Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 237

Twitter's New ISIS Policy

Twitter says that since the middle of last year it has suspended 125,000 accounts “for threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS.”

Much has been written about ISIS’s sophisticated social-media strategy. The group, as J.M. Berger reported in The Atlantic in June 2014, “doesn’t just have strong, organic support online. It also employs social-media strategies that inflate and control its message.” Indeed, a report from the Brookings Institution last year said at least 46,000 Twitter accounts were used by ISIS supporters.

That’s apparently what Twitter is trying to stop amid calls from the Obama administration to Silicon Valley firms to crack down on the online activity of terrorist groups and their supporters. In a blog post Friday, the company said its actions went beyond the account suspensions.

We have increased the size of the teams that review reports, reducing our response time significantly. We also look into other accounts similar to those reported and leverage proprietary spam-fighting tools to surface other potentially violating accounts for review by our agents. We have already seen results, including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off of Twitter.

Twitter added it works with law-enforcement agencies when appropriate and partners with groups that work to counter extremist content online. But it also acknowledged that regulating speech on Twitter wasn’t easy (For a good explanation the free-speech issues involved, go here). It said:

As an open platform for expression, we have always sought to strike a balance between the enforcement of our own Twitter Rules covering prohibited behaviors, the legitimate needs of law enforcement, and the ability of users to share their views freely – including views that some people may disagree with or find offensive. As many experts and other companies have noted, there is no ‘magic algorithm’ for identifying terrorist content on the internet, so global online platforms are forced to make challenging judgement calls based on very limited information and guidance.

Will a Cable-Box-Free Future Be Worse for Minority Americans?

The tyranny of the cable box may soon see its end. Those expensive boxes have long been the only means through which people can watch TV if they want anything aside from basic. That’s given cable companies sole control over the strings to our eyeballs, and that monopoly hasn’t led to much innovation. The Federal Communications Commission will vote February 18 on a plan to bring “consumer choice” to the cable box, by allowing tech companies to develop their own systems, something you’d think might bring joy to all.

But some Hispanic and black organizations aren’t thrilled. One organization even sent a letter to the FCC on Thursday, saying the proposal will make the already-white TV world even whiter.

So, is the proposal bad? It’s hard to say, because other black and Hispanic organizations argue the opposite.

Robert L. Johnson, the founder of BET, wrote in an op-ed that wrangling control away from cable companies would help minority TV startups. “If you have a good program idea, some financing and access to the Internet, you can find your audience,” he wrote. The Congressional Black Caucus argued the opposite, saying the move would toss minority programming into a massive heap of  channels and “relegate it to the bottom of the pile.”

Then there’s the Hispanic Technology & Telecommunications Partnership, which said the plan would “devalue diverse programming and make it harder for networks serving communities of color.” But Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, told Motherboard the plan would increase minority programing by easing access, noting that right now there’s a rather pathetic selection. “I’m paying over $150 per month for cable—what the hell am I getting for my money?” he asked.

So which is it? Is it good for minorities or bad?

It costs about $231 to rent that clunky box each year. That earns cable companies $19.5 billion per year. The proposal would open the cable-box market to companies like Apple, Tivo, Roku, and Google. Cable companies are obviously upset. They’d lose out on billions (they’ve raised cable box prices 185 percent in the past 20 years). And in much the way the Internet has disrupted the way we listen to music, watch movies, and consume the news, it could do the same for the way we watch cable. The proposal would also, cable companies say, upend the way they negotiate premium spots on their channel lists.  

That’s partly why some black and Hispanic organization are upset. Right now, wealthy programmers––including those that appeal to minority audiences––pay for prime listing space. In return, people see your network and watch it. But if tech companies take over, who will decide the pecking order? The worry is that tech companies would turn their boxes into vast and depthless rooms––much like the Internet is––where minority programs will lose the slight edge they can buy in the current pay-for-queue-style listing.

Another issue is cost. The FCC wouldn’t require consumers to switch to a third-party box, but TiVo costs about $15 a month, and to outright buy an Apple TV box is $150. Cable companies charge around $7.50 a month—though that cost adds up quickly over time.

