Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 235

The Defiant Holdouts of the Oregon Occupation

Just two weeks ago, it looked like the standoff at Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was nearly over. Eight of the armed occupiers who’d seized the federal property had been arrested, and one had been shot and killed. Militia leader Ammon Bundy, one of those arrested, had called for the occupiers to disperse. Only four were left, and they were surrounded.

On Tuesday, day 39 of the occupation, stalemate is back. And with Cliven Bundy possibly on his way to Oregon, it’s hard to imagine tensions will get lower any time soon.

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Cliven Bundy is the patriarch of the family of anti-federal-government crusaders who became nationally famous when he got into a standoff of his own in Nevada in 2014. Federal Bureau of Land Management officials planned to move in and round up Bundy’s cattle, which had been grazing on federal land though he’d refused to pay $1 million in grazing fees. They were met by armed men determined to stop them.

It’s not clear whether Cliven Bundy is actually going to Oregon. Michele Fiore, the Nevada state assemblywoman who has close ties to the movement against federal control, told Oregon Public Broadcasting the senior Bundy was traveling to Oregon with her. Bundy himself told the Las Vegas Review-Journal he hadn’t decided.

Whether or not he shows up, Cliven Bundy’s looming presence illuminates some things about the standoff as it exists today. As I noted early on, Ammon Bundy and his brother Ryan, who were at the heart of the Oregon standoff, had learned some lessons from their father’s turbulent fight in Nevada. Despite being in clear and flagrant violation of the law during that Nevada standoff, Cliven Bundy had initially gained support from many national conservatives. But once he started offering racist soundbites, they abandoned him. Ammon Bundy was careful not do the same, with message for the most part carefully controlled.

But what Ammon Bundy was attempting was more audacious. He wasn’t just trying, like his father, to prevent federal agents from seizing his cattle on a remote ranch. He mounted an armed takeover of a federal wildlife center, complete with federal computers and federal vehicles, and demanded that Washington relinquish it. He did that in a state in which he didn’t live, against the will of the local community. Since his arrest, Ammon Bundy has called on the four people remaining at the refuge to surrender. They have refused to do so, demanding that the FBI agree to let them leave without pressing charges. In a series of videos over the past few days, the holdouts have steadily escalated their rhetoric while refusing to back down. They’re now espousing a kind of Fusion Bundyism, incorporating elements of both generations.

Cliven Bundy, unlike his son, has encouraged the remaining occupiers to stay put—though he appeared ambivalent about the takeover when it first occurred. In a video released Sunday, David Fry, a 27-year-old Ohioan, says the FBI has told him the remaining gang will face additional charges for “fortifying” the site, which he identifies in the video as “Camp Finicum,” after LaVoy Finicum, the man shot and killed by police in January. Fry brags about using government vehicles (incorrectly identifying a Chevy HHR as a PT Cruiser), and then gets into a pickup truck. “I want the FBI to see this, y’know, because this is how I want to say, ‘Screw you. Piss off your little charges.’ It’s a U.S. government vehicle. You see that? It’s a U.S. government vehicle! I think I’m gonna to take it on a joy ride,” Fry says, getting increasingly agitated. “Now you got another charge on me, FBI! I am driving your vehicle!” (There’s some profanity in the video.)

Fry and others remain upset about Finicum’s death. His funeral in Utah drew fellow travelers from hours around, but it remained peaceful. But the Bundy gang’s supporters continue to argue that Finicum was shot with hands up. That’s hard to square with a video released by the FBI, which shows Finicum reaching for his jacket pocket before being shot; police said he had a loaded gun in the pocket. Shawna Cox, one of those arrested when Finicum was shot, also told The Oregonian that Finicum was “running away from the vehicle, screaming, ‘Shoot me, shoot me, shoot me.’” (Cox also accused law enforcement of murdering the man.)

Given that they are a tiny group, besieged by federal officers, called on to quit by their erstwhile leader, and hated by the local community, the impetuousness of the remaining four seems even more delusional than it did in the early days, if that’s possible. Is there anything to suggest the feds are close to their breaking point, and will simply give up and allow the occupation to keep the “Harney County Resource Center,” as they call it? But, this, too, might reflect the influence of Cliven Bundy. Bundy pere stood up to the BLM in Nevada, and he won: The BLM left, and Bundy still hasn’t paid his fees.

Federal officials have been understandably reluctant to head into Malheur with guns blazing, unwilling to risk a replay of Waco or Ruby Ridge, and they now seem content to wait out a siege on Malheur, especially with just the small, beleaguered remnant in place. Still, it’s hard not to wonder how much Cliven Bundy’s triumph in Nevada encouraged his sons and their supporters, creating an expectation that the federal government would easily roll over when challenged by a group of outlaws with guns.

Why the NBA Loves—and Fears—Stephen Curry

The Golden State Warriors are now some 15 months in to their turn as one of the best teams in basketball history. Last season, they won 67 games, the most in the NBA in eight years, and secured a championship in June against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. This season’s Warriors make last season’s Warriors look like a team that hadn’t yet gotten loose. They started the year winning their first 24 games in a row, a record opening, and as of now have won 46 of 50.

Golden State’s brilliance is more than just statistical. The Warriors are a basketball idyll, a paradise of skill and collaboration. Their offense runs on nifty ballhandling, willing passing, and sublime shooting, with their point guard and reigning NBA Most Valuable Player acting as ringleader. A slim 6’3” and 185 pounds, with a bouncy jog and a barely post-pubescent tuft of beard at his chin, Stephen Curry dribbles with the intentional abandon of a card hustler, flings one-handed passes to all sectors of the court, and shoots better than anyone ever has.

