Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 280

The Latest Development in the Oscar Pistorius Case

The Olympian Oscar Pistorius has been granted bail as he awaits sentencing in his murder conviction for killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, two years ago.

Last week, a South African court overturned Pistorius’s earlier manslaughter conviction in the case. The double amputee, who has competed in both the Olympics and the Paralympics, had served one year of a five-year sentence for the killing, and was serving out the rest under house arrest in his uncle’s home in Pretoria.  

Under Tuesday’s ruling, Pistorius will continue to remain under house arrest until he is sentenced on April 18, 2016. He faces up to 15 years in prison.

But Pistorius’s lawyer said he would appeal against the conviction to the Constitutional Court, the country’s highest, a move that could delay the case for months.

In Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Audrey Ledwaba set bail at about $700. Under the conditions of the bail, Pistorius will be electronically tagged, but be able to move within a 12-mile radius of his uncle’s home each day between 7 a.m. and noon. He will also have to hand over his passport.  

Pistorius, who was present in court, was dressed in a dark suit and tie. He looked composed during the hearing, and, the BBC reports, occasionally exchanged jokes with his legal team.

Pistorius shot and killed Steenkamp through a locked toilet door on February 14, 2013. He argued that he thought she was an intruder. In 2014, a court convicted him of manslaughter, the equivalent of culpable homicide, and sentenced him to five years in prison. But he was released a year into his sentence, and allowed to spend the rest of his term under house arrest—until last week’s reversal.

How Fiction Can Survive in a Distracted World

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

Doug McLean

When today’s novelists try to entice readers, they’re competing against a multitude of visual distractions—email, Twitter, streaming TV, the endless allure of the iPhone. The quiet appeal of the book so rarely trumps the quick digital fix, says Kevin Barry, author of Beatlebone, that novelists shouldn’t even try to compete for people’s eyes—they should go for their ears instead.

In a conversation for this series, Barry argued that the human voice still has the power to mesmerize us the way screens seem to, and that modern fiction should be heard and not seen. For Barry, the rich aural textures of Dylan Thomas’s radio drama Under Milk Wood—a “play for voices,” which first aired in 1953—offer a way forward for literature in a glassy-eyed world.

Beatlebone, Barry’s latest, is a work of speculative historical fiction: The protagonist is a world-weary John Lennon, encountered two years before his untimely death in 1980. Artistically frustrated and besieged by fame, Lennon tries to make his way to a private island off the Irish coast, where he hopes to get some peace. For Barry, there were numerous challenges in conjuring an icon’s spoken cadence, and his revision process—he reads the work aloud like an actor, and it takes years to get the voices right—is laborious.

Kevin Barry is author of the collection Dark Lies the Island and the novel City of Bohane, which won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He spoke to me by phone from his home in County Sligo, Ireland.

Kevin Barry: We’ve changed very much as readers of texts, in recent years. We’re much more impatient now—I think, primarily, because we’re all online, all the time. Our attention flits very quickly from text to text. You know: that thing where you’ve got 10 or 15 wonderful books at the side of your bed, and you’re there looking at your iPhone.

There’s too much out there to be dealing with: music, amazing films, good stuff of every variety. So you’ve got to get them fucking quick. That really changes the way you’ve got to approach writing as a novelist. It’s more like a short story now, in some ways. You have to get the reader on the first page of a short story, you have to convince them of a world inside page one. As writers try to capture the scattered attention of readers, I think the novel is moving towards that degree of compression.

But one thing can still arrest us, slow us down, and stop us in our tracks: the human voice. I think this explains the explosion in podcasts and radio narratives. The human voice still holds our attention, allowing us to tune in to a narrative in a way we find increasingly difficult on the page.

Readers and listeners increasingly want their stories to come at them directly in the form of a human voice. While everybody says that book sales are dropping, there’s an explosion in literary events, book festivals, spoken word events. People want to listen, and they want to hear stories. And that’s what makes a text like Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood—which is, what, 80 years old—so fresh and exciting.

I think I first came across it, as a teenager, in an art house film club in the 1980s—it was a version from the ’60s, with Richard Burton as the narrator (a rather over-ripe narrator, looking back at it now). I do think that there is a particular time in a reader’s life when Dylan Thomas has a special reverb, and it’s in that teenage moment. He’s deeply romantic. And he’s in love with language. He’s pushing language to the extent of what it can do on the page.

It’s a play for voices, a radio play, with a straightforward setup: It’s the life of a night in a small Welsh town, in the late ’30s or early ’40s. It’s very much in thrall to Joyce and to Faulkner, though Thomas brings something different of his own to it, and he’s possibly a more generous writer than those two gentlemen. He’s very engaged in the process of giving us color and giving us the world.

