Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 278

Rise, Shine, and Floss for the Camera

It’s 7:04 a.m. and your alarm goes off. Do you snooze? Maybe you roll out of bed and do a few jumping jacks. You check your notifications. Maybe you floss, walk your dog, and down a smoothie. Whatever your ritual, chances are it’s your own.

The Chicago-based photographer Kyle LaMere believes its in this moment, before the eye-liner and the jacket is applied, that we reveal the most about ourselves. For his project, As You Are, he’s photographing the a.m. habits of a new person every week. Some of them are professional athletes, some run NGOs, some are media professionals with a manicured social media presence.

“Every day, we are exposed to highlight reels from the daily lives of everyone we know, don’t know, and will never know. We watch their moods change from one status update to the next,” LaMere said. “In order to reconnect with people as they are, I wanted to pull back the curtain on their meticulously curated lives and photograph them in their most intimate environment, their own homes.”

But LaMere goes beyond images, asking each subject the same five questions: What do you wake up thinking about? What’s your morning ritual? How does social media play into your daily life? Are we more connected or disconnected than before? What is most important to you in life?

The answers vary as much as the photographs do; some are earnest and revealing, others less so. But rather than feeling like the images divulge the inner-workings of the subjects, the photographs are distractingly beautiful. Perhaps that’s due to LaMere’s talent—or the ability of his subjects to perform for the camera.

What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Demagogues’

He’s been compared to Hitler. And also

How ‘Badass’ Became a Feminist Word

As an insult, certainly—as an implicit invalidation of one’s political rhetoric—“demagogue” is a very good word. It’s slightly gentler than “fascist” and slightly more dignified than “buffoon”; it’s extremely opinionated, and yet carries itself with the gravitas of informed objectivity. Uttered aloud—that evocative agog— it forces one’s mouth to gape appropriately. And while Trump is certainly not the only contemporary politician to be dismissed under its auspices (“Demagoguery 101,” Charles Krauthammer wrote of President Obama and his policies), no figure has so clearly deserved the word since Huey Long and Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan riled the former century. So deep has the impact of Trump’s fist-pounding rhetoric been that, at this point, there’s a metonymic circularity to the whole thing. The Economist recently published an article titled “The Art of the Demagogue.” It did not need to clarify who it was about.

Demagogues undermine the stability of a “by the people” form of government particularly by turning “the people” against each other.

But what, actually, are people accusing Trump of when they accuse him of demagoguery? It’s not simply Biffery or buffoonery or baboonery; it’s something more contextualized. More systemic. More dangerous. To call Trump a “demagogue” is to do two things at once: to dismiss him as a political candidate and amplify him as a political threat. That is appropriate, because the key thing about demagogues, historically, is that they have been people who, by way of their very popularity, threaten the populace. They undermine the stability of a “by the people” form of government particularly by turning “the people” against each other. They represent a danger not just to electoral outcomes or political parties, but to democracy itself.

* * *

“Demagogue,” as a term—“demos,” the people, and “agogos,” leader—is pretty much as old as democracy is. It was born, like so many others of our most effective insults, in ancient Athens. And despite its anodyne etymology, it almost instantly took on a negative connotation: In Greece, the demagogue was not just a leader of people, but a leader who led, specifically, by bullying/cajoling/converting charisma into influence. He was a populist who appealed, in particular, to the lower classes. As Aristotle wrote of Cleon, a tanner, “He was the first who shouted on the public platform, who used abusive language and who spoke with his cloak girt around him, while all the others used to speak in proper dress and manner.”

“Revolutions in democracies,” Aristotle declared, “are generally caused by the intemperance of demagogues.”

Aristotle described Cleon and his fellow platform-shouters as “gadflies,” which captured not just how annoying he found them to be, but also how destructive: When large animals are pestered into a frenzy, one thing that can result is a stampede that sends them, collectively, over a cliff. For Aristotle, demagogues—people who used democracy, he felt, against itself—were potential threats to the political system he and his fellow democracy-designers were trying to build. “Revolutions in democracies,” he declared, “are generally caused by the intemperance of demagogues.”

The Athenian democracy did, in its way, survive. But its philosopher’s fear of demagogues, and of the vague threat they suggested of revolution from within, extended into the modern world. It is Charles I, arguing (unsuccessfully) for the monarchy and for his life in Eikon Basilike, who is generally credited with re-introducing the term into English. (Whereupon John Milton, as both an avid republican and perhaps an even more avid inventor of language, dismissed it as a “Goblin word,” sniffing: “The King by his leave cannot coine English as he could Money, to be current.”)

