Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 239

Paul Ryan Faces His First Uprising

“To quote William Wallace in Braveheart,” Paul Ryan said on Wednesday morning, “we have to unite the clans.”

This was the money quote of the House speaker’s address to a conservative conference in Washington. The one his office dished out to reporters in advance, a canned sound bite designed to pull back, every so briefly, the ears of a Beltway political crowd transfixed by the intensifying presidential campaign.

Just about 12 hours earlier, Ryan met for beers with the most troublesome of those “clans”—the House Freedom Caucus, that group of a few dozen conservatives who shoved Ryan’s predecessor, John Boehner, out of office and who gave him only the most lukewarm of blessings to take his place. According to The Huffington Post, the meeting “did not go well.” The topic was the budget, and the insistence of the Freedom Caucus members that House Republicans abandon the two-year agreement that Boehner struck with the White House by cutting billions of dollars in spending for fiscal 2017.

Ryan endorsed that deal and implemented it by shepherding to passage an omnibus appropriations bill that funds the federal government through next September. A top priority for him and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is to use the next several months of budget peace to return Congress to what insiders call “regular order”—the process of passing individual appropriations bills through the House and Senate to fund government agencies rather than lumping them all together into a massive, year-end bill that conservatives typically despise. (In December, 95 Republicans voted against the omnibus, and that was considered a victory for leadership.)

Conservatives prize regular order, too, but they don’t like the higher spending levels that were included in the budget agreement. And they were spooked when the projected deficit shot up by more than $100 billion, partially a direct result of the spending increases and tax increases Congress passed at the end of 2015. “Paul Ryan has two choices,” Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama told The Huffington Post. “He can either support a financially responsible path that rises to the challenges that America faces, or not.”

For Ryan and the Freedom Caucus, this confrontation was only a matter of time. House conservatives like Raul Labrador, Brooks, and others largely rolled their eyes at the adulation poured on the new speaker by Republicans who practically begged him to take the job last year. They warned Ryan would have a brief honeymoon, and now it’s over. Ryan didn’t need their votes when he struck bipartisan agreements with Democrats at the end of last year, but the annual budget resolution is another matter. It’s traditionally a party-line vote and a particular point of pride for Ryan, a former chairman of the Budget Committee. GOP leaders can’t afford to lose more than a couple dozen Republican votes, so conservatives are trying to exert their leverage to get more spending cuts. Yet a budget that doesn’t adhere to last fall’s agreement would push Democrats away and threaten to unravel Ryan and McConnell’s grand plan for a normal appropriations process.

The relatively arcane budget process, of course, is really just a small fissure compared with the much bigger tactical divisions in the Republican Party, and that’s what Ryan tried to confront on Wednesday. He was speaking to Heritage Action, the rabble-rousing, right-wing advocacy group that emboldened conservatives inside Congress and made so much trouble for Boehner and his lieutenants in the leadership. Boehner would never have appeared at the Heritage summit, having spit hot fire at the group for much of his last two years in office.

Ryan showed up, if only to ask them to stand down. He argued that Democrats had been trying to sow division in the GOP for years, and in this critical election year, conservatives had to stay united. “What I want to say to you today is this: Don’t take the bait,” he said.

Don’t fight over tactics. And don’t impugn people’s motives. It’s fine if you disagree. And there’s a lot that’s rotten in Washington. There’s no doubt about that. But we can’t let how you vote on an amendment to an appropriations bill define what it means to be a conservative. Because, it’s setting our sights too low. Frankly, that’s letting the president define us. That’s what he wants us to do. That’s defining ourselves as an opposition party, instead of a proposition party.

Will conservatives heed that call? Unlikely. Later in the afternoon, at a panel on the “State of the Conservative Movement,” Representative Dave Brat offered something of a response. Brat is the Virginian who took out Eric Cantor, defeating the Republican majority leader in perhaps the biggest primary upset in House history. He’s now a member of the Freedom Caucus, and he urged Heritage and its funders to keep the pressure on GOP leaders, no matter who they were. “It’s absolutely crucial that you guys pile on politically in order to outweigh the special-interest power,” Brat said.

Ryan wants to use 2016 as a test run for the GOP in Congress, hoping he can begin to unify the party so that it can govern effectively in 2017 if a Republican president is elected. And as a popular young conservative himself, he undoubtedly has a better chance to succeed where Boehner fell short. Yet if the emerging budget battle is any indication, he’s off to a bumpy start.

The Lonely Jaguar of the United States

There are about 15,000 jaguars living in the wild today. They are solitary creatures, preferring to live and hunt alone. But the one living and hunting in the United States takes the word “loner” to another level: The jaguar, nicknamed “El Jefe,” is the only known wild jaguar in the country.

El Jefe, which means “the boss” in Spanish, made his public debut Wednesday in video footage released by the Seattle-based Conservation CATalyst and the Tucson, Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. The brief clip shows the big cat roaming the grassy forest floor of the Santa Rita Mountains, outside Tucson, navigating rocky creeks, and just doing jaguar-y things:

Conservation CATalyst and the Center for Biological Diversity released new video today of the only known wild jaguar currently in the United States.Captured on remote sensor cameras in the Santa Rita Mountains just outside of Tucson, the dramatic footage provides a glimpse of the secretive life of one of nature’s most majestic and charismatic creatures. This is the first-ever publicly released video of the #jaguar, recently named 'El Jefe' by Tucson students, and it comes at a critical point in this cat’s conservation. Learn more here: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/ne...

