Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 229

Is Creative Television Bad for Business?

On Wednesday news broke that ABC’s entertainment president, Paul Lee, had been ousted in a power struggle with higher-ups at Disney. The reasons are clear enough: Out of the “Big Four” TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX), ABC’s ratings have dipped to the bottom of the pack. But the larger ramifications are more complex, and disheartening. During his tenure, Lee shepherded much of the network’s recent explosion of acclaimed programming, encouraging a slate of shows that were original and inclusive. The result was that ABC lost advertising dollars and Lee lost his job. As network television seeks to define itself in a world increasingly glutted with online rivals, his departure is an ominous sign.

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Lee’s successor is Channing Dungey, a veteran at the network who reportedly has a close relationship with its biggest creative personality, Shonda Rhimes. She’ll be the first African American woman to run a television network—an exciting milestone that fits with ABC’s recent focus on underserved demographics in the TV-viewing audience. Since the success of Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy in 2005, ABC has haltingly moved towards a strategy that embraces women and viewers of color, with Lee in particular encouraging that trend.

Some of ABC’s problems are not of Lee’s making. Unlike CBS, NBC, and Fox, the network doesn’t show any NFL games, which are a huge ratings booster and revenue generator since the sport is actually watched live. (ESPN, another Disney property, took the NFL from ABC in 2006.) But according to The New York Times report on his resignation, Disney executives were unhappy with Lee’s focus on prestige programming that got better reviews than ratings. Ben Sherwood, the chairman of the Disney-ABC Television Group, reportedly “wanted ABC to focus more on CBS-style procedural crime series like NCIS, while Mr. Lee continued to back serialized dramas like Scandal and American Crime.”

It’s hard to know what part Dungey will play in this vision, since she herself helped bring shows like Scandal (created by Shonda Rhimes) and American Crime (an anthology series created by the Oscar-winning screenwriter John Ridley) to fruition. Other shows that became ABC hits under Lee’s tenure were How to Get Away With Murder, a Rhimes-produced serial drama that won an Emmy for Viola Davis in its first season; Black-ish, a celebrated sitcom about an African American family; Fresh off the Boat, a similarly acclaimed Asian American comedy; and Quantico, a twisty FBI thriller starring the Indian actress Priyanka Chopra.

While all these shows get solid ratings, they can’t hold a candle to the monster hits CBS has in its NCIS, CSI, and Criminal Minds families—dependable crime procedurals that new viewers can easily jump right into. CBS’s shows tend to skew much older, while ABC does better in the youthful demographics favored by advertisers. But even ABC’s biggest hits (like the long-running sitcom Modern Family) can’t emulate the success of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, which remains network television’s most-watched show.

The idea that ABC could leapfrog CBS, a decades-long ratings powerhouse, is ludicrous, but The Times’ reporting seems to confirm that Disney might look to back away from the risk-taking that made Lee’s tenure so interesting. American Crime was never going to be for everyone, but it’s fresh and challenging for network television, and won awards when pitted against the biggest prestige miniseries projects from premium networks like HBO and FX.

Two shows produced with ABC’s corporate partner Marvel (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter) haven’t quite been the smash hits Disney hoped for, but have evolved into cult favorites with serious staying power. Lee, an Oxford-educated Brit, was often very upfront about his particular tastes, defending the reviled (and quickly-canceled) men-in-drag comedy Work It as something that appealed to his sensibilities, and keeping the odd (and little-watched) medieval musical spoof Galavant on the air for two seasons, surprising even that show’s creators.

Still, his choices worked more often than they didn’t, and Lee’s wise move (with his team of smart lieutenants, including Dungey) to double down on talented showrunners like Rhimes and seek out audiences of color with shows like Black-ish and Fresh off the Boat made ABC stand out. Network TV is littered with dull procedural crime dramas; in recent years, ABC has dared to be interesting. Time will tell if that’s a model networks can still embrace.

Donald Trump's Specious Claims About Torture

No one, or almost no one, is willing to say they support torture outright. The people who will defend its use often employ one or both of two strategies: Either they argue that the techniques they encourage aren’t really torture, or they argue that torture is generally bad but it’s necessary in certain, dire circumstances.

Donald Trump is, as on so many topics, an outlier. Here’s what he said on Wednesday:

Torture works. OK, folks? You know, I have these guys—“Torture doesn't work!”—believe me, it works. And waterboarding is your minor form. Some people say it's not actually torture. Let's assume it is. But they asked me the question: What do you think of waterboarding? Absolutely fine. But we should go much stronger than waterboarding. That's the way I feel. They're chopping off heads. Believe me, we should go much stronger, because our country's in trouble. We're in danger. We have people that want to do really bad things!

Since Trump is willing to grant that waterboarding is a form of torture, he’s dispensed with the first strategy. But what about the assertion that “torture works”? Aside from the rather menacing “believe me,” Trump offers no evidence to back it up.

