Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 226

Apple vs. the FBI: James Comey Chimes In

Updated on February 22 at 9:44 a.m. ET

The FBI’s director says the victims of the San Bernardino attack are owed a thorough and professional investigation—and that’s why the bureau wants to compel Apple to help unlock an iPhone that belonged to one of the attackers.

“The San Bernardino litigation isn't about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message,” James Comey said in a post Sunday night on the Lawfare blog. “It is about the victims and justice.”

The phone in question is the iPhone 5c that belonged to Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire on December 2, 2015, at a civic-services center, 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.

As we reported last week, Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, in a letter to customers, said the company would oppose a judge’s order to help the FBI unlock Farook’s because, in his words, the company saw it “as an overreach by the U.S. government.”

iPhones become locked when incorrect passwords are entered a certain number of times. The only known way to unlock the device is restoring the factory settings, a move that deletes all data from the phone. Apple says the FBI wants the ability to unlock the phone using multiple password attempts—a method known as bruteforcing. Cook, in his letter, said the FBI was seeking a backdoor to the iPhone, which “in the wrong hands … would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.”

The U.S. Justice Department, in a motion filed on Friday, accused Apple of “repudiating” the order ofMagistrate Judge Sheri Pym. The department dismissed the idea the FBI was seeking a “backdoor” into the iPhone, pointed out that Apple had previously complied with “a significant number of orders” related to the All Writs Act of 1789, and added Apple’s refusal to help “appears to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy.”

Apple, in a q-and-a posted on its website on Monday, denied it had ever unlocked an iPhone for law enforcement in the past and rejected the assertion its concerns were based on a business and marketing strategy. The company also urged the government to “withdraw its demands under the All Writs Act and … form a commission or other panel of experts on intelligence, technology, and civil liberties to discuss the implications for law enforcement, national security, privacy, and personal freedoms.”

Comey, in his blog post Sunday, said:

The particular legal issue is actually quite narrow. The relief we seek is limited and its value increasingly obsolete because the technology continues to evolve. We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist's passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That's it. We don't want to break anyone's encryption or set a master key loose on the land. I hope thoughtful people will take the time to understand that. Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn’t. But we can't look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don't follow this lead.  

Apple, in the q-and-a, also said the Apple ID linked to Farook’s iPhone 5c was changed soon after the government took possession of the device, and if that hadn’t happened, BuzzFeed reported, “a backup of the information the government was seeking may have been accessible.”

Here’s more from the BuzzFeed story:

The Apple executives said the company had been in regular discussions with the government since early January, and that it proposed four different ways to recover the information the government is interested in without building a backdoor. One of those methods would have involved connecting the iPhone to a known Wi-Fi network and triggering an iCloud backup that might provide the FBI with information stored to the device between the October 19th and the date of the incident.

Apple sent trusted engineers to attempt that method, the executives said, but they were unable to do it. It was then that they discovered that the Apple ID password associated with the iPhone had been changed sometime after the terrorist’s death — within 24 hours of the government taking possession of the phone. By changing the password, the government foreclosed its ability to obtain a fresh copy of the most recent device data via this back-up-to-known-wifi method.

The password was reportedly reset accidentally by the San Bernardino Health Department. The FBI acknowledged the password change, but downplayed its impact.

Apple’s lawyers are expected to file the company’s formal response to Pym’s order by next Friday.

King of the Hill: The Last Bipartisan TV Comedy

Does the political party you identify with have an influence on what you find funny? Recent trends in TV viewing habits overwhelmingly suggest that it does. In 2011, a survey conducted by Experian-Simmons for Entertainment Weekly found very little confluence between the TV shows watched by Democrats and Republicans—perhaps a symptom of how the cultural divide has grown deeper over the last eight years. Liberals generally love quirky comedies like Community, Parks and Recreation, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The Mindy Project; conservatives tend to prefer reality shows and crime dramas including NCIS, Duck Dynasty, The Bachelor, and Top Gear.

But for 13 years there was a show that drew laughs from viewers of all political persuasions. King of the Hill—an animated sitcom about a bumbling Texas everyman and his family—which ran on Fox from 1997 to 2010, still stands alone in the way it portrayed the complexity of red-state America with wit, good humor, and vitality. I was 11 years old, growing up in a rural county in North Carolina, when the show premiered, and for me, it was the first contemporary show that genuinely reflected the world I lived in. Its characters embodied all of the desires, needs, and contradictions that make up the universal human experience, undermining assumptions about “red” and “blue” culture in the process.

The show’s patriarch, Hank Hill, remains one of the great characters in TV comedy, almost Shakespearean in the tangled thoughts and feelings that emerge in glimpses from beneath his good ol’ boy facade. Hank is traditional and fundamentally uneasy in the rapidly globalizing, neoliberal culture of the ’90s and ’00s, watching the world around him transform. But one of the show’s great themes is Hank’s own place in this changing world, and his engagement with it in spite of his own reluctance. He’s stubborn with soft prejudices, but always drawn to do the right thing in the end. Via a variety of comic conflicts between its hero and a shifting culture, King of the Hill dared to suggest a world that might transcend gridlock, suspicion, and nihilism—a world in which cultural and political opposites could actually find ways to get along.

Eighteen years ago, on February 22, 1998, the season-two episode “Traffic Jam” aired, and while it preceded both the Bush and Obama administrations, the issues it considers are timely. Hank gets into a fender-bender with his neighbor, Kahn, and in order to avoid insurance increases they both opt to attend traffic school. Their teacher is a brash amateur stand-up comedian named Booda Sack, voiced by Chris Rock. Booda seems much more interested in trying out material on his class than in their driving skills. While the rest of the class howls with laughter at his jokes, made mostly at the expense of white people, Hank is highly uncomfortable, feeling that his identity and sense of propriety are being undermined.

Via a variety of comic conflicts between its hero and a shifting culture, King of the Hill dared to suggest a world that might transcend gridlock, suspicion, and nihilism.

Later, Hank brings his teenage son Bobby to the class in the hope that seeing Booda in action will discourage Bobby from his desired future in comedy. Instead, Booda brings Bobby on stage and they lampoon Hank together. Bobby confirms that his dad likes to stand around and drink beer, and Booda lampoons Hank as “four eyes, too many pies, super-size,” while Hank’s face reddens in rage and embarrassment.

It’s funny and uncomfortable in equal parts to see Hank emasculated in front of his son, and it speaks to the complexity of the issues at play. In a state still confronting a long legacy of racism, humor offers Booda a weapon that upends the historical power dynamic between white and black males. But Hank, retaining a degree of power himself, goes to Booda’s supervisor and reports his behavior, and Booda is fired. It’s worth noting that the current black unemployment rate in Texas is 9.5 percent, more than double the white unemployment rate. Booda’s situation speaks to a real-life social and political problem rooted in the persistent ghosts of Texas history.

