Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 227

Remembering Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco, the influential Italian semiotician, cultural critic, philosopher, essayist, and novelist, died at 84 on Friday. Bompiani, his Italian publisher, along with local reports confirmed that the widely revered writer and intellectual had been battling cancer.

The day had already been marked by the loss of Harper Lee, a literary giant whose fiction elucidated contemporary racial injustice in America. Eco was no less of a towering figure, one whose work often dealt with the abstract, the historical, and the undecipherable.

Born in northern Italy in 1932, the son of an accountant and an office worker, Eco’s efforts transcended genres, boundaries, and centuries. Fittingly, he later spent many years teaching at the University of Bologna, frequently touted as Europe’s oldest university.

Eco is perhaps best known for his first novel The Name of the Rose, a theological whodunnit set in the 14th century, which was published in 1980. Don’t be dulled by this synopsis: The book sold millions of copies, was translated into dozens of languages, and spawned one mediocre Sean Connery flick.

That’s also not to say he wasn’t an authority on modern pursuits. “Did you know,” Eco once bragged to an interviewer, “that I once published a structural analysis of the archetypal Ian Fleming plot?”

He was also a sharp-witted columnist, a sharp-elbowed critic, a satirist, and, after a childhood under the rule of Mussolini, a vicious anti-fascist. Eco was also a genius by most accounts; he spoke Italian, French, Spanish, German, and English. And he played the trumpet.

Writing in The Atlantic in 2012, Rebecca Rosen noted Eco’s fondness for lists. “We like lists because we don't want to die,” he said at the time.

He felt similarly about laughter, once telling an interviewer, “Laughter, and why we laugh, always fascinated me. Man is the only laughing animal because, unlike other animals, we know we have to die. Laughter is a way to tame death, a way not to take our death too seriously, by not taking too seriously our life.”

Apple vs. the FBI: The Justice Department Fires Back

The Justice Department has filed a motion to force Apple to comply with a judge’s order to help the FBI unlock an iPhone that belonged to one of the San Bernardino attackers.  

The motion comes just days after Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, in a letter to customers, described the government’s request as overreach, and called its effect “chilling.” In essence, Cook said: The “U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.”

The Justice Department, in its motion filed Friday before the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, accused Apple of “repudiating” the order of Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym.

“Apple has attempted to design and market its products to allow technology, rather than the law, to control access to data which has been found by this Court to be warranted for an important investigation,” the department said in its filing. “Despite its efforts, Apple nonetheless retains the technical ability to comply with the Order, and so should be required to obey it.”

And it dismissed the idea the FBI had asked for a “backdoor” entry that could grant the bureau access too all iPhones.

The Order requires Apple to assist the FBI with respect to this single iPhone used by Farook by providing the FBI with the opportunity to determine the passcode. The Order does not, as Apple’s public statement alleges, require Apple to create or provide a “back door” to every iPhone; it does not provide “hackers and criminals” access to iPhones; it does not require Apple to “hack [its] own users” or to its own phones; it does not give the government “the power to reach into anyone’s device” without a warrant or court authorization; and it does not compromise the security of personal information. To the contrary, the Order allows Apple and it gives Apple flexibility in the manner in which it provides assistance. In fact, the software never has to come into the government?s custody.

The phone in question is the iPhone 5c that belonged to Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire at a civic-services center in San Bernardino,  California, killing 14 people and wounded 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.

Cook, in his letter, said the FBI—rather than seeking congressional legislation—was seeking a new interpretation of the All Writs Act of 1789, which allows judges to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” The Justice Department rejected the idea that use of the All Writs Act to facilitate a warrant is unprecedented, noting Apple itself had previously complied with “a significant number of orders” related to the act to “facilitate the execution of search warrants on Apple devices running earlier versions of iOS.”

And, the department says, Apple’s refusal to help unlock the phone “appears to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy.”

