Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 282

The Wiz Live! Was NBC’s Best Musical Yet

In previous years, it’s been unclear whether NBC intended its ratings-busting “live musical events” to be true incarnations of theater or the televisual equivalent of that nightmare you sometimes have where you’re wearing an Alice in Wonderland costume and standing on a stage next to Big Bird and you can’t quite remember why. Carrie Underwood in a dirndl. Allison Williams in a boy-wig with a British accent, flying. A blue metallic crocodile. Christopher Walken. In some ways, they felt like the natural conclusion of television in the social-media era: an extraordinary pileup of visual spectacle, so-bad-it’s-good performances, and psychedelic WTF-iness, with plentiful advertising breaks in which to compose social-media commentary on the phenomenon unfolding.

But not anymore. If Thursday night’s The Wiz Live! shared the exuberant punctuation of 2013’s The Sound of Music Live! and last year’s Peter Pan Live!, it surpassed both of those previous efforts in terms of energy, spirit, and watchability. And if it wasn’t always entirely smooth, it was at least ambitious, due in large part to the fact that unlike the two musicals before it, it wasn’t just a one-night event: The production, directed by the theater veteran Kenny Leon and the choreographer Matthew Diamond, is scheduled for a Broadway run next year, with the same design elements, the same book, and the same cast of Cirque du Soleil performers in the backdrop. (There’s no word yet on which if any of the actors might be returning.)

And it’s about time for a revival. If the NBC production proved anything, it’s that the show is a gorgeous, vibrant musical that’s been sorely neglected in the U.S. in recent years. The Wiz premiered in Baltimore in 1974, moving to Broadway the following year where it won seven Tonys, including the award for Best Musical. Its modernized reframing of The Wizard of Oz as a parable about African American culture is best-known via the 1978 film adaptation starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, a critical and commercial failure that’s since become a cult classic. Stephanie Mills, who originated the role of Dorothy, appeared in The Wiz Live! as Aunt Em to offer the first song of the night, and possibly the most compelling: “The Feeling We Once Had,” a moving testament of unstinting parental love.

In the past, NBC’s desire to find big-name stars with the space in their schedule for a 10-month commitment with such fleeting payoff has led to the casting of performers like Underwood, Walken, and Williams: able singers, and/or able actors with none of the stage presence to authoritatively take command of such an undertaking. So the casting of Queen Latifah (as the Wiz) and Mary J. Blige (as the Wicked Witch of the West) was inspired, in that both women decisively dominated their scenes. Blige’s rendition of “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News” was especially stirring in its antiheroic profession of power, and the decision by Leon and the writer Harvey Fierstein to reinvent the Wiz as female also gave Latifah ample opportunity to opine on the frustrations of being a woman in a man’s world. If anyone knows impostor syndrome, it’s the lady in pajamas hiding behind a giant green robotic head.

Who knew Ne-Yo could act? Or that screensaver images from Windows 98 could be converted into such magical backdrops for the Land of Oz?

The production was at its weakest when it tried to fuse theatrical tricks with TV magic, resulting in a tornado assisted by Cirque du Soleil performers in capes and special effects not seen since 1980s music videos. But its ensemble scenes were decisively inspired: a voguing dance sequence in the Emerald City; a trippy nightclub guarded by a surly bouncer (Common) that reminded where the inspiration for Panem’s Capitol really came from; a spirited “Ease on Down the Road” sung by the 19-year-old newcomer Shanice Williams as Dorothy, paired with the Broadway actor Elijah Kelley as the Scarecrow, the R&B singer Ne-Yo as the Tin Man, and the resplendent actor/comedian David Alan Grier as the Cowardly Lion. Who knew Ne-Yo could act? Or that screensaver images from Windows 98 could be converted into such magical backdrops for the Land of Oz?

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that presence matters. All the singing lessons and dance rehearsals in the world can’t turn a performer into a stage icon, but true star power can mask a wealth of sins (Blige perhaps isn’t the strongest actor, and at times Latifah’s first song was beyond her range, but it was really hard to care). But the decision to reconsider the show’s antagonist as a woman, and to empower Dorothy with the ability to forge her own destiny, proved that musical theater has far more to offer television than hate-tweets and neon reptiles. “Home is something got to be earned,” says Aunt Em at the beginning of The Wiz Live! You could say the same for live musical events.

