Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 249

Baskets: Zach Galifianakis Is America’s Sad Clown

Baskets feels like a comedy that’s easy to pigeonhole. Try to resist that urge. Yes, it stars Zach Galifianakis, master of the vacant annoyed stare on Between Two Ferns, as yet another irascible jerk. Yes, it bears a lot of the hallmarks of its FX sister show Louie, from its co-creator (Louis C.K.) to its refusal to shoot for easy or even occasional laughs. But while Baskets is an acidic, sometimes depressing watch, it’s much better than that sounds—an incisive, absurd, darkly heartfelt show set not on the stage but in America’s dreary urban sprawl.

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Hail to the Glorious Return of Sad-Sack Louie

Chip Baskets (Galifianakis) is a self-important prig, an aspiring clown who sees himself as an artiste, and who never misses an opportunity to tell people he was educated at clown college in Paris, although his education was stymied by the fact that he can’t speak French. He returns, broke, to his hometown of Bakersfield, California, with a beautiful French wife (who married him for the green card and otherwise ignores him), and moves into a motel, where his only career prospects come via the local rodeo. Chip is a pretentious jerk, sour to everyone around him, but Galifianakis mines tragic moments of grace from his bitter existence.

The great, sad joke of Baskets is Chip’s devotion to the classical art of clowning, a tradition neither respected nor understood by his tutting mother (Louie Anderson), his superficial wife (Sabina Sciubba), or his sarcastic twin brother (also played by Galifianakis). Chip executes melancholy set-pieces in the arena while wearing white face-paint and an oversized suit straight out of commedia dell’arte, then gets mowed down by a charging bull to cheers from the crowd. His pretentious arrogance can be tough to watch, but there’s an absurd passion to his quest to become a great clown, lending him the sympathy Baskets needs to work.

It helps that Chip quickly makes a new friend in Martha (played by the stand-up comedian Martha Kelly), a subdued, socially awkward insurance agent who serves as a stoic pincushion for Chip’s dark moods. The show takes several episodes to draw out their strange relationship, which mostly consists of Chip belittling Martha every time she offers some level-headed advice. But there’s warmth there, as there is in Louie Anderson’s gamely low-key drag performance as Chip’s mother, who isn’t the battleaxe you might expect from such stunt casting. Galifianakis, who co-wrote the show with C.K. and Jonathan Krisel (Portlandia, Kroll Show), has buried an emotional throughline in this tale, but he doesn’t make it easy for audiences to unearth.

That’s the advantage of airing on FX, the network that let C.K. do whatever he wanted with his own show as long as the budget was low enough (the critically acclaimed, risk-taking Louie sometimes aired five-part episodes that lacked a single easy punchline). Galifianakis has had plenty of mainstream success thanks to The Hangover films, but he emerged from, and remains rooted in, the traditions of alt-comedy. Baskets is the kind of passion project you might expect from him, but like Louie, it doesn’t feel self-indulgent. The tone is often grim, and the audience will probably be small, but this is a fully-realized work, rather than some anti-comic noodling from a superstar who’s bored of his own fame.

There’s a reason Chip Baskets wants to be a clown, after all—and from all the hallmarks of his performing, he’s the classic sad clown, the self-important fool who’s crying on the inside. Despite being broke, Chip is too proud to live with his mother, and loudly refutes any stranger who presumes the plainly-dressed Martha is his girlfriend, instead continuing to pursue his sham wife even as she treats him venomously. Galifianakis has long excelled at fleshing out these tragic figures who cover for their anxieties with cruelty, from The Hangover’s demented Alan Garner to the prickly Ethan of Due Date. Chip is a horrible person to consider, but when he’s getting chased around the arena by a charging bull, his vulnerabilities are finally laid bare. Galifianakis clearly wants to play the role of America’s sad clown—he just doesn’t care whether we laugh along with him.  

Republicans Face a Big Decision on Criminal-Justice Reform

What will Mitch McConnell do on criminal-justice reform?

The fate of the years-long push to overhaul sentencing laws and federal prisons now rests in the hands of the Senate majority leader, who must decide whether bringing legislation to the floor is worth the election-year risk to a Republican majority that he has vowed to protect. Advocates for reform believe they have finally achieved a rare, bipartisan consensus in both chambers of Congress on most of the policy particulars—reducing mandatory minimums, banning solitary confinement of juveniles, and boosting prisoner re-entry programs, among other things.

Their task now is to convince Republican leaders that acting on a justice bill in the middle of a highly volatile presidential campaign won’t be political suicide. Top officials in the House seem ready to go, but the man on the fence is the famously risk-averse McConnell. “Let’s not miss the forest for the trees here,” said Holly Harris, the executive director for the U.S. Justice Action Network, an umbrella advocacy group. “The big issue is to prove to Leader McConnell that not only are these issues good policies that work and make us safer, but also that they make for good politics.”

