Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 270

'Sussex Carol’: A Reminder of Christmas Music's Local Roots

Welcome to The 12 Days of Christmas Songs: an attempt to uncover the forgotten history of some of the most memorable festive tunes. From December 14 through 25, we’ll be tackling one secular song and one holy song each day.

Before the globalization of Christmas, before widespread literacy, there was no canon of Christmas songs. Instead, seasonal music was local. In Britain, there were regional and village songs, preserved over decades and centuries in the oral tradition. Often, they were part of mystery plays, pageants performed each year.

The 12 Days of Christmas Songs Reflections on the music of the season, both secular and sacred
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“In several parts of England I have found carols which are peculiar to certain villages, by the inhabitants of which they are regarded as private possessions of great value, to be jealously guarded and retained for their own use,” the folklorist Cecil Sharp wrote in 1911, in the introduction to a collection of carols. Sharp lamented that already they were fading away: “Unhappily, like many another ancient traditional custom, that of Christmas carol singing by parties of men and women in the village streets is gradually disappearing. At one time, and not so very long ago, the number of carols that were sung in this way in different parts of England must have been very large.”

But a few of these carols do persist: for example, the Wexford Carol, the Coventry Carol, or the Sussex Carol. The last is one of my favorites. The words carry an unbridled joy, untroubled by the greater theological impact of Christ’s birth, but that isn’t because they possess what Sharp called “the freshness, the naiveté,” of folk carols—they were written in the 17th century by Luke Wadding, an Irish priest.

They were adapted for a carol not only in Sussex, in southeastern England, but also in Gloucester, on the other side of the country. (Each version differs slightly.) Sharp collected a tune in Gloucester, which he published. But Ralph Vaughan Williams, a folk-song collector and church composer, in 1919 collected a separate tune in Monk’s Gate, Sussex, which is the well-known version. It has a delighted, mirthful lilt, thanks to its unusual rhythm—the song is mostly in waltz-like 6/4 time, save one, irregular, syncopated bar late in each verse. (Vaughan Williams marked in 9/4.) “Then why should men on earth be so sad?” It’s true: It is very hard to imagine feeling sad while listening to the carol.

Taxpayer Funds and the Walter Scott Settlement

Earlier this year, the city of North Charleston agreed upon a $6.5 million settlement in the civil suit brought forth by the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man who was shot to death while running away from a police officer last April. The high-profile killing of the 50-year-old South Carolina man was infamously caught on camera.

This week, Scott’s family filed papers to finalize the settlement. The documents provide some insights into how the massive payout would be constructed. The first and most salient point of interest is the role of taxpayer funds. According to the Post & Courier, all but $1 million of the settlement will come from a city fund. “The S.C. Insurance Reserve Fund, which backs many governments in the state, will [also] contribute $1 million,” the report noted, which is “the maximum allowed by law.”

Major settlements between city governments and the families of black men killed by police are an increasingly common consequence of a horrifying trend in recent months. As my colleague Matt Ford noted back in October, “the Scott family’s settlement is comparable to those received by families in other cases of officer killings of unarmed black men. New York City settled a lawsuit by Eric Garner’s family in July for $5.9 million. Baltimore agreed to pay $6.4 million to the family of Freddie Gray in September.”

These settlements have also skyrocketed at a staggering rate in the past five years. In July, a study of public records by The Wall Street Journal revealed that cities with the ten largest police departments in the country paid nearly $250 million in settlements in 2014, a steady increase from 2010 when they paid out $168 million. “Those cities collectively paid out $1.02 billion over those five years in such cases, which include alleged beatings, shootings and wrongful imprisonment,” the report noted.

Some officials have pointed to the closing of old cases while others have cited the rise of video footage as a reason for the surge in settlements.

With regard to recent high-profile cases, some might argue that these large settlements have become a grim stand-in for justice. Earlier this month, protestors gathered in New York City to protest the one-year anniversary of a grand jury’s decision to not indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. And, earlier this week, a mistrial was declared in the trial of Officer William Porter, the first of six Baltimore officers to be charged in the death of Freddie Gray.

