Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 284

In Praise of Boring Romance

In every relationship there will come a time, sooner but much more probably later, when Things Get Real. When the small stuff of new romance—the daily discoveries, the pet names, the in-jokes—gives way to bigger questions. Do you see yourself getting married? Do you want kids? If so, how many? And, if so (no pressure or anything, but), when?

And also: How will those kids be cared for? Will that caring require one of us, or both of us, to scale back our careers? If so, who will do the back-scaling? For how long?

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The Mindy (Parenting) Project

So, pretty much: Where is this going?

And: How sure are you, really, about any of that?

One of the ongoing surprises of The Mindy Project—which, like Master of None and a handful of other recent sitcoms-slash-rom-coms, tries to say something about the romantic culture brought on by feminism and texting and Tinder—has been how insistently the show has bypassed all of this romantic realtalk. That’s mostly because, in service to the obligations of sitcomic tension, the show’s protagonists, Mindy and Danny, have had the answers for the most part decided for them: Mindy dates other people; Danny gets jealous; then they get together. Mindy gets pregnant; then they get engaged. They have their baby; then they think about who will care for him, day to day. For Mindy and Danny, the thing comes before the decision-to-do-the-thing, almost always. With the result that, among other things, the assorted awkwardnesses of real-getting are mostly avoided.

Until now. Mindy and Danny, at the almost-end of The Mindy Project’s fourth season, find themselves in a state of existential crisis, basically. They have love and a kid and a ring, but none of the things that normally come with them: security, steadiness, certainty about the future. They have no wedding date. No plans for the scaling-up or scaling-back of job responsibilities. No permanent decisions about kid-care. No agreement about whether the kid in question will have a sibling. In living their lives, they have failed, repeatedly, to make plans for them.

Thus: the fight—the inevitable fight—that the show has been building up to for the whole season, and in some sense for the whole series. The tearful blow-out that took place in The Mindy Project’s most recent episode, “Parent Trap.” The one that resulted from these two outspoken, opinionated characters finding themselves—for reasons that are enticingly intricate—thoroughly unable to discuss the big questions about the life they’re planning (and also failing to plan) together. Danny, it turns out, wants another kid—actually, several other kids. He also, it further turns out, expects Mindy to give up at least part of the work she loves to raise those kids. Mindy isn’t sure what she wants, more-pregnancy-wise; what she does know, though, is that she’s unwilling to give up a flourishing new business—a fertility treatment center, because irony!—for an expanded family.

The episode celebrates the opposite of romance: the pragmatic decisions that must be made when two lives are woven together.

So why are these desires just now coming out? Because, on the one hand, talking is not romantic. It’s dull. It’s boring. And: It’s not generally modeled in traditional rom-coms, which tend to prioritize the unspoken—desire, thwarted and fulfilled—over the talked-about. The Things Get Real conversation is about just what its name suggests: the reality of relationships. It’s about the stuff that needs to be talked about if a relationship is to have any kind of future. But movies and TV shows and music and the cultural products that double as models for IRL relationships haven’t tended to do much modeling when it comes to that talk. They’ve evaded. They’ve ignored. They’ve pretended that relationships, like the one Mindy and Danny have, just happen.

They do not, of course, just happen. And The Mindy Project is now, productively, recognizing that. It is writing an appreciation for realtalk into its plot. The other reason that Mindy and Danny are haven’t had the Things Get Real conversation is that they both seem to realize, correctly, that talking will force them to confront the profound difference in their desires—not for each other, but for life itself. Danny wants the mother of his children to be always around for them, in a way his mother never was; Mindy wants the career she’s spent her life studying for and preparing for and working for. These desires are not mutually exclusive; they are not, though, fully compatible. They will require some kind of compromise.

A conversation would reveal that. That’s what makes it necessary, and also awkward.

So, since Mindy and Danny can’t seem to talk to each other about what they both want, they resort to lying to each other to force themselves into yet another cart-before-the-horse situation. Danny tries to get Mindy pregnant (tracking her ovulation, taking her on romantic dates, finding himself, repeatedly, without condoms); Mindy, having realized what he’s up to, goes on birth control. Each finds out, via a predictably sitcomic series of events, what the other has been up to; each is angry; each feels, rightly, betrayed. All because they can’t talk to each other about matters that are both basic and fundamental.

