Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 248

The X-Files Returns: Inconsistent, Messy, and Promising

The nostalgic TV reboot is a tricky thing in the best of circumstances. But when it comes to The X-Files, a new season is burdened with the kind of impossible fan expectations that come with a new Star Wars. It’s easy to argue the seminal sci-fi show is the best and most influential program that ever aired on American television. But it ended horribly in 2002, each season more disappointing than the last, as its overarching conspiracy story tied itself in knots. An attempt at a film revival in 2008 drew mostly shrugs, but on Sunday, The X-Files is back on television where it belongs for a six-episode “event.” The stakes are low: All it has to do is restore the glory of one of TV’s all-time classics. Easy, right?

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The Slow Creep of Uncanny Television

It’s little wonder then that things start out slow, especially given all the setup the show needs to do justifying its own existence. But don’t be discouraged by the utter incoherence of the first hour: The spirit of the show is still here, waiting to be drawn out, and each installment is better than the last. It’s not ideal, given the brevity of this installment, but since there hasn’t been a consistent season of The X-Files since the 1990s, it’s probably the best anyone could hope for.

The biggest shift concerns the nature of conspiracy-theorizing itself, which in the Internet age has evolved from a demanding hobby for only the most devoted paranoiacs to something far more widespread, accessible, and pervasive. Early stories in The X-Files traded on every whispered secret and half-baked theory about the government, every spooky urban legend, every mythic creature given half a page in the encyclopedia. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) was an obsessive in an old-fashioned way fans could understand—charming and laconic, but with a basement full of weird secrets and passion projects, most having to do with alien abductions. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) balanced him out as the level-headed skeptic, but her characterization and growth over nine years was the show. Mulder was the constant, while Scully was the person who drew all of the drama and crackling wit out of him.

That dynamic, happily, remains in the show’s new incarnation, but things are different for the semi-retired FBI duo. In the first episode, “My Struggle,” written and directed by the show’s creator Chris Carter, Mulder buddies up to a far-right-wing, Alex Jones-style conspiracy theorist played by Joel McHale, mourning the current coolness of his relationship with Scully. But his fervor for the planet’s weird and wacky mysteries—the very quality that made him Mulder—seems to have waned. Conspiracy theories are embarrassingly mainstream at this point (think of the egg-avatar Twitter accounts ranting about lizard people or contrails or heaven knows what), and Mulder’s passion for discerning the truth from the lie is apparently sapped.

Since there hasn’t been a consistent season of The X-Files since the 1990s, it’s probably the best anyone could hope for.

I don’t know what to say about “My Struggle” (perhaps a reference to the Hitler manifesto of the same name, or the Norwegian autobiographical opus by Karl Ove Knausgaard, although the episode does little to point at either), because I barely understood what happened in it. Chris Carter long ago lost the thread of his “mytharc” for The X-Files, which was initially about a planned alien colonization but morphed into five other related things. “My Struggle” does nothing to clear things up, and it does even less to revitalize Mulder’s ardor for his work. Duchovny, perhaps shell shocked after years of making the drearily sexist Californication on Showtime, sleepwalks through the premiere and gives the usually energetic McHale little to work off of. “My Struggle” feels like it’s trying to catch up to all of contemporary TV’s new cinematic flourishes (which The X-Files helped spark in the 1990s), but its visuals are muddled and its wide-ranging plot idiotic.

But in many ways, none of this matters much. All the viewing public really wants is a trip back to the good old days, when The X-Files was the hottest, creepiest show on television, Mulder and Scully were the greatest will-they-won’t-they couple around, and you could murmur darkly about the government without sounding like a bigoted loon. The second episode, “Founder’s Mutation,” written by the veteran X-Files writer James Wong, gets closer to that vibe and does well to address one of the show’s weightier dangling stories (Mulder and Scully’s “child,” William), but it’s the third hour, “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” that really feels like a return to that old-time religion.

It’s written by Darin Morgan—inarguably the original show’s most bulletproof contributor—and crucially has a much lighter tone than the first two episodes, focusing more on Mulder and Scully’s dynamic and the inherent ridiculousness of them returning to a life running around the Vancouver woods like armed cryptozoologists. Duchovny finally wakes up in this one, and Anderson seems as delighted as the audience surely will be. The guest stars Rhys Darby and Kumail Nanjiani (whose brilliant podcast The X-Files Files was credited by producers as helping bring the show back to the airwaves) offer two sharp comic performances. There’s a sense of knowing that the first two episodes lack—that there’s something special about this show, and something crazy about the fact that it’s back. The return of The X-Files shouldn’t feel like some ordinary piece of nostalgia mining, but it’s only in this third episode that it doesn’t.

