Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 242

Samantha Bee and Barbie's New Body: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Smirking in the Boys’ Room

Rebecca Traister | New York

“Bee is trying to become a (humorous!) feminist voice we trust on topics outside (though certainly relating to) the female condition, like, you know, electoral politics and public policy and global warming and immigration. But to succeed at producing a weekly show that slices headline news to the quick, she must be two things that women are not always embraced for being—very funny and a little angry—and she must be those things while exuding a quality almost never afforded women: authority.”

Barbie’s Got a New Body

Eliana Dockterman | Time

“As much as Mattel has tried to market her as a feminist, Barbie’s famous figure has always overshadowed her business outfits. At her core, she’s just a body, not a character, a canvas upon which society can project its anxieties about body image.”

The Nostalgic Science Fiction of The X-Files

Joshua Rothman | The New Yorker

“Today, pop culture worships badasses. Everyone cultivates a fashionable, skin-deep vulnerability; underneath, they’re superheroes with jujitsu skills and heads full of put-downs. The X-Files pre-dates this trend. Often, Mulder and Scully were confused and powerless; in the end, the bad guys got away, slinking back into the woods (or the Pentagon) to lurk forevermore. In that sense, The X-Files was pretty realistic, when you think about it.”

Why Are Americans Ignoring Trevor Noah?

Willa Paskin | Slate

“But if you watch The Daily Show night after night, you get the sense that the writers have adjusted their tactics for a very different kind of host—a Potemkin Jon Stewart, someone smooth and ingratiating who is reaching for unconverted viewers, instead of an inveterate political satirist preaching to the deeply informed.”

DJ Khaled’s Journey of Success Started Long Before Snapchat

Ryan Pfeffer | Miami New Times

“On paper, Khaled’s career doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. He’s released eight full-length albums but doesn’t actually rap on any of them. He’s perhaps the most quoted figure in hip-hop, able to create viral catch phrases with an ease that marketing executives dream about ... He’s a human pop-up ad who, to many, is known simply for shouting his own name like a hairy brown Pikachu.”

Zinger! Kristaps Porzingi Is Silencing Doubters and Taking Over New York

Lee Jenkins | Sports Illustrated

“It is an act of contortion almost as acrobatic as a lefthanded floater in a crowded lane. The NBA is populated by outsized humans, but there is something especially supernatural about the length of Porzingis, which can’t simply be characterized by wingspan measurements at predraft workouts.”

I’m So Damn Tired of Slave Movies

Kara Brown | Jezebel

“When movies about slavery or, more broadly, other types of violence against black people are the only types of films regularly deemed ‘important’ and ‘good’ by white people, you wonder if white audiences are only capable of lauding a story where black people are subservient.”

Up the Anti: How Rihanna Rewrote the Rules of Pop

Peter Robinson | The Guardian

“The timing of her arrival and rise sidestepped the tailing off of the Perez Hilton-type celebrity culture of the mid-2000s and centered on direct-to-fan communication that allowed artists to control their own image. For some acts, this requirement to let the world into their affairs was far from ideal, but nobody on the pop landscape has defined their image as well as Rihanna.”

Letter of Recommendation: Cracker Barrel

Jia Tolentino | The New York Times Magazine

“The nostalgia sold by Cracker Barrel alongside every plate and trinket requires no previous emotional stake in the South as an institution … The aggression in Southern culture is heightened by the fact that it often passes as gentility. But Cracker Barrel makes the South seem, just briefly, like the front-porch paradise it believes itself to be.”

Why is Martin Shkreli Still Talking?

Allie Conti | Vice

“Echoing comments he made to the Wall Street Journal, Shkreli tells me he regrets playing a ‘character’ on TV and Twitter ... But at the same time, he realizes that the villain people love to hate gets more airtime. And attention is something he desperately, achingly craves. ‘A great bad guy is your best act,’ he says.”

The NRA Strikes Back in Virginia

One month ago, Virginia became a sudden and shining example of progress for the gun-control movement. The state’s Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring, announced that Virginia would no longer recognize concealed-carry permits of firearms owners in the 25 states with laxer gun laws than its own. The National Rifle Association promptly called his decision “the biggest setback” that gun owners had suffered politically in all of 2015.

On  Friday, the state reversed itself. As part of a bipartisan agreement with Republican legislators, Governor Terry McAuliffe announced that Virginia would keep granting reciprocity to out-of-state gun owners, so long as they had not been specifically denied a permit in Virginia. (The ban was to have taken effect next week.) In exchange, GOP leaders agreed to change state laws to prevent domestic abusers from possessing guns and to make it harder for private dealing from skipping a background check when selling at state gun shows. A beaming McAuliffe declared the accord a potentially life-saving victory for Virginia and the most significant bipartisan deal on gun laws in a generation.

