Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 255

Ten U.S. Sailors, Two Navy Boats, and Iran

The Iranian military detained 10 U.S. sailors on two small Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf that reportedly crossed into Iranian-controlled waters, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Details remain unclear, but NBC News reports that the territorial crossing was unintentional:

The officials said it’s unclear whether the 10 American sailors aboard two small riverine vessels had strayed into Iranian territorial waters before they were captured.

The sailors were on a training mission around noon ET when one of the boats experienced mechanical failure and drifted into Iranian-claimed waters, officials added. Iran's coast guard took them into custody, although the crew has been described as being safe.

Iranian officials told the U.S. that the sailors “will promptly be allowed to continue their journey,” according to the BBC.

The sailors are reportedly being held on Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the Iranian military closely tied to the country’s hardline faction.

Iran media says Revolutionary Guard navy confiscated GPS equipment belonging to 10 US sailors it has arrested, "our border was crossed."

— Thomas Erdbrink (@ThomasErdbrink) January 12, 2016

This is a developing story and we’ll have more information as it becomes available.

Florida’s Death Penalty Is Struck Down

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s death-penalty system in an 8-1 decision on Tuesday, ruling that the state’s sentencing procedures violated the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a jury trial.

The case, Hurst v. Florida, challenged Florida’s unusual method of imposing death sentences. Under the state’s capital-sentencing law, the jury merely renders an “advisory sentence” and does not elaborate upon aggravating or mitigating circumstances. Once that is rendered, the judge then independently weighs the evidence and hands down the actual sentence.

At issue was the case of Timothy Hurst, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 2000 for the 1998 stabbing death of his coworker, Cynthia Lee Harrison. The Florida Supreme Court ordered him to be resentenced in 2012. At the second sentencing trial, the jury voted 7-5 in favor of the death penalty in their advisory sentence. The judge then reached his own finding of the facts and also sentenced Hurst to death.

For seven of the U.S. Supreme Court’s justices, this sentencing scheme clashed with the Court’s decision in the 2002 case Ring v. Arizona. In that decision, the Court struck down Arizona’s sentencing scheme because it allowed a judge, not a jury, to find the facts necessary to impose a death sentence on a defendant. Under the Sixth Amendment, criminal defendants are guaranteed the right to trial “by an impartial jury.”

Although the Arizona scheme did not include a jury at all, unlike Florida, the Court saw a difference without a distinction.

“Like Arizona at the time of Ring, Florida does not require the jury to make the critical findings necessary to impose the death penalty,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. “Rather, Florida requires a judge to find these facts.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, who also dissented in Ring and a similar group of Sixth Amendment cases, concurred with the Court’s judgment but not its reasoning. Instead, he argued imposing a death sentence on Hurst by anyone other than a jury violated the Eighth Amendment. In his solo dissent, Justice Samuel Alito also disagreed with the Court’s earlier Sixth Amendment rulings and argued that Florida’s system was far from identical to the one struck down by Ring.

“Depending on how the Florida Supreme Court interprets its own retroactivity provisions, today’s opinion could apply to everyone on Florida’s death row.”

Since Florida’s system of imposing death sentences is an outlier, Hurst’s impact in other states with capital punishment is limited. A notable exception could be Alabama’s controversial death-sentence scheme, which allows trial judges to override a jury’s sentence of life imprisonment and impose the death penalty instead, or vice versa. An Equal Justice Initiative report in 2014 found that state judges overrode jury verdicts in 111 capital cases in the state since 1976. In 91 percent of those cases, the judge imposed a death sentence after the jury opted for life.

But in Florida, the ruling will have significant implications for the state’s death row.

“Today’s ruling strikes at the heart of Florida’s death-penalty statute,” said David Menschel, a criminal-defense attorney who represented Florida death-row defendants and the president of the Vital Projects Fund, a nonprofit that works on criminal-justice issues. “It would seem to require the Florida legislature to pass a new statute if it wants to continue to sentence people to death.”

How many Florida death-row inmates will be eligible for resentencing is unknown. Tuesday’s ruling will apply to inmates whose appeals are ongoing, which could include dozens of inmates. Any Florida inmates sentenced after the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Ring could also be eligible for resentencing, Menschel noted.

Hurst’s scope beyond that will depend on the scope of future court decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court sets a high threshold for applying its decisions on criminal procedure to inmates whose appeals process has ended. But the Florida Supreme Court’s previous rulings on retroactive application are much broader than its national counterpart.

“In other words, depending on how the Florida Supreme Court interprets its own retroactivity provisions, today’s opinion could apply to everyone on Florida’s death row,” Menschel said.

Florida's Death Penalty Is Struck Down

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s death-penalty system in an 8-1 decision on Tuesday, ruling that the state’s sentencing procedures violated the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a jury trial.

The case, Hurst v. Florida, challenged Florida’s unusual method of imposing death sentences. Under the state’s capital-sentencing law, the jury merely renders an “advisory sentence” and does not elaborate upon aggravating or mitigating circumstances. Once that is rendered, the judge then independently weighs the evidence and hands down the actual sentence.

