Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 300

Jumping the Snark: The Timely Return of Mystery Science Theater 3000

It went like this: Two mad scientists were working at the Gizmonic Institute, trying to develop a weapon for world domination. They decided that the perfect version of this weapon would allow them to drive people crazy. And they realized that there’s an extremely efficient source when it comes to crazy-driving: terrible B movies. So they launched Joel Robinson, a janitor at Gizmonic, into space with nothing but a selection of those terrible B movies to keep him company … and proceeded to test his sanity to determine his breaking point. Joel, meanwhile, built robots to keep him company in his satellitic isolation. The human and the machines end up watching the terrible B movies together.

That is the basic plot of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which ran for 12 years on a variety of networks and platforms and which is much, much better than its own B-movie-ish conceit would seem to indicate. That’s almost entirely because the janitor and his robot friends—the meta-audience for the show’s meta-movies—were witty and snarky and exactly the kind of characters you’d want to watch terrible movies with. Their running commentary on the films put before them was the star of the show, and, in that, consistently delightful.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K to its fans) was a show that, you could argue, perfectly anticipated the hate-watching and the Twitter-viewing and the Sharknado-ing and the Honest Trailer-ing of the present day. Back in the late ’80s and ’90s it foreshadowed the current moment’s obsession with snark, with camp, and with the cultural glories of the cinematically unworthy.

MST3K was cancelled back in 1997. Now, though, its creator is trying to bring it back via that other most contemporary of things: Kickstarter. This week the show’s creator, Joel Hodgson, launched a bid to raise $2 million to fund up to 12 new feature-length episodes of MST3K. (The number will be determined in part by the amount of funding pledged during the Kickstarter campaign.)

As Hodgson explains on the Kickstarter page:

We debuted on Minneapolis’s KTMA, local television, on Thanksgiving Day 1988, as the world was in the final throes of Teddy Ruxpin-mania. That was almost thirty years ago, but for some reason, people still seem to like the show—it’s a mitzvah!

Our show has had a long, strange run. Across a UHF channel, a cable network, cancellation, a feature film, then another cable network, the show lasted for 12 years, two generations of hosts and puppeteers, 2 Emmy nominations and a total of 197 episodes before we got canceled again for good in 1999. Sadly, it was just as Prince predicted.

He added, “But maybe that’s not where it all ends.”

So far, the campaign has raised more than $965,464—about half of its $2 million goal. Since the campaign has been operational for only a few days, and since it still has 30 days to go, odds are good that the goal will be easily met. Likely exceeded.

Which means: More snark. More camp. More terrible B movies, made delightful by a dude and his robots.

What Does ‘Made in Israel’ Mean?

Europe-bound goods made in land captured by Israel in the 1967 war with Arab states can no longer be labeled “Made in Israel,” under European Union rules unveiled Wednesday.

The EU argued that the international community does not recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem—territory Israel captured in the 1967 war.

Here are two key sections from the EU’s fact sheet on the rules:

View note

View note The EU noted that the rules aren’t new, but merely “interpretive.” In other words, the EU says it is merely providing member states guidance on how to interpret existing laws on labeling.

“Since 2009 the U.K. implements voluntary guidelines for food produce which distinguishes West Bank produce made in Israeli settlements from Palestinian West Bank produce,” the EU’s fact sheet said. “Similar guidelines have been put in place by Denmark (2013) and Belgium (2014). Other Member States also announced that they would take similar measures, but have decided to wait for guidance at EU level instead.”

Wednesday’s rules should provide them that guidance, though the EU noted: “The implementation of these rules will remain in the hands of national enforcement authorities.”

The EU announcement also pointed out the bloc does not support a boycott or sanctions against Israel, noting it is Israel’s largest trading partner.

Trade between the two sides was about €30 billion in 2014 (about $32 billion in today’s dollars). EU imports from Israel accounted for around €13 billion (about $14 billion) and EU exports to Israel reached around €17 billion (about $18 billion).

Imports to the EU from Israeli settlements are estimated to be less than 1 percent of total trade.

Still, Israeli officials reacted with anger at Wednesday’s announcement.

The European Union should be ashamed. pic.twitter.com/BaAhiXKJdo

— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) November 11, 2015

Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, in a statement, said: “We see that once again Israel is singled out for special treatment above all other nations of the world and this is clearly discriminatory and stands in stark contradistinction to the EU’s own mandate to be fair and free of prejudice.”

