Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 236

A Blow to Facebook in India

Is limited Internet access for hundreds of millions of people superior to unlimited Internet access, as enjoyed by a limited set of the population? Indian regulators say no, dealing a blow to Facebook’s Free Basics program and others like it.

In its ruling Monday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) banned zero-rated Internet services, saying:

(1) No service provider shall offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of content. (2) No service provider shall enter into any arrangement, agreement or contract, by whatever name called, with any person, natural or legal, that has the effect of discriminatory tariffs for data services being offered or charged to the consumer on the basis of content.

There are exceptions, such as in the case of providing emergency services, or “at times of grave public emergency,” TRAI said in the ruling, which the agency said it would review in two years.

Violators, the agency said, will be fined an equivalent of about $735 a day, up to a maximum of about $73,000. The amount may be a pittance to Facebook, which was not specifically named in Monday’s ruling, but the decision is a major blow to the company that had expended time and money toward promoting Free Basics in India. The service offered Indians access to a few websites without using up the data plans on their cell phones.

Last year, on a visit to India, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and CEO, described the service as “our mission is to give everyone in the world the power to share what’s important to them and to connect every person in the world.” But protests against Free Basics began in India almost as soon as the program was announced.

Here’s a summary of the two sides of the debate, courtesy of Gizmodo:

Last year, Indian net neutrality activists argued that Free Basics was a way for Facebook to shape internet access. Which is true. Zuckerberg & Co. countered that it’s actually a way to connect people who may otherwise not have internet access. Which is also true!

Another way to look at Monday’s decision (via TechCrunch): “While this may be a victory for net neutrality supporters, others might see it as a step back for the wider growth of smartphone usage in the country, where a large part of the population cannot afford services without subsidies.”

India is seen as one of Facebook’s biggest markets for growth. The Free Basics program is offered in about three dozen countries, but none of them come close in size to India, where only about a quarter of the nation’s 1.2 billion people are online. Facebook said it was disappointed with TRAI’s decision.

“Our goal with Free Basics is to bring more people online with an open, non-exclusive and free platform,” it said in a statement Monday. “While disappointed with the outcome, we will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the internet and the opportunities it brings.”

Beyoncé’s Radical Halftime Statement

What a perfect Beyoncé song name: “Formation.” All great pop involves people acting in formation. So does all great change. And while fans scream that Beyoncé’s a “queen” and “goddess,” her core appeal really is as a drill sergeant. With Beyoncé in command, greatness is scalable, achievable, for the collective. Everyone waves their hands to the same beat. Everyone walks around like they have hot sauce in their bag.

But in pop and in politics, “everyone” is a loaded term. Stars as ubiquitous as Beyoncé have haters, the “albino alligators” who “Formation” informs us she twirls upon. And in a more general historical sense, “everyone” can be a dangerous illusion that elevates one point of view as universal while minimizing others. Beyoncé gets all of this, it seems. As a pop star, she surely wants to have as broad a reach as possible. But as an artist, she has a specific message, born of a specific experience, meaningful to specific people. Rather than pretend otherwise, she’s going to make art about the tension implied by this dynamic. She’s going to show up to Super Bowl with a phalanx of women dressed as Black Panthers.

The poor guys of Coldplay, meanwhile, actually think they can work solely at the level of the universal. “Wherever you are, we’re in this together,” Chris Martin cried out, early on, last night. I don’t want to diss that intention, nor the take-home message at the end: “Believe in Love.” But from their first hit, “Yellow,” to their recent Holi-appropriating music video with Beyoncé, to their pan-cultural rainbow rally at Levi’s Stadium last night, their theme has only been about love to the extent that it’s been about how everyone loves colors. It’s music about being awed by the blandest kind of harmony: ROYGBIV, yeah yeah yeah!

Even at this level, universality’s unachievable. You could see it in the staging: a legion of human Pikmin with flower-pedal umbrellas, a youth orchestra’s members playing tie-dyed violins, and Coldplay in the middle of it all, wearing white. One shouldn’t politicize this choice too much. If their set had been the entirety of the halftime show—15 minutes of Coldplay spewing mediocrity from the center of a world of colors—the memory would have been totally eclipsed by the Vine of Eli Manning looking ambivalent (the music wasn’t going to save anyone because the sound system was so shoddy—maybe short-circuited by the woo guy?). But once Beyoncé and Bruno Mars showed up, discussions were inevitable. Contrasts needed to be drawn.