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

A TV Network for Native Americans

If there’s one thing most television lovers and critics have come to agree on in the last few years, it’s that the medium has become more racially diverse. If challenged by a skeptic on this subject, I’d cheerfully rattle off the names of great and popular shows currently on air starring and created by people of color. See? Progress!

And yet, maybe not so much. I can count the number of Native American characters—not even shows—that I’ve personally seen on TV shows in the last year on one hand. There’s the Wamapoke Indian chief Ken Hotate, who appeared in the final season of Parks and Recreation, played by the wonderful Jonathan Joss, who is of Comanche and Apache descent. There’s the terrifying 1970s enforcer Hanzee Dent, a second-season Fargo fan favorite, played by Zahn McClarnon, who’s of Hunkpapa heritage. And then there’s the spoiled Manhattan socialite Jacqueline Voorhees from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, played by Jane Krakowski, who’s Polish, French Canadian, and Scottish.

Which goes some way toward illustrating the need for an outlet like All Nations Network—a cable channel featuring TV programming created for and by native peoples that its creators hope to launch soon in the U.S., according to Variety. Though details are sparse at the moment, the channel will get some help from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, a similar outlet that launched in Canada back in 1992 and that now serves 10 million households. The U.S. has seen other efforts to cater to native peoples on TV—Red Nation Television Network is an online-only streaming service that dates back to before Hulu, and the PBS affiliate FNX: First Nations Experience launched in 2011 but is currently available only in Southern California and a few other areas. If a channel like All Nations Network succeeds, it would be a way for American Indians to do something as simple but crucial as making their own stories rather than waiting for mainstream TV to catch up.

So why doesn’t the U.S. already have a widely available, dedicated TV channel for Native Americans? Heather Rae, a producer, filmmaker, and actress of Cherokee descent, told me that studio executives and financiers often balk at the idea of what they see as narrowly targeted content. “The perception is that Native Indians are a vanishing and near-extinct part of the [U.S.] population,” she said. It’s hard, in other words, to convince many distributors and carriers of the commercial viability of a project like All Nations Network.

Kelly Faircloth further discussed the financial difficulties over at Jezebel:

Of course, the American TV business is a different beast [than the Canadian TV business]. Compare the position of the CBC with PBS. Canada’s telecom regulator, the CRTC, mandates that cable carriers include APTN, which means it’s in millions of homes across Canada. In the U.S. cable is a dollar-driven scrum where new channels like Current have trouble gaining traction. It’s unfortunately all-too-easy to see unimaginative execs and advertisers looking at Native American poverty rates and taking a pass.

The stakes for a project like All Nations Network are high. Natives live on in mainstream entertainment as romantic, ancillary characters—existing merely to supplement or amplify the stories of non-native characters, Rae said. Fargo, Parks and Recreation, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt all developed their native characters in different, sometimes revelatory, ways, but each show was ultimately created and produced by non-natives. While many minority groups in the U.S. are seeing some clear improvements when it comes to network TV shows created by and about themselves—Fresh off the Boat, Jane the Virgin, Black-ish—American Indians haven’t come anywhere close to this kind of representation (an issue Yohana Desta explored in depth in a piece for Mashable last year). If All Nations Network can find the institutional support it needs in the U.S., it could finally pave the way for native people to have a bigger presence in cable and network TV shows.

Go Set a Legacy: The Fate of Harper Lee

When their only daughter was born four years ago, Victoria and David Beckham named her Harper—a tribute, , to her favorite author, Harper Lee. This would prove be one of the few ways that the couple known for their unusual child-naming choices are extremely non-unique. The world is full of little Harpers. And older ones, too. And Scouts. —its popularity spurred along, most recently, with the help of William Atticus Parker, son of Mary-Louise and Billy Crudup, and Atticus Affleck, son of Summer Phoenix and Casey— in 2004. In 2014, .

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Go Set a Watchman: What About Scout?