Harris’s organization is partnering with conservative and liberal groups, including FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform on the right and the ACLU and the Center for American Progress on the left. She told me the network would be commissioning polls in states with hotly-contested Senate races—think Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—as part of its lobbying campaign. And this week advocacy groups released a pair of letters signed by nearly 150 current and former law enforcement officials—including two former FBI directors and ex-Attorney General Michael Mukasey—endorsing the Senate’s Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, part of an effort to build a public bulwark from soft-on-crime attacks on the legislation. Advocates are also armed with positive results of state-level reform efforts in Republican bastions of Texas, South Carolina, Georgia.

After a productive first year as majority leader, McConnell has set modest goals for the Senate in 2016; his priority is to pass a dozen individual spending bills in a bid to return to “regular order” appropriating. Like other Republican leaders, however, he has mentioned criminal-justice reform as one of the few major items that could advance this year, and it was a big topic of discussion at the party’s annual retreat last week in Baltimore. Still, McConnell has been steadfastly noncommittal on whether the bipartisan bill that passed out of the Judiciary Committee last fall would get a full floor vote. “It is an issue our members are discussing, but I don’t have any announcements,” McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said.

“The big issue is to prove to Leader McConnell that not only are these issues good policies that work and make us safer, but also that they make for good politics.”

Harris, a conservative strategist who formerly served in top GOP positions in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, spun the majority leader’s openness as a positive sign. “I know Leader McConnell well,” she said in a recent interview. “He’s a very cautious individual who’s very cognizant of all the positions of his members, and quite frankly, he’s gone further in his public remarks than we ever hoped he would with respect to saying that these issues are deserving of floor time.”

If the liberal-conservative consensus on criminal-justice reform is so broad, what is there to be afraid of? Well, crime. Advocates know that isolated or overblown spikes in murders or violent assaults are easily exploited during campaigns, and that fear is heightened even more when the Republican frontrunners are Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Trump in particular has used highly-publicized attacks by immigrants to fan concerns about border security. And it’s not hard to see him turning to the playbook of the late Lee Atwater, the George H. W. Bush campaign manager who created the infamous ad tying Michael Dukakis to Willie Horton, the Massachusetts felon who raped a woman while on a weekend furlough from prison. Cruz, meanwhile, voted against the bill in committee and made a point of trying to strike retroactive reforms that would have helped prisoners who committed a crime with a gun—signaling he might campaign against it if McConnell brings it up.

“I don’t think what the crim­in­al justice sys­tem needs is ad­di­tion­al le­ni­ency for vi­ol­ent crim­in­als,” Cruz said. “What this bill does is goes pre­cisely back­wards from where we should be go­ing.”

By and large, the House and Senate proposals do not address violent crime, and the prisoners who would be eligible for release are low-level drug offenders or elderly convicts who have been behind bars for decades. “I don’t see a whole lot of Willie Horton fodder there, quite frankly,” said Mark Holden, senior vice president of Koch Industries and spokesman for the conservative Charles Koch, who is helping to bankroll the campaign for criminal-justice reform.

“I don’t see a whole lot of Willie Horton fodder there, quite frankly.”

At the same time, Holden said the company wanted to see legislation passed in the first quarter of the year to avoid any complications with the campaign. The issue that some senators worry could scuttle justice reform before then is the question of criminal intent. Republican legislators like Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah want any package to include mens rea reform, or changes to the law that would force prosecutors to demonstrate that a defendant knew he was acting wrongfully or committing a crime in order to be found guilty. At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, a senior Justice Department official warned that Hatch’s proposed change would “make prosecutors’ jobs and law enforcement’s job much more difficult.”

“You could have guilty defendants of very serious criminal conduct escaping liability,” testified Leslie Caldwell, assistant  attorney general for the criminal division. “We think that would be a mistake.” As examples, Caldwell said that under the proposal, prosecutors would be unable to convict terrorists who bombed a hotel in Mumbai in federal court unless they could prove the terrorists knew Americans would be there during the attack. Liberal advocates also oppose the changes on the grounds that it would make it much harder to convict corporate CEOs of financial crimes committed by their firms. “It would be a very damaging provision in the white-collar space,” Caldwell said.

Democrats and the Obama administration say they’re willing to change the intent provisions on a “statute-by-statute basis,” but Hatch is pushing for a default standard that would cover hundreds if not thousands of laws. “We’re willing to do this, but you’re not going to solve a complex problem with simple, one-size-fits-all thinking,” Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said at the hearing.