My favorite bit remains the scene description that comes from the first voice, from the narrator. The play begins with a single voice, an extended monologue made up of scene directions written for their own poetry:

FIRST VOICE [very softly]

To begin at the beginning:

It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and- rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

What I love is the ripeness of the language. Dylan Thomas would have been thrown out of the MFA class. There’s no way he would be allowed through with the sheer, ornate flourishes of the language, which are glorious on the page. Also, he’s writing pretty much in meter. Formal rhymes and formal repetitions spring the prose off the page.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood.

There’s also an oddness to the description, a weirdness that makes it hard to say just what’s going on. You think, what the fuck is “an organplaying wood”? But then you can hear a breeze going through the pipes, and you realize he’s trying to summon the sound of the woods by night in your ear, a breeze playing through the forest in Wales, in the early 1940s, and you’re transported there. He’s summoning images through sound.

Everything is so perfect, so perfectly chosen for sound and rhythm. And I love the refrain, “listen,” which repeats all the way through the work:

Listen. It is night moving in the streets …

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black …

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

With this injunction to listen, Thomas is saying stop, stop, stop. He’s slowing us down so that we can enter this world.

I always think there are two kinds of readers. There are readers who read with their eyes, who process a text in images, and I think there are readers who read with their ears, who listen, as the sentences unfold across the page. I’m of the latter variety. I think the readers who are drawn to my work read with their ears. I just fucking love this stuff. I just think it’s rich, and it’s ripe, and it’s beautiful, and it’s sentimental, and it just transports us to a world.

The ambition for any piece of literary art should be that it will mesmerize, create a mesmeric effect in the reader. And as the way we write fiction has been changed, daily, by the fact of the technological apparatus that surrounds us, we need new ways to trap our readers in the page. If they can hear it—that’s the mesmeric quality. It’s hearing the work that will calm that crazed impatience in the mind, and make them grip the story and enter the world.

So I write with the intention that, ultimately, the words will be heard. It’s either going to be read by that reader with ears on the page, or by actors at some point. It will be heard out loud, and that’s the direction I think we need to push in.

Listening is a crucial part of the writing process, too, for me. My ear is my critical tool as a writer, because it’s what catches the false notes. Your eye can very easily glide across the page, look down at the text and go, “Oh yeah, that’s fine.” But if you read it out and hear it, your ear will very quickly tell you when you’re not quite there.

Writing for the ear is kind of like being an actor: I approach my characters as though I'm approaching roles to play out. Acting out the work, doing all the voices, and reciting it aloud is a very important part of the process for me. I write a lot of dialogue in my stories and novels. Duologues and monologues tend to be the engines of my projects, and I will rewrite the fuckers endlessly. I will do 100 drafts of a dialogue. I’ll constantly take the red pen to it as I act it out, trying to get closer and closer.

If you read through a dialogue twice and it seems fine, that’s something. If you read through it 10 times and it seems okay, that means something. But it’s when you go through it 100 times, and you stop making marks in it, that you know you have it right.

I believe it’s important in your work to concentrate on what you’re good at, and I can write dialogue very well. But I find it quite amusing when someone says, “Oh, you’re very natural with dialogue.” Because, of course, it’s not natural at all. If you transcribe a conversation, it looks completely unnatural on the page. An awful lot of art and effort has to go into it to make it feel real.

Dialogue has to look light and effortless. It has to have a feeling of airiness on the page. But to get that lightness takes hard, rock-breaking work. So much craft goes into it. I’ll have a page and a half or two pages of light or very light-flowing dialogue on the page, that will have cost me months of tears and sweat in my writing studio in the back of the house.

It’s hearing the work that will calm that crazed impatience in the mind, and make them grip the story and enter the world.

With this particular project, Beatlebone, it took a lot of drafts to get the voice I was happy with for John and his sidekick, Cornelius. I knew their voices were the engine of the novel, and getting them right took a couple years. It became apparent to me quickly that this project presented some unique problems, because people will come to this book with a preconception of what he should sound like. So I watched YouTube videos, mostly from 1970s U.S. chat shows like Dick Cavett, stopping, pausing, and repeating them endlessly. He was very capricious in his nature, and changed mood very quickly, going from light and fluffy and funny and charming to quite dark and paranoid and spiky, inside the course of a sentence. To replicate that on the page takes a lot of work.

It’s a short novel, 50,000 words, but I wrote countless pages—probably something like 400,000 words in drafts, just to get 50,000 from that. It was a long and uneconomical process.

I do think that if John Lennon had written a novel, the voice would sound something like the voice of Under Milk Wood. As I was writing Beatlebone it was always close to the desk, and I would sometimes look into and marvel at the way it springs you into its world with sheer, unembarrassed poetry.

As you read the text it seems so natural and light on the page. You think, this came out, surely, in a single rush of inspiration. But that wasn’t the case at all. For years, he was trying to write something about a night in the life of a place. It went through very many iterations and different drafts. It took 10 or 15 years before the idea found its ultimate fruition in Under Milk Wood.

