Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 253

Another Ebola Case in Sierra Leone

Officials in Sierra Leone have confirmed a death from Ebola, a day after the WHO declared West Africa free of the virus.

Francis Langoba Kellie, a spokesman for the Office of National Security, told a local radio program that tests on a 22-year-old woman who died earlier this month in the north of the country were positive for the virus. His comments were reported by the Associated Press.

The woman, who was from the Northern Kambia District, went to the Northern Tonkolili District for medical treatment, he said, according to the AP. Her contacts are being traced and certain areas will be quarantined, he said. Sky News reported that health workers had identified 27 people who had contact with the woman.

On Thursday, the World Health Organization said the Ebola outbreak in neighboring Liberia was over, and declared all of West Africa free of the deadly virus. But, WHO warned, “more flare-ups are expected and ... strong surveillance and response systems will be critical in the months to come.”

On Friday, responding to the case in Sierra Leone, the agency said WHO and its partners “are investigating the origin of the case, identifying contacts and initiating control measures to prevent further transmission.”

Thursday marked the first time since the Ebola outbreak began two years ago that Guinea (declared free of Ebola on December 29, 2015), Liberia (on Thursday), and Sierra Leone (on November 7, 2015)—the three worst-hit countries—reported no cases for at least 42 days.

The WHO says a country is declared free of Ebola transmission 42 days—or after two 21-day incubation cycles of the virus—after the last confirmed patient tests negative for the disease twice.

Sierra Leone was still in a 90-day period of enhanced surveillance after it was declared to be Ebola-free.

Ebola has killed more than 11,300 people, mostly in West Africa, including more than 4,000 in Sierra Leone.

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A short film captures the day the West African nation was declared free of the disease.

Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell Try to Keep the Peace

There are a great number of things that separate the two most powerful Republicans in Congress.

House Speaker Paul Ryan is 45, earnest and energetic, a fitness buff and self-described policy wonk. He publicly spurned the speakership until his party came begging, seeking the post only once his decision to do so would seem like an act of sacrifice. Since then, he’s made it part of his job to be a fixture on television, putting a smart, sunny face on modern conservatism to try to repair a tarnished Republican brand.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is, at 73, more than a generation older than Ryan, but the job he holds is the one he’s always wanted. He’s guarded, sometimes even taciturn, granting interviews only when he has a specific message to deliver. McConnell’s a dealmaker, but his passion is politics, not policy.

There are plenty of differences between the two men, but the one that matters most right now is when they assumed their current positions. McConnell became majority leader a year ago and immediately set a clear goal: He wanted to make the Senate function, pass bills, and show constituents that a legislative body universally condemned as dysfunctional could govern under Republican control. As even Democrats begrudgingly acknowledged, he did that. The GOP majority generally avoided crisis in 2015, and the Senate cleared bipartisan agreements on education, infrastructure, taxes, and spending. McConnell deserves credit, even if Democrats rightly complain that the deals were only there for the taking because of Republican obstruction when they were in charge.

Having pocketed those victories, McConnell wants to take it easy in 2016. Needing to protect his four-seat majority in a challenging election year for Senate Republicans, he simply wants the Senate to pass a dozen appropriations bills— a significant assignment, but one that by his own admission won’t “titillate the public.” McConnell’s a guy who fixes the leaky sink, dusts off his hands, and just wants to sit down with a cold beer (or in his case, Kentucky bourbon.)

The trouble for McConnell is that here comes Paul Ryan.

“We like to think of the House and the Senate at this time as really being the think tank for conservative policy.”

Ryan didn’t become speaker a year ago. He only took over from John Boehner in November, and spent the rest of the year finishing up his predecessor’s work. He’s still proving himself—both to his raucous party and to the public—and he sees 2016 as a critical “year of ideas,” one in which Republicans must lay the groundwork for a GOP administration and build a mandate to enact conservative reform next year. “Our number-one goal for the next year,” Ryan said last month, “is to put together a complete alternative to the Left’s agenda.”

In other words, Ryan wants House Republicans to do much more than pass spending bills. He wants the party to develop a long-awaited replacement for Obamacare, comprehensive tax reform, and an anti-poverty agenda, to name just a few items on his wish list. For the young speaker, there’s much less risk in overreaching, given that hardly anyone believes the House GOP majority is in jeopardy. The Senate is a different story.