“Every time you disagree with something that I do, it’s a referendum on my character,” Mindy, frustrated, tells Danny. “If I want to go to work, it means I’m a bad mother. If I want to have a second glass of wine, it means I’m out of control. In your eyes, everything single thing I do is more evidence that I’m a bad person. I thought I made good decisions, and now you’re just making all the decisions for me.”

He calls her selfish for wanting to keep her career. She retorts, “Whenever you decide to do something, it’s selfless. And whenever I decide to do something, it’s selfish. You get to choose all the definitions. You’re the judge [and] the jury.”

And that’s the other thing about the fight: It’s inevitable, but it’s also inevitably personal. In absence of a straightforward conversation, too many resentments have built up; all the slights have lost, in the aggregate, their slightness. The climactic fight represents The Mindy Project in full rom-com mode; it celebrates, however, not romance itself—the fulfilled longing that constitutes the traditional “happy ending”—but instead the thing that is in some sense romance’s opposite: the mundane decisions and revisions that are necessary when two lives are woven together.

Mindy and Danny love each other; that is not in question. What is in question at this point, though, is their ability to have a future together. Their entire relationship is at stake because they haven’t been able to face its pragmatic inevitabilities. “The Parent Trap” celebrates, in its way, what The Mindy Project itself has mostly left unsaid: the frank admissions, the inconvenient truths, the awkward realities of the day-to-day. The stuff that is not at all romantic but that is, for better or for worse, life.

A Shooting in San Bernardino

Updated on December 2 at 5:32 p.m. EST

Here’s what we know so far:

—Up to three gunmen opened fire at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, killing at least 14 people and wounding 14 others.

—The gunmen appeared to be prepared and carried long guns.

—No one is in custody, and the gunmen escaped in a dark-colored SUV.

At least 14 people are dead and 14 injured after a shooting Wednesday at a social-services facility in San Bernardino, California, police said.

San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said that police are searching for at least three suspects, who fled in a dark-colored SUV. He said the gunmen were prepared, entering the Inland Regional Center with long guns and opening fire.

“They came in with a purpose,” Burguan told reporters. “They came in with the intent to do something.”

Local police said they provide updates at the top of each hour Wednesday night. The FBI and ATF are also at the scene.

Police received information about the shooting at about 11 a.m. local time, Burguan said. He said they did not exchange fire with the gunmen.

“We don’t know if they were on scene when they arrived,” he said.

The injured were taken to local hospitals and the facility, which employs hundreds of people, was evacuated.

Vicki Cervantes, a sergeant with the San Bernardino Police Department, told ABC7, a local TV station, earlier that an event had been going on at the time of the shooting at the Inland Regional Center.

“Multiple shooters came in and just started shooting,” she said.

The Inland Regional Center, which was founded in 1971, serves people with developmental disabilities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.  On its Facebook page, the center says:

Inland Regional Center was built on the foundation of three core values – independence, inclusion, and empowerment. In following these core values, we hope to help provide each individual with a service system that helps identify and eliminate barriers for individuals with developmental disabilities and their families so they can closely live a typical lifestyle.

The center had held its annual holiday party on Tuesday, and had scheduled a winter dance for Friday.

Facebook users flooded the center’s page with comments following reports of the shooting.

“You helped my grandson a great deal a few years back. I am praying for you all,” wrote one user. “Sending Prayers from the Netherlands, to all of you and wish you all the strength you need,” wrote another.

President Obama told CBS News Wednesday that the shootings show that “we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world.”

Politicians reacted to the shooting on Twitter. Congressman Pete Aguilar, a Democrat who represents that area, said:

My deepest sympathies and prayers for the families affected by this horrific attack and for an end to this violence.

— Pete Aguilar (@RepPeteAguilar) December 2, 2015

On a plane & just seeing reports of the tragedy in San Bernardino, CA. Sad, awful, & frightening news. Praying for #SanBernardino.

