Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 301

Allen Toussaint's Unassailable Legacy

You might have never heard of Allen Toussaint, but you know his music.

Maybe you grooved to Lee Dorsey’s version of “Working in the Coal Mine”—or, if you’re a little younger, new-wavers Devo’s rendition. It could be you learned “Fortune Teller” from the Rolling Stones, or you loved Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s cover. Perhaps you’ve always loved the horn arrangements on the Band’s The Last Waltz. Maybe you liked “Get Out of My Life Woman” when you heard the Doors, or Jerry Garcia, or Derek Trucks, or Iron Butterfly play it, or dozens of classic hip-hop samples. Maybe that piano loop on Jay-Z’s “D’Evils” caught your ear. You have undoubtedly found yourself moving when LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade,” a song Toussaint produced and played on, came on.

The pianist, singer, songwriter, and producer died Monday after playing a concert in Madrid. He leaves behind enough hits to fill up your nearest jukebox, and a staggering legacy in the music of the U.S.—from rhythm and blues to funk to rock to country—and of his native New Orleans.

Born in 1938, Toussaint got his start as a teenager playing around the Crescent City. His rise to fame outside the city came not from his playing or singing, but from writing hits for other musicians and producing them. Early on, he wrote hits for Irma Thomas, Ernie K-Doe, Art Neville, and particularly Lee Dorsey. He then joined the military briefly (where he recorded “Whipped Cream,” later a staple song on The Dating Game as covered by Herb Alpert), before returning to music full time and founding his own label. Once again, Toussaint proved a reliable hitmaker. His studio’s house band, the Meters, became the most influential New Orleans funk combo—aided by Toussaint writing and producing for them, too.

In 1971, Toussaint launched a solo career, producing records that remain critically well-regarded—though perhaps typically, the biggest hit they spawned was Glenn Campbell’s hit cover of the title track from 1975’s Southern Nights. From the late 1970s on, Toussaint returned to producing and arranging until the 2000s, when Hurricane Katrina led to renewed interest in his music. (In a bio on his website, he quips that the storm was his “booking agent.”) In 2006, he released a Katrina-themed record with Elvis Costello called The River in Reverse, on which Toussaint easily stole the show from his more famous collaborator. (It’s no coincidence that Paul McCartney—the other great English student of the American pop idiom—also sought Toussaint out as a collaborator several times over the years.)

That album showcased the strong vein of civil-rights activism and social justice in his writing. “The same people you misuse on your way up, you might meet up on your way down,” he warned. “What happen to the Liberty Bell I heard so much about? Did it really ding-dong? It must have dinged wrong, it didn’t ding long,” he sang on “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” On “Freedom for the Stallion,” he lamented, “They got men making laws that destroy other men. They’ve made money God it’s a doggone sin. Oh, Lord, you got to help us find a way.” (Of course, these themes are apparent as early as “Working in the Coalmine,” sung from the perspective of a hard-worn laborer.)

Toussaint’s long run of hits was no accident. His songs are durable, carefully crafted gems. He wasn’t afraid to use repetition—“Get Out of My Life Woman” hardly includes more words than that; “Coalmine” is really just one slinky chorus, punctuated by two short verses. But he could also turn an indelible image: “Lipstick traces on a cigarette/Every memory lingers with me yet.” Vocally, he was a strong if not especially distinctive singer, with an almost sweet sound.

But it would be badly remiss not to focus on Toussaint’s piano playing—the glue which holds so many of his songs together and provides the funk and swing. He’s an essential link in the New Orleans piano pantheon, linking the likes of Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, and Huey “Piano” Smith (whom he got his start by filling in for on a bandstand) to Dr. John—and today, Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s bandleader. Toussaint took Professor Longhair’s second-line piano style and adapted it to modern, funky records.

A Toussaint piano line will be rollicking, effortlessly funky, irresistibly syncopated, but never showy or overdone. His citation in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, into which he was inducted in 1998, states, “His greatest contribution was in not allowing the city’s old-school R&B traditions to die out but by keeping pace with developments in the rapidly evolving worlds of soul and funk.” (President Obama also awarded him the National Medal for the Arts in 2012.) You can hear that in a song like “Get Out of My Life Woman.” The booming drum beat wouldn’t be out of place on a new song today; the horn arrangements are perfectly turned soul; and Toussaint’s piano trills poke through between lines, a timeless touch of funk that could be from 1910 or 2010.

Any time a musician dies, it’s common to say that he or she was taken too soon. Toussaint was 77 and packed in more hits than plenty of musicians considered wildly successful. But two videos posted online from his show Monday in Madrid probe that Toussaint hadn’t lost a step. He brings funk in a way that a man a third his age would envy.

It’s just as common, when a great musician dies, to say that he or she will live on. In Toussaint’s case, that is true as well. As long as there are piano players in the Crescent City, and as long as bands are covering “Working in the Coalmine,” producers are sampling “Get Out My Life Woman,” and dancers are moving to “Southern Nights,” Toussaint will stand as one of the most important musicians in a city famous for producing them.

Behind the Scenes in Shondaland

“I really hate the word ‘diversity,’” Shonda Rhimes declared in a speech at the Human Rights Campaign Gala earlier this year. “It suggests something … other. As if it is something … special. Or rare. Diversity! As if there is something unusual about telling stories involving women and people of color and LGBTQ characters on TV.”