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.

In the short time since it arrived online without warning the day before the Super Bowl, “Formation” has already generated a monograph’s worth of writings about Beyoncé’s choice to tie her famous swagger explicitly (and hilariously, and cleverly) to her race, gender, and cultural heritage—to “Jackson Five nostrils” and dates to Red Lobster. The video features her on stoops and in parking lots and in old-money New Orleans drawing rooms, looking fly. Everyone has the potential to appreciate her infectious attitude, the song’s strange squeaky beat, and the video’s instantly iconic visuals. But among the group of people she is directly addressing, many say “Formation” feels like something more than just a great pop song—it feels life-giving and maybe even revolutionary.

But forgoing the universal also involves risk, as Beyoncé surely knew. The aggregating of social-media users who find her totally humane imagery “anti-police,” or who hear a song about a person’s lived experience and reply with the inanity of “all lives matter,” has begun. So too has concern trolling about her acclaim from people who’ve never connected to her music. If you find “Formation” tuneless or offensive, fine. Just don’t go impugning the motives of all the people in the weeks to come walking down the street in a very specific rhythm, internally chanting “I slay.” Beyoncé no longer asks that everyone get in formation, and that’s why so many people probably will.

A lot of headlines today say that Beyoncé won the Super Bowl, and a lot of memes are fixing on the moment toward the end when she, Mars, and Martin all sang together. It was meant to be a beautiful sight, but it ended up feeling awkward; Martin seemed weak, pitiful, next to the two of them and what they’d just done. There are probably a lot of reasons for that perception. One might be that he had pretended to stand for everything, but actually stood for very little. Beyoncé did not make that mistake.

The Steady Trickle of Refugee Deaths in the Mediterranean

Updated on February 8 at 3:20 p.m. ET

At least 27 asylum-seekers, including 11 children, have drowned in the Mediterranean when the vessel in which they were sailing to Greece capsized, Turkish media reported.

About 40 migrants had set sail early Monday from Edremit, Turkey, toward Lesbos, Greece, when their boat capsized about two miles offshore. The Turkish Coast Guard recovered 27 bodies, including those of 11 children.

Already this year, 374 people have died or are missing, as of February 5, while crossing the Mediterranean, according to data compiled by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Additionally, IOM notes, 74,676 people arrived in Italy and Greece between January 1 and February 5 to seek asylum in Europe. The number is a significant increase from the same period last year when 11,834 arrived in the two countries (though 428 people died in that period).

Although the asylum-seekers are coming from a variety of countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and parts of Africa, most are fleeing the civil war in Syria. That conflict, which has now lasted almost five years, pits the government of Bashar al-Assad against a coalition of rebel groups as well as ISIS and other Islamist terrorist groups. Assad is backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, the Shia milita organization from Lebanon. The rebels are backed by the West, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others. Both sides are also fighting ISIS.

The civil war has spawned a humanitarian crisis, creating nearly 4.6 million refugees, the overwhelming majority of whom are living in camps in Turkey (2.5 million), Lebanon (1 million), and Jordan (635,000), with smaller refugee populations in Iraq (245,000) and Egypt (117,000). A significant number has also tried to flee to Europe after Germany and some other countries last year announced an open-doors policy for Syrian refugees.

In 2015 alone, more than 1 million asylum-seekers, many of them Syrian, made their way into Germany. But the open-door policy advocated by Germany, Sweden, and others, proved to be controversial in the European Union. Many of the bloc’s members, especially newer ones such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, balked at having to take in the newcomers, and countries such as Denmark adopted tactics to deter the asylum-seekers from coming there.

With no end in sight to the Syrian civil war and, consequently, the flow of refugees into Europe, EU leaders are looking for ways to stem the numbers.

Indeed on Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Turkey to discuss ways to reduce the number of refugees entering Europe. The EU says it will give Turkey $3.3 billion for help in stemming the flow.

Turkey, meanwhile, says it’s finding it difficult to cope with the increased flow of refugees into its territory following the Syrian government assault, backed by Russian airstrikes, on Aleppo. The bombardment of the city in recent days has prompted tens of thousands of people to amass at the border with Turkey.  

