Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 261

Obama's Overblown Moves on Gun Control

Reading the instant reactions from the right and left to President Obama’s gun announcement on Tuesday, you might have thought—if you were an ardent gun-rights supporter—that the president had walked over to the National Archives, retrieved an original copy of the Constitution, and scrawled a bright red X through the Second Amendment.

“Our president is not a king,” proclaimed Representative Charles Boustany, a Louisiana Senate candidate who simultaneously announced he was signing onto something called the Separation of Powers Restoration and Second Amendment Protection Act. (That’s SOPRASAPA, if you’re into acronyms.) House Speaker Paul Ryan accused Obama of “intimidation that undermines liberty,” while Senator Marco Rubio charged that he was “obsessed with undermining the Second Amendment.” “OBAMA WANTS YOUR GUNS,” read a campaign fundraising pitch from Senator Ted Cruz that featured the president wearing commando gear.

Conversely, if you listened to the administration’s Democratic allies, you might have thought the president had taken heroic and far-reaching action that would restrict access to guns and prevent thousands of needless violent deaths. Top congressional Democrats hailed the gun package as “bold,” “life-saving,” and “comprehensive.”

The reality, however, is that the alternate cries of outrage and celebration are much ado about not very much.

The centerpiece change that Obama announced on Tuesday is simply a clarification of how the government defines people “engaged in the business” of selling firearms. It will expand the number of gun-dealers who must be licensed and conduct background checks, but it would not subject all buyers to background checks, nor would it require all sellers to conduct them. It doesn’t even set a threshold for the number of firearms sold that would subject a dealer to the new rules.

The president will also require background checks for people who try to buy dangerous weapons through a trust or corporation, rather than as individuals. Most of the additional actions Obama announced involved beefing up and modernizing the existing background-check system, hiring more agents and investigators for the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and pouring $500 million into mental-health treatment programs—perhaps the only change that might garner Republican support, and since it will require congressional approval, certainly one that will need it.

The hype surrounding Obama’s announcement—and the threats of lawsuits and corrective action from Congress—recalls the anticipation leading up to the president’s executive actions on immigration in late 2014, when he detailed plans to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and overhauled federal enforcement policy. But in substance, the changes to gun policy pale by comparison.

The limited nature of the executive actions initially took gun-rights supporters by surprise. “That’s it, really?” the NRA’s Jennifer Baker told The New York Times on Monday night. “They’re not really doing anything.” By Tuesday afternoon, however, the NRA had found more to criticize and said in a statement that the proposals were “ripe for abuse by the Obama administration.” John Velleco, director of operations for Gun Owners of America, had a similar reaction. He told me in an interview on Tuesday that after reading the language put out by the White House, he feared the clarification of the definition of a gun-dealer was “much more significant than we first believed to be.” Because the administration is not clearly stating how many guns someone has to sell to be considered a professional dealer who must conduct background checks, Velleco worried that private gun transactions could be targeted.

“This is the most significant federal reform to gun policy in the last two decades.”

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence helped draft the new federal rules, and staff attorney Ari Freilich said the new language exempted “occasional sellers” and was designed to encompass people who sell guns “as a profession.” Among the factors that would determine whether someone had to conduct background checks, Freilich said, would be whether they had business cards, advertised online, or sold guns in their original packaging soon after buying them. He argued that even without a specific numerical threshold, the new guidelines would be a big step forward for ATF because the old rule was so vague it was almost impossible to enforce.

To a large extent, the wide difference in scope between Obama’s executive action on immigration and guns stems from a consensus within the gun-control community about just how limited his legal options were. Hardly any advocates on Tuesday complained that he should have done more. “He did as much as he could do,” said Elizabeth Avore, legal director of Everytown for Gun Safety. Along with several other gun-control advocacy organizations, Everytown has pushed hard to create a universal background check system that would encompass all buyers and sellers. “That requires legislative action,” she said.

Looming over the deliberations over gun policy was the fact that the much more expansive actions Obama took on immigration have been blocked by the courts, and the administration must now rely on a favorable Supreme Court ruling to see them implemented. At the same time, if the changes are so clearly legal and sensible, the question naturally becomes, why didn’t the president make them before?

Neither the advocates nor Obama tried to argue that any of the changes he announced would have stopped the myriad mass shootings that have occurred during his presidency and prompted his aggressive public push for congressional action on guns. Yet even as Obama acknowledged the limits of his power, he grew animated at the suggestion that even the most modest efforts to prevent gun violence were futile.    

Each time this comes up, we are fed the excuse that common-sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last massacre, or the one before that, or the one before that, so why bother trying?  I reject that thinking. We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world.  But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.

It’s an appeal the president has now made repeatedly, and it cut to the point of his announcement. The steps he is taking might not amount to much in substance, but they can at least reignite the gun debate at the outset of an election year. (They also are likely to spur another spike in gun sales.) As with the immigration move in 2014, Obama’s decision to act unilaterally is a reflection that the window for any congressional action has closed.

And to the extent the regulatory and administrative changes are worth hyping, it’s because the standard for any action on guns has been so low. “The sad fact is that because Congress really has done nothing in the face of repeated tragedy and gun violence, this is the most significant federal reform to gun policy in the last two decades,” Freilich said. “It is modest, but meaningful.”

Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr and the Forgotten Shiites of Saudi Arabia

The execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr has not only precipitated a new diplomatic crisis between Saudi Arabia and Iran, it also puts Saudi Arabia’s little-known, beleaguered Shia population into the spotlight. It seems like an anomaly—a Shia minority in a country founded on and nearly synonymous with hardline Sunni Wahhabism. But an estimated 10 to 15 percent of Saudi Arabia’s 31 million residents are Shia. Nimr made his name and lost his life speaking out on behalf of the group.

The myth of an endless conflict between Sunnis and Shiites across the Middle East ever since the Battle of Karbala has been ably debunked by various writers, who point to far more modern roots—perhaps 1979 and the Iranian Revolution— for the divide. In Saudi Arabia, however, the battle between Shiites and Sunnis runs back at least a century. The country’s Shia population is concentrated in al-Ahsa, an eastern province. The area abuts Bahrain, where Shiites make up a majority of the population but the ruling family is Sunni.

Ibn Saud’s forces conquered al-Ahsa in 1913, before the founding of the modern Saudi state. At that time, Wahhabist militias affiliated with him began cracking down on Shiites, destroying burial sites, trying to force conversions, and destroying mosques, writes David Commins. In response, some Shiites left for Bahrain or Iraq, but many remained. The region remains one of Saudi Arabia’s poorest. Nimr was born in the village of al-Awamiyah, in al-Ahsa, in 1960.

Tension between Sunnis and Shiites in Saudi Arabia (and elsewhere) increased following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which replaced the shah’s government with a theocratic regime, the Council on Foreign Relations says:

The transformation of Iran into an overtly Shia power after the Islamic revolution induced Saudi Arabia to accelerate the propagation of Wahhabism, as both countries revived a centuries-old sectarian rivalry over the true interpretation of Islam. Many of the groups responsible for sectarian violence that has occurred in the region and across the Muslim world since 1979 can be traced to Saudi and Iranian sources.

One estimate found that since 1979, the Saudi government had jailed, exiled, or executed hundreds of Shiites. “Saudi recruits for al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group are often motivated by a desire to contain Shiism and stem Iranian influence in the region—strategic objectives that Saudi media perpetuates ad infinitum,” writes Toby Mathiessen. “Anti-Shiite (and anti-Christian and anti-Jewish) incitement is spread across the region by Saudi-based television channels.”

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How the Execution of a Shia Cleric Is Roiling the Middle East

At the same time the revolution, in 1979, Nimr was leaving Saudi Arabia to study in Iran, as many Shia clerics do. He returned in 1994, where The Guardian reports he became well known to state security but remained otherwise obscure: “The kingdom’s intelligence services questioned him frequently, largely over his calls for increased religious freedom. He was eventually detained in 2003 for leading public prayers in his home village, where he had become an imam.”

In August 2008, a State Department official made a call on Nimr in al-Awamiyah. “The always controversial sheikh has gained extra attention over the past months by calling in bolder-than-usual terms for an end to anti-Shi'a discrimination in Saudi Arabia, and by seemingly endorsing the Iranian regime, its nuclear ambitions, and its increasingly active role in the region,” the official wrote in a cable released by Wikileaks. But the cable noted that “Al-Nimr is typically regarded as a second-tier political player in the Eastern Province.” The official noted that Nimr had been deploying anti-American rhetoric in his sermons more recently, but in person seemed far less implacably opposed to the United States—perhaps unsurprisingly, given that he was meeting with an American diplomat.

Nimr was overshadowed by more prominent Shiites—on one side, Hassan al-Saffar, who favored dialogue and reconciliation with the Saudi monarchy, and on the other by groups like Saudi Hezbollah that unapologetically backed violence against the state. Nimr told the State Department that the interfaith efforts were a “sham” and argued that only instability and tumult—rather than gradual change—would better the position of Saudi Shiites. But he hedged on whether he backed violence:

When asked by [a State Department political officer] as to whether his tough talk promoted violence or simply warned of it as a possible repercussion of continued discontent in the Shi'a community, al-Nimr responded that if a conflict were to occur he would "side with the people, never with the government." He continued by saying that though he will always choose the side of the people, this does not necessarily mean that he will always support all of the people's actions, for example, violence.

The State Department cable added Nimr was gaining popularity among young people. His stature grew in spring 2009, after Shia pilgrims clashed with security forces in Medina over access to holy sites; Nimr denounced the security forces, but then was forced to go into hiding to avoid arrest. By January 2010, the State Department reported in another cable that Nimr had returned home and was living under something like house arrest. The diplomat, who wrote that cable, judged that Nimr had overestimated his sway, gone too big, and as a result had lost his influence. A neighbor said that the government “chose not to pursue him further out of concern they would elevate his status.”

The government changed its ignore-them-and-they’ll-go-away stance on Shia rabble-rousers once the Arab Spring began. In Bahrain, Shia protests threatened the stability of the regime, and the Sunni regimes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sent troops to help quell uprisings. But protests also spread from Bahrain into the kingdom. Nimr preached forcefully against the regime, and was rare in speaking up both in favor of the domestic protests and those in Bahrain.

