Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 246

Is North Carolina's Strict Voter-ID Law Constitutional?

Lawyers and advocates were back in a courtroom in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on Monday, for a second challenge to the state’s strict new voting laws. A group of plaintiffs, led by the NAACP and the Department of Justice, is seeking to overturn a new rule, which is set to take effect in March’s primaries, requiring voters to present a photo ID before voting.

The voter-ID law was one of several major changes made by Republicans who control the Old North State’s government, in a 2013 law passed shortly after the Supreme Court struck down a clause in the Voting Rights Act that required some states to seek approval of changes to voting laws from the Justice Department. In addition to requiring a photo ID to vote, the new rules reduced early voting; ended same-day voter registration; banned the practice of casting ballots out of precinct; and ended pre-registration for teens. Proponents said the laws were essential to guarantee the integrity of the state’s elections.

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The Past Goes On Trial in North Carolina

A group of plaintiffs sued the state, alleging that the changes would suppress minority votes and that they represented the return of Jim Crow to the South. In July, federal district-court Judge Thomas Schroeder heard a challenge to some of those provisions, but not to the voter-ID law.

The voter-ID law is one of the strictest in the nation, narrowly limiting the number of acceptable forms of identification, but it is slightly looser than it was to begin with. In June 2015, with the lawsuit drawing near, the general assembly suddenly voted to slightly loosen the restrictions, allowing residents to file affidavits swearing they had a “reasonable impediment” to getting one of the approved forms of ID. They would also have to present alternate forms of identification. As a result of the change, the voter-ID law, which was not scheduled to go into effect until this year, was not considered during the summer 2015 trial.

During a conference call to discuss the changes last week, plaintiffs insisted that the conditions for votes being counted were at once too vague, leaving too much discretion to local elections officials, and too restrictive.

“The right to vote is supposed to be constitutional, not confusing,” said the Reverend William Barber, who is president of the state NAACP and also the leader of the“Moral Monday” protests in Raleigh. “North Carolina’s restrictive photo-ID law remains an immoral and unconstitutional burden on voters that creates two unequal tiers of voters. We are prepared to challenge this modern form of Jim Crow in the courts even as we continue our grassroots work.” In defense of the state, lawyers argue that the plaintiffs have presented “no evidence that any single voter will be unable to vote under the photo ID law.”

The two lawsuits over North Carolina’s voting laws are widely considered a bellwether for the future of voting. Many states, typically those governed by Republicans, passed laws or began considering legislation that tightens voting regulations after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder. Black voters, who are often disproportionately affected by such restrictions, tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. If the plaintiffs succeed, it’s a sign that the laws are vulnerable to challenge. If the defendants prevail, however, other states are expected to adopt similarly sweeping regulations.

Critics of voter-ID laws point to the minuscule or nonexistent number of actual cases of voter fraud, and point to evidence that laws like North Carolina’s disproportionately affect minorities and young people. The fact that such laws were banned under the VRA is proof they’re racially discriminatory, they say—just part of a lineage of Southern states passing laws, like literacy tests, that keep blacks from voting under the guise of defending the sanctity of the vote. The law’s backers counter that racial discrimination in voting is a thing of the past, and that while there may be some effect on minorities, the burden of obtaining an ID is minor and worth the trouble, if it keeps elections untainted.

Schroeder is hearing the case without a jury—he alone will make the decision. Because the judge is a conservative George W. Bush appointee, there’s a vague sense that he’s likely to rule against the plaintiffs. His refusal to grant a preliminary injunction that would have suspended the law taking effect until after the March primary has been taken as a bad sign for the law’s challengers. Schroeder has not yet handed down a decision in the first case, and there’s no timeline for when he might. Whichever way he rules, his decisions in both cases are likely to be appealed to the circuit court.

One key difference between the July trial and the current one, as The News and Observer notes, is the evidence at hand. In the first trial, experts for both sides scrutinized data from the 2014 election, for which the other provisions of the law applied. Defense experts argued that strong black voter turnout proved the law was not discriminatory, while the plaintiffs’ witnesses said that turnout was a result of angry voters but didn’t obviate the discriminatory effects. This time around, however, Schroeder won’t have any direct data to work with, since the voter-ID requirement is just now becoming effective.

An Indictment for the Planned Parenthood Sting Videomakers

In a surprise turn, a grand jury in Texas that was convened to investigate allegations that Planned Parenthood illegally sold fetal tissue decided instead to indict activists who made sting videos to criticize the organization.