It’s something of a curiosity, then, that one title Curry cannot claim without argument is that of the world’s best player. Figures within the NBA and observers of the league alike are hesitant to dethrone James, who has held the unofficial honor for a decade. If this may be ascribed in part to inertia, it also reflects a lingering suspicion of what Curry represents. He and the graceful, jump-shooting Warriors diverge from the brawny historical models of great players and teams, and there’s the sense among some in the sport’s establishment that they have not so much mastered the game as solved it, bringing about a basketball revolution that is not wholly welcome.

* * *

Fans had spent all of January 25 looking forward to the season’s first game between the Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs. It wasn’t only a meeting of the two best teams in the league, but also a clash of methods. Compared with the Warriors’ blink-quick pace and intricate patterns, the Spurs’ tactics seem almost hokey; they play forbidding defense and generally prefer the short jumper to the long one. For Golden State, it was the latest in an endless series of tests, and for the viewing public, it was appointment television.

Curry took his first shot from a spot closer to the Warriors’ center-court logo than to the three-point line, nearly 30 feet from the rim. It dropped cleanly, proving something of a thesis statement for the evening. Curry spent the next three quarters—the Golden State lead grew so large that he sat out the fourth—evading San Antonio’s defense in every way imaginable, skipping down the lane for one-handed layups or popping into open space for jumpers. What was predicted to be one of the season’s best and closest contests ended up like so many other Warriors games have this season: as little more than a demonstration of the Curry phenomenon. He scored 37 points in 28 minutes that night, but more to the point, he inverted the odds of the game, making the most difficult shots look like the easiest.

Curry has, these days, a folk hero’s following. In Oakland and in arenas across the country, fans arrive early to Warriors games to see his fabled warm-up routine, wherein he dribbles two basketballs at once, whipping them between his legs and behind his back, hits strings of shots from near the midcourt line, and often tosses in one final shot from far out of bounds just before disappearing into the locker room. Curry’s jersey is the NBA’s top seller. He has reached a sphere of celebrity that allowed President Obama, during the Warriors’ recent White House visit, to allude playfully to his and Curry’s golf rivalry.

* * *

Two nights after the Warriors’ victory over the Spurs, ESPN’s NBA Countdown crew was covering the recent firing of Cleveland’s head coach. In discussing LeBron James’s role in the move, Doris Burke, the show’s host, used the accepted honorific: “the best player in the world.” Despite the fact that Curry won last year’s MVP award and the near-assurance that he will do so again this season, Burke’s label didn’t raise any eyebrows. Indeed, James’s continued place atop the basketball world remains a matter of fact to many.

James himself used the phrase last June, when his Cavaliers trailed Curry’s Warriors three games to two in the Finals, saying, “I feel confident because I’m the best player in the world.” Opposing coaches regularly resort to the phrase to drive home the enormity of their task when facing James. Writers at Grantland and the Wall Street Journal have featured it in their opening paragraphs. Considering James’s unprecedented combination of strength, speed, and intelligence—he’s a linebacker-sized Swiss Army Knife—putting him atop basketball’s hierarchy is a defensible position.

To anyone reared on the sport in previous decades, the Warriors seem to play bizarro basketball.

But it’s not so obvious that it doesn’t need defending. Curry, not James, is currently the irreplaceable component of the NBA’s best team and reigning champion. Curry leads the league in Player Efficiency Rating, a catch-all statistic that James once topped for seven seasons in a row. Curry prompted the esteemed Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle to proclaim, “[He] is changing the way the game is going to be played in the future. I’m sure of it. That’s a historic thing.” The prevalent unwillingness to call Curry basketball’s best player, then, seems less like certainty that he isn’t than anxiety that he is.

Like every sport, basketball has recently undergone a statistical overhaul. A new generation of analysts has pored over the game and come to conclusions about the efficacy of certain players and techniques. Their findings have met mixed acceptance from the old guard of coaches and executives, but at least one of their takeaways is now visible every night in the NBA. The three-point shot, for much of its history a novelty or minor part of teams’ strategies, has become an essential component of almost every team’s offensive attack. As recently as 2012, the average team took about 1,200 threes over the course of a season; last year, that number ballooned to over 1,800.

The Warriors fit this environment like Michelangelo fit the Renaissance. They have the best shooting assemblage in the game at their disposal, beginning with, but not limited to, their star. If a defense lapses in its attention to Curry for even a moment, he rises for a shot from most anywhere inside the midcourt line; if he’s marked too carefully, he slips the ball to any one of the handful of shooters stationed across the court.

To anyone reared on the sport in previous decades, the Warriors seem to play bizarro basketball. Their leader is a scrawny trickster, not an imposing high-flyer. They’re more dangerous the further they are from the basket, and they have little use for certain common player types. Their most effective grouping, unofficially and enviously known as “Death Lineup” or “Nuclear Lineup,” features no player taller than 6’7” and achieves a state of delirious ball and player movement that resolves in an open long-range shot almost as a matter of course.

The fear is that the Warriors have disrupted the sport’s equilibrium and capitalized on its design flaws. That they’re forerunners of a slick, soulless future.

Prior to the Warriors’ championship win in June, objections to their style were based on purported strategic pitfalls. Charles Barkley, a former low-post bruiser and current TNT analyst, asserted last season that a jump-shooting team like Golden State would fall short in the rough-and-tumble world of the playoffs, when buckets sometimes have to be gotten by more tenacious means. Since their style has proven itself to be the NBA’s most successful, though, the type of objection has changed. It’s concerned not with the team’s effectiveness but with its effect.