Normally, having an ambitious House speaker and a cautious Senate majority leader would be a recipe for conflict, especially between two chambers with a long history of animosity regardless of party control. And as Republicans gathered on Thursday in Baltimore for their annual policy retreat, there were hints of that tension in their public events. “It is a competition of ideas,” was how Senator John Thune described it to reporters. While Ryan talked up the House’s bold plans, Thune said lawmakers were aware “it’s an even-numbered year” and noted that the looming election “always make it a bit more challenging.” “People tend to go into their respective corners,” Thune observed.

Yet Ryan's goal of pursuing a conservative agenda and McConnell's priority of defending his most vulnerable senators aren’t mutually exclusive, as long as expectations are properly managed. Republicans often faulted Boehner for over-promising and under-delivering. Ryan, by contrast, has been careful about pledging just how far he intends to go. The point, he has said, is not to pass a bunch of bills this year—everyone knows President Obama would veto them. Rather, he wants to develop the ideas that the party’s presidential nominee can then use as a platform to campaign on. “We like to think of the House and the Senate at this time as really being the think tank for conservative policy,” said Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chairwoman of the House Republican conference.

House committees might develop aggressive healthcare, tax, and welfare plans, but that doesn’t mean they’ll all receive votes on the floor. And even if the House does pass some of them, the more cautious Senate is likely to shelve them until 2017, when Republicans hope to have the votes to pass them, and a GOP president to sign them. There will still be some political pain. Democrats will undoubtedly mock Republicans if they don’t follow through on their plans, and they’ll campaign against them if they do. And some House Republicans will inevitably complain if McConnell slow-walks bills they pass. But for two leaders with different styles and different priorities, this delicate election-year dance might be the only way to hold the fractious Republican Party together.

China’s Widening Crackdown on Lawyers

The Chinese government escalated its crackdown on the country’s burgeoning community of human-rights lawyers this week, filing subversion charges against some of its most prominent members Tuesday and arresting a Swedish legal-aid activist on Wednesday.

Among those formally arrested were Zhou Shifeng, the director of Beijing’s Fengrui Law Firm, as well as Wang  Quanzhang, a lawyer with the firm, and Li Shuyun, an intern, The New York Times reported. They were charged with “subverting the state order,” a serious crime in the Chinese criminal-justice system that can potentially carry a life sentence.

The full scope of the crackdown is hard to ascertain. Amnesty International estimates that 248 “rights-defense” lawyers and activists have been arrested since the crackdown began July 9. Twenty-three of them are still in custody as of Thursday; nine have been formally charged. China’s opaque criminal-justice system makes verification difficult.

Foremost among the crackdown’s targets are attorneys and employees of the Fengrui Law Firm, one of China’s most well-known rights-defense organizations. The firm rose to prominence by representing high-profile dissidents in court, including artist Ai Weiwei during his 2011 tax-evasion case, and Chen Guancheng, the blind legal activist who fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2012.

Those still detained include Wang Yu, China’s most prominent female human-rights lawyer, as well as her husband and their son. Wang previously defended Ilham Tohti, a top Uighur academic in China’s western Xinjiang province who was accused of inciting separatism, as well as women’s rights advocates.

Chinese state-media outlets accused the rights-defense lawyers of undermining the social order by organizing protests outside courthouses.

“Lawyers should safeguard justice in the courtroom with the application of their knowledge, morality and skill, not undermine the law by rabble-rousing in the streets,” an editorial in Xinhua, the state-run news agency, declared last July.

Lawyers beyond the Fengrui Law Firm have also been targeted in the crackdown. In December, a Beijing court found rights-defense lawyer Pu Zhiqiang guilty of “inciting ethnic hatred” and “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” and handed him a three-year suspended sentence. Pu, who also previously represented clients like Ai, lost his ability to practice law as a result of the conviction.

Chinese officials also confirmed Wednesday they had arrested Swedish human-rights activist Peter Dahlin earlier this month. He is believed to be the first foreigner swept up in the crackdown. Dahlin, who cofounded the legal-aid organization Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, disappeared January 3 en route to Beijing International Airport where he was set to travel to Thailand. Chinese officials said he was being detained “on suspicion of endangering state security,” his organization told The New York Times.