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What Does the Planned Parenthood Video Show?

Beginning in July, anti-abortion activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress released several videos taken with hidden cameras that caught Planned Parenthood officials discussing the use of tissue from aborted fetuses. They made the videos by posing as middlemen for medical researchers seeking fetal tissue. The videos sought, among other things, to prove that Planned Parenthood sold fetal tissue. Federal law allows medical providers to accept donation for processing tissue, but not to profit from it.

The fifth installment in that series of videos was shot in Houston. In the footage, Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast says that the group’s research department “contributes so much to the bottom line,” but she also describes money exchanged for tissue as a donation. After two months of investigation, the grand jury in Houston decided not to charge Planned Parenthood or any staffers, but instead to indict Daleiden and Merritt for tampering with government records. That’s a second-degree felony that could carry up to 20 years in prison. Daleiden also received a misdemeanor indictment under a law that prohibits buying or selling human organs.

“We were called upon to investigate allegations of criminal conduct by Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast,” Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson, a Republican, said in a statement. “As I stated at the outset of this investigation, we must go where the evidence leads us. All the evidence uncovered in the course of this investigation was presented to the grand jury. I respect their decision on this difficult case.”

Conservatives are already reacting with dismay and shock at the indictments. But as I wrote when the first video was published, it was most effective as agitprop—playing to people’s visceral disgust with abortion. The image of Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, discussing organ harvesting cavalierly over lunch was off-putting, even to abortion supporters. But the case that Planned Parenthood had actually broken any laws was tenuous. Nucatola noted, for example, that the law prohibited trafficking of organs: “This is not—nobody should be ‘selling’ tissue.”

Planned Parenthood immediately cried foul on the videos. It alleged that the clips were misleadingly edited—a charge the Center for Medical Progress cleverly defused by posting the full raw footage. But Planned Parenthood also accused the activists of using fake government IDs, creating a fake organization, and inappropriately recording people without their consent as part of the sting. Anderson has not revealed the specifics of the indictment, but it appears that the grand jury believed Daleiden and Merritt committed some violation of laws involving government documents.

A grand-jury indictment is not the same as a criminal conviction. The burden of proof is much lower, and grand juries are generally willing to indict, although the switch from investigating Planned Parenthood to indicting the CMP workers came as a surprise. Planned Parenthood also isn’t totally off the hook. While the grand jury cleared the organization, Texas’s attorney general and the state’s Health and Human Services Commission are still investigating the group.

Médecins Sans Frontières Searches for Answers in Hospital Bombings

The global medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières has called for a full investigation of a recent bombing of a Yemen hospital that killed six people and injured seven others.

Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement Monday that it has requested an investigation from the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, an independent body created by the Geneva Convention in 1991 to handle alleged breaches of international humanitarian law.

The Shiara Hospital, located in the city of Razeh in the Saada province in northern Yemen, was struck by a “projectile” on the morning of January 10, destroying buildings and forcing the hospital to close for several hours.

MSF could not confirm the origin of the attack. The province, which is near the Yemeni border with Saudi Arabia, has been the site of many airstrikes from a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states targeting Iranian-allied Houthi rebels in Yemen.

“The war in Yemen is being fought with total disregard for the rules of war,” MSF said in a statement on its website.

The international commission recognized MSF’s request in a statement on its website, saying it “stands ready to provide its services in this context.”

The attack was the third such bombing of a medical facility run or supported by MSF in Yemen in as many months. In October, an airstrike destroyed a hospital in the Haydan district of the Saada province and slightly injured one person. In December, a mobile clinic in the city of Taiz was hit by airstrikes, leaving one person dead and eight injured. Last week, an MSF ambulance was hit and its driver killed in an airstrike in the town of Dahyan.

In October, a U.S. airstrike destroyed a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 30 people in what American officials described as an accidental hit. The group pulled its staff from Kunduz following the strike.

“Increasingly, we are seeing attacks on medical facilities being minimized, being labeled ‘mistakes’ or ‘errors,’” Raquel Ayora, MSF’s director of operations, said Monday.

MSF previously called on the humanitarian commission to investigate the Kunduz attack. The commission requires consent by the U.S. government before it can carry out such investigations. MSF says the commission has not received approval.

MSF currently runs 11 hospitals and health centers and supports 18 more in Yemen. The group says it has treated more than 20,000 people in the country.