Goodlatte said at an Atlantic Exchange forum last week that legislation without any changes to criminal intent “is not going anywhere in the House of Representatives.” His committee has been advancing bipartisan bills that appear likely to make it to the House floor, since Speaker Paul Ryan has voiced support for the effort. The Republican senators backing justice reform are not making those same demands, however, and they have the public backing of conservative advocates like the Kochs. “We don’t want to see reform go by the wayside because of this issue,” Holden told me.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Republican and a leading supporter of criminal-justice reform, suggested at the hearing on Wednesday that the dispute over mens rea could be resolved in a House-Senate conference committee. But that depends on the Senate passing a bill in the first place, and that decision belongs to the man who hasn’t said much at all: Mitch McConnell.

How Does Pluto Feel About This?

In 2006, Pluto stopped being a planet.

“Pluto is dead,” said Mike Brown, the researcher from the California Institute of Technology, whose discovery a year earlier of a bigger world orbiting beyond Pluto led some astronomers to rethink what defines a planet—and ultimately decide that Pluto doesn’t count. “There are finally, officially, eight planets in the solar system.”

Fast forward a decade, and Brown is saying the opposite.

Brown, along with Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin, announced Wednesday that they have evidence that suggests a massive planet is orbiting in the edge of the solar system, far beyond Pluto, that would qualify as its ninth planet. The authors describe the planet, which they’re calling “Planet Nine,” in a paper published in The Astronomical Journal.

Planet Nine is big—really big. It is 10 times the mass of Earth, and 5,000 times the mass of Pluto. It dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets, which Brown says makes it “the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system,” according to a press release from Caltech. That’s the test Pluto failed to pass a decade ago—hav­ing enough mass to clear its or­bit of oth­er bod­ies with sim­il­ar size.

Brown and Batygin have not directly observed Planet Nine, but have inferred its existence through mathematical models and computer simulations based on the movements of small, distant objects. From here, the planet is not even a speck of light in the vast darkness of space, and could only be seen—if it’s found—by powerful telescopes.

Brown and Batygin say Planet Nine helps explain a peculiar feature of the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy and rocky objects beyond Neptune: a mysterious clustering of six small objects that, by the laws of the Kuiper Belt, shouldn’t cluster. In 2014, Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii suggested the configuration resulted from the presence of a large planet strong enough to warp the orbits of the objects, lassoing them together. Brown and Batygin sought to disprove that theory. But they realized that, actually, something must be there—“a massive perturber”—because they found that the orbits of the objects, even though they traveled at different rates, all tilted in the same way. The probability of that happening on its own, without some external force, is about 0.007 percent.

So, Planet Nine. An icy, rocky world. The researchers posit that the planet could have been flung out to deep space when it got too close to the gravitational forces of Jupiter or Saturn. It orbits 20 times farther from the sun than does Neptune, which on average is about 2.8 billion miles from our star. It takes Planet Nine between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make one full orbit around the sun. Had it stuck closer, the planet would have been the core of a gas giant, like the four in the solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Planet Nine’s potential existence actually makes the solar system less of an anomaly in the grand scheme of the universe. It’s not unusual to find extremely far-flung planets orbiting stars, and the mass of most common planets circling other stars can be up to 10 times that of Earth.

The next challenge for astronomers will be spotting Planet Nine. It will be evaluated by the same standards that kicked Pluto out of science textbooks, 76 years after it was discovered, just over a third of the way into its 248-year-orbit around the sun, and nearly a decade before New Horizons revealed it to be a complex world with an atmosphere and icy mountains.

Brown, who tweets under the handle @plutokiller, said Wednesday that the new research should be welcome news for those still smarting over an eight-planet solar system.

“All those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there is a real planet out there still to be found,” he said. "Now we can go and find this planet and make the solar system have nine planets once again.”

Breaking the Silence in the Music Industry

It’s very easy to find examples of men employed by rock ‘n’ roll getting away with being total creeps. David Bowie’s many appreciations in the past two weeks have mostly omitted mentions of his participation in the “baby groupies” scene of the 1970s where he took the virginity of a 14 year old, nor have they delved much into the rape accusation against him in 1987 (he was acquitted). A British police investigation last year named 40 people in the music industry who’d participated in child sex abuse, some of whom had faced prosecution but many of whom had already died. In July, Jackie Fuchs of The Runaways told a horrifying story of being raped in front of a room full of people by in 1975 by her band’s manager Kim Fowley, who died in 2015.

These stories are often discussed alongside descriptions of changing cultural mores—of the permissiveness of the ‘60s and ‘70s, of drugs, of murky ideas about consent. Many are stories about men with power and fame attracting women and girls without either of those things and taking advantage of the differential. They are not stories, generally, about consequences for the men.

In fact, it’s probably the expectation of no consequences that enables many of these incidents. Sexist attitudes and simple lust may fuel some men’s desire to become a sexual predator, but impunity allows them to act on that desire. If the goal is for women to be able to operate in the music industry (or anywhere) free of harassment, assaults, discrimination, and predation, removing that impunity would seem like a good place to start. And that might—might—be what’s happening right now.