At issue was the case of Timothy Hurst, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 2000 for the 1998 stabbing death of his coworker, Cynthia Lee Harrison. The Florida Supreme Court ordered him to be resentenced in 2012. At the second sentencing trial, the jury voted 7-5 in favor of the death penalty in their advisory sentence. The judge then reached his own finding of the facts and also sentenced Hurst to death.

For seven of the U.S. Supreme Court’s justices, this sentencing scheme clashed with the Court’s decision in the 2002 case Ring v. Arizona. In that decision, the Court struck down Arizona’s sentencing scheme because it allowed a judge, not a jury, to find the facts necessary to impose a death sentence on a defendant. Under the Sixth Amendment, criminal defendants are guaranteed the right to trial “by an impartial jury.”

Although the Arizona scheme did not include a jury at all, unlike Florida, the Court saw a difference without a distinction.

“Like Arizona at the time of Ring, Florida does not require the jury to make the critical findings necessary to impose the death penalty,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. “Rather, Florida requires a judge to find these facts.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, who also dissented in Ring and a similar group of Sixth Amendment cases, concurred with the Court's judgment but not its reasoning. Instead, he argued imposing a death sentence on Hurst by anyone other than a jury violated the Eighth Amendment. In his solo dissent, Justice Samuel Alito also disagreed with the Court’s earlier Sixth Amendment rulings and argued that Florida’s system was far from identical to the one struck down by Ring.

Since Florida’s system of imposing death sentences is an outlier, Hurst’s impact in other states with capital punishment is limited. A notable exception could be Alabama’s controversial death-sentence scheme, which allows trial judges to override a jury’s sentence of life imprisonment and impose the death penalty instead, or vice versa. An Equal Justice Initiative report in 2014 found that state judges overrode jury verdicts in 111 capital cases in the state since 1976. In 91 percent of those cases, the judge imposed a death sentence after the jury opted for life.

But in Florida, the ruling will have significant implications for the state’s death row.

“Today's ruling strikes at the heart of Florida's death penalty statute,” said David Menschel, a criminal-defense attorney who represented Florida death-row defendants and president of the Vital Projects Fund, a nonprofit that works on criminal-justice issues. “It would seem to require the Florida legislature to pass a new statute if it wants to continue to sentence people to death.”

How many Florida death-row inmates will be eligible for resentencing is unknown. Tuesday’s ruling will apply to inmates whose appeals are ongoing, which could include dozens of inmates. Any Florida inmates sentenced after the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Ring could also be eligible for resentencing, Menschel noted.

Hurst’s scope beyond that will depend on the scope of future court decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court sets a high threshold for applying its decisions on criminal procedure to inmates whose appeals process has ended. But the Florida Supreme Court’s previous rulings on retroactive application are much broader than its national counterpart.

“In other words, depending on how the Florida Supreme Court interprets its own retroactivity provisions, today’s opinion could apply to everyone on Florida’s death row,” Menschel said.

What Makes a Joke ‘Transphobic’?

If there was a theme to Ricky Gervais’s performance at Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards, it was that pop culture’s purported “transgender moment” is awfully funny. He pretended that he thought Eddie Redmayne, who plays a transgender woman in The Danish Girl, was actually female. He speculated about what Jeffrey Tambor does with his testicles on Transparent. And toward the beginning of his monologue, Gervais said that he himself had changed a lot in a year, “but not as much as Bruce Jenner, obviously.”

There was a short pause. Some laughter from the audience. Then a follow-up joke.

“She became a role model for trans people everywhere, showing great bravery in breaking down barriers and destroying stereotypes. She didn’t do a lot for women drivers, but you can’t have everything, can ya?”

Some online reactions called Gervais’s routine “transphobic,” and on Tuesday, Gervais responded. “Suggesting a joke about Caitlin Jenner is automatically transphobic is like suggesting a joke about Bill Cosby is automatically racist,” he wrote on Twitter. A few hours later: “I made a joke about Caitlyn Jenner killing someone in her car. I’m #TransportPhobic.”

Gervais is right that it’s silly to label every joke about a trans person as “transphobic.” He also has a pretty good case that the car joke wasn’t hurtful to trans people. It was hurtful to Jenner’s reputation, perhaps (though it’s not like the fatal car crash at issue went unpublicized), and also to anyone who suspects that a good way to help end stereotypes about women is to stop making jokes that rely on them.

Yet Gervais’s defense misses the point of the annoyance he sparked (yes, annoyance: Many comedians who face any sort of criticism like to say they’ve offended and outraged entire nations, but that often gives them too much credit). The regressive part of his Jenner routine was in the first joke, the one where he played for laughs the mere fact that Bruce was now called Caitlin.

That’s fundamentally the same joke he made about Tambor and Redmayne. There’s not a lot to it. Its content, simply, is this: It’s funny when people previously seen as men change themselves to be seen as women.

This supposed punchline, as should become clear to anyone who thinks about it for a moment, results from and feeds the stigmas that trans people face. The idea that presenting as something other than the gender you were told you had at birth is a fundamentally hilarious proposition—whether because of the methods involved or because of the intentions behind doing so—is a very obvious sign of devaluation. The very work of Jenner, Tambor, and Redmayne, not to mention the many transgender writers and advocates across media, is in part about explaining and combating this fact.

