pick. I’m starting from the premise that Senate Republicans mean what they say: They really don’t intend to grant hearings to any Obama nominee for the Supreme Court. Starting there, this looks like a classic case of a phenomenon that drives liberals up a wall: Obama giving away his strongest chips before the hand has even been dealt. The 2011 debt-ceiling fight is only one prominent example. Let’s game out a Sandoval nomination. The worst-case scenario is that no matter what happens, Republicans refuse to hold hearings on the nominee, meaning Obama can only win politically by proving Republicans are obstructionists. The case for Sandoval is that by nominating a moderate Republican, he demonstrates good faith, and GOP rejection of him proves their bad faith. But who cares? What the last few years have shown is that the country is highly polarized and Obama’s overtures like this don’t sway rank-and-file Republicans to back him. By choosing Sandoval, he would pass up the chance to make a pick that would energize another group—say, African Americans or women—at the polls in November. The best-case scenario is that Republicans fold. And what then? Given the best chance to flip the court to the left in a generation, Obama will have succeeded only in putting a conservative (albeit a moderate one) there.

Ford: There’s merit to left-wing grievances against Obama’s negotiating tactics, especially on his readiness to cut social programs. But a Supreme Court nomination is an entirely different battle than the debt ceiling or the fiscal cliff. Obama has no leverage whatsoever here. None. If Obama were replacing one liberal justice with another, the calculus might be different on both sides. But movement conservatives have spent decades building a robust legal movement to reshape the federal judiciary. Replacing a staunch conservative like Scalia with someone in the mold of Sotomayor or Kagan would produce the first genuinely liberal Supreme Court in almost a half-century—a tantalizing possibility for the left, but an existential threat for the right. There’s less than zero incentive for any GOP senator to let that happen.

But let’s say summer comes and neither Cruz nor Rubio drop out of the presidential race, giving Donald Trump the plurality (perhaps even a majority) of delegates, and thus the nomination. Many Republicans fear his presence atop the presidential ticket will be toxic for GOP candidates down the ballot, which seems highly plausible. Democrats need to capture five seats to win the Senate, and a healthy number of GOP senators in purple states are facing reelection, including Mark Kirk in Illinois, Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Marco Rubio’s Florida seat will also be up for grabs, and Harry Reid’s Nevada seat could stay in play for Democrats.

This scenario is how I think Obama gains the upper hand. If Obama puts forth a liberal, there’s still no incentive to buckle. But with a moderate nominee, McConnell now has a lifeline to toss vulnerable GOP incumbents. Voting to confirm Sandoval would allow senators like Kirk and Ayotte to tangibly distance themselves from Trump—a chance I’d imagine they’d leap at. McConnell gets a chance to preserve his majority in the Senate, which would still likely be tenuous in this scenario. And instead of leaving a vacancy to the whims of an American electorate that could elect Trump, Obama gets to keep Roe and Obergefell safe and dilute the Supreme Court’s conservative wing for a generation.

Graham: These are smart arguments, and they force me to rethink this a bit. I worry about premising this on how the presidential race might play—after all, it’s been surprising at every turn so far.

A lot of your argument also hinges on the Supreme Court being categorically different from anything else, which it is. But I don’t know how different, there’s not much track record, and so all there is to go on is a roughly analogous nomination—an appointment of a liberal guy to fill a Republican appointee’s seat, and one that would help flip a crucial court. Remember the massive fight over Obama’s D.C. Circuit nominees? In early 2013, Obama was trying to fill out the court for the first time in years, and Republicans were determined to stop him. The circuit is often considered the second most important in the land, and the appointments would flip the court liberal. Then-Majority Leader Harry Reid threatened to change Senate rules to prevent filibusters on Sri Srinivasan’s nomination. The threat worked, and Mitch McConnell agreed to a vote. How did that vote go? Srinivasan was confirmed 97-0! (Later, Reid did change the rules when Republicans blocked three more nominees, and in the end all three of those judges were confirmed, too. The judges they replaced weren’t exactly liberals, either: solid conservative David Sentelle; Douglas Ginsburg, who Reagan unsuccessfully nominated for the Supreme Court; and current Chief Justice John Roberts.)

The most obvious lesson from these cases is that Republicans are determined to block Obama nominees from consideration, but that if forced to consider them, they tend to treat the nominees on their merits. Srinivasan was widely respected, and he won unanimous confirmation. The next set of three judges for the D.C. Circuit, including Millett, was more ideologically liberal and controversial, and those votes were accordingly closer. Is Scalia a different situation? Of course. Could Obama get a judge like Nina Pillard or Robert Wilkins through the Senate for a Supreme Court slot to replace him? Probably not. But could he get a Sri Srinivasan through? Why not? From a liberal perspective, Obama would be giving things away by picking Sandoval. This is, as many people have pointed out, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the court. How many progressives will be satisfied to use such a chance to … just preserve Obergefell and Roe?