“In some parts of Aleppo, the Assad regime has cut the north-south corridor ... Turkey is under threat,” President Tayyip Erdogan told reporters.

Turkish aid agencies have taken relief supplies to the Syrian side of the border and set up shelters there. Reuters reports Turkey is under pressure not only from the EU to stem the flow of refugees, but also from the U.S. to secure its border with Syria. But with as many as 35,000 people at the Oncupinar gate, which divides the two countries, Turkey may have little choice.

“If needed,” Erdgoan said, “we will let those brothers in.”

Super Bowl 50: Clumsy, Monotonous, Corporate

Now more than ever, the NFL is all about the quarterbacks. The buildup to Super Bowl 50 proved no exception: In the two weeks prior to Sunday night’s game in Santa Clara, the national conversation largely centered on the signal-callers, whose styles of play and off-field personas were pored over in every manner imaginable by an army of reporters and analysts. The game’s two possible outcomes were pre-cast as career-defining triumphs for the passers. If the Denver Broncos won, it would be a rousing sendoff for the potentially retiring all-time great Peyton Manning. If the Carolina Panthers won, it would be a coronation for Cam Newton, this season’s Most Valuable Player.

The Broncos beat the Panthers, 24-10, but the game featured none of the displays of virtuosity fans of Manning or Newton might have hoped for. It was a plodding, mistake-riddled affair, all stuffed runs and stalled drives. Maybe the most miraculous thing about the game was that it ended at all; it seemed for a time that it might simply give out somewhere along the way, leaving the Denver and Carolina players to wander around Levi’s Stadium until the resumption of football next fall.

Of course, in football, one group doing its work poorly means another did its work well, and if the defenses didn’t produce the most aesthetically pleasing evening of television, they generally impressed. The Carolina defense, founded on a smothering group of linemen and linebackers, forced two Manning turnovers—an interception and a fumble—and a whopping eight punts. By the game’s end, those punts seemed almost like triumphs. They smeant that nothing worse had happened, that the Broncos had held on to the ball long enough to boot it on down to the other end of the field.

The defensive star of the game, though, was the Denver pass-rusher Von Miller. Miller, the second pick in the draft that saw Newton selected first, played as if to avenge that slight. Midway through the first quarter, he darted across the line of scrimmage and wrested the ball from Newton’s hands, allowing his teammates to pounce on the rolling ball for a touchdown. For the rest of the evening, he tore through the Panthers’ offensive line to sack Newton or harangue him into launching the ball out of bounds. When some combination of blockers managed to delay him, it only opened up an opportunity for someone else; Newton was sacked seven times in all on the night, the last of these producing another fumble that he couldn’t even muster the will to pursue.

By evening’s end, the sole remaining matter of interest was how the NFL, famously oblivious to its own shortcomings, would commemorate a game that ran so counter to the expected narrative. It did so clumsily, reverting to its basest corporate instincts and tritest storylines. As Manning ran onto the field at the final whistle, he received the conspicuous congratulations of the pizza titan “Papa” John Schnatter, with whom he’s regularly appeared in commercials.

It was a plodding affair, all stuffed runs and stalled drives. Maybe the most miraculous thing about the game was that it ended at all.

Moments after Miller was declared the Super Bowl MVP at the podium wheeled out for the celebration, the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the CBS commentator Jim Nantz resumed their effusive praise of Manning, thanking him for his years of play. Nantz (who only minutes earlier had praised Manning for declining to address his future in an interview with the sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson, noting that it might distract from his team’s accomplishment) asked Manning the same question and received the same canned response. Manning hadn’t thought that far ahead; he was looking forward to kissing his wife and kids and—this was said with a spokesman’s flourish—drinking plenty of Budweiser.

As America’s most entrenched sports presence, the NFL has two features in its favor. The first is the game itself, a spectacle that has proven largely addictive even as its dangers are more and more widely known. The second is the league’s nose for middlebrow appeal, its ability to paper over its various public relations disasters and to coat its game in the language of myth. That first attribute wasn’t much help Sunday night, but the second is always there.

Broncos Beat Panthers

The Denver Broncos defeated the Carolina Panthers 24-10 to win the 50th Super Bowl on Sunday at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.