ISIS in America

Authorities say ISIS has made it to America.

Multiple news organizations reported Friday morning that Tashfeen Malik, one of the two shooters in Wednesday’s massacre in San Bernardino, California, pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, on Facebook in the midst of the attack.

Assuming the report holds true, it likely answers one central question about what motivated the attackers, Malik and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook: an allegiance to the fanatical Islamist group. But it raises many more questions. What does it mean for ISIS to take action in the United States? Is this different from other lone-wolf-style attacks in the United States? Who counts as part of ISIS? Did the couple have any material ties or instructions to the self-proclaimed Islamic State? And can attacks like this ever be stopped?

While the investigation is still in its early stages, officials said they didn't think that any ISIS leaders had instructed Farook and Malik to conduct the massacre, which killed 14. “At this point we believe they were more self-radicalized and inspired by the group than actually told to do the shooting,” a federal law-enforcement official told The New York Times.

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That means this attack is different in kind from the Paris attacks. In that case, officials believe the killings were carefully orchestrated by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian who had traveled to and from Syria at least twice, rising from foot soldier to leader in ISIS’s ranks. Even if Abaaoud’s planning was independent, he was in contact with leaders and seems to have returned to Europe with an eye toward conducting attacks there.

If Malik and Farook were acting on their own accord, it would perhaps provide some reassurance that American counterterrorism hadn’t missed communication that could have foretold the attack. The bleak side of that is that it’s very difficult to detect self-radicalizing individuals—even ones, like Malik and Farook, who had stockpiled thousands of rounds of ammunition.

As ISIS has lost physical ground in Iraq and seen its cities pounded by airstrikes, it has shifted its tactics away from controlling territory—that is, the actual work of being a state—and begun calling on sympathizers to launch attacks in Western countries. San Bernardino fits into that plea.

But if ISIS commanders weren’t involved in the planning, how is the San Bernardino attack different from other lone-wolf attacks in the United States conducted by people who professed fidelity to violent jihadism, even if they didn’t have any formal ties to established groups? The death toll in California was higher, but Americans have seen several of these attacks over the years: a foiled 2011 bomb plot in Manhattan, the Boston Marathon bombing, and a shooting at a military-recruitment center in Chattanooga earlier this year. It also includes borderline cases like Nidal Hasan, who opened fire at Fort Hood after exchanging emails with the radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, or Faisal Shahzad, who received training in Pakistan but appears to have planned a bomb plot in Times Square on his own.

For that matter, what does it mean to be a member of ISIS, especially if one hasn’t been to the Levant? This is where Malik’s pledge of allegiance seems significant. Al-Qaeda, the previous incumbent as the world’s most feared terrorist group, tends toward the bureaucratic. Earlier this year, the U.S. government released a document seized during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden—a reasonably extensive questionnaire for anyone interesting in applying for membership.

ISIS, by contrast, seems much more welcoming. The process for conversion to Islam is relatively simple: recitation of the shadada, generally with witnesses. To become a member of ISIS, or at least to act in ISIS’s name, seems to require little more than a statement of allegiance to Baghdadi, who has declared himself caliph. As close terrorism-watchers Thomas Joscelyn and Rukmini Callimachi both pointed out, ISIS has said people should swear allegiance before attacks. The swearing of allegiance—bay’ah in Arabic—is a long tradition. Early Muslims swore allegiance to Muhammad as their leader. (Some Muslim countries still employ the process formally, and political theorists have postulated that bay’ah justifies Islamic democracy, because it involves the consent of the governed to be led by a chosen ruler.)

The ease with which a would-be attacker can attach himself or herself to ISIS and then carry out an attack in the group’s name raises questions about how meaningful it is that the San Bernardino attack had connections to ISIS, as opposed to any other Islamist groups. But it also makes it very difficult to block attacks. Since the September 11 attacks, the U.S. has created massive new mechanisms to try to track terror suspects. The FBI has also specifically been watching ISIS sympathizers stateside, the Times reports:

In recent months, the F.B.I. has been particularly concerned about individuals inspired by the Islamic State staging attacks in the United States, law enforcement officials say. Even before the shootings and bombings in Paris last month, the agency had under heavy surveillance at least three dozen individuals who the authorities were concerned might commit violence in the group’s name.