Posted by Center for Biological Diversity on Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Since 2013, El Jefe has been photographed by motion-detecting cameras more than 100 times. But jaguars are notoriously elusive creatures. The 41-second video posted Wednesday is the product of three years of tracking. Chris Bugbee, a biologist at Conservation CATalyst, said in a statement that researchers regularly tinkered with camera locations and even used a dog specially trained to sniff out wildlife feces to track down El Jefe.

Historically, jaguars are not uncommon in Arizona. Their range once extended north from Argentina to Central America and Mexico and up into south-central states and even California and Louisiana. But the big cats all but disappeared from the U.S. in the last century, mostly due to habitat loss and federal population-control programs intended to protect livestock. Will Rizzo described the bleak state of the jaguar in the U.S. in Smithsonian magazine in 2005:

In 1963, a hunter in Arizona’s White Mountains shot a female, the last of her sex to be documented in the United States. Two years later, the last legally killed jaguar, a male, was taken by a deer hunter in the Patagonia Mountains, south of Tucson.

In 1969, Arizona outlawed most jaguar hunting, but with no females known to be at large, there was little hope the population could rebound. During the next 25 years, only two jaguars were documented in the United States, both killed: a large male shot in 1971 near the Santa Cruz River by two teenage duck hunters, and another male cornered by hounds in the Dos Cabezas Mountains in 1986.

The conservation centers say a proposed copper mine by a Canadian company in the middle of the Santa Rita Mountains threatens to cleave thousands of acres from the jaguar’s natural territory.

Biologists says El Jefe is the only verified jaguar living in the U.S. since Macho B, who was euthanized in 2009 following injuries sustained when he was captured and collared with a GPS tracker. The Arizona wildlife officials involved in the capture said it was accidental, but it was later revealed that one biologist had lured Macho B by placing feces from a captive female jaguar in heat along a trail the animal was known to frequent. (The Arizona Republic’s Dennis Wagner has a fascinating and comprehensive account of the capture and cover-up here.)

These days, the most jaguar conservationists can do—aside from hoping no one shoots and kills El Jefe—is wait for other jaguars, particularly female ones, to cross over the border from Mexico. Fingers crossed that happens in time for Valentine’s Day.

Obama to Muslim Americans: 'You’re Right Where You Belong'

Amid what Muslim American leaders describe as the tensest moment in their community’s history, President Obama visited the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday and delivered some of the most in-depth comments any American leader has made on Islam in the United States.

Obama’s comments were aimed at a triple audience. He placed greatest emphasis on making an impassioned case to the entire American population to accept Muslims, speaking in terms that were reminiscent of President George W. Bush’s famous post-9/11 “Islam is peace” remarks. Second, he spoke to American Muslims themselves, telling them they have a place in the country but also insisting they must help resist extremism. Finally, he spoke to Muslims around the world, calling for religious freedom and pluralism and saying the U.S. is not at war with Islam.

“Most Americans don’t necessarily know, or at least don’t know that they know, a Muslim personally. And as a result, many only hear about Muslims and Islam from the news after an act of terrorism, or in distorted media portrayals in TV or film, all of which gives this hugely distorted impression,” Obama said. “And since 9/11 but more recently since the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, you’ve seen too often people conflating the horrific acts of terrorism with the beliefs of an entire faith. And of course, recently we’ve heard inexcusable political rhetoric about Muslim Americans that has no place in our country.”

Related Story

How Republicans Won and Then Lost the Muslim Vote

In rebuke to politicians like Donald Trump, Obama presented Islam as an essential part of the nation’s heritage, going back to Muslim slaves brought to the British colonies and running through Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom up to Fazlur Rahman Khan, who designed two of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers. And he spoke emotionally about mail he received from Muslim American children and parents who felt persecuted and unsafe.

“We’re one American family. And when any part of our family starts to feel separate or second-class or targeted, it tears at the very fabric of our nation,” he said.

Obama’s visit comes at a time of particular tension for the American Muslim community. Advocates report an increasing number of Islamophobic incidents, which are mirrored in the Republican presidential race. Donald Trump endorsed the suggestion of a registry of Muslims in the U.S., and he suggested barring Muslims from entering the country—even citizens returning from abroad. Other candidates have suggested a link between refugees fleeing Syria and Iraq and terrorism. Although there was a spate of attacks and incidents against Muslims after 9/11, the support of President George W. Bush made them feel that those attacks were mostly from the fringe.

“You’re right where you belong. You’re part of America too. You’re not Muslim or American, you’re Muslim and American.”

“With the recent spike in anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide and especially in the last few months since the Paris terror attacks and the San Bernardino attacks… there’s never been this level of fear and apprehension in the American Muslim community before,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council of American-Islamic Relations. “Unfortunately now thanks to people like Donald Trump and Ben Carson, it’s directly in the mainstream.”