The Broncos scored first on a first-quarter field goal and held onto their lead throughout the game.

The win was the third Super Bowl victory for Denver. It was also the second for Denver quarterback Peyton Manning, who, at 39, is the oldest starting quarterback in Super Bowl history. Rumors swirled that this season would be his last.

The Broncos and Panthers have two of the best defenses in the National Football League. Carolina had the league’s top offense this year, but they couldn’t break through Denver’s defense Sunday night. Carolina quarterback Cam Newton, who was responsible for nearly 80 percent of the Panthers’ offensive scores this season and is a spritely 26 years old, got sacked seven times.

The game marked Newton’s first Super Bowl appearance. The Panthers have never won a Super Bowl.

Denver linebacker Von Miller, whose sack of Newton in the first quarter , was named MVP. Denver wide receiver Jordan Norwood set a Super Bowl record with his 61-yard punt return in the first half.

This year’s halftime show featured performances by Coldplay, Beyonce, and Bruno Mars. Chris Martin let loose—did you see those knees?—with the band’s popular “Viva La Vida and “Paradise;” a sunglasses-wearing Mars rocked out to “Uptown Funk;” and Beyonce performed “Formation,” released only a day ago in a surprise announcement.

And then there were the commercials, which this year reached a record-high cost of $5 million for 30 seconds, according to CNBC. Helen Mirren delivered a very British PSA against drunk driving for Budweiser. Christopher Walken in a closet served as a fantastic pun—“Walken” closet, get it?—for Kia. Prius may or may not have suggested robbing a bank. Grown-up Super Bowl babies harmonized with Seal in a pretty adorable NFL ad. Mountain Dew’s PuppyMonkeyBaby provided nightmare fuel for millions.

Manning said Sunday he would take some time to reflect before making an announcement about what’s next for him.

“It’s very special,” he said of the win. “This game is much like this season has been. It tested our toughness, our resilience, our unselfishness.”

The Search for Survivors in Taiwan

Dozens of people remain trapped in the rubble of an apartment building that collapsed Saturday after a powerful earthquake struck southern Taiwan, killing at least 26 people.

Rescue personnel spent Sunday searching for survivors in the remains of the 17-story building in Tainan, which collapsed after a 6.4-magnitude quake rattled the city Saturday. Reuters photos show the building leaning away from its foundation before it crumpled on top of itself.

The government in Tainan said that more than 170 people have been rescued so far, the Associated Press reported. Authorities believe as many as 300 people were inside the building when it came down, and 120 are thought to be trapped in the rubble. Nine other buildings in the city collapsed.

The rescue effort at the fallen high-rise entered its second day for Tawain, where it’s early Monday. Hundreds of rescue workers scoured the mountain of rubble, lifting survivors out on cranes. Dogs were dispatched to help locate people trapped under several floors of debris. In some cases, it took hours to free individuals after their voices were heard.

Local official Wang Ding-yu told the AP that a rescue worker gave Mao Yi-chen, 20, a photo album and homemade cards that were found next to her when she was rescued from the building soon after the quake hit.

“He said that ‘maybe your home is damaged, but memories of the family can last,’” Wang said. Yi-chen’s older sister was pulled from the site on Sunday and is in serious condition.

The BBC reports a six-month-old baby girl was found 30 hours after the building collapsed, but died in the hospital.

The city has launched an investigation into the construction of the high-rise, built in 1989, to determine whether developers cut corners.

Taiwan experiences frequent seismic activity because of its proximity to a boundary between two tectonic plates. Ninety earthquakes of magnitude 6.4 or higher have occurred within about 155 miles of Tainan in the last century, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Trouble With Superman

Superman should be invincible. Since his car-smashing debut in 1938, he’s starred in at least one regular monthly comic, three blockbuster films, and four television shows. His crest is recognized across the globe, his supporting cast is legendary, and anybody even vaguely familiar with comics can recount the broad strokes of his origin. (The writer Grant Morrison accomplished it in eight words: “Doomed Planet. Desperate Scientists. Last Hope. Kindly Couple.”) He’s the first of the superheroes, a genre that’s grown into a modern mass-media juggernaut.