The show could have simply left things at that, with its hero revenged, albeit in a distinctly unheroic way. Instead it imagines the possibility of something more positive. After Booda suggests to Bobby that he tell jokes about his whiteness, Bobby does an online search for white culture and inadvertently finds a string of racist jokes from a neoconfederate site, which he obliviously tries out at an open-mic night in front of a mostly black audience. Booda saves the day by jumping between Bobby and the crowd, robustly defending the First Amendment, and then improvising a series of jokes inspired by Hank’s lack of a butt. Instead of being offended, Hank is touched that Booda came to Bobby’s aid, and to make amends, he helps the comedian find a new job at his company. The episode ends with Hank and Booda exchanging yo’ mama jokes at each other’s expense with good humor rather than malice.

Bobby, a lovable, sensitive, and eccentric 13-year-old, defies Hank’s expectations for his teenage son.

It’s the kind of unifying moment that’s rarely been seen since, whether in TV shows or in politics. But King of the Hill was never afraid to portray such moments, building a diverse audience that could expect to have its cultural assumptions challenged as much as humored. On its surface, the show appealed to both liberals and conservatives thanks to its premise as a comedy about beleaguered Texas suburbanites. Viewers on the left could enjoy laughing at “hicks” who felt increasingly out of touch in the modern world, while those on the right could both appreciate and identify with the “redneck” stereotypes they were proud to embrace (see: Duck Dynasty). King of the Hill drew viewers in with these caricatures, then used them to subvert expectations.

The show regularly tackled the complex gender roles that exist within conservative southern culture. Hank’s wife, Peggy, is a substitute Spanish teacher with a developing grasp of the language, who nevertheless has a keen taste for highbrow art (at one point, she casually declares, “Unless it’s got the name Merchant, Ivory, or Billy Crystal above the title, I am not interested”). Viewers are forced to consider the cost of casual male misogyny and workplace sexual harassment when they witness Hank’s niece Luanne being subjected to such abuse. Bobby, a lovable, sensitive, and eccentric 13-year-old, also defies Hank’s expectations for his teenage son: He prefers comedy and music to outdoor activities like hunting and fishing, but is shown in one episode to be a gifted marksman.

Although King of the Hill enjoyed solid ratings and critical acclaim through its 12th season, it was ultimately canceled by Fox to make room for Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy spinoff, The Cleveland Show. In 2005, the journalist Matt Bai unpicked the series’s influence in a piece for The New York Times Magazine, arguing that it offered “the most subtle and complex portrayal of small-town voters on television.” Rather than parodying red-state America, Bai wrote, the show subtly explored the ways in which conservative Americans were struggling with their nation’s rapid transformation. But more than that, it imbued all of its characters with a rich humanity that made their foibles deeply sympathetic. In this, King of the Hill was far ahead of its time, and the broader TV landscape has yet to catch up.

The Walking Dead: For the Love of Family

Every week for the sixth season of AMC’s post-apocalyptic drama The Walking Dead, Lenika Cruz and David Sims will discuss the latest threat—human, zombie, or otherwise—to the show’s increasingly hardened band of survivors.

David Sims: After The Walking Dead returned with last week’s brutal slog, I felt more detached from the show than ever. Life in Alexandria felt unsalvageable, the body count had piled even higher, and Carl was newly disfigured. What a difference a week makes! “The Next World” actually featured a more significant time jump than that, and it was exactly the reset we needed. Lenika, you talked last week about the show’s creators saying they wanted to lean more on humor in this coming half-season. I found that hard to believe, but “The Next World” was indeed a rather light, funny episode that ended on a surprising note—but not a bloody one, for once.

I’ll get to that ending in a minute, but first the time-jump itself, which I initially thought might have been months, but now I’m not entirely sure. The walls of Alexandria are rebuilt (perhaps extended?), Carl is up and walking (though wearing an eyepatch), and little baby Judith is starting to toddle around. However long it’s been, it was just what this viewer needed. I’m sick of carnage and episodes that take place entirely at night, and I’m glad the gang isn’t just on the road again to points unknown. They’re making Alexandria work, for now, and I guess they’re just ignoring the looming threat of Negan, whose gang apparently hasn’t made any extra trouble since Daryl blew some of them up with a rocket launcher in the last episode.

So the main action of “The Next World” saw Rick and Daryl drive around the countryside looking for salvage and generally acting like a cute couple. When’s the last time these two have spent a lot of time together onscreen? It was great seeing them bicker over the radio and gently discuss their respective personal evolutions in recent months. Rick recognizes that Daryl has become less cold-blooded, despite his still-tough exterior, and acknowledges that he’s evolving in the same direction. Usually these leadership debates play out in much darker circumstances, through shouted speeches or grunting monologues, but this episode spared us the usual dramatics. Light humor on The Walking Dead! Who even thought such a thing was still possible?

Things went from quietly funny to majorly madcap when Rick and Daryl ran into a hirsute Jared Leto-lookalike named Paul, or Jesus, if you prefer. Played by the English actor Tom Payne, he’s a slippery sort with all kinds of skills—martial arts, deception, unprecedented athletic ability—who, for once, wasn’t being introduced as the latest adversary for the gang to overcome. The audience immediately recognized that Jesus was up to no good, hoping to steal a truck full of supplies that Rick and Daryl discovered in a garage, but he also wasn’t evil—just another scavenger playing the same game. Throughout the episode, Rick and Daryl tangled with Jesus, trading possession of the truck in a bunch of expertly choreographed action sequences before losing it altogether, a trite lesson learned about working together. We’ll see more of Jesus, of course, since he gets brought back to Alexandria, but that was about as winning an introduction a character can get on this show.

Light humor on The Walking Dead! Who even thought such a thing was still possible?

The episode’s B-plots were much less interesting, though they did some necessary unpacking of the trauma suffered in recent weeks. They both involved random pairs walking in the woods—Carl and Enid in the middle of their very slow-moving flirtation, and Spencer and Michonne meandering through the forest looking for ... well, something. The setup for each plot was a little vague, and the payoff was something we’ve seen before—an encounter, for both pairs, with poor zombified Deanna. Carl seemed to think he needed to confront her as some way of saying goodbye; Spencer’s motivations were even more nebulous (it almost seemed like he was in the woods for something else, then used the encounter with his mother as an excuse to placate the suspicious Michonne). There needed to be some acknowledgement of recent losses, but this was too muddled and boring to have any emotional impact.