Yet gun-control advocates were enraged, accusing the Democratic governor of a betrayal that gives up a hard-fought victory by ending reciprocity rights for concealed-carry permit holders. “This deal is a dangerous rollback that puts public safety at risk,” wrote a group of Virginians who either survived gun violence or saw family members struck down by it. “It’s practically a giveaway.” The letter was organized by Everytown for Gun Safety, the advocacy group funded in large part by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence piled on. “We are deeply disappointed that Governor McAuliffe has given in to the demands of the corporate gun lobby,” said Dan Gross, the organization’s president.

He has cut a deal, and it is a bad and dangerous one for people who live in and visit Virginia. He has basically rolled out a welcome mat for people who are armed and dangerous. Virginia already had only modest standards for deciding who is allowed to carry loaded, hidden guns. Now those standards are even lower, as domestic abusers and felons who have obtained concealed carry permits in other states with even lower standards will soon be able to menace the streets and neighborhoods of Virginia. Governor McAuliffe has made a raw deal for Virginians.

The NRA backed the deal in a statement to The Washington Post, which reported the outlines of the agreement before McAuliffe and Republican leaders announced them on Friday. That’s important because gun-control advocates were angered that the NRA was apparently included in the negotiations while they were not. Andy Parker, the father of a local television reporter who was murdered on-air last year, criticized McAuliffe for trading the reciprocity ban for “NRA-supported, watered-down gun-safety laws.”

The governor dismissed the criticism from allies as the type of complaints inherent to bipartisan deal making. “As governor, I gotta make decisions that are in the best interests of the commonwealth. I have to govern,” McAuliffe told reporters. “What we announced here today will make Virginians safer.” While he applauded Herring and credited him for spurring action with his December announcement, McAuliffe made clear that closing loopholes in the background system had always been his priority.

So which is it, a sell-out or a historic breakthrough on an issue where bipartisan achievements have been nearly impossible to come by? It’s true that advocates for stricter gun laws have prioritized the expansion of background checks and policies that prevent domestic abusers from accessing guns. But the concessions that McAuliffe won from Republicans seem fairly minor. On background checks, the proposal would empower the Virginia state police to conduct checks on behalf of private, unlicensed sellers at gun shows who don’t have access to the online system. (Only licensed firearms dealers do.) It would also require the police to be present at gun shows. But as McAuliffe acknowledged, the new law still wouldn’t require background checks to be conducted for all sales; it would only help sellers who want to conduct them.

On domestic violence, another law under the deal would force people under a permanent protective order to relinquish their guns. They are already prohibited from purchasing guns, and advocates have pointed out that the change is merely duplicating federal law. But McAuliffe argued that changing the state law is important because domestic-violence cases are rarely investigated by the FBI, so the federal law often goes unenforced.

Gun-control advocates gave McAuliffe very little credit for those changes on Friday, choosing to focus almost entirely on the state’s reversal on reciprocity for out-of-state permits. And the dispute could potentially reverberate on the presidential campaign trail. McAuliffe is a very close friend and ally of Hillary Clinton, who has made gun control a central plank of her campaign platform. She was endorsed by the Brady Campaign, which assailed the agreement on Friday. And Everytown is the advocacy arm of Bloomberg, who reportedly is considering a presidential run of his own.

The governor and Republican legislators played up the significance of the bipartisan agreement itself. Forget the details, they essentially said: The important thing is that the two parties had, for the first time in 23 years, worked out a compromise on the seemingly intractable issue of guns. In the most charitable view, the accord could set a new precedent for future reforms. In crediting Herring, McAuliffe also seemed to suggest that his declaration in December that Virginia would unilaterally reject out-of-state permits had jarred the opposition and drawn Republicans to the negotiating table. For gun advocates, however, it was a fleeting victory and an all-too-familiar feeling of two steps forward, one step back.

Cecil Rhodes, Colossus of Africa, Will Stay Up in Oxford

After months of debate, Oxford University has decided a statue of Cecil Rhodes will remain in place at Oriel College. In a statement, the college affirmed that the statute will still stand, but said “the College will seek to provide a clear historical context to explain why it is there.”

Rhodes, one of the most prominent British imperialists of the 19th century, founded the nation of Rhodesia—now Zimbabwe and Zambia—as well as the de Beers diamond company, and was  prime minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. He spoke about the supremacy of Anglo-Saxons and, as prime minister, restricted black rights. When Rhodes, an Oriel College alumnus, died in 1902, he bequeathed a portion of his estate to Oxford for the creation of the Rhodes Scholarship for international students.

“By adding context, we can help draw attention to this history, do justice to the complexity of the debate, and be true to our educational mission,” Oriel said in its statement.

The announcement is a defeat for the student movement Rhodes Must Fall In Oxford, a movement that seeks to “decolonise the institutional structures and physical space in Oxford and beyond.” The group argues that Rhodes made the fortune that funds the eponymous scholarship by exploiting black Africans. The students drew inspiration from others at the University of Cape Town who managed to get a statue of Rhodes removed from their campus last year.

