Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 224

Heart This Post: Why Facebook's Biggest Change Since 2010 Is Important

Facebook users—we few, we chatty few, we 1.5 billion—finally gained the option to “dislike” a post on Wednesday, though it wasn’t with the thumbs-down icon that many have long envisioned.

Rather, the ability to express unhappiness came as a few of six options available to users through a new Facebook feature called emoji reactions. Someone can now respond to any post on Facebook with a heart for “love,” a laughing face for “haha,” an astonished gape for “wow,” a tearful frown for “sad,” a reddening face for “angry,” or a good ol’ reliable thumbs-up for “like.”

Since the News Feed is Facebook’s “homepage” both on desktop browsers and phone apps, this feature might be the most substantive single change to the company’s flagship product since its abortive attempt to replace email in 2010. Facebook is now more colorful and more cartoonish than it’s ever been.

The feature also echoes a similar reaction scheme rolled out by Slack, the Silicon Valley darling that makes business software, last summer. In all its smiling (or crying) verve, Facebook’s new reactions show that icons and GIFs (whether on Twitter or on Tinder) are taking over more and more of the communication that was previously done with text online.

To put it another way, you may not have used the pictorial characters called emoji on your phone or on your computer yesterday. But since Facebook has now embraced them, emoji are about to become unavoidable to Americans of all age groups.

That’s because the Big Blue, despite its collegiate or tech-whiz roots, now lies at the deepest current of the American mainstream. The company announced the new feature this morning on the Today show, the same cultural venue where Martha Stewart previews a new cookbook and Justin Bieber performs at 8 a.m. The Today show is so politically and culturally bland that it’s interesting in its blandness, but Facebook might be even blander. In an America of increasingly fracturing interests, Facebook is something, like Top 40 mega-hits and nightly dinner preparation, that a vast majority of us share.

The emoji reaction release ends a nearly seven year period when Facebook knew that, even though it only had a Like button, not every post should be liked. The “Like” button was first introduced in the fall of 2009. Just four months after its release, more than 3 million users had signaled they wanted a “Dislike” button.

In 2013, a team in the company toyed with adding a “Sympathize” button, figuring that that was more considerate than the straight “Dislike” button that users clamored for. Nothing came of it. But in September of last year, Mark Zuckerberg told an internal town hall that the company would finally be adding a “Dislike” button, with a twist. It wouldn’t work like a “down vote”  button like Reddit has, he said.

“What they really want is the ability to express empathy. Not every moment is a good moment,” he said.

A month later, Facebook previewed how the feature would work: a list of emoji-like “reactions” that users could choose to say how they felt about a posting. Users in Ireland and Spain immediately began using the smileys. With the addition or deletion of a couple possibilities, it’s basically the feature Facebook debuted on Wednesday. (Facebook often tests features in Ireland and Spain because users there, for whatever reason, have fewer international friends than users living elsewhere.)

So now it’s easier to express sympathy with the touch of a button. But that won’t make every social exchange necessarily easier. As one BuzzFeed reporter put it:

Public Opinion Supports Apple Over the FBI—or Does It?

Two polls; two very different results.

The findings reflect a divisive debate between Apple and the U.S. government over the iPhone 5c that belonged to one of the San Bernardino attackers.

Fifty-one percent of respondents to a Pew Research Center poll, released Monday, said Apple should unlock the iPhone in order to help the FBI. Thirty-eight percent said Apple should not and 11 percent had no opinion.

The telephone survey of 1,002 adults conducted February 18 to 21 had a margin of error of plus-minus 3.7 percentage points. (Methodology here.)

So, it would seem a majority of the public—or close to it—wants Apple to unlock the phone.

Not so fast, according to the results of a national online poll released Wednesday by Reuters/Ipsos. According to that poll, 46 percent said they agreed with Apple’s position, 35 percent said they disagreed, and 20 percent said they did not know. The poll of 1,576 adults, conducted February 19-23, had a margin of error of 3.2 percent. (Methodology here.)

It’s worth pointing out here the two polls differed significantly in one notable manner: the question posed to respondents.

Pew’s pollsters asked:

As you may know, RANDOMIZE: [the FBI has said that accessing the iPhone is an important part of their ongoing investigation into the San Bernardino attacks] while [Apple has said that unlocking the iPhone could compromise the security of other users’ information] do you think Apple [READ; RANDOMIZE]?

Should unlock the iPhone

Should NOT unlock the iPhone

Don’t know/Refused

The Reuters/Ipsos poll, on the other hand, asked:

Apple is opposing a court order to unlock a smart phone that was used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino attack. Apple is concerned that if it helps the FBI this time, it will be forced to help the government in future cases that may not be linked to national security, opening the door for hackers and potential future data breaches for smartphone users. Do you agree or disagree with Apple’s decision to oppose the court order?

The way in which a poll question is phrased is known to have a significant effect on polling results. The Pew question, which mentioned what the FBI wants and provided less information about Apple’s concerns, could have played a role in how respondents answered that question.

Responses to both polls differed broadly by age group and political affiliation.

In the Reuters poll, Republicans favored the FBI’s position while Democrats took Apple’s side. In the Pew survey, their responses were evenly split, but independent-leaning Republicans supported the government while independent-leaning Democrats backed Apple. The Reuters poll also showed younger Americans were more likely than older ones to agree with Apple’s stand; Pew’s respondents, across age groups, favored Apple unlocking the phone.

As we’ve previously reported, the iPhone in question belonged to Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire on December 2, 2015, at a civic-services center in San Bernardino, killing 14 people and wounding 21 others. The attack was believed to be inspired by ISIS, though no direct link has been found between the attackers and the Sunni terrorist group.

Apple says the password on the phone was reset soon after the government took possession of the device (it was reportedly reset accidentally by the San Bernardino Health Department), rendering inaccessible the information the government was seeking. The FBI acknowledged the device was reset, but denied that was significant.

An auto-erase feature is enabled on iPhones if the password is incorrectly entered 10 times. Apple says the FBI wants the ability to unlock the phone using multiple password attempts—a method known as bruteforcing. And last week, a judge ordered Apple to cooperate with the FBI so it could gain access to Farook’s device.

Apple declined. Its CEO, Tim Cook, in a letter to customers, said what the government was seeking was, in essence, a backdoor into the iPhone, which “in the wrong hands … would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.” That position has broad support in the tech industry—with a notable exception.

But the Justice Department, in response, filed a motion to compel Apple to comply with the judge’s order. And it rejected the idea it was seeking a “backdoor” into the iPhone and noted the judge’s order pertains only to Farook’s iPhone—though that device is one of at least a dozen iPhones the FBI is seeking to access; those cases do not involve terrorism.