Besides, that all assumes we know how Sandoval would vote. His pro-choice record is one thing, but there’s a long history of Supreme Court justices doing unexpected things—from David Souter’s decisions, to Anthony Kennedy’s gay-rights rulings, to John Roberts’s vote on the Affordable Care Act. Democrats have had better luck with their nominees toeing the line, but why take a chance now?

Ford: I admit, I hadn’t really considered the D.C. Circuit clash when thinking this out. It does raise intriguing questions about GOP senators’ rigidity on judicial nominees. (McConnell’s zeal in presenting a united front this week might also be seen as a move to curb internal dissent.)

At the same time, it’s worth noting that Democrats broke that deadlock because they controlled the Senate, and therefore had mechanisms like the nuclear option to dissuade—and ultimately overcome—GOP obstruction. With the Senate in McConnell’s hands, Republicans control all the mechanisms to force a vote while Obama and the Democrats have none. This is ultimately a qualitatively different fight than for the D.C. Circuit. If the question were about a nominee’s actual merits, McConnell and Grassley wouldn’t have opted for a blockade before Obama even reached a shortlist. It’s about ideology.

But your D.C. Circuit example also helps me think about another point I’ve been wondering how to formulate. Srinivasan would make an excellent justice, no question about it. At the same time, I think a nominee like Sandoval could benefit the Court in other ways. First and foremost is the diversity of experiences and perspectives, which I mentioned earlier. But the Court’s also reached a point where its ideological divisions increasingly match those of the presidents who appoint them. With the retirements of Justices John Paul Stevens (a Gerald Ford appointee) and David Souter (a George H.W. Bush appointee) during Obama’s tenure, the Court is now divided between four Republican-appointed conservatives and four Democratic-appointed liberals. If that trend continues, a casual observer could be forgiven for wondering if major 5-4 decisions come from a super-legislature and not a court.

Do progressives want that balance tilted in their favor? Of course! And I don’t blame them for urging Obama to choose the most progressive nominee they can. But since those aspirations can’t escape the GOP majority in the Senate, they might consider other options. Scalia shows how a single justice can change the entire tenor of the Court, for better or for worse. A less ideological, more grounded justice could do the same. A nominee like Sandoval who isn’t already a federal appellate judge, who’s held elective office, who hails from beyond the Northeast, and who wouldn’t reliably vote along the ideological lines of the president who appointed them would be a boon for the Supreme Court as an institution. There’s no guarantee how any jurist will act on the Court, so it’s a risk. But I think it’s one worth taking.

What Did the BBC Know About the Jimmy Savile Scandal?

Jimmy Savile was an iconic British DJ, who raised millions of pounds for children’s charities, and during his decades-long career at the BBC earned the monicker Saint Jimmy. But Savile, who died in 2011, was also a “serial sexual predator,” who preyed on girls as young as eight, often with the knowledge of BBC staff, a new report says.

The Dame Janet Smith review, to give the three-volume, 1,000-page report into the sexual abuse by Savile its official name, identified 72 victims, all connected to his work at the BBC; eight of them had been raped. Most of the assaults—44—took place in the 1970s, but they began in the 1940s and continued until 2009, the report said.

Staff at the BBC knew about complaints against Savile, the report said, but did not pass those concerns on to management because of a culture of fear that still persists at the corporation.

To understand what Savile represented in the U.K., here’s how The New York Times previously described his status: “In American terms, it is as if Captain Kangaroo, Dick Clark and Jerry Lewis were suddenly being accused of committing sexual crimes dating back 30 or 40 years.”

Also named in the review, which was released Thursday, was Stuart Hall, the veteran BBC broadcaster who is now in his 80s. Hall admitted in 2013 to charges of indecently assaulting girls. He was jailed that year and is serving a 4½-year sentence for his actions. The report said Hall abused 21 girls, and that BBC management in Manchester knew of the complaints against him, but did nothing.

“Both of these men used their fame and positions as BBC celebrities to abuse the vulnerable,” Smith said in her review. “They must be condemned for their monstrous behavior.”

The review also criticized the culture at the corporation that allowed complaints against the two men to go unheeded for decades. Smith wrote that a culture of “separation, competition, and hostility” between different parts of the BBC prevented concerns arising in one to be discussed with others.

“Staff were reluctant to speak out to their managers because they felt it was not their place to do so,” Smith said.