Against that background, leaders welcomed Obama’s visit as an important signal of the nation’s leader rejecting those attacks—and a message to Muslims that they belong in the United States.

“It means to us that we are a part of this society,” said Riham Osman, a spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Committee.

Obama took pains to condemn Islamophobic rhetoric during his State of the Union address in January. “When politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or our fellow citizens, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid is called names, that doesn’t make us safer,” he said. “That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. It betrays who we are as a country.”

On Wednesday he responded to critics—especially Republican contenders to replace him in the White House—who complain that he won’t label Islamic terrorism as such, saying demands to label by religion only play into extremist propaganda.

“Just as all Americans have a responsibility to reject discrimination, Muslims around the world have a responsibility to reject extremist ideologies.”

“I often hear it said that we need moral clarity in this fight. And the suggestion is somehow that if I would simply say, ‘These are all Islamic terrorists,’ then we would actually have solved the problem by now, apparently,” he said. “Let’s have some moral clarity: Groups like ISIS are desperate for legitimacy.... We must never give them that legitimacy. They’re not defending Islam. They’re not defending Muslims.”

Implicitly responding to tiresome calls for the “moderate Muslims” to speak out against terrorism, Obama said that they are speaking—but not enough people are listening. He vowed to work to amplify their voices.

But unlike in the past, when Obama has sometimes sought to question the Muslim bona fides of groups like ISIS, he acknowledged that the group draws its power in part from its interpretation of Islam—even if that interpretation is, as Obama said Wednesday, “perverted.” (That was a vast improvement on Secretary of State John Kerry’s baffling decision to label ISIS members “apostates” in comments Tuesday.)

Before speaking publicly, the president met with a group of Muslims: mostly young, foreign- and American-born, people born into Muslim families and converts, and from various ethnic backgrounds. Speaking specifically to young Muslims during his speech, Obama offered both reassurance that they belong in America, and a lecture on the importance of religious freedom. He said the government can’t deal with Muslim Americans simply through the lens of law enforcement, a nod to consistent complaints about intrusive policing and civil-liberties violations.

“You’re right where you belong. You’re part of America too. You’re not Muslim or American, you’re Muslim and American,” he told young Muslims. But Obama also warned them not to “respond to ignorance by embracing a worldview that suggests you must choose between your faith and your patriotism.”

This sort of language causes some discomfort among American Muslims. “There are a lot of young people in this mosque. It’s hard that they’ve grown up in a post-9/11 society where they are constantly tied to violent extremism,” Osman said. “It’s going to bring up some feelings.” The misgivings echo the complaints of African Americans who have applauded some of Obama’s interactions with the black community while rejecting his overtures to “respectability politics”—comments about how black men need to “pull up their pants” or make more effort to be present as fathers.

Shifting to address a global Muslim audience, Obama reiterated that the U.S. is not at war with Islam, and made a case for religious freedom worldwide. “Just as all Americans have a responsibility to reject discrimination ... Muslims around the world have a responsibility to reject extremist ideologies,” he said, highlighting in particular anti-Semitic attacks in Europe committed by Muslims.

Early in his remarks, Obama noted that many Americans have never been to a mosque, and tried to give them a picture of a vibrant community “Think of your own church or synagogue or temple. This is where families come to worship and express their love for God and each another,” he said, mentioned Cub Scout and Girl Scout meetings, basketball games, health clinics and more.

What Obama didn’t mention, but was apparent to all those meeting with him, was the fact that this was his own first visit in office to a mosque in the United States. While grateful for the president’s presence at this moment, Muslim leaders also wondered what took him so long.

“We’ve been advocating along with other Muslim organizations for years,” Osman said. As to the timing, she added, “That’s the question all American Muslims are asking now. We’re definitely not excusing him.”

Obama’s apparent reluctance to visit a mosque had become a symbol of the frustrations many Muslims felt toward the president. His entry into office was met with high hopes, and he won the backing of an overwhelming portion of the Muslim vote. American Muslims had backed Bush during his first run for office, but had become disenchanted with him after September 11, upset at wars in the Middle East and scrutiny by the national-security state at home. Many saw Obama as the man to fix it. He spoke during his campaign about the importance of civil liberties and improving relationships in the Muslim world, and he had even spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, the world’s largest predominantly Muslim country.

But Muslims have had their frustrations with the president since 2008. His actions in office haven’t matched his campaign rhetoric on civil liberties. The U.S. has remained involved militarily in the Middle East, and the administration’s vacillation and apparent helplessness in the face of the humanitarian disaster in Syria has frustrated many American Muslims. While polling data is less reliable that one would like, Obama’s support in the group seems to have dipped significantly in 2012—though it remained at nearly seven in 10.

That highlights the dilemma for American Muslims: Where else are they going go? As inattentive as Obama has been, some leading Republicans have become increasingly strident in their hostility to Islam—a tendency that seemed to increase significantly during the debate over the spuriously named “Ground Zero Mosque,” and which has only increased during the course of the 2016 presidential campaign. (Both Muslim members of Congress, Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, are Democrats, and both attended Wednesday’s event.)