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has a roundup of more reaction to the announcement.

Why Writers Run

From Homer’s The Iliad to A.E. Housman’s poem about an athlete dying young, there’s no shortage of literary depictions of running. “Move, as the limbs / of a runner do,” writes W.H. Auden. “In orbit go / Round an endless track.” There’s also a long tradition of writers leaving their pens or screens behind to stride along roads, tracks, and trails. Jonathan Swift, according to Samuel Johnson, would “run half a mile up and down a hill every two hours” during his 20s. Louisa May Alcott ran since her youth: “I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state,” she wrote in her journal, “because it was such a joy to run.” Despite this correlation, The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz recently lamented how few books capture the mindset of the runner in descriptive terms, citing Thomas Gardner’s new collection of essays Poverty Creek Journal as the best exception.

Freedom, consciousness, and wildness: Running offers writers escape with purpose. When confronted with “structural problems” in her writing as the result of a “long, snarled, frustrating and sometimes despairing morning of work,” Joyce Carol Oates would ease her writing blocks with afternoon runs. For Oates and many other writers, running is process and proves especially useful for the type of cloistered, intensive work they do. But in many ways running is a natural extension of writing. The steady accumulation of miles mirrors the accumulation of pages, and both forms of regimented exertion can yield a sense of completion and joy. Through running, writers deepen their ability to focus on a single, engrossing task and enter a new state of mind entirely—word after word, mile after mile.

While on sabbatical in London in 1972, a homesick Oates began running “compulsively; not as a respite for the intensity of writing but as a function of writing.” At the same time, she began keeping a journal that ultimately exceeded 4,000 single-spaced, typewritten pages. “Running seems to allow me, ideally, an expanded consciousness in which I can envision what I’m writing as a film or a dream,” she wrote. Oates still runs along “a country road that goes up a hill” where she feels “there will be ideas waiting for me ... If I just sat in a room it wouldn’t be the same thing.” Don DeLillo also relished the transporting effects of running after his morning writing sessions: “This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle—it’s a nice kind of interlude.”

Whether their reasoning is practical or spiritual, many writers run with ritualistic devotion. The short-story writer Andre Dubus “ran for the joy and catharsis of it,” but like Oates and DeLillo, his running was also deliberately timed. Dubus kept a log book that detailed his daily exercise output and writing word count. His method came from an interpretation of Ernest Hemingway’s dictum to stop a story mid-sentence, perform physical exercise, and then return to the work the next day.

Why do writers so often love to run? Running affords the freedom of distance, coupled with the literary appeal of solitude. There’s a meditative cadence to the union of measured breaths and metered strides. Writers and runners both operate on linear planes, and the running writer soon realizes the relationship between art and sport is a mutually beneficial one. The novelist Haruki Murakami, a former Tokyo jazz-bar manager who would smoke 60 cigarettes a day, started running to get healthy and lose weight. His third novel had just been published, but he felt his “real existence as a serious writer [began] on the day that I first went jogging.” Continual running gave him the certainty that he could “make it to the finishing line.”

Murakami’s sentiment reminds me of the LSD—long, slow distance—of my college track days. My coach sent us on long afternoon runs without prescribed routes, simply giving us the directive of time. Once I built a tolerance for distance my runs became incubators for writing ideas. The steady, repetitive movement of distance running triggers one’s intellectual autopilot, freeing room for creative thought. Neuroscientists describe this experience as a feeling of timelessness, where attention drifts and imagination thrives.

Oates enjoyed this mental freedom and “special solitude” while running during her youth. She went through orchards, “through fields of wind-rustling corn towering over my head, along farmers’ lanes and on bluffs ... These activities are intimately bound up with storytelling, for always there’s a ghost-self, a ‘fictitious’ self, in such settings. For this reason I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression.” Exertion frees this fictitious, creative other, enabling the mind of writers who run to wander without inhibition. Writers tap into this ghost-self whenever they construct narratives and characters; writers who run have the benefit of a first draft on foot.

The steady accumulation of miles mirrors the accumulation of pages.