The BBC failed the victims, said Rona Fairhead, the chairman of the BBC Trust, which ordered the review in 2012 soon after the allegations against Savile became public.

“It turned a blind eye, where it should have shone a light,” Fairhead said. “And it did not protect those who put their trust in it.”

Tony Hall, who is the director general of the BBC and no relation to the disgraced broadcaster, told the victims that the corporation had “failed” them.

“A serial rapist and a predatory sexual abuser both hid in plain sight at the BBC for decades,” he said.

The allegations against Savile came to light soon after his death when five women came forward on ITV, a rival broadcaster, and said Savile had abused them in the 1970s. Three said the abuse occurred at the BBC’s facilities.

Smith interviewed 700 people as part of her investigation, which cost about $9 million.

Female Freedom and Fury in The Witch

Robert Eggers’s debut film, The Witch, is made with all the assuredness of one who’s a veteran master of horror. Set in Puritan New England on the edge of civilization, it builds tension through a mix of period detail and supernatural bumps in the night, telling the story of a teenage girl, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), and her family as they’re tormented by a supernatural presence in the woods. The Witch has been hailed by critics since its release last week, though the film’s scare factor has been much debated. But it’s the ending, particularly the resolution of Thomasin’s story, that distinguishes it from most traditional chillers, blending horror with an odd note of empowerment (spoilers ahead).

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The Witch Mines the Quiet Terror of the Unknown

Throughout the film, Thomasin’s family is picked off one by one until she’s the only one left (a particularly gory moment near the end sees her father William gored by the horns of a demonic goat named Black Phillip). She then signs herself over to the devil and joins a coven of witches dancing in the woods; the film closes on Thomasin levitating and laughing with delight. In an interview, Eggers said he didn’t initially approach his screenplay of The Witch as Thomasin’s story, but that he eventually realized she had to be the heart of the film.

The original draft was about how the titular witch manifested herself to different members of the family, meaning the film spent roughly equal time with everyone. “But through working on the second draft with my producers, Thomasin became the protagonist,” he said, adding that the film still works as an ensemble piece. In the story, the witch and her demonic partners take several forms: a goat, a raven, a rabbit, a beautiful woman, and a disfigured crone. While most of the other family members are besieged by these figures, Thomasin is targeted instead with suspicion from her parents and siblings, who come to think she’s in league with evil forces. “It was not my intention to make a story of female empowerment,” Egger said, “but I discovered in the writing that if you’re making a witch story, these are the issues that rise to the top.”

The director grew up in a rural New England town and was fascinated with the history of the witch-trial era from a young age. “I wanted to make an archetypal New England horror story, something that would feel like an inherited nightmare, a Puritan nightmare from the past,” he said. The film is, after all, subtitled A New England Folk-Tale, and seems to serve as an eerie warning from the era against being prideful and leaving the community, which is William’s original sin. “The Puritans believed that if you were part of ‘the elect,’ you could not be harmed by witchcraft,” Eggers said.

He tried to build The Witch around the Puritans’ psychology. A folk tale like this one wouldn’t have been seen during that time as an allegory, or a story told for broader social reasons. “It wouldn’t have been a yarn to keep people under control, just like the Ten Commandments wasn’t just a yarn to keep people under control,” he said. “All of this is ‘literal truth’ in the period.”

“I wanted to make an archetypal New England horror story, something that would feel like an Puritan’s nightmare from the past.”

The Witch really does feel like it’s coming out of the past—much of the dialogue is lifted from historical record—and its characters approach the horrors of the woods in a period-appropriate way. Talk of witches isn’t mumbo-jumbo to be dismissed, but a very real fear associated with shame and guilt. “In these people’s minds, there’s no question of the supernatural,” Eggers said. “When William is upset about Katherine bringing up the idea of a witch, it’s less that he doesn’t believe a witch is possible, and more that his pride has been hurt.”

The film’s exploration of patriarchal power was the key to unlocking Thomasin’s story. As a woman in the 17th century, she’s entirely stripped of agency. She exists only to work and help her family, and eventually be married off and bear more children. As The Witch progresses, it becomes clear that the campaign being waged against her family is targeted at freeing her so that she can join the coven in the woods. The idea that she’s been liberated is an intentionally muddy one—when she submits to Satan near the end of the film, he takes the form of a man—but there’s a giddy sense nonetheless that she has triumphed.