Before I hand off to you, Lenika, how about those final minutes! At the beginning of the episode, there was a surprising suggestion of familiarity between Rick and Michonne, as she bantered with him and Carl while wearing a bathrobe, and I wondered if the time-jump was going to be drastic enough to include a new romantic connection. Yes, but not quite—while crashing on the couch together at the end of the episode, Rick and Michonne finally sealed the deal on a potential romance that hasn’t exactly been bubbling away in the background, but has always felt possible. Am I crazy for saying so? They’ve always had chemistry on the battlefield, and they understand each other better than most. Is this something that will drive fans into wild rapture, or incensed protest? More importantly, did you think this moment worked?

Lenika Cruz: I had the exact same reaction you did in that first scene, David. Carl smiling with an eyepatch and holding baby Judith ... in a framed photograph? Rick and Michonne teasing each other ... while the latter lounges in a bathrobe? In Maggie’s chat with Enid, she suggested that it had been “weeks” since the bloodbath, and I think the time jump worked perfectly: Just enough to move past the familiar cleanup and rebuilding, while keeping the momentum. I will say, I could tell from the cold open that this was going to be a better hour than usual. The camera work was excellent (and remained that way for the entire episode), the dialogue was engaging, the pacing brisk, and we got the amusing shot of a newly at-peace Rick cranking up the music volume to Daryl’s dismay.

A few quibbles aside, I’d consider “The Next World” one of the show’s best hours in a while: clear proof of how wonderful The Walking Dead can be when the stars align. And it was wonderful in precisely all the areas that tend to be terrible. Usually, the one-on-ones make me want to throw myself into the jaws of a sewer zombie, but every pairing this week not only made sense, but also meaningfully advanced the story or the characters. (For this, let’s praise the writers Angela Kang and Corey Reed and the director Kari Skogland.) Even the B-plot scenes with Michonne and Spencer, and Enid and Carl’s emo-teen book club, felt particularly strong. Perhaps that’s because the show wisely chose to tell the stories of a handful of characters, rather than scattering its attention across all of Alexandria.

“The Next World” one of the show’s best hours in a while, clear proof of how wonderful The Walking Dead can be when the stars align.

Really, if only you could have seen my reaction to Michonne and Rick finally realizing they’re destined to be together. Skogland’s direction (and Danai Gurira and Andrew Lincoln’s performances) made that scene so beautiful and tender, I felt for a second like I was watching a romantic drama, not a gory zombie thriller. I will tolerate no hating on this matter: Obviously they are perfect. They’ve been looking out for each other for ages. Carl loves Michonne, and she loves him (and baby Judith). Next to Lori and Jessie and probably all of womankind, Michonne is a goddess—she’s smart, strong, kind, brave, stunning, and principled. Even an episode ago, I would’ve questioned whether Rick was good enough for her. This is the man who, leaving his unconscious son in the makeshift hospital, decided to run outside alone and start killing walkers to blow off some steam, forcing everyone else into harm’s way as they tried to protect him. Actions like these don’t exactly scream “life partner.”

But Rick’s behavior in this episode alone convinced me that he’s finally ready for a real relationship. I actually like Rick now. It feels like a small thing to admit (and characters can still be fascinating without being likable), but I can’t remember the last time I did. He’s the lynchpin of the series, meaning he’s allowed to do anything and everything, including the kinds of things that should make the audience afraid for his life but don’t, because we know he survives. I’d lost interest in him because all he did for a while was languish, scold people, kill people, and make out with someone I didn’t care for. This new Rick is someone I wouldn’t mind spending more time with—there’s a levity to him, a sense of self-assurance that hopefully signals a new arc.

There was no way his and Daryl’s supply run was going to be like a quick run to the grocery store, but their adventure may have been the highlight of the episode (aside from the ending). It moved easily between high suspense and humor—as Walking Dead viewers we’re used to ambushes or other FUBAR twists, not something as delightful as the introduction of Jesus. Yes, Rick and Daryl had to run a half marathon before they caught up to him (n.b.: Orange Crush is good for replenishing electrolytes), but I began cheering for this well-groomed gentleman once he revealed his sweet fighting moves. What’s not to like about a guy who hitched a ride on the roof of a truck moments after being hogtied on the side of the road, whose grand plan for evading an angry Daryl was to just literally run in circles around him?

After the episode, while internally singing “Jesus Walks” to myself, I thought a little about the show’s timely return to this theme of family. Viewers have seen so many families destroyed over the seasons. The last episode alone ended with a mother and her two sons being wiped out. Spencer is only starting to come to terms with the loss of his mother and father. Now, Carl, Michonne, and Rick, having lost almost everything, are feeling their way toward a new iteration of family—one made stronger, not weaker, by its grim history. One that absorbed all those years of anger, pain, and fear, found that the road led, miraculously, not to death, but to love.

A Shooting in Kalamazoo

On Saturday night, a gunman in Kalamazoo, Michigan, drove around in his car killing people at random in a spree that spanned several hours and left at least six victims dead.

“The rampage began about 6 p.m. Saturday outside an apartment complex on the eastern edge of the Kalamazoo County, where a woman was shot multiple times and seriously wounded,” the Washington Post reported. “A little more than four hours later and 15 miles away, a father and son were fatally shot while looking at vehicles at a car dealership. Fifteen minutes after that, five people — including a 14-year-old girl — were gunned down in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel restaurant.”

Said a police spokesman, “We have 9, 10, 11 shell casings at each of these scenes.” Police arrested a 45-year-old man with no known criminal history for the murders.

The motive for the shootings is unknown.

Over the last decade there have been more than 200 mass killings in the United States, using the FBI threshold of four or more victims in a single incident. “Well-known images from Newtown, Aurora and Virginia Tech capture the nation’s attention,” USA Today reported in a thorough investigation into the phenomenon, “but similar bloody scenes happen with alarming frequency and much less scrutiny.” Still, mass killings account for just 1 percent of murders nationally.

A majority begin with domestic disputes. Most victims know their killers. But the earliest reports from Kalamazoo suggest that most or all of Sunday’s victims did not know the killer or one another. Like the D.C. sniper killings of 2002, the seeming randomness of the murders has many in the community and beyond on edge.

On Reddit, a commenter wrote that despite being on the other side of the state,  “what I can't get out of my head is all the endless times my dad used to take me out at night (because no annoying sales guys) to look at cars at the local dealerships. It was always kinda peaceful, well lit lot, only ones there. Something so vivid in my head, a good memory with dad, bonding experience kinda thing, talking cars. Ugh. I want to say I can't imagine. But the problem is I can, I absolutely can imagine this all way too clearly. Sometimes my mom came along too, probably would've been the one to stay in the car. Fuck this. People should not have to fear living their lives, just stepping out of their home, going to a car dealership...”