All that work, in the end, yielded something with the power to transport us. And we need that, no matter what’s happening with the way we process narratives and process texts. We will always need that mesmeric quality, and we will always need stories. We need them because our lives can be shit, miserable and cruel, and they don’t turn out the way we want them to—so we turn to narratives to give us shape and to give life meaning.

Have the Justices Gone Gun-Shy?

The U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear thousands of cases each year, so in one sense, Monday’s announcement that it wouldn’t take up Friedman v. Highland Park wasn’t much of a surprise. But among the 130 cases the Court declined to grant certiorari on Monday morning, only one elicited a dissent from two justices.

Arie Friedman challenged Highland Park’s assault-weapons ban, which prohibits residents from buying, selling, or owning most types of semiautomatic firearms. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Chicago surburb’s ban by narrowly interpreting the Court’s recent Second Amendment rulings, which focused on handguns.

That ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent from the denial of certiorari, “eviscerated many of the protections recognized” by the Supreme Court. More importantly, he argued, the Court’s refusal to summarily reverse the Seventh Circuit or even hear the case at all risked “relegating the Second Amendment to a second-class right.” Justice Scalia joined his opinion without comment.

Monday’s refusal to hear Friedman is the latest episode in the Supreme Court’s strange silence on the Second Amendment since its landmark rulings five years ago. As the national debate over the role of firearms in American society intensifies with each mass shooting or proposed gun-control measure, the justices have refused to hear a single major gun-rights case since they applied the Second Amendment to the states in 2010.

The Court’s silence hasn’t been for want of a significant case. In June, the justices declined to hear a challenge to San Francisco’s requirement that handguns must be either disabled with trigger locks or stored in locked containers when not in use. The city ordinance was similar, though not identical, to the one struck down by the Supreme Court in D.C. v. Heller in 2008. Last year, the justices ignored two NRA-led cases challenging federal and state age restrictions on firearm purchases. And in 2013, the Court refused a case that sought to overturn New York’s strict regulations on carrying handguns outside the home.

The cumulative effect of these denials (and many others) is a bizarre unwillingness to participate in a legal revolution that the Court itself ignited. First, some history. For most of the republic’s existence, the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, only applied to the federal government. Then, in the 1927 case Gitlow v. New York, the justices ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause extended the protections of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause to laws passed by state and local governments. The ruling sparked a slow-burning revolution in American constitutional law over the next half-century as the justices steadily began what constitutional scholars refer to as “selective incorporation”: the application of the Bill of Rights to the states, piece by piece.

State constitutions already protected many rights in many states, but some of the Court’s incorporation rulings still led to seismic changes, especially in criminal law. In Mapp v. Ohio in 1961, the Court incorporated the exclusionary rule, a Fourth Amendment remedy that prevents the use of illegally obtained evidence during trials, to the states, where most criminal trials in the U.S. take place. Two years later, in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Court also incorporated the Sixth Amendment’s assistance-of-counsel clause and ruled that the states had to provide a lawyer for criminal defendants who could not afford one in felony cases, leading to the creation of the modern public-defender system.

By the late 1960s, the Court had expanded most of the Bill of Rights to the states. But the Second Amendment remained an outlier. Only a smattering of cases had addressed it since the Civil War, and those that did often weren’t favorable to the gun-rights movement: U.S. v. Cruikshank, a Reconstruction-era case, explicitly stated that the Second Amendment didn’t apply to the states, and the 1939 case U.S. v. Miller upheld the restrictions of the federal National Firearms Act.

As Michael Waldman noted in his recent history of the Second Amendment, virtually all judges and constitutional scholars believed until recently that there was no constitutional right to individual gun ownership. Chief Justice Warren Burger, a staunchly conservative Nixon appointee, called the idea “a fraud on the American public” in a 1980 interview. The most notable gun-related case of the Rehnquist Court, U.S. v. Lopez, struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 for exceeding Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, not for violating the Second Amendment.

Then, in two successive rulings in 2008 and 2010, the Supreme Court dramatically reversed course. First, in a 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Court ruled that, lo and behold, the Second Amendment did protect an individual’s right to bear arms. Scalia, writing for the majority, relied heavily on English legal history and colonial-era texts to outline the Founders’ intent to protect that right. At the same time, he dismissed those who noted that despite this historical record, the Court itself had never before found such a right. “Other provisions of the Bill of Rights have similarly remained unilluminated for lengthy periods,” he argued. “For most of our history the question did not present itself.”