“One of the luckiest things that can happen to a writer,” Reynolds Price notes, “is the gradual acquisition of the sense that one is doing it just for the sake of doing it, that it’s become a kind of lonely long-distance running which nonetheless has its own huge rewards.” Price is correct that this acquisition is gradual. The former United States Poet Laureate Kay Ryan captures the complicated feelings of both writers and runners: “I like to run. Actually, I don’t really like to run but I’ve done it for a million years.”

Writers, like runners, often like the idea of their pursuit more so than the difficult work. The appeal of a running regimen is how the miles not only condition the body, but free up a space for the creative mind. Which is perhaps why some writers, like Malcolm Gladwell, find themselves returning to running after a long absence. Gladwell, who recently completed the Fifth Avenue Mile in New York City in 5:03 minutes, sees the utilitarian impact running has on his projects: “I very explicitly use this time to work out writing problems.”

After my college running days ended, I chose sprints over distance, gained some pounds, and looked more like a fullback than a half-miler. Yet I missed those long, aimless runs, when the act of running was one of discovery, not dictated by the set distance of a track. I now run down open rural roads, and, against good sense, straddle the center yellow lines that yarn to the horizon. Since I’ve returned to distance running, I’ve changed the way I think about writing. Writing exists in that odd mental space between imagination and intellect, between the organic and the planned. Runners must learn to accept the same paradoxes, to realize that each individual run has its own narrative, with twists and turns and strains.

Writers and runners use the same phrase—“hit my stride”—to describe the moment when exertion and work become joy. Writers stuck on a sentence should lace their sneakers and go for a jog, knowing that when they return, they will be a bit sweatier, more tired, but often more charged to run with their words.

An Arrest After Threats at the University of Missouri

Updated on November 11 at 10:05 a.m. ET

University of Missouri police have arrested a person in connection with threats posed on social media that resulted in the cancellation of some campus events. The arrest comes two days after the university’s president resigned following protests over school administrators’ response to reports of racism on campus.

“University of Missouri Police have apprehended the suspect who posted threats to campus on YikYak and other social media,” the police department said in a statement Wednesday. “The suspect is in MUPD custody and was not located on or near the MU campus at the time of the threat.”

A subsequent news release identified the suspect as Hunter M. Park. He was arrested in Rolla, about 90 miles southeast of Columbia, the department said. Rolla is where the Missouri University of Science and Technology, part of the University of Missouri system, is located.

Following the threats Tuesday, the MU Legion of Black Collegians tweeted:

There will be NO SENATE TOMORROW. Stay home, Stay safe. ✊

Discovered: A Lost Short Story From Edith Wharton

It had been there all along, filed away in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: a story, taking up nine pages in all, about the anxious operations of Parisian society during World War I. Six of the pages are neatly typeset, with edits and annotations scrawled in both pencil and ink; the next page is composed of strips of paper, cut and neatly pasted together; the next two are composed entirely of fragments. Together, those cobbled media—paper, pencil, ink, paste—tell a full story, under the title “The Field of Honor.” It’s impossible to determine whether in the mind of its author that story is also complete. That author, either way, never published it.

More EDITH Wharton STORiES in The Atlantic Euryalus Mould and Vase The House of the Dead Hand Ogrin the Hermit The Long Run Confessions of a Novelist

What seems clear, though, is that the author in question is Edith Wharton.

“I call it ‘Wharton’s cut and paste,’” says Alice Kelly, a postdoctoral writing fellow at Oxford who is writing a book on modernism and the First World War and who made the discovery of the previously unknown work during the course of her research at Yale. The cobbling together of papers was a common Whartonian writing method in the days before Command-X and Command-Z; the scrawled edits, rendered in pencil and ink, were also distinctly familiar. Further confirming that the story in question was Wharton’s was the fact that on the back of the fragmented pages is written a draft of another short story already known to be by the author, “The Refugees,” which Wharton wrote around mid to late 1918 and published in January 1919.

So it’s very likely, Kelly told me, that the prolific author was writing both “The Field of Honor” and “The Refugees”—war stories, told from the perspective of a different kind of battlefield—at around the same time. The long war, the war people at the time thought might truly be “the war to end all wars,” was finally drawing to a close. Which would also date the newly discovered work right before the publication of The Age of Innocence (1920). As Kelly puts it, “It’s kind of exciting that this is what she was thinking about at the same time that she was writing that novel.”