Yet that dragnet still wasn’t able to catch Farook and Malik.

Critics of the U.S. reaction to the September 11 attacks see things like that and argue there’s a great risk in overreacting to terrorism. For one thing, one of the legally defined goals of terrorism is to affect government policy, so an overzealous response may be unwittingly acquiescing with the aims of attacks. Meanwhile, too extensive a dragnet produces such massive amounts of data that it’s hard to separate the real risks from the minor ones and focus resources where they’re best used. While it is little consolation to the victims in San Bernardino and their families, the odds of being killed in a terrorist attack in the United States remain very low. It’s tough see how a confirmed ISIS attack on American soil changes that math.

The New Battle Against ISIS in Raids and Laws

The news from France may have quieted down, but that doesn’t mean it has been quiet. In the aftermath of last month’s attacks, France has launched more than 2,200 raids, made more than 250 arrests, and closed at least three mosques  as authorities empowered by the country’s emergency measures crack down.

“Such measures to close mosques because of radicalization have never before been taken by any government, including during the last state of emergency in 2005,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said. Firearms have also been seized in raids and several Muslim men have been placed under house arrest.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Hassan El Alaoui, a leading French imam, predicted France would shutter as many as 160 mosques in the coming months either for operating without permits or promoting radical views.

Elsewhere, lawmakers in both the U.K. and Germany enhanced their countries’ commitments to battling ISIS. On Wednesday, the British Parliament voted to expand airstrikes into Syria; previously, they only participated in coalition strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq.

On Friday, Germany joined, but in a more measured way. Their forces will not participate in airstrikes against ISIS, instead approving a $145 million non-combat role, which will include reconnaissance support.

As efforts to battle ISIS continue, Paris, which is still under a three-month state of emergency, is showing small signs of a return to normalcy. On Friday, Bonne Bière cafe, where five people were killed in last month’s attacks, reopened. It’s the first business targeted in the Paris attacks to open its doors again.

The news came as French and Belgian authorities

Scott Weiland Was Bigger Than Grunge

“Scott Weiland wrote n sang songs about a life unrestrained,” Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction tweeted this morning after learning of the death of the 48-year-old Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver singer. “I’m sure he’d love it if you would listen to one right now.”

That seems right. Weiland has now joined the club of rock stars whose premature deaths compete with their life story in the public memory, partly because his life story so easily can be seen as predicting his death. Drugs were what “Vasoline” was about. Drugs were the subject of many Weiland’s interviews. Drugs are what led to him getting kicked out of Velvet Revolver in 2008. Drugs killed his Wildabouts bandmate Jeremy Brown earlier this year. Weiland reportedly died in his sleep from a heart attack. But what are people, accurately or not (we still don’t know), going to assume caused it?

In any case, Weiland’s death will add to the air of tragedy surrounding the early ’90s grunge boom that Stone Temple Pilots have always been associated with. Gone: Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, Mike Starr, and now Weiland. The Guardian had already called it the deadliest genre.

But thinking of Weiland solely in terms of grunge brings you to another dicey part of his public narrative. Stone Temple Pilots were often dissed by critics and fans of other bands as a mere growly imitator of Pearl Jam and Nirvana. Sixteen top-10 rock songs later, that perception persists: Around the 20th anniversary of their sophomore album Purple, Rolling Stone called the Pilots “fake grunge’s most archetypal ensemble.” It’s true that Stone Temple Pilots’ sound, for a time, coincided with grunge; it’s certainly true that sometimes I confuse a Weiland song for an Eddie Vedder song or vice versa. But does that make Weiland fake, and does it make his best music any less potent? Taken on its own, “Creep,” is as effective a ballad of self-loathing as the era produced; “Sex Type Thing” remains a hard-charging subversion of masculinity; “Interstate Love Song” is still a song you turn the radio volume up for.