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The thing is: There has been something unusual about all that. But Shonda Rhimes has been making it significantly less so. And not just in front of the camera, in the Matt Damonian way, but behind it. In her already iconic speech at the Emmy Awards this year—“You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there”—Viola Davis, star of the Rhimes-produced How to Get Away With Murder, echoed this idea that “diversity” is becoming, in the best sense, banal. “Here’s to all the writers,” Davis said, the people “who have redefined what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be black.” She then name-checked, on that Emmy stage, TV writers and producers and executives: Ben Sherwood, Paul Lee, Peter Nowalk, and Shonda Rhimes.

This is a moment not only when a black actress can (finally) win an Emmy for a leading dramatic role, but also when the role of writers themselves—the people who work, behind the scenes, to create new worlds, and in the process a new world—has been elevated. Writers, on television in particular, have for the most part been isolated and infrastructural and invisible. They have made the machinery of Hollywood, the logic used to go; other people, however—the actors, the directors—have made the magic. Which is another assumption that Rhimes has helped to change. She is creating new worlds that look more like the real world than TV has before, and yet they are distinctly her worlds. Shondaland isn’t just Rhimes’s production company; it is also a declaration of authorial intent. It is an insistence that writers deserve recognition in the same way that actors and directors do. It is a quiet, but determined, bid for celebrity.

Given all that—and given, too, the fact that Shonda Rhimes is at this point a bonafide star—you would not know that Rhimes is also, by nature and for a long time by practice, incredibly shy. Not just in the would-rather-stay-home-and-watch-Game of Thrones-than-go-to-the-party kind of shy—though it’s that kind, too—but also the crippling, pervasive kind of shy that is sometimes diagnosed as “social anxiety” and that can, as the pathology-focused epithet suggests, limit one’s life significantly.

The role of writers—the people who create new worlds, and in the process a new world—has been elevated.

Her self, however, is another thing Rhimes has changed. Her transformation from withdrawn workaholic to celebrity—one that took place, roughly, during the course of 2014—is the subject of Rhimes’s new book, Year of Yes: a memoir that doubles as a later-in-life bildungsroman. What happened, Rhimes writes, was this: On Thanksgiving in 2013, she was chatting with her sister Delorse as they cooked the family meal. Rhimes mentioned a party invitation she had gotten; she mentioned, too, that she was turning it down. “You never say yes to anything,” Delorse replied.

It was one of those off-handed comments that sticks and pokes and itches; Rhimes realized, eventually, how true it was, how it had infused a life that on the surface seemed complete—a crazy-successful career, three crazy-awesome daughters, lots of crazy-loyal friends—with subsurface sadness. Rhimes, she realized, had gradually become tired and overweight and withdrawn, in a way that prevented her from truly enjoying her success. She was “miserable,” she writes. “Truly, deeply unhappy.”

And she realized that “losing yourself happens one no at a time.”

So: She decided to will herself, essentially, into happiness by overcoming the anxiety and the fear and the isolation. She decided to start saying “yes” to stuff. To, specifically, pretty much everything that came her way.

From that decision sprang, among other things, an appearance on Kimmel, and a cameo on The Mindy Project, and the delivery of a widely shared and much-beloved commencement speech at her alma mater, Dartmouth, and appearances on several magazine covers, and the acceptance of many, many awards, and also that speech at the Human Rights Campaign Gala, and also her general conversion from a Writer to a Star. From it sprang her decision to lose the weight she had put on while workaholicking and single-mothering—127 pounds in all. From it, too, sprang her decision not to marry a man who was otherwise, she writes, “an incredible human being.” And her recognition that she simply does not want to get married. And her further recognition that that desire is 100 percent okay.

Rhimes is, unsurprisingly, a fantastic memoirist: Her writing is conversational and witty and lyrical, inflected with the supple human breathiness you might expect from a person who spends her days writing dialogue. It features lots of great punchlines. (“And then we had one of the most honest and interesting conversations I’ve ever had with a complete stranger while suffering a deficit of oxygen to my brain due to the tightness of my Spanx.”) It features occasional, chatty, second-person asides. (“When I meet you, let’s hold hands and weep for humanity, okay?”) It will probably make you extremely envious of the people who have actually gotten to meet Shonda Rhimes.

Year of Yes insists that it is time for people who used to be invisible to come forward and be seen.

But Year of Yes, as its name would suggest—and as the outlined icon of the Golden Leaping Lady on its cover makes unmistakably clear—is also in many ways a side-door self-help book. It features the kind of genial advice-giving that you’ll also find in books from Rhimes’s fellow Successful Women of Hollywood: Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler, Lena Dunham, Tina Fey. Year of Yes is full of, as Amy Poehler put it in her own Yes-titled memoir, “light emotional sharing.” It is also full of advice on how to—in words borrowed from the lexicon of Grey’s Anatomy—“dance it out, stand in the sun, and be your own person.”