A page from the typescript of "The Field of Honor" (Edith Wharton Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) A page from the typescript of "The Field of Honor" (Edith Wharton Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

“The Field of Honor” (you can read it in full here) is a story about both society and Society; this is Wharton, after all. But it reflects the fact that Wharton spent the war not just in France (she had lived there since 1907), both also on, and otherwise very close to, the front. (An ardent supporter of her adopted country’s war effort—and an ardent supporter of the war in general—she established women’s charities to assist with that effort in addition to working as a full-time writer.) The story concerns, in particular, the society that was left behind while many of the men around whom it had revolved left France’s cities for the front.

And it particularly concerns the women who found themselves both bereft and newly powerful in the exodus. There’s Rose Belknap, the American socialite unhappily married to a French nobleman, the Marquis de la Varède (“Tom” by nickname), who is liberated by her husband’s decision to go off to war. There’s the narrator, likely female, who functions among other things as proof that the “frenemy” existed as a trope long before it existed as a term, and who is decidedly more ambivalent about the new state of affairs. As Kelly explains it:

Where this story differs from Wharton’s other war fiction—and what makes it particularly interesting—is its depiction of a common wartime fear: that women were profiting socially, professionally, even sexually from the wartime economy that privileged their lives over male lives. The narrator’s discovery that Rose’s blooming is a direct result of her freedom from her husband provokes a violent impulse: “Now I knew why she looked so pretty. I felt at that moment as if she were a venomous insect that one ought to smash under one’s heel.”

Where the story doesn’t differ from Wharton’s other war fiction, however, is in its preoccupation with the greater meaning of the war itself—with the losses, with the sense of pervasive purposelessness, with the changes it would bring about for the people who survived. A lesser-known aspect of Wharton’s work takes on those concerns, concerns most commonly associated with men: Sassoon, Brooke, Eliot, Hemingway. And a lesser-known fact about Wharton’s career is that, for a time, she was a war reporter.

The story concerns  the women who found themselves both bereft and newly powerful during the war effort.

In June of 1915, as the war raged on around her, Wharton did something that pretty much every professional writer will be familiar with: She wrote to her editor and explained that her draft would be late. It wasn’t just that she had become “pen-tied,” as she would put it. It was also, she explained, that the war had come to occupy her mind as not just a humanitarian pursuit, but a literary one. She wanted to write stories about what war meant.

“Some months ago,” she confessed to Charles Scribner,

I told you that you could count on the completion of my novel by the spring of 1916; but I thought then that the war would be over by August. Now we are looking forward to a winter campaign and the whole situation is so overwhelming and unescapable that I feel less and less able to turn my mind from it. May I suggest, during the next six months, giving you instead four or five short stories, not precisely war stories, but on subjects suggested by the war? So many extraordinary and dramatic situations are springing out of the huge conflict that the temptation to use a few of them is irresistible. I have three in mind already and shall get to work on them as soon as I can finish my articles.

“My novel” in this case was Hudson River Bracketed, which would be published, finally, in 1929; “my articles,” in turn, were the pieces of war reporting Wharton had been producing from the front lines in France, which were appearing in magazines like Scribner’s and The Saturday Evening Post. In November of 1915, she would publish them in the collection Fighting France—the critical edition of which Kelly is publishing later this year.

“The Field of Honor”—a fictional side note to the nonfictional war stories Wharton was producing—would have fit in well with these efforts to explain, and more generally make sense of, the war. It is very much a “not precisely war story.” It is full of anxieties both microcosmic and macro. It helps to frame Wharton’s work in a larger historical context, and perhaps in a larger literary one, as well. While “much of Wharton’s wartime writing has been dismissed by even her most steadfast admirers as propagandistic or sentimental,” Kelly notes, “more recently a critical reassessment has begun. Although those writings might lack the ambition or the polish of masterpieces such as The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, they are far more sophisticated than has previously been assumed.”

Why “The Field of Honor” never made it to publication remains a mystery. “Perhaps,” Kelly writes, “Wharton considered her harsh portrayal of volunteer women war workers too vitriolic.” Or perhaps she decided to abandon the story to focus on The Age of Innocence, the novel that would go on to win her a Pulitzer and to take its place in the American canon. Whatever the reason, “The Field of Honor” has now joined another kind of canon: the collection of works that were created by literary luminaries only to be abandoned or rejected or forgotten. The kind of stories that get filed away in dark places, discovered decades later, asking as many questions as they answer.