Rhodes Must Fall In Oxford rejected Oriel College’s decision. “This recent move is outrageous, dishonest, and cynical. This is not over. We will be redoubling our efforts,” the group said in a post on its Facebook page.

The Daily Telegraph reported that leaked documents show wealthy alumni were upset that Oriel was considering removing the statue, and were threatening to cancel donations, which may have played a role in the decision. The college itself says the majority of the feedback they’ve received since opening debate in December “has been in support of the statue remaining in place, for a variety of reasons.”

Oxford Vice Chancellor Louise Richardson has argued that the statue is a distraction, but that Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford has contributed by sparking a discussion about speech on campus. One major issue in this debate is the experience and representation of minority students at Oxford. In its statement, Oriel College took pains to acknowledge that leaders are aware of these cultural problems and are “taking substantive steps to address them.” But for many students, the symbolism of the statue matters too.

Rihanna's Anti Capitalism

In my Anti review published earlier today, I joked that Rihanna was giving her music away for altruism’s sake. She isn’t, naturally, but it’s worth getting into the fascinating—innovative, even—financial calculations that led to her tweeting out a free download code for an album that fans have spent three years anticipating.

Anti has to be thought of in the context of the reported $25 million deal with Samsung Rihanna signed last year. According to the New York Post, the tech company is paying for her upcoming tour, and according to any regular TV viewer’s eyeballs, it supplied a great deal of Anti’s promotion in the form of commercials and an interactive website. It’s possible the corporate benefaction contributed to Rihanna feeling like she could take a risk on the sound of the album, which, as I wrote, lacks many obvious singles.

Samsung likely also paid for the copies of the album that the aforementioned download code made free to consumers. The Recording Industry Association was then able to certify Anti as platinum—one million downloads or physical copies sold in the U.S., as opposed to streams—within about 14 hours of its release. This is almost exactly the same chain of events that happened with Jay Z’s Samsung-sponsored Magna Carta Holy Grail, and Rihanna has thanked the company in her tweets about the album’s success thus far.

Another financial factor is that Rihanna is a co-owner of Tidal; the platform’s success is to some extent also her success. It getting Anti before Apple or Spotify probably counts as its biggest win yet in the streaming wars. The many people who used the free download code for Anti are also possible new Tidal customers (they’re each eligible for two-month subscriptions, and the company now has their contact info). Tidal reps said the album was streamed 13 million times in 14 hours.

The exclusivity window, it should be noted, was short. Today, iTunes got the album too. Interestingly, fans noted the conspicuous lack of promotion for the album on Apple Music’s home screen, which may well be due to Apple’s rivalry with Tidal. Spotify doesn’t yet have the album. It’s business: There are winners and losers, and it’s pretty clear how to categorize Rihanna right now.

From Whitewater to Benghazi: A Clinton-Scandal Primer

There are at least 22 top-secret emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server. The question is how they got there and when they became top secret.

That fact comes from the State Department on Friday—the Obama administration’s first public confirmation of classified material on the server. However, “these documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

The mailer demon continues to haunt Hillary Clinton’s campaign, even as the Iowa caucuses approach. The first indications of the 22 top-secret emails came in recent reports from Fox News, NBC News, and Politico. Charles McCullough, inspector general of the Intelligence Community, wrote in a letter that the private email server Clinton used to conduct business while secretary of state contained information about “special access programs.” That label applies to a subcategory of sensitive messages more restricted even than top secret. Kirby said the 22 emails include data about the special access programs.

The State Department and the Intelligence Community have previously tangled over a different pair of emails. The IC argued that the emails were top secret both at the time they were sent and in the present, while the State Department demurred. The dispute led to an FBI investigation. The emails in question in this case are newly unearthed messages, not ones that were previously under discussion.

Related Story

Among the Hillary Haters

In addition, some of Clinton’s emails—which the State Department is currently releasing in batches, per a judge’s orders—have been found to include information that is now marked top secret, but which depending on who you believe was not or possibly was top secret at the time it was sent. Clinton and her aides have consistently maintained that she did not send or receive classified information on the account while secretary. (She says she used a separate system for viewing classified material.) And so far, despite various reports and salvos from the various parties involved, there hasn’t been any clear evidence to contradict that. Yet there are many emails left, and there continue to be reports that suggest there may be more damaging information yet to come—a sword of Damocles hanging over the Clinton campaign, even as the candidate seeks to beat back a strong challenge from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic nomination.

In an additional twist of irony, the “special access programs” involved appear to be drone strikes, which the U.S. government officially maintains are secret, even though the press reports on them frequently, and White House officials have spoken about them on the record and privately to reporters.

Are you confused yet?