Take the case of Heathcliff Berru, an indie-music publicist who’s now alleged to have made unwanted attempts at a number of women over the last few years. This week, Amber Coffman of the band Dirty Projectors recounted on Twitter how Berru groped her and bit her hair at a bar. Soon other testimonials flooded in from women in bands, at PR firms, and elsewhere in the rock scene. Some said that Berru or one of his friends roofied them. Others told stories that amounted to him attempting rape.

Berru has now resigned from Life or Death PR, the firm he cofounded and that has represented a number of high-profile artists including D’Angelo, Frank Ocean, GZA, Cloud Nothings, Killer Mike, and Wavves, many of whom quickly severed ties with the company. In a statement, Berru blamed his actions of alcohol and drugs, said he’d go to rehab, apologized to any women he “offended,” and included a line so deadpan and strange that it might be a passive-aggressive joke: “It’s time to put a stop to all of this. Create a world with one less inappropriate man.” Regardless of his sincerity and of whether it’s okay to chalk up a pattern of sexual assault to partying too hard, it does appear he has lost his career and reputation for now.

The scandal has caused some soul-searching among members of the indie-music world. It appears that lots of people knew about or had heard about Berru regularly trying to take advantage of women, but that there had been no consequences till now. So, according to the allegations, he had, yes, acted with impunity. “Everyone is all, 'I knew he was a creep but wow',” tweeted Judy Miller Silverman, another well-known indie publicist. “You know, you still hired him and you still supported him. And some of you worked for him.”

Silence and complicity is common when it comes to harassment and assault in rock.

The motif of silence and complicity is common when it comes to harassment and assault in rock. In a horrifying Vice piece last October, Rachel Grace Almeida gathered up a slew of stories from women in the industry, many of which resemble the ones that have surfaced about Berru. They range from intimate and personal—about, say, a guy whose abused girlfriend didn’t speak up because he was friends with her bandmates—to higher-up: a boss making advances toward a younger female employee. None of the women or men in the article were referred to by their real names name. At the end, Almeida offered a prescription for how to change things:

As it stands, there is one thing that can be done to help prevent this: A deconstruction of the fear of powerful men. Stories need to be told and people need to be called out if someone has destroyed another person’s life. A man having a big job at a festival shouldn't take priority over the emotional and mental stability of another human.

Coffman has now proven the efficacy of this idea. She called Berru out. Other women followed. For now, it appears, he has faced consequences. Maybe that will be a warning to other men.

It’s tempting to say we’re in a moment when such attempts at countering impunity can gain more traction than before. For example: It has never been a secret that Dr. Dre assaulted women over the years, but only when the stories of those assaults resurfaced in 2015, in the wake of Straight Outta Compton’s success, did Dre publicly apologize. Then again, speaking up continues to come with grave perils. Kesha’s career remains in limbo because of her accusations of rape and abuse against her producer and label boss Dr. Luke.

These dynamics around sexual harassment and assault are not necessarily unique to the music industry, as historically sordid and exploitative as it may be. In December, the comedian Beth Stelling wrote about being abused by an ex-boyfriend who was also a comedian; others in the scene quickly realized who she was talking about, and named him. The tale of Bill Cosby’s downfall is about the cumulative power of accusers going public at around the same time. Each of these situation has involved risks for the accusers—the threat of countersuits and counteraccusations, and the guarantee of a very unpleasant kind of publicity. But they also create the impression that the risks of treating women monstrously are higher than before, and that itself might represent progress.

The Fallen Journalists in Afghanistan

A Taliban suicide bomber struck a van in central Kabul during rush hour Wednesday night, killing seven and wounding dozens of others. The majority of the dead and wounded were members of Tolo TV, an independent television station and one of two outlets the Taliban had previously threatened.

The return of television and music was heralded as one of the triumphs of post-Taliban life in Afghanistan, where entertainment and independent media had previously been banned. Tolo TV, which launched in 2004, has reported critically on such stories as an Afghan court’s recent decision to overturn death sentences for four men who killed a woman outside of a shrine after she had been falsely accused of burning a Koran.

In late September of last year, however, the Taliban seized the city of Kunduz in a surprise offensive. Media coverage of the Taliban’s exploits immediately angered the group, which threatened to “directly eliminate” employees of two media outlets, including Tolo TV.

“No employee, anchor, office, news team and reporter of these TV channels holds any immunity,” the group said in a statement in October.