Harper Lee: The Sadness of a Sequel

All that, of course, is almost entirely because of Nelle Harper Lee, who died on Friday at the age of 89. The characters the author imagined and the stories she told of them—the stuff not just of literature, but of film and television and comics and music—are more than page-bound characters and stories. The elements of To Kill a Mockingbird—“our national novel,” Oprah Winfrey called it—have been varnished by time. And polished, by the equal forces of memory and forgetfulness, into symbols of some of the things the current culture holds most dear, or tries to: justice, wisdom, decency, bravery, empathy. You never really understand a person until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. The names Scout and Atticus—and, perhaps above all, the name Harper—reflect a respect not just for the arc of history, but for the hope that it does indeed bend toward justice.

Last year, however, those names became something they hadn’t really been in decades: complicated. “Harper,” in particular—the author, the person, the symbol—got complicated. Lee published (or, perhaps more specifically, HarperCollins published, with dubious consent from the ailing Lee) the novel that would prove to be both Lee’s first and her last: Go Set a Watchman. Which is, by most critics’ estimates, a good book but not a great one. And which is, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert put it, flawed by “a meandering, distinctly unfinished style; stilted dialogue; [and] an unsatisfactory ending.”

The book is more broadly flawed, too—as a cultural matter if not a strictly literary one—by the path Atticus turns out to have taken in his old age. This Atticus, now 72, spouts “abhorrent views on race and segregation,” The New York Times’ review of Watchman put it. He has rejected the work of the NAACP. He has attended a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. “The Negroes down here,” this Atticus observes, “are still in their childhood as a people.”

Oooof. Atticus’s evolution, on the one hand, Gilbert argues, makes the novel worth welcoming, as it “offers what’s become increasingly difficult and necessary in the five decades since Mockingbird was published: an unflinching attempt to wrestle with racial prejudice.” But it also complicates Atticus’s—and, by extension, Lee’s—status as an inviting cultural metaphor. “The depiction of Atticus in Watchman,” Michiko Kakutani noted in her review for The New York Times, “makes for disturbing reading, and for Mockingbird fans, it’s especially disorienting.”

Atticus may be an even more interesting character in Watchman than he was in Mockingbird; he is, however, a distinctly less admirable one. And Lee, for her part, may still be the author who gave us the man who has been called one of the “all-time coolest heroes in pop culture” and the “Best. Dad. Ever” and “the greatest hero of American film”; she is also, however, the person who revealed that this great champion of racial justice was also a racist.

The question, now, is whether that complication will be reflected in the legacy of Harper Lee. Will she be remembered for Jurist Atticus, or Racist Atticus? Will she be remembered as the author of a book so beloved, and so revered, and so culturally dilute, that it seems wrong to call it simply a “book”? Or as the author of the work that complicates Mockingbird’s tidy vision of right and wrong?

Both, of course. But if literary history is any indication, cultural memory will be both selective and, perhaps like history itself, biased toward justice. Instead of Watchman, as some have argued, “troubling the legacy of a literary hero,” Lee’s first and second book could well serve as simply a coda to her great, if otherwise single-work, career. “Harper,” along with “Atticus” and “Scout,” could thus remain symbolically pure.  

The immediate reactions to Lee’s death—the sense of love, the sense of loss, the recognition of her cultural and historical value—have, tellingly, focused on Mockingbird.

“You never really understand a person… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Thank you, #HarperLee. pic.twitter.com/8OuUiet7IL

— Ava DuVernay (@AVAETC) February 19, 2016

Sad news about Harper Lee. But the legacy of To Kill A Mockingbird will live on for generations to come. RIP.