Cable boxes have long been a shackle of control. Opening the market to competition would likely lower prices. Not to mention that programming for minorities is already pretty abysmal. Telemundo and Univision are behemoths in media, but young Hispanics don’t watch TV in just Spanish. English networks with a Hispanic bias are pretty rare, and as Nogales told Motherboard, there’s really just the Fusion channel, “and that’s it.”

That was Johnson’s same argument for why the FCC should pass the plan. Back when he built BET, he had to first convince the gilded cable companies that enough black consumers wanted to watch his channel just so they’d try it out in their cable lineups. It was a success. But since Johnson started BET 35 years ago, only a handful of black-led channels have joined cable listing. The biggest reason why he supports the plan, Johnson wrote, is because it “would simply increase control by consumers.” No more corporate suits to convince. Each remote is its own vote.

Party Over Here Continues TV’s Sketch Revolution

The sketch show has been popular for years now—cable iterations like Inside Amy Schumer, Kroll Show, Comedy Bang Bang, Portlandia, and Key & Peele have turned a once-stodgy format into a platform for delivering some of television’s freshest, most incisive comedy. They’ve become so popular that the Emmys started an awards category devoted to them. That trend has yet to spread to network TV, where Saturday Night Live remains the genre’s only standard-bearer, which makes Fox’s decision to order its own sketch series—a small-scale, half-hour effort called Party Over Here—all the more intriguing.

Related Story

How Kroll Show Elevated the Sketch Comedy Genre

The show will debut March 12 with a regular cast of only three performers, all of them women. It’s being touted as the new show from The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone), who pioneered SNL’s Digital Shorts, but the trio will only serve as executive producers alongside their fellow comedy giant Paul Scheer. From the initial details released about its cast and writing staff, Party Over Here seems like a more interesting gamble than a Lonely Island project: It wouldn’t be an SNL threat airing on a rival network, but a smaller-scale show centered around voices that often get marginalized on the biggest comedy stages.

The show’s three main cast members are Alison Rich, a former SNL writer; Nicole Byer, a sketch comedian and actress who was part of MTV’s talk-comedy series Girl Code; and Jessica McKenna, a comic based out of the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in Los Angeles. The show will air on Saturdays, but at 11 p.m., running for only half an hour and staying out of SNL’s time slot. It’s a low-stakes move for Fox (which gives the show room to experiment), but it’s also the network’s first real venture into late-night comedy since the decline of MadTV in the mid-2000s. Other attempts, like a talk show hosted by Wanda Sykes in 2009, didn’t survive beyond their initial episode order, but the TV landscape has changed drastically since then.

A late-night comedy show, even with low ratings, can be a smart little investment—it’s aimed at a young audience, can be packaged into online clips with the potential to go viral, and doesn’t cost a ton to produce. One reason an SNL clone has never really thrived on network TV is the vast resources required to get one off the ground—the NBC juggernaut currently employs some 29 writers and 16 full-time cast members—but Party Over Here will have a writing staff of just five, and two repertory players alongside its three stars. The network gave no details on the kind of material the show will explore, but its female-dominated roster of writers and performers speaks volumes.

“The late-night landscape is wildly competitive, and we thought long and hard about the kind of audacious, attention-getting voices we needed,” Fox Broadcasting’s entertainment president, David Madden, told The Hollywood Reporter. “Andy, Akiva, Jorma, Paul, and our three stars—Nicole, Jessica and Alison—are the ideal group of talent to do just that. They’re fearless, original and, of course, very, very funny.”

Network TV is littered with the bones of sketch shows that were sold with the help of their famous executive producers only to quickly fizzle out. Kelsey Grammer produced a Fox series called The Sketch Show starring a cast of comedy luminaries before they were famous, including Paul F. Tompkins and Kaitlin Olson—but that only lasted for four weeks. ABC’s Dana Carvey Show was a notorious bust (now worshipped as a cult classic) that featured writers and stars including Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Charlie Kaufman, and Louis C.K. It survived for seven weeks.

But those shows tried to make it in the far more competitive world of primetime TV, where bad ratings can spell cancellation within a week. Small-scale shows like Party Over Here are usually left to the cable networks, but bigger channels have likely noticed the recent awards attention (and even the ratings) that the likes of IFC and Comedy Central are enjoying. If it does well—attracting a cult following or sneaking into the Emmy conversation, for example—it could be a watershed moment: for the genre, for women in comedy, for network TV, and of course, for the fans themselves.