What to expect from the rest of the season? Perhaps it just needed to build momentum, clear the cobwebs, and set Mulder and Scully on the path again—or perhaps Morgan’s episode was a one-off treat. More likely, this is The X-Files as it has existed for the past 15 or so years—occasionally excellent, often frustrating, and loaded with the kind of history you can’t ignore but that also keeps you coming back to it again and again. For all its faults, it’s great to have the show back on screens, knowing that with any luck, it has more than just one extraordinary hour of TV left to give.

The National Review Takes on Trump

As one of the country’s most prominent right-leaning publications, the National Review prides itself on its role in policing the bounds of American conservatism. In the 1950s and 1960s, the magazine figuratively “expelled” John Birchers and anti-Semites from the movement to bolster its legitimacy. Now its editors seek to do the same to the Republican presidential frontrunner.

The Review declared war on Donald Trump in its latest issue published on Thursday night, nine days before the Iowa caucuses and over seven months after Trump catapulted himself to the front of the GOP race last June. In the lead editorial, the magazine’s editors outlined their opposition to Trump’s seemingly unstoppable drive to the party’s nomination for the presidency.

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

To buttress its stance, the magazine also published a “symposium” of 21 top conservative commentators who oppose Trump, ranging from Glenn Beck and Dana Loesch to Thomas Sowell and Cal Thomas. Their opposition generally fell into four broad categories. Most were purists like Erick Erickson, who view Trump’s embrace of right-wing politics after years of espousing liberal beliefs with deep skepticism:

In a 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelly, Trump aggressively supported universal health-care, saying, “This is an un-Republican thing for me to say. . . . I’m going to take care of everybody. . . . The government’s gonna pay for it.” He supported the prosecution of hate crimes. He favored wealth-confiscation policies. He supported abortion rights. On all these things, Donald Trump now says he has changed his mind. Like the angels in heaven who rejoice for every new believer, we should rejoice for Donald Trump’s conversion to conservatism.

But we should not put a new conservative in charge of conservatism or the country, so that he does not become puffed up with conceit and fall into condemnation. Republicans have wandered in the wilderness already by letting leaders define conservatism in their own image. Donald Trump needs more time and more testing of his new conservative convictions.

Some, like Bill Kristol, critiqued Trump on aesthetic grounds:

In a letter to National Review, Leo Strauss wrote that “a conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.” Isn’t Donald Trump the very epitome of vulgarity?

In sum: Isn’t Trumpism a two-bit Caesarism of a kind that American conservatives have always disdained? Isn’t the task of conservatives today to stand athwart Trumpism, yelling Stop?

Others, like Yuval Levin, took a more principled approach, focusing on Trumpism’s deeper philosophical friction with conservatism:

The appeal of Trump’s diagnoses should be instructive to conservatives. But the shallow narcissism of his prescriptions is a warning. American conservatism is an inherently skeptical political outlook. It assumes that no one can be fully trusted with public power and that self-government in a free society demands that we reject the siren song of politics-as-management.

A shortage of such skepticism is how we ended up with the problems Trump so bluntly laments. Repeating that mistake is no way to solve these problems. To address them, we need to begin by rejecting what Trump stands for, as much as what he stands against.

Finally, there were pragmatic critics like Michael Medved, who noted (alongside other flaws) that Trump would not only lose in November, but also drag conservatism down with him:

And then there’s the uncomfortable, unavoidable issue of racism. Even those who take Trump at his word—accepting his declaration that he qualifies as the least racist individual in the nation— can imagine the parade of negative ads the Democrats are already preparing for radio stations with mainly black audiences and for Spanish-language television. Even if Trump won a crushing majority of self-described white voters, he could hardly improve on Romney’s landslide victory—59 percent to 39 percent—in that demographic group.

If Trump becomes the nominee, the GOP is sure to lose the 2016 election. But the problem is much larger: Will the Republican party and the conservative movement survive? If Asians and Latinos come to reject Republican candidates as automatically and overwhelmingly as African Americans do, the party will lose all chance of capturing the presidency, and, inevitably, it will face the disappearance of its congressional and gubernatorial majorities as well.