Chelsea Does: An Awkward Marriage of Documentary and Reality TV

Although reality television and documentary might seem like similar beasts, in many ways they’re antithetical to each other. One is all about artifice and manufactured drama, about throwing people into situations that are guaranteed to precipitate carefully orchestrated explosions, while the other is about mining a subject precisely, deeply, to encourage the unexpected. With one, you get manipulated scenes of real people presenting a public face; with the other, flashes of insight amid layers of meticulous analysis.

The main problem with Chelsea Does, a four-part Netflix docuseries centered around the comedian Chelsea Handler, well, doing things, is that it doesn’t know which one of these genres it should aim for. There are arguments to be made for both: Handler was for many years the only female late-night host on television, and her raunchy, deliberately outrageous brand of humor paved the way for the current Schumerian era of comedy. She’s also a powerful woman in Hollywood who’s almost pathologically unable to not say what she’s thinking. The people she encounters in Chelsea Does include a matchmaker, a polyamorous triad, and a woman whose business is setting up video-chatting for pets, and Handler’s eyebrows twitch so furiously while she talks with them that they make the case for having their own category at the Emmys.

If Chelsea Does were less turned off by the conceptual limitations of being a star vehicle with a very funny, innately cynical person at its helm, it could be either a groundbreaking examination of comedy or a very funny, innately cynical reality show that ran out of material after two episodes. Instead, its director Eddie Schmidt—a longtime documentary producer whose credits include This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Beauty Is Embarrassing, and Valentine Road—seems to have decided to make a docuseries in the manner of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, or Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways. The difference is that the show’s only underlying theme is Handler herself, and that it seems intent on handling topics like racism and Silicon Valley and drugs without ever being willing to shift its gaze away from her.

This isn’t Handler’s fault so much as it’s the inevitable byproduct of trying to fuse reality TV and documentary into one cohesive whole. Throughout Chelsea Does, its star seems confused as to what role she’s supposed to play: She’s alternately guarded and brazen, defensive and unapologetic, naughty and nice. She can’t figure out if she’s the host or the subject—whether she should be pointing out the many ways in which she’s the real-life model for Trainwreck, investigating modern phenomena, or simply adapting her outrageous late-night comedy shtick for a Netflix audience rather than a live studio one. (She doesn’t, she admits, entirely understand what Netflix is.)

The show can be fascinating, particularly when it delves into Handler’s neuroses, by showing her discussing topics with her shrink, or drawing pictures of her family under the influence of Ambien, or talking to her father about whether he liked any of her boyfriends (he didn’t). It can be dreary and rote, like when she talks to the founder of Ashley Madison and his wife about the state of their marriage, or to Willie Nelson about his burgeoning weed empire. (Much of the art of interviewing lies in letting people actually answer questions.) And it can be churlish, particularly when Handler insists in “Chelsea Does … Racism” that people of color are too sensitive about racial stereotypes, and sniggers when the activist Guy Aoki calls her out for joking that Angelina Jolie’s adopted Vietnamese son would grow up to be a horrible driver who’s great at doing nails.

“I want to live in a place where a person of every color is able to hit on me,” Handler says, before she goes to interview the family of Walter Scott.

The show has been criticized for being extraordinarily narcissistic, which seems unfair—series have been built around male stars and their various foibles for decades, and even in the august documentary world, the tradition of having eccentric characters investigate serious subjects is longstanding (Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, Louis Theroux). But the tension in Chelsea Does between aggressive humor and thoughtful consideration is hard to resolve. The show veers between being frustratingly shallow and oddly intense, never quite finding the ground it needs to regulate its tone. Handler, too, seems ill at ease playing herself, as opposed to her comedy persona: She’s abrasive in a meeting with the developers working on an app she wants to launch, and juvenile in a roundtable she initiates with media advocates against racism. Her funniest jokes seem unfortunately timed. “I want to live in a place where a person of every color is able to hit on me,” she tells the camera, shortly before she goes to interview the family of Walter Scott, who was shot and killed by a policeman last year.

But for all its uncomfortable juxtapositions and awkward tonal inconsistencies, there are moments in Chelsea Does that make for truly compelling television. In one scene during “Chelsea Does … Drugs,” she takes ayahuasca in a ceremony in Peru, and smiles while tears roll down her face. Schmidt can’t resist the urge to splice in footage from Handler home movies, but a more canny director might have left the moment shrouded in mystery: a glimpse into the true heart of a subject who, despite the oversharing, remains elusive.