Said another:

Ever since the Batman shooter, my wife has been terrified about going to the movies on midnight screenings or opening day. We generally wait a week or two after movies come out before going to see them and even then we go during the week. Like how sad is that? We can’t even go to something as simple as the movies without fear of being shot. The most recent Lafayette one nearly drove her to never set foot in a theater again.

On YikYak, students at Western Michigan University expressed their gratitude to police for apprehending a suspect so quickly, and complained that administrators at their Kalamazoo campus didn’t send out an alert to warn them about the gunman in town:

Crime has fallen dramatically in the last couple decades. But these killings can’t help but stoke anxiety many feel as they watch the unlucky few who are devastated by them. The suspect’s name and photograph are publicly available, but at this stage don’t add anything to the story. So I’ve chosen to exclude them, lest others get the idea that they can get their name and face before the public if only they slaughter fellow humans. I don’t know if denying infamy would reduce mass killings.

But isn’t it worth trying?

Sense and Sensibility and Jane Austen's Accidental Feminists

When it comes to the most memorable men written by Jane Austen and brought to life on the screen, Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy tends to overshadow all others—and for good reason. The BBC’s 1995 television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice titillated audiences with the invented scene of a soaking-wet Darcy running into Elizabeth Bennet after a swim, and he became such a beloved symbol of Regency-era manhood that a 12-foot tall fiberglass statue of him was erected and displayed in a London lake in 2013 (where it remained until it was relocated to Australia). In more ways than one, Firth’s Darcy positively towers over his competition as the embodiment of Austen’s ideal man—with the exception of two characters from another ’90s adaptation of the novelist’s work.

Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, which premiered in the U.K. 20 years ago, is best known for its dazzling direction and for Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning screenplay. Less remembered is the radical way the film elevated its two male characters—Colonel Brandon (played by the late Alan Rickman) and Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant)—beyond their source material. Sense and Sensibility deliberately imbued Austen’s first published heroes with qualities they either didn’t have in the novel or didn’t have to the same degree: egalitarian attitudes toward women, an affection for children, and emotional sensitivity. In other words, Sense and Sensibility used updated versions of early 19th-century heroes to sell emerging ideals of manhood to the late-20th century, at a time when the pro-feminist men’s movement was challenging gender norms in the realm of politics and pop culture.

To see what Sense and Sensibility was up against, it’s useful to remember that the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1996 was Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. (Gibson, who also starred, walked away that year with the Best Director Oscar for the film.) Braveheart has not stood the test of time, having once been declared the worst movie ever to win best picture: Gibson’s William Wallace, loosely based on the historical 13th-century Scottish warrior, now looks like a chest-thumping cross between Thor, Fabio, and Rambo. The critic William Luhr has summed up the film as offering viewers a “conservative if not reactionary masculinity,” and an excessively violent reaction to a moment when traditional manhood itself was imagined as under attack.

Sense and Sensibility set out to do something different: It made male receptiveness to female needs and desires and a commitment to proto-gender equality seem both incredibly attractive and historically inevitable. This required Thompson’s screenplay to make several departures from Austen’s 1811 novel, as I discussed in an essay I wrote for the 1998 book, Jane Austen in Hollywood. Louis Menand, writing in The New York Review of Books in February 1996, called the film’s changes “improvements on Austen’s original,” noting the heresy of that point of view. He argued that the “chief problem of the book is the stupefying dullness of the men the Dashwood sisters eventually pair off with”—a problem, Menand noted, that Thompson appeared to have fixed.

Austen’s Sense and Sensibility invests far more energy into developing its female characters than its male ones—and understandably so. It is, after all, a novel about what happens to a family of four women (a recently widowed mother and her three daughters) forced make their way in the world, suddenly without means or even a home. The story focuses specifically on the rich inner lives and opposing temperaments of its two sister-heroines, the rational Elinor and the romantic Marianne. Their respective love interests are hardly the stuff of fantasy—the diffident, not handsome, and unambitious Ferrars, and the much older, silent, and grave Colonel Brandon.

Sense and Sensibility used updated versions of early 19th-century heroes to sell emerging ideals of manhood to the late-20th century.

The first crucial feature that made Grant’s character feel more modern and likable was his love of children. Thompson’s screenplay invented Ferrars’s rapport with Elinor’s younger sister, Margaret Dashwood (Emilie Francois); in a note, Thompson indicates that a “connection [is] made” when Ferrars playfully coaxes her out of her hiding place in their first encounter. Not only does he seem to have an intuitive grasp of how children think and feel, but he also proves himself at ease in the role of both caretaker and teacher. Later in the film, Ferrars instructs Margaret how to fence—an empowering choice of sport for a young woman in the 1800s.

Rickman’s Brandon oozes a more enigmatic manliness and a strong-but-silent cosmopolitanism, but his character, too, is complemented by his guileless affection for women. Unlike Ferrars, Brandon is already an experienced guardian, having helped raise a girl, his ward Beth (renamed from the original Eliza of the novel). Brandon admits in both novel and film that he’s made mistakes as a father-figure that resulted in her running off with a libertine. (Plot spoiler: That libertine is revealed to be Marianne’s first tragic love interest, Willoughby, played by Greg Wise). Yet the film introduces new dialogue for Brandon, who worries that he gave his gone-rogue teenage ward too much “freedom.” In other words, Thompson presents Colonel Brandon as a father-figure who errs on the side of providing too much independence to girls, not too little. And in the film, Beth’s running off is not a result of Brandon’s neglect, a far more common failing in Austen’s flawed fathers, including Mr. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice and Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park.

Thompson presents Colonel Brandon as a father-figure who errs on the side of providing too much independence to girls, not too little.

Rickman’s performance offers the film’s most complex version of manhood. Brandon’s caregiving abilities shift from guardianship to courtship as he helps Marianne after she—lovesick over the faithless Willoughby—takes ill with a fever. Unlike in the novel, the film lingers on the scenes in which Brandon reads to Marianne, as she appreciatively convalesces on a lawn chair. Watching Rickman’s Brandon play Marianne’s devoted companion is a turning point: It marks the beginning of her and the audience’s recognition that she’s falling in love. The novel takes little time to explain the reasons behind Marianne’s growing affection for him, making their reimagined romance feel far more meaningful and grounded in the film.