The symposium is more than the sum of its parts. None of the brief, individual contributions land any haymakers against the likely Republican presidential nominee. Nor are they likely to sway his most enthusiastic supporters. But the breadth of the arguments is remarkable, as is the fact of their existence. It doesn’t bode well for Republican unity when the leading publication of American conservatism demands the fall of the GOP frontrunner.

Will all this be enough to alter Trump’s trajectory? Nothing is certain, but it seems unlikely. A viable alternative to him has yet to emerge among the Republican contenders after seven grueling months of Trumpmania. The GOP base is broadly tilting toward outsider candidates, not establishment ones, this election cycle, as shown by the collapse of Jeb Bush and non-rise of Marco Rubio. And as my colleague Molly Ball noted on Thursday, most of the Republican establishment even prefers Trump to his nearest current rival, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whom they passionately loathe.

Trump, for his part, fired back at the Review in his usual fashion.

National Review is a failing publication that has lost it's way. It's circulation is way down w its influence being at an all time low. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016

Very few people read the National Review because it only knows how to criticize, but not how to lead.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016

The late, great, William F. Buckley would be ashamed of what had happened to his prize, the dying National Review!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016

The Lady in the Van: Maggie Smith Dazzles Once More

Two Academy Awards (and six nominations), five BAFTAs, three Emmys, three Golden Globes, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Tony. It’s exhausting just to list the accolades that Dame Maggie Smith has accumulated over her decades on screen and stage: Imagine how tiring it must have been to earn them all.

Yet at 82, Smith seems, if anything, more lively and ubiquitous than ever before. She’s appeared in 20 films over the past 15 years, notably as Minerva McGonagall, the benevolent headmistress of Harry Potter’s beloved Gryffindor House. And over the past five years she’s also won two Emmys (and been nominated for two more) for her portrait of Violet Crawley on Downton Abbey. It’s a schedule that might break a performer half her age.

For her latest feat, Smith rescues Nicholas Hytner’s film The Lady in the Van from the confectionery uplift that otherwise might have swallowed it. Smith plays Mary Shepherd—or, more accurately, someone who has chosen to go by the name “Mary Shepherd”—a real-life homeless woman who, for 15 years, parked her van in the driveway of the real-life playwright Alan Bennett (played here by Alex Jennings). It’s a role Smith has played twice before: in Bennett’s 1999 stage play of the same name (also directed by Hytner) and in a 2009 BBC radio production.

The story begins when Bennett moves into the bourgeois-boho London neighborhood of Camden Town in the early 1970s. (A typical exchange takes place with a neighbor played by Roger Allam: Bennett: “I’ve got a play on in the West End”; neighbor: “Of course you do.”) Shepherd is already a fixture on the block, moving her dilapidated van from curb to curb as needed. None of the resident families are particularly happy to have her park in front of their homes; but all feel ideologically bound not to complain. “That’s Camden,” one explains. “People wash up here.” Or as Bennett himself puts it, “They tolerate Ms. Shepherd, their consciences absolved by her presence.”

Shepherd eventually moves her van—painted a sickly, custard yellow—to the curb in front of Bennett’s house and, later, into his unused driveway. There, as if assembling a breakwater in preparation for a flood, the vehicle gradually barricades itself among bags of refuse and human waste. (It is made apparent on numerous occasions that Shepherd’s olfactory presence is at least as great an imposition as her physical one.)

There’s not much more to the tale than that. Bennett endures an uneasy peace with his determinedly ungrateful quasi-tenant, and bit by bit elements of her past become clear: the sources of her fluent French and fierce Catholicism; the purposes of the smiling blackmailer (Jim Broadbent) who occasionally comes a-tapping on her windshield.

Throughout, there is an underlying theme of doubling: Bennett watches Shepherd age and decay even as he watches his widowed mother do the same. And the playwright is himself split in two. As he explains, “The writer is double. There is the one who does the writing. And there is the one who does the living.” The two halves—both played by Jennings—are in constant, ambivalent dialogue about whether it would be proper to use his experiences with Shepherd as material for a play. It’s the kind of narrative stunt that could easily go awry, but Jennings (a three-time Olivier award winner whom it would be nice to see more often onscreen) pulls it off with understated aplomb.

Smith has no need for such handicapping. She is not a gimmick; she is a treasure.

Yet it all comes back, of course, to Smith. In other hands, Ms. Shepherd might have joined in cinema’s long litany of saintly vagabonds. But Smith, as is customary, foregoes the saccharine in favor of the astringent, and thus keeps Hytner’s film on its toes. It’s little wonder that neither he nor Bennett has seen fit to cast any other actress in the role, whatever the medium.