The Magicians: Sex, Drugs, and the Supernatural

An oversimplified description of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians goes something like this: It’s like Harry Potter, only set at a leafy upstate college rather than Hogwarts, and instead of plucky 11-year-olds learning witchcraft and wizardry, there are moody freshmen wrestling with sex, drugs, and their abundant feelings. Despite the dubious premise, Grossman’s novel succeeds due to its self-awareness: Its hero, Quentin Coldwater, is an avid reader of a fictional, Narnia-like series, and so his acceptance at a wizarding school is portrayed almost as an entry into a familiar world. Retaining that metatextual edge is crucial in adapting the series for television, but it turns out to be the very task the new show, premiering Monday on SyFy, struggles with the most.

The show, created by John McNamara and Sera Gamble, faces all the challenges you might expect from a book-to-TV adaptation. The first half of The Magicians (the first in a trilogy of novels by Grossman) is packed with world-building, fleshing out the magical Brakebills College; the fictional novels of “Fillory” that Quentin (Jason Ralph) devoured as a child; and the enchanting, secretive process by which students are admitted to the school. McNamara and Gamble have to cram all of that into a pilot episode while also setting up the series’ first major adversary, and they understandably cut plenty of corners in doing so. So the result ends up feeling like a knock-off of the genre works that inspired Grossman, lacking in the wry commentary that made the original books feel so fresh.

Without the meta, The Magicians is mostly a tale of dark, emotional teenagers acting out their problems and desires as they transition to adulthood. With magic. Still, there’s plenty that does work: The magic itself has a odd, intricate feel—the characters wiggle their fingers and arms around in bizarre, jerky motions with studied practice. The ensemble is a languid bunch of beautiful emo nightmare children, including the depressed Quentin, goody-two-shoes Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), troublemaker Penny (Arjun Gupta), and Quentin’s lush of a mentor, Eliot (Hale Appleman). In terms of setting, Brakebills is suitably bucolic, although its classroom sets are surprisingly modernistic and clean, perhaps seeking to avoid the cluttered, old-world feel of Harry Potter, Narnia, and other recognizable forebears.

But in trying to comprehensively set up the plot, McNamara and Gamble end up delivering a pretty perfunctory “special boy” narrative about Quentin—a lonely outsider in a mundane world—being discovered and tapped for greatness by this magical new school. In his writing, Grossman always tried to flip that story on its head by contrasting Quentin’s fantasies of his new magical life (informed by the Fillory books he kept referring back to) with the harsh, scary truth that a world of magic would be infinitely more dangerous and challenging to navigate than one without it. The show tries to tie in Fillory as best as it can without being completely confusing, but in the pilot episode that amounts to a couple of dream sequences that hint at wilder adventures to come.

Take the meta out of The Magicians and you have a tale of dark, emotional teenagers.

SyFy aired a sneak preview of The Magicians’ pilot in December, perhaps aware that it’s crammed with so much exposition that it best functions as a promising set-up to what still could be a fascinating series. The episode closes on an encounter with a powerful, magical being called “The Beast,” a crucial early sequence in Grossman’s first book that lays bare the darkness of the wider world outside Brakebills. It’s the best part of the show so far because it combines visual flair with the allure of the unknown—there’s no explanation of who this person is or what his motivations are. In other words: no analogue to Harry Potter’s straightforward representations of villainy.

This is where the “adult” nature of Grossman’s books shines through and distinguishes itself, and it’s the only point at which the show felt truly remarkable. There are plenty of other vanilla attempts at risqué material, but they fall flat, especially a parallel storyline about Quentin’s real-world friend Julia (Stella Maeve) who gets rejected from Brakebills and tries to work her way into the world of magic another way. Like much of the early episodes, this is necessary set-up for the future—Julia ends up a crucial character in Grossman’s later books—but here it feels plodding and far too satisfied with being scandalous (in her initiation into the world of unauthorized magic, she’s tied to a radiator and stripped of her shirt).

McNamara is a strong, charming writer who faltered last year with Aquarius, another show that aped the strong violent and sexual content of premium TV without including much of the substance behind it. The Magicians is a better and more promising show. Perhaps once the exposition is disposed of, it’ll pick up speed (the second episode, which also airs Monday, is a little better than the first). But to succeed, the show needs to more fully explore the complex and often terrifying world it introduces, tropes and all.