The Super Bowl Ads That Aren't on TV

Super Bowl 50—the game, this year, has reverted back to Arabic numerals to avoid the assorted awkwardnesses of the name “Super Bowl L”—will likely bring many of the things you’d expect from it. Clydesdales that restore your faith in humanity. Celebrity cameos that restore your nostalgia for mid-’90s TV sitcoms. Beer ads that restore your faith in beer. Oh, definitely, there will be a football game included among all the pageantry—spread out, dependably, like the beany bottom of a seven-layer dip—but what will make this bowl really Super, for most viewers, is the same that makes it Super every year: the ads. The weep-worthy stories of adversity overcome, the bikini-clad models sloppy-eating bacon cheeseburgers, the tiny tales of American culture told in 30-second snippets.

Related Story

America’s Existential Crisis, as Illustrated by Super Bowl Ads

Some of this spectacle, though—this year as in other years—will take place online. People will do what they long have done (mocking the ads, hoping for a halftime wardrobe malfunction, getting pissed at GoDaddy) on Facebook and Snapchat and WhatsApp and Twitter. And the brands will do, for their part, what they have long done: finding the people where they are and then trying to sell things to them. This year, that means a couple of things. Promoted hashtags. Promoted trends. And, on Twitter, the latest innovation: custom emojis.

Twitter, for Super Bowl 50, is partnering with brands like Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch and Verizon to offer emojis with a Super Bowl theme. And the company is charging, AdWeek reports, a “seven-figure” fee for its services.

The admoji suggest the interactivity ads will adopt as the web moves from “technological innovation” to “cultural infrastructure.”

Call them “Cashmoji,” as TechCrunch’s Drew Olanoff suggests, or, even better, “admoji.” (Just please don’t call them “hashflags,” which is what the #brands have tried to #brand them.) The emoji work, generally, like this: If you tweet a hashtag of a particular brand’s ad campaign—think “#LoveYourCurls” from Dove, or #RedCups from Starbucks—a Dove- or Starbucks-branded emoji will pop up along with your hashtag. (Or, in the case of the new Super Bowl emoji: Budweiser’s #GiveADamn tag, tied to its responsible-drinking campaign, results in a hand relinquishing car keys. Pepsi’s #PepsiHalftime yields a soda can bubbling with both carbonation and music notes.)

So: hashtags that produce images, via the crazy alchemy of the social Internet! You will be, the thinking goes, surprised and/or delighted at this turn of events.  

Perhaps you will be. The emojis Twitter has so far designed for its clients (a curly-haired woman for Dove, a cup of coffee for Starbucks) are fun little additions to hashtagged messages. Which, after all, Twitter users are using voluntarily. (If, occasionally, ironically.) The first experiment Twitter conducted with the emojis—for Coke’s #ShareACoke campaign this October—resulted in more than 170,000 appearances of the merrily clinking Coke bottles Twitter had designed for the occasion circulating around the Internet. And, since that initial campaign, Twitter has designed 16 others that involved custom emojis—for brands and events from Dove to Subway to Starbucks to Star Wars to the VMAs to the Vatican.

Network executives and Hollywood studio heads have long been contending with the Internet; advertisers are doing the same thing.

The emojis are on the one hand a nice little revenue stream for a company that has been struggling financially. (The “seven-figure” price tag for the emojis, AdWeek notes, likely involves packages that combine the custom emoji with Promoted Trends—which normally cost $200,000 on their own—and/or Promoted Moments, and/or Promoted Tweets.) What the emoji are more broadly, though, are suggestions of the new interactivity ads will likely adopt as the web settles from “technological innovation” to “cultural infrastructure.” The advertisers here aren’t paying seven figures for tiny images of beverages and Storm Troopers; what they’re paying for, really, is the cachet of newness and hipness. They’re paying for the ability—the potential—to surprise and amuse and delight people. They’re paying for what advertisers are always trying to purchase, in the end: fickle human attention.