Gervais’s joke is also among the most elemental joke kinds there are: the joke of difference. It stems from the idea that “the other”—whatever the other may be to the speaker and the audience—is inherently freaky. It accounts for part (and only part) of the perceived humor in blackface, or mocking accents, or any number of other worn-out tropes that routinely upset swaths of the population just trying to live their lives. It is also usually not a very good joke, both because people have heard it so many times and because it reinforces something that’s definitionally boring—the status quo.

When a Video-Game World Ends

In English, the word “apocalypse”—ety. Greek, n. apo (un-) + kaluptein (-veil)—has three non-exclusive meanings. The first and most common is simply the end of the world, whether by divine punishment or whatever transpires in movies directed by Roland Emmerich. The second is any form of calamity, representational or real, man-made or no, that resembles the end of the world, like the 2010 Haitian earthquake, Chernobyl, or the movies directed by Roland Emmerich themselves. The third is what the Greeks intended apocalypse to mean: the revelation of knowledge through profound disruption, which is why the final book of the New Testament is called “Revelations” (composed, it is thought, to reassure Christians during their widespread persecution by the Roman emperor, Domitian). In other words, the apocalypse either is the end, looks like the end, or helps us understand the end.

Like books, movies, and the visual arts, video games are well acquainted with the apocalypse. Scores of them have been set in the final days of mankind; countless more ask the player to prevent them. Yet, as mere setting, the apocalypse can never be true to its name—when Mass Effect 3 ends and the galaxy has been saved/altered/destroyed, you can always boot up the series’s first act and play it all again. The finale is not the end. In the curious lexicon of games criticism, we often speak of “world-building,” yet rarely do we stop to think about its opposite. Anything made can be destroyed, yet destruction in games is rarely the destruction of games. What masterpiece of eschatological design could possibly convey the all-encompassing, crushing finality of a true apocalypse?

Perhaps we will never know. But, in the meantime, we have the next best thing.

A still from Star Wars Galaxies (Daybreak Game Company / Electronic Arts)

Since the 1990s, when the rise of reliable home Internet access made persistent game worlds both commercially and technically viable, the game industry has developed over 300 massively multiplayer online games, some gargantuan (The Old Republic, etc.) and others slight, like the thoughtful browser-based government simulator NationStates. The majority of MMOs, of course, don’t experience the runaway success of World of Warcraft or EVE Online and eventually adopt a free-to-play model once it becomes clear that subscriptions alone can’t sustain ongoing costs. But a smaller number—44, if Wikipedia is to be believed—have shut down, and with their closure, their persistent worlds simply phase out of existence, beyond the reach of any archaeology.

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Star Wars Galaxies launched in 2003 to critical and commercial acclaim. Though video games routinely spoil the player with fantasies of singular greatness (in Elder Scrolls Online, every player is, improbably, “the one”), Galaxies initially set its sights lower. Instead of saving the Star Wars universe for the umpteenth time, the player was asked merely to live in that universe, getting by doing anything from bounty hunting to stripping in dusty cantinas on the Outer Rim. That might seem hopelessly jejune in 2015, but Galaxies was a tremendous success for several years. Alas, in 2005, in response to a lack of new players, Sony Online Entertainment redesigned the game to emphasize combat, trading the game’s supreme sense of inhabitation and belonging for a sense of power (the lure of the dark side indeed!). Players revolted, and, by 2006 barely 10,000 people could be found in Galaxies on any given Friday. The death-knell came in 2011, when SOE announced, to no one’s surprise, that Galaxies would be shut down for good in December of that year (not coincidentally, the same month that BioWare launched its dreary Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic).

Call it pity, or perhaps apology, but SOE used the end of Galaxies to do something meaningful with its apocalypse: It declared a winner for each server based on the relative population of Rebels and Imperials. And in the galaxy’s final moments, before the servers took everything and everyone with them, the players who remained gathered in Mos Eisley and Corellia to wait for the end. Bittersweet celebration ruled the day: Veterans let neophytes try out their finest gear, the sky was filled with brilliant (if lag-producing) fireworks, and the spaceports clogged with groups of friends, some cultivated over thousands of hours, waiting to say goodbye. In the end, though, the final moment was a whimper. Writing in PC Gamer the next day, Chris Thursten captured the moment perfectly

[We] timed the hyperspace jump to coincide with the final shutdown. As the seconds tick down, the hyperdrive calculation rises to 100 percent completion … The time hits zero and tiny points of light begin to streak across the windows then freeze, arrested in time. The moment hangs, the game unresponsive, one of the most iconic images in Star Wars halted before it can fully play itself out. “You cannot connect to that Galaxy at this time. Please try again later.”