But while the word proved its utility as both a political description and an epithet, it also, thus anglicized, lost some of the Aristotelian certainty that had defined it in earlier ages. Latham’s A Dictionary of the English Language, a re-print of Doctor Johnson’s sweeping version from 1755, defines “demagogue” as “ringleader of the rabble” but also, secondarily, as a “popular and factious orator.” A New Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1867, lists “demagogue” as “a leader of the people,” but goes on to suggest that the term is “applied to a factious or seditious leader.” Trollope, in his 1855 novel The Warden, demurred: “Now I will not say that the archdeacon is strictly correct in stigmatizing John Bold as a demagogue, for I hardly know how extreme must be a man’s opinions before he can be justly so called.”

It’s a word that doubles as a siren for a democratic system, an epithet that implicates us all: Our house is on fire.

That muddled sense of demagoguery—extremity that is threatening both despite and because of its vagueness—continues today. (This despite efforts among academics to classify demagogues: Type I, Type II, and so on.) And it is enabled not just by TV and Twitter and a cultural environment that converts human charisma into mass media, but by our political system itself. As Michael Signer notes in Demagogue: The Fight to Save America From Its Own Worst Enemies: “Democracy—and any other system with an element of democracy—intrinsically creates an opening for a demagogue.”

Today, perhaps as a response to that vague but ongoing threat of media-driven menace, “demagogue” has become a term of last resort: a description—a deeply loaded epithet—that is summoned only when a particular politician or media figure or other modern people-leader has moved so far away from the mainstream that the Overton Window has receded well into the distance. It’s a word that doubles as a siren for a democratic system, directed at one person but implicating us all: Our house is on fire. It’s this sense that gave the phrase its shock value, and its lasting power, when H.L. Mencken dismissed Huey Long as “a backwoods demagogue.” And when Joe Kennedy decried Father Coughlin as “an out and out demagogue.” It is why American history, its terrain so widely populated with people who bluster and flatter and smarm and shout, has anointed so few actual “demagogues.”

* * *

Which makes it telling, and significant, that the people who today are writing the rough draft of future histories are playing that trump card against one, yes, Donald Trump. You could dismiss those dismissals as misinformed, or melodramatic, or evidence that the Internet’s outrage machine has once again overridden nuance and/or rational thought. You could, too, point out the obvious: that there is an extent, inevitably, to which demagoguery is in the eye of the beholder. (Plutarch, in Theseus, wrote of Menestheus, who “sowed disturbance” among the “common people” by “telling them, that though they pleased themselves with the dream of liberty, in fact they were robbed of their country and religion”—a description that might also apply to a freedom fighter, or a revolutionary, or any other person whom history remembers as a “hero.”)

You could say, basically, that Trump’s popular reception has been making exceedingly clear what every “demagogue” will: that one person’s threat to democracy is another person’s populist hero.

Trump, as America’s newly anointed “demagogue,” may represent just what Aristotle feared: democracy, feeding on itself.

And yet. Democracy, by its nature, allows for only so much relativism. At a certain point—that point traditionally being an election—the people will have to come to some kind of awkward agreement about who they are and what they want. At some point, too, they will have to decide what Trump is, and whether they can stomach what he claims to represent.

In the meantime, though, Trump embodies, with his pounding fist and his artilleried insults and his cheeky baseball cap, the uneasy compromise of the American experiment. He is a human distillation of the maxim that democracy “is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” In all that, he may well represent just what Aristotle feared: democracy, feeding on itself. And thereby destroying itself. Which is a fear, it’s worth noting, shared by the Founders. As Alexander Hamilton, summoning his reading of history and human nature, warned: “Of those men who have overturned the liberty of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by playing an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”

Another Food Scare at Chipotle

Last month, when commenting on Chipotle’s third food contamination scandal in as many months, one retail analyst told Reuters not to expect a lengthy downturn for the fast-casual chain. “Short term they will take a hit but it will blow over quickly,” he said, adding, “They have a lot of customer goodwill.”

Many of those warm feelings have to do with Chipotle’s carefully cultivated image as the feel-good alternative to fast food. Over recent years, the company had seen stellar revenue growth and become into the face of the fast-casual movement, where consumers, particularly millennials, will pay a little bit more for seemingly better, more customizable food.

But as we noted last month in the wake of an E. coli outbreak that made dozens of burrito lovers in nine states sick, “Part of what makes this series of food contamination outbreaks so damning is that the company markets itself so aggressively as a quick-service purveyor of responsible food.”

Fast forward four weeks and add a norovirus outbreak at a Boston College Chipotle, which has made as many as 120 students ill and the goodwill seems to have vanished. “Chipotle’s shares are down 22 percent over the last four months, the worst performance among restaurant companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index,” Bloomberg reported. “The shares fell an additional 5.6 percent...on Tuesday after the latest reports about Boston College.”