In all that, though, are buried pieces of advice that concern not just Rhimes’s readers, but everyone. Society. Rhimes mentions how much she hates being asked, usually by reporters, questions that begin, “As an African American woman, how do you feel about ____?” (“Here’s a tip. The answer, no matter how you fill in that blank, is always the same: I don’t know. Since I’ve never been anything other than a black woman, I can’t tell you how specifically anything feels any more than someone could tell someone how things feel as a white woman. It’s a creepy question. Stop asking it.”) She also mentions how much she hates being asked how she accomplishes so much as a single mother. And that “I find it offensive to motherhood to call being a mother a job. Being a mother isn’t a job. It’s who someone is.” She mentions the dizzying expectations placed on people who are what she calls F.O.D.s: “First. Only. Differents”—the people, like her, who are saddled with the heavy pressures of cultural trailblazing. “It irritated me to my core,” she writes, “that we live in an era of ignorance great enough that it was still necessary for me to be a role model, but that didn’t change the fact that I was one.”

Despite and because of all the changes, she remains one. Year of Yes is a book about the shifts taking place in Hollywood right now, and in the world right now, in the guise of a friendly memoir. It is, like Shondaland itself, making a statement. It is insisting that it is time for the people who used to be invisible to come forward and be seen.

Here is another passage of that Human Rights Campaign speech, the one in which Rhimes downplayed the value of “diversity.” It offers, in the hope for a better world, a better word:

I am making TV look like the world looks. Women, people of color, LGBTQ people equal WAY more than 50 percent of the population. Which means it ain’t out of the ordinary. I am making the world of television look NORMAL.

I am normalizing television.

You should get to turn on the TV and see your tribe. And your tribe can be any kind of person, any one you identify with, anyone who feels like you, who feels like home, who feels like truth. You should get to turn on the TV and see your tribe, see your people, someone like you out there, existing. So that you know on your darkest day that when you run (metaphorically or physically run), there is somewhere, someone, to run to. Your tribe is waiting for you.

You are not alone.

The goal is that everyone should get to turn on the TV and see someone who looks like them and loves like them. And just as important, everyone should turn on the TV and see someone who doesn’t look like them and love like them. Because, perhaps then, they will learn from them.

Perhaps then, they will not isolate them.

Marginalize them.

Erase them.

Perhaps they will even come to recognize themselves in them.

Perhaps they will even learn to love them.

The Inanity of the Starbucks Christmas Cup ‘Controversy’

“Maybe we should boycott Starbucks. I don't know,” Donald Trump said on Monday night at a speech in Springfield, Illinois. “Seriously, I don't care.”

It was a rare moment of trollish apathy for the Donald, considering that he was referring to the kind of peevish campaign that’s right up his alley: a video going around the Internet by a guy named Joshua Feuerstein—he calls himself “an American evangelist, Internet, and social media personality”—raging against “the age of political correctness” and the new seasonal coffee cups at Starbucks.

“Do you realize that Starbucks wanted to take Christ, and Christmas, off of their brand-new cups? That’s why they’re just plain red,” he says.

First off, just to be clear, the long-haired, chill-looking person on Starbucks’s cups isn’t Jesus—she’s “a 16th century Norse woodcut of a twin-tailed mermaid, or Siren.” And though Starbucks says it “has told a story of the holidays by featuring symbols of the season from vintage ornaments and hand-drawn reindeer to modern vector-illustrated characters” since 1997, there was never a time when someone could sip a latte out of a nativity-scene-decorated cup.

“Do you realize that Starbucks isn’t allowed to say ‘Merry Christmas’ to customers?” Feuerstein continues.

In an email, a Starbucks spokesperson said that the company’s baristas “are not provided a script or a policy around greeting customers. They are simply encouraged to create a welcoming environment to delight each person who walks through our doors.” So, no, Feuerstein isn’t right—there’s no ban on Christmas greetings at Starbucks. That being said, Starbucks is a global company that serves millions of customers per day at over 23,000 stores in 68 countries, including the United States, which is home to people who celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, other holidays, or nothing at all in December. They can’t, as a matter of protocol, wish everyone a Merry Christmas. For those who really, really need their barista to wish them a Merry Christmas to find their delight, Feuerstein has a solution: Tell her your name is “Merry Christmas,” and then she’ll have to say it when she’s fixed your hot beverage of choice.

“Guess what, Starbucks—I tricked you!” Feuerstein says. Clever, clever.

The video has been viewed 12 million times. There’s a hashtag. (Sadly for Feuerstein, most of those using it are there to say his campaign is dumb.) And the campaign has been covered as “news” by such esteemed publications as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Doing what newspapers do, they dutifully show both “sides” of the “issue,” treating Feuerstein’s post as if it’s a Serious Cultural Thing.

Which, maybe it is, but that doesn’t make it any less inane, ironic, or misguided. Insofar as the Great Starbucks Cup Controversy of 2015 is at all meaningful, it’s a chance to examine the way mass culture gets created and enforced by corporations, and also to look at how damaging trivial pushback against that mass culture can be.

Big business is one of the main aggressors in the War on Christmas. Bill O’Reilly, the War’s patron saint, has long objected to the oh-so-P.C. “Happy Holidays” greeting in stores and on cards, claiming the milquetoast phrase represents a suppression of Christian culture in mainstream American life.

The thing is, he’s got a point. When businesses make the decision to express religiously neutral seasonal greetings, or decorate their stores with non-explicitly Christian holiday symbols, they are making a strategic business decision to try and appeal to a broad and diverse consumer base in the United States, a lot of which is not Christian or religious. That decision is motivated by profit, but it is not culturally meaningless. Advertisements surround us. Almost every interaction in contemporary life involves some sort of monetary transaction, typically with a major corporation, especially around the holidays: Meeting an old friend for coffee involves buying coffee, often at Starbucks; spending the holidays with family involves buying gifts for family, often at Target or Walmart or wherever. With corporations so thoroughly enmeshed with culture, it’s difficult to argue that they don’t play a significant role in mediating culture. So, point for you, War on Christmas folks.