“In any place he rules—Bahrain, here, in Yemen, in Egypt, or in any place—the unjust ruler is hated,” Nimr said. “Whoever defends the oppressor is his partner with him in oppression, and whoever is with the oppressed shares with him his reward from God.” He also denounced the king and his family as “tyrants,” saying: “We don’t accept al-Saud as rulers. We don’t accept them and want to remove them.”

In another 2011 speech, Nimr said, “From the day I was born and to this day, I’ve never felt safe or secure in this country. We are not loyal to other countries or authorities, nor are we loyal to this country. What is this country? The regime that oppresses me? The regime that steals my money, sheds my blood, and violates my honor?”

“From the day I was born and to this day, I’ve never felt safe or secure in this country.”

That was all too much for the regime, and in 2012 it moved to arrest him. But during his apprehension, police claimed they came under fire. Nimr was shot in the leg. He was charged with sedition and various terrorism-related crimes. In his absence and persecution, Nimr’s popularity soared. There were “near-nightly protests [at his mosque] and elsewhere in the Eastern Province,” wrote Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2013. “Nimr speaks to what we are feeling in hearts,” a young activist told Wehrey. A cleric added, “Awamiya is just the opening of the volcano, and you don’t judge the size of the volcano from its opening.” Wehrey reported little change in the area since the height of the 2011 demonstrations. Many Shiites put more faith in interfaith dialogue than did Nimr, but they were frustrated by reticence among hardline Sunnis.

Protests once again died down. Then, on October 15, 2014, Nimr was sentenced to death, and unrest broke out again. The timing of the sentence baffled some observers, who said it was simply stoking resentment all over again. Matthiessen suggested it might be an attempt to assuage criticism over the Saudi government’s sentencing of Sunni alleged terrorists to death—evidence for naysayers that Sunnis and Shiites alike would be dealt with harshly. The sentence also drew condemnation from Iran.

(Since then, Saudi Arabia and Iran have been in frequent tension on a variety of matters: the Iranian nuclear deal, a diplomatic effort to bring peace to Syria, and the deadly stampede at the Hajj in September.)

Nimr’s execution, along with 46 others, on Sunday once again jumpstarted protests that had gone dormant. This time, however, the backlash wasn’t just in al-Ahsa—it was in Bahrain, and in Lebanon, and from Yemen’s Houthi rebels, a Shia insurgency that has been targeted by months of Saudi bombings. And it was in Iran, where demonstrators marched in the streets and sacked and burned the Saudi embassy, triggering a break in diplomatic relations. The immediate effect of the execution and protests has been to make the Middle East into an even less stable place than it seemed before. Once again, the broader geopolitical turbulence has overshadowed Saudi Arabia’s Shiites.

Sexual Assaults in Germany and the Debate Over Refugees

Outrage is growing in Germany over the reported sexual harassment of and assaults on women in the city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve that police have blamed on as many as 1,000 men of “Arab or North African” background.

The attacks—and robberies—allegedly occurred in Cologne’s historic square, which lies between the city’s main train station and its cathedral. News reports say 90 criminal complaints, including one of rape, were made at the city’s police department. Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, has spoken with some of the women who say they were assaulted.

Wolfgang Albers, the police chief, told DPA, the German news agency, the incidents were “an intolerable situation” for the city of 1 million, which is one of Germany’s most diverse. And Henriette Reker, Cologne’s mayor, said: “We cannot tolerate this development of lawlessness.”

Reker, city officials, and police met Tuesday to discuss the incidents. Deutsche Welle adds:

The police is currently analyzing footage from surveillance cameras as well as from photos and videos victims and witnesses took on their smart phones. But the police say it was impossible to catch perpetrators at the scene since the square was too crowded for victims to recognize the men.

For months, Cologne police has had an eye on groups of young North African pickpockets operating in Cologne in groups of threes or fours. A big organized group like the one on New Year's Eve, however, is something "totally new," police investigators said.

It’s unclear why the incidents came to light only this week. Similar incidents were reported on New Year’s Eve in Hamburg and Stuttgart, German media reported, though on a smaller scale.

Some in the country are drawing a link between the alleged ethnic identity of the attackers—“Arab or North African”—and the more than 1 million migrants and refugees, many of them from the Middle East and North Africa, who entered the country in 2015.

Groups that oppose migration into Germany said the incidents in Cologne showcased the dangers of accepting large numbers of migrants. Lutz Bachmann, who heads the anti-immigrant Pegida movement, blamed the German leadership for the alleged assaults.

Merkel, Beck, Gabriel, Gauck usw... IHR HABT ALLE MIT MISSBRAUCHT IN KÖLN & HAMBURG! #

Shannara, Star Wars, and the Burden of Fantasy

Watching the first three episodes of MTV’s new series The Shannara Chronicles, I kept thinking about Star Wars. When the naive country boy Wil learned of the heroism and sad fate of a father he barely knew, I thought of Luke Skywalker’s original impression of Anakin. When the young princess Amberle (also orphaned, also chosen for greatness by destiny) faced a supernatural trial where she loses “if she succumbs to her fear,” I thought of Luke’s trial in the cave on Dagobah. At one point, even, I swore I heard Darth Vader’s breathing in the score.