Even after their Finals victory, Barkley sees in Golden State evidence of a league gone soft through a combination of rule changes curbing defensive aggression and finesse-oriented ideologies. “That Bulls team would kill this little team,” he said, referring the 1995-96 Chicago squad led by Michael Jordan that set the record for most wins in a season, a mark the Warriors presently chase. “They would love playing the way the Warriors play. It’s a much easier game now. Could you imagine how many points Michael would average if you couldn’t touch him?” Mark Jackson, Golden State’s former head coach and current ESPN analyst, said, “To a degree, [Curry’s] hurt the game. And what I mean by that is I go into these high-school gyms, I watch these kids, and the first thing they do is run to the 3-point line.”

So Curry and the Warriors are, in certain spheres, less the historical greats that their accomplishments suggest than an opportunistic and homogenizing presence in the basketball landscape. The fear is that they’ve disrupted the sport’s equilibrium and capitalized on its design flaws. That they’re forerunners of a slick, soulless future.

* * *

That perspective makes enough sense on a radio show or in an article. Turn on the Warriors, though, and your skepticism gets tested. You get swept up, especially if you’re watching a Golden State home-game broadcast from the rapturous din of Oracle Arena. A neat little aesthetic trick of the Warriors’ marksmanship is that, no matter what the statistics teach you to expect, the shots still look daunting, and so they still surprise and thrill, all the more in sequences of three and four in a row, with the bench saluting and the crowd roaring and the opposing team looking like it has just tangled with a poltergeist.

In the middle of all this, Curry doesn’t seem anything like an avatar of basketball’s decay. The ball magnetized to his palm, his sneakers moving in odd-angled darts and backpedals, he burrows around the court at the height of his defenders’ stomachs. He gets them stumbling or grasping at air and then lifts off the floor for that atom-pure jumper. It’s magical to watch.

Historically great teams get people thinking in historical terms, so it’s tempting to try to position Curry in basketball’s lineage and to try to discern what he will mean to it going forward. Is he an anomaly or a prototype? Does he expand possibilities or impose a doctrine?

Depending on your perspective and investment, these questions are either interesting or dull, but eventually they become moot. For all the chatter they produce at the periphery, sports eventually turn to the games themselves. And playing, Curry is as captivating a presence as the NBA has seen in a long time. He may not have proven himself as the word’s unquestioned best player yet, but he can make you forget, for a moment, that there are any others.

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Samantha Bee: The Natural Heir to Jon Stewart

For all the talk of Trevor Noah’s middling tenure thus far at The Daily Show, people probably need to stop worrying about Jon Stewart’s legacy. That show itself might be floundering, but Stewart’s legacy is still felt across late night, from Stephen Colbert to Larry Wilmore to John Oliver at HBO. And: Samantha Bee, whose barnstorming debut of her new weekly TBS show Full Frontal on Monday was an acidly funny half-hour that had none of the shakiness typically associated with a new late-night show.

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Full Frontal’s format is less cozy than many a talk show—Bee stands for the entire ride—and it makes her Daily Show-style segments feel all the more blistering. She’s dispensed with the padding that makes most late-night shows interminable, like musical guests, or sit-down interviews with someone shilling a book. Like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, the show is running weekly, to give her and her writers time to focus on well-researched bits and remote pieces. If Monday night’s premiere was anything to go by, that’s a great idea—Bee ripped into three long, topical, planned-out pieces with the kind of furious, witty aplomb we haven’t seen enough of on television since Jon Stewart rode out into the sunset.

In fact, Full Frontal’s first episode was such a welcome jolt of energy that you might wish the show was airing every day. The layered ridiculousness of this presidential race has been strangely difficult for late-night shows to cover, perhaps because it’s hard to find a way in to such nakedly crazy material, but Bee’s takedown of every candidate, part of her first segment, was pitch perfect. Every one-liner felt honed and briskly funny (describing Donald Trump as a “human caps lock”), and throughout, Bee exuded the quiet confidence that makes her a natural for this gig. Yes, it’s great to have a woman in the late-night fray; it’s also great to have someone who knows what she’s doing.

If Full Frontal continues with the format it debuted this week, it’ll quickly become appointment TV for the political-comedy crowd. While Bee can’t play around with the commercial-free half-hour John Oliver gets over at HBO, she harnesses her act breaks well. The first seven minutes was a topical round-up going into New Hampshire, efficiently taking down flubs like Marco Rubio’s robotic debate performance. The second act focused on a single news story—a Kansas state senator proposing a bill regulating women’s dress—and was similarly excoriating, only in grander detail (Bee’s writers’ room is there to research and flesh out such stories, as well as come up with brutal zingers).

The last segment, a Werner Herzog-style parody film about Jeb Bush’s campaign, was the biggest standout—a well-executed parody that also managed to elicit real sympathy for its floundering subject. “A Jeb in Winter” is worth watching in full for the footage the Full Frontal team managed to capture, featuring both the mournful candidate and of supporters, who can’t help but damn him with faint praise when they’re cornered by the camera. The Daily Show’s remote pieces, which Bee excelled at, always had a formula to them—some stock footage, some winking interviews—but this was more artful, and far funnier as a result.