Moreover, Starbucks has purposefully cultivated its shops as “third spaces”—not home or work, but another place to cultivate community. That people would care so much about the design of the company’s holiday cups shows just how successful that effort has been—Starbucks occupies territory worth fighting over.

Coffee-cup outrage is flimsy when paired with real conflicts of conscience faced by American Christians.

There are many, many ways in which the erosion of an American Christian mono-culture has created fascinating, difficult challenges for Christians—see perspectives from the Southern Baptist leaders Russell Moore or Albert Mohler, for example. But coffee cups are not one of them. Rhetorical bluster about coffee cups distracts from the real,  difficult questions of religious liberty and freedom of expression—including workplace hiring and discrimination, wedding-vendor services, or contraception insurance—and diminishes the seriousness of those questions by association. Feuerstein’s challenge to “all great Americans and Christians around this great nation” to “take your own coffee selfie” is a silly social-media campaign. This is a situation all but defined by choices and freedom: the choice to buy coffee from Starbucks, the choice to facetiously trick baristas into saying something that aligns with Christian cultural preferences, even the choice to speak out against the company on social media. Coffee-cup outrage is flimsy when paired with real conflicts of conscience that have led to years-long lawsuits and businesses shutting down and significant public protests—and it is shameful in light of the violent persecution of Christians around the world.

The outrage effort is being led by a self-promoter who says his “charisma and his bold, passionate, and distinctive communication style resonates with the Millennial Generation.” All self-described Millennial whisperers should be immediately suspect, but unfortunately, Feuerstein has still been able to grab a large cultural megaphone.   

There is irony in seeking validation of one’s religious identity from corporate America. Religious groups have often been the first to complain about the commodification of Christmas, charging that advertising has obscured the true meaning of the holiday. As just one example, take this open letter reported on by The New York Times in 1991, in which 25 clergymen railed against the “advertising lords” of Madison Avenue. They wrote:

Malls have become the new shrines of worship. Massive and alluring advertising crusades have waged war on the essential meaning of the spiritual life, fostering the belief that the marketplace can fulfill our highest aspirations.

There it is again—“war.” The rhetoric is just as blustery, but in this case, it’s being used in the opposite way, suggesting that the true threat to religious freedom in the United States is the brand-ification of all identities, communities, and measures of meaning and value in one’s life.

And there is truth to that. Businesses never exist purely to promote and defend specific religious ideologies. They exist, first and foremost, to make money, and though some owners may have and express certain values, looking to businesses to enforce the cultural symbolism of your faith is a bad bet. It’s an attitude that “sees Christianity as a mood, rather than a life-changing truth,” as the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore put it in an interview with me earlier this year. It also betrays a lack of imagination—an inability to envision a personal identity that’s not fundamentally shaped by Brands.

Political correctness, as Feuerstein calls it in his video, is a straw-man enemy. Starbucks’s decision to make plain red cups is less an erasure of Christian values than a neutral design choice that also happens to reflect a solid understanding of the company’s diverse audience. And nothing about this design limits individual freedom of expression—as Feuerstein says in the video, “Just to offend you, I made sure to wear my Jesus Christ shirt into your store.” More likely than not, baristas will look at him with a shrug, and think, just like Trump, “Seriously, I don’t care.”

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The Rage of Grimes

In the swirl of fantastical images surrounding the release of Grimes’s Art Angels, Claire Boucher has been seen with a battle-axe, a sword, a suit of armor, and a mouth dripping with blood. For the album cover, she drew a serpentine self-portrait with three bloody eyes. Whatever the underlying message, the primary implication is clear: Don’t mess with Grimes.

On first listen, there are a few moments on Art Angels when she’s obviously meant to sound as scary as the pictures would suggest. The first is “SCREAM,” which rides a scuzzy, heavy-metal bassline as the rapper Aristophanes jabbers in Mandarin about removing someone’s lifeforce and Grimes does the screaming. The second is when, amid the keyboard chaos of “Kill V. Maim,” Boucher growls theatrically from the point of view of a male vampire. And the third is on “Venus Fly,” a factory-floor spazzout that keeps getting louder as Janelle Monáe barks about disfiguring herself to avoid getting objectified while she dances.

The rest of the album may initially seem far gentler—more sugar rush than blood lust. There are compressed acoustic guitars that remind me of Sheryl Crow or Sixpence None the Richer, dance beats that evoke K-pop in their giddy density, and one Rihanna sample. Grimes’s singing voice is a high wisp that’s been called, to her annoyance, “girly.” But the truth is that there’s aggression even in the album’s prettiest moments. Grimes is taking what a lot of people would consider some of the least dangerous sounds in music and turning them into weapons.

In the time since Grimes’s 2012 album Visions—a clicking, burbling soundscape that happened to contain some of the catchiest tracks of the new millennium—Boucher has gained icon status in the world of alternative music. But in interview after interview, she’s talked more about the negative feedback she’s received. Some of that negativity has been from men who showed discomfort with the fact that she writes and produces all of her music, and some of it has been from indie fans who sneered at Grimes’s love for Mariah Carey, Taylor Swift, and other pop artists. Adding evidence for the theory that opposition breeds great art, Art Angels is made, in part, for these haters. “There’s a lot of diss tracks,” she has said.