The truth is that Weiland didn’t care much about grunge’s pretentions, as can be seen in the fact that he joined up with Velvet Revolver, composed of members of Guns ‘n’ Roses, a band that personified all that grunge hated. After STP’s heyday, his catalogue gets eclectic:  The 2001 Stone Temple Pilots song “Hello It’s Late” comes off like a lovely Beatles cover, and his 2011 holiday album was either a total trolling effort or a gloriously earnest appreciation for ’40s male crooners. “My solo albums are very avant-garde compared to Velvet Revolver or STP,” he said to Spin in an attempt to explain that Christmas record. “It’s more influenced by bands I like such as Granddaddy and the Flaming Lips and Sigur Rós and the Smiths.”

More than anything, Weiland stood apart through his persona. He was the kind of flamboyant, swaggering, alpha rocker that the sweater-swathed likes of Kurt Cobain were reacting to. Sometimes he stripped naked on stage; other times, he shouted through a megaphone; his dancing, his wardrobe, and his energy repeatedly drew comparisons to Mick Jagger. And when he talked about drugs, he talked about them less as a salve for pain and more as a way to have a really great time. His first experience with heroin, he reportedly wrote in his 2010 memoir, came while touring with other musicians partaking in China White. Weiland decided he couldn’t pass up “the delicacies that came with being a rock star.”

But Weiland did realize the dangers of those delicacies, and of the mythology around rock stardom. There’s a now gut-punching quote in a 2008 interview he did with EW, where he talked about excess, music, and mortality. “There are a lot of junkies that have died with that Keith Richards poster pinned inside their minds: ‘Like, ‘He can do it, why can’t I?’” he said. “But no one is Keith. God doesn’t make many of them.”

It’s Official: Ramsay Bolton Is the Actual Worst Character on Television

Earlier this year, when we started pondering the question of who in contemporary television is more dastardly, more unlikable, and more flat-out terrible than anyone else, we had a handful of contenders in mind. Matt Thompson was convinced it was Scandal’s Fitz, whom he memorably described as “an overprivileged, murderous, man-shaped infant whose libido dictates his foreign policy.” Adrienne LaFrance made the case for Mad Men’s Pete Campbell, citing “the fact that his character is so realistic, that humans who think like Pete Campbell really do exist, and that they often end up getting what they want—no matter how they act and whom they humiliate along the way.”

Readers also offered their own submissions. More than a handful were convinced it was Donald Trump. John Goshorn nominated Breaking Bad’s Todd Alquist, “an amoral sociopath, whose capacity for cruelty knows no bounds.” Nassim Hosseinzadeh made the case for Veep’s Jonah Ryan. “He’s loud, crass, tactless, incompetent, absurd, deluded, and obnoxious in every way,” she wrote. “But gosh is he fun.” Howard Shpetner offered Scandal’s Rowan Pope, because he “killed Little Jerry. Also I don’t get cable.” Kristen Hoyles wrote that OITNB’s Piper Chapman is the worst, because “for as long as she’s been in prison, she’s failed to gain any empathy for those less fortunate.”

And Laura Argiri offered a terrific diagnosis of one Ramsay Bolton. “Ramsay just wants to have fun,” she wrote. “By peeling the skin off people and gelding them.”

After a month and more than 145,000 votes (see the completed bracket here), it’s now official: Ramsay is the worst person on television. As David Sims has written: “The bastard child of the ice-blooded Roose Bolton, a northern lord who usurps the heroic Starks at the notorious Red Wedding, Ramsay has spent the majority of his screen time torturing people, feeding women to dogs, and sexually assaulting the teenaged Sansa Stark on the night of their (forced) marriage. He does almost all of this with an impish grin on his face.” But beyond sheer sadism, Spencer Kornhaber adds, Ramsay “uses brutality as it’s commonly been used in history: for power … He’s not evil for evil’s sake; he’s someone who sews atrocity and reaps the benefits for himself and his family.”