— Coral Williamson (@coralamberrr) February 19, 2016

God bless and protect the legacy of Harper Lee. pic.twitter.com/JxFc2tVFBn

— Jenny B. Jones (@JenBJones) February 19, 2016

And if the trend continues—if Lee’s legacy is indeed honed and burnished to focus on Mockingbird—it would not be the first time. J.D. Salinger, in the cultural imagination, is not known as the author of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” or even of Franny and Zooey; he is remembered mostly for his “one-hit wonder,” The Catcher in the Rye. Margaret Mitchell’s Lost Laysen, released posthumously in 1997, made nary a dent in the legacy of the author who had also, during her lifetime, published Gone With the Wind. We remember people, in general, for the extremes of their accomplishment—the races won, the artistic heights reached, the evils perpetrated. Cultural memory, like human memory itself, is flexible, and fickle. It is also exclusive. Most of us, as George Eliot noted, will live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. Had Harper Lee simply published Go Set a Watchman—the book that is good but not great, and that lacks the soaring arc-of-history premise that her first novel boasted—she may well have lived, and died, in relative obscurity, along with the rest of us.

But Mockingbird, both fortunately and unfortunately for the reclusive Lee, prevented that. And its breadth—as a book that is so much more than a book, and as a cultural product, and as a symbol—may well mean that history treats it, effectively, as Lee’s own “one-hit wonder.” What may well happen to Lee is the same thing that happened to her characters: She will be remembered not for her complications, but for her simplicity. She will be in death what she had been for most of her life: a symbol of justice and kindness and of all that can be achieved when one little person tries to change a very large world. Nelle Harper Lee may have died, but Harper—the person who was so much more—will live on.

Remembering Harper Lee

Harper Lee, the iconic American author of To Kill a Mockingbird, died Friday in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, her publisher, HarperCollins, confirmed.

In a statement, Michael Morrison, the publishing firm’s president, said:

The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don’t know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness.  She lived her life the way she wanted to—in private—surrounded by books and the people who loved her.

Lee, the youngest of four children and the daughter of a prominent lawyer in segregated Alabama, was a few months shy of her 90th birthday. The famously reclusive author had suffered a stroke in 2007 and she spent the last several years in a nursing home not far from her childhood home.

In The Atlantic’s 1960 review of Mockingbird, our critic characterized what would eventually become one of the most important works of 20th-century American fiction as “respectable hammock reading” and “sugar-water served with humor.”

It is frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a 6-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult.

It’s true that were Lee’s seminal book to be released today, it would probably qualify as a Young Adult novel, but its style didn’t stop the work about racial injustice from winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, becoming the basis for a wildly popular film, or from seeming dangerous.

As Maria Popova noted in The Atlantic in 2012, entities like Virginia’s Hanover County School Board banned the book on the grounds that it was immoral, prompting a reply from the author. Here’s one section of Lee’s letter from 1966:

Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is “immoral” has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

In a classic flourish, Lee included a “small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund” so the members of the school board might enroll in first grade and learn how to read. To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the most frequently taught books in American schools.

That same year, Lee accompanied her childhood friend Truman Capote to western Kansas to help him research his critical book In Cold Blood. She resisted the literary fame she had been assured, making rare public appearances.

“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird,” she said in a 1964 radio interview cited by The New York Times. “I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but, at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it well enough to give me encouragement.”

The flood rush of praise and encouragement she did receive was, in her words, “just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”

Decades later, the national discourse still drifts along the dividing lines amplified by her first great work. Last year, the long-sought follow-up to Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman, appeared, but not without controversies over whether Lee had wanted the work published at all as well as the , the first book’s unimpeachable hero.

The Witch Mines the Quiet Terror of the Unknown

There’s nothing better than a horror film that knows just how to manipulate our dread of the unknown. The Witch has many spooky figures: a goat named Black Phillip who might just be an agent of Satan, a beady-eyed rabbit who keeps appearing out of nowhere, a haggard crone who kidnaps babies and grinds them into a bloody pulp. But none manage to be quite as terrifying as a quiet shot of the hemlock trees lining the entrance to the woods near a family home. This is a film that conjures its scares not from sharp jumps, but from the eerie hostility of the untamed American wilderness.