Relations between Beijing and the country’s small but dedicated corps of rights-defense lawyers, while never friendly, worsened significantly after President Xi Jinping assumed power in 2013. Xi, one of China’s most powerful leaders in decades, launched major anti-corruption campaigns within the Communist Party, the army, the middle and upper echelons of the bureaucracy, and the country’s state-run enterprises. His administration also imposed stricter censorship measures and tighter controls on Chinese Internet users who criticize the government, including arrests and detention.

“The assault on lawyers reflects the broader trend under President Xi of repressing various elements of civil society across China,” Human Rights Watch wrote earlier this month when it called for the lawyers’ release. “The government has also severely tightened control over freedom of expression, including on the Internet, in the media, and within academia.”

The crackdown comes as China’s leaders try to bolster public and foreign confidence in the country’s legal system. Last January, the party condemned the use of arrest and conviction quotas by police, prosecutors, and judges in an attempt to rein in false convictions. Statistics from the Supreme People’s Court, China’s highest judicial body, reported that only 825 people were found not guilty in the 1.16 million criminal trials that occurred in 2013.

Two New Questions About Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Violence

Rahm Emanuel says he’s sincere in his desire to reform the city of Chicago's police department and mend its relationship with citizens, especially blacks and Hispanics. But whether or not residents believe him is likely to depend on whether or not they find his past behavior credible—and that’s becoming an ever more serious problem for the mayor.

On Thursday, the Chicago Tribune published a damning report suggesting that despite Emanuel’s protestations of ignorance about the shooting of Laquan McDonald, his top staffers were aware of how the 17-year-old black youth was killed and of the videotape of his shooting by a police officer months before the mayor says he found out. And Thursday afternoon, the city released a video of a separate shooting: this one on January 7, 2013, of Cedrick Chatman, a black teenager shot by a Chicago police officer after he ran from a stolen vehicle. The city had been trying to prevent the video’s release, but on Wednesday abruptly changed course and said it would not object to making it public. A federal judge scolded Chicago’s lawyers for their lengthy obstruction followed by the city’s 11th-hour reversal. The McDonald video itself was released only after a judge’s order.

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Chatman’s family has filed a wrongful-death suit against the city. Officer Kevin Fry shot at Chatman four times, hitting him twice, after the 17-year-old bolted from the car. Fry said he fired because he believed Chatman had a gun and was about to fire at his partner, Officer Lou Toth. The teen was carrying an iPhone box. The shooting was investigated by the Independent Police Review Authority, which has come under intense scrutiny in the McDonald case, with its chief forced to resign. The IPRA investigator, Lorenzo Davis, found the shooting unjustified, but his bosses overruled him and cleared Fry. Davis was fired and has sued.

The video, shot from a surveillance camera on the corner, doesn't offer the same immediacy as the dashcam footage of McDonald’s killing. Around 5:30 in the clip below, Chatman can be seen running, with Toth in pursuit. Then Fry fires. As a firetruck arrives (around 6:30), Toth can be seen standing over Chatman’s body, which lies in the street near the curb. Lawyers for Chatman’s family said Toth had his foot on the boy’s neck.

The Chatman case provides just the latest example of a police department where officers seem to shoot unarmed civilians of color with no repercussions. And as the Tribune story shows, questions about the McDonald case will continue to haunt the mayor's office.

Emanuel’s critics charge that he tried to bury the video of that shooting—which showed Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting McDonald repeatedly in the back and on the ground—for political reasons. Emanuel, a Democrat, faced a challenging reelection campaign in 2015, having alienated many progressives by closing schools and failing to prevent a crime spike. The city painstakingly fought to keep the video private. On February 24, Emanuel failed to win enough votes to keep his seat outright, and he was forced into a runoff election. Three days later, lawyers for the McDonald family began talking to city lawyers about a settlement.

On April 7, Emanuel triumphed in the runoff, winning a second term, and eight days later the city council quickly approved a settlement with the McDonald family. A judge finally ordered the video’s release on November 19. The footage created a national uproar and instigated marches in the streets of the Windy City. Van Dyke has been charged with first-degree murder. Several days later, Emanuel removed his police chief, Garry McCarthy, in a move that critics both welcomed and derided as scapegoating.