The cost of all this custom emoji-ing comes, notably, at roughly the same price point as a standard TV Super Bowl ad. (A 30-second spot during the airing of Super Bowl 50 will likely cost as much as $5 million.) Which is to say that advertisers—the big ones, the ones who can afford it—are roughly as happy to pay for newfangled digital gimmicks as they are for tried-and-true methods of reaching consumers. They’re roughly as happy to pay for distributed attention as they are for concentrated. Network executives and Hollywood studio heads have long been contending with the Internet; advertisers are doing the same thing. The spectacle of the Super Bowl is just as spectacular as it’s always been—maybe even more so—but the platforms for all the pageantry are expanding. One Budweiser-sponsored emoji at a time.

Maurice White, Michael Jackson, and the Excellence of Disco

“When you see somebody’s work you can see the details and if they actually truly love what they do—if they really do pay attention to the craft,” Kobe Bryant says. “I think this generation, their perception has become skewed. The love for the craft becomes secondary to the love of the fame and notoriety. My generation, the Jordan generation, Bird, Magic, Michael Jackson, they focused on what they loved to do.”

That quote from the notoriously uncompromising NBA vet was made not in the context of a Lakers retrospective, nor in response to a question about today’s young athletes, but rather during a documentary about the actual last days of disco. Its director, Spike Lee, weaves commentary from Bryant—and from a diverse array of famous talents, including non-musical ones like Misty Copeland and Rosie Perez—throughout the hour and a half of Showtime’s Michael Jackson’s Journey From Motown to Off The Wall, premiering Friday. The film gleefully pays tribute to Jackson at a moment when he first staked his claim to all-time-great status, before he was engulfed in image problems. In doing so, it forcefully highlights the dedication, skill, and vision that went into some of the most joyful music that modern times have produced.

I’d finished watching From Motown to Off the Wall shortly before news broke that Maurice White, founder of Earth, Wind & Fire, had died at age 74. Jackson and White are connected in ways obvious and not. Viewers of the documentary learn that some record executives had wanted White to produce Jackson’s 1979 solo debut Off the Wall, which makes sense given that Jackson was making the kind of sumptuous, full-band, R&B-rooted disco for which Earth, Wind & Fire had helped set the template (of course, both that band and Off the Wall were not neatly categorizable in any genre). Jackson instead went with Quincy Jones, resulting in one of the greatest creative partnerships of all time. Wondering what could have been is silly; “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and “Rock With You” stand next to Earth, Wind & Fire songs like “September” in the pantheon of the era’s everlasting hits. As the documentary notes, Off the Wall’s final song, “Burn This Disco Out,” was a symbolically apt title as pop—and Jackson—moved on to new styles as the decade turned.

Both White’s obituaries and the Jackson documentary make clear that in order to make people truly lose their minds on the dance floor, you’ve got to have a powerful mind yourself—plus training and tenacity. White began his career as a session drummer for the likes of Etta James and Muddy Waters; in Earth, Wind & Fire, he not only drummed but sang, wrote, and produced as the band scored seven top-10 albums. For all the spiritualism of their music, ambition was its driver. “We just wanted to be the best band in the whole world,” White’s bandmate Philip Bailey recalled to Billboard. “Maurice had a fierce work ethic, and we learned from him to have that same work ethic. He was the consummate perfectionist.”

Jackson identifies as a perfectionist in Lee’s documentary, setting up the aforementioned Kobe Bryant quote about excellence. The early parts of the film are filled with testimonials from people who knew Jackson in his days with the Jackson 5 and the Jacksons, when he would practice his singing and dancing endlessly and quiz older stars in detail about how they achieved success. In 1979, on tour with his brothers but yearning for the creative freedom that he would soon be granted, he wrote a manifesto that is shocking in its determination and its prophetic accuracy:

MJ will be my new name. No more Michael Jackson. I want a whole new character, a new look, I should be a totally different person … I should be a new incredible actor, singer, dancer that will shock the world. I will do no interviews. I will be magic. I will be a perfectionist.  A researcher. A trainer. A master. I will be better than every great actor rolled in one. I must have the most incredible training system to dig and dig and dig until I find. I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it. Look back on the world of entertainment and take it from where the greats left off.