Rickman’s nuanced, restrained, and tortured performance only adds to his character’s emotional depth—and at first glance contains echoes of Firth’s Darcy (as The Atlantic’s Megan Garber noted, the late actor also shone as a romantic lead). And yet Darcy is ultimately distant, while Rickman’s Brandon is an uninhibitedly intimate and dependable figure for the women around him—regardless of what he stands to gain from them. His “manliness” goes beyond superficial displays of heroism, and his romantic appeal stems from how unlike the handsome hedonist Willoughby he is. The changes Lee and Thompson made to Austen’s original story meant the title Sense and Sensibility no longer alluded to just the characteristics of its heroines. It now applied to the heroes as well, with Rickman and Grant’s characters proving men could combine a heightened emotional sensitivity (“sensibility”) with the traditionally masculine bedrock of clear-eyed rationality (“sense”).

Sense and Sensibility’s Grant and Rickman emerged out of a moment that—Braveheart aside—was nonetheless beginning to grasp more widely the cultural value in examining and unsettling gender roles from the male side. Michael Kimmel, a sociologist known for his view that gender equality is good for men and women, published his work of cultural history, Manhood in America, in 1996. The year also saw films like Jerry Maguire, where Tom Cruise’s character’s ability to bond with a single mother’s son proves his romantic mettle. (In one scene, Maguire even wins over a roomful of stereotypically angry divorced women.) Also in 1996, the Coen Brothers’ critically acclaimed Fargo lampooned the fraught masculinities of its male characters. As The Dissolve’s Tasha Robinson noted, “Ultimately, all the men in this film are poseurs in various ways—except maybe Norm (Gunderson), who expresses his masculinity by defiantly cooking eggs for his wife so she can go off to work well-fed. As a result, he’s the one who winds up happy, free, and alive.”

Sense and Sensibility served as a turning point, proving that pro-feminist masculinity in Austen adaptations would live on. Thanks to Lee and Thompson, Austen’s heroes were not to remain pride-filled prigs in search of sassy take-downs. They were reborn on screen—through Rickman and Grant—as irresistible nurturers, influencing not only how people reread the novel today but also how they reimagine the history of sense and sensibility in men.

Scalia's Pro-Business Legacy

Justice Antonin Scalia took his seat on the bench in 1986, during one of the greatest bull markets and the heyday of corporate mergers and acquisitions. In the three decades he served on the high court, he helped raise barriers for employees and consumers and he helped strike down limits on corporate political spending in our democracy. He will be remembered for his intellect and personality, but he should also be remembered for increasing the power of business in society.

For example, in Walmart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, the Supreme Court denied 1.5 million women the ability to bring a class action against Walmart for unequal pay or promotions on the basis of sex. A class action would have allowed all of the women to join together in one gender discrimination lawsuit, brought by one set of lawyers who would be paid out of any recovery from the suit. These plaintiffs might not otherwise be able to surmount the logistical and economic obstacles to bring 1.5 million individual suits against one of the world’s largest companies. Without the class action, they might not even be aware of their own claims or the patterns of discrimination.

The Court split 5-4, and the majority opinion written by Scalia rejected the certification of the class of women plaintiffs, reasoning that their claims did not have enough in common. According to Scalia, there was not enough “glue” holding together the alleged reasons for the employment decisions. “Merely showing that Walmart’s policy of discretion has produced an overall sex-based disparity does not suffice.” The women could not proceed as a class when they could not show that they would receive “a common answer to the crucial question, why was I disfavored?”

Walmart was not the only case in which Scalia weakened the ability of individuals to band together as a class to challenge corporate misconduct. In AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, a couple signed up for the company’s service with the advertised promise of “free” cell phones, but discovered a $30 charge on their bill for sales tax based on the phones’ retail value. In defending itself against a class action, AT&T pointed to the standard form contract the plaintiffs had signed, which required the arbitration of all disputes and barred class arbitration. The district court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to enforce this provision, recognizing that under California contract law it was unconscionable. Not so, according to Scalia’s majority opinion, which ruled that the Federal Arbitration Act preempted state contract law on this point. If consumers wanted to bring a claim against AT&T, they had to do so individually and through arbitration.

Scalia’s corporate legacy extends beyond his jurisprudence that weakened the class action and tilted the balance of power against workers and consumers.  Of course, not all of his opinions favored corporations and business interests, but like the Roberts Court generally, his track record was on the whole pro-business. He has been ranked one of the top 10 most pro-business justices in modern U.S. history.

Just last year, for example, in Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency, a group of states and trade groups representing the electric power and coal mining industry challenged the EPA’s approach to implementing the Clean Air Act’s section on hazardous air pollutants. The EPA had interpreted its mandate as allowing it to make an initial determination that regulating power plant emissions was appropriate and necessary to protect public health and the environment, and then to consider costs when calculating the emissions standards to impose. Writing for a 5-4 majority, Scalia ruled that the EPA unreasonably delayed its cost-benefit analysis—costs to the power plants must be taken into account at the outset of the regulatory process.

Perhaps the case that will be most remembered in Scalia’s corporate legacy is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Scalia joined the 5-4 majority, overturning previous campaign-finance precedents and holding that under the First Amendment corporations could make unlimited independent political expenditures. Super-PACs and a new era of politics were born. Citizens United represented a major expansion of the rights of corporations.

Scalia concurred, writing separately to battle with Justice John Paul Stevens’ 90-page dissent. Scalia criticized the “corporation-hating quotations the dissent has dredged up,” and argued that the text of the First Amendment “is written in terms of ‘speech,’ not speakers.” It “offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker, from single individuals to partnerships of individuals, to unincorporated associations of individuals, to incorporated associations of individuals”—in other words, corporations.

“Indeed, to exclude or impede corporate speech,” wrote Scalia, “is to muzzle the principal agents of the modern free economy.” He concluded, “We should celebrate rather than condemn the addition of this speech to the public debate.”

By contrast, in his Citizens United dissent, Stevens stressed that no principle required the Court to overrule two major campaign-finance precedents. “The only relevant thing that has changed since” those cases, “is the composition of this Court.”

Without doubt, Scalia will be remembered for his sharp intellect and for profoundly shaping the law and the legal profession. But Stevens was surely right that the composition of the Court matters. It matters that for 30 years Scalia tended to be more sympathetic to the concerns of the employers instead of the employees, the power plants instead of the planet, and the corporations instead of the citizens. His legacy lives on in the super PAC ads that Americans will watch this political season and in the fine print of everyday contracts that protect corporations from complaints of abuse.

An Elegy for the Jeb Bush Campaign

Almost all presidential campaigns end in failure. But few complete an arc as dramatic as Jeb Bush’s bid: Once considered a highly unlikely candidate, Bush surged almost immediately upon his entry into the pole position, then almost as quickly fell out contention and became a punch line.

Bush announced on Saturday night that he would leave the race, after a disappointing finish in South Carolina on Saturday. “The people of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken, and I really respect their decision,” he said. “So tonight I am suspending my campaign.”