— Gabrielle Giffords (@GabbyGiffords) December 2, 2015

California shooting looks very bad. Good luck to law enforcement and God bless. This is when our police are so appreciated!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2015

I refuse to accept this as normal. We must take action to stop gun violence now. -H https://t.co/SkKglwQycb

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) December 2, 2015

This is a developing story and we’ll update it as we learn more.

All Hail ‘The Founders’

With civilization in flames and popular culture disrupted beyond recognition, the world is looking to a new generation to rebuild it. Enter “The Founders.” According to a new nationwide survey conducted by MTV, the children of the new millennium will rescue the world from the sins of the past, and befitting this worthy mission, they get maybe the most self-important name imaginable. Yes, the spirit of MTV’s new project is well-meaning and intended to capture the diversity of the country’s youngsters. But the report goes a step further to paint a bleak picture of the present, and saddles the next generation with the task of “founding the new world.” No pressure, kids.

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Most Millennials Reject the Term 'Millennial'

The name “The Founders” comes from the kids themselves, according to MTV’s survey of more than 1,000 respondents born after the year 2000. America is still reckoning with Millennials (loosely classified as those born from the mid-1980s to the late-’90s) one thinkpiece at a time, but according to this survey, their fate is already sealed. As the children of indulgent baby boomers, Millennials are classified as “dreamers” who live to disrupt and challenge established norms. The Founders, by contrast, are “pragmatists” who will navigate a tougher world defined by 9/11, the financial crisis, and gender fluidity. Previous generations had to worry about getting into college and finding a job, but the next one is tasked with cleaning up their mess.

Classifying a generation’s personality and goals is tough no matter what era you’re looking at, but it’s particularly absurd when you’re interviewing a bunch of kids who have just entered high school. Their youth is almost certainly a factor in their optimism—according to MTV’s press release, among the names considered were “The Bridge Generation,” “The Builder Generation,” and “The Regenerator Generation.”

One thing “The Founders” have in common with other generations? They’re reacting to those who came before. The terms “Baby Boomer,” “Generation X-er,” and “Millennial” have all become pejoratives, though the MTV survey’s description of the latter is particularly rough. Millennials’ celebrity icon? Miley Cyrus, who “pushed back against Disney’s model” of fame. Their defining movie? High School Musical, which “disrupted the model of cliques” (a phenomenon previously unseen on screen, apparently). What’s more, Millennials are defined by the video game The Sims, building houses “within the templates” of society. The Founders, meanwhile, live in the world of Minecraft, where regular laws of physics don’t apply and all the building has to be done by hand. The implication being that they’re going to make a different society, cube by pixilated cube. Their pop-culture heroes are YouTube stars and Vine comedians, ordinary folk finding fame in the democratic moray of the world wide web.

Thirteen Years at Guantanamo Over a Mistaken Identity

On Tuesday evening, U.S. officials released a document highlighting the 13-year detention of Mustafa Abd-al-Qawi Abd-al-Aziz al-Shamiri, a Yemeni man captured in Afghanistan in 2002. In it, they admitted they believed al-Shamiri was someone else.

Originally thought to be an al-Qaeda courier or trainer, those reviewing his case noted in a summary written in September that “we now judge that these activities were carried out by other known extremists with names or aliases similar [to his].” Al-Shamiri has been held without charge for 13 years at Guantanamo Bay and still remains there.

The 37-year-old al-Shamiri did fight in Bosnia, Yemen, and Afghanistan with the Taliban, officials asserted, linking his activities to “fragmentary reporting.” They also believe he had explosives training and may have bunked with al-Qaeda members involved in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Nevertheless, officials also noted there is no evidence linking him to the attack. In other words, rather than high-level al-Qaeda operative, al-Shamiri appears to have been a junior fighter. On Tuesday, a representative for al-Shamiri sought to secure his release, emphasizing he is contrite about his earlier activities:

Mustafa does have remorse for choosing the wrong path early in life. He has vocalized to us that while he cannot change the past, he would definitely have chosen a different path. He wants to make a life for himself. He is aware that Yemen is not an option and he is willing to go to any country that will accept him.