Super Bowl 50: What the Big Game Looks Like

In the pantheon of cherished American institutions, one of the only things greater than the sports cliché is the Super Bowl spectacle. Fortunately, this year’s match-up between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos offers more space for both to flourish than in recent years.

Consider the quarterback and the narrative of old-versus-young

Denver is led by Peyton Manning, the 39-year-old ailing and aging all-time great. Born during the Gerald Ford administration, Manning remains the aw-shucks embodiment of the humble and serious signal caller: winner of five MVP awards, possessor of the all-time NFL records for passing touchdowns and passing yards, and now a hobbling relic. Manning overcame a terrible regular season to make an unlikely (and likely final) return to the Super Bowl with a tense, two-point win against the defending champion New England Patriots. He is the first quarterback to reach the Super Bowl under four different coaches.

Carolina features Cam Newton, who was born in the era of the elder George Bush and is the favorite to be the NFL’s most valuable player this year. Newton can run and pass; his style is frequently characterized as “flashy” and his end-zone dances inspire mothers to write screeds in major newspapers. Before Carolina manhandled the Arizona Cardinal 49-15 on Sunday to reach February’s big game, Newton was taking pictures with Future and Jeezy.

Defense wins championships, et cetera

Manning knows how to win, and Newton had the best season of anyone in football, but stellar defenses are huge parts of why Carolina and Denver are in the Super Bowl.

Denver was the NFL’s top-ranked defense this year, which proved itself again on Sunday by knocking down Patriots quarterback Tom Brady 20 times, the most times any quarterback was hit in a game this year. All of the Broncos’ Pro-Bowl selections were on the defensive side, with cornerbacks Chris Harris and Aqib Talib and linebackers Von Miller and DeMarcus Ware leading the way.

Carolina is blessed with offense, but also boasts the league’s sixth-best defense. More impressive than its defensive ranking in yards and points allowed is its ability to force turnovers. The Panthers’ opponents turned the ball over on nearly 20 percent of their offensive drives this season, the best in the league. On Sunday, Arizona lost the ball a shocking seven times.

Call it “Super Bowl 50,” not “Super Bowl L”

The circus that envelops the country’s biggest sporting event has the potential to be even more frenzied than in previous years. The game will be the first Super Bowl ever held at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Predictably, even though Super Bowl tickets are never cheap, prices are already surging to record-level prices. As CNN notes, the average resale price for a single ticket is $5,178, which at this point is a five-year high.

Then, there’s Coldplay, the polarizing, snoozy pick for the Super Bowl halftime show. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber argued back in December, the selection was inevitable:

The truth is that the Super Bowl halftime show is America’s last great monocultural musical moment, and it’s mostly helpful as a thought experiment to help figure out which acts can legitimately be called superstars—and moreover, which kind of acts.

The choice, he adds, “is further confirmation that in the category of relevant, still-going, culture-uniting, newish rock-and-roll bands, Coldplay’s close to all we’ve got.” Just in case, Beyonce and Bruno Mars will be there too.

Perhaps most representative of the NFL’s quest for the broadest possible appeal, as The New York Times notes, Super Bowl 50 is the first big game to not be referred to by its Roman numeral since the fourth Super Bowl.

What’s so bad about Super Bowl L? The league promises “the numerals will return next season for Super Bowl LI.”

The Standoff in Oregon, Three Weeks Later

At the start of the new year, a group of armed protesters stormed the headquarters of a national wildlife refuge in Oregon and claimed it as their base of operations for a standoff against the federal government.

Three weeks later, they’re still out there, and their laundry list of demands hasn’t changed.

The group, led by Ammon Bundy, the son of a Nevada rancher known for his own fight against the feds, is staked out at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in defense of two ranchers whom the protesters say were unfairly treated by the government.

The standoff began in early January in support of two Oregon ranchers convicted three years ago of arson on public lands. Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven Hammond, 43, say they set fire to the land they leased from the government for grazing as a way to get rid of invasive species. The men were sentenced to five years in prison—the mandatory minimum for arson on federal land—but argued that the sentence was unconstitutional. The father served three months and the son one year before being released, but a federal judge ordered them back to prison to serve the remainder of their sentences. The Hammonds turned themselves in to a California prison January 4.

Law-enforcement authorities are still trying to talk Bundy down. Bundy has said he’s going to stay at the refuge until the group’s demands are met—“several months at the shortest.” Bundy’s brother Ryan has reportedly said the protesters are willing to “kill and be killed if necessary.”