In an interview with NPR in October, Saad Mohseni, the channel’s founder, addressed the threats made after Tolo TV reported on allegations that Taliban troops had raped women in Kunduz:

Yes, I mean, there were a number of allegations of rape committed by Taliban troops. And we reported on these stories like any other media outlet. And of course, Amnesty and others came forward as well condemning what they saw as crimes of war. So I think that's a thing that really upset the Taliban. And they have stated that as being the reason as to why this declaration was made. Well, you know, when you're launching attacks from time to time and the objective is to actually kill and maim, they probably feel that sort of coverage is not negative. But this is the first time that the Taliban had to also win hearts and minds. So they probably felt that they needed to make an impression, and that impression wasn't necessarily the one that they ended up making. This declaration came from the military council, so this is a pretty serious threat.

Following the attack, which drew wide condemnations, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement: “Attacks aimed at crushing independent media organizations in Afghanistan are a direct assault on the very foundation of Afghan democracy-a free and open press.”

Wednesday’s attack was the fourth in Kabul this month.

Will Labeling Bernie Sanders a 'Socialist' Stop His Rise?

It’s a good time to be Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator has enjoyed rising polling since Christmas, including one New Hampshire poll Tuesday showing him with an astonishing 27-point lead. Sanders also delivered perhaps his finest performance in a debate yet over the weekend, going toe-to-toe with Clinton in a setting she has dominated. The Clinton campaign’s official line: Move along, folks, nothing to see here—just some natural tightening as the caucuses and votes draw nigh.

Some of her supporters, however, are more anxious, and smell a reprise of Clinton’s 2008 upset in Iowa. Their effort to try to slow Sanders’s roll is effectively summed up by this GIF:

omg pic.twitter.com/EY9FIX2Xdt

— Dorsey Shaw (@dorseyshaw) January 19, 2016

They’re playing the red card, so to speak. “Here in the heartland, we like our politicians in the mainstream, and he is not—he’s a socialist,” Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, told The New York Times. “Hillary Clinton doesn’t have to explain socialism to suburban voters,” added Representative Steve Cohen, a Memphis Democrat. James Carville, the famed accented strategist, even suggested that other Democrats might run an advertisement assailing Sanders, to give voters an idea what the Republican line in a general election might be—and how effective it would be.

Such an attack might give some progressive Democrats pause, but if deployed in Clinton’s defense, they would seem to validate the feeling among some liberals that Clinton is a DINO—a Democrat in name only, practically a Republican. And it would tend to undermine her own, measured steps to adopt more progressive policies.

Clinton’s allies may be right that the socialist label would be an albatross for Sanders—and for down-ballot Democrats—in the general election. Last summer, a Gallup poll found that 50 percent of Americans would refuse to vote for a socialist for president—lower even than a gay candidate, a Muslim, or an atheist. (Greg Sargent goes into more detail about the general-election implications of the “socialist” label.) But the Clinton surrogates are trying to make a general-election argument during a primary, which can be a tricky business. The theory is that Democrats tend to gravitate toward a more electable candidate—as demonstrated by primary voters’ flight from Howard Dean to John Kerry in 2004. (And how’d that work out for you? the idealists snort.) Sanders obviously believes this theory, to a certain extent: His campaign has seized on polls that show him beating Republican candidates in head-to-head matches, sending out press releases with titles like “Electability Matters.” (There are good reasons to be skeptical of such head-to-head polling, as I explained here.)

Besides, Democratic primary voters are likely less attuned to the vulnerabilities of the s-word than Carville, et al., might hope. Steve Cohen isn’t wrong that Sanders has struggled to explain to a wide audience what exactly he means when he says he’s a “Democratic socialist,” but Democratic primary voters aren’t worried. In the same 2015 Gallup poll, 59 percent of Democrats said they’d vote for a socialist. Or just look at key Democratic demographics like young people and African Americans. Broken down by age, 69 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds agreed, as did 50 percent of those from 30-49. Gallup didn’t break those numbers out by race, but a Pew survey in 2011 found that more than half of black Americans had a positive view of socialism.

A Bloomberg News/Des Moines Register poll conducted last week offered even more piquant evidence. Among Iowa Democrats, 43 percent described themselves as “socialist”—a solid bit more than the 38 percent who self-identified as “capitalist.”

To some extent, Sanders may be capitalizing on changing attitudes since the Great Recession—lingering anger among progressives about the slow recovery and about the way financial institutions got off mostly scot-free. But he’s also probably driving the increased acceptance of socialism. In early May, about a week after Sanders announced his candidacy, YouGov found Democrats evenly divided on socialism vs. capitalism, 43-43. In mid-October, with Sanderistas in full swing, that had switched to 49-37. Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz sees a similar shift, and attributes it to the Sanders candidacy.

The question of what exactly anyone means by “socialism” is both central and irrelevant. Some honest-to-God socialists have lambasted Sanders for offering what they see as socialism-lite; he’s really more of a European-style social democrat, they argue. Meanwhile, plenty of people who say they oppose socialism may (or may not!) be fine with a robust social-safety net, but are wary of a slide into communism.