As The Guardian notes, al-Shamiri is one of the 107 remaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, almost all of whom are slated for release. On Tuesday, deeming it costly, the White House rejected a $600 million Pentagon plan to replace the Guantanamo prison with a new facility in the United States.

Astronauts Come to Congress

To testify before Congress, you don’t actually have to be in the room.

That’s the case for NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station, who have occasionally beamed into congressional hearings via satellite.

On Wednesday, Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren appeared before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. And, as in previous hearings, lawmakers’ questions sounded like what parents ask their kids during their first semester of college: What are you eating? Are you staying healthy? Are you making friends with the Russians? (Seriously. Brian Babin, a Republican congressman from Texas who is also a dentist, asked the astronauts about their oral health.)

Kelly and Lindgren, appearing on a large screen in a Rayburn hearing room, bobbed up and down, their arms crossed or planted on their hips or in pockets to keep them from floating upward in the zero-gravity environment.

Representative Donna Edwards, a Democrat from Maryland, asked Kelly and Lindgren about the vegetables they’re growing aboard the orbital station, which include lettuce, Swiss chard, radishes, and Chinese cabbage. The ability to produce food thousands of miles from Earth is crucial for longer space missions—like one to Mars, which Kelly said he believes is possible by 2033. But for now, it’s mostly a comfort,  said Kelly, for astronauts who can’t experience nature on the ISS.

“We live in an environment that’s pretty much devoid of life, except for us,” he said.

Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, asked about the astronauts’ relationship with their Russian colleagues, given strained relations between the U.S. and Russia on the Assad government, the Islamic State, the Ukraine conflict, Edward Snowden—the list goes on. The orbital station, a half American, half Russian operation, has remained largely untouched by terrestrial politics over the years. Three cosmonauts are currently living on the ISS.

“We rely on each other for our lives, and we have to count on one another,” Kelly said. “Any conflict that our countries experience is something that—although we recognize that stuff goes on and occasionally we talk about it—doesn’t affect our relationship up here.”

The guest list for Thanksgiving dinner on the ISS was pretty much a given, but here’s some visual proof they all get along:

Finishing our #Thanksgiving meal. Warm wishes and #happythankgiving from the crew of @ISS! #YearInSpace

A photo posted by Scott Kelly (@stationcdrkelly) on Nov 26, 2015 at 8:27am PST

Last week, President Obama signed into the law a bill introduced by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. The legislation, called the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, encourages private-sector companies to conduct rocket launches and space exploration. It would allow businesses to own and sell resources they might mine on asteroids, an idea that has divided space policy wonks. The bill also reiterated the need to keep the ISS in orbit until at least 2024, a year set by the White House’s latest extension this past January. It costs about $350,000 an hour to keep the station flying.

On Capitol Hill, people just leave the room when a hearing is over. Not Kelly and Lindgren:

Why Has Trump Endured as Carson Fades?

A new Quinnipiac poll Wednesday morning has more bad news for Ben Carson. The doctor is down to third place, at 16 percent. In the last Q poll, at the beginning of November, he was in second, just one point behind Donald Trump. Now he trails Trump by 11. That’s in line with a series of other recent polls that show him losing much of his edge. When I looked at Carson’s polling two weeks ago, it looked like he might be facing a downturn. Now he’s lost between a quarter and a third of his support, depending on how you run the averages. It’s a collapse.

Here’s what his trend looks like against Trump’s:

Trump and Carson have been twinned in media coverage for months, and not just because they’ve been leading the field: two outsider candidates, atypical presidential contenders with no debt to the traditional party structure, little interest in old-fashioned political pieties, and no practical experience in either campaigning or policymaking.

But if you had to bet on whether Carson or Trump would do better, Carson would have been a safer wager. He was a man of unassailable character, a highly lauded neurosurgeon and bestselling author. He had an impressive rags-to-riches personal story, and his comments assailing Obamacare at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast had made him an instant conservative folk hero. Trump, meanwhile, was a thrice-married mogul with a history of questionable business practices, a record of inflammatory comments, a grab bag of unorthodox beliefs for a self-proclaimed conservative, and a long history of party-switching and donations to Democrats.