Chipotle, to its credit, has acted swiftly, closing down stores and promising to improve a food-safety standards. But given the variety of issues recently associated with the company—salmonella, E. coli, and, now, norovirus—some are saying the company has not done the rhetorical work to take account.

“They’re not going far enough,” one communications crisis expert told CNBC. “They're not painting pictures with their words. They’re still doing too much explaining.” In a Bloomberg column titled “It’s Time for Chipotle to Eat Crow,” Shelly Banjo cited the company’s all-time low in brand favorability and implored it to “immediately and authentically reassure customers that it’s safe to come back.”

In an email to CNBC, Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold pushed back. “I think it's very easy to armchair quarterback these things and say a company should have done this, or could have done that better.” He added that the company has apologized to affected consumers while pushing to investigate its food-safety issues.

Nevertheless, Chipotle has long promoted its model as a panacea for the failings of the food system and practically named itself a movement of the righteous. Sample website copy: With every burrito we roll or bowl we fill, we're working to cultivate a better world. It may have grown too fast for all of that.

Will the U.S. Join the Fight Against ISIS in Ramadi?

A day ago, U.S.-backed Iraqi forces seized one of the Islamic State’s operations centers on the outskirts of Ramadi, the Iraqi city that has been under the group’s control since spring.

The recapture was a significant achievement in the battle to wrest neighborhoods in and around Ramadi from the Islamic State’s grasp. But it took “a frustratingly long time” to get to this point, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Wednesday.

Carter said that though there has been some success in the attempt to retake Ramadi in recent months, “there is still tough fighting ahead.” And, he said, the Pentagon is prepared to deploy advisers and attack helicopters—if the prime minister of Iraq wants them—to the region to “finish the job.”

“I mention all this because it represents how we’ve adapted in the way we support our Iraqi partners. And it shows that training, advising, and assisting is the right approach,” Carter said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “We will do more of what works going forward.”

The Obama administration has repeatedly said it would not put “boots on the ground” in Iraq, where the Islamic State controls large swaths of territory, or in Syria, where the group has established its capital in Raqqa. Since last summer, the United States has been conducting airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria; in Iraq, it has supported ground offensives by local fighters.

But the second half of this year has seen a public escalation in the administration’s response to the group—one that involves more Americans—but not quite “boots”—on the ground. In June, President Obama authorized the deployment of 450 U.S. troops to Iraq to advise government forces. In November, Pentagon announced it would send special-operations troops to help U.S.-backed rebels in Syria for the first time; the team of about 50, officials said, would advise vetted Syrian and Kurdish rebel groups, and not take part in ground combat. And last week, Carter said the U.S. will send special-operations troops to Iraq that, “over time,” will conduct raids, free hostages, gather intelligence, and attempt to capture Islamic State leaders.

Those steps come amid high-profile operations claimed by the Islamic State, like last month’s deadly attacks in Paris in Beirut, and apparently inspired by it, like last week’s shooting rampage in San Bernardino, California. Those assaults, and the president’s response to them, have been sharply criticized by lawmakers—and the American public—as insufficient and ineffective.

Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, asked Carter on Wednesday whether the defense secretary agreed with a recent comment made by Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, that “we have not contained” the Islamic State.

“I agree with what General Dunford said, yes,” Carter replied.

A Trump-Netanyahu Meeting Is Happening

Updated on December 9 at 1:57 p.m.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned Donald Trump’s remarks about Muslims, but said he would meet with the presidential candidate—and others running for president—when the Republican visits Israel later this month.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects Donald Trump's recent remarks about Muslims.

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) December 9, 2015

The State of Israel respects all religions and strictly guarantees the rights of all its citizens.

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) December 9, 2015

At the same time, Israel is fighting against militant Islam that targets Muslims, Christians and Jews alike and threatens the entire world.

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) December 9, 2015

As for the meeting with Mr. Trump that was set some two weeks ago, the Prime Minister decided earlier this year on a uniform policy »

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) December 9, 2015

» to agree to meet with all presidential candidates from either party who visit Israel and ask for a meeting.

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) December 9, 2015

This policy does not represent an endorsement of any candidate or his or her views.

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) December 9, 2015

Rather, it is an expression of the importance that PM Netanyahu attributes to the strong alliance between Israel and the United States.

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) December 9, 2015

A meeting between the two men is scheduled for December 28, when Trump is scheduled to be in Jerusalem.

Trump’s visit to Israel, which he announced on Twitter on Tuesday, has proven highly controversial, and his proposed meeting with Netanyahu has been condemned by some Israeli lawmakers, mostly Israeli Arabs and members of leftist parties.

Issawi Frej, an Arab-Israeli lawmaker from the Meretz party, wrote to Silvan Shalom, the interior minister, asking that Trump’s visit be blocked.