It’s hard to agree that the late-night landscape was calling out for yet another topical news/comedy show, but as crowded as the genre is, Samantha Bee is the first truly interesting thing to happen to it for quite a while. That it took this long for a network to hire a woman is nothing more than predictable, but it stings all the more when you watch Full Frontal and remember that she’s been doing this for years, spending all of that time at the top of her game. Bee started the show with a joking segment about how she got the gig, which cut to an elaborate sequence of witchcraft and human sacrifice, putting the obvious jokes to bed within the first two minutes. Then she went about showing viewers just how she really got hired—by being one of the best late-night comedians in the business.

A Deadly Train Collision in Germany

Updated on February 9 at 1:48 p.m. ET

A head-on collision Tuesday between two trains in southern Germany has killed at least 10 people and seriously injured dozens more, officials say.

The crash, said to be the worst in the region’s history, took place shortly after 7 a.m. near the town of Bad Aibling. Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, reported that 108 people were injured in the crash, and two people were still missing.

The reason for the crash is unknown, but Alexander Dobrint, the German transport minister, said the two trains were on a curve and it appears the drivers hadn’t seen each other and didn’t have time to brake. He said speeds of up to 60 mph were possible on the stretch of track where the crash occurred.

Dobrint said the stretch where the collision occurred was fitted with a system designed to prevent such crashes. It’s unclear, he said, why that system didn’t work. The train’s black boxes have been recovered and should provide more answers, he said.

The trains were regional commuters that carry people to work. They’re also usually full of children on their way to school, but this week is winter break in Bavaria.

Authorities issued an urgent call for blood donations, as ambulances and rescue helicopters from neighboring Austria carried the injured to hospitals across the region.

Images of the wreck showed the fronts of the two blue-and-yellow trains smashed, with splintered metal and debris scattered on the ground.

Christian Schreyer, the board chairman of Transdev, the company that operates the trains, explained to CNN how the reported safety system on that stretch of track worked.

Normally, as the trains approached one another, a red light would alert the driver of an oncoming train. Even if the driver should miss that light, the automatic-breaking system should halt it. A driver and a driver instructor were aboard each train, Schreyer said, so it’s likely the lights malfunctioned.

“We assume that those signals were green,” he said, “but we don't know yet.”

The Continuing Saga of Julian Assange

The Swedish prosecutor’s office said Tuesday it is working on a renewed request to interview Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in connection with an allegation of rape against the Wikileaks founder. The statement comes just days after a UN panel ruled that Assange’s detention was arbitrary and a month after Ecuador’s top prosecutor rejected a previous request from Sweden.

Marianne Ny, Sweden’s director of public prosecution, in a statement said last week’s ruling by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions “does not change my earlier assessments in the investigation.”

As we reported on February 5, Assange was arrested in 2010 under a European Arrest Warrant issued by Sweden over claims of sexual assault—claims he denies. But in 2012, while on bail, he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London so he could avoid extradition. Last year, Swedish authorities dropped two cases of sexual assault against him, though the allegation of rape still stands—and it’s in connection with that case the Swedish prosecutor wants to question him. Assange says he fears that if he’s sent to Sweden he’d be extradited to the U.S., whose secret diplomatic cables were published by Wikileaks. The U.S. says there’s no sealed indictment against Assange.

In 2014, Assange appealed to the UN panel, saying his situation was tantamount to arbitrary detention because he couldn’t leave the embassy without being arrested. The panel agreed, saying Assange’s detention “should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected … [and he] should be afforded the right to compensation.”

Britain and Sweden said they reject the UN ruling, which isn’t legally binding. They say his presence in the Ecuadorian Embassy is purely voluntary.

Last month, Ecuador’s prosecutor-general rejected a previous request from the Swedish prosecutor to question Assange in London. That office, in a letter to Swedish authorities, said it will interview Assange and asked for a list of questions the Swedish prosecutor wants the Ecuadorian prosecutor to ask the Wikileaks founder.

Does America Need More Hitler Humor?

In 2010, the German production company Constantin Films launched a campaign to remove a group of parody videos that had been proliferating on YouTube—parodies of the Constantin film Unterganger, or Downfall. The movie earnestly documented the final days of one Adolf Hitler; the parodies, true to form, took those final, angry days and made them the subject of sassy jokes. (“BUT YOU SAID I COULD HAVE DIBS ON THE FRONT SEAT.”) Constantin’s objections, Daniel Gross notes in his rich history of “the art of Nazi comedy,” were based mostly on copyright; the company’s suit also cited, however, the general offensiveness of satirizing the man for whom “the banality of evil” was coined. As Abraham Foxman, then the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said of the videos: “We feel that they trivialize not only the Holocaust but World War II. Hitler is not a cartoon character.”

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Well. You know who else is now treating Hitler as the subject of parody? Yes: Constantin Films. The company, last year, signed on to produce and distribute a new, feature-length film about Hitler: a satire called, in English, Look Who’s Back. The film—based on the 2015 book of the same name—goes, basically, like this: Hitler doesn’t die. Instead, he wakes up in his bunker in roughly the present day, and is made to navigate the world that he helped, however circuitously, to bring about. The satire, in the tradition of Borat and The Interview and so many similar parodies-of-power, gets a lot of its humor from its placement of Hitler in situations of banal modernity (at the dry cleaner’s, learning how to use a computer, becoming a YouTube star, etc.). And it uses those situations to make a point not just about Hitler himself, but about the world in which he operates. (“Look Who’s Back,” Daniel Gross notes, “even parodies the very Downfall scene that the company tried to scrub from the Internet.”)