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Take their campaigns, too. Trump has little fundraising and nothing resembling a real campaign apparatus. His campaign staff is cobbled together from political operatives who’ve never run a national campaign, people who worked for the Trump Organization, and people with no political experience at all. Carson’s campaign is a strange melting pot of operatives from various places and eras, but they’re mostly real political professionals. There are serious questions about the strategy and sustainability of Carson’s fundraising, which I explored here, but he’s pulling in huge top-line hauls of cash. And Carson has a natural constituency, particularly in Iowa, among evangelicals.

Yet Trump, after an early November slump, has regained his footing, while Carson is sliding toward Jeb Bush territory. But the culprit doesn’t seem to be Trump. Carson’s two adversaries are the press and Ted Cruz. (Talk about strange bedfellows!) Carson depends heavily on evangelical support, but as Cruz surges, evangelical voters, especially in Iowa, have begun migrating from Carson to Cruz. With an eye toward arresting that slippage, Carson’s campaign is hosting an “evangelical rollout” Wednesday in South Carolina. He will reportedly be endorsed by some number of pastors there, though who and how many are not yet clear.

The other problem for Carson is that he seems to have lost the attention of the press. Poll numbers, especially at this still-somewhat-early stage, are heavily dependent on how much face time candidates get. As has been noted repeatedly, Trump is a wizard at garnering “earned media,” as highfalutin’ operatives and political scientists call it. Carson is attracting a steadily decreasing share of national TV attention given to the Republican candidates since his early November spike; Cruz’s trend is up, though less steeply.

Television Mentions in the Past 30 Days

Kalev Leetaru / The Atlantic

None of this means it’s the end of the road for Carson. The campaign is fluid, and many candidates have been up and down—though Carson’s time is getting short to turn things around. (Back in July, I looked at Carson’s declining poll numbers and wondered whether he was finished. Oops!) Carson also still has certain advantages that Trump can’t claim: a massive fundraising operation, and a base among evangelicals—a demographic that, unlike Trump supporters, consistently votes in primary elections. (What sort of get-out-the-vote operation will Trump have?) But with less than two months to go until the Iowa caucus, Donald Trump is clearly well ahead in the outsider primary.

Unearthing King Hezekiah’s Biblical-Era Seal

On Wednesday, archaeologists in Jerusalem announced the discovery of a rare biblical-era seal. The mark of the seal is said to belong to King Hezekiah, who ruled in the Levant in the eighth-century B.C. and got a glowing review in the Book of Kings.

Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. He held fast to the Lord and did not stop following him; he kept the commands the Lord had given Moses. And the Lord was with him; he was successful in whatever he undertook. He rebelled against the king of Assyria and did not serve him.

According to Hebrew University, the inscription reads: “Belonging to Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz king of Judah.” It also bears a “two-winged sun, with wings turned downward, flanked by two ankh symbols symbolizing life.”

As Reuters reports, excavators believe Hezekiah may have made the seal himself and that “the back side of the clay imprint of the seal had markings of thin cords that were used to tie a papyrus document.”

The seal is said to be the first mark from an Israelite or Judean king ever found during a scientific excavation, which is noteworthy because it links the artifact to the location.

“It’s always a question, what are the real facts behind the biblical stories,” said Dr. Eilat Mazar, who led the excavation. “Here we have a chance to get as close as possible to the person himself, to the king himself.”

The discovery was made at an ancient refuse dump in the shadow of the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, the third-holiest site in Islam, and a central point of focus in the recent violence between Israelis and Palestinians. As

Erdogan Accused

The tensions between Russia and Turkey show no sign of abating, with Anatoly Antonov, the Russian defense minister, repeating the allegation that Turkey trades oil with the Islamic State—and taking it one step further: accusing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family of personally profiting from the business.

“Turkey is the main destination for the oil stolen from its legitimate owners, which are Syria and Iraq. Turkey resells this oil,” Antonov said at a Defense Ministry briefing in Moscow. “The appalling part about it is that the country’s top political leadership is involved in the illegal business—President Erdogan and his family.”