It followed an excruciating week of campaigning—a week in which the Jeb finally brought his brother to campaign as a desperation step, tried contacts for the first time in his life, lashed out at pundits and his rivals, and practically begged voters to believe in him.

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It’s almost incredible to remember that when Bush first announced he was considering a run, in December 2014, it was seen as a gamechanger. He was instantly declared the frontrunner. Scores of anguished thinkpieces lamented the corrosive effects of the presumed Bush-Clinton dynastic rematch. Yet Bush could have left the race even before the Iowa caucuses and it might not have altered the course of the race: he finished sixth in Iowa and fourth in New Hampshire. All that despite bringing in more money (between his super PAC and campaign) than any other Republican candidate. What happened that Bush, once the brightest scion of a storied political dynasty, and one of the nation’s most acclaimed conservative governors, should fall so far?

Jeb Bush sailed blind into an unexpected storm. In a year when the Republican Party’s strength was supposed to be the bumper crop of governors, it has been senators and outsiders who have thrived, while anything vaguely reminiscent of the establishment has been toxic. In a cycle when the GOP was supposedly going to reach out to Hispanics and liberalize on immigration, the mood has turned sharply in the other direction. In a post-Citizens United environment where huge money was though to be the be-all and end-all, well-funded and connected candidates have struggled. In short, everything that was supposed to be a boon for Bush turned out to be an albatross.

What happened to the governors? Rick Perry never got in gear. Neither did Bobby Jindal—too wonky. Scott Walker turned out not be a very good campaigner. As the GOP race heads to Nevada, it looks like a three-way contest between two senators, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and one first-time candidate, Donald Trump. Around mid-July 2015, Trump entered the race and quickly eclipsed Bush, who was at the time leading the polls. Bush never recovered, following a steady downward trajectory. On immigration, the duo of Trump and Cruz rejected GOP elders’ insistence that the party shift toward reform, and instead took a harder line than ever. That left Bush, with his mixed family, talk of “acts of love,” and push for a path to citizenship, far outside the discourse. And on money, Bush has become the first high-profile victim of a super PAC. While his Right to Rise pulled in huge sums, the group never managed to effectively complement the campaign with which it could not legally coordinate. Mike Murphy, a longtime Bush aide and head of R2R, became a punching bag for establishment conservatives. Through Iowa and New Hampshire, Bush spent $795 per vote, more than all but Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson. By February, he was saying he wanted to reverse the Citizens United decision that had paved the way for super PACs.

The thing that was supposed to be Bush’s Achilles heel was that last name. People still hated George W. Bush too much—either for his wars, or for his economic collapse, or (among Tea Partiers) for his spendthrift ways—and they were sick of the Bush dynasty. As it turned out, the focus on the family missed the broader problem for Jeb. Yes, he was clumsy in his approach to his family legacy—insisting he wasn’t his brother yet taking on many of his advisers, or shifting his view on the war in Iraq over several, painful days as he tried to stay true to family without crippling his campaign. But it wasn’t that Republican voters were angry at the Bush family per se. It was that they were angry at the entire establishment. They were ready to punish anyone on the inside and flock to guys like Donald Trump—even if they found him uncouth, they liked that he said what he felt. Bush, meanwhile, was couth to a fault, openly appalled by Trump’s attitude and behavior. During an early debate, he even demanded Trump apologize; when Trump refused, Jeb meekly backed down, seemingly bewildered.

Making matters worse, Jeb didn’t have the common touch of his older brother. Over and over again, reporters told the story of George, the screw-up brother who somehow became president, and Jeb, the good son who somehow was failing to take advantage of his chance, but once both appeared together it was clear why their fortunes had played out that way. Trump memorably tagged Jeb as “low energy,” and he was unable to shed it, only showing real emotion late in the campaign, when he started to get irritable. In October, before the real panic set in, he lashed out.

“If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then I don’t want anything—I don’t want any part of it,” Bush said. “I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that.”

In a gesture that might have seemed endearing if it were not so sad, he took to handing out small plastic turtles at campaign stops, insisting he was the proverbial tortoise to Trump’s hare. By February, Bush seemed mostly pitiable, pleading with an audience: “Please clap.” Last week, after learning that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley had decided to endorse Rubio, he angrily asked whether he should quit campaigning.

Little wonder he was upset. By this week, there were already reports of doom out of the Bush campaign. Erick Erickson reported that the campaign was out of money. Politico said donors were refusing to give more, and were circulating resumes. Almost the whole Bush family had joined Jeb in South Carolina, but it didn’t seem like preparation for a triumphant comeback—one more Bush family win in the Palmetto State—but for the end.

What will Jeb Bush’s legacy in the 2016 race be? For a one-time frontrunner, the answer is precious little. It’s hard to see much policy impact, and given his standing in the polls, hard to see much political impact. In the final months of the campaign, Bush tried to position himself as Trump’s top assailant, attacking him during debates and on the stump—whether because he thought that would benefit him or because he figured he might as well help the party out on his way out.

His major impact, however, may be the damage he did to his former protege Marco Rubio. First, by staying in the race well past the time when he realistically had a chance, Bush clogged up the “establishment lane” Rubio needs to consolidate. Secondly, Right to Rise unloaded on Rubio for weeks, trying to weaken him to Bush’s benefit. It didn’t help Jeb, but it might have hurt Marco. Rubio heads to Nevada with a TK-place finish in South Carolina—and that’s the highest he’s finished so far. Maybe Rubio would have faltered anyway, but if the race comes down to Cruz and Trump, expect a great deal of establishment finger-pointing at Bush and Right to Rise for destroying Rubio’s chances.

One thing that can be said for Jeb Bush’s candidacy is that he foretold his own fate at the start.

“I don’t know if I would be a good candidate or a bad one, but I kinda know how a Republican could win, whether it’s me or somebody else, and it has to be much more uplifting, much more positive,” he said at a Wall Street Journal event in December 2014, adding that a GOP nominee must be willing “lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles.”

There were a few cringeworthy moments—like the contacts—but in general, it’s a credo that Bush kept to. While he wasn’t above attacking rivals, he was never comfortable adopting the tactics of a Trump or a Cruz. He tried to stay positive. Whether Bush was capable of winning the general election is now only a matter of speculation, but he was willing to lose the primary to do it.

How Will the Nevada Caucus Change the Democratic Race?

Hillary Clinton got out of Iowa with a narrow win. She explained away her crushing loss in New Hampshire. But what happens if she can’t prevail in Nevada?