Lee’s documentary spends almost half of its running time in a fascinating track-by-track dissection of Off the Wall, featuring analysis both from present-day figures like Questlove and Mark Ronson and from people involved in the album’s creation, like the engineer Bruce Swedien. The result is a portrait of the late ‘70s pop machine—session players and co-writers and producers and A&R men—brought to heel by the creative power of Jackson and Jones. The songwriter Siedah Garrett testifies about Jackson using his voice to demonstrate instrumental parts for musicians to recreate. “He didn’t play it, but he sang it,” she says, seeming totally awed. “And if you didn’t play it like he sang it, he would sing it until you played it like he sang it.”

This is an image at odds with the idea that dance music simply flowing from some primal groove tapped into by instinct. And it reflects Maurice White’s way of working, too. “I had a vision, and music was playing in my head that I wanted to bring through,” he told Billboard not long before he died. “What I had in mind was exactly what Earth, Wind & Fire became.” His younger brother Verdine, still the bassist for Earth, Wind & Fire, actually shows up in the Off the Wall documentary for a segment where the question of elemental passion versus hard work comes up. He’s very clear about the answer. “No, no, you got to put in the work, man, you got to put the time in,” he says. “Really, man, it’s love that you’re putting in. Because the people that do this stuff, we love what we do.”

The Big Question: Reader Poll

We asked readers to answer our question for the March issue: Who is the greatest supporting player of all time? Vote for your favorite response, and we’ll publish the results in the next issue of the magazine.

Create your own user feedback survey

Coming up in April: What are the best last words? Email your nomination to bigquestion@theatlantic.com for a chance to appear in the April issue of the magazine and the next reader poll.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Classic Romance With a Nasty Bite

On the face of it, adding putrid, brain-eating zombies to one of the most beloved and intellectually astute comedy of manners in the English language seems like an odd thing to do. On the one side: empire-waisted tea gowns, landed gentry, and a fiercely keen analysis of social strata in the Regency era. On the other: the undead. There have perhaps been odder marriages (the time Quentin Tarantino appeared in an episode of The Golden Girls springs to mind), but not many.

But as any student of Jane Austen knows, her biting social satires are very much about combat, whether it’s Miss Bingley hurling veiled insults at Elizabeth Bennet faster than she can thwack them away or Emma and Mr. Knightley furiously sparring over the former’s spoilt behavior. In 1996, Andrew Davies inserted a scene of Mr. Darcy fencing into his six-part BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, aiming to increase the surly hero’s romantic appeal by demonstrating his prowess with a rapier. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the new adaptation of the 2009 novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, the director Burr Steers goes one further: He makes Darcy one of the most fearsome zombie hunters in all England, amid a “virulent and gruesome plague” that’s wreaking havoc in the country. And Elizabeth isn’t just his sparring partner in a metaphorical sense—she’s an equally deadly warrior who can match him both intellectually and physically, at least when it comes to decapitating the undead.

One of the great surprises of Grahame-Smith’s novel was that it was literally Pride and Prejudice, as written by Austen, with a few lines about zombie warfare spliced into the text. And it worked! In the book’s zombie subplot, Elizabeth and her sisters have been trained in the martial arts in Shaolin, China, making them one of Hertfordshire’s most vital lines of defense against the increasing zombie incursion. But the movie, sensing that a genteel romantic satire with less than five percent brain eating might be tonally awkward, rejiggers things to allow for more cinematic potential. In an early sequence, the camera lingers on the Bennet sisters’ undergarments as they arm themselves beneath their muslin frocks. Meanwhile, Darcy (Sam Riley) travels around England’s stately homes looking for aristocrats who’ve fallen victim to the plague and finds a young blonde cheerfully gnawing at the throat of an elderly man’s corpse.

Steers leans all the way in to the cognitive dissonance of his source material, amping up the blood, brains, and horror while retaining the key romantic plot points of the novel. Elizabeth (Downton Abbey’s Lily James) is a spirited and independent young woman whose pride is mortified when she overhears Darcy criticize her “tolerable” appearance at a ball; Jane (Bella Heathcote) is her beautiful and sweet-natured older sister who falls in love with Mr. Bingley (Douglas Booth), a wealthy and eligible gentleman who takes a house nearby.

The movie isn’t quite satire, but nor is it serious; as it barrels toward a high-stakes climax, it seems to forget it was ever ironic. Less Austen, more Armageddon.