The Oregonian reports that the protesters have four demands from the federal government: Release the local ranchers, turn federal lands over to private ownership, void federal grazing permits, and allow Harney County to manage the wildlife refuge, rather than the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Bundy met briefly with an FBI official on Friday, but left abruptly after some disagreement over the nature of the meeting, according to the Associated Press. The FBI wanted to speak in private, while Bundy wanted the press to be able to look on. A community meeting about the standoff scheduled for Monday was canceled for safety concerns, but it’s unclear exactly what those concerns were.

One rancher in New Mexico and another eight in Utah have pledged to ignore their grazing contracts with the federal government in support of the group’s mission. The lawyer representing the eight ranchers from Utah confirmed their participation in what he called “an act of civil disobedience,” but did not identify them, according to The Oregonian.

The Hammonds have distanced themselves from the standoff since its beginning. A lawyer for the family wrote early on that "neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone within his group/organization speak for the Hammond Family.”

So has Cliven Bundy, the father of Ammon, who held his own standoff against the federal government nearly two years ago. The elder Bundy does not  recognize federal control over the land where his cattle graze, and refuses to pay his grazing fees. In 2014, when federal agents started seizing his cattle, Bundy owed $1.2 million to the Bureau of Land Management. According to the Los Angeles Times, he still does.

“I don’t quite understand how much they’re going to accomplish,” Cliven Bundy said about his sons at the beginning of this month. “I think of it this way: what business does the Bundy family have in Harney County, Oregon?”

The website for the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge states the park is closed until further notice.

The East Coast Digs Out

Three days after the first flakes began to fall, the East Coast is starting the long process of digging itself out from piles and piles of snow.

Commuters faced limited rail service and icy driving conditions Monday morning as crews raced to clear roads. Federal government offices in Washington were closed, as were plenty of schools in various states. Service has been restored on all subway lines in New York City and most regional rails in Philadelphia, while the Washington metro is offering limited service on trains and buses. Hundreds of flights were canceled Monday, and Amtrak offered fewer trains than usual along the northeast corridor.

At least 31 people have died as a result of the snowstorm, the AP reported.

Before it hit Friday, the snowstorm had the makings of the “Big One” and appeared “textbook,” according to the winter-weather expert who literally wrote the textbook on northeast snowstorms. It was indeed big, dumping up to 24 inches of snow in at least 14 states and more than 30 inches in some areas. The blizzard was the second-biggest snowstorm in New York City history, with 26.8 inches measured in Central Park by the end of Saturday.

The snowstorm effectively shut down major cities, and residents were urged to stay home and off the roads. As the storm raged, more than 85 million people—or more than one in every four Americans—were covered by some kind of blizzard or winter-storm advisory on Friday, according to weather.com. Governors in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania declared states of emergency, which free up resources for storm response. Washington, D.C. declared a snow emergency, and shut down all Metro and bus service for the weekend. Thousands of flights to mostly East Coast airports were canceled.

At least 13 people were killed in car or snowplow-related accidents in New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Ten people died while shoveling snow in New York, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. Four people died of carbon monoxide poisoning inside their cars in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Two people died of hypothermia in Virginia, and one teenager was struck by a truck and killed while he was sledding in Ohio.

An Earthquake in Alaska

Some Alaskans were woken up in the middle of the night by a 7.1-magnitude earthquake that rattled buildings, knocked out power for thousands, and led to some evacuations.

The earthquake struck Sunday at 1:30 a.m. local time in the area of Old Iliamna, about 162 miles south of Anchorage, said the U.S. Geological Survey. The Alaska Earthquake Center recorded about 30 aftershocks in the first two-and-a-half hours after the quake. The largest, at 3:37 a.m. local time, was measured at magnitude 4.3.

There is no threat of a tsunami as a result of the quake. There have been no reports of injuries so far.

At least 10,000 people lost power in the Anchorage area. The city’s fire department said in a tweet that it is “very busy with reports of gas odors, alarm systems sounding, broken water lines, etc.”