And yet, for a character who gains his power from the light of the sun, Superman is curiously eclipsed by other heroes. According to numbers provided by Diamond Distributors, the long-running Superman comic sold only 55,000 copies a month in 2015, down from around 70,000 in 2010—a mediocre showing even for the famously anemic comic-book market. That’s significantly less than his colleague Batman, who last year moved issues at a comparatively brisk 150,000 a month. Mass media hasn’t been much kinder: The longest-running Superman television show, 2001’s Smallville, kept him out of his iconic suit for a decade. Superman Returns recouped its budget at the box office, but proved mostly forgettable. 2013’s Man of Steel drew sharp criticism from critics and audiences alike for its bleak tone and rampaging finale. Trailers for the sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, have shifted the focus (and top billing) to the Dark Knight. Worst of all, conventional wisdom puts the blame on Superman himself. He’s boring, people say; he’s unrelatable, nothing like the Marvel characters dominating the sales charts and the box office. More than anything, he seems embarrassing. Look at him. Truth? Justice? He wears his underwear on the outside.

Behold! I give you the problem of Superman. It’s a problem that has less to do with the character himself and more to with DC Comics, which found itself stuck with a flagship character it thought needed fixing. In trying, it broke him nearly beyond repair.

* * *

The storytelling engine Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel devised for Superman when they created him should be, like their hero, bulletproof. Clark Kent is a mild-mannered reporter hiding his secret identity from the world, including his sharp, competent coworker, who happens to be the woman of his dreams. He’s stuck in a love triangle with himself, between the man he is, and the man he wishes he could be. He’s an immigrant driven not by tragedy but by an unshakable sense of right and wrong and a desire to fix the world for the less fortunate—a battle that can never end. As the famed comics creator Alan Moore wrote:

Almost certainly by instinct rather than by psycho-social analysis, two Cleveland teenagers had crafted a near-perfect and iconic fantasy which spoke to something deeply rooted in the psyche of working America [in the early 1930s] … At his inception, Superman seems very much a representative of the downtrodden working classes his creators hailed from, and a wonderful embodiment of all the dreams and aspirations of the powerless.

This is who the character is at his best: not a walking set of superpowers, but a man fighting for truth and justice to the best of his considerable ability.

Superman was so popular in the 1940s that his comic was adapted into a smash-hit radio show, which itself proved popular enough that it helped bring down parts of the Ku Klux Klan. Before long, he was the biggest comic-book character in the world. But Siegel and Shuster, exploited and cast aside by the company whose fortunes they had made, saw barely a dime of the profits. Away from his creators and under DC’s management, Superman changed from a rabble-rousing populist into a bland icon of the establishment, cycling through the same sets of adventures every few years: a hero with nothing better to do than devise elaborate pranks to play on Lois Lane. Despite the gloriously silly super-science of Silver Age Superman, with its time-travel, transformation rays, and bottled cities, the engine rusted under the hood.

In 1962, the competition arrived. In August of that year, the newly christened Marvel Comics, already humming with hits like The Fantastic Four, debuted Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man. Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, his creators, had reinvented the Superman engine, taking the archetype of the superheroic outsider and making him an underdog through a series of clever tweaks. Where Clark Kent’s romantic life was a game, Peter Parker’s was a soap opera; where Clark’s boss was gruff, Peter’s was a jerk; where Kent was ignored in civilian guise, Parker was actively picked on. Marvel had, in effect, figured out how to supplant Superman. In doing so, they began selling not just to children but also to college students, and eventually to adults. It was a challenge that DC, formerly the dominant comics publisher, had to answer.

DC responded to Marvel in halting steps during the 1970s by refashioning many of its characters to be a little more quarrelsome and a little less aspirational. Some, like Batman, easily made the switch. Others, like Flash or Wonder Woman, were reinvented to varying degrees of success. But with Superman the company routinely stumbled, worried about messing up its star hero.

In 1971 DC hired Jack Kirby, the architect of Marvel Comics, but instead of assigning him the main Superman book, it put him on a spin-off, Jimmy Olsen. Even as Kirby was cranking out concepts that would become pivotal to the DC Universe, the company had other artists redrawing his Superman in the house style. It assigned the Batman writer Denny O’Neil to tell more modern Superman stories, but rolled back his changes as well. As the comics landscape shifted, Superman remained either purely superheroic or continued to lean on the endless, increasingly tired triangle of Lois, Clark, and Superman. DC had typecast its flagship character as a company man, and no amount of multicolored kryptonite or super-pets could change that.