First, though, she has to establish that we’re firmly in her world. Art Angels opens with a minute and a half of mischievous violin picking and woodwind curlicues that will transport a lot of listeners to days spent playing The Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy. The arrangement drops out and Boucher coos in an operatic cadence, culminating in a Pokemon reference: “I try to catch ‘em all.”

Next comes “California,” a sunny but bizarre pastiche with that ’90s pop guitar strumming, some sudden new-jack-swing drum slams, the snappy “Pon de Replay” beat, and Boucher’s vocals, influenced by the Joni Mitchell song of the same title. She sings of the dangers of “commodifying all the pain,” and says, “You only like me when I’m looking sad”; even before she mentioned Pitchfork when talking about the song, could the target be anyone other than music journalists? The chorus has stayed in my head since I’ve first heard it.

Even catchier is the lead single, “Flesh Without Blood.” As an assertion of Boucher’s production prowess, it’s staggering: The beats come fast and from all over, with each measure unfolding like a party-starting Rube Goldberg reaction. As an assertion of her songwriting power, it’s even more undeniable, with a verse melody that jags up and down and up and down and up again, and a chorus that juxtaposes low and high singing even more dramatically. The lyrics alternate between two sides of a doomed relationship that could very well be the one between Grimes and listeners who don’t want her to evolve. “Just let me go,” she commands; underneath, guitar and bass rumble like an engine.

Elsewhere on the album, she’s more interested in communicating bliss—but not the carefree kind. On a newly anthemic version of the wonderful “REALiTi,” which she released as a demo earlier this year, she creates a lilting house reverie about the idea that happiness only comes through struggle. And during the loungey, hypnotic back-to-back of “Easily” and the title track, she describes a hot-and-cold relationship—maybe with a friend, a fan, a lover, or her own muse. “Don’t tell me with your story, cause I’ve got my own,” she sings in yet another line begging to be interpreted as meta-career commentary. “Never better, just less immediate.”

The public narrative around Boucher’s follow-up to Visions has been an archetypal one about an experimentalist finding sudden fame and then having to decide whether to go artier or go poppier. Art Angels is definitely poppier, but it would be deranged to see the results as compromised. It reminds me in spirit, if not sound, of Nicki Minaj’s bonkers Roman Reloaded, which resolved the competing desires for hard rapping and blockbuster-chart pop by going full-speed in both directions, resulting in a dense, defiant work that took the public a while to digest. Now, Grimes’s songs are becoming stranger but more inviting at the same time, even as her artistic point becomes clearer, more pointed. Video games, dance music, soaring singalongs, studio tinkering—these are all activities that can make someone feel invincible. Five tracks in, she sings, “You’ll never get sad and you’ll never get sick and you’ll never get weak / We’re deep in the Belly of the Beat.” From there, a perfect position to strike.

What the U.K. Wants From the EU

Prime Minister David Cameron, in a letter to the president of the European Council, is seeking an overhaul of the European Union ahead of a U.K. referendum in 2017 over whether to remain in the bloc.   

“This is perhaps the most important decision the British people will have to take at the ballot box in our lifetimes,” Cameron said in a speech at the Chatham House think tank in London.

The U.K. is seeking an overhaul of four areas:

Economic governance: Britain is one of nine EU members that’s not part of the eurozone, the group of nations that uses the single European currency, the euro. Cameron says he wants to ensure Britain isn’t discriminated against economically because it’s retaining the pound. Here’s more from his letter to Donald Tusk, the EC president:

View note

Competitiveness: Cameron says he wants the EU to make it easier to do business across the bloc. In the letter, he says the “burden from existing regulation is still too high,” and the U.K. “would like to see a target to cut the total burden on business.”

Sovereignty: This is perhaps the most important of Cameron’s demands, and one that Euroskeptics in the U.K. will be watching closely because they believe the country’s membership in the EU erodes its sovereignty.

View note View note

In addition, Cameron wants national security to remain the sole responsibility of member states, “while recognizing the benefits of working together on issues that affect the security of us all.”

Immigration: This is another concern in Britain because the bloc allows for free movement of all of the EU’s citizens, and Britons worry that the EU’s newer—and poorer members—will burden the country’s schools, hospitals, and public services. The population of the U.K., Cameron noted in his letter, is already expanding, and it’s set to become the bloc’s most-populous country by 2050. At the same time, he says, net migration is 300,000 a year.

“That is not sustainable,” Cameron wrote in his letter to Tusk. “We have taken lots of steps to control immigration from outside the EU. But we need to be able to exert greater control on arrivals from inside the EU too.”

View note In response, Tusk tweeted:

Acknowledgement of receipt. With @David_Cameron's letter, negotiations on #UKinEU can now begin

— Donald Tusk (@eucopresident) November 10, 2015

Next week, I will launch bilateral consultations with Member States as well as EP on topics to be addressed in #UKinEU negotiations

— Donald Tusk (@eucopresident) November 10, 2015

Britons will vote in what’s being called an in-out referendum by the end of the 2017. Polls show that membership in the EU, once unpopular, has gained support in recent years.