That lack of a clear definition does pose a challenge to Sanders in a hypothetical general election. But for now, the vagueness seems to benefit him with Democratic voters. About four in 10 of them are hearing what he’s peddling—universal health care, wealth redistribution, a level playing field, and retribution for Wall Street—and they like it. So if he’s a socialist, socialism must not be so bad. Clinton allies who expect the bogeyman of Marx to marginalize Sanders may find the attack less useful than they hope.

Sylvester Stallone's Glorious Renaissance

One of Sylvester Stallone’s big acting challenges in Creed comes early on, when he has to pull off the kind of trite joke that could so easily land with a thud. As the aged Rocky Balboa, he scribbles down some simple training advice on a piece of paper for the young boxer Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), who promptly takes pictures of it and walks off. “What if you lose it?” Rocky asks. “It’s already in the cloud!” Adonis replies. Rocky gives him a confused look, and then casts his quizzical gaze to the sky. Aha—the Old Man Hasn’t Heard of the Cloud joke! And yet Rocky looks so genuinely befuddled, he defuses the groan-worthy moment entirely. Shouldn’t that scene alone win him an Academy Award?

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Creed Lands Every Punch

Stallone, who’s been collecting a slew of prizes for Creed, is considered a strong contender to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor—the first time he’s gotten that kind of attention since the original Rocky came out 39 years ago. In the intervening years, he’s been nominated for 32 Golden Raspberry Awards, which named him “Worst Actor of the Century” in 2000. The contradiction might seem baffling, but Stallone’s remarkable performance in Creed in some ways feels like a response to the countless Rambo and Expendables sequels he suffered through to get to this point—which make his recent work look even better by comparison.

With the Oscars, you can never discount the impact of narrative. Frontrunners this year like Leonardo DiCaprio are being tipped not only for their work on screen, but also for the trials they endured on set, because they’re perceived as being “due” an award, or because they’re well-liked in the industry. With Creed, Stallone took his most beloved character and turned it over to a younger generation—the writer/director Ryan Coogler and Jordan—while himself taking on the supporting role of mentor in the film. The move, which blended Stallone’s humility with reverence for the old days, worked for critics, and the film was a huge box-office hit. So Stallone’s nomination was all but certain, though Creed was disappointingly passed over for other Oscar categories.

In Creed, Stallone’s Rocky is a sweet old coot who wears a porkpie hat and big glasses, and reads the newspaper to the graves of his dead wife and best friend. Rocky was always a likeable doof, but there’s a lot to be said for how Stallone pulls his punches (no pun intended, really) throughout the film. Rocky seems somewhat lost as it begins, going through the motions running an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, and his standoffishness lingers even as he trains young Adonis (spoilers for the film to follow). When he’s handed a cancer diagnosis, he accepts it as the end, but the emotional turning point of Creed is Rocky realizing there’s still reason for him to stick around. Stallone never overplays that—his monologues and kernels of wisdom are always mumbled half-thoughts, but there’s a slow energy to his performance that builds throughout.

With Creed, Stallone took his most beloved character and turned it over to a younger generation.

Stallone’s success in the film owes something to audience goodwill, but even more to Coogler’s great work as a director and writer. Some actors can transform any mediocre script into gold, but Stallone has never been one of them. His best-remembered work—the first Rocky, the low-key horror of First Blood—perfectly tapped into Stallone’s onscreen presence but also gave him real material to work with. No one who’s seen these films can forget his monologue in Rocky about how he and Adrienne “fill gaps,” or his breakdown at the end of First Blood.

The same can’t be said for any of his other material: the interminable Rocky and Rambo sequels, ’80s crime nonsense like Cobra, creaky comedies like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. By the time the mid-’90s rolled around, Stallone’s nadir as a star came with films like Judge Dredd, where he proclaimed “I AM. THE LAW!” to the sky like some tinpot Mussolini. There were solid moments—the knowing sci-fi satire Demolition Man, the subdued crime drama Cop Land—but they were buried under decades of poor decisions.

Stallone has since carved out a new career with winking action comedies like The Expendables, which served up perfunctory explosions and bloody violence while knowingly trading on his image as a Hollywood fossil. With Creed, Coogler did the latter and yet conjured far greater work out of Stallone. There are a couple of nods to the audience’s nostalgia, but the film’s real success comes from remembering that Rocky is a character first, an icon second. The characters, rather than the cameras, treat him with reverence. Maybe all Stallone needed was for a director to tell him it was okay to act with restraint, but whatever Coogler did, it worked. While it’s impossible to discount the effect Stallone’s previous work has had on audience’s expectations, the bottom line is that his work in Creed stands up both in a vacuum and against the rest of his career. What more could a Hollywood veteran ask for?