Emanuel says he only saw the video when it was made public, and only came to understand the details of the case at the end of March—thus exculpating him for any political motive. The Tribune casts doubt on that claim:

But interviews, official city calendars and emails show in both cases the mayor's closest aides and City Hall attorneys knew much earlier than that. Emanuel's top staffers became keenly aware the McDonald shooting could become a legal and political quagmire in December 2014—more than three months before the mayor has said he was fully briefed on the issue. And lawyers for McDonald's family informed Emanuel's Law Department in March that police officers' version of what happened differed dramatically from the infamous shooting video—more than eight months before the mayor said he found out about the discrepancy and well after he agreed to settle the case for $5 million.

In a statement to the Tribune, Emanuel’s spokesman argued these meetings were routine, and wouldn’t have involved the McDonald case: “What you’re talking about are routine meetings between the mayor and police superintendent on crime reduction strategies, and the mayor and the corporation counsel on a wide range of legal matters.”

The story, which comes with a very helpful timeline, creates a difficult bind for Emanuel: Either he’s lying about when he learned about the McDonald shooting, or the situation in his office is such that top aides were not keeping him informed about a matter of such seriousness that it resulted in a $5 million payout and a murder charge against an officer. In other words, Emanuel wants to convince Chicagoans that he’s not dishonest; he’s just bad at managing, which happens to be his job as mayor. (He’s not the first politician to make this case.) Even those who give him the benefit of the doubt are bound to wonder whether better management of the situation might have prevented other police shootings and brought about accountability sooner.

Meanwhile, Emanuel is beset on various sides. He has vowed to improve his responsiveness and acknowledged shortcomings. State lawmakers have introduced a bill that would allow Chicagoans to try to recall the mayor, and Governor Bruce Rauner—a Republican, but a one-time pal of Emanuel’s—has said he is “very disappointed” in the mayor and would not veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

A quick glance at the headlines in Chicago Thursday offers a snapshot of why Emanuel finds his position suddenly so tenuous. In addition to the questions about his handling of the McDonald case and stories about the Chatman video, the Tribune has a report on the shooting of Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones by police and on the “deadly start to the new year” in Chicago. Another item notes that the Cook County Democratic Party has endorsed a challenger to district attorney Anita Alvarez, who has also come under fire for being slow to charge Van Dyke in the McDonald shooting; she brought the charges only the day the video was released.

There continue to be calls for Emanuel’s resignation. Meanwhile, Emanuel is searching for a new police chief, even as the city and department face a U.S. Department of Justice investigation. A top police expert told The New York Times the post was “the most challenging job, police chief job, in the country right now.” But taking over the Chicago Police Department might be easier than Emanuel’s job right now.

Meet Alex, the First Atlantic Hurricane to Form in January Since 1938

That big swirl of color up there is Alex, the first Atlantic hurricane to form in the month of January since 1938.

NOAA’s National Hurricane Center upgraded Alex from a subtropical storm to a hurricane on Thursday as it whirled over the North Atlantic Ocean near Portugal’s Azores islands. Hurricane Alex carries sustained winds of up to 85 miles per hour, and is expected to dump three inches to five inches of rain over the islands through Friday. Meteorologists warn of the possibility of flash floods and mudslides. Near the coast, the storm system will produce large and dangerous waves.

Alex is truly rare. It is one of the earliest tropical systems to form in the Atlantic hurricane basin since record-keeping began in 1851, according to Bob Henson, a meteorologist at Weather Underground. The last hurricane to rage over the Atlantic Ocean in January was Alice in 1955, which formed in December of 1954, and brought strong winds and heavy rains to the Caribbean islands of Anguilla and Saba.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30, and the first named storms of the year in both the Atlantic and the Pacific usually form in July, according to NOAA’s National Hurricane Center. Tropical storms form most often over warm waters, and not in the dead of winter.

A hurricane warning for central Azores—a grouping of five islands—was issued Thursday. After passing by the region, Alex is expected to move north toward Greenland.

Guantanamo's Declining Population

The number of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay fell below 100 for the first time since it opened 14 years ago—two days after President Obama vowed to work on closing the detention center for good in the last months of his presidency.