The film, out in October, has been a sensation in Germany. Which may help to explain why, this week, Constantin signed a deal with Netflix to distribute Look Who’s Back in the U.S. The film will come to the streaming service in early April. (Insert a “Springtime for Hitler” joke here, if you’d like.) And with it will come questions, chief among them: Are Americans ready for a cheeky comedy about Adolf Hitler?

On the one hand, sure. The U.S. has a long history of both the production and the consumption of Hitler jokery, from Disneyfied World War II propaganda films to Tom and Jerry to The Great Dictator to The Producers to Monty Python to, today, South Park and those only-semi-serious “would you kill Baby Hitler?” polls and the even-less-serious website www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com. They have all, in their way, taken for granted the idea that satire is a form of power: that to mock Hitler is to de-legitimize him. That the distance required of humor is the same distance that will relegate Hitler and his horrors to the past. That to mock History’s Greatest Monster is to claim a kind of victory over him.

Jokes test the limits of respectful silence. They replace the hash mark in #toosoon with a question mark.

“In Germany, where Mein Kampf was recently republished for the first time since the end of World War II,” Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich points out, “being able to laugh at Hitler comes with incredible catharsis.” The same may well be true of the U.S.

But that ability will also come, likely, with cogitation. And conversation, and—as Constantin’s initial posture toward Hitler humor suggested—controversy. “Hitler,” after all, is not just Hitler, the historical person; the name and the image and the ghost, today, also bring with them a host of thorny questions and tensions about freedom of speech and the constraints of memory and the moral limits of laughter. The book version of Look Who’s Back, The New York Times’s Janet Maslin notes, “generated endless essays asking whether it’s acceptable to laugh at ... Hitler jokes.” The movie, available on Netflix next to episodes of Frasier and The Great British Baking Show, will very likely do the same.

Those essays may mention the fact that Charlie Chaplin famously came to regret the role he played in creating The Great Dictator. (He admitted in his 1964 autobiography, “Had I known of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”) The essays may echo Abraham Foxman’s argument, objecting to the meme-ification of Hitler, that it is offensive—to individuals, to history—to turn history’s greatest monster into a cartoon. They may come to a conclusion that is both unsatisfactory and ultimately true: that it’s acceptable to laugh at Hitler jokes if they are funny. They may turn Hitler humor into a tautology.

If they do, though, they will also highlight the extent to which satire itself has become—and, of course, always was—a platform for moral exploration. They’ll take for granted the progressive power of parody. They’ll assume what any casual watching of The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live or Comedy Central will quickly reveal: that jokes, in the age of Internet-aided conventional wisdom—takes and counter-takes, tumbling together until some warm takeaway emerges—are not merely vehicles for humor. They’re also vehicles for argument. Comedy, today perhaps more than ever, has ethical statements to make. Chris Rock and his race jokes. Amy Schumer and her rape jokes. Tig Notaro and her cancer jokes. And on and on. They may be funny; more to the point, though, they force their audiences to ask questions like, “How far is too far?” and “How much is too much?” They invoke Hallin and Overton. They test the limits of respectful silence. They replace the hash mark in #toosoon with a question mark.

Look Who’s Back, for its part, will likely do the same. It will, very likely, make its audience cringe and laugh and feel good about cringing and feel bad about laughing. It will treat Hitler, just like those Downfall memes did, as a “cartoon character.” But it will force its audience, and the rest of us, to consider what it means for Adolf Hitler to be, on top of everything else, a joke.

Saying Goodbye to The Good Wife

When The Good Wife debuted on CBS in 2009, it was mostly dismissed as salacious fluff that traded its marketing on a single image ripped from the headlines: the wounded wife of a politician standing by him as he confessed to an affair. But it immediately broke free from that pigeonhole, and over the last seven years has been one of network television’s most audacious delights. It’s a legal drama wrapped in a political thriller balanced on well-drawn romances, an ensemble piece with one of the best casts on television, centered around a dynamic lead performance from Julianna Margulies. But it’s time for it to end.

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On CBS’s Super Bowl broadcast Sunday night, the network made it official with a commemorative commercial: The Good Wife’s current season will be its last. The show’s creators, Robert and Michelle King, had already announced they’d be leaving after season seven, but CBS had hinted the show might live on without them. Still, it’s better this way. The classic network model, particularly for the kinds of case-of-the-week dramas CBS favors, has always favored the product over the process—hits like NCIS, Blue Bloods, and Criminal Minds can last forever in the hands of a rotating stable of writers. But The Good Wife has always been a special case, stringing together complex, multi-season plotting that required thorough viewer investment—all on a network that favors simplistic storytelling. Without the Kings, the show would have lost the inimitable sense of authorship that helped it succeed in the first place.

To be sure, The Good Wife’s ratings compared to other CBS mainstays were always middling to poor. In its later seasons, the show struggled to maintain its frantic pace, getting bogged down in political subplots that felt like re-runs of its better, earlier years. But it’s also the last network show to have been nominated for an Emmy for Best Drama Series (in 2011). In a television world  increasingly dominated by “prestige” cable networks and streaming series that demand to be binged in 10-episode gulps, The Good Wife continues to put out 22 Emmy-worthy episodes over a year without feeling like an artifact from network TV’s glory days.

Unlike the average legal drama, The Good Wife delves deep into the ethical murkiness of life at a white-shoe firm: Alicia Florrick (Margulies) represents wealthy criminals, drug lords, and tech CEOs, all while competing for pay and attention with hungry law-school graduates. It’s also a story about the terrible power of celebrity, as Alicia wrestles with when to leverage her status as a famously jilted woman. Early seasons were centered around a terrific love triangle involving Alicia, her cheating husband Peter (Chris Noth), and her boss Will (Josh Charles); in its fifth year, in one of the show’s most traumatic moments, Charles left the show after Will was killed off. It could have been The Good Wife’s death knell; instead, it was its dramatic high point, the centerpiece of a fifth season that was easily the show’s best.