Heller was a triumph of the gun-rights movement, which spent decades dragging the idea out of the hinterlands of American constitutional thought and into the Supreme Court’s rulings. But despite the fears of some and the hopes of others, the decision was more restrained than it could have been. D.C.’s handgun law was among the strictest in the country, making it an easy target for legal activists but limiting its factual relevance for future challenges to other city and state gun laws. In his opinion for the Court, Scalia also indicated that Heller should not throw most of the nation’s gun laws into chaos.

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

More importantly, the decision only applied to D.C. itself and to the federal government; it would take another ruling to apply it to the states. Two years later, the same 5-4 majority of justices incorporated the Second Amendment to strike down Chicago’s handgun ban in McDonald v. Chicago. Citing the historical record, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “it is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty.”

Throughout their opinions in McDonald, both sides braced for future legal challenges to gun laws nationwide. Justice John Paul Stevens complained that the Court “unleashed in Heller a tsunami of legal uncertainty,” citing hundreds of Second Amendment challenges filed in the lower courts in the previous two years. Alito countered those fears with the Court’s past reassurances.

We made it clear in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such longstanding regulatory measures as “prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,” “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” We repeat those assurances here. Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, incorporation does not imperil every law regulating firearms.  

Five justices formed the majorities in Heller and McDonald: Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Chief Justice John Roberts. All of them remain on the Court today. The Court does not identify how justices vote when granting or denying certiorari petitions, but four votes are required to grant a case. We can therefore logically conclude that at least two justices from the Heller/McDonald majority have refused to take a single Second Amendment case in the last five years.

That does not mean that the same two justices voted against hearings in every single case—Alito and Thomas could have voted against some, for example, while Scalia and Kennedy might have voted against others. More than two justices could have also voted against hearings in some cases. In Friedman, for example, Roberts might have voted to hear the case but chosen not to disclose his vote or join Thomas's dissent. And it’s also possible that the entire Heller/McDonald majority is voting to block further Second Amendment cases with the help of one or more dissenters, though that seems unlikely given how many of the denied cases undercut Heller and/or McDonald.

If the justices had accepted one or two firearm-related cases or their silence was limited to a single term or two, it would be irresponsible to speculate. But a five-year silence on the Second Amendment amid a number of major cases suggests something deeper is at work. Maybe it’s the high-profile mass shootings since McDonald. Or the rise in shootings in Chicago since they struck down the city’s handgun ban. Or maybe they’re waiting for more consensus to emerge among the federal circuit courts before revisiting the questions. Or maybe they’re just waiting for the right one

Donald Trump's Call to Ban Muslim Immigrants

Donald Trump is now calling for an end to all Muslim immigration into the United States.

In a written statement late Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign said the Republican frontrunner wanted a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.” As backing, Trump cited a controversial six-month-old survey from the right-wing Center for Security Policy finding that one-quarter of U.S. Muslim respondents believed that violence against Americans was justified as part of global jihad and that a slim majority “agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah.”

Trump has built his campaign juggernaut on the premise that he is willing to flout all standards of political correctness, drawing the support of Americans fearful of immigrants and favoring a muscular response to Islamic terrorism. In the aftermath of the Islamic State attack that killed 130 people in Paris, he’s claimed—without evidence of truth—that “thousands” of Muslims were cheering the 9/11 attacks on rooftops in New Jersey, and he’s seemed to suggest that he would support a registry of all Muslims in the U.S. And just days after the attack by two apparently-radicalized terrorists in San Bernandino, Trump has tried to outflank his Republican rivals, most of whom have called for rejecting refugees fleeing Syria because of security concerns.

Yet Trump’s constitutionally-questionable call to place an explicit religious test on immigration goes far beyond his previous statements.

For one, this was not an off-the-cuff remark, a response to a vague question, or even an idle retweet. Trump detailed his new position in a written statement sent to hundreds if not thousands of reporters covering the campaign. “Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine,” Trump said.

Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.

The statement amounts to a sharp rebuke of President Obama’s plea, delivered in an Oval Office address on Sunday night, that the nation “reject discrimination” against Muslims. “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country,” Obama said. “It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently.  Because when we travel down that road, we lose."

One Democratic candidate responded immediately to Trump’s proposal.

.@realdonaldtrump removes all doubt: he is running for President as a fascist demagogue.

— Martin O'Malley (@MartinOMalley) December 7, 2015

Condemnations from Republicans quickly followed. Jeb Bush tweeted that Trump had become “unhinged.” Senator Lindsey Graham, a long-shot Republican rival, tweeted that Trump had “gone from making absurd comments to being downright dangerous with his bombastic rhetoric.”

He’s putting at risk the lives of interpreters, American supporters, diplomats, & the troops in the region by making these bigoted comments

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 7, 2015

Another Senate Republican, Jeff Flake of Arizona, wrote that “just when you think [Trump] can stoop no lower, he does.” The White House responded on Twitter by posting a quote, in all-caps, of Obama’s call to rejected religious tests.