The Pentagon announced Thursday that 10 prisoners from Yemen have been released and sent to Oman, where they will be resettled. The Guantanamo Review Task Force—a collection of dozens of intelligence analysts, law-enforcement agents, and lawyers from the Justice, Defense, and State departments, CIA, FBI, and other agencies—determined the prisoners do not pose a security threat.

Ninety-three detainees, mostly from Yemen, remain at the prison, which was created in January 2002 to house individuals captured in the war on terrorism. Thirty-four of those have been cleared to leave, according to a database maintained by The New York Times and NPR, and are expected to be released by summer. About 780 people have been sent to Guantanamo since it opened.

“I will keep working to shut down the prison at Guantanamo: It’s expensive, it’s unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies,” Obama said Tuesday in his final State of the Union.

The road to closure has been rocky. In 2009, two days after he took office, Obama signed an executive order that called for Guantanamo to be shut down within a year. Forty-eight prisoners left the prison that year, but the pace of transfers slowed considerably in the coming years. In 2010, a Republican-controlled House blocked funding for the administration’s attempt to buy U.S. detention facilities to serve as replacements for Guantanamo. One prisoner was released in 2011, and four in 2012.

The numbers climbed in 2014 (28 releases) and 2015 (20 releases), but opposition from congressional Republicans remained. Former prisoners, opponents of their release argue, could return as terrorists. The latest National Defense Authorization Act, passed last November by a Republican-controlled Congress, prohibits the use of government funds to transfer prisoners to American soil and the construction of facilities to house them—restrictions Obama sharply criticized.

The White House has promised to present a final proposal for the closure of Guantanamo Bay to Congress this year. Should Congress reject it, Obama may consider executive action.

The Pentagon transferred four other Guantanamo prisoners this month, in addition to the 10 sent to Oman. A total of 678 prisoners have been returned to their home countries or resettled in countries that were willing to take them—in all, 56 nations—since Guantanamo opened, according to the Times/NPR database. The majority have gone to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Only two have been transferred to the U.S.; one, a citizen of both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, was repatriated to Saudi Arabia, and the other, a native of Tanzania, is held at a federal super-maximum security prison in Colorado.

Polling from 2014 shows most Americans don’t want the detention center to close. In December 2013, the now-retired Mar­ine ma­jor gen­er­al who helped establish the pris­on said Guantanamo should have nev­er been opened, and called on the government to close the prison.

“In retrospect,” Mi­chael Lehnert wrote in the De­troit Free Press, “the entire detention and interrogation strategy was wrong.”

A Chance to Make a Big Impression Before the Voting Starts

Has the Republican primary become—[gulp]—boring?

As the GOP presidential contenders gather to debate Thursday night for one of the last times before the Iowa caucuses, the colorful assortment of candidates find themselves in an unusual position: For the first time in the race, the Republican primary is looking pretty static.

Over on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is putting a real scare into Hillary Clinton, threatening to overtake the prohibitive favorite in the first two nominating contests. Yet the dynamic in the GOP race is little changed from the last time the candidates debated a month ago. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are jockeying for the top spot in Iowa, Marco Rubio is stuck in the low double digits across the board, and lower-tier hopefuls Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich are trying to “beat expectations” when voters finally start to cast their ballots.

Before the December debate, the big question was whether there would be fireworks between Trump and Cruz, who had just surged into first place in Iowa polling. That dog didn’t bite, but as the caucuses draw closer, the two candidates are again flirting with an all-out rhetorical war. Trump has conspicuously drawn attention to questions about whether Cruz’s birth in Canada precludes him from the presidency (it almost certainly doesn’t), and Cruz has responded by jabbing at Trump’s own “foreign” vulnerability with heartland Republican voters: his “New York values.”

Has Trump’s Canadian campaign worked? It’s possible. Polls out of Iowa over the last couple weeks have shown a margin-of-error race as Trump has, at the very least, contained Cruz’s rise. Still, Cruz has been wary to go after the frontrunner aggressively, and whether that changes Thursday night in Charleston is reason alone to watch.