Since then, the show has creatively floundered, with Alicia making her own failed run for office and getting mired in surprisingly weak swipes at topical issues. The show’s many law firms got sucked into repetitive cycles of mergers and acquisitions, but the drama couldn’t sustain itself after Alicia left to strike out on her own. One of the show’s most dynamic characters, the mercenary private investigator Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), departed after season six following waves of gossip about Panjabi’s on-set tension with Margulies, and their jarring farewell scene appeared to be shot at different times and edited together.

Despite all the missteps, The Good Wife’s latest season has had some bright moments. The addition of the theater actress Cush Jumbo as Lucca Quinn, a new legal associate of Alicia’s, has proven invigorating. One episode that touched on the passive racism present in the hiring practices of major law firms felt incisive and relevant, without resorting to the heavy-handedness of some of the show’s other recent commentary on political issues.

Perhaps the Kings, who are among TV’s most passionate showrunners and who’ve always been candid about their creative process, could have eventually turned things around. But CBS’s early announcement gives them a chance to find the right ending for Alicia’s arc without worrying about what might happen to her story in the future. As TV schedules grow more packed and the industry focuses on telling shorter stories, The Good Wife will end without an obvious heir. The empty throne will either be a challenge to other networks or a solemn relic of a fading form of TV storytelling that many have given up on.

The Triumphs and Downfalls of Super Bowl 50

Super Bowl 50 is over. The Denver Broncos won 24-10 and the commercials, were—well a lot of people still aren’t sure how they feel about them.

If you tuned in to watch the game, then you know it was a clumsy, monotonous affair that saw both offenses forced into punting, then punting again.

After the game, Peyton Manning, the 39-year-old Broncos quarterback, was asked if he’d retire. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he responded (though his mother later said he should). Then Manning plugged Budweiser; the company said it was “delighted” by the endorsement, but hadn’t paid Manning for the promotion.

At a post-game press conference, a sullen Carolina Panther’s quarterback, Cam Newton, answered two minutes of questions with his hoodie pulled to his brow. Then he he told reporters, “I don’t know what you want me to say, I’m sorry.” He stood and abruptly left. The New York Times described it thusly: “It was as if Newton was intent on taking his magical season, his jumping jacks and dabs and evident leadership, and poking a hole in his side. He let his charisma and leadership drain away, to be replaced by a soup of the sour and the petulant.”

As for the commercials, if you like babies, talking animals, or Jeff Goldblum, you likely came away happy. Writing in The Atlantic, my colleague Sophie Gilbert bemoaned the offerings.

If anything, the 2016 Super Bowl ads, in all their greying, hyper-consumptive glory, might be both symptom and cause of the Donald Trump ascendancy, in which Marco Rubio and Madison Avenue alike try desperately to woo disillusioned Boomers while also proving they’re hip enough to capture the youth vote. (Case in point: Jeff Goldblum, playing piano in a winch on the side of the building, then running smack into Lil Wayne and George Washington having a cookout).

Still, the Internet is spilling over with best and worst lists, which at $5million for 30 seconds of air time set a record. Doritos caught flak for its spot in which a fetus leaps out of its mother’s womb to chase a cheesy chip.

USA Today’s rated the commercials in its annual Ad Meter feature. The winner: Hyundai’s “First Date” commercial.  Heinz’s “Wiener Stampede” and Audi’s “Commander” also scored high. One ad that topped lists—and scared viewers— was Mountain Dew’s “Puppymonkeybaby.”

Many people, including children’s horror author R.L. Stine, will be scarred. “Did #Puppymonkeybaby come from a horror movie? It terrified me,” Stine tweeted.

To which, Mountain Dew responded, “@RL_Stine You terrified us first. #puppymonkeybaby”

As for the halftime entertainment, though Coldplay headlined, Beyoncé’s performance prompted some to ask, “Coldplay? What’s a Coldplay” The internet declared her the winner (though BuzzFeed was in denial).

On Saturday, she had released a new music video, called “Formation.” Her performance featured a Black Panther-inspired rendition of the new song, an apparent nod to the Black Lives Matter movement. My colleague Spencer Kornhaber called her performance “radical.”

Both Beyoncé and Bruno wore black. They dressed the same as the people they stood shoulder to shoulder with. And then, before being interrupted by a strange retrospective video about past halftimes, they offered a reminder that synchronized dancing can be the best kind of spectacle there is—better than Left Shark, better than a middle finger to the camera, better than a crotch slide from Springsteen. There was no racial subtext to this, just text. Mars’s crew was B-boying. Beyoncé’s was channeling black radical movements and Michael Jackson in 1993. These were displays of cultural power coming from specific places, with specific meanings. They were rooted in history, but obviously spoke to the present.

The Times said: “The halftime show was there to serve her, not the other way around.”

But not everyone was awed. Sitting down with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, one host on Fox & Friends complained that “Beyoncé got a police escort there, and then she gives a salute to the black lives matter movement?” Giuliani said he thought it was outrageous and ridiculous, then said of the halftime show: “I don’t know what the heck it was––a bunch of people bouncing around and doing strange things?”

Why do we even have a halftime show, Giuliani mused.  Another host replied, “You gotta do something at halftime.”