I’m reminded of 18 years ago, when Gloria Stuart was nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role in Titanic. With all due respect, the nomination was openly absurd: Stuart’s part was a bit one and, while perfectly adequate, she did nothing memorable with it. Rather, she was nominated almost entirely because she was 87 years old at the time—the oldest person ever nominated in an acting category. Maggie Smith is just five years younger than Stuart was then. But while her performance in The Lady in the Van was very much in the discussion for Best Actress this year, her age was scarcely brought up at all. Which is exactly as it should be. Smith has no need for such handicapping. She is not a gimmick; she is a treasure.

Who Poisoned Flint?

Why did it take so long for state and federal government to do something about lead in the water in Flint, Michigan? Or, put another way, who is to blame, and who should have fixed it?

There’s a telling moment within the 274 pages of emails released by Governor Rick Snyder’s office about Flint. Dennis Muchmore, then chief of staff to the governor, puzzles over who should be on the hook. He gripes about Representative Dan Kildee, and mentions former state Treasurer Andy Dillon:

Muchmore went on, “The real responsibility resists with the County, city and [Flint’s water authority], but since the issue here is the health of citizens and their children, we’re taking a pro-active approach.”

The question of who really is responsible has become suddenly widespread. On Thursday, news broke that the U.S. House will call Snyder to testify. The EPA official responsible for Michigan also resigned on Thursday. Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have both called for Snyder to resign. The Wall Street Journal points a finger at every level of government. Disentangling the blame proves to be a difficult task.

Muchmore’s statement may seem a bit callous, but his mention of Dillon is somewhat tangential: After all, Dillon’s role was simply to sign off on the change to taking water from the Flint River, because of the size of the transaction. But Muchmore omitted the reason why Dillon was involved—a fact that also complicates his assignment of blame to the city. The switch to water from the Flint River occurred under the oversight of an emergency manager appointed by Snyder. Under a state law that Snyder signed, the governor can appoint a manager to take over cities in financial emergency.

Prior to the switch, Flint had been preparing to move away from water provided by Detroit’s water service and toward a pipeline that would bring water directly from Lake Huron. (The city council did have a chance to weigh in on that change, and supported it 7-1.) But when Flint made the decision, the Detroit Water Services District announced it would terminate service to Flint a year later. That was legal under the contract, but it put Flint in a bad spot, since the new pipeline wasn’t going to be complete in a year. DWSD shrugged, saying Flint should have expected it. That’s how the emergency manager, Darnell Earley, ended up overseeing the switch to water from the Flint River. Flint residents and leaders blame Earley for the decision; Earley insists it was their idea. (Flint reconnected to Detroit water late last year, but there’s lasting damage to the pipes.)

In any case, the final authority for the decision rested with Earley, the manager. That makes it jarring to see Muchmore write, in the same email quoted above, that the state departments of Environmental Quality and Community Health complained that the water issue had become “a political football”:

For one thing, it had become clear by the time of writing, in September 2015, that Flint’s water had dangerous levels of lead. The residents weren’t just angry because they saw a partisan gain—they were angry about brown and apparently tainted water coming out of their faucets. Meanwhile, their political representation had been directly curtailed by the appointment of the emergency manager who oversaw the switch. Officials in Lansing withdrew Flint’s power to govern itself, but when Flint begged Lansing for help, it was told that the problem was Flint’s alone.

There are other cases of the state government getting closely involved with city governance elsewhere in the emails. In one case, officials discussed changing state law to try to outmaneuver a candidate for mayor, after a clerk’s error locked the incumbent out of the ballot:

The emails contain other unflattering moments for Snyder’s office. As early as February 2015, a pastor wrote to the governor that residents were “on the verge of civil unrest.” Even then, Snyder’s aides was impassive. Early on, Flint’s water was treated with high levels of chlorine to combat a bad smell. But that produced high concentration of TTHMs, a type of carcinogen. “It’s not ‘nothing,’” a memo noted. “But it’s not like it’s an eminent [sic] threat to public health.” Even so, the memo conceded communication had been bad.

When the scandal eventually broke out to a wider audience, it was in part due to that pesky political activism. With elected and local leaders continuing to make noise about the dangers of Flint’s water, they were finally able to get state and federal declarations of emergency, bringing with the supplies of water carried by the national guard, as well as the nation’s attention.