Following the death of Walter Scott, Michael Slager was immediately fired from the North Charleston Police Department. He is being kept in jail until late next year when his trial is slated to begin. As Ford observed, “Civil lawsuits brought by the families of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Akai Gurley in New York City, and Michael Brown in Ferguson are ongoing.”

When a Record-Breaking Box-Office Opening Isn't Enough

On Saturday, the first box-office figures from Star Wars: The Force Awakens streamed in, revealing the flick to be the unprecedented sales smash that many expected. “The $120.5 million opening day for Star Wars marks the largest Friday, opening day and single day records previously held by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 at $91 million,” reported Brad Brevat.

In just one day, the film also hauled in an estimated quarter of a billion dollars globally, giving it an early shot to challenge Avatar ($2.8 billion) as the high-grossing film of all-time. Fans and critics alike are already giving it an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

But even as Star Wars sat poised to beat Jurassic World for the biggest opening weekend ever in North America, Disney shares dropped on Friday, the same day that film was released. As Fortune noted, the company’s shares dropped “4 percent, as the overall market also suffered declines, with the S&P 500 down 1.8 percent.”

As it turns out, there’s a disturbance in the Disney force. EU anti-trust regulators are banging on the door and, on Friday, BTIG downgraded Disney to “sell.” In a note, Richard Greenfield, one of the firm’s analysts said that if Star Wars fails to reach the $2 billion threshold, the company would fall short of its forecasts for 2016. (Another firm, Nomura, politely disagreed.)

This gripe has little to do with Jedis and everything to do with cord-cutters, which have made Disney’s long-term investment in sports seem like serious baggage. Quoting Greenfield, Deadline noted:

Cable networks, led by ESPN, account for 44% of the company’s operating income. The sports channel “now appears poised to become Disney’s most troubled business as consumer behavior shifts rapidly” to digital video... The company recently said that Nielsen data show that the channel lost about 3.2% of its subscribers this year.

Almost three years ago, in explaining why the cost of cable is so high, my colleague Derek Thompson explained that the answer lies in sports programming and, in particular, ESPN. “Television economics are sports economics, and sports economics are television economics,” he wrote.

A lot has changed since then as more people, particularly the younger set, have ditched the expensive cable bundle to rely on digital-streaming services for their entertainment. And, in an Anakin-like switch, it’s now entertainment must help offset the cost of sports instead of the other way around.

Bernie Sanders and the DNC Make Peace for Now

The Democratic National Committee and the Bernie Sanders campaign reached a late-night deal on Friday that restores the candidate's access to crucial voter files, slightly mitigating one crisis ahead of what many already expect to be a more tense Democratic debate on Saturday evening than the DNC wants.

On Friday morning, the DNC blocked the Sanders campaign from accessing its own data after a glitch allowed staffers from the Sanders team to view Hillary Clinton’s propriety voter data for about 30 minutes. Only after the Sanders campaign filed a lawsuit did the two sides come together.

In a statement, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced the agreement, but held that it was only restoring access because the Sanders campaign had supplied information about the data breach and promised to cooperate in an investigation.

Based on this information, we are restoring the Sanders campaign’s access to the voter file, but will continue to investigate to ensure that the data that was inappropriately accessed has been deleted and is no longer in possession of the Sanders campaign.

The Sanders campaign saw it differently. On Friday evening, the campaign crowed that the DNC had “capitulated.” Jeff Weaver, the campaign’s manager added,“We are extremely pleased that the DNC has reversed its outrageous decision.”

At least one senior Sanders staffer has been let go since the breach was discovered. Weaver, who has already accused the DNC of helping the Clinton campaign, said the committee should shoulder the blame for the incident because it failed to keep the data secure.

Star Wars: The Feminism Awakens

In an early scene in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Han Solo and his newest protégé, Rey, prepare to fight a collection of Storm Troopers. Han hands her a blaster. “You might need this,” he says. Rey shoots him an are-you-kidding-me look. “I think I can handle myself,” she says. Han shoots back: “That’s why I’m giving it to you.”