The survey that Trump cited, by a D.C. think tank started by a former adivser to Ronald Reagan, was repudiated by a group at Georgetown University that tracks Islamophobia. “This survey should not be taken seriously,” the organization wrote in June after the survey was cited by Bill O’Reilly on Fox News.

It comes from an organization with a history of producing dubious claims and “studies” about the threat of shariah, and was administered using an unreliable methodology. Its proponents seize upon its shoddy findings, exaggerating and misrepresenting them to American audiences, and falsely claim that the survey data represents the views of Muslims nationwide.

Trump’s call for banning all Muslim immigrants came hours after a Monmouth University survey found that the GOP frontrunner is now trailing Ted Cruz in the important early-voting state of Iowa. The poll-obsessed Trump ignored that survey and instead tweeted a different Iowa poll showing him in the lead.

The Long Radicalization of the San Bernardino Shooters

Both Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were radicalized for quite some time before the couple killed 14 people and wounded 21 others at a civic-services center in San Bernardino,  California, the FBI said.

“As the investigation has progressed, we have learned and believe that both subjects were radicalized and have been for quite some time,” David Bowdich, the assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said at a news briefing.

Bowdich also said both Farook and Malik participated in target practice at ranges in the Los Angeles area. “That target practice, on one occasion, was done within days of this event,” he said.

Bowdich said investigators are unsure how the couple was radicalized, who radicalized them, and at what point. News reports about Illinois-born Farook and Pakistan-born Malik provide few details.

The New York Times reports Malik enrolled at Al Huda center, a conservative religious school for women in Multan, Pakistan, after completing a degree in pharmacology at another university nearby. She left the 18-month course at Al Huda before completing it, telling administrators she was leaving to get married, the Times reported.

The Wall Street Journal adds:

Ms. Malik appeared religious even when she started at the university in 2007, wearing a niqab—the all-covering veil that leaves only the eyes exposed—throughout her time there, according to her professors.

Her brother, speaking to the Journal from Riyadh, where her family is based, said: “We are in shock. We don’t know what happened to our life.”

Malik apparently posted a message of allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, at the time of last Wednesday’s rampage.    

Farook’s father, also named Syed Farook, told La Stampa, the Italian newspaper, that his son was “fixated” on Israel and supported ISIS’s ideology. The environmental engineer had worked with the San Bernardino County Health Department for five years before last week’s shooting in which most of those killed were his colleagues.

Addressing the nation Sunday night, President Obama said the couple “had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West.”

Farook and Faisal, who were killed in a shootout with police, left behind a 6-month-old daughter.

Terror Alerts in the 'See Something, Say Something' Era

On Monday, after President Obama’s Oval Office address about last week’s ISIS-inspired attack in San Bernardino, California, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced he would change the national terrorism-warning system.

This raises an important question: What is the current terror warning system in the United States? (Scratches head.)

Since the discarding of the infamous color-coded threat levels, Americans have been left to rely on the National Terrorism Advisory System. The mission of the four-and-a-half-year-old system is to “effectively communicate information about terrorist threats by providing timely, detailed information to the public, government agencies, first responders, airports and other transportation hubs, and the private sector.”

The only problem is that it has never been used. While Americans traveling abroad may have heard warnings from the State Department, no alerts have been issued by the Department of Homeland Security. In the wake of the San Bernardino attacks and a heightened uneasiness about terrorism, Johnson said it was time for a change.

“I believe that in this environment, we need to get beyond that and go to a new system that has an intermediate level to it and I’ll be announcing soon, hopefully, what our new system is, that I think, reflects the current environment and the current realities,” he said at a Defense One event.

Forgetting that this already sounds a little like what the current system was designed to do, what does an “intermediate level” of warning look like? The answer, it seems, is a lower bar for officials to pass along information about threats to the general public.

“The new alerts will be similar to intelligence bulletins the FBI and DHS share with law enforcement agencies around the country, and not currently with the public,” CBS reported.

One irony here is that Johnson’s announcement comes in the wake of an attack for which there was seemingly no warning or intelligence. Even ISIS could only take partial credit for the events and, if anything, the episode only renewed the discourse about the challenges law enforcement faces in confronting violence by self-radicalized attackers. Meanwhile, on the Sunday morning shows, pundits and presidential contenders alike weren’t calling for inquiries into intelligence failures, but debating gun control, no-fly lists, and the broader fighting against ISIS.

In one critique of the old color-coded terror warning system, Bruce Schneier, the terrorism expert, explained, “They don’t tell people what they can do—they just make people afraid.” Will giving the public access to intelligence bulletins offer more than that?

Could Kendrick Lamar Win Album of the Year at the Grammys?