James Comey, the FBI chief, wrote this week the litigation against Apple “is about victims and justice.” He appeared to have support from the CIA.

Apple’s lawyers, who are expected to file the company’s formal response to the judge’s order by Friday, are reportedly considering using its First Amendment rights to decline cooperating with the FBI.

Why Clinton Is Connecting With Black Voters—and Sanders Isn't

BENNETTSVILLE, S.C.—Everyone agrees that African Americans are the pivotal demographic in Saturday’s South Carolina Democratic primary. But the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns are working to court that group in sharply divergent ways. It’s the difference between huge rallies and small gatherings. Upstate versus Pee Dee. Anecdote versus abstraction. Their approaches are as different as night and day—or, one might say, black and white.

Over the last few months, Sanders has incorporated a great deal about race into his stump speech. His discussion of racism in America is abstract—it deals with arrest rates and incarceration figures, wealth gaps and unemployment rates. Though Clinton is often described as a policy wonk and derided for her (very real) failures as a retail politician, she has cleverly chosen to focus more on concrete and personal stories as a means of addressing race, a strategy that was on display in the Palmetto State this week.

On Monday evening, Clinton was on the other side of the country in Hollywood, at a pair of glitzy fundraisers. But 75 or so people were backed into the Marian Wright Edelman Public Library in Bennettsville for a campaign event, where the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Dontre Hamilton, Jordan Davis, and Eric Garner were making the case for Clinton. A community room overflowed with people—standing room only, with people standing in the hall, craning their necks to get in, as the mothers took turns telling their wrenching tales of loss.

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Is Sanders Writing Off South Carolina?

The stories, though by now familiar from media accounts and surveillance videos, were freshly horrifying, told in person by the victims’ mothers. Each woman related how her son had been killed, and then how Clinton had reached out to her. They told stories about phone calls, personal letters, and half-hour meetings that stretched on for hours.

“Hillary took it upon herself to listen to me when none of the leaders decided to lay in the street with us, march in the street with us, pour our hearts out and ask for help. Hillary heard my cry,” said Maria Hamilton, whose son Dontre was shot and killed by a Milwaukee police officer in 2014. “When Hillary called me in March, and her staffer told me I didn’t have to rally people in the street to shut her rally down, that she would talk to me, it changed my life.”

“We don’t need any more members in this club. The membership is too high for this club,” said Gwen Carr, whose son Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York City police officer in 2014. “She has proved to us, one by one, that we do matter in her campaign. We are endorsing her because she endorsed us.”

“She has proved to us, one by one, that we do matter in her campaign. We are endorsing her because she endorsed us.”

It was fitting that the event was at a library named for Edelman, a favorite daughter of the town who founded the Children’s Defense Fund—and gave young Hillary Rodham her first job out of Yale Law School. Bennettsville is a small town, with less than 10,000 people, in the northeastern corner of the state near the North Carolina line. (The other local celebrity is Aziz Ansari, who grew up in town.) It’s also nearly two-thirds African American. I counted only five white people there—and two if you exclude me, another reporter, and the Clinton campaign cameraman filming the event.

Everyone in attendance seemed to know one another, and they were all enthusiastically ready for Hillary. The local state representative emceed the event, and she hailed her Alpha Kappa Alpha sisters for working to register new voters at local high schools. The police chief and sheriff (both black) attended. It felt like going to church: Particularly emotional moments elicited a chorus of “That’s right”s and “Amen” and “Mmhmm”s from a crowd that hung on every word.

Maria Hamilton, Sybrina Fulton, Lucy McBath, Gwen Carr, and Geneva Reed-Veal in Bennettsville, S.C. (David A. Graham / The Atlantic)

Several hours earlier, I dropped by an event at Friendship Baptist Church in Aiken, all the way across the state, near Augusta, Georgia. Ben Crump, the attorney who represented the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, was there, along with Billy Murphy, the attorney who represented Freddie Gray’s family (and who famously played himself on The Wire). So was activist Gregg Greer. State Representative Bill Clyburn, whose more famous cousin Jim had endorsed Clinton a few days earlier, stopped by. The event wasn’t quite so packed—there weren’t more than 25 or 30 people, though it was also midday on a Monday. Almost everyone in attendance qualified for Social Security.

The Bennettsville and Aiken meetings were part of a coordinated statewide push. There were 10 such events, featuring either the lawyers or the mothers, across South Carolina over the last three days, each of them at a church or community center. They’re designed to be smaller events. (Clinton joined the mothers Tuesday night in Columbia.)

Compare that with Sanders’s approach. The Vermont senator came to South Carolina Saturday night after losing to Clinton in Nevada. Sunday morning, he stopped by a black church in Columbia, then headed to Greenville for a rally. It was a massive event—there were more than 5,000 people at the Bon Secours Wellness Arena. But few of them were African American—certainly a smaller proportion than the 55 percent of the Democratic primary vote that blacks comprised in 2008. Geographically speaking, that’s no surprise. Greenville is the center of South Carolina’s Upstate, which is less than 20 percent black. But after the Sunday rally, Sanders left to campaign elsewhere. He came back for a Tuesday-night town hall in Columbia and held a press conference Wednesday morning before jetting out again. Sanders appears to have decided to focus more energy on states holding March 1 nominating contests.

Clinton holds a huge lead with black voters in South Carolina in polls ahead of Saturday’s Democratic primary—as much as 47 points, in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The difference in Sanders’s and Clinton’s approaches to black voters is in part a reaction to those results—if Sanders had more of a chance to win them, he’d likely spend more time on it—but it also helps explain the gap.

It isn’t that Sanders isn’t talking about race issues. Despite the overwhelmingly Caucasian crowd, he talked at length about racial disparities in Greenville. Sanders was introduced by a local black politician, former NAACP President Ben Jealous, and the actor Danny Glover. He railed against police brutality, mass incarceration of black men, unequal prosecutions for drug use, and more.

“The fact that he’s a white man who admits that white privilege exists and wants to get rid of white privilege—that’s huge.”

There’s little doubt that Sanders cares about these civil-rights questions, nor that his supporters do. His fans are passionate about stopping racism. “The fact that he’s a white man who admits that white privilege exists and wants to get rid of white privilege—that’s huge,” Jonathan Bussey, a young white man, told me as he waited for Sanders to speak.