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens Is a Mashup Masterpiece

Aaaaaand there it is. With that brief exchange, the big questions about the new Star Wars and women—would there, uh, be any? Would the film find a way to update Leia’s (in)famous bikini? Would the franchise, under J.J. Abrams, give audiences a female character they can finally feel un-weird about liking?—got its answer. Rey, the tantalizingly de-surnamed woman played by the Hollywood newcomer Daisy Ridley, may have been dubbed “Star Wars’s first female protagonist,” but that isn’t strictly correct: The franchise has had its Leias and its Padmes. What Rey is, however, is Star Wars’s first feminist protagonist. No distressing damsel, she’s instead a fighter and a survivor and a nurturer and an all-around badass. She may fit the trope-happy cliches of Hollywood lady-ry—the “empowered woman,” the Strong Female Lead—but she’s also something both simpler and more meaningful: a fully realized character. Rey is a woman who refuses to be defined as one.

(Some discussion of minor plot points follow.) When audiences first meet Rey, she’s living on Jakku, a desert (and mostly deserted) planet. She’s a scavenger—she trades scrap metal for rehydratable bread—and a pilot. She is clothed (and remains clothed for almost all of The Force Awakens) in typical apocalypse chic: pants and a tunic made of sun-bleached fabric, bands that extend the length of her arms, thick-soled boots, a leather belt looped several times around her waist. She is, all in all, vaguely feral. (In an early scene, she eats some of her barter-bread in a way that makes clear she’s been on her own for a very long time.)

And then: Through dumb luck (or, this being Star Wars, maybe something more), Rey encounters a droid, BB-8, who holds the secrets to the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker. And then, via BB-8, she encounters Finn, a former Storm Trooper who (through desperation and dumb luck) has escaped conscription to the First Order. They end up, with Han Solo (more dumb luck!), teaming up with the Resistance. Which is also to say: They all end up fighting a lot of baddies.

Rey has neither the luxury nor the burden of being a damsel in distress; she is too busy surviving.

And Rey proves herself to be, in extremely short order, extremely adept as a fighter. She is brave. She is smart. She is resourceful. She is a pilot of Soloian skill. She has a ninja-like command of a bow staff.

The plot of The Force Awakens, in fact, revolves around—relies on—Rey’s martial abilities. It also gently mocks the characters who would doubt those abilities. Finn, in particular, repeatedly attempts to inject chivalry into situations where chivalry is drastically out of place. During a fight the pair has against the First Order troopers, he runs over to Rey in an attempt to rescue her—only to realize that her attackers have already been neatly dispatched with. When Finn grabs her hand as they flee, she snaps, “I know how to run without you holding my hand.” (A few moments later: “Stop taking my hand!”) When Finn asks her, after another battle with intergalactic baddies, “Are you okay?” she shoots him a why-wouldn’t-I-be look. She replies, simply, “Yeah.”

They’re good jokes, but also loaded ones. Rey, after all, has been surviving all this time not just without her family—they left Jakku years ago, and she’s waiting for them to return—but also without, for the most part, a society. And extreme self-sufficiency has a way of putting social conventions into relief. The broader joke embedded in all these small ones is that all the stuff that makes for chivalry (and inequalities, and patriarchy, and if you stretch things only a teeny bit, maybe even gender itself) is itself extremely contingent. It would never occur to Rey that she would be in need of chivalry’s attentions. She has neither the luxury nor the burden of being a damsel in distress; she’s too busy surviving. She fights alongside men and women and droids, superficial matters of identity—clothing, appearance, even gender—all subsumed under bigger questions that come down to, basically: “Can you fight?”

Rey’s feminism is not insistent; it is not obvious. It is, instead, that most powerful of things: simply there.

Her styling, too, reflects all that. Rey, whose name evokes suns and kings and friendship, wears no (visible) makeup. She keeps her hair slicked back. Everything about her appearance, besides the stuff she can’t help, is designed to accomplish one thing, and one thing only: survival. Rey is beautiful (this is Hollywood; there is at this point no other choice for a blockbuster heroine), but her beauty is presented as merely incidental. It is, in the Star Wars universe, very much beside the point.