I also thought a lot about Tolkien, Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, and the Terry Brooks novels upon which the show is based and that I fuzzily remember reading in early adolescence. Elves, druids, magic, demons—as the AV Club’s review smartly puts it, the show could easily be a drinking game about fantasy tropes.

It’s worth recognizing the two categories of tropes mentioned above. There are the storyline intangibles, the characters’ quests and destinies and dead parents—narrative shapes that, a lot of people argue, appeal universally. And then there are the nouns—gnomes! changelings!—used to build the world in which those narratives unfolds. The fact that the mostly inert The Shannara Chronicles is utterly familiar on both levels is a reminder that a truly vibrant fantasy story requires some sort of invention.

It should be noted that it’s possible the show could become an MTV hit. Though it’s based on a novel released in 1982, Shannara is aimed at teens who may be better versed in the universes of The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner (both of which the show’s opening scene heavily recalls) than Lord of the Rings. Maybe for those viewers, the pointy-eared elves and spell books and hints of a long-ago apocalypse detailed in the show’s brisk and lucid scenes will scan as intrinsically interesting. Or maybe it’ll just be enough to take in the blank acting of the handsome, doe-eyed leads who get into an improbable number of situations that require them to interact while naked.

For most others—even adults with some affinity for the Shannara books or fantasy in general—the show should be pretty boring. When Amberle faces a mystical test of her meddle, or when Wil decides he wants no part of the grand conflict he’s been swept into, the only tension for viewers comes from wondering how quickly these obligatory plot waymarkers will be passed by (thankfully, in both cases, it’s very quickly). In order to get truly lost in this world, you’d have to shut off your memory.

But its rote-ness does help shed a light on the virtues of some of the works Shannara will be compared to. After watching this show, Game of Thrones seems all the more remarkable, not because it avoids its genre’s cliches—it doesn’t, entirely—but because it obscures them, or stretches them out, or in some cases totally upends them. Five seasons into that show, you still can’t confidently say that there is a “chosen one” character. Does destiny play a role at all? The answer could well turn out to be no, and if it’s a yes, it’s not a yes that was revealed in the first hour of the show. This uncertainty, the feeling that anything could happen, helps make a world otherwise made up of borrowed elements feel novel, absorbing.

Plot uncertainty can make an otherwise familiar world feel exciting. An unfamiliar world can make a predictable plot wondrous.

Conversely, Star Wars shows how an unfamiliar world can make a predictable plot feel wondrous. The first three films indulged in mythic-formula storytelling but placed it in a magical junkyard future that seemed surprising, different, bizarre. Now, The Force Awakens has ignited a debate about whether it’s okay for Star Wars to forgo further world-building. If it is okay, it’s only because of how sturdy and inimitable George Lucas’s original universe was. For a lot of people, the trappings of the 1977 Star Wars remains fresh enough to thrill; though the franchise has reshaped pop culture, lightsabers and TIE Fighters haven’t quite been as pervasively knocked off as Tolkien’s elvish cities and enchanted swords have been. As for the storytelling: The Force Awakens apes A New Hope apes Joseph Campbell, but the the archetypal heroes themselves represent a small innovation. Finn, Rey, and even Kylo Ren have unique and memorable personalities that the cardboard-like Shannara kids so far lack (the show even winks at the possibility that the two strong female leads might get mixed up).

I remember loving the Shannara books when I was younger, but all I really now remember about them is the fact that the story’s so-called “elf stones” (glowing pebbles with special powers) were awesome because you could imagine digging them up in your own backyard. In the show, though, they seem like cheap, plastic props. Maybe that can be chalked up to my changed perspective, or maybe it’s just a result of bland filmmaking. What’s clear is that The Shannara Chronicles has yet to remake the familiar into that thing all great fantasies require: something fantastic.

Obama's Emotional Speech on Gun Control

President Obama announced Tuesday new measures that he said would curb gun violence across the country.

Read Follow-Up Notes Watch a guided version of Obama’s speech from James Fallows

“People are dying,” the president said. “And the constant excuses for inaction no longer do, no longer suffice. That is why we are here today. Not to debate the last mass shooting, but to do something to prevent the next one.”

Obama said his executive action would leverage existing law that requires all licensed gun sellers to carry out background checks of potential buyers. The president wants to make “anybody in the business of selling firearms” register as a licensed dealer. Such criteria would mean more oversight, particularly for people selling guns over the Internet, which could mean more buyers would be subject to background checks.

Obama said the FBI will hire more employees to work on the national background-check system; White House officials have promised that checks will be processed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The administration will also improve the process by which states submit mental-health records to the system, and fund research of gun-safety technology, he said.

“If we have the technology to unlock your phone without the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same for our guns?” Obama said Tuesday. “If a child can’t open up a bottle of aspirin, we should make sure that they can’t pull the trigger on a gun.”

The president spoke in the East Room of the White House, flanked by families of gun-violence victims, as well as gun-control activists. He spoke for more than half an hour, referencing places whose names have become synonymous with tragedy: Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, Charleston, San Bernardino.