“We’ve been advocating along with other Muslim organizations for years. We’re definitely not excusing him.”

Given that, Obama’s absence from American mosques—even as he visited foreign ones—had come to be seen as a symbol of how Obama carefully kept Muslims at arm’s-length. As early as 2011, U.S. Muslim leaders were expressing frustration that Obama hadn’t visited yet. “[He] has not spoken in any Muslim or Arab gathering that I know of, nor has he spoken in a mosque,” Imam Mohamed Magid told me then. “President Obama does all the speeches overseas.” Muslim leaders noted that American presidents as far back as Dwight Eisenhower had visited mosques, and spoke with increasing wistfulness about Bush, who—in an extraordinary gesture—had gone to the Islamic Center of Washington on September 17, 2001, just six days after the attacks in New York and D.C.

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” Bush said. “That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world.”

American Muslims tend to attribute Obama’s slowness to a combination of very real political pressure, including false suggestions that he is a Muslim, and a lack of political courage from the White House, which did not want to encourage those falsehoods. “I guess it’s natural human inclination to avoid even scurrilous attacks,” Hooper said.

The president acknowledged those attacks Wednesday: “Thomas Jefferson’s opponents tried to stir things up by suggesting he was a Muslim. I was not the first. Look it up! I’m in good company.”

Obama’s visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore came after months of rumors that the president was finally ready to make an appearance, Osman said. MPAC learned of the visit two weeks ago, but ISB only got word last week, and invitations went out over the last two days.

A single visit to a mosque by Obama, at this late stage in his term, will not be enough to roll back the recent climate of fear. But even this late, tenuous visit represents an unusually strong step by an American leader to include the American Muslim community.

Lord Lucan’s Second Death

This much is known: The seventh earl of Lucan vanished in 1974 shortly after the body of the nanny to his three young children was found bludgeoned to death at his family home at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, in London’s posh Belgravia neighborhood.

He and his wife, Veronica Duncan, had been estranged, and were in the midst of a bitter custody battle over their children. Lucan had moved out of the family home and was living nearby. According to news reports of the time, Duncan told a coroner’s court that Lucan tried to strangle her on November 7, 1974, the same night the nanny, Sandra Rivett, was found in the basement of the home beaten to death with lead pipe. Duncan ran bleeding into a nearby pub and shouted: “Help me, help me. I have just escaped from a murderer. He’s in my house. He’s murdered the nanny.”

Lucan’s bloodstained car was found three days later near the English coast, and police began a years-long manhunt. He was never seen again—though in 1975 an inquest declared him to be Rivett’s killer.

That’s where the facts end and speculation begins: For four decades, rumors swirled about the fate of the man born Richard John Bingham, a playboy and peer whose penchant for powerboats, vodka martinis, and Aston Martins had captivated Britain’s tabloids. He became the center of conspiracy theories, news articles, books, and documentaries, and was “spotted” as far afield as South Africa, India, South America, Australia, and France, as authorities continued their search for him in connection with Rivett’s death. Until today.

On Wednesday, a High Court judge ruled that Lucan, who would be 82 if he were alive, is presumed to be dead, paving the way for a death certificate to be issued and for his only son, George Bingham, to inherit the family title. Lucan was previously declared dead in 1999, a move that allowed matters of inheritance to be settled, but his son argued that the previous declaration was insufficient for other purposes. Wednesday’s declaration was made possible by a new British law, the Presumption of Death Act, which took effect in 2014.

“I am very happy with the judgment of the court in this matter,” Bingham said Wednesday. “It has been a very long time coming.”

The Guardian adds that the process was accelerated after Neil Berriman, Rivett’s son, withdrew his objections to the death certificate. Berriman told the court he had seen a police document from 2002 that said officers believed Lucan was alive at that time. The judge ruled Lucan was presumed dead, saying she was satisfied he hadn’t been known to be alive after that year.

Berriman had been adopted shortly after his mother’s death and learned of her only as an adult. In a prepared statement, he said: “I feel that Mr. Bingham and myself have a great deal in common. I would sooner try and work with the family rather than against them.”

Bingham thanked Berriman’s efforts to “secure justice for his mother and our beloved family nanny.”

The two men have reportedly become close over the past few years as they sought answers to questions about their shared pasts.

Bingham said Wednesday’s decision is a “nice moment to say farewell to a very dark past and move on. My own personal view is that he [Lucan] has definitely been dead since [1974].”

“In the circumstances, I would think it possible that he saw his life at an end, regardless of guilt or otherwise; being dragged through the courts and the media would have destroyed his personal life, his career and the chances of getting the custody of his children back,” he said. “And that may well have pushed a man to end his own life, but I have no idea.”

Berriman said he believes Lucan escaped on the night of the murder, but died sometime in the past 15 years.

“Maybe the police know more than they let on. But at the end we have to get to the truth and justice for Sandra—a horrible death, a young woman beaten, my mother,” he said. “There is no getting away from the fact that, whatever happened that night, Lord Lucan is guilty of something in my eyes.”