“As an Israeli citizen, I ask that the state treat the racism against me in the same way it would relate to racism against Jews,” he wrote, according to The Times of Israel. “Just as it is obvious that Israel wouldn’t allow an anti-Semite to use it to advance its political goals, so too, should be the case of Trump.”

Omar Bar-Lev, a member of the Knesset from the Zionist Union, tweeted:

As far as it depends on me, this racist @realDonaldTrump should not be welcome in the @knessetisrael pic.twitter.com/OC6AfyX2Na

— עמר בר-לב (@omerbarlev) December 9, 2015

Much of the outrage at the announced visit follows Trump’s remarks on Monday in which he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.” He has since doubled-down on those remarks, citing the attacks in San Bernardino, California, which was carried out by an Illinois-born man and his Pakistan-born wife.

But while Trump’s comments—and Trump himself—have been widely condemned around the world, including in Israel, a visit to Israel is akin to a rite of passage for any serious presidential candidate. Barack Obama did it when he was running in 2008, as did Mitt Romney, prior to the 2012 election.

Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to Washington, cited those visits in comments to The Times of Israel. He added that while Trump’s remarks should be condemned, Netanyahu should meet with him—and other presidential candidates—to avoid being seen as taking sides in American politics.

“At the same time,” he told the news website, “it’s important for leaders of a country close to 20 percent of whose population is Muslim to stand up and say that we distinguish between radical violent Islam and the faith that inspires millions not just here but internationally.”

The Jerusalem Post reported that Trump, during his trip to Israel, was also planning a visit to the Temple Mount, the site that both Muslims and Jews consider sacred and which has been the source of recent violence between members of the two faiths. The newspaper cited a “source closely connected to organizing the trip to Israel.”

Tensions over the Temple Mount has prompted Netanyahu to bar Israeli politicians from visiting it. Trump’s proposed visit to the site is already being condemned.

“Such a visit,” Taleb Abu Arrar, an Arab-Israeli lawmaker, told the Post, “will set the whole region on fire.”

Rahm Emanuel Feels the Heat

First, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel tried to bury the video of Laquan McDonald’s shooting. Then he stalled, successfully pushing it past the April election where he won a second term. Then he tried some more to bury it. When he lost that battle and the video was released, he fired his police chief. Then he fired the head of the body in charge of the Independent Police Review Authority, which is charged with handling complaints about officers but has been attacked as unwilling to seriously discipline cops.

But Emanuel is still feeling the heat, including calls for his resignation. So on Wednesday, he gave a 40-minute speech to the City Council, apologizing for McDonald’s death and vowing changes. (Officer Jason Van Dyke has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting, the first such charge for an on-duty Chicago cop in decades.)

“If we’re going to fix it, I want you to understand it’s my responsibility with you," Emanuel said, according to the Chicago Tribune. “But if we’re also going to begin the healing process, the first step in that journey is my step, and I’m sorry.”

He also said, “Nothing, nothing can excuse what happened to Laquan McDonald.” Emanuel described a lunch with young men who’d been in trouble with the law:

So I asked them, tell me the one thing I need to know. And rather than tell me something, one young man asked me a simple question that gets to the core of what we're talking about. He said, “Do you think the police would ever treat you the way they treat me?” And the answer is no, and that’s wrong. And that has to change in this city. That has to come to an end and end now. No citizen is a second-class citizen in the city of Chicago. If my children are treated one way, every child is treated the same way.

Protesters chanted outside as Emanuel spoke. Aldermen’s reaction to the speech were mixed, the Tribune reported. Emanuel critics remained critical; his allies, meanwhile, seemed subdued, noting the test will be what sort of reforms Emanuel is willing and able to produce. Even that is a vast shift from just a few months ago. In his first term, even as citizen frustrations grew with the mayor’s administration, the council had become an almost-automatic rubber stamp for his ambitious plans for the Windy City.

Emanuel is probably wise to feel pressure. He squeaked by in a tight reelection battle this spring, and only after some of the most promising challengers decided not to run; even then, he had to withstand a runoff. His reaction to the McDonald case has been wooden, peevish, and widely criticized. For a man famous for putting his political opponents (and often his allies) in a vise-grip, it’s an unusual role reversal. The problems with Chicago’s police force are both deep and broad, and the Department of Justice has just announced—over Emanuel’s objections—that it will investigate the CPD.

Similar police-related outcries have been bad for mayors. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, viewed as a rising Democratic star, fired her police chief but ultimately decided not to run for reelection months later, as pressure remained high on her. Ferguson, Missouri, Mayor James Knowles remains in office, but much of the city government was swept out. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio is facing low polling as he heads toward re-election, though his criticism of the police has generally gotten high marks.