Obama grew emotional as he recalled the deaths of 20 children at a Connecticut elementary school at the hands of a gunman in 2012.

“Our unalienable right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness were stripped from college kids in Blacksburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers in Columbine, and from first-graders in Newtown. First-graders. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from their lives by a bullet of a gun,” Obama said, pausing to wipe away tears. “Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad. And by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago everyday.”

Watch the full speech:

Obama compared the push for greater gun control in the United States to the movements that abolished slavery, gave women the right to vote, and granted equal rights to LGBT people. “It won’t happen in this Congress, it won’t happen in my presidency,” he said. “But a lot of things don’t happen overnight.”

Obama criticized Republicans and gun-control opponents who say the president is disregarding the Second Amendment, injecting some sarcasm into a mostly solemn speech. “I taught constitutional law,” he said. “I know a little bit about this.”

The president was introduced by Mark Barden, whose son Daniel was killed in Newtown. In the wake of that shooting, Obama announced 23 executive initiatives related to gun violence. In the months after the massacre, a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks for gun purchases, far more than Obama’s latest measure would, was introduced in Congress. The proposal was defeated in the Senate in spring 2013.

“The gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage right now, but they can’t hold America hostage,” Obama said Tuesday.

According to an October Gallup poll, 86 percent of Americans support the idea of laws that would require universal background checks for gun buyers. But Americans are split on whether such regulation would reduce the number of mass shootings in the nations.

Obama will hold a town hall-style meeting on gun violence on Thursday in Fairfax, Virginia. A week from now, he will deliver his final State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress, where he is expected to raise the issue again.

The Joys of Basic Television

If you’re employing the traditional, critical definition of “good,” Superstore is not a good TV show. The NBC sitcom, which premieres this week after a teaser aired late last year, is not especially innovative (it’s The Office, essentially, only set in a Walmart-esque big-box store). It is not especially subtle. It is not especially deep, or empowering, or ambiguous, or empathetic, or generous, or quirky, or any other of the traits that might, in combination, merit discussion of it in optimistically literary terms. On the contrary: Superstore’s characters rely pretty heavily on stereotype; its ratio of landed to non-landed jokes is pretty average; its tone vacillates in a way that suggests that its creators and writers are still figuring out what their show is going, and trying, to be. Its ambition, on the whole, seems limited to the typical stuff of pleasant primetime sitcom-ery.

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And yet! Superstore is delightful! Good, even, in its way! The show is, despite and very much because of its shortcomings, extremely successful as a piece of pop-cultural confectionery. It gets some nice one-liners in (“He looks like a panda and a Disney princess had a baby”). It has some sweet, sweeping story lines (new employee Jonah, trying to rectify floor-manager Amy’s complaint that the store makes “today just like yesterday,” covers the store’s ceiling in glow-in-the-dark stars). It has a pleasing dose of wackiness (the team members playing shopping-cart polo!). It has America Ferrera, which is an objective win for any TV show. Its cast, and just as importantly its characters, are diverse, at least in relation to what sitcoms have traditionally offered.

And also: It’s fun! It’s fine! It asks just enough of its audience, which is to say not very much at all. Superstore is Applebee’s and McDonald’s and Starbucks rendered as audio-visual entertainment: It is comforting and nourishing and unsurprising and, above all, supremely confident in its own tasty mediocrity. It’s about Walmart; in some sense, it also is Walmart.

Superstore, for all its shortcomings, offers that most comforting of things: a tidily contained universe.

And: Thank goodness for that. We live, critics are fond of reminding us, in the Golden Age of Television. The age of The Wire and Breaking Bad and Orange Is the New Black and Sherlock and Master of None and Making a Murderer and the approximately 5,342 other recent shows that have elevated TV as a medium of literature and artistry. And sitcoms, traditionally the boobiest denizens of the boob tube, have gotten their own sprinkling of gold dust in all that. A lot of them, these days, are really good, in both the critical and the basic senses. Jane the Virgin is a subtle, heartfelt ode to the telenovela. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a media satire as much as it is a sitcom. Black-ish and Modern Family and Fresh off the Boat are as interested in sociology as they are entertainment, so much so that they announce their concerns in their titles.

Which is all pretty fantastic. Smart TV makes for smart audiences, and vice versa. The only problem, though, is that sometimes viewers, curling up on the couch after a long day of working and/or school-going and/or kid-raising and/or life-living, don’t want something smart. Sometimes you don’t want literature. Sometimes you just want something that’s funny, and entertaining, and thoughtless, and above all easy. Sometimes you just want a sitcom that takes the core premise of the situational comedy—wacky characters, placed into wacky situations—and runs with it. Sometimes you just want something basic. Sometimes you just want Walmart.

And that, in every sense, is what Superstore offers. The show is about a mishmash of employees in a big-box store—nothing less, and really not much more. Plot lines include a wedding-stuff sale that coincides with a proposal to a (pregnant, teenage) employee. And the store’s Michael Scott-esque manager going out of his way to show his okay-ness with the gay couple who attend that sale. And the store becoming the subject of a trade magazine profile. The scope of all these shenanigans is small, reassuringly so. The characters, and stories, are self-referential.