You’re just more likely to meet someone like Bussey at a Sanders event than you are a young black man. The African Americans who attend the Greenville Sanders rally tended to say they there for the same reasons that whites are there: Because they feel that the economy is rigged, the health-care system is insufficient, and Bernie is the most honest candidate and the one who was most concerned with helping the little guy.

Ralph Morton, whose gray hair matched his gray suit, told me he thought pundits and the Clinton campaign were counting black votes before they were cast, predicting a replay of the 2008 primary, where her support eroded quickly and she lost. “I think the same thing might happen to her again,” he said. “It’s just like Jeb Bush thought he was going to be a shoo-in because of past support. He got toasted.”

Does that parallel really make sense? The key difference between 2008 and 2016, of course, is Barack Obama. While there were persistent media questions about whether Obama was “black enough” for black voters, voters answered them resoundingly in the affirmative. Obama proved adept at codeswitching, changing his register and vocabulary and jokes to connect with African Americans and eventually winning them over.

What Barack could do, Bernie can’t so easily pull off. Sanders speaks in generalities and attacks systemic injustices, while Clinton focuses on the pain of individual lives. By befriending women like Hamilton and Carr, she is able to connect her policies to real stories. By convincing them she cares about them, she produces a squadron of surrogates with powerful stories to take into black communities.

“Nobody made—I don’t think they could have made us, I don’t think they could have persuaded any of these mothers to vote for Hillary Clinton against their own will,” Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother, said in Bennettsville. “This was a conscious decision we made.” (There was evidently some sensitivity about that impression. Geneva Reed-Veal, Sandra Bland’s mother, closed the event with a rousing call to vote, and then added, “I’m with her. All my sisters are with her. And please tell the people we are not being exploited!”)

That might not come through as clearly in debates, but it was warmly appreciated at the South Carolina events. Attendees said over and over that they were supporting Clinton in large because of her long familiarity with the black community. They said they felt she knew them and their people—not just the statistics, but the people. Sanders speaks to racism; Clinton speaks to black people.

These attendees uniformly respected and appreciated Sanders. His problem in winning them is the same as his problem across the country: unfamiliarity. The more people get to know Sanders, the more they tend to like him—he has some of the highest favorable ratings in American politics—but many people still don’t know who he is. It’s a point Billy Murphy hammered home in Aiken.

Ben Crump, Gregg Greer, and Billy Murphy

(David A. Graham / The Atlantic)

“I like Bernie Sanders. The problem is I just met him!” Murphy said, peering owlishly over the rimless reading glasses he likes to wear low on his nose. “I haven’t lived with Bernie Sanders like I’ve lived with the Clinton family. I know substantially more about Hillary Clinton and she knows substantially more about communities of color.”

And then Murphy turned the knife, demonstrating why he’s so effective in front of a jury.

“Bernie posted a very interesting picture about how he was marching with the civil-rights movement, but we didn’t hear much from Bernie after that,” he said. “I’m sure he has his heart in the right place.”

That sentiment is a toned-down version of the comments from Representative John Lewis that caused a ruckus earlier this month. “I never saw him, I never met him," Lewis said. "I'm a chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years, from 1963 to 1966. I was involved in the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery, and directed their voter-education project for six years. But I met Hillary Clinton. I met President Clinton.”

Their argument isn’t that Sanders doesn’t care. It’s just that they don’t think he has the hands-on experience. The point is to remind black voters that the Clintons have been there for them for decades. Clinton may not be able to turn out 5,000 voters for a single event, but her deep ties to the black community give her a huge base of surrogates who can go out to small, grassroots events where they can appeal directly to African Americans.

“The president trusted her—our beloved Barack Obama—with one of the most important jobs in her administration,” Murphy said, in case anyone had forgotten that the president is black. And later, he got a hearty, knowing response for what sounded like an implication that Republican opposition to Obama is racist: “I’ve never seen a Congress whose avowed purpose was preventing the president of the United States from achieving his goals.”

“I like Bernie Sanders. The problem is I just met him!”

Later on, Crump harkened back to Clinton’s work establishing legal aid in Arkansas, and said she understood problems like direct filing, when teenagers are moved to adult courts. “We know who that affects most when they start talking about direct filing,” Crump said. “They ain’t direct filing little Billy, they’re direct filing little Junebug and Leroy and Shaniqua. It ain’t a new fight for her.”

It’s hard to imagine either Clinton or Sanders coming off as well at these events as these surrogates do. Clinton has been mocked for drawling when she campaigns south of the Mason-Dixon Line. When Sanders dropped by a black church on Sunday, delivering his normal spiel, he was met with polite indifference. Perhaps his bigger problem is that the worshippers were indifferent to his black surrogate, Ben Jealous, too.

None of this is to say that the voters who showed for the events didn’t have hesitations about Clinton. In Aiken, Shirley Abney wondered where the candidate was. “I am disappointed she has not been here herself,” Abney said. “She’s sent some good people, but she needs to be here herself.” (A nervous young white staffer who was coordinating the event quickly chimed in that Clinton was coming to South Carolina Tuesday.)

There’s also still ambivalence about Bill Clinton, whose comments about then-Senator Barack Obama alienated many African American voters in 2008, en route to handing Obama a Palmetto State win. “Let’s make sure that we don’t run away from her because we’re looking at what Bill’s campaign did,” Reed-Veal warned in Bennettsville.

The Clinton White House legacy has also been tarnished, especially among the new generation of criminal-justice reformers, by the tough-on-crime law he signed into law. When one of the two younger men in the audience in Aiken asked about three-strikes laws, Murphy was quick to say that Bill Clinton had asked for forgiveness for the law and Hillary Clinton had said, “Never again.” But several people in the audience were ready to excuse the law as a product of its era. “It was a different time,” they said, pointing to the fear of crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

That reflects the one cleavage in the black vote in South Carolina: between young and old. The crowd in Aiken was especially elderly; the crowd in Bennettsville was more evenly distributed, but it leaned older, too. Clinton retains an edge among younger African Americans in the state, but it’s much smaller than her overall lead, as The Wall Street Journal reports. One reason may be that younger black voters don’t have the same memories of the Clinton years, good and bad: There’s none of the rosy recollection of 1990s prosperity, and they don’t have memories of the crack epidemic that help them rationalize or excuse the crime bill.

Notably, Eric Garner’s daughter Erica has endorsed Sanders, participating in a powerful four-minute video on his behalf. I asked Carr what accounted for the family split. She chuckled. “Everyone picks their own candidate. They got their own mind,” she said in a thick Brooklyn accent. “You just got to look at the candidate’s track record.”

A Deadly Tornado in the South

A deadly storm that hit Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida on Tuesday spun off tornados that killed three people and injured others.