Yet it took more than a year and a half from the switch to Flint River water until the present day for that to work. One result of the ensuing controversy may be that Flint finally gets back some level of self-governance. In April 2015, the last emergency manager turned over many powers to the city manager. Now, with the crisis in full swing, Snyder has called for the state to transfer control back to the elected mayor, Karen Weaver. The lead-laden water has been a heavy price for Flint to pay to get back control.

Tracking the East Coast's Massive Snowstorm

That swirling cover of white up there is the first blizzard of 2016, captured by satellite as it barreled across the central United States, toward the East Coast.

The “potentially crippling” storm is expected to bring powerful winds and up to two feet of snow to parts of the Mid-Atlantic this weekend, which could result in flooding in coastal regions, the U.S. National Weather Service warned. The storm has the makings of the “Big One” and so far appears “textbook,” according to the winter-weather expert who literally wrote the textbook on northeast snowstorms.

As of Thursday morning, about 73 million people—or roughly one in every four Americans—were covered by some kind of blizzard or winter-storm advisory, according to weather.com. Local, state, and federal officials have been scrambling to organize their responses to the blizzard as residents swarm grocery stores to stock up on food and water.

We’ll be tracking the snowstorm here throughout the weekend at various levels: NASA/NOAA GOES Project

London Spy: The Great Gay Espionage Story, Almost

“No plot but lots of disco dancing!” That was the headline for Christopher Stevens’s deliciously deranged Daily Mail review of the BBC five-part miniseries London Spy when it premiered in the U.K. in December. Some sort of unfortunate natural law dictates that exactly this kind of review must be written by someone, somewhere, for any new show with gay characters. “It's become impossible to switch the telly on without seeing two men locked in a naked clinch, or in drag, or snogging,” Stevens carped, a statement that takes a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to make when only now, and only on some networks, is TV beginning to reflect the percentage of queer people in the general population. You can see evidence of this cognitive dissonance in the aforementioned headline: There is no actual disco dancing in London Spy.

Stevens’s review already received some backlash. But it’s worth noting that one argument supposedly in the show’s favor isn’t quite accurate. In an interview with The Guardian, supporting star Jim Broadbent summed it up: “It’s not a gay story … It’s about these particular guys, who happen to be gay, who are in the midst of this maelstrom of an unfolding tale.” There are, to be sure, many stories where the presence of same-sex romance is merely incidental. But London Spy, which debuts on BBC America tonight, isn’t one of them. Its gayness is the most interesting thing about it.

Ben Whishaw, reconfiguring the ratio of nervous anxiety to dreamy self-possession he displays as Q in the recent James Bond movies, plays the hero, Danny. His drug use, promiscuity, and aimlessness fit the archetype of a “party boy”; the show wants viewers to see those traits as coping mechanisms for something. He meets the mysterious and handsome Alex, who more fits the Alan Turing mold: His long-ignored desires coexist with and maybe even fuel savant-like brilliance (Edward Holcroft’s deep voice and heavy-tongued speaking style even recall Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Turing in The Imitation Game). The two strike up a yin-yang love affair featuring beach walks and slow sex and very laconic conversations. Then something horrible happens, and the show turns from muted romance to terrifying mystery.

Both characters have been deeply shaped by the closet and social expectation, though in Alex’s case there are quite a few more layers of repression to peel back. That’s also true of Danny’s mentor, Scottie (Broadbent, kindly menace incarnate), a bureaucrat whose life story would have been very different had he been straight. All three men are terminally lonely for different reasons with similar root causes; the show’s plot is plausible only because of the vivid desperation that has led them to form iron commitments to one another. There are other sexuality-related factors here, too: the effects of AIDS in the past and present, the exploitative dynamics created when a group must exist on society’s margins, and the eagerness of the mainstream to lump all gay people into one amoral, kinky mass.

The characters have been deeply shaped by the closet and social expectations.

On TV, it’s rare for all these currents to converge so smartly. But the medium, at least as it’s approached here by creator Tom Rob Smith and director Jakob Verbruggen, doesn’t quite work to London Spy’s advantage, even though the show is visually gorgeous, wonderfully performed, and competently written. The need to occupy almost a full hour per episode seems to have resulted in lots of filler, presented, unconvincingly, under the guise of artful mood-setting. Outside of having potential screensaver value for Whishaw superfans, there’s nothing useful about seeing Danny wander through a hedge maze to kill time before dinner, or gloomily swim in slow motion, or contemplate the Thames over and over again. The time-killing isn’t justified by the central mystery, the solving of which turns out to be neither very shocking nor complex: Of all the possibilities suggested by the show’s inciting incident, one of the least interesting ends up being true. Five episodes might sound like a perfect, lithe treatment for such a tale, but the truth is it really only needed two or three. London Spy should have been a movie.  