When Coming Out Means Rewriting Your Story

All bands have a mythology around them, and Passion Pit’s begins with a man and a woman. It goes like this: When he was a student at Emerson College, Michael Angelakos recorded a set of songs in his dorm room and gave them to his then-girlfriend as a belated Valentine’s Day present. The sweetly romantic electro-pop made it onto the Chunk of Change EP in 2008, which then made it to listeners and festival stages worldwide.

There’s another chapter of Passion Pit’s mythology, and it’s also about a man and a (different) woman. Angelakos has talked openly about his bipolar disorder, depression, and alcoholism; he has also talked about deeply loving Kristy Mucci, the woman he married. In a 2012 Pitchfork profile, he said that she stopped him from jumping out of a window during one of his manic episodes, and some of the songs on his most recent album, Gossamer, are explicitly about her. “Just believe in me, Kristina / All these demons, I can beat them,” goes one lyric that People quoted when it covered their divorce this past August.

Passion Pit’s latest extra-musical chapter began Monday, when the 28-year-old Angelakos for the first time said publicly that he’s gay. The statement came during a conversation on Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast that began (after a lengthy monologue from Ellis about Quentin Tarantino’s recent controversies) with a discussion of Angelakos’s mental-health struggles and the media’s treatment of them. “It's pretty amazing how often my life can be condensed into a very easy-to-rattle-off monologue,” Angelakos said, before any mention of his sexuality.

Whenever a public figure comes out, there are few stock reactions from the Internet-commenting masses. Some people offer congratulations. Some people recoil, either with blatantly homophobic statements or the equally insidious idea that LGBT folks should keep quiet about their personal lives (even though straight celebs aren’t asked to do the same). And some people ask what took the public figure so long to come out, often with a hint of condemnation.

It’s the last question—why now­?—that Angelakos and Ellis spent the most time discussing on the podcast. Angelakos said he first felt conflicted about his sexuality around age 20, but tried to forget about it because he was in a world of “dudes in bands talking about girls.” He also talked about having no gay role models growing up, a deathly fear of AIDS, a wonderful relationship with a woman, and a profound amount of self-hatred. In other words, it’s complicated.

More than anything, though, Angelakos talked about stories: the ones he told to himself, the ones that the public told about him, and the ones that belong in both categories. “Also, there was the narrative of the Chunk of Change EP,” Angelakos said when starting to explain why he stayed in the closet. “It’s like, he made it for his girlfriend.”

Ellis broke in with a tone of helpful skepticism: “That’s the myth, that’s the origin story.”

“That’s a very true story!” Angelakos shot back.

Everything came to a climax, he said, this past spring, when his marriage was in trouble and he was getting wound up about his own press coverage. It was Mucci who encouraged him to figure out his sexuality, while also saying she didn’t hold him at fault or think he misled her. He recalled talking to her on his birthday and hearing that she was exhausted from dealing with his issues. “I needed to feel embarrassed about how I was making other people feel, because that was the only way I could understand how I was feeling,”Angelakos said. “It's kind of like the RuPaul saying, ‘If you don't love yourself how the hell are you going to love anybody else?’ That was quite honestly what was happening.”

“It's amazing how often my life can be condensed into a very easy-to-rattle-off monologue,” Angelakos said.

Mucci also helped him move past his hangups with the public. “You can't be buying all these things that people are saying about you, all these narratives,” Angelakos remembered her saying. “You have a very rich and interesting life that cannot be condensed into an article.”

His anxiety about narratives should be relatable to a lot of people who’ve had to come out. In a society where straightness is the default, being gay can feel like a disruption to one’s life story, an unwanted plot twist—when in fact what it means is that it’s dangerous to try and fit into predetermined narratives. “I was buying into these notions that I kind of was receiving very early on: This is the way you live your life,” Angelakos said when talking about his marriage.  

As for the future, Angelakos said that he is excited to make music that can be fully honest, something he hasn’t quite been able to do since the early days of the band. And he’s trying not to worry about what this revelation means for his mythology. “Publicly, I came out about [being] bipolar and everyone was, ‘Ohhh that dude is crazy.’ That's basically overshadowed so much of my work life,” he said. “If I come out what is that going to do? How can that diminish the impact of it? But then I was like, I don't care! I don't care anymore. I like girls, I like boys, everyone's fantastic, but you know what? I'm gay. Finally.”