Worst damaged was the Sugar Hill RV Park in Convent, Louisiana, a community along the Mississippi River about an hour from New Orleans. The storm hit in the late afternoon Tuesday and nearly half of the community’s 300 mobile homes were destroyed. Rescuers rushed people to the hospital, and by Wednesday morning, two people had died and many more were critically injured. Governor John Bel Edwards called it a “modern miracle” that more people had not been killed.

“I want to thank all of the responders here," the governor said. "We’ve got a lot of work still going on. There are a lot of people unaccounted for, but that doesn't mean there are any more injuries or any more fatalities.”

In some of the worst-hit parishes in state, the governor declared a state of emergency as rescuers and dogs picked through the wreckage to find the missing.

The other death came from Lamar County, Mississippi, where a 73-year-old man was reportedly killed. As it headed toward the Atlantic, the storm destroyed homes and buildings and the Mississippi governor also declared a state of emergency for hard-hit areas. Tens-of-thousands of people were left without power, and more than 20 homes in the state had been destroyed.

In Alabama, people reported tornadoes and severe hail. In Florida, 24 homes were destroyed and trucks and cars flipped on the highway. Throughout the night, the National Weather Service posted updates and alerted people to stay vigilant, and by Wednesday morning, in northern Florida and parts of Georgia, a tornado watch was still in effect.

Around 20 tornadoes had spun out of the storm, The Weather Channel reported, though those still needed confirmation by the National Weather Service.

The Assault Claims Resurfacing Against Peyton Manning

It’s not difficult to imagine the 19-year-old star quarterback of a big-name college football team doing something ungallant like mooning another athlete while being examined by a female trainer.

For a number of similar reasons, it’s also unfortunately not difficult to imagine that same 19-year-old doing something much worse to a female trainer, like pressing his bare buttocks and genitals against her face.

One of the two aforementioned things likely happened to Jamie Naughright, who was a medical trainer at the University of Tennessee in 1996 when she told the institution that she’d been assaulted while she was examining a student athlete’s ankle. What is difficult to imagine is that the star quarterback involved was Peyton Manning.

Murmurs of this incident have intermittently followed Manning throughout the years, always at a very low volume and never with enough force to thwart his rise to mainstream mega-celebrity. (In addition to holding numerous NFL passing records, Manning is among the rare athletes who’ve both hosted Saturday Night Live and served as pitchman for several national ad campaigns.)

Earlier this month, as Manning and the Denver Broncos were preparing for an unlikely Super Bowl triumph, the story resurfaced with ferocity. Shaun King of the New York Daily News published a much-seen and much-debated dissection of old court documents chronicling the alleged training-room incident from Naughright’s perspective.

In his piece, King charged that Manning had been at the center of a “sexual-assault scandal, cover up, and smear campaign” against the trainer. Naughright quietly settled with the University of Tennessee for $300,000 over a number of sexual-harassment incidents and left in 1997 after signing a confidentiality agreement; she later sued Manning for defamation after he and his father Archie, a former NFL great, referenced the incident and disparaged her in an autobiography. (That case was also settled.)

The reemergence of the incident dovetailed with news of a lawsuit by six women, former Tennessee student athletes, who alleged that Manning was among a number of athletes who contributed to “a hostile sexual environment” at the school in the 1990s.

On Monday evening, the story intensified again after ESPN published a review of documents from a sexual-assault crisis center in Tennessee that was said to have fielded a call from Naughright (who went by her married name Whited) just hours after the alleged training-room incident took place.

According to the document, Naughright did not name Manning and did not want to discuss details of the assault over the phone because she “feared for her job, worried and feared for her life.” Notes written by the crisis center worker quote Naughright as saying, “I can’t believe this ... sense there will be a cover-up.”

The document also suggests that Mike Rollo, the head trainer and Naughright’s boss, instructed her to keep the incident quiet, telling neither the press and the police, which she did.

“Rollo [also] said in his deposition that Naughright never described the incident as a ‘mooning’ and he had come up with the description,” the report continues. “In his deposition, he said he regretted it.”

A definitive understanding of what actually happened remains elusive. Malcolm Saxon, the athlete who Manning claims he mooned and who was never questioned under oath, maintains that Manning dropped his pants, but never touched Naughright. Moreover, the episode wasn’t characterized by Naughright as involving contact until 2002, when she gave a deposition.

Nevertheless, her allegations are currently being scrutinized once more. They’ve been cited as evidence of American indifference to rape culture, of the business community’s indifference to sexual assault, and of the scourges of confirmation bias and racism, as well as of journalistic crusading and PC culture run amok.

The question for many may be, why now? The incident occurred almost 20 years ago, and any related lawsuits were settled over a decade ago. But more now than ever, old allegations continue to emerge against high-profile public figures, from Bill Cosby to Jimmy Savile to David Bowie. Manning, whose fame, image, and success might have suggested he was beyond scrutiny and reproach, perhaps seemed untouchable at this point in his career, but current circumstances would suggest that that’s not the case.

Senate Republicans Pledge to Ignore Obama's Pick for the Supreme Court

President Obama, don’t even bother.

That was the clear message from Senate Republicans on Tuesday as they decided to formally ignore any nominee the president appoint to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee—the panel responsible for vetting court picks—emerged from a private meeting Tuesday afternoon and declared there was a “consensus view” among them not to grant an Obama nominee a hearing, much less a vote, before the presidential election. The committee members then sent a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell putting their decision in writing.

“The election is well underway, so I believe the overwhelming view of the Republican conference in the Senate is that this nomination should not be filled, this vacancy should not be filled by this lame-duck president,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday afternoon. McConnell’s second-in-command, Senator John Cornyn, said members of the Judiciary Committee were “unanimous” in their view that there should no hearing for Obama's nominee. “The reason for that is, it’s not about the personality, it’s about the principle,” Cornyn said. Taking matters a step further, both McConnell and Cornyn said they were not inclined even to meet with the person Obama picks—a traditional first step in any nomination process.

The announcement was not a surprise: Since the first hours after Scalia’s death, Republican leaders had signaled that his seat should be filled by the next president, and not Obama. But they had not firmly decided exactly how they would obstruct the president’s nominee. Would they hold hearings, even a floor vote, before rejecting the appointment? Or would they ignore the nominee altogether rather than risk giving an otherwise qualified person an opportunity to make their case in public? On Tuesday, they confirmed they would follow the advice of conservative activists, who are urging senators to avoid any discussion of the merits of Obama’s choice and stick to the principle that because the presidential campaign is already underway, the public should decide who gets to replace Scalia on the court.