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The Witch is subtitled A New England Folk Tale, and it walks a curious line between faithful period detail and supernatural weirdness. A postscript notes that its dialogue was inspired by court transcripts of the 1630s, the early Puritan era in which it’s set; like the many hokey tales of women in bonnets that have preceded it, it features a pious family with a growing suspicion of witchcraft. The only difference is that almost immediately, the audience sees that the threat is real—there is evil in the wood, and it intends wicked misfortune. The movie’s first-time director, Robert Eggers, blends authenticity with black magic, and the result is giddying.

In the film’s early scenes, a New England family are turfed out of their village because of their religious beliefs and forced to live on the edge of the wilderness, after which they lose their infant son in a mysterious kidnapping. The patriarch, William (Ralph Ineson), professes piety while trying to hide prideful transgressions; his wife Katherine (Kate Dickey) fears that their son was taken to answer for their sins; and their eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) provokes suspicion from her parents with her precocious and outspoken behavior. The audience sees exactly who took the baby—a wizened crone, shot in shadow, played by the wonderfully named Bathsheba Garnett—but this does nothing to blunt the film’s mounting tension.

Like many an indie horror sensation, The Witch succeeds not by action, or the specter of its central monster, but by its immersive details. From the family’s sad bundles of corn, which quickly wither in the face of unknown evil, to their simple prayer sessions shot entirely by candlelight, the disaster of their new life away from civilization comes into clearer and clearer focus, starting with the mundane (hunger, crop failure) and building to the symbolic (Thomasin milks Black Philip, and all he produces is blood). This tension finally crests into a dizzying final act that flips the audience’s expectations on their heads.

What’s scary, of course, is a matter of individual preference, and The Witch’s particular emphasis on atmospherics may thwart some moviegoers’ expectations. The simple conceit of It Follows—a monster who takes the form of an ordinary person—was too mundane for some; The Blair Witch Project’s shaky-cam marathon in the woods left many viewers nauseated rather than terrified. Like those films, The Witch uses its barren locations, and languorous pace as a weapon—just don’t go in expecting a mile-a-minute thrill ride.

Indeed, the subtitle “A New England Folk Tale” feels particularly important—this isn’t a morality play so much as a dark story to be whispered by the fire at night. Ineson and Dickey take care not to make their characters simple zealots who deserve their fate. They love their family, even if the manner in which they do is sometimes curious to modern eyes, and their transgressions against God are minor, but feel major to them. Taylor-Joy is a revelation as Thomasin, who feels compelled to respect her elders and is led down not a simple path of temptation, but a winding road of Satanic entrapment. The greatest character of all is the witch herself, barely seen, but standing for so much—flowering sexuality, the untamed wild, fear of the unknown. For such a phenomenal debut film, Eggers could not have conjured up a greater adversary.

Race: An Inspiring but Muddled Biopic

Race sets itself up as a standard Hollywood biopic: a straightforward telling of the life story of Jesse Owens, the African American sprinter who made history when he won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. It accomplishes its task with all the subtlety of a Hallmark film—Owens (Stephan James) overcomes an impoverished upbringing and racism to become the world’s leading athlete, with the help of a bullish coach (Jason Sudeikis) and a burning desire to win. But where Race both soars and fumbles is in its telling of the most thrilling part of Owens’s biography—his triumph at the Games, which were held in Nazi Germany three years after Adolf Hitler came to power.

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At two hours and 14 minutes, Stephen Hopkins’s film is far too long, though the bloat makes sense to an extent. He’s juggling two different movies that demand to be told concurrently, with a script that isn’t quite up to the job. The intersections at the core of Race are riveting—the idea that Owens, faced with daily racism at home, was pressured by some to take a stand against even attending the Olympics as a larger symbol of protest, versus the idea that his eventual triumph would undermine Hitler’s grand spectacle. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t explore these clashing ideals in enough depth, though it’s at its most original and compelling when it tries to.