Not every apocalypse is so poetic. Sega’s ill-fated MMO The Matrix Online ran from 2005 to July 2009, when it was brought down with little warning by none other than SOE, which had purchased the property from Sega some years before. Like they would later do for Galaxies, SOE organized a final event for The Matrix Online. But unlike Galaxies, it wasn’t so much a celebration as a genocide fitting of an apocalypse. On PvE servers, SOE flooded common areas with high-level monsters that slaughtered every player in sight; on PvP servers, players discovered that their weapons had been augmented to kill other players with a single shot. A bloodbath ensued; anyone whose character died found that death, suddenly, was permanent. In both cases, survivors were cut down by an unexplained electrical phenomenon (a glitch in the matrix, so to speak). In one Youtube video, perhaps two dozen players obliviously wait for the end. Someone in the server-wide chat yells, “I’m smoking weed and crying”; someone replies, “Please don’t cry.” Seconds later, a bolt of ochre lightning tears through the crowd, killing everyone. The contortions are horrific; the screams are worse. After, the only sound is an irregular beep, like an old modem. Someone asks “Is it over?” A pop window answers: “Failed to reconnect to the margin server. Shutting down.” The machines win after all.

The last moments of Star Wars Galaxies and The Matrix Online stand out among MMO apocalypses as a conscious attempt to script a proper “end” to their universes, whether celebratory or catastrophic. Most titles, though, take a simpler route: passing out free high-level gear or experience boosts to offer players a sense of closure, however insufficient. In its final months, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online offered players double gold, double XP, and unlocked all the game’s content for all its players. But in the end, the small population of remaining players watched the world go dark from the beaches of Port Royale. Another Disney Property, Toontown Online, ran for over a decade before being shuttered in 2013. With two weeks to go, Toontown Online arranged for its holiday events to take place two months early and flooded Toontown with the game’s most iconic foe, The Big Cheeses (“Watch out! I can be a real Muenster at times”), a parody of corporate greed, which, in retrospect, is an oddly apropos metaphor for a beloved children’s game whittled into extinction by the budget hawks at Disney Interactive.

Even when a developer doesn’t plan a final hurrah, players often take it upon themselves to commemorate their world’s imminent end (Cormac McCarthy, in The Road: “When one has nothing left, make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them”). In Hellgate: London, which lasted barely 18 months thanks to gross mismanagement by its developer, Flagship Studios, the small band of players that held out to the end took it upon themselves to don their most visually outrageous gear and fight the game’s final boss, who had long since ceased to be a challenge. How ironic that a game set in the apocalypse succumbed to another apocalypse. The final moment, when it came, arrived without warning: A friend of mine who played Hellgate from beta to the end told me that he was cut off mid-conversation by a final, mass disconnection. But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven …

Faced with annihilation, other communities resist: When Bungie announced in 2010 that it would soon take Halo 2’s long-running servers offline, several dozen Halo 2 fanatics vowed to leave their consoles on in order to host further matches. One by one, whether by overheating consoles or the loss of power, the number of dwindled to a handful of hosts. The last holdout was disconnected by Bungie nearly six weeks after the “official” end of Halo 2.

Those MMOs that are resurrected by carrion-picking studios are often flattened unrecognizably to prepare them for the designs of free-to-play, as was the ultimate fate of Hellgate: London. User-made revivals are equally fraught: In 2014, a group of modders revived Galaxies as SWG: Reborn after (dubiously) acquiring the source code to the game, but infighting among developers and a litany of game-breaking bugs quickly doomed the project. Today, persistent fans can still access a handful of private servers, but must contend with constant technical glitches and corrupt administrators. Players can celebrate, or they can resist, but in the end, they cannot stop the inevitable.

A scene in Hellgate: London (Flagship Studios)

Whether it’s the final horror of The Matrix Online or the somber last acts in ToonTown Online, it isn’t hard to see how the end of an MMO constitutes an apocalypse of the first and second kind (i.e. “the end” and that which resembles the end). From the perspective of the characters who inhabit a doomed MMO’s diegesis, it is truly the end of everything, their world, as the poet Philip Larkin put it, “[soon] to be lost in always, not to be here, not to be anywhere.” For players, the apocalypse is, of course, not real, but nevertheless imparts a real experience of what the apocalypse might be like, to see a world they have come to care about lose its ability to be. But what about the third form of the apocalypse, that which helps us understand the end? How do MMOs help us come to terms with the causes and effects of an apocalypse on any scale?

The media scholar Richard Grusin attributes the popularity of end-of-the-world scenarios in popular media to a phenomenon he calls “premediation,” the representation of cataclysm to build the public’s expectations for a real cataclysm. The plausibility of these scenarios matters little; the point of premediation, Grusin holds, isn’t “prediction” but “practice”—we steel ourselves for any number of possible futures so that we might overcome whatever trauma awaits us, like swallowing a pill to prevent the heartburn we know is coming. Because we know, deep down, that apocalypse awaits us on every scale. Premediation helps us rehearse our reaction so that, in the event of real chaos, we might behave in a manner more rational and productive.

It’s easy to see how games like Fallout 4 (2015), Mass Effect 3 (2012), and Mad Max (2015) constitute a kind of premediation, rehearsing our collective anxieties over nuclear war, AI takeover, and ecological devastation, respectively. Yet premediation isn’t quite sufficient to describe the end of an MMO—SOE likely didn’t imagine or at least didn’t intend for Galaxies to suffer its gradual blackout. Premediation, like its prefix implies, is rooted in what comes before; by the time an MMO shuts down, it’s already too late. In this respect, all-but-forgotten Hellgate: London is an object lesson in this distinction, a game about an apocalypse that eventually fell victim to its own. But if not because of premediation, why should we care about the end of MMOs at all? What knowledge is there that isn’t present elsewhere?