The emails have become a classic Clinton scandal. Her use of a private email account became known during the course of the Benghazi investigation. Thus far, the investigations have found no wrongdoing on her part with respect to the 2012 attacks themselves, but Clinton’s private-email use and concerns about whether she sent classified information have become huge stories unto themselves. This is a pattern with the Clinton family, which has been in the public spotlight since Bill Clinton’s first run for office, in 1974: Something that appears potentially scandalous on its face turns out to be innocuous, but an investigation into it reveals different questionable behavior. The canonical case is Whitewater, a failed real-estate investment Bill and Hillary Clinton made in 1978. While no inquiry ever produced evidence of wrongdoing, investigations ultimately led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice.

With Hillary Clinton leading the field for the Democratic nomination for president, every Clinton scandal—from Whitewater to the State Department emails—will be under the microscope. (No other American politicians—even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush—have fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.) Keeping track of each controversy, where it came from, and how serious it is, is no small task, so here’s a primer. We’ll update it as new information emerges.

Clinton’s State Department Emails

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton checks her phone on board a plane from Malta to Tripoli, Libya. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? Setting aside the question of the Clintons’ private email server, what’s actually in the emails that Clinton did turn over to State? While some of the emails related to Benghazi have been released, there are plenty of others covered by public-records laws that haven’t.

When? 2009-2013

How serious is it? Serious. Initially, it seemed that the interest in the emails would stem from damaging things that Clinton or other aides had said: cover-ups, misrepresentations, who knows? But so far, other than some cringeworthy moments of sucking up and some eye-rolly emails from contacts like Sidney Blumenthal, the emails have been remarkably boring. The main focus now is on classification. We know that some of the material in the emails is now classified. The question is whether any of it, and how much of it, was classified at the time it was sent. Clinton has said she didn’t knowingly send or receive classified material on the account. The State Department and Intelligence Community have disagreed about that. In addition, the Intelligence Community’s inspector general wrote in a January letter that Clinton’s server contained information marked “special access program,” higher even than top secret. Some emails that Clinton didn’t turn over have also since surfaced.

Benghazi

A man celebrates as the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi burns on September 11, 2012. (Esam Al-Fetori / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? On September 11, 2012, attackers overran a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Since then, Republicans have charged that Hillary Clinton failed to adequately protect U.S. installations or that she attempted to spin the attacks as spontaneous when she knew they were planned terrorist operations. She testifies for the first time on October 22.

When? September 11, 2012-present

How serious is it? Benghazi has gradually turned into a classic “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” scenario. Only the fringes argue, at this point, that Clinton deliberately withheld aid. A House committee continues to investigate the killings and aftermath, but Clinton’s marathon appearance before the committee in October was widely considered a win for her. However, it was through the Benghazi investigations that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server became public—a controversy that remains potent.

Conflicts of Interest in Foggy Bottom

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What? Before becoming Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills worked for Clinton on an unpaid basis for four month while also working for New York University, in which capacity she negotiated on the school’s behalf with the government of Abu Dhabi, where it was building a campus. In June 2012, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin’s status at State changed to “special government employee,” allowing her to also work for Teneo, a consulting firm run by Bill Clinton’s former right-hand man. She also earned money from the Clinton Foundation and was paid directly by Hillary Clinton.

Who? Both Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin are among Clinton’s longest-serving and closest aides. Abedin remains involved in her campaign (and she’s also married to Anthony Weiner).

When? January 2009-February 2013

How serious is it? This is arcane stuff, to be sure. There are questions about conflict of interest—such as whether Teneo clients might have benefited from special treatment by the State Department while Abedin worked for both. To a great extent, this is just an extension of the tangle of conflicts presented by the Clinton Foundation and the many overlapping roles of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Clintons’ Private Email Server

Jim Young / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What? During the course of the Benghazi investigation, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt learned Clinton had used a personal email account while secretary of state. It turned out she had also been using a private server, located at a house in New York. The result was that Clinton and her staff decided which emails to turn over to the State Department as public records and which to withhold; they say they then destroyed the ones they had designated as personal.

When? 2009-2013, during Clinton’s term as secretary.

Who? Hillary Clinton; Bill Clinton; top aides including Huma Abedin

How serious is it? It looks more serious all the time. The rules governing use of personal emails are murky, and Clinton aides insist she followed the rules. There’s no dispositive evidence otherwise so far. The greater political problem for Clinton is it raises questions about how she selected the emails she turned over and what was in the ones she deleted. The FBI has reportedly managed to recover some of the deleted correspondence. Could the server have been hacked? Some of the emails she received on her personal account are marked sensitive. Plus there’s a entirely different set of questions about Clinton’s State Department emails. The FBI is investigating the security of the server as well as the safety of a thumb drive belonging to her lawyer that contains copies of her emails. And the AP reports that the setup may have made the server vulnerable to hacking. Given the shabby state of State Department cybersecurity, she might not have been any better off using the official system.

Sidney Blumenthal

Blumenthal takes a lunch break while being deposed in private session of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? A former journalist, Blumenthal was a top aide in the second term of the Bill Clinton administration and helped on messaging during the bad old days. He served as an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and when she took over the State Department, she sought to hire Blumenthal. Obama aides, apparently still smarting over his role in attacks on candidate Obama, refused the request, so Clinton just sought out his counsel informally. At the same time, Blumenthal was drawing a check from the Clinton Foundation.