The briefing was dedicated to showcasing what Russia says is Turkey’s connection to the oil trade with the Islamic State, and it threatens to shred whatever hope was left for a rapprochement between the two countries. Tensions have been high ever since Russia began airstrikes in September in Syria, on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad, against the Islamic State and other groups, including some allied with Turkey and the West. They became heightened after Russian warplanes were accused of violating Turkish airspace, and reached a peak on November 24 when Turkey shot down a Russian warplane.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the incident “a stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists.” Then, in Paris this week, he increased the rhetoric: “We have every reason to believe that the decision to shoot down our aircraft was dictated by the desire to ensure the safety of supply routes of oil to Turkey, to the ports where they are shipped in tankers.”

Erdogan vehemently rejected the claim, calling it slanderous and saying he would resign as president if the allegation could be proven. Cut to Wednesday’s news conference in Moscow: Officials presented photographs of what they said were oil-delivery convoys at Syria’s border with Turkey.

Sergei Rudskoy, the head of the Russian General Staff’s operative command, said three main oil routes had been identified: The western route to Turkish ports in the Mediterranean; the northern to Patma oil refinery; the eastern to Cazri transfer point. The oil is then being delivered to third countries, he said.

Officials at the briefing said the Islamic State was earning $3 million a day from the trade, but that figure had been halved after the Russian airstrikes began.

Russia is Turkey’s third-biggest trading partner and the tensions are likely to have some impact on its fragile economy. Russia has announced several measures, including visa restrictions and economic steps, in retaliation for the downed plane.

Turkey denies it buys oil from the Islamic State, but several news reports suggest Turkey tolerates some level of oil smuggling from its southeastern borders with Iraq and Syria. (For an assessment of these claims, read this.) Assad, Putin’s ally in the Syrian civil war, has also been accused of buying oil from the Islamic State, a group that his forces are ostensibly fighting.

The U.K. Vote on Striking ISIS in Syria

Updated on December 2 at 5:33 p.m.

BREAKING: UK lawmakers vote 397-223 to launch airstrikes against Islamic State group in Syria.

— The Associated Press (@AP) December 2, 2015

Britain’s House of Commons has begun a 10-hour debate that will end in a vote on whether the U.K. should expand its air strikes against the Islamic State from Iraq to Syria.

At issue is a motion that calls the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh, “a direct threat to the United Kingdom” and supports “military action, specifically airstrikes, exclusively against ISIL in Syria.”

How is the vote likely to proceed?

Lawmakers are easily expected to vote to approve the government’s motion. Here’s the BBC:

According to BBC research, of the 640 MPs expected to vote, 362 MPs are in favour of the motion while 175 are against. Of the remainder, 19 are "leaning to" supporting the government, three are "leaning against" while 80 are undecided.

Most of the 330 Conservative MPs are likely to vote for the motion, as are about 90 Labour MPs (of 231 in Parliament), the Liberal Democrats, and Democratic Unionists.

Who are the main opponents?

Some members of the opposition Labour Party, including Jeremy Corbyn, its leader, are against Britain’s new role in Syria. The motion is also opposed by some members of the Scottish National Party. But the overall numbers are small: 110 members of Parliament from six parties say they oppose the action.

The public is also divided. A YouGov poll released Tuesday showed support for the air strikes has fallen sharply. Here’s more:

Last week, 59% of Britons backed air strikes; now the figure is just 48%. That eleven-point decline equates to five million electors. The number opposed is up eleven points, from 20% to 31%.

Much of the opposition stems from lingering resentment over Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war in 2003. But the government’s motion explicitly rules out the use of ground forces against the Islamic State in Syria.

How did we get here?

The Arab Spring inspired protests against the Syrian government that were crushed by President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. That eventually resulted in opposition groups taking up arms against Assad. The Islamic State, which until then had been consolidating in neighboring Iraq, swept into the security vacuum and seized territory. At its peak, the group controlled 55,000 square kilometers across both countries—an area slightly smaller than Croatia. Although the Islamic State has lost some ground in Iraq, it remains strong in Syria and carries out attacks around the world, most recently in Paris on November 13—an attack that prompted Wednesday’s vote in Britain’s Parliament.