Once and for All: Jack Could Totally Have Fit on Rose's Raft

“I’ll never let go,” she whispered.

Except, uh: She did. She totally did.

Rose DeWitt Bukater, heroine of Titanic, badass proto-feminist, wearer of the Heart of the Ocean and owner of the beating heart Céline sang about, did, in the end, something you wouldn’t expect: She let the love of her life freeze to death in icy waters. Oh, and she did that while 1). wearing a life vest that she could have at least lent to Jack, and 2). floating safely and relatively comfortably upon a wooden door that, science has proven, totally had enough room for Jack to come aboard. As Ross Geller (a fellow who, say what you will about him, never would have let Rachel be swallowed alive into the murky Atlantic) would put it, decades later: “Let’s try scooching.”

Don’t blame Rose, however, for Jack’s demise. According to Rose herself—Kate Winslet, who appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live this week—Jack “actually could have fitted” on the pair’s makeshift (yet roomy! so roomy!) raft. The actor thereby washed her hands of decades’ worth of conspiracy theories and scientific inquiries and indignant self-defenses and, in general, confusion and consternation on the part of Titanic’s legions of fans. There was room, Rose! There was totally room.

You could look at that decades-in-the-making admission as Winslet’s “agreement,” as the Guardian put it, “with fans who felt Leonardo DiCaprio’s character died unnecessarily.” You could see it, even more dramatically, as a final declaration—as Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos argued—that “Rose let Jack die.”

Which: She kind of did! (See, again: All that room.) Another way of seeing it, though, is that Rose DeWitt Bukater, the lover and the fighter and the fictional character, had very little to do with things on that life raft and in that movie. It was James Cameron, Titanic’s director and auteur, who let Jack die. It was Cameron who approved the use of a prop that would have room for Titanic’s star and yet refuse to accommodate him; it was Cameron who made the decision, finally, that Jack would die. It was Cameron who made Rose let go.  

The culture that created and propelled and validated Titanic as a film was the same culture that killed Jack Dawson.

And: All of us who watched Titanic helped him to make those decisions. Imagine, after all, if Jack had survived. On the one hand this would demand that an already long movie become even longer, to explain the survival; on the other, though, it would compromise the lofty ambitions Titanic had for itself as a cinematic project. “Epics”—the types of movies that get celebrated at the Oscars and remembered for their human dramas—don’t traditionally accommodate happy endings. They tend to prefer pathos. They tend to prefer plots that allow for the ironization of lines like “I’ll never let go.” They tend, essentially, to prefer dying over living. As Cameron sniffed of the Jack Matter back in 2012: “I’m going to call up William Shakespeare and ask why Romeo and Juliet had to die.”

Commercially, too, Titanic had a vested interest in Jack’s death. The song that helped the film to cement its status and its brand in pop culture almost demanded that Jack be sacrificed to the cause. (“Near … far … whereeeeeeever you are …” wouldn’t have had the same poignance if the “wherever” in question had been “an artist’s loft in New York City.” ) The resonance that audiences felt with the film when it premiered in 1997—the resonance that they continue to feel when it streams on Amazon or airs on HBO—is premised on the romance of the unfinished. Had Jack and Rose been left to live their lives in America—had their story, even if only through implication, gone on to involve the finding of an apartment and the making of a living and Jack’s realization that Rose has never in her life needed to cook a meal—the romance of their story would have been compromised. Their love, gauzy and warm, would have congealed into the stilted pragmatisms of everyday life. Their romance took place in international waters; Jack’s survival would have, in every sense, brought it to shore.  

Which is all to say that the culture that created and propelled and validated Titanic as a film was also the culture that killed Jack. Titanic wouldn’t have enjoyed the successes it did, as an artistic product or a commercial one, had Jack survived. James Cameron—and Rose Bukater along with him—sacrificed their hero upon Hollywood’s icy altar. Jack had to end, so that the film could go on.

Lady Gaga’s High-Stakes February

The last time Lady Gaga sang the national anthem in public was at a New York City LGBT pride celebration in 2013. She sounded great. She also modified the words: “Oh say does that star-spangled flag of pride yet wave”—at which point, yes, she waved a rainbow flag—“o’er the land of the free, and a home for the gays.” Some people did not love this.

She probably won’t take such liberties when she sings “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl on Sunday. But is it wrong to root for her to do something weird? Maybe wear a fun hat? February is a big month for Gaga, featuring three high-stakes nationally televised performances: first the Super Bowl, then a David Bowie memorial set at the Grammys, then a ballad at the Oscars. By the end of it, she will either have completed her surprising transformation into America’s leading gala singer, or will have left a portion of the world fuming at her sacrilege. She will also have further illuminated her answer to the question that a number of her contemporaries have been grappling with lately: Where does a pop star go when they want to take a break from the radio race while remaining relevant?