For those bored by the halftime show, unhappy with the commercials, and unenthused with the game, NPR offered a more cerebral experience: It tweeted the entire Super Bowl, in haiku. Here’s a sample:

Von Miller, once more,

knocks the ball from Newton's hand.

First and goal, Denver.#SuperBowlHaiku

— NPR (@NPR) February 8, 2016

O, second chances!

Thy face is the yellow flag.

First and ten, again.#SuperBowlHaiku

— NPR (@NPR) February 8, 2016

And there to take photos of it all, in a photographer’s vest he complained was too small, was NBA star (and amateur photographer?) Kevin Durant.

Why the Officer Who Killed Quintonio LeGrier Is Suing Him

In a country where police are rarely prosecuted for killing civilians, and where those who are prosecuted are rarely convicted, civil lawsuits filed by victims of police violence and their families have become perhaps the foremost tool for law-enforcement accountability. The wrongful-death suit is a familiar step in the all-too-common story arc.

But something stranger is happening in Chicago: The police officer is suing the estate of his victim.

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The Paranoid Style of American Policing

On December 26, Chicago police officers responded to a domestic-disturbance call. According to police, 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier was threatening his father and wielding a baseball bat. During the response, Officer Robert Rialmo shot and killed LeGrier as well as Bettie Jones, a mother of five and downstairs neighbor.

The death came amid heated protests in Chicago over excessive use of force by police—most prominently the killing, caught on video, of Laquan McDonald by Officer Jason Van Dyke. Critics, including LeGrier’s mother, complained that police had been too quick to use deadly force rather than less-lethal alternatives, and too quick to use force rather than de-escalating the situation. LeGrier’s mother, in fact, said the police never should have been called. The killing of Bettie Jones, an innocent bystander whom Quintonio LeGrier’s father Antonio had asked to let police in the door, added more horror to the situation.

Shortly after the shooting, Antonio LeGrier filed a suit against the city for wrongful death, wrongful arrest, excessive use of force, and not providing prompt medical attention to his son. It’s unclear how much LeGrier is seeking in damages; the lawsuit specifies only more than $50,000. On Friday, Rialmo countersued, asking for more than $10 million from LeGrier’s estate for assault and infliction of emotional distress.

“LeGrier knew his actions toward Officer Rialmo were extreme and outrageous, and that his conduct was atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community,” the complaint states. It goes on to say that by “forc[ing] Officer Rialmo to end LeGrier’s life” and Jones’s innocent life as well, caused “Rialmo to suffer extreme emotional trauma.”

Counterclaims to civil lawsuits are not themselves rare; in some states, they’re even compulsory. “Most astute lawyers would encourage a client to file a counterclaim” in a civil suit, said Michael Kaufman, associate dean for academic affairs at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. But a police officer suing someone he’s killed does seem to be unusual, as does the language used in the suit, as his lawyer acknowledged to The New York Times.

“There is no question that he suffered very extreme emotional trauma and stress as a result of what Quintonio LeGrier did,” said Joel Brodsky. “When I say he feels extremely horrible about her death, that’s an understatement. But the bottom line is that it was Quintonio LeGrier who forced him to shoot.”

The LeGrier family’s lawyer blasted the countersuit, calling it “nonsense,” “pure fantasy,” and “a new low for the Chicago Police Department.”

The countersuit does provide the most detailed explanation of the December 26 shooting yet made public. Official investigations are ongoing, although the victims’ families have said they have little confidence in the process—not surprising, given Chicago and Cook County authorities’ handling of the McDonald case, among others.

“LeGrier knew his actions toward Officer Rialmo were extreme and outrageous, and that his conduct was atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community.”

The suit alleges that shortly after the officer arrived on the scene, LeGrier “took a full swing at Officer Rialmo’s head, missing it by inches, but getting close enough for Officer Rialmo to feel the movement of air as the bat passed in front of his face.” It alleges that Rialmo retreated down steps from the second-floor porch, instructing LeGrier to drop the bat. At the bottom of the steps, “Officer Rialmo reasonably believed that if he did not use deadly force against LeGrier, that LeGrier would kill him,” and so he fired eight shots, striking both LeGrier and Jones, whom Rialmo says he did not see.

Rialmo is white; LeGrier and Jones were both black. Rialmo has been placed on desk duty.

It’s tough to compare the legal prospects for Rialmo’s suit to those of the LeGrier family’s original claim. Kaufman said the language in Rialmo’s suit—“atrocious,” “utterly intolerable in a civilized community”—seemed uncommon, and unusually strident for a suit. They could put off a judge or jury, or create conflict with the plaintiff’s lawyers, he said.

And whatever the legal implications, the lawsuit seems like a bad public-relations strategy. Whatever the merits of Rialmo’s case, blaming a mentally troubled young man he shot is unlikely to win him many defenders, and social media lit up with shock at the suit. Moreover, one of the most common defenses of police accused of using excessive force is that officers are willing to put themselves in the line of fire on the job. That kind of stress, they say, explains and justifies why police sometimes make regrettable decisions. It’s true that police officers take special risks, but demanding $10 million from the family of a college student killed by police bullet goes a long way to leveling the moral high ground.

Super Bowl 50 Ads to Nation: Make America Great Again

Each year, the great minds that sell us so many of our beloved consumer staples get together to assess the state of the American psyche. Is America tired? Hangry? Missing the golden age of Bruces Willis and Springsteen, the Buick GNX, and avuncular sexism?