An apocalypse can help bridge the gap between what we experience and why we experience it.

If there can be said to be any good in an apocalypse, it’s that it almost always reveals something about what went wrong. As The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in an op-ed just days after Hurricane Katrina transformed economic marginalization into mass death, apocalyptic disasters “wash away the surface of society … expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.” In the days after Haiti’s horrific 2010 earthquake, it became clear that the landslides that killed so many were tied to decades of strip-logging in the forests nearby. (This phenomenon was itself tied to the nation’s sovereign debt, which replaced colonial occupation as a means of imperialist domination, in a chain of injustices stretching back to the European encounter, depicted at the end in Mel Gibson’s historical epic named, not coincidentally, Apocalypto.) There are no such thing as natural disasters, just fantasies we entertain to excuse our inaction.

In other words, an apocalypse can help bridge the gap between what we experience and why we experience it, to negotiate between our lives as individuals and the systems that establish the limits of our experience. In an article in The Atlantic, Ian Bogost argues that what games offer, above all else, is an “operable argument … that shows us something about the world outside ourselves, something incomplete and grotesque, but something we ought to see.” Through simulation, we transcend the need for personal identification and focus instead on systems we are embedded in. On this count, Bogost surely has a point. But it’s only half the story. Life might occur within systems, but it is not itself a system. Identity or system, narrative or simulation, representation is always a failed project—if a game could represent everything, it wouldn’t be a game at all, but (and just) a perfect simulacrum of the real. What’s unique and valuable about the end of an MMO is that it can be read as a kind of representation, but it’s also a kind of “real” event that destroys representation, the destruction of an imagined world. With that duality comes the ability to wander between personal identification and reflection on the institutions that give rise to identification.

Looking back at Galaxies, Hellgate, ToonTown, and everything else that occupies the immaterial junkyard of discarded universes, the signs of their impending doom are all too obvious. In Galaxies, the attempt to simplify combat galled old players; the subsequent reversal of these changes alienated new ones. In Hellgate: London, the lack of new content for players to experience in-game signaled that something was deeply wrong outside of the game; Flagship Studios filed for bankruptcy in July 2008 and all of its intellectual property was seized as assets, halting the creation of new material.

And closure doesn’t have to be about failing revenues; it can be about building new ones. Contrary to conventional wisdom, ToonTown didn’t shut down on account of dwindling subscriptions. Rather, as Disney Interactive wrote in the press release announcing its end, “we are shifting our development focus towards other online and mobile play experiences, such as a growing selection of Disney Mobile apps.” The simplicity of ToonTown’s mechanics lent itself to the uncomplicated interfaces of mobile devices, the preferred platform for the game’s target demographic, children age 7 to 12. In every case, built into the experience of play is something larger about the architects of the machines in which we play. And when those machines shut down, even (and especially) when their indifference doesn’t match our own investment, we should know that the heraldry of the end times were there all along. There’s always truth in a ruin.

An apocalypse cares for nothing but its own being, bought at the expense of everyone else’s. Only a hopeless optimist would think that games can save us from whatever fates await us, as individuals or more. But whether at most or at least, the end of a world, even a virtual one, can help us understand both our own experiences and how “made” those experiences are, no matter how natural and private they feel to us. Before it can be changed, it must be understood. Eventually, there will be nothing to save but ourselves.

This post appears courtesy of Kill Screen.

Enough With the Origin Stories

The title Robin Hood: Origins by itself is enough to raise eyebrows, but nevertheless it’s a real project and not a nature-themed cosmetics line, or a piece of young adult fan fiction. Jamie Foxx has signed on to the film in the role of Little John, joining the Kingsman star Taron Egerton as Robin and The Knick’s Eve Hewson as Maid Marian. In my years covering entertainment, I haven’t noticed much clamoring for an explanation of Robin Hood’s origins. But this era of Hollywood is rooted in the familiar: If it’s a name audiences have heard before, it’s a safer bet for investment.

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The World Doesn't Need a Young Han Solo

That’s also why there’s a young Han Solo movie on the horizon, because Disney wants to hold on to an iconic character as Harrison Ford ages out of the role. That’s why there are endless reboots planned for mythic characters in the public domain, from Frankenstein (in 2014 and 2015) to Hercules (twice in 2014) to Tarzan (who returns to the big screen this year). Robin Hood: Origins is being described as a “gritty” take on the character, which would be laughable if it hadn’t already been done in 2010, when Ridley Scott made his own grim Robin Hood with Russell Crowe. But the mistake that film made was casting an actor in his mid-40s. Every studio is after a franchise-starter, so every film has to begin with an “origin story” and star some young, cheap talent to keep the sequels from being too expensive. The strangest thing about this strategy is that Hollywood keeps trying it, even though there isn’t much evidence that it works.