When? 2009-2013

How serious is it? Some of the damage is already done. Blumenthal was apparently the source of the idea that the Benghazi attacks were spontaneous, a notion that proved incorrect and provided a political bludgeon against Clinton and Obama. He also advised the secretary on a wide range of other issues, from Northern Ireland to China, and passed along analysis from his son Max, a staunch critic of the Israeli government (and conservative bête noire). But emails released so far show even Clinton’s top foreign-policy guru, Jake Sullivan, rejecting Blumenthal’s analysis, raising questions about her judgment in trusting him.

The Speeches

Keith Bedford / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What? Since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, both Clintons have made millions of dollars for giving speeches.

When? 2001-present

Who? Hillary Clinton; Bill Clinton; Chelsea Clinton

How serious is it? At one time, this seemed like the most dangerous of the bunch, but it has since gone dormant—which isn’t to say that it’s dead. For the couple, who left the White House up to their ears in legal debt, lucrative speeches—mostly by the former president—proved to be an effective way of rebuilding wealth. They have also been an effective magnet for prying questions. Where did Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton speak? How did they decide how much to charge? What did they say? How did they decide which speeches would be given on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, with fees going to the charity, and which would be treated as personal income? Are there cases of conflicts of interest or quid pro quos—for example, speaking gigs for Bill Clinton on behalf of clients who had business before the State Department?

The Clinton Foundation

A brooch for sale at the Clinton Museum Store in Little Rock, Arkansas (Lucy Nicholson / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? Bill Clinton’s foundation was actually established in 1997, but after leaving the White House it became his primary vehicle for … well, everything. With projects ranging from public health to elephant-poaching protection and small-business assistance to child development, the foundation is a huge global player with several prominent offshoots. In 2013, following Hillary Clinton’s departure as secretary of State, it was renamed the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

When? 1997-present

Who? Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; Chelsea Clinton, etc.

How serious is it? If the Clinton Foundation’s strength is President Clinton’s endless intellectual omnivorousness, its weakness is the distractibility and lack of interest in detail that sometimes come with it. On a philanthropic level, the foundation gets decent ratings from outside review groups, though critics charge that it’s too diffuse to do much good, that the money has not always achieved what it was intended to, and that in some cases the money doesn’t seem to have achieved its intended purpose. The foundation made errors in its tax returns it has to correct. Overall, however, the essential questions about the Clinton Foundation come down to two, related issues. The first is the seemingly unavoidable conflicts of interest: How did the Clintons’ charitable work intersect with their for-profit speeches? How did their speeches intersect with Hillary Clinton’s work at the State Department? Were there quid-pro-quos involving U.S. policy? The second, connected question is about disclosure. When Clinton became secretary, she agreed that the foundation would make certain disclosures, which it’s now clear it didn’t always do. And the looming questions about Clinton’s State Department emails make it harder to answer those questions.

The Bad Old Days

Supporter Dick Furinash holds up cardboard cut-outs of Bill and Hillary Clinton. (Jim Young / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What is it? Since the Clintons have a long history of controversies, there are any number of past scandals that continue to float around, especially in conservative media: Whitewater. Troopergate. Paula Jones. Monica Lewinsky. Vince Foster. Juanita Broaddrick.

When? 1975-2001

Who? Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; a brigade of supporting characters

How serious is it? The conventional wisdom is that they’re not terribly dangerous. Some are wholly spurious (Foster). Others (Lewinsky, Whitewater) have been so exhaustively investigated it’s hard to imagine them doing much further damage to Hillary Clinton’s standing. In fact, the Lewinsky scandal famously boosted her public approval ratings. But the January 2016 resurfacing of Juanita Broaddrick’s rape allegations offers a test case to see whether the conventional wisdom is truly wise—or just conventional.

Is O.J. Simpson the NFL's Latest Concussion Casualty?

With the cottage industry of true-crime entertainment booming, O.J. Simpson is back in the news. The story of the disgraced former NFL star, who is currently serving 33 years for armed robbery and kidnapping, will be featured in the forthcoming FX series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story as well as a five-part ESPN documentary this summer.

On Thursday, the renascent Simpson fixation took a strange turn when Bennet Omalu, the doctor who first identified chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), strongly suggested that Simpson is suffering from the disease, which is brought on by repeated head trauma and has afflicted scores of former football players.  

“I would bet my medical license on it,” said Omalu in an interview with ABC News. “He was exposed to thousands of blunt-force trauma of his brain.”

The assertion that Simpson suffers from a degenerative brain condition isn’t exactly novel. In 2012, while seeking a new trial in an effort to overturn his 2008 conviction, Simpson prepared a sworn statement in which he sought to connect his troubling behavior and issues with judgment to repeated concussions:

I was knocked out of games for such head blows repeatedly in the 1970s & and other times I continued playing despite hard blows to my head during the football games.