This was a major battle during the George W. Bush years and early Obama years. But now there’s a body of evidence as to whether waterboarding was an effective tool: a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s use of it and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Most of the report remains classified, but the executive summary kicks off with this finding:

#1: The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.

Here’s the immediate point after:

#2: The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.

Despite their use against at least 39 detainees, there’s still no evidence that “enhanced interrogation” methods produced information useful to stopping terror attacks, while there’s plenty of evidence that those subject to torture produced false information in the hopes of ending their ordeals. If torture works, wouldn’t torture have worked?

Where is Trump getting this stuff? It’s impossible to know, especially because it’s unclear who, if anyone, is advising Trump on foreign-policy issues. But one reason why the idea that torture is effective remains current is its circulation in pop culture. For example, Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the killing of Osama bin Laden, suggested key intelligence to catching the al-Qaeda leader had been procured via torture. That led acting CIA Director Michael Morrell to write a memo to employees stating otherwise. “The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden," he wrote. "That impression is false."

A common variation on this theme is the “ticking time-bomb” case—another staple of Hollywood representations. But as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf has written, that scenario is a chimera: “No one can cite even a single terrorist attack that has been stopped, or could have been stopped, with torture in this manner. Scour all of history and you come up empty. Little wonder that it's always invoked as a hypothetical, not a cautionary tale. Who can prove it won't ever happen?”

The case against torture is both moral and factual. Trump isn’t just out of the mainstream in boosting torture, though. His position that the barbarism of terrorists demands to be met with barbarism, for barbarism’s sake, is the sort of idea it shouldn’t require a Senate report to reject.

Broad City and the Triumph of the Platonic Rom-Com

In an early scene of the new season of Broad City, premiering this week on Comedy Central, Ilana, carried away by her love for best friend, finds herself making a suggestion that is as awkward as it is totally appropriate. “Let’s get married!” she tells Abbi.

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The two have just had a series of traumatic experiences: Abbi has had a run-in with a runaway porta-potty, and Ilana has gotten stuck, via a magnetized bike chain, to the back of a delivery truck, and they’ve each been totally scared, and ... well, the context doesn’t really matter. What matters is that their near-death experiences, with all their attendant wackiness, filter down to the same thing that every scene in Broad City will come down to, in the end: the intimacy Abbi and Ilana share. And the question of what that intimacy is, definitionally. Best friendship? Definitely, but it’s somehow more than that. Romance? Yes, but it’s somehow less than that. And maybe more, too?

Abbi and Ilana share, basically, what a lot of young women—and young men—share in this age of delayed marriage and emergent adulthood and platonic roommates and geographic peripateticism and economic prosperity and economic uncertainty: a friendship that occupies the psychic space that used to be devoted to spouses and children. While the marriage plot may still, dissolved and distended, drive many of Hollywood’s cultural products, Broad City reflects friendship’s age-old, but also new, reality: The show is suggesting that its heroines are already, effectively, married. To each other.

Abbi and Ilana spend most of their free time together. They are dedicated to each other, wholly. They love each other, passionately—often illogically. (Ilana, playing the part of the Bumbling Husband, gives Abbi many reasons to be upset with her—reasons the patient, nurturing Abbi generally ignores.) They accept each other’s faults, and embrace them. They are soul mates. They are life partners. “We are very upwardly mobile right now,” Ilana informs Abbi in the new season. “Seriously: Very Jay and Bey.”

Abbi and Ilana are each other’s Happily Ever After.

The women’s partnership, crucially, is not merely a matter of social circumstance; they aren’t simply keeping each other company until their respective dudes carry them along to their Happily Ever After. They are each other’s Happily Ever After. The pair, as Ann Friedman put it, are “more obsessed with each other than they are with men.” They are very probably the loves of each other’s lives.

Which is also to say that Abbi and Ilana are co-stars in a rom-com that is rom-y in every way but the most basic. That they don’t sleep together is, in their world, very much beside the point. The broads of Broad City are straight, for the most part (though “sexuality exists on a continuum!” Ilana points out during the new season). They sleep (or, often, try to sleep) with guys. Ilana has a boyfriend, kinda. Abbi is looking for a boyfriend, kinda. All that is B-plot. The guys (and, occasionally, girls) here fill the traditional rom-comic role of “the best friend,” ranging from the boring-but-supportive to the wacky: They’re around, but that’s pretty much all they are.