A “grim and gritty” Robin Hood feels reminiscent of Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 attempt to demystify King Arthur, which starred Clive Owen as a battle-worn Arthur and Keira Knightley as a bow-wielding Guinevere. That film, like most of the aforementioned prequels, wasn’t a big hit, but Hollywood is nonetheless trying the exact same thing again in 2017 with Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur, this time starring Charlie Hunnam. If it works, as so few of these things do, then audiences just may be lucky enough to get even more sequels (according to Variety, it’s the first in a planned six-part series). No word on Robin Hood: Origins’ future, but any time a colon is in the title, it means studios are already thinking about possible sequels.

So what, really, would an “origin story” of Robin Hood have to offer? Do audiences need an explanation for why he robs from the rich and gives to the poor, beyond the business about the nasty Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham that everyone’s already familiar with? Will they learn who taught him to shoot arrows? Where he acquired his hood? Will the director Otto Bathurst, who previously helmed the BBC series Peaky Blinders, attempt to draw parallels to contemporary issues as his bandit hero loots from the one percent?

The big problem with the “origin” story for an established character is that it handcuffs a film’s ability to remotely surprise an audience. In 2015’s Pan, many convoluted story threads were spun to explain just how Peter Pan got to Neverland and how he met a young Tiger Lily, Tinkerbell, and Captain Hook. Since the audience knows exactly where every one of those characters is going to end up, the film has to subsist on winking references to the future in lieu of any original storytelling. Hook has a run-in with a crocodile! Peter doesn’t know how to fly yet! In echoing the beloved property, Pan (like so many others), hoped to cash in on a familiar name and imagery, and perhaps even spin a few sequels out of it. But the film bombed at the box office, and that was that.

Sure, Robin Hood: Origins could buck this trend. Perhaps the upcoming Tarzan movie will be the revival audiences have been waiting for. Young Han Solo could even eclipse the storied work of Harrison Ford. But while these reboots and prequels are being embraced for their supposedly inherent safety, they still feel like a gamble. As Hollywood clogs release schedules with the overly familiar, moviegoers might instead flock to whatever hasn’t been done a thousand times before. Making those kinds of films would be a risk worth taking.  

When the Forgery Is the Art

At the BBC today, Jennifer Pak has a fascinating report on the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism Architecture, taking place this month in Shenzhen (it starts 17 minutes in). The city, home to Foxconn and often referred to as “China’s Silicon Valley,” is also, Pak notes, sometimes called the “counterfeit capital of China.”

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Some of the many fascinating objects on display—within an abandoned flour mill converted for the purpose—were curated by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which is establishing a design museum in Shenzhen in partnership with the Chinese Merchants Group. And they hint at an extremely contemporary iteration of Walter Benjamin’s century-old anxieties: What is art in an age of digital reproduction? What is creativity in the era of the network? What does it mean, really, to “invent” something during a time when technological improvements mean that good designs, and good ideas, can be copied in an instant?

Innovation, David Li of Shenzhen’s Open Innovation Lab tells Pak, is no longer “limited by my access to technology, or my access to design, or my access to manufactures.” That means on the one hand that manufacturing has been freed from the traditional constraints of corporate marketing. The V&A’s Brendan Cormier, demonstrating one of the cheap, mobile phones on exhibit at the biennale—a copy of a big-brand model, modified with large, well-marked buttons and heightened sound quality that make it perfect for use by seniors—notes that the people who might get use of such a gadget had previously formed “a market that was completely ignored by the larger phone companies.”

What is art in an age of digital reproduction? What is creativity in the era of the network?

In that sense, the V&A suggests, the distinction between “real” and “knockoff” is, from the consumer perspective, a largely semantic one. Sometimes the counterfeit can be, as a practical device, better than the original. “It’s not that we’re trying to promote counterfeit goods,” Cormier says. “What we’re trying to say is that the ecosystem—because it really is an ecosystem which allows shanzhai [counterfeits] to exist—it’s allowing for many small-scale innovations within the mobile industry.”

But it’s not just commercial goods that are being changed by the industry quickly evolving to produce—and, yes, design—counterfeit goods. According to Luisa Mengoni, who is overseeing the V&A’s contribution to the Shenzhen Design Museum, art—and innovation as a broader cultural and commercial goal—will be affected, too.

Take Dafen Village, a Shenzhen suburb known for its replications of famous paintings. (As The Atlantic’s James Fallows described it: “In one sprawling area are many hundreds of individual art factories, in which teams of artists crank out hand-painted replicas of any sort of picture you can imagine. European old masters. Andy Warhol. Gustav Klimt. Classic Chinese landscapes. Manet. Audubon. Botero. The super-hot and faddish contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun, whose paintings and sculptures all feature people wearing enormous grins. Thomas Kinkade, the ‘Painter of Light.’ Walter Keane, the ‘Painter of Mawkish Big-Eyed Kids.’”)

“In one sprawling area are many hundreds of individual art factories, in which teams of artists crank out hand-painted replicas of any sort of picture you can imagine.”

Another of the V&A’s biennale exhibits is a series of four paintings, three of them oils-on-canvas produced in Dafen, and a fourth a digital print on canvas. To the casual observer, they look the same. And they make, as such, a provocative juxtaposition. While few would argue that a Dafen artisan is an artist in quite the same way Klimt—or even Kinkade—was, the exhibit suggests the myriad levels of artistry and creativity and craftsmanship that contribute to a good forgery. It suggests the many ways that technological improvements have blurred the line between “original” and “copy.”