“Presidents have a right to nominate just as the Senate has its constitutional right to provide or withhold consent,” McConnell said in a floor speech before the Judiciary Committee Republicans met on Tuesday. “In this case, the Senate will withhold it.”

Over the last week, senators from both parties have been digging deep into the archives to unearth statements that paint their opponents as hypocritical in this high-stakes debate over the Senate's role in confirming, or rejecting, presidential nominees. The latest goodie emerged on Monday, when Republicans seized on a speech delivered by then-Senator Joseph Biden in June 1992, when he urged Democrats to consider ignoring a nomination by President George H. W. Bush in the middle of his reelection bid. The possibility was entirely hypothetical, as there were no vacancies on the high court that year. But McConnell and other Republicans quoted heavily from the speech as they made their arguments this week.

Opinions on the matter within the Republican caucus are not unanimous. In recent days, centrist Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Susan Collins of Maine have called on their party to consider an Obama nominee just as they would in any other year. But they aren’t the voices that count. Those belong to McConnell, and to a lesser extent, to Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa and the Republicans on his committee. And they made their decision clear on Tuesday.

Republicans know they can’t stop Obama from nominating someone and heavily promoting that person in public. But by announcing their strategy before he does, they might have some hope of influencing whomever might be offered the job. Democrats sense a political advantage either way: Assuming Obama advances a popular nominee, Democrats will either try to leverage public opinion and get Republicans to buckle (unlikely), or they take the consolation prize of making them look unreasonable and obstructionist by denying a qualified potential justice so much as a hearing. Republicans hope that by telegraphing their strategy so clearly ahead of time, the most qualified potential nominees will turn Obama down and make him choose someone who has a harder time capturing broad public support.

The scheming on both sides obscures what this fight is really about: Republicans can’t abide allowing Obama to shift the ideological balance on the court for a generation when there’s a possibility a Republican president will replace him next year. And on Tuesday they confirmed that any short-term political pain they suffer for blocking the president is a trade they’re eager to make.

All Bets Are Off as Republicans Caucus in Nevada

The Republican presidential race moves from South Carolina to a pit stop Tuesday night in Nevada—also known as the land of the political unknown.

Donald Trump is once again the favorite in the Silver State caucuses. After two consecutive double-digit victories, how could he not be? But because of its caucus process and its relatively recent entry into the early voting rotation, Nevada is a graveyard for polling. Only two surveys on the Republican race have been publicly released in the last month, according to RealClearPolitics, and while Trump has led them both comfortably, a victory for the front-runner is far less assured than it was in New Hampshire or South Carolina.

Marco Rubio has undeniably captured some momentum in the days since his second-place finish in South Carolina. He has won a slew of endorsements following the withdrawal of Jeb Bush from the race—from national Republican figures like Bob Dole and Tim Pawlenty, from a number of current U.S. senators, and, perhaps most importantly for Tuesday night, from Nevada Senator Dean Heller and two of the state’s congressmen. Rubio now has the support of the state’s entire Republican congressional delegation. And the Florida senator already had the deepest Nevada roots of any of the GOP contenders: His family lived in Las Vegas for six years when Rubio was a child, and they briefly joined the Mormon church. (One quarter of Republican caucusgoers in Nevada in 2012 were Mormon, according to entrance polls.)

Ted Cruz finished just about 1,000 votes shy of Rubio in South Carolina, but he has had a rough aftermath, and if anyone truly needs a strong showing in the caucuses, it’s him. Under fire for playing dirty in Iowa and South Carolina, Cruz abruptly fired his chief spokesman, Rick Tyler, on Monday night after Tyler spread a false story suggesting that Rubio had disparaged the Bible. Cruz usually speaks in front of a banner that says “TrusTED,” and the incidents were clearly giving him a reputation. At the same time, Cruz has devoted considerable resources to organization, which paid off handsomely in Iowa, when he overcame a polling deficit to overtake Trump in the caucuses. Organizational strength is just as important in Nevada, so it’s possible Cruz could surprise again.

With Super Tuesday just a week away and just 30 delegates at stake, it’s unlikely that the results in Nevada will dramatically shift the trajectory of the GOP race. A Trump win would further solidify the front-runner status he has gained in the last few weeks. A Rubio upset would only speed up the Florida senator’s momentum as the establishment-favored alternative, and it could be an early indication that he’s benefiting most from Bush’s departure. A Cruz victory clearly would slow Rubio and stabilize Cruz’s campaign. Ben Carson, meanwhile, hasn’t been much of a factor in months, and John Kasich has already looked beyond the early states to the Midwest, which will make or break his hopes in March.

The Nevada caucuses are really a three-man race, and more than anything else, it’s one of the last chances for Cruz or Rubio to stop the runaway train named Trump.

The X-Files: Do We Still Want to Believe?

Some thoughts on the conclusion of Fox’s The X-Files revival, including but not limited to: the Spartan virus, shady cabals, were-monsters, climate change, trash spirits, and Ford Explorers.

Sophie Gilbert: During the first episode of The X-Files’s mini-revival, I found myself saying “gahhhh” rather more than I’d expected (and I’d expected a fair amount). Like: when it was proposed that the military-industrial complex had weaponized alien technology and was using it to conduct experiments on humans. At the suggestion that a Glenn Beck/Alex Jones-esque online peddler of conspiracy theories called Tad O’Malley (played by Joel McHale) was actually a fearless truth-teller and investigative journalist. At the words “false flag” being used in such close proximity to “9/11.”  When Mulder actually said out loud that the New World Order’s ultimate goal was using our online bank accounts to steal all our money. (What would they do with that money if all the people in the world were dead? Play very, very, very high-stakes games of poker among themselves?)

Understanding that Fox Mulder—the fiendishly handsome, winningly skeptical, extraordinarily loyal partner to the single greatest female television role model of the 1990s—is basically a disheveled, sweaty wackadoo who plausibly spends large parts of his day uploading YouTube videos regarding snake people and the melting point of steel was a trifle disappointing. But way worse was realizing that he had been these things all along. The X-Files debuted during a time before everyone and their mother had access to the deepest recesses of the online conspiracy-theory cesspool. Viewers hadn’t seen their aunts posting links to realworldtruth.net about the doctors decrying the “shameful” HPV vaccine, or suffered through years of “mind-blowing” videos about Obama being a pawn of the Antichrist and the Iraq War being a plot conjured up over cocktails by George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth, Liza Minnelli, and the Pope.