In considering what makes characters objectionable, there seem to be two recurring qualities on display: cruelty and/or a profound disregard for others. Often it’s a desire for power that governs the behavior of archetypal villains like Jim Moriarty, Vee Parker, Gus Fring, and Jeremy Jamm. For some viewers, seeing the selfishness displayed regularly by Carrie Mathison, Pete Campbell, Hannah Horvath, and Fitzgerald Grant makes them equally difficult to watch. But to some extent, every person on the bracket had at least one or two redeeming qualities, even if it was just their willingness to protect the people they loved. Ramsay, however, has none. He is the #actualworst.

The 32 Actual Worst Characters on Television

A Very Murray Christmas Captures the True Spirit of the Season

What is Christmas? A religious holiday? A commercial ritual? A time of warmth, and togetherness, and generosity, and love? A time of sadness, and loneliness, and regret? Is it magic? Is it mythic? Is it madness?

It is, at this point, all of those things. As a culture, here in the U.S., we tend to be extremely confused about what, precisely, is being celebrated on December 25 (and, at this point, the entire month that precedes it). The Starbucks cup controversy. The fact that you can buy an advent calendar from Dior. The notion that there is, apparently, a war being currently waged in the name of the most wonderful time of the year.

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Nowhere is all this yuletide perplexity made more clear than in A Very Murray Christmas, the Netflix special directed by Sofia Coppola that takes the traditional cliches of the Celebrity-Driven Christmas Extravaganza—complete with musical acts and dance numbers and cameos from fellow celebrities—and makes Murray of it. The premise: Bill Murray, playing himself or a proximate version, has signed on to do one of those extravaganzas, this particular one set at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, on Christmas Eve. He does not want to do the show. This is mostly because he thinks the show is silly, but also because, apparently, he is beset with holiday ennui. (We are meant to understand this because A Very Murray Christmas’s opening musical number features Murray, bedecked in a tux and an antler headband, crooning “Christmas Blues” as Paul Shaffer accompanies him on the piano. And because Murray announces to his producers that “I feel so alone” and also that “God hates me.”)

Murray is forced to do the special, though, because—as his producers (Amy Poehler and Julie White) repeatedly remind him—he is under contract. And because, Poehler also reminds him, with an indeterminate amount of irony, “Everything that’s fun is always hard.”

But! Murray is saved, kind of, by a huge blizzard that hits New York. As a result of which none of his show’s planned guests—George Clooney, Miley Cyrus—can make it to the taping. Instead, he enlists the help of Chris Rock, whom he runs into while he’s trying to leave the Carlyle. He brings Rock to the set. And then, clad in green Christmas sweaters with holly-based boutonnieres, they sing a delightfully awkward duet of the religious Christmas slow-jam “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Then come, via various shenanigans, duets with Jenny Lewis, Maya Rudolph, and the Carlyle’s pastry chef.

If all this sounds not just delightfully awkward, but also full-on bananas, that’s because it most certainly is. “It’s starting to feel to me like Christ-mess,” Michael Cera, as Murray’s wannabe agent and a general “Hollywood sleazebag,” puts it. “As in,” he elaborates, unnecessarily: “What a mess.”

Neither fully ironic nor fully earnest, the whole thing radiates confusion. This is Hollywood, taking solipsistic delight in laughing at itself.

And: indeed. A Very Murray Christmas is not just jarringly uneven, or even insistently dada: It’s just … confusing. The plot has a Mad-Libs quality to it; the musical performances generally resemble karaoke songs sung without the benefit of Auto-tune; Murray’s character vacillates confusingly between a curmudgeonly old man and a caring one. In a call-back to Scrooged, Murray refers to himself as “The Ghost of Christmas Present.” Then he gives sweet romance advice to a bride (Rashida Jones) who’s had her Christmas Eve wedding ruined by the storm. All of this culminates in the bride and her groom-to-be (Jason Schwartzman) singing the extremely non-holiday song “I Saw the Light in Your Eyes” together.

The unkind reading of all this is that it is the result of hubris of a particular Hollywoodian strain, the kind that stems from the fact that the entire thing revolves around Murray’s curmudgeonly charisma. We’ll watch this, the thinking seems to have gone, because of Murray and his constellation of stars. Which precludes the need for a compelling—or even sensical—plot. And which precludes the need, too, for a consistent tone. Neither fully ironic nor fully earnest, the whole thing radiates confusion. This is Hollywood, once again taking solipsistic delight in laughing at itself.