The character was still popular enough in the wider cultural sphere: The 1978 film Superman, starring Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder, was a hit. But eventually DC faced facts: The comic needed fixing. In 1985, DC hired John Byrne, a writer from Marvel, as part of a massive retooling effort. The resulting series, Superman: Man of Steel, summoned a bit of the competition’s swagger, quickly reinventing and streamlining portions of Superman’s universe while keeping its fundamental cheeriness. The evil scientist Lex Luthor became a corporate raider. Bits of continuity ephemera, like Clark Kent’s early career as Superboy, were dropped.

For a while, things ran smoothly, but Superman couldn’t quite seem to shake his stodgy reputation. Despite Byrne’s reboot, the comics’ sales again flagged, rising only in the 1990s with a series of increasingly desperate stunts. DC married Clark Kent and Lois Lane. It killed Superman and brought him back. It split him into two different bodies, one red, one blue. Each event brought diminishing returns. Finally, DC decided it was time to try and give Superman a fresh start for the new millennium.

To date, it has not stopped trying.

* * *

The problem DC faced was this: You can’t fix something if you’re not sure where it’s broken. One of the issues halting a successful reinvention of Superman is a shift in the nature of the comics market. Since the 1980s, the dominant trend in the industry has been specialty comics shops replacing newsstands as primary distributors. Given this change, companies like Marvel and DC have focused their marketing toward an ever-dwindling market of adult fans, darkening their characters in an attempt to keep the interest of a readership desperate for mainstream respectability. In effect, adults were colonizing young-adult narratives and warping them in the process—an early example of what later occurred with Michael Bay’s legendarily crass Transformers films.

In one of the uglier paradoxes of the superhero-comics industry, characters who were devised to entertain children soon became completely unsuitable for them. Leaning into this trend in an effort to entice new adult readers, DC largely abandoned its strengths as a publisher of optimistic, bizarre superheroics and fumbled for an edgier identity. Aspirational characters were hit hard by this change—Wonder Woman in particular has suffered nearly as many reboots as Superman, the latest of which has cast her as the bloodthirstiest of her Justice League coworkers, her trademark lasso of truth traded for a sword.

But the trend proved particularly damaging to the Man of Steel. The 1986 Dark Knight Returns, one of the landmark wave of “mature” superhero comics, cast him as a Reaganite stooge and ended with Batman knocking him out. The choice directly shadowed Superman’s history up until the present. The dour trailers for Batman v Superman draw directly from the imagery of The Dark Knight Returns, with several shots paralleling panels from the earlier comic. The effect is to shout for everybody watching: This is a serious film. Pointedly, in these trailers Superman never once smiles.

In fact, it’s hard to escape the impression that Superman’s own company finds him a bit embarrassing. As the comics writer Chris Sims points out in his review of the anniversary compilation Superman: A Celebration of 75 Years, DC’s company line on Superman seems to be that he’s “a depressed sad sack who never wins.” The company ditched his iconic red trunks in 2011 and placed him instead in the blue, armor-like suit he currently wears on film. In response to fan complaints that Superman was “too powerful” and thus boring, it constantly adjusted his level of strength. Broader attempts to reconcile the character with its new approach have been filled with false starts and cold feet: Many of the innovative Superman runs of the past decade, including Joe Casey’s short-lived attempt to position the character as a pacifist, were either quickly rolled back or derailed by editorial interference. Promising new approaches, including a radical late ’90s pitch by the modern comics superstars Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, and Mark Waid, likewise went unexplored.

Instead, the majority of Superman stories published in recent years have either been chair-rearranging reboots or have focused on the question of his relevance. The relaunches have been particularly difficult to ignore. Since 2001 alone, DC has commissioned five different reboots of Superman’s origins in the comics: the excellent Superman: Birthright and All-Star Superman, the adequate Superman: Secret Origins, the execrable Superman: Earth One, and the ongoing (and rather good) Superman: American Alien. Mass media has gotten in on the act as well, with the show Smallville and the blockbuster Man of Steel likewise being obsessed with reinventing the character for modern America.