The conflicts Austen sets up so well are mostly pared down in favor of the bloodier scenes mandated by the soulless corpse element. Miss Bingley (Emma Greenwell) is reduced to a minimal irritation, Mrs. Bennet (Sally Phillips) embarrasses her eldest daughters only fleetingly, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Lena Headey) becomes a fearsome warrior herself who sports an eyepatch thanks to a battle injury and is less an obnoxious, pompous aristocrat than a strong female role model. Mr. Collins (Matt Smith) is the lone character whose presence is fortified, but even he gets a reasonably sympathetic interpretation thanks to Smith’s simpering, winking charm.

Mr. Wickham (Jack Huston) remains the primary antagonist, although his motivations are somewhat altered—he becomes convinced that zombies can be deterred from eating human brains, and seeks to encourage a detente between the two rival forces. As for the zombies themselves, they’re visually horrific (with their skin peeling off and their bonnets covered in blood) but Steers seems unable to find a balance between the comedy of the source material and the eeriness he clearly wants to channel. The movie isn’t quite satire, but nor is it serious; as it barrels toward a high-stakes climax in which London has fallen and the zombies are fast approaching, it veers all the way into action territory and seems to forget it was ever ironic. Less Austen, more Armageddon.

Still, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has its assets, namely James’s unabashed charisma and Charles Dance’s all-too-brief moments as the hard-done-by Mr. Bennet. (Riley is oddly awkward and maladjusted even for Mr. Darcy—the character seems to hint that he’d be more at home at a Marilyn Manson concert than felling the undead at Pemberley—and Booth’s Bingley looks like a Burberry model, which isn’t surprising, given that he is one.) Movies have proven that zombies can be funny (Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead), and that adaptations of classic novels can be thrilling. But all three at the same time? That’s an awful lot to bite off in one go.

Are ISIS Members Posing as Refugees?

The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency says ISIS members slipped into the country along with the more than 1 million refugees who have entered, but added there was no concrete evidence of an imminent attack.  

“We have repeatedly seen that terrorists ... have slipped in camouflaged or disguised as refugees,” Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the BfV, told ZDF, the German public broadcaster, on Friday. “This is a fact that the security agencies are facing.”

He added: “We are trying to recognize and identify whether there are still more IS fighters or terrorists from IS that have slipped in.”

English translation of the remarks were provided by Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster.

Maassen’s remarks came a day after police in Berlin arrested three Algerians with suspected ties to ISIS who, they say, were planning a terrorist attack on the German capital. Among those arrested was a 35-year-old man held at the refugee shelter in Attendorn, Germany, who was the alleged head of the cell. Authorities say he entered the European Union posing as a refugee.

“We are in a serious situation and there is a high risk that there could be an attack,” Maassen told ZDF. “But the security agencies, the intelligence services and the police authorities are very alert and our goal is to minimize the risk as best we can.”

Europe has been on high alert since last year’s deadly attacks on Paris that killed 130 people. That attack, which was claimed by ISIS, coincided with Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing the civil war in Syria and unrest elsewhere and seeking refuge in Europe. Germany, which has announced an open-door policy for Syrian asylum-seekers, is their most-favored destination.

But critics of Germany’s policy, and indeed of Europe’s acceptance of the newcomers, point to the growth of ISIS in Syria and other restive parts of the Arab and Muslim world. Terrorists, they say, could enter Europe posing as refugees. Indeed, at least some of the Paris attackers, all European-born members of ISIS, entered the EU from Turkey using false Syrian passports and posing as refugees.

January's U.S. Jobs Report: All-Around, Not Bad

The January jobs report is out, and it’s mostly good. On Friday morning, the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy added 151,000 jobs and that unemployment is at 4.9 percent.

While the number of jobs added missed expectations (economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal were expecting 185,000), this is the first time the unemployment rate has dipped below 5 percent since February 2008. In the last 12 months, the number of unemployed Americans decreased by 1.1 million.

The question on everyone’s mind leading up to the January jobs report has been whether the kind of growth seen in the last few months of 2015 is sustainable. 2015 was one of the best years for U.S. job growth since 1999, with a monthly average of 221,000 jobs added. The January jobs-added number represents a slowdown in growth, which was somewhat expected. But combined with the unemployment rate, it shows that growth at the moment is modestly strong. In other words, it’s not great, but it's far from terrible.