An Arrest in the Bloody Sunday Massacre

More than 40 years after unarmed civil-rights marchers were shot to death by British soldiers in Northern Ireland, police have made an arrest in the incident.

Investigators detained a 66-year-old man in County Antrim on Tuesday in connection with the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 people, the Police Service of Northern Ireland said. The man, whose name was not released, was questioned at a police station in Belfast. A police statement quoted Detective Chief Inspector Ian Harrison, the officer leading the investigation, as saying the arrest “marked a new phase in the overall investigation which would continue for some time.”

The BBC reported the man is a former member of the Parachute Regiment, and was referred to as “soldier J” in a British government inquiry into the shooting. No soldiers present at the shooting have been arrested and tried for the events of Bloody Sunday.

On January 30, 1972, thousands of Northern Ireland Catholics marched in the city of Londonderry to protest the British policy of arresting and imprisoning without trial suspected Irish nationalists. British army paratroopers fired into the crowd, killing 13 people and wounding 17 others. A 14th victim died of his injuries some months later.

The massacre occurred during the Troubles, the decades-long sectarian fight over the status of Northern Ireland; Protestant loyalists wanted Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom, while Catholic nationalists sought to form a united Ireland. The conflict mostly ended in 1998 with the Good Friday agreement, a peace accord reached by the British and Irish governments and several political groups from Northern Ireland that halted the violence and defined Northern Ireland’s current system of government. More than 3,600 people died in the conflict.

An inquiry launched shortly after Bloody Sunday—and later considered a “whitewash”—cleared the British army of wrongdoing and said the protesters were armed. A second inquiry, established in 1998 by former Prime Minister Tony Blair and led by jurist Lord Saville, exonerated the victims. The findings, published in 2010, determined the demonstrators posed no threat to the British army and that soldiers “lost control” and fired without warning. The report also found that some of those killed or injured were attempting to flee or help the injured. When the results were released, Prime Minister David Cameron apologized for the “unjustified and unjustifiable” killings. In 2011, the British government announced it would pay compensation to the relatives of the victims.

A New York Times account from the day after the massacre described the scene at Londonderry. One person present said:

The speakers threw themselves to the platform and I shouted for people to keep down. I could see the army systematically picking off people who had got up to run away. There was complete panic and confusion, and I thought the best thing I could do was to tend to the injured with a friend. I was carrying a white pillowcase. We were both fired on and my friend was hit on the side of the face.

Tuesday’s arrest was made by a branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland that was given the task in January of investigating unsolved murder cases dating from the beginning of the Troubles until 2004, according to the BBC.

John Kelly, whose 17-year-old brother Michael was killed on Bloody Sunday, told the Times Tuesday that “all of the families of the victims are very excited” by the arrest and that “we expect all of the rest of those responsible to be brought in and prosecuted.” Kate Nash, whose 19-year-old brother William was killed, told the BBC that “there is a flicker of hope. It’s a very positive step.”

Saturday Night Live and the Tao of Lorne Michaels

Last weekend, Saturday Night Live received its highest ratings in four years when it handed its stage to Donald Trump, prompting dismay over what seemed like a naked ratings grab. Two days later, the comedian Marc Maron’s long-awaited interview with SNL’s creator Lorne Michaels went live. Though the conversation was recorded weeks ago (Trump doesn’t come up), it yields a fascinating portrait of SNL’s strengths and flaws as an institution—a show where Michaels has the power to buck the network and largely do what he wants, but that’s still clearly the product of a long-forgotten era of TV programming.

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Saturday Night Live’s Talent Problem

Throughout the history of his super-popular podcast, WTF, Maron has cast Michaels as a kind of boogeyman, the all-powerful gatekeeper who met with him in 1995 but chose not to hire him for SNL after a nerve-shredding interview. That’s a not-uncommon view of Michaels, who usually slips into a reserved mogul persona for his rare guest appearances on SNL and was the inspiration for Mike Myers’s Dr. Evil character in the Austin Powers films. By interviewing him for WTF, Maron was confronting his own demons, but the experience was probably cathartic for any longtime SNL fan wondering why the show so often confounds their expectations for how it should evolve.