Emanuel retains his reputation as a savvy political operator. But the crisis in Chicago will put to the test not only his retail political skills but also his strategic wisdom.

A Death in His Own Paradise

For those with antennae particularly attuned to schadenfreude, the headlines announcing the death of an eccentric-seeming billionaire in a kayaking accident in Chile might present a story that’s impossible to resist.

But with the case of Douglas Tompkins, the headlines and context don’t match up. Tompkins, who co-founded North Face and Esprit, died in the ecological empyrean of Patagonia that he had sought to protect after cashing out of his life in America and moving to South America.

The high-school dropout turned outdoors-loving mogul turned eco-baron devoted the last quarter of his life to conservation advocacy. Tompkins bought more than 2 million acres of land and set about creating private parks that kept rainforests from development across Chile and Argentina before his death at 72 on Tuesday.

“He flew airplanes, he climbed to the top of mountains all over the world,” his daughter told The New York Times. “To have lost his life in a lake and have nature just sort of gobble him up is just shocking.”

In 1999, William Langewiesche provided The Atlantic with one irreplaceable piece of writing on Tompkins’ ideological shift, which led him to sell his stake in Esprit and move to South America and denouncing the consumerism that built his fortune.

Tompkins believes in “deep ecology,” an absolutist version of environmentalism—which contains little to surprise a North American reader. It is an “ecocentric” view that rejects the idea of inherent human superiority and instead gives equal moral weight to all elements of nature—from the living to the inanimate. The deep ecologists are purists.

As Langewiesche details, Tompkins’ efforts aroused suspicion in Chile, where land purchased to be held and not developed (and not turned into an creator of many jobs) was unheard of. “He must have felt the frustration of an environmentalist who heard himself sounding like the very developers he wanted to stand against.”

Along the way, he married Kristine McDivitt, the former CEO of Patagonia, who joined him in establishing numerous foundations. Revisiting their work in The Atlantic last year, Diana Saverin wrote of how Tompkins’ fealty to his ideology kept him a misunderstood figure.

Rumors now range from the conspiratorial to the phantasmagorical: Tompkins is creating a second Israel in South America; he is siphoning off the world’s last freshwater resources for other American millionaires; he is building bunkers for a pending nuclear war.

Nevertheless, she adds, “They have protected more land than any other private individuals in history.”

'No Child Left Behind' Is No More

Arne Duncan can go home now.

The education secretary will return to Chicago next week and leave government at the end of the month, having served longer than all but one of President Obama’s original Cabinet secretaries. (Only Tom Vilsack at the Department of Agriculture remains.)

On Wednesday, the Senate delivered the bill that Duncan has been seeking for nearly seven years, passing by 85-12 vote a rewrite of the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind education law. The House approved the measure in similarly bipartisan fashion last week, and Obama plans to sign it on Thursday morning at a White House ceremony. Whether the new law is a parting gift for the secretary or a kick on the way out the door, however, is a matter of some debate.

Duncan drew praise from Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Jeb Bush early in his tenure for his aggressive efforts to promote school reform. But over the years he has become a polarizing figure among conservatives, who accuse him of overstepping his authority by requiring states to adopt higher standards—like the Common Core—in exchange for federal money from the Race to the Top program and later, temporary waivers from the punitive sanctions in No Child Left Behind.

That anger led Republicans to demand provisions in the replacement law that specifically curtailed the education secretary’s authority. Future secretaries, for example, are forbidden from mandating or even incentivizing states to adopt particular standards like Common Core. The provisions led scholars like Frederick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute to describe the new Every Student Succeeds Act as a “repudiation” of Duncan and his way of doing business.

You might think the departing secretary would be cool to the bill, if not downright bitter about the congressional stripping of his department’s power. But in an interview earlier this week, Duncan was practically jubilant.

“If you look at the heart of the bill, it absolutely reflects our values and priorities,” he told me.

“If you look at the heart of the bill, it absolutely reflects our values and priorities.”

The compromise hashed out over the last few months is a reflection of the fact that both parties came to believe that No Child Left Behind had gone too far and more importantly, that the waiver system Duncan implemented to shield states from its harshest penalties had caused a torrent of frustration across the country. The new law returns significant power to the states to develop their own accountability standards for schools, repealing the requirement that schools demonstrate “adequate yearly progress.” But it doesn’t eviscerate the federal role entirely.

The legislation maintains the requirement for annual testing, and it requires the Department of Education to sign off on state-developed plans for improving when states fail to improve their lowest 5 percent performing schools and high school “dropout factories.” It prevents states from exempting more than 1 percent of students from their main annual tests, and it mandates that states report performance data broken out by subgroups based on factors like income, race, language barriers, and learning disabilities—a tool advocates consider crucial for addressing the achievement gap. And in a victory for the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, the law includes $250 million in annual funding for early childhood education, although it is housed not in the Department of Education but in Health and Human Services.