The Silver State was once considered part of Clinton’s firewall against the encroaching Bern. But it appears—that’s the key word here—that Senator Sanders has closed that gap, making the state a toss-up. Clinton backers are now just including Southern states with large African American populations in the firewall, and insisting they always expected Nevada to be close. On the eve of the caucuses, Nevada looks like all upside for Sanders. If he wins, it will be the latest blow to the argument that Clinton will win the Democratic nomination because Sanders can’t win minority voters.

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If he loses in a close race, it’s still a major victory for Sanders. Clinton started staffing up there in August 2015; Sanders was two months behind. The Clinton family has deep roots in the state. She won the race in 2008—although, thanks to quirks in delegate-allocation rules, Barack Obama still won more delegates. But Clinton’s edge has been battered by forces in and outside the state. Outside, Sanders has all the momentum, and he’s been working hard to catch up with among minority voters. He has spent much of the last week campaigning across the state. Late Thursday, he was endorsed by the black caucus in Clark County, home to Las Vegas. Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a towering figure in the state, has tacitly backed Clinton but hasn’t publicly endorsed her, part of an elaborate and classically Reidian ploy to increase turnout. In short, Nevada wasn’t supposed to be close.

Assuming, of course, that it is close. No one is totally sure. The polling in Nevada is sparse and thought to be unreliable, making it tough to know exactly what the situation is. RealClearPolitics includes just three polls so far this year in its average, which show the two candidates either even or Clinton a little bit ahead. Part of the difficulty springs from the process—the fact that Nevada uses a caucus rather than a primary—and from the state’s geography, which is more spread out and wide open than the other early states, as Nora Kelly reports. Plus there's same-day registration for caucuses, meaning that Republicans and independents could show up Saturday, register as Democrats, and participate.

One reason that Nevada has the nation’s fourth Democratic contest, and one reason it’s expected to be such an important one, is that the state has a far less white Democratic electorate than Iowa and New Hampshire. In 2008, 15 percent of caucusgoers were black and another 15 percent were Hispanic, with whites accounting for 65 percent. The premise of the Clinton firewall argument is that Sanders would run into trouble once he left rural, white states like Iowa and New Hampshire behind and had to content with voters of color. But lately, Clinton’s backers are talking more and more about how that will play in the south, and in particular in South Carolina, than they are in Nevada. Both campaigns have been making their play for Hispanic voters.

On Thursday, Clinton released what’s probably her strongest spot of the cycle, which is just raw footage of a girl whose parents could be deported speaking to her at a rally:

The same day, Sanders released his own strong video, a bilingual ad focusing on the housing crisis, which hit Nevada hard. (Don’t miss Sanders’s Spanish-language disclaimer at the end.)

Both campaigns have also courted black voters. Clinton has tied herself closely to President Obama and accused Sanders of betraying him. In an interview with BET, Sanders accused her of pandering: “We know what that's about. That's trying to win support from the African American community where the president is enormously popular.”

Besides the minority vote, the two campaigns have also battled for the backing of the Culinary Workers Union. The Sanders campaign seemed to have committed a major gaffe when the union accused his staffers of impersonating union workers, but they somehow resolved the dispute, and the union has stayed out of the race.

Assuming the race is as close as the polls suggest, Sanders and Clinton will split a roughly equal number of the Nevada’s 43 delegates. That would be Clinton still way ahead of Sanders in the delegate count—though it remains hard to believe that superdelegates would deliver the nomination to Clinton if primary voters clearly favor Sanders.

Whatever the results in Nevada, they’re almost inseparable from what happens in South Carolina on February 27. If Clinton wins the Nevada caucus, and particularly if she wins with some room, she’ll go to South Carolina breathing a little bit easier, and she’ll arrive with a polling lead and the recent endorsement of Representative Jim Clyburn. But what if Sanders wins Nevada, and particularly if exit polls show him doing well with black and Hispanic voters? Clinton has a big lead in South Carolina, but one lesson of the last few months is that Clinton’s big leads are fluid and fleeting. There’s already been a shift of many black leaders and groups to Sanders, and if can prove that he can win in Nevada, why should anyone be sure the rest of the firewall will hold?

Kanye West and the Tumblr Teens: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

God’s Not Finished: Kanye West Sees the Light on The Life of Pablo

Craig Jenkins | Vice

“Pablo finds him more famous perhaps than ever before but not more powerful. He still can’t find the necessary venture capital to execute his most lofty ideas, and the cruel hum around the net when he details plans to shift the worlds of fashion and technology suggest at least a low-grade lunacy. This is not a burden we lay on the shoulders of white dreamers, the Disneys and Jobses Kanye counts as personal heroes.”

The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens

Elspeth Reeve | The New Republic

“On Tumblr, you can revel in anonymity, say whatever you want without fear of it going on your permanent record … While other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn generated billions upon billions of dollars, Tumblr gradually evolved into a fast-moving conversation focused on jokes, art, and sex. The culture of Tumblr began to be dominated by teens—weird teens.”

What Should We Say About David Bowie and Lori Maddox?

Jia Tolentino | Jezebel

“It is less easy to turn over what Maddox evinces in this narrative, from the late 1970s to her account of it now—which is that women have developed the vastly unfair, nonetheless remarkable, and still essential ability to find pleasure and freedom in a system that oppresses them. The persistence of that reality—that we learn to have sex not in a utopia but within and around whatever norms we are presented with—is why it matters that things were different in the ’70s.”

Love Naturally

Hannah Giorgis | BuzzFeed

“What could very well be a simple matter of aesthetic preference, in the vein of ombre versus jet-black hair color, or nude versus red nail polish, is instead depicted as a matter of moral fortitude. To have a weave is to aspire toward whiteness, to be fake; to have natural hair is to be ‘down for the cause.’ If black women’s bodies are the stages on which gendered respectability politics are acted out, then weaves are the (sometimes red) curtains.”

Fortunate Son

Rawiya Kameir | The Fader

“Davido thinks he will triumph where others have struggled because of his innate cultural literacy of both the U.S. and Africa, the result of being raised between worlds. Long before the Internet erased them for the rest of us, money and travel erased borders for him. ‘I can be in the club with Meek Mill and Future and be on a level with them,’ he says. ‘I understand what they’re talking about. I know what the trap is.’”

The Uncomfortable Power of Pop-Music Cruelty

Alexandra Molotkow | New York

“Tesfaye’s best songs describe cruelty with an exactness and emotional heft that confirms the worst about sexual power dynamics while making some sense of them. There’s cruel music, and there’s music that’s aware of its cruelty: Cruel music makes me uncomfortable when I love it … music that knows its own cruelty makes me uncomfortable, but I love it. Music is a form of confession without accountability, or an especially intimate fiction.”