Instead, the women’s mental and emotional energies—and those of the show that contains them—are focused on each other. There Abbi is, to help Ilana remove the 12-pound bike chain whose key she has lost and that she’s had belted around her all day. There is Ilana, to soothe Abbi (“Yankee Candle Store, Vanilla Bean; B, B, and B, right when it opens”) after the competitive streak in Abbi streaks a little too hard. (“How DARE you lie to your wife!” Ilana says, when Abbi initially demurs about her participation in Soulstice’s pseudo-Olympics. “I hear your teeth grinding through the phone! You’re at a competitive event, aren’t you?”) There they are, as they always are, to stop everything and help each other out. Their lives revolve around each other. So much so that Ilana’s pseudo-proposal to Abbi after their brushes with tragicomic deaths comes across as not only fitting, but fated.

Matrimonormalism is out; friendship—and all its possibilities—is in.

Which makes Broad City, on the one hand, yet more evidence that we are living, as The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg put it, in “a golden age of female friendship.” Recent culture is rife with encouraging examples of female friends, from the BFF to the sorta-frenemy: Leslie and Ann (and Donna and April) on Parks and Recreation, Meredith and Cristina on Grey’s Anatomy, Alicia and Lucca on The Good Wife, the women of Bridesmaids and Mad Max: Fury Road and Girls and Orange Is the New Black.

But Broad City does more than simply portray—more even than simply celebrate—its central friendship. It is instead taking a cue from a culture in which Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joke (and also totally don’t joke) about their status as “life partners.” In which Amy Schumer talks about her friendship with Jennifer Lawrence—and does it using the normally-reserved-for-romance language of fate. (“I believe people come into each other’s lives when they need them,” she explained to The Hollywood Reporter, “and Jen and I just kind of like clung to each other, like this is happening for a reason.”) In which celebrity best friends function as power couples, and in which Grammys performers sing duets with their “new friends,” and in which #squadgoals has proved, as hashtags go, to be surprisingly enduring.

It’s a culture, too, that is increasingly ambivalent about marriage as its own kind of #squadgoal. Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own—Kate Bolick’s book-length follow-up to her article “All the Single Ladies”—emphasizes the promise of a post-marriage world. Rebecca Traister’s upcoming book (title: All the Single Ladies) promises to do the same. As far as Hollywood goes, even the shows that purport to be the definitive new rom-coms involve narratives that either reject or ironize the marriage plot. Married offers matrimonial realtalk. Togetherness offers the same. You’re the Worst plays up the “o no” in “monogamy.” Master of None questions whether marriage is an “outdated institution.” So transformed have the traditional norms become that New York magazine recently claimed that the old, aspirational standby—marriage and two kids—has become “a most scandalous fantasy.” Matrimonormalism is out; friendship—and all its possibilities—is in.

Broad City is the product of a culture that is not only recognizing the primacy of friendship, but trying to institutionalize it.

What that amounts to is a culture that is not only recognizing the primacy of friendship, but trying to carve a space for it. A culture that is trying to turn deep, passionate friendship—best friendship, platonic life partnership of the Fey-Poehler and Broad City vein—into its own kind of category. And its own kind of institution. The subtitle of Spinster may be “Making a Life of One’s Own,” but the book focuses, tellingly, on community: the love and support that women can provide each other outside of marriage—via, yes, deep friendship.

There is a nice cyclicality to all that. In the 16th century, Marilyn Yalom and Theresa Donovan Brown write in their book The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship, “it was understood that a woman could share the same soul with her best friend, but rarely, if ever, with her husband.” And in 17th-century France and England—a practice carried on into the 19th—women wrote odes to each other, lavished attention on each other, and generally carved out a space for friendship that was independent of their duties to their husbands and children.

While, today, friendship has been at least partially relegated to secondary status—as Tara Parker-Pope pointed out in The New York Times, even sociologists and psychologists tend to downplay its effects in favor of those of romantic love—female friendship is also, Yalom and Donovan Brown argue, on the rise. As Emily Rapp put it a few years ago:

Here’s the truth: Friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, “bonus” relationships to the truly important ones. Women’s friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and sometimes children.

Broad City reflects that. So do a handful of other shows—most of them, tellingly, created by women. Girls, an Atlantic roundtable noted, argues that “friendships are more dramatic than romances.” The pilot for the USA comedy Playing House—a show, Julie Beck wrote, that “understands that many women’s most important relationships are platonic”—ends with a classic “one chases the other on the way to the airport” trope. Those shows are following, as Broad City is, in a long tradition—a path paved by Mary and Rhoda and Laverne and Shirley and Thelma and Louise—but they’re also building on it. They’re normalizing it.

The friendships, here, aren’t competing with romantic relationships. They’re not treated as “ancillary.” Nor are they making, à la Thelma and Louise, subversively feminist statements. Instead: They just are. “Let’s get married!” Ilana says to Abbi, and it’s awkward but also it’s not at all. And that in itself is subversive. Broad City, a show whose plots revolve around weed and booze and sex—the show whose third season intro explores the many creative and disgusting uses of an apartment’s bathroom—has one core theme. It is that love conquers all.