To begin with, there’s a lot of standard sports-movie myth-making to get through. James is quietly charming as Owens, who possesses unnatural calm and focus from the first minutes of the movie. It’s hard to visually dramatize the skill of running very fast—the simple fact of Owens’s greatest achievements was that they occurred so quickly—so James makes Owens seem poised to bolt at any minute. When he isn’t running or jumping on the track, he’s a reserved figure, so much of the film’s early action is handed to Sudeikis, who plays Larry Snyder, Owens’s tough-talking coach at Ohio State.

Most of the film’s first and second acts are predictable. Owens and Snyder rub each other the wrong way at first, but quickly offer a grudging respect; there are training montages and scenes establishing the abuse Owens faced from other students and coaches at the school. Then, success strikes, and the road to the Olympics beckons. Too often, Race’s script (by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse) seems content to merely check the biopic boxes without fully fleshing out its subjects. A tangent about Owens’s brief college dalliance with another woman is a half-hearted attempt to give him some flaws, but he quickly returns to his high-school sweetheart and marries her (they stayed married for 45 years until his death in 1980).

Too often, Race’s script  seems merely content to check the biopic boxes without fully fleshing out its subjects.

Meanwhile, the larger Olympic story is playing out in parallel. Jeremy Irons plays the industrialist Avery Brundage, who pushed for America’s participation in the Berlin games while giving a determined blind eye to Nazi Germany’s bigotry and terror, which he witnesses first-hand in the film. William Hurt makes some principled speeches as his opponent in the American Olympic Committee, and Glynn Turman shows up as the NAACP official Harry Davis, who asks Owens not to attend in 1936 as a symbolic protest against global racism. The film tries to give Owens’s decision its proper weight, even though viewers know what he’ll choose, but this saggy second act merely amounts to everyone giving a lot of unnecessary speeches.

The action in Berlin is much more engrossing, but jarringly so. What has largely been Owens’s story, with some historical window dressing, suddenly draws several other major figures into its orbit. There’s a whole subplot about the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten), and her efforts to make her famed propaganda documentary Olympia in uneasy collaboration with the Nazis (a topic that’s far too complicated for the brief treatment Race’s script gives it). Germany’s racist propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (Barnaby Metschurat) also makes an appearance, anchoring every scene he’s in with terrifying, psychotic calm. There are even glimpses of Hitler over his shoulder, although the film smartly avoids trying to fully capture his personality onscreen.

There are other stories, too, that don’t get nearly enough attention—the participation of the Jewish athletes Marty Glickman (Jeremy Ferdman) and Sam Stoller (Giacomo Gianniotti), and Owens’s unlikely friendship with the German long jumper Carl Long (David Kross). These threads all play out against the generally surreal experience of being free of segregation for the first time in a country that’s cracking down on its own disenfranchised people. The film ends without really exploring Owens’s post-Olympics life and the struggles he faced upon returning to America. Race wants to end, unsurprisingly, on a note of uplift—but for a film with so much dark, unexplored potential, it’s an unsatisfying finish line to cross.

A U.S. Strike Against an ISIS Target in Libya

U.S. airstrikes in Libya have reportedly targeted a Tunisian ISIS commander, multiple news organizations are reporting, citing U.S. officials.

The airstrikes, which reportedly were carried out early Friday near the town of Sabratha, about 50 miles west of Tripoli, the capital, come as the White House is considering military action against ISIS, which has made significant recent gains in Libya.

The New York Times, citing the Pentagon, reported the ISIS operative, Noureddine Chouchane, was most likely killed. A spokesman for the U.S. African Command, Colonel Mark Cheadle, told Reuters the Pentagon was “assessing the results of the operation.” An unnamed U.S. official told the Associated Press the target of the strikes was an ISIS training camp in Libya, but did not provide any indication as to whether Chouchane was specifically targeted.

Chouchane is the ISIS militant who is believed to have masterminded two deadly attacks in Tunisia last year: one on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis killed 22 people; the other,  in a coastal resort in Sousse, killed 38.