Why keep Colin Jost on Weekend Update when he just isn’t working? Why add yet another 20-something white guy to a swelling ensemble that already seems to be full of them? Why hand the show and its free publicity to Trump while he’s running for president? Maron didn’t go after Michaels (except when asking about his own audition), but in their conversation (one of the longest interviews he’s done in years), Michaels shed light on some of his philosophies, which seemed rooted in the mid-’70s era he rose to fame in. Growing up in Toronto, he appreciated how the live TV shows from New York tapped into something broader and accessible. As Michaels told Maron, this impacted the kind of show he wanted SNL to be:

And I think for SNL, our strength has always been in the middle part of the country ... shutting them out because you think they’re not qualified to watch, or because we’re just going to do things that are so specific that they won’t understand jokes ... to me, there’s something about a variety show that’s a variety of comedy styles. Never has there been a consensus, as long as I’ve been here.

Live sketch comedy is about as old as television itself, and comparatively rare these days. As Michaels tells Maron, the idea of including live music (which SNL does every week) was considered unfashionable even in 1975 when he launched the show, but it felt crucial to him, so it stuck. You can take Michaels’s idea of playing to the broadest American audience possible as romantic, or as foolhardy—some of the show’s best humor has been the definition of niche—but it also seems borne from fears of the show’s mortality. “Holding an audience is the crux of a business,” he said. Though SNL still feels invincible 40 years into its run, Michaels reminds Maron it’s been pronounced “Saturday Night Dead” by the media over and over again, especially in the mid ’90s, the time of their fateful interview. “We were under assault” in 1995, he remembers, which he guesses was one reason he decided not to take the risk of hiring Maron.

Still, that lack of risk-taking can often doom SNL into moving slower than it should with the tide of popular opinion. The idea of casting Fred Armisen (who’s white) as Barack Obama was flawed from the start, but it took years before the show decided to hand off the role to Jay Pharoah (who’s African American). Similarly, the total lack of black female cast members wasn’t addressed in a hiring spree before the show’s 39th season (instead, Michaels hired five white men and one white woman). Sasheer Zamata was finally added to the cast mid-season, a sign that Michaels recognized his mistake, and the writer Leslie Jones was promoted to on-camera status the next season, becoming a breakout star.

When he talked about the prodding it took for him to bring Jones onscreen, Michaels revealed the limits of his approach to the show. Though he was initially resistant, a recommendation from Chris Rock finally brought her on board. It was only later that Michaels realized she was “the real thing,” a revelation he had seemingly missed before. “What you say you’re looking for, that’s just the brochure. You don’t really know until you see it,” he added cryptically. “Then you see it and you fall in love ... when you see it and you’re blown away by it, you can do the right thing.” It was a telling moment in the conversation; Michaels is not a man who admits to many mistakes. But his comments also suggested a flaw in the show’s process—even after 40 years, SNL relies so heavily on his ineffable sense of what will or won’t work.

Still, that’s also part of SNL’s charm. There’s no similarly long-running TV institution that remains the singular brainchild of its creator. Audiences get angry about Donald Trump hosting because the show is steeped in tradition that can be tarnished. Michaels has cast himself as the champion of that tradition, one that continues to win viewers over—even with all the cast-change uproar and dud episodes. “There’s something to the audience’s patience with us,” Michaels said, recalling a reviewer who stopped writing about the show because she hated the new cast, only to return two years later a renewed fan. “You have to introduce a whole new group of people, and [audiences say], ‘Well, they’re not the ones we love.’ And you go, ‘Trust me, wait.’ But it is painful.”

About Helmut Schmidt

Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt died Tuesday in Hamburg. The 96-year-old leader, who served as premier from 1974 until 1982, is credited with turning Germany into a Cold War leader and shepherding the country through a recession to become an economic power.

Schmidt remains one of the most popular and well-regarded German politicians. At least some of this is owed to his reputation as a pragmatist. As a moderate leader of the left-leaning Social Democratic Party, he pushed for free-market principles and battled a wave of far-left terrorism by the Red Army Faction.

Schmidt also courted better relations with Moscow and East Germany while aligning more muscularly within NATO and Europe. He was said to speak English better than Henry Kissinger, seemed to hate Jimmy Carter, and remained wary of Ronald Reagan.