But by now, in 2016, we have. And we know how nakedly crazy it is. So the fact that “My Struggle II,” the final installment in the six-episode series (like the first, written and directed by the series’s director, Chris Carter) not only doubled down on the tinfoil-hat plot but extended it to include vaccines, chemtrails, anthrax, alien DNA, and a plot to kill all humans on earth really felt like a letdown.

Vaccines? Seriously? Do you know what the public-health ramifications are of having Dana Scully (of all people!) reveal that the small-pox vaccine actually contains a secret virus that allows the government to destroy our immune systems (enhanced by releasing radiation and phosphorus into the air), at which point the other vaccines we’ve received over time will kill us? I know this is a TV show, but this is also America. A reality-show host who literally learned everything he knows about business via a FisherPrice My First Corporation™ kit is about to become the Republican presidential candidate. People frequently think the things they learn in entertainment are true! I myself was swayed by The Da Vinci Code for an embarrassingly long time when the book first came out. Dana Scully not becoming an anti-vaxxer in a time of such fierce anti-intellectualism isn’t such a huge amount to ask, even from Fox.

Megan, David, Lenika, what did you think of this long-awaited revival? Of the “My Struggle” (rad Hitler/Knausgaard reference, Chris Carter) episodes, but also of the stylistically jarring and absurdly tone-deaf “Babylon” last week, and the Were-Monster, and “Founder’s Mutation”?

David Sims: Well, while watching the last episode of this strange, stunted “event season,” things suddenly seemed perfectly clear to me: We need to give creator Chris Carter the George Lucas treatment. Thank him for all he’s done, present him with a gold watch, and get him as far away from this show as possible. Because while I only really loved one episode of this little revival (I dug “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster”), every episode that wasn’t written by Chris Carter was basically fine—slotted into any other season of the show, they’d feel like solid efforts. But the first, fifth, and sixth episodes were all disasters onto themselves—and they all had Carter’s name on the teleplay.

I love The X-Files; it might be my favorite TV show ever. I was cautiously excited about its return to TV simply because Carter made so many mistakes in its later years that I figured he had to have learned from them. In a post-mortem interview with The New York Times, he declared that he had set out to do something “fresh and thought-provoking” with the new season. It certainly provoked some thoughts from me. Like: “How could something this rancid make it onto broadcast television in this day and age?”

We need to give Chris Carter the George Lucas treatment. Thank him for all he’s done, present him with a gold watch, and get him as far away from this show as possible.

Watching Joel McHale flail onscreen and rant about chemtrails, it felt like Carter had seen all of the narrative leaps and bounds prestige television made in the 14 years since The X-Files wrapped up, but absorbed none of them. The finale followed the show’s old format of compartmentalizing between “conspiracy” episodes and “monster” episodes, picking up from this season’s opening episode and ignoring everything that happened in the middle. That worked in 1994, when anything remotely serialized was a revolution in itself, but these days it seems shudderingly inconsistent. Maybe recognizing that the junk he threw at the wall wasn’t going to stick, Carter ended the episode on a cliffhanger, then immediately promised in that interview that the show would be back. Can’t wait.

Sophie, I too loudly groaned when McHale’s Internet journalist started ranting like an anti-vaxxer on his YouTube channel. I talked about it in my review of the show’s first three episodes—maybe conspiracies just can’t be cool anymore. The aesthetic of The X-Files was always that Cold War conception of the one-world government—shadowy meetings between faceless bureaucrats, invisible hands nudging things into place. Freedom fighters looked like The Lone Gunmen—goofy but harmless folk tinkering with HAM radios in their trailers. Now, it’s a very InfoWars world, and even though it’s pure fiction, it’s sad to see Mulder and Scully get wrapped up in it.

I’m happy to wash my hands of this season. “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” which featured guest appearances from Rhys Darby and Kumail Nanjiani, was a great throwback for the show, but maybe it reinforces the notion that The X-Files should be left in the past. While it’s always pretty compelling to watch David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson banter, I can just cue up a classic episode if I want to see that. Are there any arguments for more seasons, especially if Chris Carter is still rambling away at the helm? I know we live in a media era where any beloved franchise has to be revived and bled dry in the name of viewership, but I draw the line at chemtrails. Megan, do you see a reason for this sad situation to continue?

Megan Garber: Ugh, that’s a good question, David. But—despite the many, many flaws of this revival, despite the plot gaps and the absurdities and the fact that the silly phrase “alien DNA” runs like a Greek chorus through the episodes—I still feel a little bit like Mulder: I want to believe! Still! Despite everything! Partially I blame “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” which was one of the most delightful pieces of television I have seen in a long time, and which, as a result, filled me with cruel, cruel hope that a new(er) season might contain a similar gem.

One other reason for hope: I actually appreciated the staccato nature of the episodes of the revival. I liked that the six entries functioned as a little Whitman’s Sampler of themes and genres of prior X-Files episodes. I liked that they were tonally discordant; to me, that offered a nice counterbalance to the intricate, sometimes stiflingly monotonal universe-building that has become such a typical aspect of prestige drama (and even prestige comedy). Game of Thrones and House of Cards and Sons of Anarchy and Cats of Chaos (that last one doesn’t exist yet, but given the way things are going, will probably come to Showtime very soon) may often surprise—and shock!—viewers with their plot points, with their zig-instead-of-zag murders and hook-ups and baby-births and break-ups. Tonally, though, they all tend to be ploddingly predictable. They tend to be, for better but sometimes for worse, #branded.

In that sense, I appreciated the jarring variation of The X-Files’s revival. It kept me guessing. It surprised me, and sometimes frustrated me, and occasionally delighted me. It read to me a little like televisional jazz.

Which is … not to say that I was a fan of it. I felt, on the whole, the same as you guys: This season left me, too, gah-ing. My main GOL (gah-ing-out-loud? is that a thing?) in last night’s episode came, just in case you guys were wondering, when it was revealed that the great global scandal that would wipe out the human race and destroy life as we know it was justified, in the minds of the scandal-doers, by … climate change. Which: ugh, no, GOL. Nevermind that this general plot line was already better employed by the comic and 2015 movie Kingsman, only with natty Englishmen and a charmingly villainous Samuel L. Jackson; worse was that the whole thing seemed to reveal a desperation to make a show like this, with its patchwork quilt of decades-old conspiracy theories, still relevant in 2016. The whole thing seemed to belie a kind of generational anxiety, like a dad trying to talk to his kids about Kanye. Which: admirable! Kind of cool! But also: GAH.  

A plus: the rare and glorious and still-sparking-after-all-these-years chemistry between one Dana Scully and one Fox Mulder.