“You got robbed. I wanted you to win. You should have. It’s weird and it sucks that I robbed you.” So texted Macklemore to Kendrick Lamar when the former beat out the latter for the Best Rap Album award at the Grammys in 2014. It was a somewhat confusing move for him to apologize for something other people had decided and then post the apology to Instagram, but if nothing else the incident had one clear effect: bolstering the idea that Kendrick Lamar is the kind of musician who should win awards.

The Grammys came to embrace that notion in 2015, giving Lamar’s single “i” both Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song honors. And today, it nominated Lamar in 11 categories for the 2016 ceremony. Which means he now has the second most nominations for an artist in a single year in the Grammys’ history—just behind Michael Jackson’s 12 nods in 1984. In a perfect world, the Recording Academy’s newfound enthusiasm would result in Lamar getting the top prize of the night, the Album of the Year Grammy, but, as Lamar’s work so often reminds listeners, this is not a perfect world.

Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly is a brilliant, dense, and noisy document of someone struggling with the expectations put on him by society, his community, and his conscience. At a time when the relevance of the album format is in question, Lamar is an example of a young artist using it to its full, cohesive effect. Accordingly, it’s landed at the top of many critics’ year-end lists, and the praise is so broad that some people have gotten suspicious about it. “This bizarre and supposedly ‘challenging’ album was universally acclaimed and, apparently, unimpeachable,” wrote Complex’s Justin Charity in a November article headlined, “Why Did Everyone Claim to Enjoy Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly?” Charity liked the album a lot, he said, but wanted to point out that most of the rave reviews praised Lamar’s complexity without really parsing it.

Regardless of whether you agree with that appraisal, the fact that it was made at all is a sign of how wide the cultural credibility Lamar holds is. It will now be seen whether that credibility can stand up to the historical headwinds against hip-hop at the Grammys. If To Pimp a Butterfly wins Album of the Year, it’ll be only the third rap release ever to do so, and the first in more than a decade. What’s more, it would be arguably a clearer-cut victory for the genre than any before. Jack Hamilton laid the groundwork for this case writing for The Atlantic in 2012:

The first time the Academy gave Album of the Year to a rap record was in 1999—a mere 20 years after “Rapper’s Delight”—for Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Miseducation is an undeniably great record, but it’s also an undeniably great record for people who don’t actually like hip-hop, or, more honestly and less politely, don’t like the kind of people who tend to make hip-hop. Lauryn was a Columbia-educated, movie-star beauty who also sang; Miseducation wasn’t even entered in the “Best Rap Album” category, winning “Best R&B Album” instead. The next time a hip-hop artist won was in 2004, when Album of the Year went to Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, a double album that also benefited from a “rap-but-not-really” vibe thanks to the massive success of “Hey Ya!,” which won a Grammy in the category of “Best Urban/Alternative Performance” (a.k.a. “Best Euphemism Coined By A Confused Elderly White Person”).

To Pimp a Butterfly has a cultural profile outside of hip-hop, but it’s difficult to argue the music itself is rap for people who don’t like rap. It’s true that the primary instrumentation—studio-recorded jazz and funk—might appeal to traditionalist members of the Recording Academy. But Lamar delivers his words fast and raggedly, and by all rights some people will recoil at—or be offended by—what he says. The first song on the album starts with the sampled words “Every nigger is a star.” The second one has Lamar riffing on the phrase “this dick ain’t free.”

This, of course, is why it’s unlikely it would win. Album of the Year Grammys tend to go to sonically safe material without many obviously synthetic elements, music that would work well at chain coffee shops. For example, Beck’s whispered melodies and meditative fingerpicking scored an upset over Beyonce’s raunchy self-titled release last year. Before that, Daft Punk’s lush homage to the same musical traditions responsible for elevator music beat out Lamar’s major-label debut. Mumford & Sons, Adele, Arcade Fire, U2, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss were other winners in recent years. So was Taylor Swift, whose 1989 is up against Butterfly. But it’s worth noting that her previous win was for 2010’s Fearless, when she was in her guitar-strumming confessional phase. Now that she’s moved to shiny dance-pop, her chances at taking top prize on Grammy night may have decreased even though—or maybe even because—her popularity has increased.

Chris Stapleton, the songwriter whose improbable story, soulful voice, and throwback style gave him a surprising victory at the Country Music Awards last month, could well be the Academy’s choice. Then again, Alabama Shakes—who can be described with many of the same adjectives as Stapleton, though their Grammy-nominated Sound & Color sounds very different from him—might siphon away some country- or rock-inclined voters. Then again again, the other nominee, The Weeknd, an R&B singer with heavy rap influence, might have a similar effect on Lamar’s possible constituency. All of which means it’s not impossible he could prevail, but it would still count as a surprise.