Enter the Grief Police

The first World War transformed, along with so much else, the way people mourn. The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argues that the death of so many people in such a small span of time overwhelmed those they left behind, and rendered them unable to undergo the rituals that had previously been in place for grieving. Combined with the rise of psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the interiority of the individual—Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia presented grief as a highly personal phenomenon—the social practice of mourning was transformed in the early 20th century, to the extent that, by the 1960s, Gorer was describing grief as something to be kept “under complete control by strength of will and character, so that it need be given no public expression.”

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Mourning in America: Whitney Houston and the Social Speed of Grief

Today, that tradition continues. Grief, in the popular imagination, is a sadness to be experienced and carried and borne as silently and as stoically as possible. And yet mourning, too, has a public face: condolences, wakes, the sharing of memories and sympathies. That juxtaposition leaves many confused about how to celebrate the dead, how to comfort the living—how, in short, to grieve together. “Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say,” Meghan O’Rourke puts it in her magisterial memoir The Long Goodbye. “Now, we’re at sea.”

One recent consequence of that collective drifting, especially as the confusion expands to digital platforms, is the rise of grief policing. The notion that there is but one way to grieve, and that deviation from that way is wrong. The tendency to tell mourners that, essentially, they’re mourning too much, or not enough. The desire to restore order to a practice that has become, culturally, chaotic.

Grief policing was on display recently, during the aftermath of David Bowie’s death. Camilla Long, the film critic for The Sunday Times, witnessed the outpouring of emotion posted online as people learned, and tried to make sense, of Bowie’s passing. She did not like the way they mourned. Their grieving, she suggested—or, well, “grieving”—was self-indulgent, and, like so much else on social media, purely performative. “Bowie Blubberers,” she called the grievers.

Thus:

After several lengthy trips to the vomitorium today, I am now rather dreading what will happen on social media when Paul McCartney dies

— Camilla Long (@camillalong) January 11, 2016

So many people "crying" or "in bits" over Bowie. FUCK YOU. You are not ten - you are an adult. Man the fuck up and say something interesting

— Camilla Long (@camillalong) January 11, 2016

It is so deeply insincere watching all of this, that's all. I think grief should be private

— Camilla Long (@camillalong) January 11, 2016

This is NOTHING to do with Bowie. This is to do with the utter insincerity of social media grief, the odd mimicry and circle-jerkery of it

— Camilla Long (@camillalong) January 11, 2016

The outcry against these sentiments—the backlash-against-the-backlash, as it were—has been, unsurprisingly, swift and fierce. “Journalist tells grieving Bowie fans to ‘man the f*** up’ and gets taken down big time,” Metro U.K. noted. The Pool’s Sali Hughes scoffed at “the usual grief ombudsman, waiting in the wings with clipboards, ready to pass the feelings of others through rigorous quality control, before noisily finding it lacking.”

But usual is apt. Grief-policing, though social media have made it more prominent and more public, has a long history. Pundits of the time made similar criticisms, after all, about Princess Diana’s mourners, accusing them of crying “crocodile tears.” Yet as online communications have given the public new outlets for grieving, they’ve also given critics more fodder for their criticism. “For a generation known for broadcasting internal monologue across the Internet,” The New York Times put it in 2014, “some of its members seem eager for spaces to express not just the good stuff that litters everyone’s Facebook newsfeed, but also the painful.” Mourning has become, as it were, #content.​

#RIPDavidBowie was a hashtag, yes; it was also a funeral.

And that means that mourning has, in the process, become fodder for analysis—and argument. For objection. The online outpouring of grief after Robin Williams’s death, Politico argued, “makes death feel cheap.” Even the great Zadie Smith, novelist and essayist and humanist, proved, a few years ago, to have little patience for the ad-hoc rituals of Internet-assisted mourning:

I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?

What Smith’s “frightening thought” underestimates, though, is the extent to which mourning is, on top of everything else—apologies to Freud, and especially to Gorer—in fact a deeply communal concern. “I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! ,” posted on a Facebook wall, isn’t merely a declaration of a memory of the deceased; it’s a declaration of support to the deceased’s family and friends. It’s a condolence card. The author of this sentiment was, in essence, attending a virtual wake.

So, too, were the many, many people who expressed their grief about the passing of Bowie. Posting videos, sharing favorite songs, telling the world about first Bowie concerts and first Bowie albums, about what Bowie meant and will continue to mean—this was not, overall, “crocodile tears.” It was evidence of people doing what they always will: using the tools available to express themselves and share their feelings with other people. They were forming a community of grief. #RIPDavidBowie was a hashtag, yes; it was also a funeral.

Taking to the Internet to share and cry and commiserate is now part of how we cope with a loss. It is what we do.