Some of Schmidt’s popularity is also owed to his legendary capacity to be blunt-spoken and to dispatch his acerbic wit. A few of his mentions in The Atlantic archives involve him calling the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden “a violation of international law” and predicting vicious, ethnic clashes in the United States by the middle of the century.

Deutsche Welle relates one moment of relative restraint when German television asked him to comment on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s leadership during the European financial crisis. “It would take me a while to come up with a diplomatic answer,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt was also an exceedingly complicated man. He joined the Hitler Youth and fought with the Nazis during World War II, all while harboring the secret his grandfather was Jewish.

“The author of books on defense, politics and economic policy, he played the piano well enough to record Mozart concertos,” notes Michael Getler at The Washington Post. “He was a serious smoker, the most celebrated of Germany’s 600,000 ‘schnupfers,’ or snuff-takers, and also unable to resist colas and sticky buns.”

Helmut Schmidt was the only man in Germany to whom smoking bans didn't apply. He was allowed to smoke anywhere, anytime.

— Mathieu von Rohr (@mathieuvonrohr) November 10, 2015

Perhaps Schmidt’s last tweet sums it all up: “So much excitement about a nicotine patch. As if we did not have more pressing problems.”

Republicans Look for a Leader in Fourth Presidential Debate

As the eight leading Republican presidential candidates meet on a debate stage Tuesday night for the fourth time, the GOP field is in search of a clear frontrunner.

Is it Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon and political neophyte who is now confronting a crush of media scrutiny prompted by his surge in the polls?

Is it Donald Trump, the celebrity stunt man whose most surprising attribute might be his steady presence in or near first place both nationally and in the early voting states?

Or is it Marco Rubio, whose middling position behind Carson and Trump in the polls is belied by the increasingly pointed attacks he has faced from rivals treating him as the real threat to their prospects—Trump and Jeb Bush in particular?

Just two weeks have passed since the Republicans last gathered in Colorado. Carson and Trump have held their positions, but it is Rubio, the first-term Florida senator, who has edged into third place after his strong performance in Boulder. Bush has tumbled into fifth, behind Ted Cruz, raising doubts about whether he can even make it to the Iowa caucuses without turning around his campaign. Bush’s assault on Rubio’s record fell flat in the last debate, but his allies are whispering to The New York Times that they might go after Rubio even more aggressively in the weeks ahead. Will the former Florida governor try to sharpen his case, or will he project a sunnier message and let his Super PAC do the dirty work against a senator he once supported? Then again, Bush could also just sit back and hope Trump brings his tweets to life when standing alongside Rubio.

Marco Rubio is totally weak on illegal immigration & in favor of easy amnesty. A lightweight choker - bad for #USA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2015

The debate in Milwaukee will air on the Fox Business Network beginning at 9 p.m. ET, and moderators Maria Bartiromo, Neil Cavuto, Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal can only hope that they aren’t the story at the end of the night—unlike their widely-criticized counterparts at CNBC. Perhaps the slightly more manageable roster of candidates will help; Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee have been dumped from the main event after they failed to reach 2.5 percent in the qualifying polls. They will join Bobby Jindal and a raspy-voiced Rick Santorum in the undercard round at 7 p.m. (George Pataki, Lindsey Graham, and the apparently-still-running Jim Gilmore failed to make the cut entirely.)

After the CNBC debate prompted an attempted mutiny from the candidates and a harsh smack-down from the Republican National Committee, the Fox Business moderators have pledged to stick closer to the issues and economic policy. But how will they handle Carson and the questions raised in the last few days about his biography? It might be a no-win situation for the moderators, who have seen that attacks on the media have been a sure-fire strategy for the Republicans in the first three debates, even when candidates launch them in defense of their rivals.

For John Kasich, Rand Paul, and Carly Fiorina, the goal on Tuesday hasn’t changed much from the earlier contests: They need to get noticed and avoid fading into the background or whining about their air time. With only eight candidates on stage, that should be an easier task. The Republican candidates will meet twice more before the Iowa caucuses and several more times after, leaving plenty of opportunities for contenders to rise and fall. But if the long shots want to knock Carson and Trump from their perches, halt Rubio’s rise, and make a run before their money runs out, Tuesday’s debate in Wisconsin is an important place to start.