Ultimately, Simpson opted to seek a new trial on the basis that his former attorney had been incompetent rather than introducing the concussion narrative.

What is noteworthy is that Omalu, whose story is the basis of the Will Smith biopic Concussion, is willing to deliver a speculative assessment of such a high-profile figure despite having never examined him. In the interview with ABC News, Omalu explained that Simpson exhibits the disease’s behavioral symptoms, which “include explosive, impulsive behavior, impaired judgment, criminality and even mood disorders.”

As professional football wrangles with the concussion problem among its current and former players, the introduction of Simpson into the science is likely to serve more as sideshow than to benefit the discussion. Of course, that doesn’t mean the suggestion isn’t valid.

“Given his profile,” Omalu concludes, “I think it's not an irresponsible conclusion to suspect he has CTE.”

How far that may go in explaining Simpson’s misdeeds is another thing entirely.

Is Bernie Going Negative?

It was the first promise Bernie Sanders made as a presidential candidate.

“I’ve never run a negative ad in my life,” Sanders told reporters at the Capitol exactly nine months ago, at the brief press conference he held to declare his candidacy. “I hate and detest these ugly, 30-second negative ads.”

As Iowa voters prepare to caucus on Monday, the Clinton campaign is accusing its surprisingly strong rival of repeatedly breaking that pledge. “Sanders Campaign Doubles Down on Last-Minute Barrage of Negative Attacks,” read the subject of one Clinton campaign email Thursday. A day earlier came a similar email: “Facing Pressure, Sanders Turns to More Negative Attacks, Undermining Promise to Run a Different Kind of Campaign.”

And on Friday, Clinton’s top pollster, Joel Benenson, charged that Sanders was running “the most negative” Democratic primary campaign in history.

Huh? Are we watching the same campaign?

All of this sturm und drang is about a single Sanders ad released on Thursday that takes aim—implicitly—at the six-figure speaking fees that Clinton accepted from top Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs after she left the State Department in 2013.

Is this a tougher, more negative ad than the hopeful, patriotic spot Sanders ran to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America”? Certainly. Is it an attack ad? No. As you can see, the narrator never mentions Clinton's name or even refers to an opponent or another Democratic candidate. The ad more subtlety drops in references to “Goldman Sachs,” “speaking fees,” and Washington politicians “bought and paid for.” It leaves it to viewers to make the connection to Clinton, which given the headlines and Sanders’ more-direct references at the Democratic debates, they surely will. In other words, it’s a classic primary-campaign ad.

Clinton should know: She ran plenty of them against Barack Obama in 2008, and if this year's race stays close, you can bet she’ll run them against Sanders as well, before long. In fact, several of Clinton’s ads in 2008 made even more direct attacks on Obama, putting to rest the specious claim that Sanders is running the most-negative campaign in history. (Benenson should know, too: He was Obama’s pollster eight years ago, and that campaign ran plenty of negative ads against Clinton.) To take one example, in April of 2008, Clinton ran an ad in Pennsylvania seizing on Obama's comments at a private fundraiser that people in small towns “cling to guns or religion” to explain their frustration. The ad featured video of voters calling Obama “insulting” and “out of touch” with voters. (While many Clinton ads from 2008 have been taken off YouTube, you can find a good repository at Stanford University’s Political Communication Lab.)

The real story here is that the Clinton campaign is pursuing the same strategy she tried to use, without success, against Obama. Sanders is running on a more economically populist version of the “new politics” campaign that Obama ran in 2008, and Clinton is looking for any morsel of hypocrisy in an effort to dent his image and cast him as the kind of traditional politician from whom voters are recoiling. By seizing on any hint of negativity, she’s also trying to force Sanders into a box of his own making, keeping him from drawing the kinds of direct contrasts he may need to make in order to win. Never mind for the moment the many studies showing that negative advertising is actually quite effective, and whether voters actually care about the “negativity debate” is another question.

It’s a tricky game for both candidates. Sanders says he won’t run “negative ads,” but he will draw “a contrast” with Clinton on the issues. That can be a very blurry line, and politicians often use the word “contrast” as a euphemism to describe ads that are, in truth, quite nasty. “Let me tell you, I run vigorous campaigns,” Sanders said at that same opening press conference. Sanders is benefitting from the fact that nothing he’s said about Clinton compares to the mud-slinging going on in the Republican primary. And so far, Sanders is the one looking artful while Clinton risks coming off as desperate. But that can change as fast as the votes are counted in Iowa.

In Defense of Instagramming Your Food

On this week’s episode of Top Chef, the surprise judge was, surprisingly, Instagram. The show challenged its contestants—cheftestants, in Bravo parlance—to create dishes, using an array of junk foods (Oreos, Easy Cheese), that would be worthy of being photographed. Winning the challenge didn’t require a dish to be tasty or innovative or displaying of technical skill; it required only the creation of a pretty-looking plate. With the prettiness judged by the public: To win the challenge, the cheftestants simply had create the dish whose photo got the most likes on Instagram.