Perhaps most importantly to Duncan, the law codifies the idea that states must develop standards to make students “college and career-ready.” “This is the first time in the history of the nation that college and career-ready standards are going to be the law of the land,” Duncan told me. “That’s a massive breakthrough.”

Yet Congress leaves it to the states to define what those mean, and Duncan acknowledged that the added flexibility offers “both the greatest opportunity and the greatest risk.” “If they focus on real long-term outcomes, then this is going to be a huge step in the right direction,” Duncan said.  “If states resort to softer things and walk away from real outcomes for kids, that’s the risk.”

And what about those restrictions on secretarial authority? Duncan didn’t want to talk about those provisions on the record. But Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill characterized them as “talking points” for Republicans and say they worked with lawyers to water them down. In a victory-lap speech on Tuesday, Duncan said a focus on his own power “fundamentally misses the point.”

It wasn’t about what power I had. It was about what kind of opportunity Brandon, Russhaun, Federico Christina and Star have. Throughout our nation’s history, the federal government has played an important role in protecting their civil rights. And despite the rhetoric, the law that the House passed last week, and that the Senate is considering today allows us to continue to play that critical role in the lives of students across the country.

Representative John Kline, the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee and a lead Republican negotiator, argued that the restrictions on federal authority—and specifically the secretary—were significant. “We spent about 50 pages in this bill putting very strict prohibitions on what the secretary can and cannot do,” he said in a phone interview. “There are some things in there that I’m sure Arne Duncan likes. But there’s also a lot in there to keep this education secretary or any education secretary from writing their own policy. That’s very important.”

Critics of the new law characterize Duncan’s embrace of the Every Student Succeeds Act as something close to delusional. “Arne, they leveled your office and program. Why are you celebrating it,” tweeted Sandy Kress, a former education adviser to President Bush and an architect of No Child Left Behind.

He elaborated on his critique in a blog post on Wednesday.

While annual testing and the provision for states to put together accountability plans with certain features continues to be required, this legislation fundamentally finishes off the evisceration of accountability begun by the administration four years ago.

The secretary will have virtually no authority to enforce the meager “requirements” that remain, and the federal government will have no power whatsoever to require any consequences for schools that fail to lift student achievement or close achievement gaps.

In many respects, the debate over federal education policy is a question of trust, and the Republicans now running Congress trust the states.

“I think we just have to have confidence that the states have learned over these last years,” Kline told me. “I don’t subscribe to the notion that only the federal government cares about how well these kids do.” The Senate education chairman, Lamar Alexander, predicted in a floor speech that the new law would “unleash a flood of innovation and student achievement across America.”

As recently as this summer, it seemed unlikely that Congress would be able to agree to a broad education bill after so many years of trying. The Senate had passed a bipartisan measure, but the House version was seen as much more conservative. Kline argued, however, that the odds were never that low. He said the frustration with the status quo waiver system had increased the urgency to compromise. “It turns out the principles were shared in kind of a bipartisan way,” he told me. “We wanted to reduce the federal imprint that came with No Child Left Behind, a huge intrusion by the federal government. We wanted to restore local control, and we wanted to empower parents with some choices. And we got all those things in the bill.”

The dispute over secretarial authority aside, Kline’s statement would draw little protest from Duncan, who professed shock that the bill actually got stronger in his view after the House and Senate reconciled their proposals. The final measure passed with unusually broad support and little vocal opposition, with just 12 opponents in the Senate and 64 in the House. Federal education policy is often far removed from the day-to-day reality in America’s classrooms, and it will take years to determine if this new approach yields improvements. But judging by the vote in Congress, it appears that a bipartisan consensus on education policy in Washington has, however briefly and for good or ill, been restored.

How The San Bernardino Shooters Planned for Jihad

The husband and wife who opened fire at a holiday office party in San Bernardino, California, last week had discussed “jihad and martyrdom” as early as 2013, the FBI’s director said Wednesday.

James Comey said at a Senate hearing that Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik “were radicalized for quite a long time before their attack,” which claimed 14 lives and injured 21 others.

“Our investigation to date, which I can only say so much about at this point, indicates that they were actually radicalized before they started courting or dating each other online,” he said. “As early as the end of 2013, they were talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom.”

Comey said the shooters were inspired by foreign terrorist organizations.

“We’re working very hard to understand whether there was anybody else involved with assisting them, with supporting them, with equipping them,” he said. “We’re working very, very hard to understand, did they have other plans?