Questioning Superman’s place in culture isn’t an inherently bad idea, and it’s no wonder that creators want to dig into his truth-and-justice symbolism in a world that seems to hold both in short supply. However, that impulse has led into a rabbit hole of navel-gazing narratives that endlessly attempt to justify the character’s existence. In its constant attempts to “fix” Superman over the last 20 years, DC has largely forgotten to tell stories with him.  

The irony of all this is that, for all the rust and ineffectual tinkering, the storytelling engine built by Siegel and Shuster still runs. Superman remains as inspirational a character as he did during the Great Depression: Considering the current state of rampant income inequality, brutal law enforcement and corrupt politics, the immigrant superhero from the planet Krypton may be more relevant now than he has been in years. What the comic requires now is not another reboot, but a forceful, committed attempt to refine the engine that currently exists—to stop trying to make Superman something he’s not, and to focus instead on what he is. The current writer on Action Comics, Greg Pak, has leaned into this idea with stories of a more socially aware Superman. It’s a good start. But it remains to be seen whether or not DC will allow it to stick.

* * *

Who, then, is the modern Superman? Per Grant Morrison’s critically acclaimed All-Star Superman (2005), a love-letter to the Silver Age of Superman comics, Clark Kent is a man whose god-like power is his incredible empathy, juxtaposed against strange and dastardly villains—tyrant suns, Bizarro clones, the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor. He’s a journalist who fights corruption and oppression wherever he finds it, both in and out of costume, as in Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright (2004), which retells the character’s origin with an emphasis on his relationships with the Daily Planet and the astute Lois Lane.

Perhaps most importantly, he’s a character who deeply feels his responsibilities, but still manages to be cheerful, funny, and down to earth—the defining characteristics of Kurt Busiek’s alternate-universe tale Superman: Secret Identity (2005). Secret Identity in particular is worth noting for another reason: it’s the only Superman story to graft the refinements of Stan Lee’s underdog Spider-Man back onto Superman. As a result, it’s the best Superman story of the decade and perhaps one of the best of all time.

Taken together, these stories point to a way forward for Superman that could easily recapture people’s imagination while mirroring Siegel and Shuster’s original vision: stories of a man with the powers of a god, who chooses to live as a normal person and fight for normal people. Stories that are part newsroom drama and part mind-bending superheroics, mixing in corrupt corporations and alien invaders from other dimensions. Stories that can veer into snappy romantic comedy or genuine emotion with the removal of a pair of glasses. Stories that stop trying to reboot Superman and instead refine and build on what’s already there.

In other words, if you believe in him, the man can fly.

'We Fear the Water'

Brittany Greeson began photographing the Flint water crisis in the spring of 2015, when what is now a nationally-recognized health emergency was a local Michigan headline. As an intern for The Flint Journal, Greeson documented the small protests outside City Hall, talking to frustrated residents asking for clean and affordable drinking water. “The only thing I could do to help would be to pick up my camera,” she said. Greeson teamed up with The Ground Truth Project to produce her essay, "We Fear the Water," which shows how residents' daily lives have been impacted by this man-made disaster. In Flint, people have to drag suitcases of water down snow-covered streets, children have to have their fingers regularly pricked for lead testing and families bathe in baby wipes for fear of rashes. Who is to blame? What are the long-term effects of exposure to contaminated water? These questions are luxuries to the citizens of Flint, who have to decide if they can buy food or bottled water. “This story isn’t finished yet,” Greeson said. “So naturally, I’m not finished yet either.”

A Satellite Launch in North Korea

Updated at 1:30 a.m. on February 7

North Korea launched a long-range missile and placed a satellite into orbit, the country’s state-run media outlets announced Saturday night.

Details from the isolated country remain minimal, but official state broadcasters said the launch had been a “complete success” and the Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite was orbiting Earth every 94 minutes.

Japan's NHK captures North Korean rocket launch on TV from camera in China. Upper center of image pic.twitter.com/4tscOyVOMk

— Martyn Williams (@martyn_williams) February 7, 2016

North Korea had indicated in previous days that a launch was imminent. The country is under strict UN sanctions related to its ballistic-missile program; Pyongyang insisted the launch was for peaceful space-exploration purposes.

The U.S. Department of Defense, which tracked the missile launch, said it was not an immediate threat to the United States or its allies.