Superstore, for all of its shortcomings, offers that most comforting of things: a tidily contained universe.

Sometimes you just want Walmart.  

In that, the show is somewhat—in Susan Sontag’s definition—campy. It has a whiff (Deborah Solomon’s) of “bad art.” More than anything else, though, it is, like so many other sitcoms both recently premiered and long-running, from The Grinder to Grandfathered to New Girl to The Big Bang Theory … simply fine. In that good way! Superstore glories in its own mediocrity. Its stakes are wonderfully low. And that, these days, is its own kind of value. The Golden Age of Television is also, not at all coincidentally, the Internet Age—an age that has, on top of everything else, made cultural criticism both extremely commonplace and especially fervent. As a result, even TV-viewing—formerly that most passive of activities—has become inflected with the web’s “hot takes” and “outrage culture” and the general opinion industrial complex. Couch-potato-ing has become, almost by default, interactive. Which is wonderful, and liberating, and democratizing, but also occasionally exhausting.

Superstore, and the precious few sitcoms that share its concise ambitions, offer a nice antidote to all that. They’re a throwback to what television used to be before everything got so interactive: small, easy, and gloriously two-dimensional.  

Killing Fields: A Real-Life True Detective

Discovery’s new true-crime series, Killing Fields, unfolds in the picturesque bayous of Louisiana, where dragonflies buzz around swamps in the drowsy sun. But the loveliness of the landscape hides a terrible reality, as a local warns in the pilot episode: Thanks to the decomposing effects of heat, humidity, and fauna, the wetlands are a well-known dumping ground for dead bodies.

Hence the show’s title. Killing Fields follows an active homicide investigation unfolding amid the sinister terrain of the Creole State, most recently romanticized by the first season of True Detective. The six-episode documentary series revolves around Detective Rodie Sanchez, who’s come out of retirement to work a cold case he failed to solve back in 1997: A young woman named Eugenie Boisfontaine had been missing for three months before her body was found in a bayou with signs of blunt-force trauma to the head. In August last year, her case was reopened, and Sanchez, with the help of a younger detective, Aubrey St. Angelo, is hoping to keep the promise he made to Boisfontaine’s mother to find her killer. The people are real, the case is real, the place is real, and yet Killing Fields has the veneer of fiction to it—partly due to the natural tendency of human beings to view themselves as characters in their own stories, but also due to some unfortunately heavy-handed production choices.

For one thing, it’s hard not to notice how characterly the two leads are. Much of the first two episodes is spent painting a picture of Sanchez’s devotion to the case—he explains how his career cost him five marriages, he wipes tears from his face when he revisits the place where Boisfontaine’s body was discovered, and he rails frequently against the “son of a bitch” who killed her. His dynamic with St. Angelo is that of the gruff veteran cop trying to teach the young hotshot (the actual word the show uses) a thing or two about how police work used to be. Jokes about their age difference ensue. “I never thought I’d be partnering up with somebody who got an AARP card,” St. Angelo tells the camera. And later: “He’s Yellow Pages, and I’m Google.”

And then there’s the investigation itself, helped by a team of detectives from Iberville Parish. Old leads are chased down, suspect profiles considered, criminal informants summoned, DNA submitted for testing, flyers posted, and sonar testing conducted. At face value, it’s compelling stuff, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how cops do their jobs. Plus there’s a solid justification for reopening the case now, with all the advancements in technology since the ’90s . But the show’s “real-time” nature has its drawbacks. Good police work takes time, meaning Killing Fields doesn’t have many new details. So it resorts to somewhat repetitive filler scenes where Sanchez sits outside at night with a drink in his hand, speculating about the murder, or working through his feelings about the case.

Because good police work takes time, Killing Fields isn’t very dense with new details.

It’s tempting to lump the show in with pop culture’s recent crop of true-crime entries. But Killing Fields isn’t quite like the first season of the podcast Serial, HBO’s The Jinx, or Netflix’s Making a Murderer. For one thing, it doesn’t have the same highbrow feel, despite its preoccupation with stylish visuals. It’s hard to get lost in the story when the music—shimmering cymbals, booming percussion, atmospheric strings—crashes in every 30 seconds or so to underpin the Dramatic Stakes. There’s no narrator, and the dialogue often feels unnatural. A sample voicemail left for Sanchez: “Hey, the sheriff gave us the go ahead to reopen the Boisfontaine case, buddy. He’s going to reinstate your ass to work it, too. I’m going to need you at the office tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. Hope you got one more in you, baby.”

Meanwhile, anyone who’s even remotely familiar with True Detective’s first season will recognize parallels: the buddy-ish partnering of two cops on the hunt for a young woman’s killer, the curious locals they encounter along the way, the weighty pontificating about what it means to be law enforcement, the exhilarating aerial shots of a car racing down a dirt road. But the heavily fictionalized aesthetic of the show makes it that much more difficult to connect with Killing Fields as reality. Though the Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson (Diner; Good Morning, Vietnam) and the Emmy-winner Tom Fontana (Oz) are on board as executive producers, it’s notable that the show doesn’t have much in the way of journalistic or documentary credentials. As Matt Brennan aptly noted at Indiewire of true crime’s surge in popularity:

What was once a fixture of arthouse cinemas and public television is now a lucrative pop-culture phenomenon, and with this transformation may come increasing pressure to “compete” in the “marketplace,” to “stick the landing,” to satisfy audience expectations. To treat docuseries as prestige dramas, however, as in the case of The Jinx, is to ask more of the truth than it can bear.