When asked about The Witch’s deeper commentary at a press conference, the actress Anya Taylor-Joy said she thought the film had a “happy” ending—because joining the coven is the first choice Thomasin gets to make on her own. Eggers is careful to communicate the darkness of Thomasin’s coercion, but doesn’t shy away from the fact that she’s leaving a repressive society behind. When he started thinking about The Witch, his focus was on the unknown, on “understanding where all this stuff comes from, the origins of the clichés—how they’re powerful, how they’re part of everyday life.” But he’s surprised and happy with the way his story evolved, and how it can speak to important modern issues despite being set centuries ago. Thomasin and The Witch seem destined to enter the great canon of horror films that includes the likes of Carrie, The Descent, and A Nightmare on Elm Street: stories that terrify by tapping into the immense power and fury of isolated women.

Animal Collective’s Radical Barbershop

To explain the glory that is Paul McCartney singing with John Lennon, John Coltrane playing with Elvin Jones, and a number of other symbiotic duos performing together, Ben Ratliff’s new book Every Song Ever: 20 Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty wades into the scientific discipline of biomusicology and comes back with the term “entrainment.” It “means two oscillating bodies vibrating synchronously, creating resonance. It is one organism adjusting internally to another. It’s what fireflies do when they flicker in tandem.”

The members of the band Animal Collective might be familiar with the concept. Sometimes when listening to the intertwined voices of singers David Portner (known as Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox (known as Panda Bear), you might think of them as two insects dancing midair. At other times in their songs, you literally hear the sounds of insects. Over 15 years, Animal Collective has cemented its status as one of the most influential and divisive indie-rock bands of the aughts, in large part because they seem to operate by some hidden, inscrutable logic. But at the core of their unruly pop experiments might just be this concept of entrainment. Their music both encapsulates and is about the idea of organisms hitched together through sound, and other forces.

In the heyday of Animal Collective’s acclaim, when they released an uninterrupted string of phenomenal albums from 2004’s Sung Tongs to 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, their songs veered between stomp-along celebrations and eerie, all-enveloping atmospheric passages. Sometimes the instrumentation sounded prehistoric, little more than a drum circle; sometimes it was futuristic and gleaming; often it was both things in the same track. But the vocals have always been key to their appeal. Lennox sings in a high keen that routinely earns the description “angelic,” while Portner delivers harsher, punky croons and yelps. The pairing would seem to lend itself to metaphorical contrasts between sacred and profane, and some of Animal Collective’s songs do suggest that idea. But more often, the joy of the music comes from the two main vocalists working toward the same goal, either when one harmonizes for the other or when the pair trade off on a topline, showing that a strong tune can survive two very different delivery systems (not to mention layers of studio gunk).

Reviews of their new studio album, Painting With, have largely spun a narrative about onetime experimentalists settling into middle age and creating solid but less-challenging music. That’s because the songs are uniformly short and uptempo, adhering to verse/chorus/verse/chorus; the band has said it’s their “Ramones record” and that they purposefully avoided having any ambient passages. But another way of thinking about the album is as extreme rather than safe: a 100-percent concentration of not only the sounds and styles that have defined the band, but also of the mentality that has guided its singers. For anyone interested in the possibilities of human voices working in tandem, Painting With is worth at least one listen, because the vocals are, simply put, insane.

The opener and lead single, “FloriDada,” is a good introduction to the album’s big motif: Avey Tare and Panda Bear trade off every few syllables, completing each others’ sentences while while also independently writing their own. It’s melody rendered as an EKG. This shtick, of course, is not new: You might be reminded of barbershop quartets, church carolers, the Beach Boys, or Caroline Shaw. But Painting With’s collaging of vocals is unusually dense even in the context of history, and rather than render it in clean a capella or with simple pop arrangements, Animal Collective slathers on squelching synthesizers, surreal samples, and unusual instruments (much of it courtesy of the band’s other active member, Brian Weitz a.k.a. Geologist).

The results often feel like optical illusions rendered in sound, which certainly fits the band’s long-running visual aesthetic. On “Hocus Pocus,” the two singers very slightly overlap words in the verses, creating a freaky echoing effect, and then for the chorus get together for a hymnlike and strangely emotional call-and-response. “Vertical” creates a swirling effect with singing in rounds as the lyrics suggest the idea of feeling dwarfed by the universe. On the closer, “Recycling,” Avey Tare and Panda Bear literally switch off every other word, and it’s as if the process of forging two human voices into one entity over the course of the album has been completed.

The effect is, to be honest, a bit intimidating. It tires the ear sometimes, and the multiplicity of vocal approaches can all can blur into one polyphonic sameness if you’re not paying close attention. Some critics have accused Animal Collective of showing off, using their vocal ping-pong matches like a bad metal band uses guitar solos. I can’t argue that this is one of their best albums, though even now it sounds better with each listen as new details reveal themselves. What’s inarguble, though, is that the chaos and density allows for powerful payoffs when the two singers stop bantering and instead converge in harmony. The bridge on “FloriDada,” for example, is as glorious a musical passage as I’ve encountered in 2016.