And it makes a corollary to the commercial finding that counterfeits can actually boost sales of the items they knock off: Counterfeits, the curators are arguing, can actually offer their own contribution to innovation. Copies suggest not the death of the author so much as a new form of networked, industrialized authorship.

“When we first started this project, we wanted to understand: ‘How can we understand Shenzhen as a design city?’” Cormier tells Pak. “And to do so, you have to go through a personal kind of exercise of changing, or altering, a lot of your biases or assumptions about design. So: assumptions about design being driven by a singular author, that painting is all about individual creativity. That has to be shifted to an idea that painting is about craft and technique.”

Angela Merkel’s Response to the New Year's Eve Assaults

For months, Angela Merkel has remained resolute in her position that Germany must remain open to people seeking refuge from war and civil strife. But now, after men of mostly immigrant backgrounds allegedly sexually assaulted women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve, the German chancellor says something has to change.

“The events of New Year’s Eve have dramatically exposed the challenge we’re facing, revealing a new facet that we haven’t yet seen,” Merkel recently told reporters.

Her government responded to that challenge Tuesday with a proposal that would make it easier to deport asylum-seekers convicted of committing crimes in Germany, including sexual assault and violent theft. According to the Associated Press, many refugees who commit crimes in Germany do not face deportation because the danger they face in their home countries is perceived as greater than the reason to deport them.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas told reporters Tuesday that “we owe this to the victims of these serious crimes.”

“We shouldn’t place migrants under general suspicion. That’s why we must make a clear distinction,” Maas said in a statement published on the justice ministry’s website. “We have to protect the many law-abiding refugees that have sought safety and refuge with us. But against foreign criminals we have to be very determined.”

The proposal requires Cabinet and parliamentary approval. Merkel said she wants the changes signed into law “as quickly as possible.”

On the night of December 31, dozens of women reported being robbed and sexually assaulted—two said they were raped—in Cologne, Hamburg, and Stuttgart. In Cologne, as many as 1,000 men described to be of Arab and North African origin formed rings around women, who tried to fight their way out. Police say more than 500 criminal complaints have been filed in connection with the assaults, with about 45 percent involving allegations of sexual offenses, the AP reports. Most of the 55 suspects who have been detained are foreign nationals.

The assaults stunned media, law enforcement, and government officials, and have generated debates in Germany about police response and sexual-assault prevention, and across Europe about refugee policies.

On January 1, Cologne police issued a news release that reported most New Year celebrations had gone “peacefully” in the city. A week later, after news broke that at least 90 women had filed complaints stemming from those celebrations, police retracted the statement, and Cologne’s police chief was fired. A leaked police report published by German publications last week said officers on the ground that night were overwhelmed by “all of the events, attacks and crimes—there were simply too many at the same time.” A report from the interior ministry of the North Rhine-Westphalia region, where Cologne is located, faulted police for its slowness in informing the public about what happened.

Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker said police failed to inform her of the severity of the incidents on New Year’s Eve. Reker drew criticism herself for suggesting a code of conduct for women fearful of attacks that called for keeping “an arm’s length” from strangers.

Maas, the justice minister, on Tuesday criticized what Germany legally considers “rape,” saying the crime is “too narrowly defined.”

“We must nonetheless protect women better from sexualized violence,” he said in a statement. “On the question of how much resistance a women must give for an attack to be considered rape, the law in question does not always give a clear answer.”

German officials have repeatedly warned against making a connection between the suspects in the alleged New Year’s Eve assaults and asylum-seekers. But some immigration opponents in Germany have blamed the crimes on the 1.1 million migrants and refugees that entered the country last year—and the open-door policy that helped facilitate the influx. Thousands of members of the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA), a German anti-immigration movement, have participated in rallies in Cologne and Leipzig in recent days.

Some demonstrations have turned violent, with protesters smashing windows of buildings, setting cars on fire, and throwing rocks at police officers. Police have responded with tear gas and water cannons. More than 200 protesters were arrested Monday in Leipzig, the BBC reported. Immigration supporters held counterprotests against PEGIDA, and some vandalized a bus that was being used by the group.

The Decline of the Bundy Rebellion

What did Ammon and Ryan Bundy learn from their father's 2014 standoff in Nevada? Not enough, apparently.

When Cliven Bundy started his showdown with the Bureau of Land Management, he quickly attracted a slew of high-profile backers: Republican Senators Dean Heller, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul; Texas Governor Rick Perry; and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who has since become governor. But Bundy’s hand was weak—after all, anyone who claims he isn’t governed by the Constitution and refuses to pay land fees for decades has a weak claim, to say nothing of the jarring image of armed men holding off law enforcement. Bundy overplayed the weak hand, too, spouting off about “the Negro.” His backers fled and the standoff ended—though he has continued to graze his cattle on federal lands and still hasn’t paid the fees he owes, which could hold clues for how the Oregon standoff might end.