Rom-coms were triumphant for centuries because they reflected ideas their respective societies held dear—among them the notion that romance was a primary goal of life.

The rom-com is on the one hand an extremely silly genre, full of fluff and goo and thirst. But it is also a genre that, in its roundabout way, is revealing: It pays homage to what a culture most cares about. Rom-coms—heteronormative, matrimonormative, whatever else you want to call them—were triumphant for centuries because they reflected ideas their respective societies held dear: that romance was a primary, and empowering, goal of life. That idea lives on, to be sure, if Nielsen ratings for The Bachelor are any indication—but it has also broadened, and loosened. Friendship, so long relegated to second-class status as a category of relationship, is reclaiming its place—as a social institution, and as a pursuit worthy of human time and attention and love.

The new episodes of Broad City, with all their talk of marriage, suggest that the show will keep asking what Abbi and Ilana are to each other; they also suggest, however, that the definition doesn’t much matter in the end. That the line between the romantic and the platonic, in a culture that celebrates fluidity and flexibility and the phrase “cultural construct,” is a thin one. That if love conquers all, definitions that would try to constrain it must be counted among the vanquished. The root of the word “friendship,” after all, is “pri-.” Which doesn’t mean “secondary” or “pragmatic” or “while you wait for the real thing to come along.” It means, simply, “love.”

Iran’s Response to a Freeze on Oil Production

Over the past year and a half, oil prices have dropped nearly 70 percent amid a supply glut. Global markets are distressed and the economies of oil-exporting countries are shrinking. The impact of cheap oil is so profound that a generation of younger Saudis may have to work for a living.

On Tuesday, a quartet of major oil producers—Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Qatar—proposed an agreement to limit the global supply by reining in production. The announcement is significant because it’s the first time in more than a decade that members of OPEC, the oil-producers’ cartel—Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Qatar—and a major non-member—Russia—agreed to curb production. The only catch: Other major oil-exporting states have to agree.

The plan had early skeptics, including those who believe the parties involved would cheat on the deal anyway. But just hours after the proposal made headlines, Mehdi Asali, the OPEC envoy for Iran, which possesses the fourth-largest proven oil reserves, dismissed the plan as “illogical.”

“[W]hen Iran was under sanctions, some countries raised their output and they caused the drop in oil prices,” he told a local paper. “How can they expect Iran to co-operate now and pay the price?”

Wide-reaching international sanctions were enacted against Iran in 2012 in response to its nuclear ambitions. The country’s capacity to export oil in recent years was severely limited, which in turn, crippled its economy.

Iran’s Oil Production



Reuters

With sanctions relief from last year’s nuclear deal having gone into effect last month, the Islamic Republic is now seeking to return to its pre-2012 production levels.  

As Reuters noted, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh was absent from meetings that produced the proposal and is now being courted in Tehran by his counterparts from the quartet. On Wednesday, Zanganeh said Iran would welcome a production freeze, but would not commit to curbing his country’s output.

It is unclear what impact a production cut would have. Indeed, even the plan announced the quarter would curb production to levels of oil produced in January. But for months now, it has been evident that the market is oversupplied with oil—part of the reason for the oil-price plunge. As recently as 2008, the price of oil was $147 per barrel. It is now hovering at around $30.

Meanwhile, Iran’s neighbor Iraq also appears to be a potential holdout in the agreement. Those who wish to see a production freeze may be in for a crude awakening.

Art for Instagram’s Sake

In November 2015, after two years closed for extensive renovations, the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery marked its reopening with an immersive exhibition called “Wonder.” The title is no misnomer: In the Renwick’s grand 1859 building across the street from the White House, nine artists have created site-specific installations designed to spark feelings of awe, joy, and delight. In one room, thousands of notecards pile up like paper mountains; in another, woven nest-like pods made of twigs swirl upward. Over the grand staircase a dazzling, algorithm-driven light display falls from the ceiling, its countless LED lights twinkling in changing sequences as visitors come and go.

Meanwhile, throughout the museum’s galleries, hundreds of guests pose for pictures, snap selfies, and stare at their phones, meticulously choosing filters to best highlight the vibrant colors and textures of the art before them.

Exhibitions like “Wonder”—which drew more visitors in six weeks than the Renwick had previously hosted in one year—are on the rise, as institutions seek to capitalize on the promotional power of social media. Increasingly, shows feature big, bold, spectacular works that translate into showy Instagram pictures or Snap stories, allowing art to wow people who might otherwise rarely set foot inside museums. But the trend toward accessibility has its critics, who wonder whether the sensationalist works being exhibited are worthy of all the attention, not to mention whether the smartphone photography is getting in the way of people looking and thinking about the art in front of them.

Nicholas R. Bell, the curator of “Wonder,” disagrees with the idea that there’s a “proper” way to experience art, or that large-scale installations are somehow inferior. “Have we not clamored for spectacle for thousands of years?” he says. “People like large things that overpower them in some way. I think it’s part of human nature.”