The Labor Department reported that last month’s increases were led by hiring in the sectors of retail, food services, health care, and manufacturing. Employment in educational services, transportation, warehousing, and mining declined.

Here’s the good news: In 2016, economists are looking for wages and labor-force participation to improve. While job creation was steady in 2015, wages have yet to show the recovery arriving in workers’ bank accounts. The January jobs report saw average hourly earnings rise 0.5 percent, and in the last 12 months the growth of average hourly earnings held steady at 2.5 percent, beating expectations. There’s hope yet that a tightening labor market will mean a bigger payday for American workers this year.

The labor-force participation rate edged up ever so slightly to 62.7 percent, but it’s still at its lowest level in decades. Economists have been wondering since the recovery whether those who lost their job during the recession will return to work.

In 2016, these weak spots—wage growth and labor-force participation—are where improvement is needed. While an unemployment rate under 5 percent is certainly a good sign (it’s a benchmark indicating full employment), all these numbers together mean that the forecast is still mixed on just how 2016 will be for American workers.

The Super Bowl and a Broken San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO—The protest kicked off just a few feet from Super Bowl City, the commercial playground behind security fences on the Embarcadero, where football fans were milling about drinking beer, noshing on $18 bacon cheeseburgers, and lining up for a ride on a zip line down Market Street.

The protesters held up big green camping tents painted with slogans such as “End the Class War” and “Stop Stealing Our Homes,” and chanted phrases blaming San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee for a whole range of problems, including the catchy “Hey Hey, Mayor Lee, No Penalty for Poverty.” They blocked the sidewalk, battling with tourists, joggers, and city workers, some of whom were trying to wheel their bikes through the crowd to get to the ferries that would take them home.

San Francisco is a city that loves to protest. This is where many counter-cultural movements gained traction: the hippies, the beat generation, the gay-rights movement.

And protests in recent weeks have followed in that tradition. Last month, during Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, people demanding racial equality chained themselves to their cars and blocked all five lanes of the Bay Bridge. Protesters drowned out a Boys’ Chorus during Mayor Ed Lee’s inauguration last month, calling for the city’s police chief to resign. The protest outside Super Bowl city was the first of many expected during Super Bowl week, including one by thousands of Uber drivers who say they plan to bring traffic to a standstill around Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.

As Super Bowl 50 and hordes of tourists and media descend on the city for Sunday’s game, though, there’s a sense in San Francisco that something is very wrong, that recent changes in this city have created intolerable inequities and made just living here too hard for all but the most well-off residents.

Eric Risberg / AP

Put simply, the city has gotten too crowded and expensive for all the people who want to live there. That’s driving up prices, leading to evictions, and changing the tenor of the much-beloved city on the Bay. Protesters may be chanting about racial justice and homelessness and tech workers, but at their heart, many of the protests are about what kind of city—and whose city—San Francisco will be.

The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment hit $3,530 in August of last year, a 14 percent increase from the year before (that contrasts to $3,160 for a one-bedroom in New York last August). The median rent for two bedrooms in August was $4,900.

The problem can be partly explained by supply and demand. The city has added 45,000 residents since 2010, but has built just 7,500 new housing units, according to a report from Paragon Real Estate. What’s more, the city has failed to build enough new housing for decades, largely because of restrictions of what can be built where. The planning and approval process is also a mess: Projects can be approved and can languish for years, tied up in lawsuits and as developers wait for permits from city staff. Gabe Metcalf, of SPUR, estimates that San Francisco has only built 1,500 new units a year for the past two decades, a time during which the population added nearly 200,000 people.

At the same time, people are flocking to the city, and it’s easy to see why. As the protesters chanted outside Super Bowl City, the sun was setting on the San Francisco Bay, casting a golden light over the hills of Marin, Berkeley, and Oakland. People walked and ran outside in the balmy weather, watching the ferries and sailboats gliding through the water. Workers hurried from jobs under the tall buildings of downtown, home to booming companies such as Salesforce, and meandered to the fancy restaurants that now line the city’s streets. This is a very appealing city, with lovely scenery and a growing number of jobs for the well-educated. But in an attempt to preserve the city’s current look and feel, San Francisco has failed to approve zoning changes that would allow developers to build enough units for all the people moving here.