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It was a weird challenge (“this is not Top Food Stylist,” you could almost hear the cheftestants muttering to themselves), but also a fitting one for a time when imagery is playing an increasing role in the way people consume food. And not always, of course, literally. Diners are finding out about new restaurants via geotags on Instagram, seduced or repelled by way of the photos their friends post of fried chicken, or ice cream, or tacos. They’re making decisions about where to have that anniversary dinner based on customer photos on Yelp. They’re pausing before their meals—using the time that, in some previous eras, might have been taken up with the saying of grace—to take pictures of plates.

Which leads to that other outcome of the digital age: debate. Today, Christopher Mims, the technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wondered aloud—which is to say, to his 48,000 followers on Twitter—why people photograph their food.

Why do people photograph food?

— Christopher Mims (@mims) January 29, 2016

Is it because they can't bear to be parted from the food?

— Christopher Mims (@mims) January 29, 2016

Seriously what is going on here. Consumption of the food is being documented one bite at a time. pic.twitter.com/nLZpzWtLNG

— Christopher Mims (@mims) January 29, 2016

Mims is, of course, not the only one to question the practice. Your mom might have. You might have. If so, you’d be in good company. Pete Wells, the chief restaurant critic for The New York Times and a person who, when it comes to food culture, knows of what he speaks, has gone on the record decrying what he dubbed “camera cuisine”: food, that is, essentially, doing it for the ‘gram. Food that is the direct result of Instagram and Twitter and the age that turns any random diner into an amateur food photographer—and food marketer. “Any dish,” Wells had it, “that was inspired by a picture or aspires to be one.” Camera cuisine leads in turn, he argued, to food that cares more about being pretty than being tasty—to food that may double as art, but that can end up, in the process, tasting not much better than acrylic paint.

Top Chef’s tribute to Instagram this week represents, in its way, a normalization of the relationship between food and social media.

Some restaurants, too, have jumped on the anti-’gram bandwagon. In France, chefs have begun banning smartphones from their establishments. “There is a time and a place for everything,” Alexandre Gauthier, chef at the Grenouillère restaurant near Calais, explained to The Telegraph. “Our aim is to create a special moment in time for our clients. And for that, you have to switch off your phone.” So have restaurants in New York City. (Jo-Ann Makovitzky, owner of Tocqueville in Union Square: “People are there for their own dining experience and anything you do to infringe on that experience, we frown on.”) Komi, one of the consistently highest-rated restaurants in Washington, D.C., had adopted a principled no-picture policy. As its co-owner Anne Marler told me in an email, “Call us old-fashioned, but we love it when our guests are able to soak in the food and wine and company; to savor each dish in real time without the distraction of attempting to document the meal simultaneously.”

These are all understandable objections, and understandable stipulations. Food photography can be obnoxious. And even if documenting food weren’t a compromise to being “present,” as it goes, the practice can lead, as Pete Wells pointed out, to that biggest of food-borne bummers: meals that are meant to be hot, eaten only once they’re cold. Doing it for the ‘gram often doubles as ruining it for the ‘gram.

And yet! Despite all this! There’s a good chance, still, that the tides of history are stacked in favor of amateur food photography. That Top Chef’s tribute to Instagram, this week, represents a kind of normalization of the relationship between food and social media.

And there’s a good chance, too, that there is nothing at all wrong with that.

Seen most optimistically, the age of Instagram is bringing Americans back to an older age of food consumption—a time before industrialization and mass-production, and a time before a general cultural bias toward efficiency made eating an often very solitary affair. Instagram—and, with it, the rise of food blogs and Top Chef-style cooking shows and food-focused verticals at BuzzFeed—ultimately highlights the gorgeous communality of that oldest of things: the meal. Food may be, to an extent, cultured, and class-inscribed, and gendered. (The ladysalad! The manly t-bone!) It can be expensive; it can be egregious; it can appropriate; it can offend.

The age of Instagram is bringing Americans back to an older age of food consumption—literally and otherwise.

For all that, though, food is universal in a way that few things are, or have ever been. The bright bite of lemon juice; the earthy umami of an oil-roasted mushroom; the sour-sweet of dark chocolate—these are experiences that people across cultures and races and genders and generations can understand. They are relatively apolitical; they are relatively transcendent. Eating is biologically banal, but dining—the ritual, the event—is deep and social and shared.

The food-based Instagram taps into all that. It reflects a very human thing, a thing that has been part of culture, and for that matter of religion, for millennia: the desire to share our meals with other people. To break bread together. To take a picture of a meal, and to share that picture with friends and family with the help of the World Wide Web … that may be an act of performance, but it’s also an act of invitation. It’s extending, basically, the number of people at one’s table.