A photo posted by JB_Bridgeman (@jb_bridgeman) on Feb 15, 2016 at 10:58am PST

Over the last few years, a number of immersive exhibitions have drawn huge crowds, in large part thanks to their social-media potential. In 2012, “Rain Room” debuted in London at the Barbican Center, offering visitors the chance to walk though a space filled with falling water while miraculously staying dry (the installation’s sensors shut off flow when they detect bodies below them). The show prompted unprecedented lines during a later run at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and is now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it’s completely sold out.

A photo posted by LOREN with an O. (@lorenpiretra) on Feb 16, 2016 at 4:21pm PST

Last summer, the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. installed a huge ball pit for adults called “The Beach” in its central atrium, inspiring thousands of playful pictures. A 2015 exhibition in Tokyo, “Floating Flower Garden,” enabled visitors to walk unencumbered through a hanging garden, where the flowers rose as they approached. At the newly opened Broad Museum in Los Angeles, visitors with pre-timed tickets can spend 45 seconds alone in Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room,” a mirror-lined space filled with an array of twinkling LED lights. It was previously at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York, where visitors spent hours in line in order to contemplate the room for a brief moment. The installation elicits feelings of serenity and intimacy with the universe—and, according to The New York Times, “makes for the ultimate selfie.”

A photo posted by Chika

Killer Mike Inflames the Democrats' Intergenerational Struggle

There comes a time in every campaign when a surrogate causes a headache for a candidate. That’s no less true when the surrogate is a beloved MC.

Killer Mike, the rapper who has been one of Bernie Sanders’s most high-profile backers, was speaking at Morehouse College in his hometown of Atlanta Tuesday night when he said … well, that’s part of the question. On Twitter, his remarks were first reported as this, presumably a swipe at Hillary Clinton: “A uterus doesn’t qualify you to be president of the United States.”

If that were the full comment, there’d be no question that it was an outrageously sexist remark. But that’s actually only a part of what he said. Here’s the full quote:

When people tell us, “hold on, wait a while”—and that’s what the other Democrat is telling you—“Hold on, Black Lives Matter, just wait a while. Hold on, young people in this country, just wait a while.” And then she get good, she have your own momma come to you, your momma sit down and say, “Well you’re a woman.” But I talked to Jane Elliott a few weeks ago, and Jane said, “Michael, a uterus doesn't qualify you to be president of the United States. You have to have policies that's reflective of social justice.”

(As Emily Crockett explains for Vox, Elliott is an activist he’s cited before.)

The backlash to Killer Mike’s comments was quick, with many people accusing him of sexism. It has continued into Tuesday, with condemnations from groups like NARAL Pro-Choice America, which has endorsed Clinton. It also brought new scrutiny for Killer Mike’s lyrics. He fired back on Twitter:

But I didn't say that a progressive activist woman said to me RT @elielcruz: C'mon mike this sexism isn't cute https://t.co/bVfaALfz0b

— Killer Mike (@KillerMike) February 17, 2016

So Women are being told to not vote Hillary is sex betrayal & Becuz another progressive woman says something disagreeing I'm sexist. Lmfao

— Killer Mike (@KillerMike) February 17, 2016

What is there to say here? First, the full context is important, and it does put the comments in a different light. This isn’t so simple as Killer Mike making a straightforwardly sexist remark that a woman can’t be president. Parsing Elliott’s quote, as conveyed here, it seems likely that what she really meant was that having a uterus alone is not qualification enough to be president.

Does that really get him off the hook, though? Killer Mike is relying on a classic tactic deployed by people who have committed a verbal gaffe: I didn’t say it, I was just quoting So-and-so. It’s not a very compelling retort. It doesn’t matter that she’s a “progressive activist woman,” a defense that seems a lot like the sort of tokenism that Killer Mike was criticizing. Jane Elliott can and does speak for herself. He chose to repeat what she said, and he was doing so to undermine Clinton’s case for the Democratic nomination. Repeating it was a particularly questionable choice since the remark (at least as he conveyed it) was inartful, scanning as a suggestion that a woman isn’t qualified to be president.

The more interesting part of Killer Mike’s argument is the implied charge: By emphasizing the historic nature of her candidacy, are Clinton’s supporters asking social-justice causes besides sexism—racism, generational disadvantages, income inequality—to take a back seat? That’s a question about which reasonable progressives can, and do, disagree. The Sanders and Clinton campaigns are in a fierce battle to win over black voters, and each have made missteps. In the last few days alone, Bill Clinton offered the cringe-inducing comment that “we are all mixed-race people,” while Sanders irked black voters who thought he was dismissive of racial concerns at an event in Charleston, South Carolina. Those struggles with African Americans are one reason Killer Mike was speaking at Morehouse, a historically black college. After a very rough start with black activists who were frustrated that Sanders elevated class concerns over race, the senator has moved quickly but not flawlessly to correct course.