It was a year ago at the Oscars that Gaga staged her big coming-out as a normal-ish person. Her faithful and lovely tribute to The Sound of Music shocked people who hadn’t seen the videos of her pre-meat-dress performances under her birth name Stefani Germanotta, or hadn’t listened to her recent Tony Bennett collaboration Cheek to Cheek, or just hadn’t paid attention to her pipes on “Edge of Glory.” She also dropped the shroud she had long held up around her personal life, gushing on social media about her engagement to the actor Taylor Kinney. The year ended with her starring in American Horror Story, a decision that called back to her old loud-proud-freak routine while also attempting to demonstrate her versatility. Critics said her acting wasn’t great; the Golden Globes disagreed.

There’s no more sacred or scary gig than a Super Bowl performance of the national anthem. Botch it, and the caterwauling memes go into your permanent record. Truly nail it, and fans will write awestruck appreciations for decades, as Danyel Smith just did at ESPN with 3,000 words on Whitney Houston’s 1991 rendition. Smith’s article points out the oft-forgotten fact that Houston lip-synced then; indeed, many other landmark Super Bowl performances of the song, like Jennifer Hudson’s in 2009, were prerecorded. Judging by the backlash that followed the allegations of Beyoncé mouthing instead of singing at Barack Obama’s 2012 inauguration, though, lip-syncing is still a PR risk; if Gaga’s still trying to prove that she Really Can Sing, she might try it live.

2016 pop is sorely in need of Gaga’s joyful nonsense.

Either way, she’ll be back in the spotlight a week later, facing skepticism from those horrified that the Grammys chose her to pay tribute to David Bowie. “She is not, however she might like to style herself, this generation’s answer to David Bowie,” Christina Cauterucci wrote at Slate. Well of course she isn’t and of course Gaga never actually claimed she is. But if someone has to take on the task, you could do worse than a star who uses ever-changing public personae as performance, has undisguised affection for cabaret, and has worked to undermine old gender and sexuality norms.

I’ll agree that the idea of one star of possibly fleeting popularity and still unclear historical importance trying to sum up a career as vast and influential as Bowie’s feels wrong. But that’s why it seems likely that other Bowie-connected performers will be brought in for Gaga’s three-to-four song medley; already, it’s been announced that the Chic guitarist and Bowie collaborator Nile Rodgers will participate. Really she has two choices for how to tackle the challenge before her. She can faithfully cover a few of Bowie’s defining tunes, making for a relatively safe bet as with her Sound of Music performance. Or she can do something weirder and newer that attempts to channel his adventuresome spirit. If it’s the latter she goes with, the risks of blowback are high, but so is the potential for a career-defining moment—maybe even the return of Gaga the pop star.

Gaga-uary will end, fittingly, with the Oscars, where she will perform the only piece of original music she put out in her year of normcore: “Til It Happens to You,” recorded for The Hunting Ground, a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses. The wrenching rock ballad is a frontrunner for Best Original Song, but if its release was an attempt to shore up Gaga’s credibility as a songwriter, the effort has been sabotaged. Last month, the musician Linda Perry tweeted that Gaga shouldn’t receive writing credit for the tune because the recorded version had barely been changed from the demo that co-writer Diane Warren shopped around a while back. Warren disagreed with that assessment and Perry backed down, but the damage had been done. It seems likely that Gaga’s contribution to the song, aside from the not-minor fact of belting it out forcefully, was altering just a few words.

Regardless, the Oscar performance should prove to be one more reassertion of Gaga’s musical skills outside of the context of Eurodance beats and wild costumes. If she executes well at each of these events, by the end of February, anyone who’s not impressed by her voice will probably never be. Afterwards, perhaps she’ll settle into a long career of respectable, slow, safe-for-everyone singing. Who could blame her? If she bows out from dancepop for good, expect a Vegas residency by the end of the decade

But fans of the ’08-’13 era when she did battle on the Hot 100 might argue that 2016 pop is sorely in need of a Gaga-like presence. The current chart dominators tend to be strained, calculatedly cool presences, whether it’s Bieber in his lip-biting “Sorry” phase or Alessia Cara acting like she’s so over partying or Selena Gomez shimmying blankly or Drake scowling from the top of the rap heap or Rihanna morosely messing around in the studio. All these artists refuse to find joy in nonsense, and to them I say ro-mah ro-mah-mah, Gaga oh-la-la.

Can Art Trump Trump?

In October 2015, the artists David Gleeson and Mary Mihelic purchased a Donald Trump tour bus on Craigslist.

It was the start of an art project that for the last few months has seen the newly dubbed T.RUMP Bus on the trail from Philadelphia to Miami Beach to Iowa. Gleeson and Mihelic, who cofounded the art collective t.Rutt, began by reappropriating the bus with a cheeky first accent—“Make Fruit Punch Great Again”—but the Republican presidential candidate’s controversial declarations soon sparked new additions.

Mary Mihelic and David Gleeson



Mary Mihelic and David Gleeson

After Trump proposed banning Muslim immigrants from the U.S., the artists added an Arabic translation of “Make America Great Again” on its back windows; after he claimed he could shoot someone in the middle of New York City without hurting his campaign, they appended a bullet-point list of Trump’s “struggles,” based on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that includes “to not hate,” “to not exploit bankruptcy,” and “to not cheat at golf.” When the artists park at a rally, Gleeson takes to the bus’s roof to hit balls covered in Trump’s face with a golf club.