Both Cruz and Rubio might also have to confront potentially damaging stories that popped up over the last couple of days. For Cruz, it was a New York Times report that he financed his Senate campaign in 2012 with up to $750,000 in loans from Goldman Sachs—his wife's employer—which he failed to properly disclose in FEC filings. And on Thursday morning, CNN reported that a lawyer and longtime friend working for Rubio in 2013 inserted provisions into the Senate Gang of Eight’s immigration bill that could have helped clients he represented. Cruz acknowledged that there may have been an oversight in his federal disclosure, but both he and Rubio have denied doing anything substantively improper.

One thing that will be different Thursday from December’s GOP debate is the number of candidates on the prime-time stage. Rand Paul failed to qualify for the main debate (televised by Fox Business Network) at 9 p.m., and after protesting Fox’s decision to exclude him, he is refusing to participate in the undercard round at 6 p.m. “By any reasonable criteria Senator Paul has a top tier campaign,” his campaign said. “He will not let the media decide the tiers of this race and will instead take his message directly to the voters of New Hampshire and Iowa.”

After advancing from “happy hour” to prime-time last summer, Carly Fiorina has fallen back off the main stage; she does plan to participate in the earlier debate, along with Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. (George Pataki dropped out over the holidays.) Ben Carson remains on the main stage despite plunging into the single digits from his brief lead in the race during the fall. But his campaign has been going in one direction for months now—down. After Carson lost three of his top staffers in a New Year’s exodus, his finance chairman quit hours before the debate.

It’s probably too late for the bottom three, and maybe Carson, to reverse their sagging fortunes. And it’s hard to see at this point how anything that Donald Trump says will affect his standing in the polls—the race’s most unpredictable candidate has somehow been the steadiest. But Thursday night is an important moment for Cruz to reclaim his momentum, and for Rubio, Kasich, Christie, or Bush to seize some of their own. The next debate—and only one in Iowa—will take place on January 28, just a few days before the caucuses, and likely too late to change many minds. With the Iowa caucuses just three weeks away, this may be the last chance for many of these candidates to make a big impression. And if nothing else, a Hail Mary or two could make the debate itself engaging.

Alan Rickman: Even Better as a Romantic Lead

That voice. That rumbling, grumbling growl whose vague menace is a reminder that humans are, at their core, animals. Alan Rickman’s simmering baritone allowed him to play, time after time, quintessential villains: the Sheriff of Nottingham, Rasputin, Elliot Marston, Hans Gruber. Those roles, after his death, may well be what Rickman is best remembered for: Rickman, the “complicated villain.” The “sensual screen villain.” The villain “you couldn’t help rooting for.”

Equally worth celebrating, though—and maybe even more—is the narrower category of Rickman’s long list of film credits: the few roles that, in their way, exploited the full potential of his voice and his person. The ones that cast him, somewhat counterintuitively, as a romantic lead. Jamie in Truly, Madly, Deeply, witty and charming and selfless. Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, gallant and strong and terribly sad. It came as little surprise, in the end, that Severus Snape had been, all along, the Harry Potter series’s true romantic hero: Rickman was able to weave a subterranean anguish into even his portrayal of the stone-cold, black-robed wizard.

These were all the performances of a highly skilled actor, yes, but they were something more: They were all, in the literary sense, Romantic. They celebrated love not just as an obligatory B plot in an otherwise dude-driven action movie, or as a simple social concern, or as an emotional inconvenience; they treated love, instead, as an end in itself. The nuance Rickman lent to his roles brought to the fore centuries-old, and yet still highly relevant, treatments of romance as a series of collisions—of individual and other, of emotion and reason, of passion and social constraint.

Rickman’s portrayals of men in love are at once retrograde and progressive: They celebrate the simple yet culturally fraught fact that men can love as deeply as women. And here’s the thing that’s both totally obvious and totally noteworthy: These characters were men. Today, in an era ushering in a complicated relationship with traditional notions of masculinity—the era of Are Men Necessary? , the era of The End of Men —that seems significant. And insightful. Rickman’s portrayals of men in love are at once retrograde and progressive: They celebrate the simple yet culturally freighted fact that men can love as deeply as women. That men can easily do the romantic work that so many cultural products have often, and lazily, assigned to everyone else: pining, longing, waiting.