Killer Mike’s remarks are a mirror of controversial comments made by Clinton surrogates Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem earlier this month. Steinem accused women who back Sanders of doing so to get boys, for which she mostly apologized. Albright repeated a line she’s used many times, saying, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” She, too, apologized, and said she did not mean to argue that women were obligated to vote for Clinton.

One lesson here is that candidates have to be very careful about choosing surrogates and preparing them. The Democratic race has become a battleground over identity politics and their intersectionality, and while the candidates themselves have largely avoided the most dangerous potholes, those speaking for them keep wandering off course and delivering blunt lines where subtlety is required.

But the comments by these two elder stateswomen reflect a division, noted by The New York Times, between younger and older women over Clinton. For older women, the Clinton candidacy and the prospect of a female president feels like a monumental moment. For younger ones, however, who have grown up with women in positions of power—women like, say, Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright—there’s less novelty.

The generational question here is not so much one about whether—to borrow Killer Mike’s metaphor—young people and minorities are being asked to wait in line behind women, and it’s certainly not one about whether having a uterus qualifies someone to be president. The disagreement is over whether women are in line or already in the building.

Another Terrorist Attack in Turkey

Updated on February 17 at 2:46 p.m. ET

An explosion in the Turkish capital, Ankara, has killed at least 28 people and wounded dozens of others, according to multiple outlets. CNN Türk reported the rush-hour explosion occurred near military buildings in the city.

Mehmet Kılıçdar, Ankara’s governor, said the attack was carried out by a car bomb. It’s unclear how many of those killed were members of the military.

“We are looking into details of the explosion,” Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said prior to canceling a scheduled trip to Belgium.

Photos and videos posted on social media showed plumes of smoke in the area in the aftermath of the incident. Turkey has been targeted repeatedly in recent months; in January, a suicide bomber killed 10 people in Istanbul.

Following Wednesday’s episode, the Turkish government placed a media blackout that would prohibit the publication of images of the scene. Turkish officials later confirmed that military vehicles had been targeted at a stoplight and condemned the attack as “contemptible and dastardly.”

Turkey, which borders Syria, is bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis sparked by that country’s civil war. In recent days, Turkey, along with Saudi Arabia, had been lobbying for a ground invasion of Syria as prospects for a cease-fire dim.

Although no one has yet claimed responsibility, suspicion immediately fell on two groups: ISIS, which controls territory across Iraq and Syria; and the PKK, the Kurdish separatist group Turkey regards as a terrorist organization. Indeed, Sky News quoted a Turkish security official as saying initial signs indicate the PKK was behind the attack. Turkey blamed ISIS for last month’s attack in Istanbul.

This is a developing story and we’ll update it when we learn more.

Apple vs. the FBI

Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company will fight an order that instructs it to provide “reasonable technical assistance” to unlock an iPhone that belonged to one of the San Bernardino attackers.

In a letter to Apple’s customers, Cook writes that opposing the “order is not something we take lightly … [but] we feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government.”

At issue is a court order issued Tuesday by Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California ordering Apple to, in the words of The Associated Press, “supply highly specialized software the FBI can load onto the phone to cripple a security encryption feature that erases data after too many unsuccessful unlocking attempts.” Wired adds that Apple’s compliance would allow the FBI to attempt to unlock the phone using multiple password attempts—a method known as bruteforcing. But Apple declined, calling for a public discussion, so its customers and citizens “understand what is at stake.”

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 company has cooperated with the FBI’s investigation into the attack, complied with subpoenas and search warrants in the case, and made Apple engineers available to advise the bureau.

“But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create,” he said. “They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.”

Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

Apple points out that the FBI—rather than seeking congressional legislation—is 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.”

Cook say the government could use order this to demand that the company build surveillance software to intercept customers’ messages, access their health records or financial data, track their location, or even access a phone’s microphone or camera without its owner’s knowledge.

“The implications of the government’s demands are chilling,” Cook writes. “If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data.”

The Senate Awaits Its Doomed Nominee

Updated on February 16, 2016

Within the next few weeks, President Obama will call up one of the nation’s top legal minds and initiate one of the trickier conversations of his presidency. He will offer him or her the honor of a lifetime—an appointment to the Supreme Court—and then he’ll share a caveat they already know: It’s a nomination that’s probably doomed from the start.

Congratulations?

That is one of the many awkward complications of the constitutional confrontation that has erupted in record time following the unexpected death on Saturday of Justice Antonin Scalia. Over the weekend, Senate Republicans up for reelection in 2016 largely fell in line behind Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s declaration that it should be “the next president” who appoints Scalia’s replacement on the high court. Their support dampens Democratic hopes that electoral pressure from Republicans in swing states would force McConnell to give Obama’s nominee a fair hearing and a floor vote in the several months.