And that, in its way, is the point! Star Wars heroines will always, on some level, reflect the feminism of their times (though, granted, the sample set here is pretty much three). Leia, clad alternately in a flowing muumuu and a metal bikini, reflected the social upheavals of the women’s movement. She fought and she fawned. Padme, clad in thick robes and a mid-riff bearing white shirt, did pretty much the same thing. She embodied an era that wasn’t quite sure whether feminism and femininity could peacefully co-exist.

Previous Star Wars films went out of their way to empower their ladycharacters, to make them strong and self-sufficient and generally badass. They, like Rey, know their way around a blaster. And yet: They are also damsely! And pretty awkwardly needy! They operate at extremes, vacillating between strength and helplessness, between objectification and empowerment. They spend very little time in the middle. It’s no accident that one of the lines that’s endured from the original trilogy is Leia’s “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.” It’s also no accident that Padme, a queen and a senator, has been dubbed one of “Hollywood’s 5 Saddest Attempts at Feminism.”

Rey, however, is a character for a time that is coming to a new peace with feminism. A time that is replacing feminism-as-a-movement with feminism-as-a-way-of-life. Rey’s feminism does not protest too much. It is not insistent; it is not obvious. It is, instead, that most powerful of things: simply there. Rey, tellingly, is not an archetype, but rather a fully realized character, subtle and nuanced and human. She, as a character, luxuriates in her own subjectivity.

Rey is a character for an age that is replacing feminism-as-a-movement with feminism-as-a-way-of-life.

Look, again, at that costume. It’s a testament to hardship and practicality—the kind of thing Katniss Everdeen and Imperator Furiosa and probably also Jessica Jones would wear, were they to find themselves trying to make a go of survival on Jakku—and yet it also has little nods to femininity. The belt, emphasizing Rey’s waist. The tunic, crossed over she shoulders, recalling Greek goddessery.

And! It’s a costume, of course, that is extremely similar to one Luke Skywalker’s.

At one point in The Force Awakens, in full fan-service dudgeon, Han mentions the Force: “a magical power holding together Good and Evil, the darkness and the light.” You could say something similar about the feminism of 2015: It gets much of its power from tension, from opposing ideas that feed off of each other, productively. It embraces the notion that genders can be different, but still equal. That women can be empowered, and yet subject to forces beyond their control. The Force Awakens’s treatment of its Strong Female Lead reflects that nuance. Rey is beautiful, but that isn’t fully the point. She is strong and skilled—but that, too, isn’t the point. She is a good person: That, ultimately, is the point. “I hope Rey will be something of a girl power figure,” Ridley has said of her character. She added: “She’s brave and she’s vulnerable and she’s so nuanced ... She doesn’t have to be one thing to embody a woman in a film. It just so happens she’s a woman, but she transcends gender. She’s going to speak to men and women.”

Star Wars and Streaming: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Star Wars Didn’t Invent the Modern Blockbuster, The Empire Strikes Back Did
Matt Singer | Screen Crush
“It might seem like a small distinction, because The Empire Strikes Back is a sequel to Star Wars and couldn’t exist without it, but it’s a critical one. Although Empire is a direct continuation of Star Wars’ story, featuring all of the original film’s cast, it is its own animal in terms of tone, pacing, structure, and the circumstances behind its development, production, and release.”

Streaming TV Isn’t Just a New Way to Watch. It’s a New Genre.
James Poniewozik | The New York Times
“The streaming services assume they own your free time, whenever it comes—travel, holidays, weekends—to fill with five-and 10-hour entertainments … In other words, they schedule their shows like Hollywood movies. Streaming is like a vast multiplex where every screen is playing The Mahabharata. It expects commitment—and gets it.”

Men Explain Lolita to Me
Rebecca Solnit | Literary Hub
“You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.”

The First Black Trans Model Had Her Face on a Box of Clariol
Jada Yuan and Aaron Wong | The Cut
“We’re living in a time when trans models like Lea T and Andreja Pejic have been the faces of Redken and Make Up For Ever, and Caitlyn Jenner has been celebrated on the cover of Vanity Fair. This kind of cultural acceptance makes it easy to lose sight of how dangerous it was 40 years ago—and still can be today—for women like Norman to just walk down a street.”