Not all of Rickman’s turns as a “romantic lead” were, to be sure, truly romantic. (See: Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd. And Harry in Love Actually. Ugh, Harry.) And he of course played many other characters beyond villains and romantic heroes. (Galaxy Quest! Dogma! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!) It was the traditionally romantic roles, though, that most deftly combined Rickman’s great capacity for comedy with the emotional nuance that his singular physical gifts—those acrobatic eyes, and that sinewy voice—allowed. It was the romantic roles that merged two things that, all these years after the true Romantic era has passed us by, still drive so much culture: sense, and sensibility.

What Is This ‘Wage Insurance’ Obama’s Talking About?

In his State of the Union address this week, President Obama reinforced unemployment insurance and job-training programs as ways the government can help those in need of work. Then he listed “wage insurance” as a distinct and separate recommended method:

Say a hardworking American loses his job — we shouldn’t just make sure he can get unemployment insurance; we should make sure that program encourages him to retrain for a business that’s ready to hire him. If that new job doesn’t pay as much, there should be a system of wage insurance in place so that he can still pay his bills.

Though for many Americans this may have been news, wage insurance is an idea that isn’t particularly new. The University of Chicago economist Robert LaLonde wrote the The Case for Wage Insurance in 2007, arguing that the basic unemployment-insurance system only gave income to workers without jobs and thus failed to help the many (often older) workers who could only find jobs that provided much less pay—a pattern common among those who lost their jobs to trade with low-wage nations. The concept was premised on a notion of fairness: The set of winners from trade (consumers benefiting from rock-bottom prices and employers benefiting from cheap labor) ought to compensate the losers.

In a similar proposal, the Brookings economist Gary Burtless wrote in 2014 that wage insurance “would provide experienced, laid-off workers with monthly or quarterly earnings supplements, compensating them for a portion of their lost wages.” As he had it, a program could cover half of a worker’s lost earnings, landing them a total compensation that was the average of their old and new wages. Proposals for such a system often cap their generosity at a certain salary (say, $50,000) and a certain duration (two years).

Wage insurance like this is actually just one of a range of policies that could all be fairly described by the phrase “wage insurance”—efforts to protect families from shocks to their income, or from barebones wages more generally. Americans already benefit from some of these policies—they aren’t something that only exist among the usual suspects, Scandinavia or Canada. One of the earliest forms of wage insurance is unemployment insurance, made national in 1935.

Some companies—typically ones that are unionized or those prone to cyclical and seasonal furloughs and layoffs—provide their own version of wage insurance. Employers can set up a trust fund that holds any combination of employee and employer contributions. Such Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Plans have been around since the 1950s. Unemployment insurance plus SUB plans helps employers who lay off workers, but want these experienced unemployed workers to not take first job available, and wait in case the employers call them back to work.

The last form of wage insurance is the Earned Income Tax Credit, advanced by President Nixon and signed into law by President Ford in 1975. The EITC subsidizes low-income working families—and, indirectly, their employers. The credit equals a fixed percentage of earnings from the first dollar of earnings until the credit reaches its maximum; both the percentage and the maximum credit depend on the number of children in the family. Those eligible for some credit range from a single worker with no children earning less than about $14,000 to a married couple earning less than approximately $50,000 with three or more children.

The EITC does on a permanent and automatic basis what Obama says he wants to do more of via wage insurance—subsidize the low wages of a family with money other than the employer’s. From the point of view of the employee, the EITC is insurance against a low-wage employer. From the point of view of the employer, the EITC pays its workers money.

Insurance always introduces the possibility of moral hazard. For example, factory owners may change their behavior after they buy insurance, and not adopt costly practices that minimize fires. To protect against this behavior, insurers impose deductions and lobby the government for fire codes.

​Economists have concerns that wage insurance—such as the EITC—could have the outcome of generating more of the undesirable insured event, in this case low-wage jobs. Insurance against the high costs of low wages and displaced workers will suffer from moral hazard (and, thus escalating costs) unless taxpayers (the insurers) impose co-pays and deductions. Minimum wages are a form of co-pays and unions are a type of fire code. Both together help minimize the existence of low wages. Wage insurance, like any insurance policy, is good to have when you need it, but it’s better if you don’t need it at all.

Alan Rickman's Extraordinary Legacy

Alan Rickman was an actor who could take even the blandest roles and spin them into something wonderful. But offered more to work with, he was unforgettable, portraying countless distinctive characters until his death on Thursday at the age of 69. Rickman defined villainy for multiple generations, playing the terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard, the tetchy Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Harry Potter’s sneering Professor Snape. He was also one of the finest stage actors of his generation, blessed with a silky, mellifluous voice that became his trademark.