This week’s Top Chef challenge celebrates all of that. (It also takes a subtle victory lap, since Top Chef has—along with Chopped and Iron Chef and Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives—helped to turn images of food into their own forms of celebrity.) Yes, it makes jokes about #foodporn. Yes, it uses the episode to reveal the identity of the Instagrammer @chefjacqueslamerde, overuser of the phrase “soigné” and poster of satirically beautiful plates. On the whole, though, it emphasizes how cool it is that food—that most intimate and physical and transient of things—can now be captured, and remembered, and shared. That food can become media. And, with it, art. Chefs are fond of remarking that people “eat, first, with their eyes”; Instagram is simply bringing more truth to that truism.

Syrian Peace Talks, Now Featuring a Reluctant Oppostion

Updated on January 29 at 4:22 p.m.

The United Nations-led Syrian peace talks have begun in Geneva despite some initial confusion over who would actually be attending. The “proximity talks,” the first movement toward negotiations in two years, will involve the Syrian government and opposition groups meeting separately with the UN envoy Staffan de Mistura.

The High Negotiations Committee (HNC), the anti-Assad coalition created in Saudi Arabia last month, had demanded various goodwill gestures, including an end to airstrikes and blockades, to ensure their attendance. On Thursday, the HNC said those demands have not been met and, as Reuters reported, the committee claimed it would “certainly” not be present at the talks.

“We can’t sit down and negotiate when our people need milk. We need to stop the sieges. We need to stop the starvation of our people,” one committee member told the BBC.

Yet on Friday, as the talks started without them, the group reversed course and said it would attend and focus on humanitarian issues before entering political negotiations.

Another factor complicating the peace talks are the recent gains made by the Syrian government forces with Russia’s help. Russian airstrikes have allowed significant advancement for Assad’s forces in the past few months, leaving the government with less incentive to negotiate. And on the opposition side this means rebels are more concerned with what’s going on at ground level than what the outcome of a negotiation might be.

These talks are the latest diplomatic effort to bring an end, or at least some respite, to a five-year-long civil war that has killed more than 250,000 and forced more than half of all Syrians from their homes.

The talks were initially set to begin on Monday, but were delayed until the end of the week after it remained unclear who would represent the opposition. In a video addressed to the Syrian people on Thursday, de Mistura asked citizens to urge all parties to come to the table.

“You have seen enough conferences, two of them already taken place,” he said. “This one cannot fail.”

On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry praised the HNC for changing its mind and stressed that humanitarian access to “besieged areas of Syria” must be restored.

Obama's New Equal-Pay Rules

For Americans who’ve ever wondered whether the person in the next cubicle doing the same job is being paid more, or those who’d like their companies to take a hard look at inequality on the payroll—there’s good news from the government.

On Friday, the Obama administration announced executive action that would require companies with 100 employees or more to report to the federal government how much they pay their employees broken down by race, gender, and ethnicity. The proposed regulation is being jointly published by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Labor. It is hoped that this transparency will help to root out discrimination and reduce the gender pay gap—which, according to the White House, leaves women in full-time jobs earning 79 cents for every dollar a man earns. Further, a report from the Council of Economic Advisers found that the gender wage gap in the U.S. is 2.5 percentage points larger than the average among industrialized countries.

The announcement coincides with the anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which Obama signed into law in 2009 and allows employees to file lawsuits regarding equal pay for up to 180 days after a discriminatory paycheck. On Friday, Obama will also be calling Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Some criticized the president for attempting to deal with this issue via executive action. Republican Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska responded that passing a law with bipartisan support is the way forward. “The way to make meaningful, lasting progress on equal pay for women isn’t unilateral presidential action. I remain fully committed to forging a bipartisan consensus in Congress to update our laws and ensure women and men have the information they need to negotiate the salaries they deserve,” said Fischer in a statement. “I urge the president to step up and work with, not around, Congress to make a difference in the lives of working families.”

In a press release regarding the proposed changes, the EEOC argues that “this new data will assist the agency in identifying possible pay discrimination and assist employers in promoting equal pay in their workplaces.” According to the EEOC, this data would point to which industry and occupations have the worst pay disparities. The compensation data would be an addition to employment information companies are already required to submit annually on race and gender—the EEOC says that the aggregate data would be published to help employers “facilitate voluntary compliance.” These requirements would begin in 2017.

“We expect that reporting this data will help employers to evaluate their own pay practices to prevent pay discrimination in their workplaces,” said Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez.

Regardless of concerns about race and gender discrimination, talking about compensation at work, though a legal right, is often discouraged by managers and bosses. As concerns rise about lagging wages and pay discrimination, pay transparency has become a popular tactic in recent years, with some companies revealing exactly how they calculate compensation to appease their employees.

And sometimes, just being forced to look at the data actually helps. The New York Times reports that Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, was enlisted to support these new rules. Last year, Salesforce reviewed the salaries of all 17,000 employees after two female employees asked Benioff to examine whether the company paid women fairly. Benioff was skeptical of this claim, but commissioned the internal review anyway. The results surprised him, and the company added $3 million to its payroll to address the inequities.