The Female Body of Punk
Ivan Kreilkamp | Public Books
“One welcome effect of this canonizing process has been a recent wave of new memoirs by some of the major female punk and post-punk innovators: a collection of books that allow us better to apprehend some of the possibilities for sex and gender experiment that briefly opened up, and quickly shut down, as punk took form in the U.S. and Britain in the mid- and late 1970s.”

The Year in Natural Hair
Pilot Viruet | Hazlitt
“This year, as I covered my hair in straightener products and regularly tried to use heat to iron it stick-straight, I watched these women on television—and watched black women in my own life, and on Twitter—embrace, document, and celebrate their natural hair, and I knew that I could do the same. But I had to first get rid of all the self-hating and negative connotations surrounding natural hair that had been ingrained in me throughout my life.”

Patriotism on Broadway
The Economist
“Unlike most stories about America’s intrepid first steps as a country, Hamilton resembles much of the nation as it is now. All of those dead white men and women have been energetically reincarnated by an excellent cast of mostly African American and Latino actors. At a stroke, the show reasserts the way America has always been a nation of striving immigrants and outsiders, and that the country’s story is the property of all Americans—even those whose ancestors may have started out as property themselves.”

The Best Film Scenes of 2015
The Editors | A.V. Club
“Without TV-style cutting, the scene also tosses out TV-style commentary; the whole thing unfolds with great immediacy, aided by sound design that simulates the camera’s position in the ring, rather than an evenly mixed macro perspective. For a few minutes, Creed’s whole world is contained within the boxing ring, and the audience is right there with him.”

Get Rich or Die Vlogging: The Sad Economics of Internet Fame
Gaby Dunn | Fusion
“The high highs and low lows leave me reeling. One week, I was stopped for photos six times while perusing comic books in downtown L.A. The next week, I sat faceless in a room of 40 people vying for a menial courier job. I’ve walked a red carpet with $80 in my bank account. Popular YouTube musician Meghan Tonjes said she performed on Vidcon’s MainStage this year to screaming, crying fans without knowing whether she’d be able to afford groceries.”

The Glorious Bitterness of 'Last Christmas'

Welcome to The 12 Days of Christmas Songs: an attempt to uncover the forgotten history of some of the most memorable festive tunes. From December 14 through 25, we’ll be tackling one secular song and one holy song each day.

It’s offline now, but previously published hot takes about the coldest season report that there was once a Facebook group entitled “Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ IS NOT A CHRISTMAS SONG!” The case it made is easy enough to imagine. George Michael’s crooned tale of getting cuffed then dumped happened to be set around Yuletide, but it could have taken place at any time of the year.

Or could it have?

It’s a truism that for many people Christmas has gone beyond its religious meaning to become a pan-cultural annual frenzy of consumerism. But it also should be recognized as a pan-cultural frenzy of emotion. That’s partly because of the ritual of giving and getting, which forces vulnerability, gratitude, consideration of others, and expectations that are either met, exceeded, or disappointed. Michael’s playing with that fact: Him “giving” his heart wasn’t just a declaration of affections, it was a gift in a way that it wouldn’t be another time of year. And the person he gave it to re-gifted it. That’s a special kind of ouch.

Christmas is also one of the few yearly rituals that the bulk of Western society still partakes in. Which means most everyone has a memory of their Last Christmas, and everyone has aspirations for This Year (when we take measures, in vain, to be Saved From Tears). Wham! is tapping into the holiday’s unique ability to make people take stock and look ahead.

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They band’s also tapping into the fact that, contrary to the notion of seasonal cheer, many holiday memories are negative—tinted by sadness, loss, or anger, depending on how that year ended for you. It’s probably the bitterest Christmas tune we’ve got, and to say its bitterness keeps it from being a Christmas tune denies the nature of the holiday itself.