The kinder reading, however, is that the show—this big, flashy, confusing Christmess—is a reflection of a broader confusion about Christmas. “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” sung by comedians. The pastry chef, professing his Yuletide loneliness. It makes extremely little sense, except in the context of a culture that itself isn’t sure what Christmas is supposed to be about. Love? Religion? Baked goods?

A Very Murray Christmas concludes, as all good holiday extravaganzas will, with a flashy musical number. This particular one, however, is a dream sequence, the result of Murray doing that apparently most Christmas-y of things: drinking too much and then passing out. The booze-illusion in this case involves Murray and George Clooney doing a duet of “Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin’.” It also involves Miley Cyrus, clad in a red satin mini-dress and white-fur-lined red stilettos, singing “Sleigh Ride” with Murray as the two engage in some light dancing. Then Miley, wearing the same outfit, hops up on a gleaming, white piano and belts a soulful rendition of that quintessentially religious Christmas song: “Silent night, holy night …”

It’s beautiful and haunting and and commercial and confusing and cringe-worthy. So maybe it’s also Christmas.

November Jobs Report Points to U.S. Economy's Health

The November jobs report is out, and it’s meeting what were moderately high expectations. The figures from the Labor Department show that the unemployment rate remained at 5 percent and the economy added 211,000 jobs in November. Jobs were added in construction, health care, and “professional and technical services”—the Labor Department’s term for an assortment of white-collar jobs. Among those, the construction sector showing particularly strong growth, adding 46,000 jobs.

Besides slightly beating economists’ expectation that 200,000 jobs would be added, another optimistic note is that the September and October numbers have both been revised up. October, then, delivered the strongest showing in 2015 after three consecutive months of disappointing jobs reports led to worries about a slowdown.

That fantastic jobs report has now been revised up from 271,000 to 298,000, while the September jobs-added numbers have been revised up to 145,000 from 137,000. In the past three months, job gains have averaged 218,000 per month.

It’s two weeks before the Federal Reserve’s December meeting, at which there’s a good chance the Fed will raise interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade. Many have said that the Fed only needed a decent November jobs report to clear the way for a rate hike.

In two public appearances this week, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen expressed confidence in the U.S. economy. Still, Yellen said on Wednesday at the Economic Club of Washington, “We cannot yet, in my judgment, declare that the labor market has reached full employment.” She warned that delaying a rate hike could lead to a risky, abrupt tightening. On Thursday, during her testimony at Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, Yellen emphasized that interest rates would be raised slowly and gradually after the “lift off” that’s expected later this month.

A Major Infrastructure Bill Clears Congress

Congress scored the first of what could be a series of bipartisan year-end victories late Thursday night with the final passage of a $305 billion measure to fund roads, bridges, and rail lines.

The five-year infrastructure bill is the longest reauthorization of federal transportation programs that Congress has approved in more than a decade, ending an era of stopgap bills and half-measures that left the Highway Trust Fund nearly broke and frustrated local governments and business groups. President Obama will sign the bill into law, as it fulfills his long-running push for lawmakers to pass an infrastructure bill even though it is significantly less than the $478 billion he sought in his own plan earlier this year.

The Senate approved the highway bill on an 83-16 vote. All but two Democrats—Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tom Carper—voted for it. Among the 14 Republican opponents were three of the four presidential candidates serving in the Senate: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul. (Senator Bernie Sanders missed the vote.) The House cleared it, 359-65, earlier on Thursday. It won unanimous support from Democrats and opposition mainly from conservatives. Negotiators had struck a deal on the legislation only on Tuesday, but the House and Senate needed to act quickly before the Highway Trust Fund again ran dry.

Perhaps the most important single provision in the 1,300-page bill had little to do with transportation. It was the renewal of the Export-Import Bank, the federal lending agency that Congress allowed to expire with its inaction over the summer. While relatively obscure to much of the public, the battle over the bank’s future had become a fierce fight within the Republican Party. Conservatives assailed it as a form of corporate welfare and crony capitalism that benefits giants like Boeing and G.E. that shouldn’t need government help. But along with most Democrats and under heavy pressure from business groups, moderate Republicans warned that its demise would cost jobs in their districts. Test votes in the House and Senate demonstrated that the Export-Import Bank maintained majority support, and in the end, Republican leaders did not object to its inclusion in the highway bill.