The president must now decide what kind of candidate to nominate. A centrist choice who has previously won Republican support and thus would be difficult for GOP senators to oppose? That could point to Sri Srinivasan, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was confirmed by a 97-0 vote just three years ago. Or it might point to another federal appellate judge in D.C., Merrick Garland, who has been singled out by Republicans in the past as the kind of consensus pick they could support.

Yet knowing that Republicans would reject—or more likely, simply ignore—even the most unobjectionable nominee, Obama could go for a more liberal pick like Judges Patricia Ann Millett, who sits on the D.C. Circuit Court, or Paul Watford of the Ninth Circuit. Both would add diversity to the high court and energize the Democratic base (Watford is African American), but both were also opposed by most conservatives when Obama appointed them to their current posts. The same is true of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, another rumored candidate.

It’s also possible that none of these judges would actually want the nomination, realizing that they’d have to subject themselves to what amounts to a public colonoscopy with uncertain prospects of actually being confirmed to serve on the court. That’s why there’s speculation that a senator like Cory Booker of New Jersey or Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota could be Obama’s choice. Republicans might still refuse to confirm either Democrat, but as senators they are accustomed to scrutiny, and it’s more likely that their own colleagues would at least treat them gently on the way to a filibuster.

It’s also possible that none of these judges would actually want the nomination.

At a press conference Tuesday afternoon in California, Obama offered few clues as to which way he was leaning other than to say he would nominate someone who was “indisputably qualified for the seat.” (He refused to take the bait when a reporter surmised from his words that he would go with “a moderate.” “No,” the president replied.) But as expected, Obama forcefully made the case that there was plenty of time for the Senate to consider and vote on a nominee, and he said there was “no unwritten law” that Supreme Court vacancies should only be filled in “off years.”

“The Constitution is pretty clear on what should happen now,” the president said. “Historically, this has not been viewed as a question.” He said this debate was merely an extension of years worth of Senate slow-walking on judicial nominations to lower courts. “We’ve almost gotten accustomed to how obstructionist the Senate has become when it comes to nominations,” Obama said. He noted that the battles over judges often drew little notice outside the Beltway, but in a warning to Republicans, he promised this would be different: “This is the Supreme Court. It’s going to get some attention.”

While Obama deliberated, the Senate descended into rather predictable charges of hypocrisy. Democrats accused McConnell and other top Republicans of disrespecting the president and willfully flouting their constitutional responsibility to provide “advice and consent” on a judicial nomination. “If my Republican colleagues proceed down this reckless path, they should know that this act alone will define their time in the majority,” Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, wrote in the Washington Post.

Thinking otherwise is fantasy. If Republicans proceed, they will ensure that this Republican majority is remembered as the most nakedly partisan, obstructionist and irresponsible majority in history. All other impressions will be instantly and irretrievably swept away.

Republicans have tried to suggest there is “an 80-year precedent” of the Senate not confirming Supreme Court nominees in an election year. In turn, Democrats point to the 98-0 vote installing Anthony Kennedy as an associate justice in 1988, in Ronald Reagan’s final year in office. But Republicans note that the vacancy that Kennedy filled actually occurred in the middle of 1987 and that the only reason a Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed him was that Reagan's previous two nominees—Robert Bork (rejected by the Senate) and Douglas Ginsburg (withdrew)—both failed.

Conservatives have also highlighted a 2007 speech by Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader-in-waiting, who urged his party to block any potential Supreme Court nomination by George W. Bush in the final 18 months of his term. Schumer replied Tuesday in a post on Medium, writing that Republicans were “comparing apples to oranges” and that he was merely suggesting that Democrats “entertain voting no if the nominee [was] out of the mainstream.” He was not calling, he said, for Democrats to reject a Bush choice out of hand without a hearing or a vote.

Obama also faced a question Tuesday about his vote as a senator to sustain a filibuster against Samuel Alito’s nomination to the high court in 2005. The president dodged the question and suggested that he, too, was voting politically; he noted that senators often vote to appease constituencies or for other “strategic reasons,” but he didn’t directly say whether that was his reason for opposing the conservative Alito.

McConnell hasn’t explicitly ruled out allowing Obama’s nominee a hearing or even a vote; his only public statement since Scalia’s death said simply that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” Conservative activists are already mobilizing before Obama makes his pick, however, and they are concerned that GOP opposition will soften if the nominee is obviously qualified, potentially historic, or both. In the days since McConnell made his statement, Republican Senators Rob Portman of Ohio, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania have all backed him up and said Scalia’s replacement should wait until a new president takes office. All four are facing tough reelection battles this year.