Released in 1985 and blocked from the No. 1 charts spot by “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” “Last Christmas” also stands as one of the few canonical Christmas songs minted after the Baby Boom—it’s basically ‘80s New Wave’s only popular entry. Accordingly, it attracts a certain kind of skepticism. Tom Keiser’s 2011 screed against it for The Awl charged that it contains “contains a synthy falseness that would make even Paul McCartney and Wings wince.” That's a genre complaint you either agree with or don’t. Carly Rae Jepsen’s great version this year kept the keyboards but added in a less mopey vocals and a sax.

Keiser also called “Last Christmas” a“a wallowing mess of a song” that “mistakes self-indulgence for closure,” and thereby accidentally hit upon what makes it unique. Really, it’s the ultimate Christmas tune for the modern secular person whose holiday memories are more about personal joys and defeats rather than a wider cultural celebration, as the video—about a ski retreat with friends and a lot of hairspray—hints. After “Last Christmas,” there’s an entire class of rock songs that use the holiday as a peg, a backdrop, to give some typical lyrical angst an air of specialness. Band of Horses’ “First Song” and Okkervil River’s “Calling and Not Calling My Ex” are nice examples. But they’re not in the mainstream Christmas catalogue, probably because the seasonally heartbroken already have their needs met by “Last Christmas.”

'In the Bleak Midwinter': A Literary Christmas Carol

Welcome to The 12 Days of Christmas Songs: an attempt to uncover the forgotten history of some of the most memorable festive tunes. From December 14 through 25, we’ll be tackling one secular song and one holy song each day.

In 1872, the short-lived American literary magazine Scribner’s Monthly asked the English poet Christina Rossetti to contribute a Christmas poem for publication. Rossetti, presumably buffeted by the chilly British climate, wrote “In the Bleak Midwinter,” a gorgeous five-stanza work that’s notable for its simplicity, its pastoral description, and its insistence that Jesus Christ was born in, say, northern Westeros rather than Bethlehem, whose average temperature in December is a balmy 55 degrees.

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone
Snow had fallen snow on snow
Snow on snow
In the bleak midwinter
Long ago

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Between the frosty wind, the hard earth, and the snow on snow on snow on snow, Rossetti really hammers home the idea that it’s cold out, perhaps because unlike the other Pre-Raphaelites and Romantic poets with whom she socialized, she traveled little, and left Britain only twice in her lifetime. Still, she’s considered one of the most important figures in English poetry.

Im 1904, ten years after Rossetti’s death, “In the Bleak Midwinter” was published in an anthology of her work, and two years later, the composer Gustav Holst set it to music, creating what is to my mind at least one of the more extraordinarily lovely and little-known carols.

Rossetti’s lyrics speak of a person whom heaven cannot hold and earth cannot sustain, but whose presence can unite both realms. Her final verse considers how best to honor such a child:

What can I give Him
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb
If I were a wise man
I would do my part
Yet what I can, I give him—
Give my heart

Even cynical and ungodly as one might be (ahem), there’s something poignant in the reminder, especially at this time of year, that giving is about intention, not cost. When Holst wrote the music for “In the Bleak Midwinter,” he was working as a music teacher at James Allen’s Girls School (my high school, oddly), because the money he made from his compositions wasn’t enough to live on. This changed a few years after he wrote “The Planets” during the First World War, but he continued to teach at girls’ schools until his death in 1934. “Music, being identical with heaven, isn’t a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones,” he wrote in a letter in 1914. “It's a condition of eternity.” For me, no carol captures that condition better than this one.

Obama's Christmas Clemency Cavalcade

President Obama granted pardons to two people and commuted the sentences of 95 others on Friday, marking his most expansive use of the clemency power yet as his presidency enters its final year.

The 95 commutations largely targeted prisoners convicted of drug-related crimes, many of whom received lengthy sentences for cocaine trafficking and possession in the 1990s. Commutations, unlike pardons, do not remove penalties like the loss of voting rights or jury service. But they still have a dramatic impact on the recipient's life. All of the 95 inmates who received commutations, including 37 of them serving life sentences, will be released either on April 16 or December 18 next year.