Believe it or not, this meeting happens not at a Madison Avenue steakhouse, or atop a mountain in Jackson Hole, or even in Papa John Schnatter’s meteor-crater lair. Instead, it plays out in full view of the American public during the 47 hours or so of television advertisements that punctuate the Super Bowl. As the nation’s burliest athletes wrestle each other’s lycra-clad bodies for control of that most potent symbol of fragile masculinity (literally an ovoid ball), corporations take stock of a more general struggle happening off the pitch: an existential crisis that concerns the very fabric of the American character.

My friends, let me be clear: The state of the union is not looking good. Last year, while America was indubitably suffering through a kind of malaise, there was at least the promise that brands could fix it. There was CrossFit to make us buffer, and Jeff Bridges to sing us to sleep, and Snickers to literally reverse the transformation of kind sweet blonde women into aggressive, ball-busting Danny Trejos. The little Italian Fiat accidentally swallowed erectile-dysfunction medication and became a swole, ripped, protruding manifestation of American power. Women became attracted to men with big trucks. And women did other things, too—they skied and had big houses and #ranlikegirls. It was a complex time, but with a ray of hope refracting its way through the ocean of Budweiser-flavored despair.

Not so much in 2016. We’re so alienated from real emotion that all-day McDonald’s breakfast is the closest thing we have to love.

If anything, the 2016 Super Bowl ads, in all their greying, hyper-consumptive glory, might be both symptom and cause of the Donald Trump ascendancy, in which Marco Rubio and Madison Avenue alike try desperately to woo disillusioned Boomers while also proving they’re hip enough to capture the youth vote. (Case in point: Jeff Goldblum, playing piano in a winch on the side of the building, then running smack into Lil Wayne and George Washington having a cookout).

In fact, was there a male Hollywood star from the 20th century who didn’t show up? Willem Dafoe, enduring the nightmare of being subjected to the male gaze for the first time in his life while dressed in women’s clothing and standing over a subway grate. (Bonus points for Eugene Levy as his long-suffering director). Alec Baldwin, loudly extolling the many virtues of his penis-shaped Amazon Echo to Missy Elliott. Harvey Keitel, driving a Mini alongside Serena Williams and T-Pain. Liam Neeson appearing in a Tron remake that also doubled as a television ad. Scott Baio, cryogenically frozen and being exhibited to a room full of aliens. Anthony Hopkins, using his magisterial thespian powers to winkingly endorse TurboTax.com in an interview with a journalist. Christopher Walken, telling a man whose life has become consumed by monotony to liven things up by buying a Kia. “It’s like the world’s most exciting pair of socks, but … a midsize sedan.”

These ads, believe it or not, weren’t even the depressing ones. Craven, yes. Hyperactive, sure. Prostrate before the altar of the fickle god greenback, absolutely (it’s the Super Bowl). No, the actually tragic 30-second slots were the ones that held a mirror up to nature, as it were, revealing the sad fact that the most gridlocked place in the nation isn’t Washington. It’s the American colon.

And do we have to anthropomorphize everything now? M&Ms are one thing, disturbingly cannibalistic though it is to make candy into a cute charming character. And sheep totally get a pass. But razors?

Coffee?

Our freaking intestines??

And when ads weren’t turning benign household objects into adorable characters, they were turning adorable animals into FOOD.

Look, I get it. We’re still recovering from the worst  financial crisis since the Great Depression. Times have been hard. Everyone needs a little R&R. So perhaps we could all do without the recurring reminders from the NFL that despite the opioid-induced constipation, the man buns, and the fact that not every man in America does in fact look like Ryan Reynolds, we were all supposed to have sex after the game. Or as my colleague Yoni Appelbaum put it, Super Bowl and Chill.

This despite the fact that women in this year’s Super Bowl ads were a nagging, shrewish bunch. There was Helen Mirren, reminding everyone not to drink and drive by sipping a Budweiser and calling them names.

(These aren’t even good British insults, okay? If you really want to shame someone in a plummy RADA accent, try calling them an abortive, elvish-mark’d, rooting hog. Or a loggerheaded knotty-pated flirt-gill. Or a cullionly fly-bitten horn-beast. Or a cockered flap-mouthed clack-dish. We can do so much better than “pillock.”)

Then there was Emily Ratajkoswki, diving for a bouquet at a wedding because she’s desperate to trap some poor sap into marriage, despite the fact that she looks like the offspring of Venus de Milo and a blowup doll.

Thank God for the super-chill femme du jour, Amy Schumer, running for office with Seth Rogen on a platform dedicated to Making America Drink Bud Light again and promising “the biggest CAUCus in the country.”

I could go off on a tangent here about the latent fears of paternity and procreation embodied in the hideous puppymonkeybaby Mountain Dew ad and the Doritos commercial where a man literally used flavored corn chips to pull a fetus out of his wife’s vagina. Or the self-loathing implicit in the Skittles ad where Steven Tyler saw his likeness in a candy-colored work of art and was so struck by the truth that he was compelled to destroy it. Or the complex semiotics at play in an ad presenting beer that insults you as a compelling product.

But in the cold light of day on the morning after, it feels too unnecessarily high-resolution a portrait of the American psyche. There’s no paternalistic Kevin Hart to take care of us. No car that can remind us of the dreams we once had while walking on the moon. No Coke Mini to unify the wrestling ids of Hulk and Ant-Man inside every fragile soul. No more The Good Wife! So let us drink Death Wish coffee to kick start those plasticized intestines and embraced our fractured and dissonant reality. At least until football season starts again.