There were varying reports of how many people were killed in the U.S. airstrikes. The Times, citing an unnamed Western official, said at least 30 ISIS recruits, many of them Tunisian, were killed at the site. Libya Herald, an English-language news website, quoted sources at the town’s hospital as saying at least 41 bodies had been brought there. Hussein Dawadi, the town’s mayor, provided similar numbers to Libya TV, adding most of those killed had recently arrived in town.

The Times added that the strikes were carried out by Air Force F-15E jets. And, the newspaper added, the site was being monitored for several weeks by Special Operations forces, using reconnaissance drones, satellite imagery, and other surveillance equipment. A second Western official who spoke to the Times said it appeared that the militants were planning a “major attack outside of Libya, either in the region or possibly Europe.”

Libya has emerged as the main focus of ISIS’s attention outside of the vast swath it controls across the Iraq-Syria border. Like those countries, Libya lacks a strong central government and well-functioning civic institutions. The country has mostly been in political turmoil since the ouster, capture, and eventual death of Muammar al-Qaddafi, its longtime dictator, in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Friday’s attack is by no means the first U.S. strike in Libya against ISIS. Last November, the U.S. killed Abu Nabil, an Iraqi militant who led the terrorist group in Libya, in the eastern town of Darnah. And, The Guardian reports: “Unidentified aircraft have bombed other Isis bases in the eastern Libyan towns of Sirte and Derna in recent days, with Human Rights Watch saying a hospital was struck in the Derna raids.”

Speaking this week at a news conference about ISIS’s presence in Libya , President Obama said the U.S. would go after the group “wherever it appears.”

“We will continue to take actions where we’ve got a clear operation and a clear target in mind,” he said. “As we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them.”

A ‘Con’ for Everyone

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Proud nerds converged upon the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center this month to celebrate their love of anime at Katsucon, the annual three-day gathering that showcases Japanese animation culture and welcomes professional and amateur cosplayers of all degrees of fandom.

Since its launch in 1995, Katsucon has experienced a dramatic shift in its attendees. For a while, the event skewed older and male. But by 2000, according to Chad Diederichs, who is in charge of press, the fan base was primarily under the age of 30, and women and girls represented 50 percent of attendees. In the past decade, crowds have continued to get younger and more female. Not surprising, brands like Marvel have committed to diversifying their characters and creators, most recently hiring the young Chicago artist Ashley Woods and introducing Amadeus Cho, a Korean-American Hulk.

Anime fans of color have historically chosen to create spaces for themselves through independent podcasts and communities. Zaria Poynter, 19, put it bluntly, “I don’t expect diversity when I come to cons. I see a lot of racism on the Internet, and I think it deters people from [attending].”

“I feel like there is something you have to overcome to come to a con,” her friend Bianca Wadie added. Both young women are black and say they have observed racism in online anime communities. But both also agree that the Internet enables geeks to find out more about conventions and mingle IRL (in real life), particularly so in the realm of cosplay, a subculture of costumed role playing that has exploded in recent years, and in which Katsucon has found a niche. “At first, I felt I could only cos as a dark-skinned character,” Wadie said. “Now, I don’t care.”

According to Diederichs, who is white, Katsucon’s intentional inclusion goes beyond gender and skin color. One of the reasons Katsucon is hosted at its current location is the location’s extra handicap-accessible facilities. “We just had a photo shoot upstairs hosted by Marvel, and I was so thrilled to see the number of disabled cosplayers participating,” said Diederichs. “And I think that’s what people come here looking for. This is a place they can meet up with their other costumed friends and catch up and see what everybody has been working on.”

“There’s certainly an ugly side to large groups of fandom,” says Diederichs. “There are a lot of jerks around, but I’ve got to say, Katsucon has been a very welcoming environment for these cosplayers.”