Congress will now turn its attention to passing a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind education law and to striking a deal on an omnibus spending package to fund the government through September and avoid a shutdown next week. The debate over infrastructure funding won’t end, but it moves to the presidential campaign trail. Hillary Clinton has proposed spending $275 billion on top of what Congress just authorized, while Sanders has called for a more robust program costing $1 trillion in taxpayer money. Several plans from Republicans would cut federal infrastructure spending, although it is the current GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump, who has spoken the most about the need to upgrade the nation’s outdated infrastructure.

San Bernardino Shooting: The Victims

Most of the 14 people who authorities say were killed Wednesday by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were Farook’s coworkers at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.

Here is a list:

Robert Adams, 40, of Yucaipa: Adams was an environmental health specialist, who had worked for the county’s Department of Health since at least 2011. He married his high school sweetheart, Summer, and the couple had a 20-month-old daughter, Savannah.

“When you saw the three of them together, you just wanted to jump in the middle and think, ‘I want to have fun too,’” Jenni Kosse, a family friend told The Los Angeles Times.

Isaac Amanios, 60, of Fontana: Amanios was an immigrant from Ethiopia, Kosse told KPCC. He worked hard, she said, to bring his children to the U.S., and when he became a naturalized American citizen, he brought his wife over, too.

“He was so proud of his kids,” she told KPCC. “I asked him about them the last time I saw him in October. And his whole face lit up and he took out pictures. He was such a proud dad. And just was an amazing guy.”

Bennetta Bet-Badal, 46, of Rialto: Bet-Badal came to America from Iran in to “escape Islamic extremism and the persecution of Christians that followed the Iranian Revolution,” her family said in a statement.

She earned a degree in chemistry from Cal Poly Pomona and took a job with the county’s health department in 2006. She married her husband, a police officer at Riverside Community College, in 1997. The couple had three children, two boys and a girl.

Aurora Godoy, 26, of San Jacinto: Her husband, James Godoy, said they met in 2003 during a Junior ROTC class. They had a son, Alexander, who will turn 2 next month. Godoy told the L.A. Times his wife was a devoted mother. “It was all about him,” he said.

Harry Bowman, 46, of Upland: Little is known about Bowman, except he had two daughters.

Sierra Clayborn, 27, of Moreno Valley: The 2010 graduate of UC Riverside worked as an environmental health specialist for the county. Her sister Tamisha wrote on Facebook:

I just found out the most horrible news of my life! My sister Sierra Clayborn was killed in the San Bernardino shooting....

Posted by Tamishia Clayborn on Thursday, December 3, 2015

“When I think of Sierra, only one word comes to mind: She was a lady,” Mary Hale, manager of the Fontana apartment complex where Clayborn had lived for a year and a half, told the L.A. Times. “That’s not a word I use lightly. She was a super, super lady.”

Juan Espinosa, 50, of Highland: The married father of two made his own wine, Kosse told KPCC.

Shannon Johnson, 45, of Los Angeles: Johnson was an environmental-health specialist at the county’s public-health department, where he had worked for 10 years.

Daniel Kaufman, 42, of Rialto: Kaufman was one of the few victims who did not work with Farook. He ran the coffee shop at the Inland Region Center, where the massacre occurred. He trained developmentally disabled clients who worked there.

“He was so full of life it was ridiculous,” Stachia Chadwick, who knew Kaufman for more than a decade, told The New York Times.

“Only she can understand me—she understood everything I went through.”

Damian Meins, 58, of Riverside: Meins worked at the environmental health department, and also worked as an extended care coordinator at St. Catherine of Alexandria School in Riverside. His wife was the principal at Sacred Heart School in Rancho Cucamonga. The couple had two children.

The Press Institute of Riverside reports: “Friends describe Damian Meins as a kind, compassionate, loving man with a ready smile. He’d dress as Santa Claus for school pictures at Saint Catherine of Alexandria School.”