The lyrics of that bridge are, it turns out, about a bridge, which is an image that helps clarify the possible underlying purpose of Painting With. When you sit with the lyrics you realize they’re all, basically, about various ways that people might be connected—geography, family, love, even gender (as on the Bea Arthur-sampling “Golden Gal”). “I wanna discover the key and open the everywhere place:  A mix of sky from Montana dipped in FloriDada,” goes one refrain, a surreal and surprisingly moving display of desire for unity. Connection and community have always been big parts of Animal Collective’s message, but here the concept of oneness is made incarnate by Portner and Lennox’s performance across the album. The phone app that promoted Painting With is even on theme in that it allows users to collaborate on art with other users.

Before they headed out on tour, the members of the band expressed some trepidation about how they were going to pull off the album’s complicated vocals in concert. I was curious, too, when I went to see them at the Royale in Boston earlier this week. Animal Collective shows are notoriously uncompromising events, with the members playing jammy, soupy sets that omit most of their “hits” and often lean heavily on unreleased material. That was somewhat the case here, though much of Painting With did get played. Whenever Avey Tare and Panda Bear had to trade off singing, I watched closely. To my surprise, it appeared they were mostly doing it live—casually throwing their voices to each other across the stage, with precision that seemed born less of practice than of  biological connection.

Where ISIS Is Doubling

The Libyan branch of ISIS staged a gruesome attack Wednesday on government-security headquarters in the western city of Sabratha. According to the AP, the group beheaded 12 officers before taking control of the complex.

“A second security official said that the militants used the headless bodies of the officers they killed to block the roads leading to the security headquarters—which they occupied for about three hours,” the report added.

The attack came less than a week after American airstrikes hit an ISIS training camp in the city, killing about 40 people, including two Serbian hostages. The renascent U.S. efforts in Libya speak to a growing concern shared by a number of countries about ISIS’s increasing ability to flourish in the North African country.

American intelligence officials estimate that the group’s ranks in Libya have grown to 6,500 fighters, more than doubling since the fall. ISIS first declared its intentions to establish a presence in Libya in 2014 and has been launching attacks ever since. The group is now thought to control 150 miles of Libyan coastline.

Part of this surge is being attributed to the civil discord in Libya among the country’s competing political factions and militias, which have produce rival governments with their own security forces. The chaos has had major economic repercussions as well. Last month, the head of the country’s national oil company estimated that Libya has lost $68 billion in oil sales since 2013.

With Islamic State fighters suffering under heavy fire in Iraq and Syria, the group’s strategy of exploiting the security vacuum in Libya also appears to be a conscious one.

“Islamic State leaders in Syria are telling recruits traveling north from West African nations like Senegal and Chad, as well as others streaming up through Sudan in eastern Africa, not to press on to the Middle East,” The New York Times reported. “Instead, they are being told to stay put in Libya.”

Although it’s not the most commonly used country, Libya is a popular place from which migrants and refugees cross the Mediterranean to go to Europe. One harrowing possibility for Western countries is the growth of ISIS in Libya means Europe, given its proximity, could be more vulnerable to attacks.

On Wednesday, the French daily Le Monde issued a report chronicling France’s enhanced military engagement in Libya, which the paper characterized as a “secret war” to stanch the group’s growth in the wake of ISIS’s attacks on Paris in November. Italy and the United Kingdom are also thought to be contemplating military involvement.

The presence of special forces from these three countries as well as the United States have been reported in recent weeks and last month. Italy discreetly agreed to allow U.S. drones operating in Libya and North Africa to launch from one of its bases after a year of negotiations.

But a complicated and telling question, which The Guardian noted on Tuesday, is how a major coordinated military operation could legally come together at all if deemed necessary.

With a UN mandate highly unlikely at this point – because that would require Russia’s approval – there would need to be an official request from Libyan authorities themselves. But there is no agreement in Libya on who the government is.

Since the American-led intervention in 2011 that resulted in the ouster of Muammar al-Qaddafi, the longtime leader, the U.S. has intermittently deployed troops for operations in Libya. The most recent confirmed activity took place in December of last year, less than 18 months after American commandos seized Ahmed Abu Khattala, the man currently on trial for his alleged role in the 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

President Obama says he will go after ISIS “wherever it appears,” and is reportedly considering whether to approve the broader use of military force to combat the group in Libya. And, as he said last week: “We will continue to take actions where we’ve got a clear operation and a clear target in mind. As we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them.”