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Remembering Alan Rickman

Born in London in 1946, Rickman excelled in the arts but pursued a career in design, thinking it a more stable profession, before eventually giving in to his passion for acting and attending Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1972. He worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company not long after graduating, a connection he maintained throughout his career, and got his big break playing the manipulative Valmont in 1985’s Les liaisons dangereuses. The production moved to Broadway, and Rickman earned a Tony nomination for his role.

In 1988, he made his film debut in Die Hard, a mid-budget action movie starring the then-sitcom actor Bruce Willis. As Hans Gruber, the villainous German hijacking a building and matching wits with a lone New York City cop, he stole the show, avoiding the overacting the part cried out for, and instead using his magnificent voice to intimidate. Three years later, he played another iconic villain—the Sheriff of Nottingham—with much more theatrical flair, and won a BAFTA for it. “I’ll take this as a healthy reminder that subtlety … isn’t everything,” he deadpanned in his acceptance speech.

While Hollywood often gave Rickman roles that called for him to be over the top, he always rose to the challenge. He collected an Emmy for playing a darkly seductive Rasputin in a TV movie, and was the literal voice of God as the angel Metatron in Kevin Smith’s satirical comedy Dogma. In Galaxy Quest he was Alexander Dane, an English thespian reduced to playing a hammy alien in a Star Trek-esque series, a role in which Rickman both mocked his big-screen career and transcended it by giving one of his most memorable performances. In 2001, he was cast as Professor Snape in the eight-film Harry Potter series, playing another definitive villain for a younger generation. Though he was a supporting player in a vast ensemble, Rickman invested the slimy professor with pathos as much as he could, and it paid off beautifully with the character’s tragic end in 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Hollywood often called on Rickman to be unsubtle, and he always rose to the challenge.

Though he booked many Hollywood roles, Rickman worked primarily in British film and theater throughout his career, performing alongside many of the country’s greatest talents. In Anthony Minghella’s heartbreaking 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply, he played a man who returns as a ghost to help his partner move on—one of his finest film performances. He was the steadfast Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, a jilted husband in Stephen Poliakoff’s masterful Close My Eyes, and the Irish revolutionary Éamon de Valera in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins. His unfaithful husband in Richard Curtis’s Love Actually became another sort of villain for many moviegoers, but even in his limited screen time Rickman lent humor and humanity to his character.

He rarely visited the New York stage but when he did, his work resonated with audiences—from Les Liaisons dangereuses to a revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives (for which he also earned a Tony nod), both alongside Lindsay Duncan. His contribution to British theater was immeasurable, with a list of credits too long to mention. And he was always in demand as a voice actor, from the strange Danish animated comedy Help! I’m a Fish, to his role as Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to playing Absolem the Caterpillar in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. He directed two films, 1997’s The Winter Guest (an adaptation of a play starring his frequent collaborator Emma Thompson) and the 2014 period drama A Little Chaos.

Rickman was consistently overlooked by the Oscars, a fact that didn’t bother him (“Parts win prizes, not actors,” he once said), but his legacy makes that fact a minor footnote. He was by all accounts a warm and beloved member of his community and a professional who poured himself into every role, whether it was a big-budget film extravaganza or regional theater. He met his wife, Rima Horton, when he was 19 years old; they were partners until his death, marrying in 2012 in a secret ceremony that he casually mentioned in a newspaper interview. “It was great, because no one was there. After the wedding in New York, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and ate lunch,” he said.

Rickman always professed a deep love for the power of acting and art, both to entertain and educate. In 2006, he co-wrote and directed the controversial play My Name Is Rachel Corrie on London’s West End, about a protester who died demonstrating against the destruction of homes in the Gaza Strip. It was just one work in a lifetime of political activism (he was a card-carrying member of the British Labour Party). At the other end of the spectrum, when he wrapped the Harry Potter series he wrote a note praising the arc of the films and reminiscing on having watched their young actors grow up over 12 years. “A lifetime seems to have passed in minutes,” he said. “It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller.” Through decades of his performances and other creative efforts, Rickman was one of the world’s finest.