Discovery says the show will be filming until the finale, meaning no neat ending is guaranteed. But Killing Fields would have done well to let its raw material shine through without the help of melodramatic camera zoom, or moody, moonlit monologues about the “animal” who left Boisfontaine in a “raggedy-ass ditch.” Midway through the first episode, there’s a moment where the show temporarily escapes its own theatricality, when Sanchez and St. Angelo interview “Ms. Elizabeth,” who discovered Boisfontaine’s body 18 years ago. “She smelled really sweet,” is how the woman describes encountering the corpse. “God just made us smell a little sweeter, animals smell a bit muskier. It’s an ugly smell but it’s sweet.” It’s a scene Killing Fields should have more of; where the darkness of the details doesn’t need to be announced, because it speaks for itself.

The Newcomers to the Periodic Table

The world is going to need new science textbooks.

Four new elements have been added to the periodic table, finally filling out its seventh row, in a change approved by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (AIUPAC), which governs such decisions.

The elements were discovered in the past several years by researchers in Japan, Russia, and the United States, AIUPAC said in a statement on December 30. Chemists and chemistry enthusiasts are, and we mean this in the best way possible, nerding out.

“The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row,” said Jan Reedijk, a Dutch professor and president of IUPAC’s Inorganic Chemistry Division, which will now begin accepting suggestions for names and symbols for the new elements from the scientists involved the discoveries.

The new kids on the block—elements 113, 115, 117, and 118—are “superheavy,” a label given to elements with more than 104 protons. Saying that researchers “discovered” them is actually misleading—the elements do not occur in nature, and were created in laboratories using particle accelerators.

Element 113, whose temporary working name is ununtrium (Uut), was discovered by Japanese researchers at the Riken institute. Elements 115 (Uup), known as ununpentium, and 117, known as ununseptium (Uus), were discovered by researchers from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Element 118, referred to as ununoctium (Uuo), was discovered by a joint team of Dubna and Livermore researchers.

The periodic table is the most important reference for anything chemistry. Elements are arranged left to right and top to bottom in order of increasing atomic number, which is the number of protons in an atom of a given element.

The addition of the quartet comes five years after element 114, or ferovium (Fl), and element 116, livermorium (Lv), got their permanent spots on the table. Back then, in 2011, NPR offered a handy explanation of the very difficult process by which scientists create new elements these days:

Smash together atoms of two elements. Hope their nuclei fuse. If they do, you have a new element. Congratulations!

And then, you don’t. At least not until you fire up the particle accelerators and try to re-create that fusion again, which produces only a few atoms of a new element. Such artificial elements usually exist for less than a second before they decay into other elements. The atoms of element 113, for example, lasted for less than a thousandth of a second, according to the Riken. After researchers twice successfully created 113, it took seven years before they could do it again a third time.

“To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal,”

United States v. Volkswagen

The United States is suing Volkswagen for allegedly violating U.S. federal environmental laws by installing illegal software in thousands of its diesel vehicles and cheating on emissions tests.

The U.S. Justice Department, on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, on Monday filed a civil complaint against the German automaker, as well as Porsche and Audi, both part of the Volkswagen Group.

The complaint, filed in Detroit, Michigan, alleges that Volkswagen breached the Clean Air Act, a major environmental law aimed at reducing air pollution, by selling nearly 600,000 diesel-engine vehicles in the U.S. that were equipped with devices that deliberately circumvented U.S. regulations on emissions, “resulting in harmful air pollution.”

“Car manufacturers that fail to properly certify their cars and that defeat emission control systems breach the public trust, endanger public health and disadvantage competitors,” said Assistant Attorney General John Cruden, head of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, in a statement. “The United States will pursue all appropriate remedies against Volkswagen to redress the violations of our nation’s clean air laws alleged in the complaint.”

The Justice Department says the software was able to detect when a given vehicle was being tested for compliance with EPA emissions standards, and would turn on acceptable emissions controls only during that time. On the road, the cars emitted nitrogen dioxide, an air pollutant, up to 40 times the levels allowed.

The fraud came to light last September when the Obama administration ordered Volkswagen to pull 500,000 of its diesel cars off the road. The administration said U.S. regulators had found that starting in 2009, the German automaker had installed illegal software in its “clean diesel” vehicles in order to dodge emissions standards set by the EPA for certain air pollutants, like smog.

Volkswagen quickly owned up to rigging the tests, and revealed it had installed the software in 11 million cars worldwide. Its CEO, Martin Winterkorn, resigned days after the U.S. announcement. The company’s shares nosedived. Michael Horn, the company’s top U.S. executive, admitted “we have totally screwed up,” and was called to testify before the House Commerce and Energy Committee in October, where lawmakers heavily castigated him and the automaker.