U.S. @DeptofDefense systems detected and tracked today what we assess was a North Korean missile launch into space at 2:29 p.m. HST.

— U.S. Pacific Command (@PacificCommand) February 7, 2016

Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. quickly condemned the launch and called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the incident. Secretary of State John Kerry described the launch as a “major provocation.”

The test comes one month after North Korea said it tested a hydrogen bomb, although international experts threw cold water on that claim.

This is a developing story and we’ll update it with more information as it becomes available.

Whitney Houston and the Pro Tailgater: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

When Whitney Hit the High Note

Danyel Smith | ESPN the Magazine

“You have to understand. Key to American blues is the notion that by performing them and by experiencing them being performed, one can escape them. ‘I will be free,’ sang this black American woman to a mostly white, tucked-in-tuxes audience attending an event at which black achievement has been and remains segregated and minimized. This is our most familiar pop dance.”

Why I Tailgate, by Professional Tailgater Michael Mina

Hillary Dixler | Eater

“We would get to the point where there were 200 people at our tailgates out in the parking lot. We’d invite fans from the other team just so that we could get the jawing going. I’d be like, ‘Come on. Come over here and have some lobster tortellini.’ We just embraced how everybody makes fun of us being from California and San Francisco, meaning that we drink cheese and wine. We always kept it within the spirit.”

Winona, Forever

Soraya Roberts | Hazlitt

“The teen actress who sought to make her own life nostalgic before it had even passed her by peeks out from within the woman Marc Jacobs now imbues with nostalgia—she is a Russian nesting doll of reminiscence. That Winona Ryder’s image makes more of an impression than her current performances—in The Ten, The Last Word, Stay Cool—confirms our culture’s chronic desire to preserve the past rather than accept the present.”

From Berlin’s Warehouses to London’s Estates: How Cities Shape Music Scenes

Ian Wylie | The Guardian

“Most modern music is an urban animal. Cities regularly birth music scenes, and artists often claim to be inspired by ‘the streets,’ or by their neighborhood. Yet the actual link between the music they make and the built environment where they do so is generally underplayed—spoken about as a matter of mood, or a source of lyrics.”

I’m a Mom. Make Fun of Me on TV, Please!

Elissa Strauss | Elle

“Though there might be something deeper going on here than just good old Hollywood ageism. The absence of mom-coms might also have something to do with the way in which our culture continues to, simultaneously, idealize and diminish motherhood—much to the detriment of actual mothers.”

Darkness on the Edge of Town

Eric Benson | Texas Monthly

“Still, Lansdale was always one step short of crossover success, a little too vulgar, a little too bleak, his humor a little too politically incorrect—or maybe he was just always a little bit unlucky. ‘The only thing more certain than Lansdale’s eventual fame is tomorrow’s sunrise,’ the best-selling horror writer Dean Koontz wrote in 1989.”

Roger Goodell’s Unstoppable Football Machine

Mark Leibovich | The New York Times Magazine

“The sport might represent the great spectacle of 21st-century America, played by extraordinary, bulked-up specimens before millions of viewers. But it’s these needy billionaires who own it. They are the heads of the football city-states that stir our civic passions and twist our moods from September to February.”

If Rihanna Can Go Platinum Giving Anti Away for Free, What Does Platinum Even Mean?

Michael Nelson | Stereogum

“Why would people break the law to obtain music if they weren’t interested in hearing it? Forget about piracy—how about mixtapes? It seems grossly unfair (and radically unrepresentative) to award plaques only to those artists who are able to strike lucrative deals with gigantic multinational conglomerates.”

How the O.J. Simpson Case Explains Reality in 2016

Lili Anolik | Vanity Fair

“This, too: Reality TV can offer, as the O.J. trial did, as the recent Making a Murderer did, sex and violence, real sex and violence, but real sex and violence on a screen, and thus at a distance; which means you don’t have to take the moral pain that usually goes along with real sex and violence. Win-win.”

The Waves: The Brotherhood of Madlib

Hilton Als | The New Yorker

“The song sounds like nothing that West has ever been part of; it has a depth beyond his bombast and a soulful mellowness that dials him down—a bit ... Making the past matter in the present is just one aspect of Madlib’s genius, as is pushing hip-hop’s more commercially minded performers to move beyond the fans and the record-company executives and listen to themselves.”