To be fair, the storytelling does pay off frequently enough that I don’t regret having sat through the whole thing. Those strong character relationships feel all the more real because of the amount of time spent with them. And the drip-drop pacing allows for some exquisitely terrifying climaxes. The twist of the first episode really isn’t hard to guess at (and has been mentioned in some of the show’s advertising)—and yet it’s unveiled with such deliberation and patience that it feels like something from a great horror film.

Given the potential, though, the show’s flaws are frustrating. London Spy’s innovation is in the way that the sexuality of its characters intersects with a standard spy mystery to explore some concepts that popular culture hasn’t yet fully reckoned with. Yet its lethargy and the unremarkable nature of the underlying plot allow people like Stevens to maintain a false dichotomy: inclusive storytelling vs. entertaining storytelling. Both can coexist. Even within the slog of London Spy, there are plenty of times when they do.

Walmart Workers Get a Raise, but Is That Enough?

On Wednesday, Walmart announced that in mid-February, 1.2 million employees at its U.S. stores will be getting a small raise. Hourly wages for full-time Walmart employees will increase from an average of $13 to $13.38 (and for part-time employees, the average wage will go from $10 to $10.58.) Unfortunately, that’s still lower than the average for U.S. retail workers, which according to the Labor Department is $14.95.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the pay increases at America’s largest private employer are an effort to address concerns about new hires getting better pay than long-tenured employees, as well as a way of reducing employee turnover. This is the second round of the multi-stage, wage-raising plan Walmart announced last year.

In 2015, Walmart promised that all of their employees would earn at least $10 by this February. At the time, the move was largely seen as a sign of that the labor market had tightened—unemployment was (and is) steady at 5 percent, making it more difficult for companies to retain low-wage workers. And though the raises aren’t large—it’s not the $15 an hour that advocates have been fighting for—the fact that it was Walmart, a company historically known for underpaying its employees in order to keep prices low, seemed significant in the retail world.

But things have changed in a year. First, the company began cutting employee work hours. Bloomberg reported that Walmart executives were telling store managers to rein in labor costs by making reductions to work schedules (though a spokesperson for Walmart insisted that these cuts were only for over-scheduled workers). More recently, Walmart announced that it would be closing 154 stores in the U.S., which it estimates will affect 10,000 workers.

Walmart’s critics, though, don’t think it’s a coincidence that last year’s raise was followed by moves that hurt the company’s employees. In an email, Jessica Levin, a spokesperson for Making Change at Walmart, a campaign backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, wrote, “After Walmart’s last wage increase stunt, many workers almost immediately saw their hours cut and take-home pay go down. It’s easier to find a unicorn than a Walmart worker who has received a meaningful raise, or hasn’t had their hours cut.”

Still, there’s reason to believe that Walmart isn’t raising wages just for the publicity. For one, its additional labor costs—which this year and next will add up to $2.7 billion—have  investors spooked. Last October, Walmart’s stock had its steepest one-day decline in 25 years when the company released a review earnings outlook that accounted for the increased labor costs and the effects of a strong dollar. Many American retailers are struggling to figure out how to keep shareholders happy and pay people fairly, and, despite the market’s reaction, Walmart’s CEO Doug McMillon maintained that a raise was the right decision. According to one estimate, Walmart can definitely bear raises like this: After all, it’s hard for a company that still makes $3 billion a quarter to say it can’t afford it.

Wages matter, especially when spread across millions of employees. That said, they do seem smaller when put alongside the other ways Walmart deals with its workers. For instance, a BusinessWeek cover story about Walmart’s surveillance of its employees included unsavory details about the company’s hiring Lockheed Martin to gather intelligence on employees who were suspected to be involved in labor activities. Last year, Anonymous leaked one of the company’s training videos, which had a heavy anti-union slant.  Walmart might be paying their workers a little bit more, but it’s a long way from appeasing critics on how it treats their employees overall.

Breaking the NFL's Glass Ceiling

Professional football, despite its reputation and its dangers, is becoming an increasingly inclusive place. Female executives have populated the front offices of NFL teams for decades. Michael Sam, the college defensive standout and first openly gay player to be drafted, got a chance to fight for a roster spot on two different teams before walking away from the sport last year.  