Watching Beyoncé From New Orleans

Elena Bergeron | NPR

“Blackness here has been measured in drops and fractions, measured against paper bags and disguised with French and Spanish terminology, divided into backatown and Uptown neighborhoods and left to drown as a community. Blackness, here more than anywhere, is complicated, and Beyoncé’s experience of it may be unapologetic, but New Orleanians at Mardi Gras time didn’t exactly agree that it was theirs.”

What Bill Cosby Taught Me About Sexual Violence and Flying

Kiese Lamon | Literary Hub

“Bill Cosby, the comedic master of “the talk,” made a career talking at us about how to be good black students, how to be clean black children, and how to appropriately pay for pound cake … But Bill Cosby, like most of the famous cis-gendered American men we pay way too much attention to, was a complicated, monetarily generous coward, afraid to give his audience a chance to love, hate, or disregard where and who he’d really been.”

Why Am I Obsessed With a Cellphone Game About Collecting Cats?

Ryan Bradley | The New York Times Magazine

“The cats do not care. They have other lives, other places to be. What brings you back, again and again, is that these semiwild creatures have decided, temporarily, to share their existence with you. You cannot collect them, merely the memory of them, for existence is fleeting and nothing, save for ourselves, is ever entirely ours.”

Girls: Still Flawless at Being Itself

Apologies. I’m going to start this review of the latest work from one of modern pop culture’s great and flawed masters of trolling (Lena Dunham) with a reference to the latest work from another of modern pop culture’s great and flawed masters of trolling (Kanye West). On West’s The Life of Pablo, the young emcee Chance the Rapper shares the advice that West gave him about rapping: Make “the bars so hard that there ain’t one gosh darn part you can’t tweet.”

Beneath the social-media reference and hip-hop context, there’s an eternal definition of excellent writing. Dunham and her team basically have it nailed on Girls.

The fifth season of HBO’s comedy about white Brooklyn 20- and 30-somethings arrives into a culture fatigued by years of discussion of it. Dunham has said that the show will end next year: a valid personal/business decision that might feed into the common impression of Girls as a televised think-piece. But it would be a shame if burnout over arguing about Hannah Horvath prevented anyone who enjoyed Girls in the past from tuning in for season five, which, as a work of entertainment, is as sharp as the show’s ever been.

The premiere tackles a situation that’s plenty familiar in film and TV: a wedding day. Girls has even been here before, in its first-season finale when Jessa got hitched. But where that was a surprise affair, this wedding is as meticulously planned as you’d expect from the bride, Type-A avatar Marnie. There are no grand twists on Bridezilla tropes here. Feet get cold; mascara gets runny. The first line of the episode has Marnie worrying that it’s going to rain, and, spoiler, it eventually does. At one point, in a typically meta moment, Hannah reflects that “it’s like a really bad rom-com that’s really obvious and not funny.”

Except it is funny. From the first moments, the writing delivers gift after gift to viewers in the form of perfectly crafted declarations of self-aggrandizement, obliviousness, and bizarre viewpoints. Extremely flawed characters turn you off? Want your comedic kicks to come from regular-seeming people rather than from highly stylized vehicles for satire? Fine, you never liked the show anyways. Everyone else can titter at the utterly blasé way that Jessa enters a scene talking about having just bathed in a stream. Or at Hannah comparing a bad makeup job to a trip to Hershey, Pennsylvania. Or at Marnie trying out a few ways to describe her wedding’s aesthetic and landing on this: “artistic, but also with a nod to my cultural heritage, which is white Christian woman.”

Many of the show’s best pieces of dialogue aren’t jokes per se, because there’s no punchline. They’re distinct formations of thoughts that people really do possess but rarely choose to say, and even more rarely say with the panache on display here. Hannah enters the season wearing an “I Woke Up Like This” sweater, which is simultaneously a joke about her unapologetic embrace of the frump persona, a reflection of how much her age/gender/class cohort tends to love Beyoncé, and—meta again—a reminder of the kind of work it takes to pull off a show as densely hilarious as Girls. The song that sweater slogan comes from, “Flawless,” is meant to be an oxymoron: No one wakes up perfect, but there’s power in making it seem that way. In Girls’s world, you can extend the principle. No one is as effortlessly deranged as these characters, but there’s power in making it seem otherwise.

Which is not to say, as people often do, that Dunham and her team hate these characters and want the audience to do so too. There is love and gentleness to the show that is more pervasive than ever before in the fifth season. You can, yes, call it character growth. It’s seen most clearly in the core friend group’s interactions, the ways in which, despite their bickering, they demonstrate a growing sympathy for one another’s emotional states. The four episodes I’ve seen tend to center on the question of whether one character will show another character mercy by not blurting out whatever is on their mind, and often, the answer turns out to be yes. Jessa in particular undergoes a surprising test of her ability to self-deny in the name of friendship, though, of course, doing so involves directly insulting the very person whose feelings she wants to spare.

Season five offers a primer in the subtle varieties of 21st-century enlightened male shitheadedness.

As for the question of whether season five will touch off any online essay wars, the answer probably is yes. When the third episode takes a visit to Japan to check in on Shoshanna, it does little but reaffirm Western stereotypes about that country as a wonderland of infantilized kink. At the very least, the portrayal won’t help with the show’s well-documented race problems, which are more pronounced than ever: Five seasons in, and not one regular character of color? On the other side of the progressive viewer’s ledger is an ongoing storyline about a quote-unquote nice guy who maybe isn’t all that nice: basically a feminist meme turned, skillfully, into a plot point.

That storyline dovetails with perhaps the most underrated part of Girls, which is how much fun it has with its boys. Season five offers a primer in the various subtle varieties of 21st-century enlightened male shitheadedness (before any MRAs hop into the comments, know this entire show is predicated on demonstrating the female version of that—we all want equality, no?). The thing that the guys share, in contrast to the women, is a pretension to seriousness (with the one exception being Elijah who, as is sometimes the case with gay men, has been liberated to indulge his narcissism undisguised). Hannah’s current boyfriend Fran and her ex Adam negotiate their relationship using pseudo-dignified non-verbal communication. Ray quizzes Fran on the profundity of his bond with Hannah, asking if he cares about her views “on transgender politics, or the afterlife.”

More deliciously, there’s Desi, the furrowed-brow wannabe mountainman who Marnie’s marrying, played with deliciously vacant intensity by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. He’s more of a caricature than any other regular cast member, and who can complain about that fact when you get a scene as glorious as the one in the premiere where he salutes each of his groomsmen? He calls Adam “my comrade in arts, my comrade in arms.” He calls Elijah “a comic persona as skilled and radical as Lucille Ball.” He says “this is among one of the greatest days of my life.” It’s tempting to quote the entire thing. Truly, whenever he’s onscreen, there ain’t one gosh darn part you can’t tweet.