A week after the rampage, investigators have assembled a fuzzy portrait of the couple who carried out the attack before they were killed in a shootout with police. Farook, 28, and Malik, 27, met on a dating website for Muslims. Malik, who was born in Pakistan and spent 20 years living in Saudi Arabia, came to the United States last July on a K-1 visa that allows individuals to enter the country to marry U.S. citizens. Farook, a native of Illinois, had worked for the San Bernardino County Health Department for five years. Most of the victims of last week’s shooting were his coworkers.

On the morning of the shooting, Malik pledged allegiance in a Facebook post to the Islamic State and its self-declared leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Farook’s coworkers said he rarely talked about his faith. Malik’s relatives in Pakistan say she grew more religious in recent years. Relatives of both have expressed shock and disbelief over their actions.

Farook and Malik lived in a rented apartment in Redlands, about a 15-minute drive from where the attack occurred, with Farook’s mother and the couple’s six-month-old baby. The husband and wife had turned part of their home into a bomb-making factory and stockpiled thousands of rounds of ammunition. In the days and weeks before the attack, they practiced shooting at a gun range and smashed cellphones and deleted emails in an attempt to conceal their planning. A deposit of $28,500 was made into Farook’s bank account before the shooting, its provider unknown.

Comey said investigators are trying to determine “the source of their inspiration.” Officials say they do not have any evidence that suggests Farook and Malik were working as part of a larger network. They believe the attack appears to be a product of what President Obama on Sunday called “a new phase” of the threat of terrorism.

“As we’ve become better at preventing complex, multifaceted attacks like 9/11, terrorists turned to less complicated acts of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common in our society,” Obama said in a speech about the shooting. “And as groups like ISIL grew stronger amidst the chaos of war in Iraq and then Syria, and as the Internet erases the distance between countries, we see growing efforts by terrorists to poison the minds of people like the Boston Marathon bombers and the San Bernardino killers.”

As my colleague Kathy Gilsinan wrote Tuesday, the process by which a person grows radical involves a complex mix of variables:

“Self-radicalization is not new, and in fact represents the norm that we have dealt with,” Jenkins told me. “What is new is that the very effective use of social media by ISIL, ISIS, whatever you choose to call it, has enabled them to reach a larger audience, a younger audience,” due in part to the “content of the communications, the vehicle of the communications.” …  Still, Charlie Winter, a senior research associate at the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative at Georgia State University, said radicalization does not occur “in a bubble”—passive consumption of propaganda is not enough to transform an ordinary person into a murderer. It’s not the case, he said, “that individuals can find themselves on inevitable trajectories toward extremism if they go to the right place on the Internet and start hanging out with the wrong crowd. It’s nowhere near as simple as that.”

The Weird Athleticism of the Victoria's Secret Model

“It feels like we’re training for the Olympics,” a model confided during the Victoria’s Secret Fashion show on Tuesday evening. She was not being ironic. Among the many tensions implicit in the annual spectacle that dubs itself “the most watched fashion event in the world”—“fashion” that does not involve, strictly, clothing; an appeal to girls presented as an appeal to men; advertisement in the guise of entertainment; etc.—the most striking was the lingerie company’s insistence that its statuesque models are, in fact, elite athletes. “It might be considered the Super Bowl of fashion,” another model declared of the show, before sashaying down the runway in a lace demi-bra and bedazzled bikini briefs.

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The sportiness of Victoria’s Secret’s models (who in this case included both the company’s standard runway walkers and the ones whom it has elevated, Milton-like, to its arsenal of “Angels”) was an idea the show returned to again and again. In between the event’s official, hour-long proceedings—the heeled-to-the-heavens Angels and sub-Angels stomping and smizing as of-the-moment pop stars including Ellie Goulding, The Weeknd, and Selena Gomez performed in the background—the show filled its air with tales of the rigorous training the models went through to prepare for the event. And with supercuts of the women sharing their favorite workout routines. (“Pilates, racket sports, barre, weight training, resistance bands, squats.”) And with languorous shots of them kickboxing and trampolining and running and lifting—all while clad, of course, in VS-branded athletic wear.

The overall impression reflected, indeed, a point that Victoria’s Secret’s creative director, Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou, is fond of making about Angel-ing: “It’s like being an Olympian.” Lingerie-focused runway-walking, as Victoria’s Secret presents it, requires the kind of physical stamina and mental focus and ongoing dedication normally seen only in high-level athletes. If you follow the logic, then the airing of that walking becomes its own televised sporting event. The show broadcast last night wasn’t live—it was a heavily edited version of the show that took place last month, in New York. But what it sacrificed in immediacy and suspense, it compensated for in its other Olympics-on-TV approaches: its pageantry, its contextually justified celebration of the human body, its presentation of its athletes’ backstories. The shots of the models prancing in arted-up underwear were interspersed with shots of their “regimens.” The models themselves testified to their own athleticism, with comments like:

“I work out seven days a week, sometimes twice a day.”