Tin Nguyen, 31, of Santa Ana: Nguyen had emigrated from Vietnam as a child, graduated from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in health sciences, worked for the county for more than four years, and had planned to get engaged to her longtime boyfriend, San Trinh, next year.

She was “such a good soul,” her mother, Vanessa Nguyen, told the L.A. Times. “Only she can understand me—she understood everything I went through.”

Nicholas Thalasinos, 52, of Colton: Thalasinos worked as a county environmental specialist. His wife, Jennifer, said he was a “very spiritual believer.” The couple were Messianic Jews.

“He had a huge heart and an amazing faith and he wanted to bring as many people as he could to the Lord,” Jennifer Thalasinos told KPCC. “That was his goal in life.”

Yvette Velasco, 27, of Fontana: Velasco had worked as an environmental-health specialist with the county’s Department of Public Health since last year.

A family statement said: “We are devastated about what happened and are still processing this nightmare.”

She is survived by her parents and three sisters.

Michael Wetzel, 37, of Lake Arrowhead: Wetzel was a supervising environmental health specialist at the department. He was married and had six children.

“He was an exceptional guy, really he was,” Rod Akins, the pastor of the Church of the Woods in Lake Arrowhead, which Wetzel attended, told KPCC. “I mean, a lot of people tend to highlight people once they’ve passed, but Michael was one of the most caring and generous guys.”

Coldplay’s Super Bowl Show: Inevitable

It seems like a sign of some sort of existential crisis that Coldplay will play the halftime show of the 50th Super Bowl, but I’m not sure whose crisis it is or what it’s about. Should people worry about the famously tough sport of football giving airtime to the biggest soft-rockers of the millennium? Should they lament that America’s favorite championship has been conquered by the Brits? Should they fret about whether Chris Martin will be able to find a confetti gun big enough to cake each and every seat in San Jose’s Levi’s Stadium with rainbow confetti?

Probably no, no, and no. Regarding the macho/wimpy dichotomy: The pop likes of Madonna, Katy Perry, and Beyoncé have, in some critics’ words, queered the halftime show irrevocably; intentionally or not, Coldplay can continue the tradition. (Remember that 40 Year Old Virgin “How I know you’re gay” banter about them?) As for xenophobic concerns: The Who, U2, Paul McCartney, and The Rolling Stones have all headlined in the past. As for the logistics, one imagines that Coldplay’s got excellent colored-paper technology stockpiled from its previous arena tours.

The truth is that the Super Bowl halftime show is America’s last great monocultural musical moment, and it’s mostly helpful as a thought experiment to help figure out which acts can legitimately be called superstars—and moreover, which kind of acts. Bruno Mars brought out the Red Hot Chili Peppers and made a big deal about using live instruments in his 2014 performance, but he’s generally thought of as a pop and R&B artist. The last time we had a young (read: not considered “classic”) rocker headline the show alone was never, basically, though Kid Rock was overshadowed by Janet Jackson’s boob in 2003, and No Doubt teamed up with Shania Twain the year before that. All of which is to say, today’s Super Bowl announcement is further confirmation that in the category of relevant, still-going, culture-uniting, newish rock-and-roll bands, Coldplay’s close to all we’ve got. And now they’ve gone disco.

Also, they’re retiring soon, supposedly. So the Super Bowl will be sort of a Super Bowl for their career, a lifetime achievement after which Chris Martin can feel free to open a car dealership like he maybe always wanted to. The band would do well to keep in mind that halftime shows are about visual spectacle, not music; if you want your performance to be anywhere approaching iconic in the cultural memory, you’ve got to offer up a Left Shark, or a middle finger, or a phallic guitar silhouette. Lately, Coldplay’s been performing with apes, which is a start. But one imagines something grander is in the works with the hopes of turning every viewer’s teardrop into a waterfall. Gwyneth Paltrow, Beyoncé, and Barack Obama all have guest spots on the band’s Head Full of Dreams, which is conveniently out tomorrow (breaking: not on Spotify). The image of that crew holding hands as a stadium sings “The Scientist” might even justify all the puns about cold plays we’re about to endure.