On Wednesday night, Kathryn Smith, who has worked in the NFL for several years, became the first woman to be named a full-time member of a coaching staff. Smith will serve as a special-teams coach for the Buffalo Bills under their charismatic leader Rex Ryan. (Coincidentally enough, in 2014, Daniel Snyder argued in The Atlantic that Michael Sam would have made a great fit for Ryan’s defense.)

In announcing the hire, Ryan eschewed mention of the noteworthiness of the moment and choose to highlight Smith’s extensive resume instead:

Kathryn Smith has done an outstanding job in the seven years that she has worked with our staff. She certainly deserves this promotion based on her knowledge and strong commitment, just to name a couple of her outstanding qualities, and I just know she’s going to do a great job serving in the role of Quality Control-Special Teams.

If you thought reaction to Smith’s hire was going to be universally positive or, perhaps encouragingly seen as not a big deal, prepare yourself for disappointment.

On Thursday morning, Kevin Kiley and Ken Carman of CBS Cleveland’s radio sports talk show “Kiley & Carman,” devoted an entire segment to lampooning and second-guessing Ryan’s decision to hire Smith.

“I’m sure if I’m running 100 miles-per-hour under a kickoff and miss a tackle, I’m gonna wanna hear from Kathryn on how I could have done it better. That’s exactly what I want to hear,” Carman begins a heavily sexist bit punctuated by the titters of his co-host. He continued: “There’s no place for a woman in professional sports in football coaching men. Men will not take to it.”

Meanwhile, the Buffalo Bills guard Richie Incognito, known best for his general lack of grace, was among the first to embrace the news about Smith.

Congrats Kathryn!! I know you will do a great job.

World of Tomorrow and the Copy-Pasted Brain

It’s impressive that World of Tomorrow is one of the best films nominated for an Oscar this year given that it’s only 16 minutes long. It’s even more so considering that the movie is almost entirely exposition. Don Hertzfeldt’s animated short, which is now available on Netflix, is a beautifully told tale of sci-fi horror with the feel of a melancholy bedtime story. Its hero is a little girl named Emily who gets a phone call from her future self—sort of: The Emily calling from 227 years ahead is a clone, the third such copy made from a previous Emily and given her memories. Hers is a copy-pasted brain, and she has a long story to unravel.

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Immortal but Damned to Hell on Earth

World of Tomorrow is a wonder of ping-ponging dialogue: Clone Emily, in a monotone, describes the dystopian future to “Emily Prime” (voiced by the 4-year-old Winona Mae), who gleefully burbles childish nonsense in response to her future “self.” Hertzfeldt’s animation uses simple stick figures, but his Emily Prime dances around the screen with delight while her clone stands and regards her solemnly. His film posits a future where emotion has slowly slipped away as humans foolishly pursued immortality, but where feelings and warm memories are valued higher than anything.

The idea of the copy-pasted brain, and the moral quandaries that could stem from it, has enjoyed a quiet revival in sci-fi recently, with World of Tomorrow as the must-see standard-bearer. Hertzfeldt, whose work always tends towards the absurd, had never experimented with the genre before making this short, which was his first digitally produced film. As Emily and her clone drift through the “outernet,” the virtual reality through which all people in the future apparently communicate, the environment pops and crackles around them. But for all of his fantastical imagery, Hertzfeldt triumphs by focusing tightly on his protagonist’s emotions, which are seemingly haywire thanks to their being a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox. “I am very proud of my sadness, because it means I am more alive,” the clone proclaims, while acknowledging that she has occasionally fallen in love with inanimate objects in the past.

It’s hard to say too much about World of Tomorrow without spoiling its delicate balance of world-building and surreal humor. But its central, hypothetical concept, that of transferring your mind to a new body or a computer, has long been debated within scientific and transhumanist communities. Emily Clone is something of a great-granddaughter to Emily Prime, who will give birth to her first clone, who then gives birth to the next one, and so on. But is she a separate entity altogether or just a continuation of Emily’s lifespan? This clone is strange and affectless, but certainly possesses pathos and consciousness. If humans create these “backups,” are we generating new life, or extending our own?

My colleague Conor Friedersdorf examined this vaguely horrifying idea from a socio-political point of view last year. It provokes so many questions—how would criminal justice function in such a world, especially if life was mostly lived within a computer and physical concerns were forgotten? How could we conceive of any human experience without the bounds of mortality? “Nuclear war could come tomorrow,” Conor wrote. “Those of us who survive it might spend the rest of our days in misery. But that misery would be relatively short. Radical life extension via mind uploads would seem to risk inconceivably long, possibly endless misery.”