And:

“I really use every muscle when I’m on the runway—walking with heavy wings you have to really have your body be the strongest that it can be.”

And:

“The Fashion Show is the event where you really step it up.”

And:

“There’s millions and millions of people who will see it on TV, so there’s nowhere to hide on that runway. You really have to think about that when you’re in the gym, in pain. You’re like, ‘Come on!’”

The point was driven home, relentlessly. (Another model: “I totally think we’re athletes. I mean, we have to work out all the time, just like an athlete.”) The women, via reality show-esque confessionals, shared stories about their commitment to exercise, their desire for strength, their need for stamina—all of this aimed toward beauty, yes, but also, Victoria’s Secret suggested, at something both broader and more basic: athletic achievement. One model boasted that, after a workout, “I’m a sweaty mess.” Another noted that “I think it’s kind of badass when a girl is tough and shows what she’s got.”

“It might be considered the Super Bowl of fashion,” a model declared, before sashaying the runway in a lace demi-bra and bedazzled bikini briefs.

It’s a continuation of what many of these elite models have been doing not just with Victoria’s Secret, but with their own #personalbrands, on Instagram and Twitter and YouTube: They’re emphasizing not just their beauty, but the work that is required to attain, and retain, it. In the process, they’re emphasizing things like fitness and strength and maybe even that hazy thing that has nothing, and everything, to do with beauty: health. Adriana Lima shares photos of her gym workouts and their sweat-soaked aftermath; Lindsay Ellingson shares pics of her Muay Thai practice; Miranda Kerr thanks her trainer for “kicking my butt today.” In January, former Angel Karlie Kloss shared an Instagram of herself in an impressive side plank/lateral raise with the caption “Start the New Year off feeling Healthy and Strong.”

All of which speaks to another tension the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was navigating on Tuesday: presenting a bevy of underwear-wearing women in a way that, in the culture of 2015, doesn’t come across as tremendously exploitative or irresponsible or retrograde. A pageant like this, however much Victoria’s Secret frames it as a sporting event that just happens to involve lightly lined demi bras, is, by its nature, going to have less in common with the Olympics and much more in common with Miss America/Girls Gone Wild!/soft-core porn. The “fashion” on display here is women’s bodies. The upshot of all of its models’ hard-won athleticism, as presented by Victoria’s Secret, is looking good in underwear.

Which, gross. And also gross, it’s worth noting, are the decidedly less “athletic” aspects of the demands Victoria’s Secret makes of its models, all of which went unsurprisingly unmentioned in the show’s discussion of its Angels’ intense “training regimens.” The extreme diets. The banning of liquids 12 hours before the show (mild dehydration tightens skin). The kind of aesthetic-athletic-capitalistic competition engaged in by the models who strive to “earn their wings.” As Adriana Lima put it in an ostensibly post-workout Instagram post: “To be the best got to make it rain baby!” As the fitness blogger Poppy Cross, who spent a grueling four months attempting to Angelize herself, countered: “Nothing could have prepared me for the mental and physical challenge I had in store.”

And yet for Victoria’s Secret to emphasize, in its show, the work required of its models also represents, in its small way, progress. It used to be that the prototypical model—and the prototypical supermodel—was not just willowy, but gaunt: a human hanger, essentially, with inconvenient flesh that was to be minimized as much as possible. It used to be, too, that models stayed mostly silent about the work required to look like a model—or, even worse, that they breezily de-emphasized the extremes it took to conform to those expectations. (“I just have good genes!” “OMG, I love cheeseburgers!”)

It was a show fit for a culture of Crossfit and Fitbit and #fitnessgoals—one that is slowly coming around to believe that “strong is the new thin.”

The show last night, contra all that, celebrated sweat, and sacrifice, and work. It celebrated muscles and strength. It was a show fit for a culture of Crossfit and Fitbit and #fitnessgoals—a culture that is slowly coming around to believe, as a poster at my gym declares, that “strong is the new thin.”

Make no mistake: The fashion show—“fashion show”—was still a celebration of women in their underwear. Their demonstrations of their athletic prowess—and, as Jasmine Tookes suggested in an interview, their comprehensive badassery—were constrained by high heels and drag-inducing “wings” and cultural expectations that were themselves extremely un-aerodynamic. And yet: This was also Victoria’s Secret, a longstanding arbiter of what is considered both sexy and marketable, celebrating women’s bodies as agents of strength. It was Angels, complicating the idea of what it means to be Angelic in the first place. “I would like to think it’s all good genes,” one model mused, “but definitely not. There’s a lot of hard work that goes into this.”