Still, the EC might find some of Cameron’s demands unpalatable. Here’s Margaritis Schinas, the EC spokesman:  

Prima facie we see a number of elements which appear to be feasible, like finding ways to increase the role of national parliaments, some issues which are difficult, like ever closer union and relations between the euro ins and outs, and some things which are highly problematic as they touch upon the fundamental freedoms of the internal market. Direct discrimination between EU citizens clearly falls into this last category.

Why Puerto Rican Statehood Matters So Much Right Now

If Ben Carson becomes president, he plans to add one more star to the American flag.

During a New Progressive Party rally in Puerto Rico, Carson said, “Mis hermanos Americanos, my campaign is built around the premise of 'We the People,' and through such lens, I view the statehood question in Puerto Rico as settled."

Carson isn’t the first, or only, Republican candidate to support granting statehood to Puerto Rico. Both Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush have previously voiced their support, likely in hopes that it will endear them to the growing numbers of Hispanic voters within the U.S.

As a commonwealth, the island of Puerto Rico exists somewhere between belonging and not. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but they’re exempt from paying federal taxes, and they are not allowed to vote in presidential elections.

But for Puerto Rico, full political integration at this precise moment is about more than voting. The most immediate and profound effects of being fully folded into the United States would be economic: specifically the ability to file for bankruptcy.

Earlier this year, the Government Development Bank reported that Puerto Rico’s economy was in much worse shape than previously thought. Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla then announced that there was no way the country could pay its $72 billion of debt. Because of its in-between status, Puerto Rico’s agencies and cities are left without the ability to file Chapter 9 bankruptcy (entire states can’t file for bankruptcy), a strategy that has saved cities like Detroit from complete default and ensuing economic meltdown in recent years. The ability to file for Chapter 9 could lessen some of the economic turmoil Puerto Rico is going through now. Municipal bankruptcy allows cities and municipal services (like water or light utilities) to negotiate with creditors to write-down debt, lower interest rates, or extend repayment terms. That breathing room can allow cities to continue providing important services while they work on restructuring and repaying.

In addition to the ability to file for bankruptcy, many supporters hope that statehood could mean a significant boost for the island’s economy, which struggles with rampant unemployment and poverty. Puerto Rico has been steadily losing residents for years, as they move to the mainland in search of work and better opportunities. Even as the economy has continued shrinking, debt has grown, as the island borrowed heavily to finance everything from pensions to government services.

Statehood would also come with increases to safety-net services like disability benefits and broadened Medicaid funding. Such measures may bring more trouble than benefit: The federal minimum wage, for example, is far above prevailing basic wages on the island, and is often cited as a deterrent to entering the workforce at all. So while statehood might help the current debt debacle, it won’t solve the island’s economic woes.

But statehood isn’t the only path for Puerto Rico to cope with its debt mess. Congress could still vote to allow the island to have access to Chapter 9 protections, even without becoming the 51st state. It’s a plan that has been endorsed by both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, but vehemently opposed in the House. Padilla has also asked for what is called “Super Chapter 9”—a bankruptcy that would allow Puerto Rico itself to discharge its debts, a hotly contested and unprecedented move.

According to the Government Development Bank, such a drastic move, be it Super 9 or something else, is the only thing that stands a chance at improving the island’s critical debt crisis. It faces a projected revenue gap of nearly $30 billion between 2016 and 2020. “Any debt restructuring would be challenging as there is no precedent of this scale and scope,” the organization found in a recent study. But even drastic measures meant to deal with the debt would only be a bandaid, buying time for the country to try to figure out what to do going forward.  Statehood or not, there won’t be an easy fix to the large, and far-reaching economic problems facing Puerto Rico.

Fallout 4: Have Dog, Will Travel

I think I knew Fallout 4 had wormed its way into my brain when I started talking to my imaginary dog. About 20 hours into the staggeringly ambitious, post-apocalyptic video game, which Bethesda Games releases on Tuesday, my character’s loyal German Shepherd ran ahead of me to sniff at something. I’d met the dog early on and adopted him as a loyal companion, one who helped alert me to nearby threats and dug around for buried treasure. As he sniffed, I said aloud, to an empty room, “You got something, boy?”

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Playing video games is often an embarrassingly involving experience. In the past, I’ve struggled to explain an emotional moment in a game to others, before realizing that it might be difficult for them to relate when they haven’t played. Fallout 4 throws this disconnect into even sharper relief—even for players of the exact same game. That’s because it operates on an even grander, more open-ended scale than 2008’s legendary Fallout 3. Set some 200 years after a nuclear apocalypse devastates the world, players assume the role of a wanderer who’s just emerged back on the surface. The rest is up to them. For some, that might mean unraveling vast conspiracies. For others, it might just be tending a garden with a dog at your side. The result is an experience that’s deeply intimate and immersive, despite the dizzying array of possibilities.

Video games used to fit into neat categories—role-playing games, strategy games, shooter games. But as consoles have become more powerful, and gaming has become less of a niche activity, everything has begun to merge together into blockbuster powerhouses like Fallout 4. Do you want to run around shooting monsters while wearing a mechanized suit of armor? Do you want to stealthily slip behind locked doors, or charm and connive your way through a complex story? Or do you want to eschew the story entirely and simply walk the blasted landscape of Boston (rendered in impressive detail, as Fallout 3 did for Washington, D.C.) and see what kind of trouble you get into? This is the intoxicating power of the open-world game. Having played Fallout 4 for days, pouring hours and hours into exploring its nooks and crannies, it was still clear it’d be months before I’d experienced anything close to its entire scope.