If humans create “backups,” are we generating new life, or merely extending our own?

The idea of crime and punishment in a world where everyone’s brains are downloaded to computers is the subject of Richard Morgan’s seminal sci-fi novel Altered Carbon. There, consciousness is stored digitally and transferred to a new body upon death, if you can afford it; the rich constantly hop into new, youthful bodies, while the poor can linger in digital storage for decades. Coincidentally enough, Netflix announced Wednesday that it would produce a 10-episode TV series based on the book, which filters the concept of an uploaded mind through that of a cop show, wrestling with the warped morality of a world where it’s very difficult to actually kill someone and practically impossible to imprison them.

The idea of copy-pasted brains, of course, lends itself best to more apocalyptic fiction. In World of Tomorrow, Clone Emily calmly reports that her society is on the brink of witnessing the end of the world, with some trying to escape by zapping their minds into computers and shooting them into space. That idea is at the heart of the brilliant 2015 video game Soma, a nightmarish work of first-person horror storytelling that was released by Frictional Games last September.

Soma begins with its protagonist getting a routine brain-scan in the present day, then waking up in an underwater research facility hundreds of years into the future. It’s a video game, so players pull levers, run down corridors, and dodge scary monsters, but the larger story concept is chilling—the world on Earth’s surface has ended following a comet strike, and this underwater station is all that remains of humanity. Players are tasked with retrieving the world’s brain-scans, including their own, and uploading them into a virtual-reality machine to create some semblance of humanity’s continued existence.

Soma is undoubtedly not for everyone—playing it was scarier than most films I’ve watched in recent years—but like World of Tomorrow and Altered Carbon, it poses fascinating questions about our commitment to living as long as we can by whatever means we can devise. Soma’s protagonist slogs through an abandoned subterranean world just to guarantee the future of human consciousness; Emily’s clone is a stunted creature, but all she wants is to experience life as fully and powerfully as everyone who came before her. World of Tomorrow is just the latest, fascinating reminder of the emotional breadth sci-fi can conjure as it imagines our future, no matter how dark or satirical that vision might be.

Vladimir Putin ‘Probably Approved’ the Murder of a Former Russian Spy

A British inquiry into the 2006 death of Alexander Litvinenko has found that the killing of the former Russian spy was “probably approved” by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s intelligence agency.

The results of public inquiry, published Thursday, suggest that Putin and Nikolai Patrushev, then the head of FSB, the Russian intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB, signed off on the operation, wrote Judge Robert Owen.

“Taking full account of all the evidence and analysis available to me, I find that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev and also by President Putin,” Owen said.

Litvinenko signed a statement two days before his death that alleged the Russian president had ordered his murder. Thursday’s report is the first public official statement linking Putin to the crime.

Litvinenko, a former KGB agent turned Kremlin critic who fled to Britain, fell suddenly ill in November 2006, a month after drinking tea with two Russian agents in a London hotel. Hospital tests detected the presence of a radioactive poison, polonium-210, in his body. Litvinenko, 44, died three weeks later.

Moscow has always denied involvement, and its reaction to the new report was no different. “We regret that a purely criminal case has been politicized and has darkened the general atmosphere of our bilateral relations,” said Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, according to The Guardian.

Russia has for years denied extradition requests by Britain for Andrei Lugovoy—who is now a member of the Russian parliament—and Dmitry Kovtun, the two men Litvinenko met in the bar of the Millennium Hotel in 2006 and whom British prosecutors believe poisoned Litvinenko’s tea. In the report, Owen wrote that, given the results of the inquiry, he is “sure” that Lugovoy and Kovtun placed polonium-210 in Litvinenko’s drink.

British Home Secretary Theresa May on Thursday called the crime a “blatant and unacceptable” breach of international law, and said British Prime Minister David Cameron would speak to Putin about the report at “the next available opportunity,” according to the BBC.

Marina Litvinenko, the former agent’s widow, praised the “damning” findings Thursday, and called on the prime minister to impose sanctions on Putin and other officials and expel Russian intelligence agents working in Britain, the Associated Press reported. Her lawyer called her husband’s death “a mini-act of nuclear terrorism on the streets of London.”

Marina Litvinenko has said her husband grew disillusioned with the FSB in the 1990s, during Russia’s war against Chechan separatists. He fled Russia to Britain in 2000 and was granted asylum, and became a vocal critic of Putin, claiming at one point that the Russian president was a pedophile. Litvinenko