T.RUMP Bus is one of a host of art works inspired by the 2016 election, many of which feature distortions of the Republican frontrunner’s visage. Like the candidate himself, some aim for cheap shots rather than substantive commentary: One reinvention of Shepard Fairey’s iconic 2008 “Hope” poster calls Trump a “potato with butthole lips”; the street artist Hanksy’s painting on a building in New York explicitly compares Trump to feces; a U.K. mural of Trump’s face was painted only to be defaced by the artist, who reportedly threw eggs at it after he was finished. But the T.RUMP Bus in particular seeks to complicate the public’s understanding of the GOP’s most controversial figure by using his own performative tactics against him.

“When this huge bus pulls in, it’s such a spectacle,” says Mihelic, who calls Trump a “performance artist” in his own right. “It actually draws all the people over, and we really engage with the public in a great way about Donald Trump—with the lovers, the haters, and the undecided.”

Mary Mihelic and David Gleeson

The bus normally causes a stir wherever it goes. On the road, the artists regularly get Trump supporters taking selfies with the bus and Hillary supporters calling them Nazis—until each group realizes what the bus is actually saying. Most recently, the artists have started showcasing burqa-covered Trump campaign posters near the bus when they’re parked.

“We try to create a moment or a pause,” says Gleeson. “We have something that is equally grand that counterbalances that big emotional presence that [Trump] tries to stoke. Hopefully it enables people to think about what the American political process is, and who this man is, and why is he has such an appeal, and to hopefully get a little smile out of it too.”

Other artists who’ve been inspired to satirize Trump have similarly focused on his inflammatory remarks. The artist Sarah Levy used a tampon to paint a visceral portrait of Trump out of her own menstrual blood after his now infamous remarks about the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. In a defense of her work, she wrote, “I think there’s a way to use art, especially if it’s a little humorous, to begin to deflate Trump’s arrogance,” and emphasized that her painting was meant to provoke conversation about women’s issues. Conor Collins, a British artist, created an image of Trump purely out of the statements from the candidate’s Twitter, speeches, and interviews that he viewed as racist, sexist, or bigoted in some way—implying that Trump’s fear-mongering language is the only thing he’s made of.  

Trump isn’t the only candidate to inspire art—street artists have also critiqued Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders through several series of posters. Meanwhile, Ted Cruz has emerged as the darling of some anonymous street artists, who have used his name in conjunction with the Mockingjay symbol from the popular series The Hunger Games in order to paint him as a revolutionary.

“[Gleeson and I] don’t do this stuff lightly,” says Mihelic—the two artists have discussed the possible impact T.RUMP Bus could have on their personal safety. Just days after Trump’s anti-Muslim comments, someone threw a pig head at a mosque in the Philadelphia neighborhood where the bus was parked. But Mihelic counts among her heroes the radical feminist art collective the Guerrilla Girls, and ultimately believes the risk of engaging in political dialogue with her art is worth it: “The role of the artist in history is to implement change.”

How Toyota May Have Started Overcharging Minority Customers

Toyota’s auto-loan division has agreed to pay $21.9 million in restitution to thousands of black, Pacific Islander, and Asian customers whom the government said were charged higher interest rates than white borrowers.

The settlement, announced Tuesday, came about because beginning in 2013 the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Justice had investigated the Toyota Motor Credit Corporation for unfair pricing. Federal agencies said that from 2011 up to 2016 borrowers of color regularly paid Toyota between $100 and $200 more in interest rates than a white borrower with similar credit. The discriminatory system that allowed the unfair pricing is called “dealer markup,” a little-known loan-inflation tactic that allows dealers to make more money; and in this case, at the unequal expense of minorities.

Here’s how the markup worked: Auto dealers often offer in-house financing. And when a person chooses that route, the dealer sends the buyer’s credit score and other loan risk factors to, in this case Toyota Motor Credit Corporation. The dealer learns the rates the buyer has qualified for, but then is allowed increase it, as the dealer sees fit. That inflated rate can translate into profit for the dealer. It’s usually a small amount—Toyota allowed its dealers to increase rates up to 2.5 percent. But that adds up over years of interest.

The CFPB found that, when the dealer was allowed to decide which customers to charge more, people of color, regardless of their credit, most often paid higher interest.

Toyota Motor Credit has also agreed to reduce the amount of markup its dealers can inflate, capping it at 1.25 percent for five-year loans, and 1 percent for loans with longer terms—an agreement that limits the discriminatory practice, but doesn’t eradicate it.

The Toyota Motor Credit Corporation said in a statement that it denies any wrongdoing. It also said it “does not tolerate discrimination of any kind, even perceived or unintentional.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said the lender hadn’t “intentionally discriminated against its customers, but rather that its discretionary pricing and compensation policies resulted in discriminatory outcomes.” Meaning that even though Toyota’s markup policy didn’t inherently discriminate against some people, it did allow dealers to vary prices. And that variation increased when a person was black, a Pacific Islander, or Asian.

Toyota is not the only auto lender to be investigated for this practice. Recently, Honda's lending arm and a couple of U.S. banks have all settled with the bureau in similar cases.