Two other centrist Republicans, Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Susan Collins of Maine, issued more equivocal statements on a possible nomination. “In the past we’ve had a problem with certain Republican senators who are a little too eager to seem bipartisan right after a nominee is announced,” said Curt Levey, who as the former president of the Committee for Justice has been battling Supreme Court nominations for more than a decade. The group is now affiliated with FreedomWorks, and they are urging Republican senators to “keep their powder dry” when Obama makes his pick. “Don’t say anything,” he said Tuesday morning, summarizing his advice on a conference call with reporters. “When the time comes to have a vote or not have a vote, fine, but do not at this point talk about how you want to ‘work with the president’ and [say] ‘isn’t it wonderful that we have the first, you know, disabled female black nominee.’”

“In the past we’ve had a problem with certain Republican senators who are a little too eager to seem bipartisan right after a nominee is announced.”

The political strategy from conservatives is to argue against the nomination on process, not substance. Levey said Obama and the Senate “each have a constitutional role here. If the Senate decides that it doesn’t want to act, that’s as much within its constitutional role as Obama naming a nominee.” That decision could have ramifications in 2017 if a Democrat wins the presidency. A nominee who gets roughed up by Republicans now could be eliminated as a possible choice by Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, who might not want to begin their terms with a difficult confirmation battle. But if conservatives stick to the procedural argument, then whoever Obama picks might become the frontrunner next year, almost a second running-mate for the Democratic nominee. And it could get more complicated still: Should Democrats win the Senate, Clinton or Sanders would be tempted to pick an even more liberal nominee, consigning Obama’s doomed selection to a footnote in history.

All of which will likely make an awkward few months for whoever the president picks. “It’s an honor just to be nominated” might be an Oscar-season cliché. But this year it might sound most genuine coming from a distinguished federal judge.

The New Yorker Presents: Quirky, Eclectic, Fascinating

The kind of dramatic whiplash offered by The New Yorker Presents is rare indeed among television shows. The new Amazon series, an anthology of half-hour episodes made up of smaller vignettes, covers the broad range of topics you might encounter in any one issue of the storied magazine, from a chilling documentary on a police shooting of a homeless man in Albuquerque to more whimsical humor pieces starring Alan Cumming or Paul Giamatti, all delivered in a necessarily breezy tone that avoids an air of self-importance. The result is a mixed bag, but one that—like the magazine—offers the opportunity to pick and choose as you go.

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In that, the show seems well suited to Amazon’s bulk-release strategy, and as with many streaming series released in their entirety, it’s good to go into The New Yorker Presents knowing that it starts a little slow. The first episode includes an interview with the performance artist Marina Abramović that only skims the surface of her rich (and controversial) body of work. That’s followed by a humor piece, scripted by Simon Rich (a New Yorker contributor and the creator of the TV show Man Seeking Woman), that has an intriguing cast (Cumming as God, speaking to a demented man played by Brett Gelman) but provokes only mild chuckles. The New Yorker’s humor isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, of course, but its profiles usually go much deeper, making the half-hour format feel somewhat limiting.

But the main news piece of the first episode—about the UC Berkeley biologist Tyrone Hayes and his investigation into the effects of pesticides on amphibian ecosystems—feels much more thoughtful and fully realized. Fortunately, every episode has something as weighty and well-reported as this piece: segments that unpack complex topics in intense detail. The piece about the aforementioned police shooting in Albuquerque is sober and powerful, and an illustrated essay (basically an animated short) about black migration in the U.S. is more impressionistic but equally affecting. Other comedic material, like an interview with the father of the legendary Times Square performer Naked Cowboy, has a personal touch that’s missing from talks with more famous figures.

The show has some self-awareness about its lurches in tone. One episode begins with a look into the magazine’s story meeting, headed by the editor-in-chief David Remnick. The ideas pitched are all fascinating, but the subjects range from criminal justice and prison reform in the United States to environmental curiosities in Antarctica. It’s a reminder that the magazine’s variety is part of the fun, even if it doesn’t always make for compelling television. At times, episodes seem to aim for more thematic clarity—one focuses on food—but even this additional organization doesn’t offer a total fix.

For all its foibles, The New Yorker Presents is distinguished by feeling totally original. The glut of streaming shows on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon so often strive to replicate what’s previously succeeded on TV—crime shows, superhero shows, antihero shows, and “prestige dramas” with lots of nudity and violence. But the medium is primed for experimentation more than anything else: Not every show has to be (or should be) a serialized work that requires the viewer to binge every episode back-to-back to get the full experience.

This is perhaps the best context in which to appreciate a show like this one. Its hand-drawn cartoon sequences and brief vignettes in the magazine’s offices lend it specificity and character, and keep it from simply being a collection of short documentaries. And its highs are investigative journalism at its very best, work that’s strong enough to justify future seasons (perhaps produced with a little more thematic focus). If viewers stumble upon a segment that lags—well, that’s what the fast-forward button is for.