But back to the dog. If there’s a criticism to be made of Fallout 4 (beyond its buggy programming, which will likely be smoothed out over the next few weeks), it’s that on a surface level, it doesn’t feel that different from the seven-year-old Fallout 3, which also had players emerge from a fallout shelter and explore a giant post-apocalyptic wasteland. To be fair, that game was one of the most successful and acclaimed of all time, and often the rule of video-game sequels is to provide more of the same, but better.

And yet Fallout 3 could sometimes be a merciless slog, marching the player across dull, rubble-strewn landscapes or through D.C.’s labyrinthine Metro tunnels for hours before you reached your goal. Fallout 4 is more interested in giving those journeys some personality, and starting with the dog, you can travel with companions. Playing video games can be a lonely experience, and it’s amazing what a difference even a pretend dog makes.

Having played Fallout 4 for days, it was clear it’d be months before I’d experienced anything close to its entire scope.

Beyond that, another new addition to Fallout 4 is communities that you can build from the ground up. The world is littered with debris, both of the traditional and human variety: spoons and tin cans waiting to be recycled for a better purpose, lost souls traveling the world looking for meaning. You can gather people into small towns and start building houses, shops, and farms for them. The result is a sort of small-scale SimCity (or larger-scale Minecraft) that seems to have no particular bearing on the game’s main story (where you hunt your baby’s kidnapper).

When I first realized the scale of this new feature, I was nonplussed: Why insert what feels like a whole other game into a game that’s already so dauntingly massive? But after several hours scavenging around on various missions, I returned to my home base and built a few beds for my meager citizenry. It was when they started thanking me that I realized the game had simply snuck in another emotional hook.

As such, Fallout 4 may not feel like the future of gaming because it resembles so much of its past, cobbled together into a mighty behemoth that requires 10 hours to even begin to understand the scope. But that’s just part of the technological arms race that’s emerged as games get bigger and consoles get more powerful—the successful franchise is one that finds a way to do it all without scaring the customer off at minute one.

For a game so mammoth, Fallout 4 is deceptively simple in its opening: You emerge from your shelter, pistol in hand, a singular mission in mind. Then it does everything it can to derail you from your original goal by offering you distraction upon distraction. The joy is discovering that each distraction offers its own thrills and achievements; the pain is realizing the amount of time it would take to accomplish everything of interest in a world this large. But that’s something about video games that has never changed since their invention: In the best of them, joy and pain always go hand in hand.

The Financial Calculations: Why Tim Wolfe Had to Resign

The University of Missouri’s president Tim Wolfe has resigned after months of protest from students, faculty, and community members over the administration’s handling of recent instances of racism targeted at black students.

“The frustration and anger that I see is clear, real, and I don’t doubt it for a second,” Wolfe said at a press conference announcing his resignation. “I take full responsibility for this frustration and for the inaction that has occurred … My resignation comes out of love, not hate.”

The resignation follows pressure from both athletes and the general student body: Thirty-two members of the football team had announced they would not participate in any football-related activities—including practices and games—until the president’s removal or resignation; one graduate student declared a hunger strike a week ago.

This is not the first time student athletes have protested abuses—NCAA image-use, compensation, labor issues, etc.—from their respective universities. But what makes this protest different is that it may be one of the first to have posed a true economic threat to the university, explaining, at least its part, today’s turnaround.

There is big money in college football. In 2014, the University of Missouri football team generated $14,229,128. Coach Gary Pinkel recently received a salary increase from $3.1 million to about $4 million; Wolfe, by contrast, made $459,000 per year. His decision to step down prevented substantial financial losses to the university.

The Missouri Tigers have a football game against Brigham Young University scheduled for next Saturday. If the game, which is scheduled to be hosted by Missouri, is played, the contract states that Missouri should pay BYU a visitor’s fee of $250,000. If not, the forfeiture is much more costly. The Kansas City Star published a copy of the contract between Mizzou and BYU in January, which stipulates the costs associated with one of the teams canceling the game (emphasis added):

The parties agree that if one party cancels, forfeits, unilaterally delays or postpones, or fails to appear at, any game (there and similar actions hereafter referred to as “cancel”), actual damages—including those relating to public relations, radio and television broadcasts, lost profits, and other consequential damages—would be difficult or impossible to calculate. The parties further agree that processes, including litigation, to determine damages would be both unnecessarily expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, the parties agree that if one party cancels (hereafter, the “defaulting party”) any game or games, the defaulting party shall pay as liquidated damages to the other party One Million Dollars ($1,000,000) for each cancelled game, to be paid no later than thirty (30) days following the scheduled game.

In addition, last-minute ticket sales, concession-stand profits, television-distribution deals, and local businesses that benefit from the influx of game-watchers would have all seen losses.

According to The Columbia Missourian, just 7 percent of the overall student body is black, but nearly half of the football team is (60 of 124 players). This likely contributes to a distance between black athletes and “regular” students. What’s more, this disparity can result in a sort of cognitive dissonance for black athletes, who possibly have experienced discrimination directly or have friends who have, and whose talents generate millions of dollars for an institution that ignores those problems.