Ashlynne Perez, 19, who was dressed in a unicorn onesie, shrugged at my long-winded questions about inclusion and diversity in comics and how the two play out at the convention, and explained to me plainly, “Everyone’s just super hyped about what they’re excited about.”

Waiting for coat check (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)



Kristal Cazella, 28, from Florida, dressed as BB-8 from Star Wars (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)



The Cantuba family came to Katsucon together with 14-year-old Gezelin’s anime club at school. “This is our first time,” said Fernando Cantuba, on the right. “We’re mostly just people watching. Everyone’s just so friendly.” Clockwise from left: Zena, Gezelin, Fernando, and Persephone Cantuba (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)



Brad Harper, 27, from Severn, Maryland, takes a break with his Pikachu costume. (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)



18-year-old twins Laura and Leia Parayannakos, traveled from Long Island, New York, for their first Katsucon. They dressed as characters from Love Live! (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)



Jasmine Godfrey, 25, left, and Kailynn Millner, 25, said they stayed up for three days straight preparing their costumes. “A few years ago, I’d say I didn’t see people of color actually cosplaying,” said Millner. Godfrey says that since anime has become more mainstream, it has allowed more people, especially fans of color, to feel comfortable getting into cosplay. “There’s the thought of ‘Oh, they can do it? I can do it, too!’” (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)



“I think anime’s becoming more and more diverse,” said Stephanie Johnson, 26 (in the silver wig). “And fast,” her friend Charles Walker, to her right, added. Both have been to other conventions before, often with their significant others. (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)



Cosplayers in line for studio shots at Katsucon (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)



Cesar Via, 25, dressed up as Drake for his third time at Katsucon. (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)



Ashlynne Perez, 19, left, came with her boyfriend Kendall Guerra, 22, in matching unicorn onesies. “I’m into anime,” said Guerra. “And I’m into him,” said Perez. (Emily Jan / The Atlantic)

An Old-New Lech Walesa Scandal

Like a readymade Hollywood drama about Cold War-era Eastern Europe, this story begins in the house of Czeslaw Kiszczak, a deceased Communist general and the former Polish interior minister.

It was there that new documents were seized this week that appear to show that Lech Walesa—the shipyard worker and founder of Poland’s anti-Communist Solidarity movement —was a paid informant for the Communist regime he later brought down. Walesa eventually won a Nobel Prize for his democracy promotion and became Poland’s first president after the fall of Berlin Wall.

This is, in some ways, old news. Walesa previously admitted to having been an informant, which was not uncommon at the time. Walesa maintains that he never collaborated with the government then and, in 2000, a special court cleared him of any wrongdoing. (The Polish government still prosecutes Communist-era crimes.)

But the specifics of the documents claim to show new evidence that would link Walesa to actual work for the government from 1970 until 1976.

“Among the documents in the file there are also handwritten and signed with the nickname ‘Bolek,’ confirmations of receipt of money,” a press release read from the Institute of National Remembrance, which is holding the papers.

The file reportedly contains an unsent letter written by Kiszczak in 1996 that was meant to accompany the documents. The institute added that an expert has vouched for the papers’ authenticity; Kiszczak’s widow was said to having been working to sell the documents before they were seized.

Nevertheless, the timing and circumstances of these latest accusations are not without their curiosities. As NBC notes, the institute holding the documents has ties to Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, which Walesa recently accused of anti-democratic behavior following their electoral win in October.

Just earlier this week, Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s deputy prime minister, accused Walesa of collaborating with the Soviets. “Walesa has an agent’s past, of course he does. For the last 27 years I not only suspected this, but was almost sure.”

On Thursday, Walesa denied the allegations and claimed that the incriminating documents were forged. (Communist-era security services were also notorious for forging documents.) He pledged to fight the charges in a court of law.

Walesa became a hero in the 1970s and 1980s by striking for workers’ rights and galvanizing independent trade unions in Poland, which was under repressive Soviet control. Given that these documents seem to pre-date these efforts, it’s unclear how the allegations, if true, would affect his legacy.