So to answer your original question, David: I probably will watch the show’s re-revival, with trepidation and stupid hope. And I thiiiiiiink I’ll be happy, all things considered, that there will be one to watch in the first place. Despite it all. The flip side of all the Peak TV stuff is that, as you said, viewers can be selective—not just about the episodes of a show they watch, but about how they think of a show as, you know, A Show. There’s a nice Create Your Own Economy aspect to the whole thing, is I guess what I’m saying: If you’re an “aliens and conspiracies” person, you can watch just those episodes, and ignore the others. If you’re a “monster of the week” person, you can focus on those episodes. We can all, basically, choose our own personal X-Files canons. And if there are more episodes for us to choose among … hey, I guess, all the better?

One last thought: A lot of this reminds me not just of George Lucas, but also of the discussions that came up again last week, after the death of Harper Lee: the question of a late-in-life shift in one’s legacy. In Lee’s case, will To Kill a Mockingbird be tainted by Go Set a Watchman? Will Atticus’s late-in-life racism affect his moral-heroic status in the culture? In Chris Carter’s case—and in The X-Files’s case overall—Will “My Struggles I and II” (not to mention the almost offensively stupid “Babylon”) taint the show?

I think probably not. Fans have already chosen, largely, to ignore the dark years of pseudo-Mulders (and pseudo-Scullys) after David Duchovny left the show; we can just ignore the new ones, too. But we can tell ourselves that, if The X-Files’s out-there truth does involve new episodes, what they will maybe give us is wonderfully self-aware were-monsters and actually-plausible conspiracy theories. And we can reassure ourselves that, even if they don’t give us those things, what they will definitely give us is the one thing that has been constant, episode by episode, for most of The X-Files’s tenure: the rare and glorious and still-sparking-after-all-these-years chemistry between one Dana Scully and one Fox Mulder. So, basically, I guess: We can hope. Stupid hope.

Lenika Cruz: I’m so frustrated right now with how this miniseries ended, but I’m going to put those feelings aside and force myself to remark on what I liked. Like Megan and David, I also adored Darin Morgan’s “Were-Monster” episode. It felt like a piece of exceptionally well-realized fan service for people like myself who rank “Bad Blood” as one of their top-two favorite X-Files episodes ever. It was goofy and charmingly self-aware, but more than anything it felt like a real story—one that had carefully assembled all of its moving parts, and weighed the narrative value of every joke, flashback, and bit of misdirection. I’m comfortable calling it one of the funniest hours of TV so far this year.

The monster in the fourth episode—the so-called “Trash Man”—managed to be the revival’s most terrifying figure, a kind of superhuman (or non-human?), nauseatingly malodorous Slender Man that had me recoiling in my seat the way Eugene Victor Tooms did way back in season one. The extended scene of the Trash Man hunting down the trash-compactor lady in her own house to the sounds of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” reminded how imaginative The X-Files has been in the past with its use of music. (The fact that the series has an episode in which the music of Cher played a pivotal role should be evidence enough.)

It’s hard to imagine that X-Files newcomers could watch these new episodes and see how the series could have transformed television.

Which sadly brings me to the end of my list of things I genuinely enjoyed about this six-episode run. The only redeeming part of Monday’s stinker of a finale was that a good chunk of it revolved around two women teaming up and using science to try and save the entire world. Unfortunately, that entire part of the plot (Scully rambling about her extra nucleotides, her tautologous explanation to Agent Einstein that her “anomalous” DNA features an “aberration”) also felt like total nonsense, even though it was purportedly co-written by two scientists. And, Sophie, I agree that it wasn’t worth hearing Scully turn into a vaccine truther.

It’s hard to imagine that X-Files newcomers could watch these new episodes and see how a series about two FBI agents with (once) differing world views, and who occasionally brush up against aliens and government conspiracies, could have transformed the history of television. I’m not even totally sure how Carter can rewatch this “event series” and think that it’s come close to capturing the spirit of what made the originals so special.

But I think I share your reluctant optimism, Megan. I’ll probably tune in to whatever Chris Carter and co. think up next, but with low expectations. Maybe by then, enough time will have passed to somewhat forgive the disaster that was “Babylon.” Or Scully thinking that “Nurse!” is an appropriate way to address someone who is a nurse. But mostly, I’m going to pretend this entire new season never happened. Like David said, you can always go back and find any number of terrific episodes—“X-Cops,” “Drive,” “Small Potatoes,” “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” and so many others—on Netflix, which might help erase the image of Scully weaving through the rioting masses behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer.

Why Netflix Doesn’t Release Its Ratings

Judging by online chatter, it’s tempting to assume that almost everyone with Internet access is watching Love, or Making a Murderer, or catching up on House of Cards before the new season. It can feel like there’s a certain amount of pressure to watch, too, in order to stay abreast of the cultural conversation.

In reality, the odds are that only a fraction of people you know have watched Netflix’s latest “hit series.” But it’s impossible to tell, because Netflix is notorious for keeping its viewership numbers confidential. One reason is because the streaming service doesn’t want to reveal proprietary information about its products. But another is that Netflix simply doesn’t care about ratings—at least not in the way other television providers do.

In January, NBC claimed to have discovered a way to estimate Netflix’s viewership, which revealed that NBC’s top shows are more popular than Netflix’s, and thus that the reported death of broadcasting has been overstated. Predictably, Netflix claimed NBC’s revelations were “remarkably inaccurate,” leading to the type of intra-industry feud that generates good headlines. But beneath the scuffle, the more interesting story is what the feud says about television popularity today, Netflix’s unique business model, and why viewers really should care.

For starters, the business models for American broadcasters like NBC and streamers like Netflix (or Hulu, or Amazon) are drastically different. The core product for NBC and other commercial broadcasters is viewers—or at least estimates of viewership they can sell to advertisers via the crude common currency of Nielsen ratings. Broadcasters sell audience eyeballs to sponsors, and so they need to know what programs are popular so they can price their ads accordingly. For decades, the broadcast networks have been competing for ratings points to maximize their ad sales, a battle that became increasingly fierce in the 1980s with the rise of cable television. For NBC and its kin, popular programs mean profits, as they’re effective bait to deliver viewers to sponsors.

Netflix, meanwhile, doesn’t care about viewers, only subscribers—its revenue comes from maintaining and expanding the ranks of people who find spending $10 a month to be a worthwhile investment. It accomplishes this not by creating individual hits, but by offering a slate of programs with broad appeal and reach, including original series and movies, as well as a back catalog of older television and film offerings. Like other online-streaming companies, its ultimate goal is to provide sufficient material to justify the ongoing subscription cost, persuading customers to buy into the brand itself. An individual hit is certainly useful toward that goal, but only insofar as it helps expand the service’s reputation and reach.