“The economy of the city and the Bay Area is just so strong and the city is so attractive to people from all over the world that we are simply faced with a huge growing demand of people wanting to be here,” Metcalf said. “At the same time, we made some mistakes with regard to housing policy. It boils down to a very simple thing—we didn’t allow the supply of housing to increase enough to keep up with the growing demand to live here.”

In other words, this is a zoning problem. In the early 1970s, a series of decisions were made to “downzone” areas of the city to prevent it from changing, Metcalf said. Those decisions limited where high buildings could be built and restricted where dense office and residential spaces could go up. The below San Francisco Planning Department map indicates that most of the residential lots in the city are restricted to three units per lot.

The light yellow areas indicate where zoning limits residential buildings to three units per lot. The darker orange, concentrated mostly near downtown, indicates zoning that allows one unit per 200 square foot. Red is downtown office, purple is commercial. (San Francisco Planning Department)

This was one of the things that first struck me when I arrived in San Francisco. I’d heard about the high prices and lack of housing, and thought the city would be, like New York, finding creative ways to pack in more living spaces and cars and offices and people. But San Francisco isn’t very dense at all. Some of its hottest areas are still taken up by multi-level above-ground parking lots. Its streets are dotted with one-story commercial buildings, even in neighborhoods like the Marina District, where people really, really want to live. Its waterfronts still feature empty warehouses and industrial spaces, and even developers who want to divide Victorian homes into separate units to fit more people are rebuffed. In much of the city, anyone who builds a new unit is required to also build a parking space with it—one of the only ways to get around that regulation is to have a hearing. Stand atop Twin Peaks and look over San Francisco, and it’s hard to see any apartment buildings at all: Most of the buildings are either the tall office buildings of downtown, the colonial Spanish-style churches of the Mission, or the three- and four-story homes that are just about everywhere else.

It’s a big contrast to New York City, where you can’t miss the scaffolding and cranes and construction when you walk down the street, regardless of what borough you’re in (okay, maybe not Staten Island). In New York, parking garages are compressed into small spaces with wacky stacking systems where cars ride elevators to be parked. There, just about every empty warehouse, building, or park is in the process of being converted into something. In San Francisco, everywhere you turn there are empty lots or empty commercial buildings that would make for great spots for apartments.

“We have plenty of room to add housing—but yes, it would mean bigger, taller buildings, it would also mean more people getting around by bike and transit rather than driving,” Metcalf said.

A view of San Francisco from Twin Peaks (Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP)

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors could change the city’s zoning to allow more tall buildings, but they’d likely face opposition from residents who still don’t want the city to change, Metcalf said. After all, if you own a home in San Francisco, you are likely seeing its value skyrocket as demand continues to increase and supply remains low. And why support new building that might block your view or your sun or bring hassles into the neighborhood?

Protests aren’t focused on zoning changes or creating more affordability, though. Instead, they’re encouraging the city to ask the NFL for reimbursement for the $5 million San Francisco is spending on city services like police ahead of the Super Bowl, asking the city to divert that money to resources for the homeless population. They’re protesting over alleged police actions that moved homeless residents from the space around Super Bowl City and carrying around signs with swastikas that read iSlave. (For a good summary of why tech workers aren’t solely to blame, read my colleague Conor Friedersdorf.)

At the protest, I talked to a man with a flowing white beard who identified himself as Ron Ron, and who has lived in the Bay Area since the 1970s.

“This is globalization, this is what Obama's brought on, this is what Ed Lee has brought on,” he said. “It’s called capitalism, Darwinism, survival of the fittest.”

The city’s newest residents are only concerned about tech and about sports like the Super Bowl, but ignore the homeless who are out on the streets because San Francisco is too expensive, he told me. He disagreed with the idea that building more apartments would help, though.

“Everything they build is for rich people,” he said.

In fact, San Francisco has some of the best inclusionary-zoning laws in the country, better than those in New York, Metcalf told me. Any new building with more than 10 units has to set aside a certain number of units for affordable housing. Building more units throughout the city would be a very good start to creating more housing for the rich and poor alike, he said. It’s just a question of how to get those units approved, permitted, and built.