Residents of 20 homes in the Kenai Peninsula were evacuated following reports of gas leaks, according to Alaska’s KTUU-TV. The earthquake damaged Kalifornsky Beach Road, just off the Sterling Highway, one of two highways in the peninsula:

A closer look at the #AKquake damage to K-Beach Road. Zach Moore & Myles Thomas photos. https://t.co/k8k4DQIQ0T pic.twitter.com/vZ9SieO0XM

— KTUU.com (@Ch2KTUU) January 24, 2016

Some Alaskans took to social media to share their experience of feeling tremors, report power outages, and post photos of shattered wall decorations or items strewn about grocery-store aisles.

Cleanup on Aisle 3!!Kaylee Price sends in a few photos of Soldotna Fred Meyer.Bottles of wine on clearance!

Posted by The Alaska Life on Sunday, January 24, 2016

Southern Alaska is prone to earthquakes, according to USGS. On March 27, 1964, the area experienced a 9.2-magnitude quake, the most powerful earthquake recorded in the United States and the second-most powerful earthquake recorded in world history.

Perhaps the frequency of seismic activity explains this great response from an Anchorage resident:

Back to bed. Tell me the magnitude in the morning. #akquake

— Sebastian G.S. (@NewsGumshoe) January 24, 2016

45 Years: A Quiet Romantic Nightmare

45 Years begins the way many tense mysteries do—with a dark secret being unearthed. But this is no Nordic crime thriller, or horror film about monsters emerging from the deep. The cold case that’s re-opened in 45 Years is a romance, involving a long-ago love of Geoff’s (Tom Courtenay) who died in a hiking accident decades ago. The news that her body has finally been found begins Andrew Haigh’s quietly taut drama, and slowly infects Geoff’s marriage to Kate (Charlotte Rampling) just as they prepare to celebrate their 45th anniversary.

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If this sounds like it could be tough going, it is. But 45 Years is methodical in its devastation, chronicling a busier-than-usual week in Kate and Geoff’s quiet, settled life in Norfolk, England, after this dark news breaks. Like Haigh’s last film, the masterful 2011 romantic drama Weekend, it succeeds most with its muted moments, in the stilted pauses and loaded glances Kate can’t avoid as Geoff’s memories begin to take over every part of his life. Haigh brilliantly sidesteps melodrama and clunky exposition as he picks at the margins of this seemingly stable relationship.

His biggest weapon, of course, is Rampling, who manages to convey so much without speaking. It’s perhaps awkward to praise Rampling, who deservingly received an Oscar nomination for her performance, so soon after she aired a host of opinions about “racism against white people” in a French radio interview, but her work in 45 Years is undeniable, a testament to an incredible career of understated performances. Kate is a woman who exudes contentment and confidence in her life: She and Geoff don’t have children and are less sociable than some of their friends, but that’s easily explained by their strong connection.

Haigh, who also worked on the HBO show Looking, builds up the world around Geoff and Kate with similar grace. Weekend, centered around the gay scene in the mid-sized English city of Nottingham, had an amazing sense of place for a film that was largely set in people’s apartments. Geoff and Kate’s countryside existence in Norfolk feels parochial in all the right ways—comforting and picturesque—until Kate begins to chafe at Geoff’s obsessive focus on the past, at which point the walls start closing in. The couple’s friends go from supportive to pesky, and Kate suddenly can’t walk down the street without being reminded of her husband’s old flame. Haigh shifts the world on its axis in a thousand subtle ways, without needing to lean much on dialogue.

Geoff and Kate’s countryside existence feels parochial in all the right ways, until she begins to chafe at his obsessive focus on the past.

45 Years is based on a short story, “In Another Country” by David Constantine, who was in turn inspired by a real news story of a glacier melting enough to reveal the perfectly preserved corpse of someone who’d died on a French mountain decades before. It’s an apt and disturbing metaphor for the kinds of hidden secrets that can surface only decades after the fact. Geoff hasn’t so much lied to Kate about the past as he’s buried it himself, so long resigned to the loss of the alternate life he could have led. Kate’s inadequacy isn’t in trying to compete with another person for her husband’s affections, but in trying to have the life she’s led measure up to another that exists only in fantasy. It’s a horrifying scenario to consider, but at the same time, a disturbingly plausible one.

Eventually, the film’s plot ramps up to mete out more crushing revelations, including a scene with a slide projector that Haigh strangely foreshadows in the opening credits of the film. But just as it seems 45 Years is building to an unnatural, histrionic conclusion, Haigh and Rampling pull back again and, with one wordless closing shot, deliver the most biggest blow of all—one that’s worth the 95-minute running time alone, and that lingers long after the lights go up.