Which is also to say that the Internet is, in some sense, returning us to the days before war transformed grief into a largely solitary affair. Public mourning—via Twitter, via Facebook, via Tumblr—has become its own kind of ritual.

Grief policing is a corollary to all that: It is people recognizing that human impulses are hardening into social rituals, and then disliking what those rituals represent. It is people assuming the worst of others, rather than the best. Grief policing may be a fitting thing for a culture that has elevated “you’re doing it wrong” to a kind of Hegelian taunt, that treats every social-media-ed expression as a basis for an argument, and that is on top of it all generally extremely confused about how to mourn “properly.” Such policing, however, very much misses the point. The outcry of love and sadness after the news of Bowie’s death—that heavy sense that the world had been permanently dented—was, on top of everything else, evidence of the new way of mourning. Taking to the Internet to share and cry and commiserate is now part of how we cope with a loss. It is what we do. But it is also, just as importantly, what is done.

The Bright, Cozy AirBnB Listings in West Bank Settlements

Since its inception or, perhaps, since it became profitable, AirBnB, the home-sharing behemoth, has been accused of everything from enabling its users to operate illegal hotels to driving up the cost of housing in cities around the world. The company argues that its platform helps its landlords make ends meet and allows travelers a more unique and affordable experience, all while extracting a nifty fee from each party.

To that dynamic, now add one of the world’s most intractable and polarizing disputes: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent weeks, the San Francisco-based company has weathered criticism for allowing users to rent apartments in West Bank settlements, which are widely seen internationally as being illegal and have long been the target of boycotts and other alienating measures. (On Tuesday, for example, the U.S. State Department said it supported a European Union initiative to place labels on products denoting that they were made in the West Bank.)

The dispute blossomed to the point that earlier this month, Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian official and leader of the last round of failed peace talks, wrote AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky a letter to demand the company not allow listings in settlements. Other Palestinians say the company “profits on the [Israeli] occupation” or otherwise legitimatizes the settlement enterprise.

“We follow laws and regulations on where we can do business and investigate concerns raised about specific listings,” one AirBnB spokesperson said in response to the controversy. The company, as the Associated Press points out, “also has listings in Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus and Moroccan-annexed Western Sahara, among other disputed territories.”

In some ways, the controversy mimics that of SodaStream, the popular home soda maker, which hosted a factory in the West Bank before decamping to southern Israel last fall amid persistent calls for boycotts. At the time, some argued that the efforts to pressure the company to disengage were ultimately counterproductive—after all, the SodaStream employed both Jewish and Palestinian workers.

While renters of apartments in settlements would likely contribute negligibly to the Palestinian economy, the opportunity for an open-minded traveler to see what life is like in the West Bank presents other potential benefits. As The Guardian notes, in order to travel to a listing in Efrat, a settlement some four miles beyond the generally recognized boundaries of Israel, guests “would have to travel through two Israeli military checkpoints.”

As a business, AirBnB goes to lengths to avoid embroiling itself in the ethical nuances of local politics, lest it violate its credo of connecting “people to unique travel experiences.” But as one telling experiment shows, sometimes the politics eclipse the mission. One Israeli writer, posing as a prospective American renter of Palestinian descent, chronicled the difficulties of securing lodging in a number of the company’s listings in settlements.

While discrimination by AirBnB landlords is hardly a new problem in any of its 190 countries, one response to an inquiry about a listing in the settlement of Tekoa was particularly tenderizing: “I’m very sorry but I don’t think that it’s possible … it’s very sensitive here … [I] hope that in [a] different life we could be good friends.”

136 Years of Rising Temperatures on Earth in 30 Seconds

Last year was the hottest year in recorded history, scientists said Wednesday.

Earth’s surface temperatures in 2015 were the warmest since record keeping began in 1880, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

Scientists said that the planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1.0 degree Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change they largely attribute to the increased presence of carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions in the atmosphere.

Here’s what that looks like in 30 seconds:

Data on global temperatures comes from thousands of weather stations around the world. Most of the planet’s warming occurred in the last 35 years, according to NOAA and NASA. Fifteen of the 16 warmest years on record occurred since 2001.

Last year’s global temperatures broke the record set in 2014 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius)—only the second time in modern history—the first being in 1998—that a new record was this much greater than the previous one. In December of last year, the average surface temperatures of land and oceans around the globe was the highest on record for any month in 136 years of record keeping, according to NOAA.

The year 2015 was pushed into record-breaking territory thanks in part to one of the strongest El Niños on record, which lifted plenty of heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere, contributing to overall higher global temperatures, and brought rains to usually wet regions and droughts to usually dry regions.

Last year was a historic one for climate change. In November, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million for the first time, higher than it’s been in at least 1 million years. And in December, 195 nations approved a landmark climate deal that for the first time committed nearly every country to lowering greenhouse-gas emissions.