“In the past, the ability of mostly white head coaches and administrators to get their mostly black athletes to see themselves as separate from the larger university community often kept wider issues that affect black Americans from disrupting the system,” wrote William Rhoden, a reporter for The New York Times.

This is not the first time athletes have used their sports as a platform for social justice: For example, there was John Carlos and Tommie Smith's Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics and in 2013 the Miami Heat wore hoodies in memory of Trayvon Martin. But student athletes have leveraged their power less often, perhaps because doing so comes at a great personal risk—scholarships, housing, and potential careers all ride on their athletic performance.

The resignation of Wolfe may signal a short-term victory for minority populations at universities, but it signals something else, too: the economic stranglehold that college football has on the decisions made by these institutions. The experiences of racism at the University of Missouri needed to be addressed, and it appears that it took those with the most financial influence to make that happen.

Will a 'Goodwill Package' Win Back Angry VW Owners?

On Monday, Volkswagen announced that it will offer a combination of cash and dealership credit to the owners of the roughly 482,000 vehicles that were designed to cheat emissions tests. This compensation isn’t required by any regulatory or judicial command, and the company is presenting it as a gesture of goodwill. “It’s clear that our company betrayed the trust of our customers, our employees, our dealers, and the public,” said Michael Horn, the CEO of Volkswagen America, in a video message accompanying the details of the offer.

The compensation is $1,000 total, $500 of which comes in the form of a prepaid debit card and $500 of which can be put toward service at a VW dealership as well as 24-hour roadside assistance for three years. If all owners accept it, it would cost the company about $500 million, which is part of the $7.4 billion Volkswagen has set aside to deal with the fallout of its scandal. Earlier this month, the EPA accused Volkswagen of cheating on emissions tests in 10,000 more cars than the company originally admitted, and a similar package for the owners of those vehicles is likely on the way.

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(Any owner who accepts Volkswagen’s package is still eligible to participate in a class-action lawsuit in order to receive further compensation in the future. There are already about 350 lawsuits filed against the company in the U.S. so far.)

Even when combined with the $2,000 credit, announced last month, to be put toward a new VW car, the overtures the company is making to its jilted customers will probably not be enough to appease many of them. One lawsuit estimates that owners paid $7,000 extra for a clean-diesel vehicle. And many owners continue to worry about the drop in resale value of their vehicles—not to mention their concerns about performance after Volkswagen has made the necessary repairs. Some owners simply want Volkswagen to buy their cars back—one FAQ on the company's site for customers is "I want to turn in my vehicle now. Can I and how?" (Volkswagen's response: "We ask for your patience.")

All of these gestures are independent of Volkswagen’s legal obligations, which have yet to be determined. (Some analysts think that the $7.4 billion the company has set aside will not be enough.) The company is still discussing software fixes with the EPA and the California Air Resources Board. According to an EPA spokesperson, an official recall won’t be announced until that fix has been tested and approved.

Is Making of a Murderer Netflix’s Serial?

On Friday, a Baltimore Circuit Court judge granted a request to reopen the case of Adnan Syed, whose 2000 conviction for murdering his girlfriend was at the center of last year’s hit podcast Serial. It was the latest in a series of developments that came after Sarah Koenig’s exploration of the death of Hae Min Lee. It’s also a particularly potent example of how true-crime storytelling in the 21st century can lead to reversed fortunes, especially if they capture the public imagination.

Netflix appears to be the latest player to see the genre’s value: It announced Monday that it will be releasing a documentary series called Making a Murderer in December. The 10 episodes will follow the story of Steven Avery, a man who was convicted of rape and later exonerated by DNA evidence after serving 18 years in prison. The kicker: After his release, he was sentenced to life for murdering another woman in 2005.

Making of a Murderer appears to be Netflix’s first foray into true crime (its only other documentary series is the decidedly cheerier Chef’s Table.) In June, I looked at how the genre has changed since its earliest beginnings in the 19th century:

New forces—improved technology, new media, and less trust in institutions—have helped shape true crime into a truly modern form ... The result is a genre that’s still indebted to decades-old conventions, but also one that has found renewed relevance and won a new generation of fans by going beyond the usual grisly sensationalism.

And indeed the series looks like it’ll hew to the typical storytelling demands of true crime, which shoots for the most outrageous characters and incredible reveals. “There are an unbelievable number of twists and turns in the story arc of Making a Murderer,” Netflix said in a statement. But at the same time the series looks like it’ll take a longer view of history—using Avery’s story to see what has and hasn’t changed in the justice system over the last 30 years. The series will also explicitly look at “allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering and witness coercion.”

Because Netflix is releasing the series in its entirety, Making a Murderer probably won’t have the same sense of suspense as Serial or HBO’s The Jinx, (though it could be just as bingeworthy). If those earlier works are any indication, Google searches for “Steven Avery” could spike, and a new spate of true-crime obsessives could take it upon themselves to parse every tiny detail of his case.

It’s impossible to say whether Avery’s tale specifically will captivate audiences the way Syed’s or Robert Durst’s did. (The second season of Serial is set for a November release, and the podcast is also being adapted into a TV show.) Still, Avery’s story—a fortuitous escape from prison followed by a return behind bars—certainly resembles that of one of the most sensationalized criminal trials in U.S. history. Fittingly, American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson will premiere in January, just over 20 years after a not-guilty verdict set the football player free.