Neither commercial broadcasters nor online streamers view “television programs” as their products—for both, programming is a means to their ends of selling audiences to advertisers or subscriptions to audiences, respectively.

For broadcasters, popularity (at least as measured through the inexact ratings system) equals profit, since every increase in viewership means increased ad revenues with no additional costs to produce and procure programs. For streamers, actual popularity is less important than perceived popularity—Netflix gains the most by having its programming seem more popular than it is, as that helps generate interest from potential subscribers, and helps current subscribers justify their monthly fees for access to the hottest programs. Netflix’s refusal to release actual viewer numbers serves this end, as it can market a series as a “hit” without any reality checks to deflate that perception.

For streaming services like Netflix, actual popularity is less important than perceived popularity.

Why does this matter for TV viewers without any financial stake in the industry? Popularity typically fuels the cultural conversation, with new releases serving as essential touchstones for what friends and neighbors might be consuming—consider Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Adele’s 25 as examples of how hype and sales mutually reinforce each other in film and music. Television functions quite differently: The most popular programs often garner far less attention than niche offerings. Some of the biggest broadcast hits today include Blue Bloods, Scorpion, and The Goldbergs, but those series are rarely described as “must-watch” programs, even though they’re among the most-viewed shows on television. The Nielsen ratings for an average episode of NCIS are five times the number for the hugely hyped series finale of Mad Men, proving how cultural attention and actual viewership often diverge sharply.

For a subscription service like Netflix, where promoting a brand is equivalent to building value, it’s far more important to dominate the conversation than have millions of people actually watch its programs. Netflix has done a masterful job generating buzz, awareness, and demand for itself, meaning whether or not its programs are popular hits doesn’t really matter—at least to its shareholders. But television viewers should be aware of what and how they’re being sold: For broadcasters, they’re the product. Netflix is selling a brand that asserts its own value without actually proving its ultimate worth. That doesn’t belittle the quality, appeal, or even popularity of its programming, but it does make it important to be aware of its strategy.

For Netflix, it’s far more important to dominate the cultural conversation than to have millions of people actually watch its programs.

Such a business model points toward Netflix’s possible future. Currently, it functions more like a tech company than a media brand, meaning its key assets are its user base, its hype, and the vast bank of data it has related to its customers. Actual revenue and profits are secondary to building that base. In the coming years, Netflix will likely be forced to decide whether to more closely mirror the media business (where content and monetized viewers are key assets), to try to carve an identity for itself as a hybrid media/tech company (a balance that Apple and Amazon are both struggling with), or to follow the path of most tech companies: acquire, or be acquired by, other companies.

Prognostication is a fool’s game, but here’s one distinct possibility: Netflix acquires more traditional media production and distribution companies. Acquiring a film studio or television broadcaster might seem like an odd move for a company whose identity is built upon being an upstart alternative to traditional media, but it would allow Netflix to produce its own programming rather than just distribute what it licenses from other studios. Additionally, the company claims that its great advantage is its incredibly detailed data about viewer preferences and behavior. Leveraging that information to guide a broader slate of media productions would potentially allow Netflix to tap into more than just $10 per month from its customers.

The track record for technology companies acquiring media companies isn’t particularly strong, due to inherent differences in business models and corporate cultures (the AOL-Time Warner merger serves as an example). But Netflix might think its success working with Hollywood as a distributor of both DVDs and streaming might set it up to succeed where other tech companies have struggled.

Thus Netflix’s core product is its own brand name, allowing it to draw and retain subscribers, increase global reach, and potentially make it the powerhouse anchor of a media conglomerate. So the next time an article asserts that the new Gilmore Girls or Fuller House are what everyone is talking about, remember that what’s really being talked about is Netflix itself.

Oregon's Smart Approach to a Minimum Wage

Last week, Oregon’s house of representatives passed a bill that would make the state’s minimum wage one of the highest in the country. While the bill still needs the approval of Oregon Governor Kate Brown for the bill to pass, Brown has already said that she intends to sign the bill.

But what’s most noteworthy about the Oregon bill isn’t how high the minimum wage will be. It’s that different minimum wages will go into effect in different parts of the state, roughly based on their population density. In and around Portland, the state’s biggest city, the increase will be the largest: The minimum wage will rise there to $14.75 in 2022. Outside of Portland, the minimum hourly wage in mid-sized counties will go up to $13.50 over the next six years, and more rural areas will see theirs increase to $12.50.

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A Minimum Wage Proposal From a Former White House Economist

Oregon’s tiered system is interesting because it addresses one of the chief concerns some economists have about raising federal or state minimum wages: that rural areas will struggle to weather a decrease in jobs that may come with the increased cost of labor. A 2014 study by the Congressional Budget Office estimates that while a federal minimum-wage hike to $10.10 (from $7.25) would lift nearly a million workers above the poverty line, it’s expected that it would also result in 500,000 fewer jobs nationwide. Many economists point out that these job losses would not be evenly distributed—they’d likely cluster in the cities and states whose economies aren’t strong enough to start paying their low-wage workers a bit more. Oregon’s tiered approach is an attempt to try and avoid this consequence.

In addition, Oregon’s tiered system might allay a related concern: that the minimum should be adjusted for the cost of living, since $15 goes a lot less far in metropolitan areas than it does in more rural ones. If the point of raising the minimum wage is to pay a living wage to workers, some say, then that amount should be determined regionally instead of nationally. (It is also worth noting that, according to a Fed study, when Oregon’s previous minimum wage was adjusted for the state’s cost of living, it was already among the highest in the country.)

Because the federal minimum wage hasn’t moved since 2009, states and cities have been increasingly taking minimum-wage levels into their own hands in order to make life more affordable for their residents. Because the cost of living is so much higher in cities, it’s no wonder that so many of them—including New York, San Francisco, and Seattle—have already raised their minimum wages to well above the current federal level of $7.25.

Even though it would seem like a straightforward calculation involving supply and demand, raising the wage floor remains one of the big economic experiments of our time. Would it cause businesses to move? Decrease the number of jobs? Reduce turnover? Hurt some industries more than others? Researchers have gathered some data—much of it mixed, and some of it contradictory—about how raising the minimum wage would impact the economy. If Oregon’s experiment works, it could end up setting an important example for the many states that are contemplating large minimum-wage hikes more seriously than ever.