A Justice Department official told Reuters on Monday the lawsuit could cost Volkswagen “billions of dollars.” The automaker has already set aside billions of euros to handle the fallout from the scandal.

George R.R. Martin Accepts the Truth

In May 2005, George R.R. Martin, the author best known for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, made a somewhat curious announcement: His book A Feast for Crows, the fourth entry in the saga, had grown so large that it had become unpublishable, and would have to be split into two books as a result. Crows came out later that year; its other half, A Dance With Dragons, finally followed six years later. So there are plenty of emotions you might feel after reading Martin’s latest blog post announcing that Dragons’ follow-up, The Winds of Winter, isn’t coming out anytime soon. Surprise shouldn’t be one of them.

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HBO's Big Game of Thrones Gamble

The thing that’s changed for Martin since 2005, of course, is the existence of Game of Thrones, the wildly popular HBO show that launched his books to even more stratospheric levels of fame. A Dance With Dragons debuted in 2011, after the first season premiered. Now, all of Martin’s books have been adapted for television, and the sixth season that returns this spring will be entering fully uncharted territory for readers and viewers alike. Some fans had held out hope that Martin could push out The Winds of Winter before the show returned, but according to Martin, he blew through an end-of-year deadline that marked the latest date he could hand his publishers the book to ensure a March release. So it’s official: Game of Thrones is going to tell Martin’s story faster than he can, and will probably conclude before he’s published all of his planned novels.

“I still thought I could do it ... but the days and weeks flew by faster than the pile of pages grew, and (as I often do) I grew unhappy with some of the choices I’d made and began to revise,” Martin wrote. “And suddenly it was October, and then November ... and as the suspicion grew that I would not make it after all, a gloom set in, and I found myself struggling even more.”

It’s easy to sympathize (who among us likes deadlines?), but even easier to offer armchair diagnosis of Martin’s problems, which the Internet has always been ready to do. His sprawling narrative of war, politicking, and revenge has only expanded with every sequel, and his gimmick of telling every chapter from the point of view of a single character makes it all the more challenging to recount events on a global scale. Martin frequently blogged about what he calls the “Meereenese knot,” a complicated bit of storytelling centered around the fictitious city of Meereen in A Dance With Dragons that took him years to untangle. With The Winds of Winter, Martin should be moving his grand saga toward a conclusion, since he has seven books planned overall. That involves tying up hundreds of story threads, so it’s no wonder that it’s taking a while.

It’s not the first time the conclusion of an epic series has been threatened by authorial issues. The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan is often cited as the worst-case scenario for a beloved fantasy saga: He spent decades writing them and died at the young age of 58, meaning the final three entries had to be assembled from his notes with the help of a co-author. Martin has always had a pithy response pre-loaded for fans who speculate about his health (namely: “Fuck you”), since much of their concern is less about his wellbeing than it is about who will finish the series. As was the case with Jordan, it’s likely Martin’s work will not be completed entirely by him—only here it’s thanks to the realities of TV scheduling, not to an early death.

It’s likely Martin’s work will not be completed entirely by him, thanks to the realities of TV scheduling.

Perhaps the most baffling sentence in Martin’s blog post about his missed deadline is this: “The show moved faster than I anticipated.” Game of Thrones, like 99 percent of television shows on the air, has produced one season per year, and five years have passed since the fifth book came out. Perhaps Martin thought it’d take longer to get through the books, since they’re narratively dense—indeed, it took two seasons (the third and fourth) to get through his mammoth third entry A Storm of Swords. But then it only took one season (the fifth) to get through the next two equally massive books combined, suggesting that while Martin’s writing remains voluminous, the amount of necessary story he’s doling out has considerably shrunk. Game of Thrones has hardly crept up on the novels, but it will now inevitably lap them.

So fans will likely first get the end of A Song of Ice and Fire as told by the TV writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss rather than Martin himself. HBO’s president, Michael Lombardo, has speculated that the show will last for eight years, and it seems pretty unlikely that Martin will write two more books between now and 2018. Of course, as the writer pointed out on his blog, the show will take different routes than his books. “Given where we are, inevitably, there will be certain plot twists and reveals in season six of Game of Thrones that have not yet happened in the books,” he wrote. “Some of the ‘spoilers’ you may encounter in season six may not be spoilers at all ... because the show and the books have diverged, and will continue to do so.”

Nonetheless, Martin has been upfront about telling Benioff and Weiss where he imagines the series will end up, and they’ll follow his road map in the broadest sense. So, the only real news Martin offered in his blog post was an official declaration that his book wasn’t yet finished. It was a fact that Martin appeared to be in denial about for a long time, however obvious it might have been to many frustrated readers. In 2014, he speculated to Vanity Fair that he could still catch up with the show, providing a timeline that seemed wildly unrealistic. Clearly, his attitude has shifted. As disheartening as his announcement is, the bright side is that now that Martin has accepted the facts, he can finally turn his attention to making the end of his series the best it can be. “Winds of Winter should be pretty good too, when it comes out,” he said in his blog post. “As good as I can make it, anyway ... Enjoy the show. Enjoy the books. Meanwhile, I'll keep writing. Chapter at a time. Page at a time. Word at a time. That’s all I know how to do.”