The situation in Syria is complicated by the involvement of the U.S. and its allies, including Britain, on one side, and Russia and Iran on the other. The West says Assad must step down if Syria’s civil war is to end. Russia and Iran, allies of the Syrian leader, want him to stay in power. The U.S. and some of its allies are already carrying out air strikes agains the Islamic State in Syria (and also in Iraq). Britain, which is part of the Iraq operations against the Islamic State, would join those efforts in Syria after Wednesday’s vote. Russia is carrying out its own air strikes against the group, but it’s also targeting other rebel groups opposed to Assad, including some backed by the West and its allies.

Nearly five years after it began, the Syrian civil war shows no sign of ending, Assad remains firmly in charge, more than 200,000 people have been killed, and 4.2 million Syrians are now refugees. It’s unclear what Britain’s involvement will change.

You can watch the debate here:

The vote is expected at 10 p.m. local time (5 p.m. ET).

In Defense of #BadSex

Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award is a colorful circus that’s gleefully publicized on social media each year using the hashtag #badsex. Since its debut in 1993, it’s been a somewhat lighthearted, somewhat serious literary spectacle, with the award meant to honor “an author who has produced an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.” But it also professes to have a greater purpose: “to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory, or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them.”

A great deal of joy is taken in cringing over the nominated passages—although perhaps less by the writers themselves, who are expected to receive their nominations for the anti-prize with humor and good grace (and possibly gritted teeth). But not everyone is convinced of the legitimacy of the award, despite its playful nature. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian has called it “a terribly English display of smug, gigglingly unfunny, charmless and spiteful bullying.” Indeed, the award is rather mean: The joy taken in guffawing can be a little too joyful, a little too enthusiastic. But the bigger, less discussed problem is that the award highlights passages of (supposed) #badsex without enlightening readers as to what is #goodsex. If the award is truly to improve the quality of writing, some examples of #goodsex need to be applauded and examined—a task that goes beyond providing abstract advice on technique.

This year, the award was largely expected to be a two-horse race between Erica Jong and Morrissey, and on Tuesday, the musician-turned-novelist was announced as the victor—to almost no one’s surprise. Morrissey’s work should’ve perhaps been ineligible: His novel List of the Lost has been universally panned, and therefore the sex scene fails to meet the criterion of being part of “an otherwise good novel.” This technical objection notwithstanding, the winning passage is startling:

Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.

Is this #badsex? If so, why? Or is it just good ol’ #badwriting? When it comes to fiction, Kurt Vonnegut says that “every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.” Having read List of the Lost, I can bear witness: This sex scene does neither. Can that be the extent of the objection to this piece of writing?

The craft of writing sex scenes stumbles at the first hurdle: language. How to describe the, ahem, apparatuses involved? Euphemism? This is Morrissey’s tactic and, when stripped of their adjectives, a reader must come to terms with the fact that the two euphemisms Morrissey selects are “salutation” for penis and “zone” for vagina. This approach is rarely satisfactory to a modern reader. How about just keeping it real? Tell it like it is: Use biological, anatomical diction. An eye for an eye, a penis for a penis, a clitoris for a clitoris. Or perhaps colloquialisms—at the risk of lowering the tone or turning the scene comic. Euphemism, anatomical diction, colloquialism: Within that mix lies the problem of language for sex in fiction. How to overcome?

In my attempts to find an exemplar for #goodsex, I decided to revisit Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, which I remembered as a book that dealt admirably and expertly with this material. But, I was in for a surprise. The novel had, I discovered, been nominated for the bad sex award in the year of its publication (it was longlisted, but wasn’t deemed “bad” enough to make the shortlist). I like to think of myself as a thoughtful, sophisticated reader, so how did I end up in such vehement disagreement with the judges? And for that matter, what of the 2007 Booker Prize panel, who shortlisted On Chesil Beach for that prestigious  award? Why is the novel excellent while the sex scenes are bad?