A pervasive opinion about the Grammys is that they don’t matter, given that they have a dismal record when it comes to awarding works that eventually come to be seen as classics. But the ideal they represent is still important to many people, especially among those who make music in genres that have been historically ignored by gatekeepers. When common attitudes about what kinds of art are worthy of respect conform to the broader real-world patterns about who hold power and who doesn’t, awards—arbitrary though they may seem—can act as a force for change, or at least as a cultural mirror. Maybe it’s time that mirror reflect as something as complicated and profound, and as different from what’s come before, as To Pimp a Butterfly.

How Obama's Gun-Control Push Inverted the Politics of the No-Fly List

It’s a familiar story of the post-September 11 era: Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a partisan fight over the “no-fly” list created after the attacks. One party insists that the nation must take common-sense measures to protect citizens and the homeland. The other party howls that it’s an outrageous violation of due-process rules and part of a slide into lawlessness. All that’s different now is that the dominant voices in the two parties have flipped 180 degrees.

During his Oval Office speech Sunday night, President Obama said: “Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun. What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security.”

Republicans reject that argument. “These are everyday Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism, they wind up on the no-fly list, there’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion, and now they’re having their Second Amendment rights being impeded upon,” Senator Marco Rubio, a top Republican presidential candidate, said on Sunday.

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The TSA Doesn't Work—and Never Has

Last week, prior to the massacre in San Bernardino, House Republicans blocked debate on the Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act. On Thursday, the measure failed in the Senate as well. While its sponsors say the bill would prevent those on terror lists from acquiring guns, the law doesn’t specify whether it would bar those on the no-fly list or on several other federal watchlists.

What’s striking about this debate is how closely it mirrors the argument during the George W. Bush administration, when Democrats warned against the excesses of the list and Republicans defended it. The current debate suggests the extent to which the leading voices in the parties are willing to rearrange their positions around hot-button issues like gun rights, and shows how civil liberties tend to be treated as a tactical tool, exalted when they’re politically useful and forgotten when that’s more expedient.

Before September 11, the government did maintain a list of people who were not permitted to get on planes—16 of them, according to 60 Minutes. The list quickly grew after the attacks, though the government doesn’t report exact figures, making it tough to tell where things stand at any given moment. By 2006, 60 Minutes reported, there were 44,000 people on the list, plus another 75,000 for whom the feds called for extra screening. The no-fly list is also part of a much larger set, the Terrorist Screening Database, which the government compiled in 2003. In September 2008, an FBI deputy director told Congress there were 400,000 people on that last, 97 percent of them foreigners.

How does someone get on the watchlist? Who knows! The government says it gets thousands of tips a day, but it won’t tell you whether you’re on it, and it won’t tell you how to get off, as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf explained in 2012. The enormous size of the lists inevitably led to confusion, false positives, and outrage. Even Senator Ted Kennedy managed to end up on the no-fly list. So did Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam.

The system understandably raised the hackles of civil libertarians. The ACLU has been outspoken about the problems with the list for years. But it also upset Democrats, who complained that the list was yet another example of the Bush administration overreaching in its conduct of national-security policy, sacrificing in order to fight terrorism the very liberties that it purported to be defending.

“If his name got on the list in error, is that happening to other citizens and are they experiencing such difficulty in resolving the problem?” Kennedy’s spokesman told The Washington Post.

Over the late 2000s, pressure grew, and the no-fly list actually shrank significantly, to about 4,000. But after the failed Christmas Day “underwear bomber” attack in December 2009, the Obama administration reversed course and significantly ramped up the list. By 2013, according to documents obtained by The Intercept, there were 47,000 people on the no-fly list, topping the Bush administration’s high. Obama’s decision was driven in part by national-security hawks in his own party, including California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called for a more aggressive list after the failed attack.

Republicans did not hesitate to criticize Obama over the attack, but the party was starting to discover a newfound skepticism for the no-fly list, now that a Democrat was in the White House and in charge of the list. That shift was helped by the election of a crop of libertarian-leaning legislators in the 2010 Tea Party wave, and growing evidence of the TSA’s inefficacy. The  change wasn’t unanimous—you can read the conservative pundit Michelle Malkin saying no-fly enforcement was too lax in 2010—but something had changed. (It can’t have helped that Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes was somehow placed on the list, too.)

Obama didn’t personally make a great deal out of the no-fly list itself during his 2008 campaign for president, but he did criticize the Bush administration for overreach on civil liberties and excessive secrecy. Yet when the administration was sued by a man who believed he was on the list, it refused to say whether or not the man was on the list. As Nick Baumann of Mother Jones put it, “2008 Obama would have slammed 2014 Obama for this.”

When arguing that those on the no-fly list shouldn’t be able to buy guns, Obama and his allies have pointed to a 2011 call from American-born al-Qaeda member Adam Gadahn for would-be jihadis to take advantage of lax American gun laws. Still, it’s unclear how large an effect such a change would have on actual terrorism. The GAO found in 2010 that between February 2004 and February 2010, people on the terror watchlist were subject to firearm or explosives background checks in 1,228 cases. They were allowed to make their purchases in 1,119 of those cases, because there was noting that legally prohibited the buys.