In addition to the commutations, Obama also granted pardons to Jon Dylan Girard, who was convicted of counterfeiting in Ohio in 2002, and Melody Eileen Homa, who was convicted of aiding and abetting bank fraud in Virginia in 1991.

Friday’s pardons and commutations are the third and largest burst of presidential clemency this year. In March, Obama granted pardons and commutations for 22 people, most of whom had been imprisoned for drug-related crimes. In July, he commuted the sentences of another 46 prisoners convicted under similar circumstances. Overall, Obama has now granted 248 pardons during the first seven years of this presidency, mostly since his reelection.

For most of his tenure in office, Obama shied away from the unbridled power granted to him by the Constitution to pardon and commute the sentences of federal prisoners. Before he commuted 20 inmates’ sentences exactly one year before Friday's slate of pardons and commutations, one in seven of his clemency grants had been for Thanksgiving turkeys.

As my colleague David Graham noted in March, Obama’s pardons and commutations are infinitesimal when compared to the size of  the federal prison system, which houses over 200,000 prisoners. (Federal prisons are dwarfed in turn by prison systems in the 50 states where nine-tenths of the American prison population is incarcerated.) If Obama wants to make criminal-justice reform a priority in the closing act of his presidency, the pardoning power is a formidable option to selectively reduce prison populations and excessive sentences.

Criminal-justice reform advocates expressed optimism in response to Obama’s move on Friday but urged further action. “American presidents have had the power to show mercy since the founding of our Republic,” said Julie Stewart, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, or FAMM, in a statement. “President Obama is the first president in decades to use it as the founders intended. For that reason, we commend him for showing more mercy than his predecessors. But his work is not done.”

The process toward commutations is lengthy and rarely successful, a problem that Obama sought to remedy last year. He and then-Attorney General Eric Holder enlisted a group of criminal-justice-oriented organizations, including FAMM, the American Bar Association, the ACLU, and the NAACP, to pre-screen potential clemency applicants in an effort to mitigate the Justice Department’s cumbersome process. In an examination of the project’s record so far earlier this month, The Marshall Project described it as “one of the oddest workarounds in the annals of bureaucracy” and noted that many of the system’s flaws remain unchanged.

In his first major speech on mass incarceration at the NAACP in July, Obama touted his clemency record as proof of his commitment to the cause. But his remarks also acknowledged the long path ahead for criminal-justice reform to take root. “I know how hard things are for a lot of folks. But I also know that it takes steps,” he told the crowd. “And if we have the courage to take that first step, then we take a second step. And if we have the courage to take the second step then suddenly we’ve taken 10 steps. The next thing you know, you’ve taken 100 steps. And that’s true not just for us as individuals, but that is true for us as a nation.”

Exit, 'Pharma Bro'

Martin Shkreli, the infamous “Pharma bro” who was arrested Thursday and charged with securities fraud, has resigned as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company announced.

Turing said Ron Tiles, the chairman of the board of directors, will serves as interim CEO.

“We wish to thank Martin for helping us build Turing Pharmaceuticals into the dynamic research focused company it is today, and wish him the best in his future endeavors,” Tiles said in the statement.

As we reported Thursday, Shkreli and Evan Greebel, an associate, who was also arrested Thursday, were charged with two counts of securities fraud, three counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. You can read the indictment against them here.

The charges against Shkreli are unrelated to his work at Turing, but it’s his actions at the company that brought him into the public consciousness in September. Turing bought the drug Daraprim, which is used to treat people with weakened immune systems, as in AIDS and during chemotherapy, and raised its price by 5,000 percent—from $13.50 to $750. In the backlash that followed, Shkreli was called “a spoiled brat,” and “the most hated man in America.”

At first, Shkreli appeared unapologetic about the backlash, but as it grew, he appeared to relent, only to backtrack.

“It’s a business,” he said at a health-care conference this month, “we’re supposed to make as much money as possible.”

In the Turing statement, Tiles said the company was “committed to ensuring that all patients have ready and affordable access” to Daraprim and other drugs. But it’s unclear what that actually means.