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The Oregon Standoff, Black Lives Matter, and Criminal-Justice Reform

The Oregon standoff seems to be following a similar, though not identical, arc. At a community meeting Monday night in the town of Burns, residents vented their frustrations with the militia led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy, which has occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. “Our community does not want you here,” Mayor Craig LaFollette said. “Leave peacefully and soon.” Teenagers spoke of their fear of leaving home. One resident, Dave Brown was blunter: “There's enough crazies in this county to throw your ass out.”

At least a few residents praised the militia, but as Brown’s quote indicates, local people don’t so much disagree with the Bundy gang’s fundamental point: They, too, have serious objections to the extent of federal land ownership in the area, and to the way the federal government manages the land it owns. Many of these complaints were aired during Monday night’s meeting. But the Bundys have managed to alienate the people who are their natural allies, and whose support they need for political success. In Nevada, Cliven Bundy had the advantage that he was acting in a largely deserted area—just his ranch and open federal land. That’s not true in Oregon, where there’s an existing community. The militia members say they are staging an occupation, but if the local population doesn’t back them, it’s really an invasion.

As The New York Times reported this week, the Bundy gang is the more militant, extreme wing of a movement that is widespread among Western conservatives:

Many conservatives ... criticized Mr. Bundy’s gun-toting tactics, but their grievances and goals are nearly identical. And the outcry has grown amid a dust storm of rural anger at President Obama’s efforts to tighten regulations on fracking, air quality, small streams and other environmental issues that put struggling Western counties at odds with conservation advocates.

Even as the standoff in Oregon was starting, the two men whose case inspired the Bundys, Dwight and Steven Hammond, said that the militia did not speak for them and urged them to go home. But as the standoff has dragged on (it’s now in Day 11), the antipathy seems to be building, which is perhaps unsurprising given the impact it’s having on Harney County residents’ day-to-day lives. Schools reopened Monday for the first time since the standoff began, but many people are still working from home. The militia insists it’s no threat to residents, but the presence of many armed people, to say nothing of the prospect of a pitched gun battle, has residents on edge.

There may be an element of outsider vs. insider, as Dave Brown’s comment about “crazies in the county” suggests. Reporter Amanda Peacher said many attendees at the meeting wanted to make clear that their policy qualms were with the BLM in Washington, not with the agency’s local representatives. (Compounding the outsider problem, The Oregonian reports that armed militiamen are arriving from elsewhere to oppose the occupation, since the only thing worse than a standoff between law enforcement and heavily armed dissidents is a three-way standoff between law enforcement and two separate groups of heavily armed dissidents.)

But a great deal of the objections are about the tactics and the message, whoever is executing them. It’s not enough for the militia to agree that the BLM is heavy-handed if you feel threatened in your daily life. What good is it to challenge tyranny from Washington if it only constricts your freedom on an everyday level? There are plenty of examples from history where an extreme vanguard has been successful in forwarding an agenda, over the objections of gradualist fellow-travelers, but people who agree with the Bundys—even fellow self-styled patriots who stood with them in Nevada—have come to the conclusion that their methods are unhelpful and dangerous.

The militia members say they are staging an occupation, but if the local population doesn’t back them, it’s really an invasion.

Questions about who the occupiers are, and what motivates them, have helped to isolate the Bundy gang. So have some of their actions, like rifling through government documents (and, according to some reports, computers) at the refuge, which makes them look less like simple protesters in an act of civil disobedience and more like a strange, vigilante posse.

“Second-generation radical propagandists tend to be more tempered,” Ben Wallace-Wells wrote of the second-generation Bundys last week. “You see your father denounced as a loon, and you learn to round off your edges.” But while Ammon and Ryan Bundy have avoided the racist comments that helped sink their father, their occupation has still fallen into some of the same traps—alienating their own natural backers while hanging around long enough to seriously rattle those who disagree with them, too. With the two-week milestone in sight, there’s no indication of when or how the Oregon standoff will end, but the battle for hearts and minds has already been lost.

Istanbul Explosion: What We Know So Far

Updated on January 12 at 10:27 a.m.

What we know about the explosion in Istanbul:

—At least 10 people are dead and 15 wounded. Turkish news reports quote the prime minister as telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the victims are mostly German. He later said all the victims were foreigners.

—The blast occurred in the historic Sultanahmet district, which is home to the Blue Mosque and is popular with tourists.

—President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber of “Syrian origin.” The deputy prime minister said the bomber was born in 1988. He was later identified as Saudi-born Nabil Fadli. The deputy prime minister said he’d recently entered Turkey from Syria.

Most of the victims of Tuesday’s suicide attack in Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet district that killed 10 people and wounded 15 others were German, Turkey’s prime minister has told the German Chancellor. Ahmet Davutoglu, the prime minister, later said all the victims were foreigners.

Turkish officials also identified the bomber as Nabil Fadli, who was born in Saudi Arabia. They had earlier identified the attacker as a Syrian born in 1988. It’s unclear if he held dual citizenship, Syrian citizenship, or if Turkish officials had misspoken earlier.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the attacker was of “Syrian origin.” Numan Kurtulmuş, the deputy prime minister, said the bomber was born in 1988. He said the attacker had recently entered Turkey from Syria.

Davutoglu, the Turkish prime minister,