In a smaller subset of the data, between 2009 and 2010, the GAO found that “several” people on the no-fly list were allowed to buy guns. So far, there’s nothing to suggest that Syed Rizwan Farook and Tafsheen Malik, the suspects in the San Bernardino shooting, were on the no-fly list, either.

“There aren’t 700,000 terrorists operating in America openly on watch lists.”

The major objection among Republican politicians at the moment to Obama’s proposal is not that it wouldn’t prevent many gun purchases. It’s that it would infringe on people’s Second Amendment rights.

While that’s true, it somewhat misses the point. There are plenty of reasons why people in the United States can have their firearm rights abridged. The broader problem is not that the people on the no-fly list are being denied their rights; it’s that they’re being denied their rights without due process. The lack of due process for being placed on the list or getting off forms the basis for an ACLU case against the government, Latif, et al. v. Holder. In 2014, a federal court ruled that the redress process for people on the list was unconstitutional. The government revised its redress system, but the ACLU has again challenged that process as unconstitutional because of its lack of due process.

On Sunday, Rubio said, “There aren’t 700,000 terrorists operating in America openly on watch lists.” In fact, very few of the 700,000 he lists are in the U.S., but even accepting the principle, Rubio might, on some level, be making an argument against Obama’s gun proposal. But mostly, it’s a compelling case against the essence of the no-fly list as it exists today.

Beijing’s First ‘Red Alert’ Over Smog

As delegations from governments around the world gather in Paris to push for a deal to battle climate change, the capital of the world’s biggest polluter has issued a “red alert” over severe smog.

Starting Tuesday and continuing for three days, the more than 20 million residents of Beijing will have heavy limitations imposed on their daily activities. Schools will be closed, outdoor construction will be halted, and as the BBC reported, “cars with odd and even number plates will be banned from driving on alternate days.” It’s the first time China’s highest alert has ever been enacted in the city.

This latest development in China’s ongoing air-pocalypse comes after smog levels reached a 13-month high last week. To exhibit the extent of the haze, some residents posted outlines of famous buildings that were otherwise obscured by the pollution. As above, here’s the Temple of Heaven again:

Wu Jie News

At that time, the Chinese government issued an orange alert, the second-highest level in the country’s four-tier warning system. “Air pollution monitors showed that areas of Beijing had more than 256 micrograms per cubic meter of poisonous particles,” notes The Independent. “The World Health Organization (WHO) says that anything over 25 micrograms is considered unsafe.”

Citing a study conducted earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal noted that “air pollution could prematurely kill more than 250,000 Chinese residents in major cities.” In some parts of Beijing, visibility has been limited to less than 700 feet.

An Investigation Into Chicago's Police Department

The Justice Department will investigate the Chicago Police Department’s use of force, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Monday.

The move comes amid the fallout over a video showing the police-involved death of Laquan McDonald, but Lynch said the investigation, which will be carried out by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, will go beyond individuals. It will examine the department’s use of force, and whether that force is used disproportionately against racial and ethnic minorities. The inquiry will also examine accountability mechanisms, such as its disciplinary actions, and the department’s handling of allegations of misconduct, Lynch said.

Lynch said the goal of the investigation is to improve systems; to ensure officers are being provided with the tools to be more effective. She said when systems fail, they hurt community members as well as conscientious officers, creating mistrust between the two.

“This mistrust from members of the community makes it more difficult to gain help with investigations, to encourage victims and witnesses of crimes to speak up, and to fulfill the most basic responsibilities of public safety officials,” Lynch said. “And when suspicion and hostility is allowed to fester, it can erupt into unrest.”

The investigation will be similar to those the department has carried out recently in other cities, including Cleveland; Baltimore; and Ferguson, Missouri, and was prompted by Chicago’s recent release of a video from October 2014 in which a white police officer kills McDonald, a black teenager, by shooting him 16 times. The officer has since been charged with murder.

Last week, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired Garry McCarthy, the police superintendent, amid controversy over the video. But protests have also called for Emanuel’s resignation, as well as that of Anita Alvarez, the Cook County State’s Attorney, who waited 13 months to charge the officer, Jason Van Dyke, with McDonald’s murder. Emanuel’s administration released the video only after a judge ordered the city to make it public.

In a statement, Emanuel welcomed the Justice Department’s investigation:

"I welcome today's announcement by the @TheJusticeDept and pledge the City's complete cooperation." pic.twitter.com/T53V42L1sx

— ChicagosMayor (@ChicagosMayor) December 7, 2015

He has scheduled a 3 p.m. news conference (4 p.m. ET) to comment on the investigation.