Well, they aren’t bad. A novel is a single, indivisible entity—a continuous waking dream. Removed from the fiction it lives in, almost all sex will appear gratuitous. By evaluating isolated passages, the work of a sex scene on both character and action is inherently lost, and even the most accomplished prose can falter. You can’t judge the merit of a novel by an isolated sex scene any more than you can judge the value of a person by the shape of their liver. Here’s a passage from On Chesil Beach, in which the newlyweds Edward and Florence are in bed together for the first time:

Drawing her fingers across its underside, she arrived at the base of his penis, which she held with extreme care, for she had no idea how sensitive or robust it was. She trailed her fingers along its length, noting with interest its silky texture, right to the tip, which she lightly stroked; and then, amazed by her own boldness, she moved back down a little, to take his penis firmly, about halfway along, and pulled it downwards, a slight adjustment, until she felt it touching her labia.

McEwan has opted for anatomical language—and this is, I think, more tolerable than Morrissey’s euphemisms. Nevertheless, it’s uncomfortable to read, and certainly as an isolated passage it can make a reader cringe. Does that make it bad sex?

How can it? The language is sincere, unsentimental, direct, and yet also delicate and curious; the sentences are fluid. But more importantly, On Chesil Beach is a novel about sex—sexual naivety, expectation, desire, consequence. And this scene, although more than halfway through the book, is the hinge on which the story pivots. It absolutely advances the action, and the characters fundamentally shift at this point—to the extent that Edward’s inability to deal with Florence’s desire has lifelong consequences for them both. In the context of the novel, the sex is anything but gratuitous; it is necessary. Read as part of the whole, the sex is #goodsex; it is only when extracted that it takes on the attributes of #badsex.

What of Jong’s Fear of Dying, which was supposedly Morrissey’s prime competition for the award? This is the passage that prompted her novel’s nomination:

I slip into bed, amazed that Asher is making the first move – which is unusual for him. While I lie next to him, astounded by his presence still, he opens my silk robe and touches my cunt as if he were Adam just discovering Eve’s pussy.

‘Beautiful,’ he says.

And then he begins to run his tongue slowly along my labia, gently inserting one finger to feel for my G-spot on the front wall of wet pussy.

Confronting, perhaps, when extracted so plainly. But bad writing? The novel as a whole was given serious, thoughtful reviews, most of which allowed it to pass without major censure or with only relatively mild quibbling. Where Morrissey opted for euphemisms, Jong has gone for colloquialisms. The strange invocation of Adam and Eve, and perhaps some redundancy, are the only crimes the passage can be accused of—and these are really more a matter of reader sensibility than craft. Surely this isn’t bad sex worthy of international ridicule. (When this passage is considered alongside the material of On Chesil Beach, one might wonder whether issues of female sexual desire are, at least for the bad sex judges, a little more cringeworthy, a little more transgressive, than issues of male desire. That, however, is a separate analysis.)

There are at least two things at stake in the bad sex awards. The first concern is that the judges might just get it plain wrong. They might anoint a piece of writing as #badsex when it’s actually, in its original context, #goodsex. Secondly, and more crucially, there’s the risk that the awards will suppress certain modes of writing—that is, direct descriptions of sex that are necessary to the narrative—therefore impeding the advancement of fiction and the emergence of new writers. The writer and mathematician Manil Suri has anticipated this effect, and has recently provided some consolatory advice. Remember: The stated aim of the award is discouragement. Which would be fine if the nominated scenes were indeed all bad, but this patently isn’t the case. It would be an aesthetic tragedy if fear of being publicly shamed for writing #badsex compelled an author to censor his or her own writing.

What now then, for the award? Well, it surely will continue—as will the easy laughs and the faintly nasty condemnation. The publicity it generates is just too alluring. I can’t help but think, however, that a rebranding is in order. When bad sex is truly bad (and Morrissey’s passage might be the best example), it is simply bad writing. That is, bad sex isn’t its own category, and does nothing more than violate another of Vonnegut’s maxims—that is, don’t waste your reader’s time with rubbish. The best readers can hope is that the bad sex award remains as described by Ben Okri’s editor last year after Okri’s “win”— “fun but a bit undignified.”