A Win for Australia’s Controversial Migrant-Detention Policy

Australia’s high court has rejected a challenge to the country’s practice of holding asylum-seekers at a camp on Nauru, the Pacific island nation, a decision that paves the way for the return of more than 250 people—including dozens of babies—who are now in Australia.

At issue is a case brought by the Human Rights Law Center (HRLC) on behalf of a Bangladeshi woman who entered Australia by sea. She was detained by Australian officials and taken to Nauru, which along with Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea, is where Australia processes its asylum-seekers. The woman was returned to Australia for medical treatment during the late stages of her pregnancy, but appealed her return to Nauru. Lawyers for the woman challenged Australia’s right to detain people on foreign soil. On Wednesday, the court said the government’s actions were both legal and constitutional.

The decision paves the way for the return of about 267 people, including 37 babies born in Australia, to the detention center on Nauru.

HRLC and other immigrant-rights groups say the conditions on Nauru are poor, citing women who say they have been sexually assaulted at the detention center on the island.

“The legality is one thing, the morality is another. Ripping kids out of primary schools and sending them to be indefinitely warehoused on a tiny remote island is wrong,” Daniel Webb, the HRLC’s director of legal advocacy, said in a statement. “We now look to the Prime Minister to step in and do the right thing and let them stay so these families can start to rebuild their lives.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Australia’s tough stance, which is supported by the opposition, not only secures the country’s borders, but also saves lives by preventing drownings.

“Our commitment today is simply this: The people smugglers will not prevail over our sovereignty. Our borders are secure,” he told Parliament on Wednesday. “The line has to be drawn somewhere and it is drawn at our border.”

In a statement, UNICEF, the UN children’s fund, said the court’s decision shifts the international legal obligations for refugees from Australia to its poorer neighbor Nauru.

“The current offshore immigration network is a system in crisis and is creating crisis for affected children and families,” the organization said.

Under Australian law, those asylum-seekers who are granted refugee status are either settled in Nauru or Papua New Guinea—not Australia. They also have an option of going to Cambodia, under a deal worked out between the two countries.

At present, more than 1,400 people are being detained on Nauru and Manus as they await their claims to be processed. The average length of their detention is 445 days.

Was the Iowa Caucus Decided by Coin Flips?

Updated at 5:32 p.m. Eastern on February 2, 2016

The Democratic caucuses in Iowa on Monday were so close that more than a dozen delegates were awarded based on coin flips.

How many is not exactly clear—the state party doesn’t track all the games of chance that occur as part of the complex process for divvying up delegates at hundreds of caucus sites across the state. But despite initial reports that Hillary Clinton had improbably run the table, it appears that Bernie Sanders won a sizable share of coin tosses as well, according to information provided on Tuesday by the state Democratic Party.

Delegates to the Democratic National Convention are the main prize of any caucus or primary, and the percentage of the vote in each of 1,681 Iowa precincts is used to determine how many delegates each candidate earns. Yet because these percentages are often messy, the Democratic rules call for precinct chairmen to use games of chance—coin flips—when the delegates can’t be determined simply by rounding up or down. (A photo of the relevant section was tweeted by Univision’s Fernando Peinado.)

Games of chance have been included in the Democratic caucus rules “forever,” said Norm Sterzenbach, a former executive director of the state part who oversaw the nominating contests in 2008 and 2012. “It happens, but it’s not frequent,” he said in an interview on Tuesday afternoon. They usually occur when calculations for electing delegates to the county convention result in an extra delegate that can’t be assigned to one candidate by rounding. The county delegates are distinct from the “state delegation equivalents,” which is what the party uses to determine how many delegates each candidates secures for the national convention in Philadelphia. Clinton finished with 700.59 state delegate equivalents to 696.82 for Sanders, yet because county delegates are worth a “tiny fraction” of the state delegates, Sterzenbach said he could say “with absolute certainty” that the coin flips did not determine the outcome in Iowa.

The early reports out of caucus sites gave a different impression. The Des Moines Register collected reports from six different precincts that resorted to coin flips—and Clinton won all of them. But Sam Lau, a spokesman for the Iowa Democratic Party, said that Sanders fared better in the games of chance that were reported through the party’s official mobile app. He won six of those seven coin flips—a fact that underlines how incomplete the available data remains, and the likelihood that a full accounting of all the coin flips on Monday night would yield a more even result than initial reports suggested.

The coin flips are a longstanding feature of the Democratic caucuses, and games of chance actually have a long history in deciding close electoral contests in the U.S., and they are still used outside Iowa. As recently as November, a pair of candidates for the state legislature in Mississippi drew straws to determine the winner after an election of more than 9,000 votes resulted in a tie. The stakes weren’t quite that high for Clinton and Sanders in Iowa on Monday night—both candidates head onto New Hampshire in decent shape. But the coin flips in Iowa drew an unusual amount of attention this year with Clinton's razor-thin margin of victory, a result that state party chairwoman Andy McGuire said was  “the closest in Iowa Democratic caucus history.” And their use underscores the fact that even small shifts in individual precincts can have an outsized impact in a race as tight as this one.