Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 302

Do Russian Athletes Cheat?

Last week, ahead of a major report by an independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Russia banned five of its athletes for alleged steroid use and other biological irregularities.

“Marathon runner Maria Konovalova received a two-year ban and was stripped of results going back to 2009,” the AP reported. “She finished second at the Chicago Marathon in 2010 and third in 2013.” The report adds, disconcertingly, that five of the past seven winners of the Chicago Marathon have been banned for doping.

If Russia’s preemptive actions were meant to soften the impact of the WADA commission’s report, which dropped Monday, let’s just say it didn’t. The 323-page report contends that major Russian track-and-field athletes and Olympians conspired with high-ranking state sports officials to engage in “systemic” doping, cover-ups, and extortion.

The report provides evidence confirming involvement in such activities by everyone from coaches, trainers, and athletes to state-laboratory personnel, and effectively suggests the 2012 Olympics were tainted.

As a result of this widespread inaction, the Olympic Games in London were, in a sense, sabotaged by the admission of athletes who should have not been competing, and could have been prevented from competing, were it not for the collective and inexplicable laissez-fair policy.

The blowback from the report is already considerable. Russia’s alleged culture of doping is so pervasive it’s yielding comparisons to “notorious drug regimes like the state-run doping system of East Germany.” One member of the report’s commission is recommending that Russia be barred from international track and field events as well as be kept from competition in the 2016 Olympics. Criminal proceedings may follow suit.

Making record time was Vladimir Uiba, the head of Russia’s Federal Medical-Biological Agency, who denounced the report as “politically motivated.” Given the renascent feud between Russia and the West over Ukraine and Syria, it’s not surprising to see the results of the WADA report fall along these rhetorical lines.

Nevertheless, just last week Kenya’s failure to enact anti-doping mechanisms led to some worry the country may be kept out of the Olympics. Also, according to data released by WADA in June, the top 12 countries garnering doping violations in recent years include France (No. 3), Belgium (No. 5), Italy (No. 6), Spain (No. 7), and the United States (No. 11). Russia ranked first on the list by several laps.

The International Association of Athletics Federations‎ has given Russia one week to respond to the allegations. Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko chimed in early by threatening to cut all of Russia’s funding for anti-doping programs. His rationale: “Whatever we do, everything is bad.”

How Ben Carson and Marco Rubio Outfoxed the Media

Two Republican candidates. Two sets of potentially damaging stories. So far, not a great deal of damage. What happened?

In one case, much-anticipated credit-card records from Marco Rubio produced … not a great deal. Mike Allen—perhaps the leading arbiter of conventional wisdom in Washington, with all the positives and negatives that connotes—deemed the records a “nothingburger.” Ben Carson, meanwhile, has shrugged off several stories raising questions about his recollections of the past by attacking the media.

These stories seem to have run into three problems. First, the outlets that pursued them seem not to have understood how they might be received. Second, the abiding distrust of the media on the right ensured they would be met with a degree of skepticism by Republican voters. And third—and relatedly—the sloppy presentation of some scoops served to undermine the better-documented allegations of other stories.

Start with the Rubio story. The Florida senator’s personal finances have been subject to questions for years. This latest story concerned his use of a Republican Party of Florida credit card while he was speaker of the Florida House. Rubio’s team had seemed to resist releasing the records for some time, but once it did, there wasn’t much there. Rubio’s spending was lower than his successor’s, and he says he reimbursed personal expenses—which seems to have been within the rules. Marc Caputo suggested Rubio had even set a trap for the press and candidates by holding back the documents.

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Rubio may not be totally out of the woods; there are several different lines of questions about his personal record-keeping, including campaign-finance violations and turbulent real-estate deals. But earlier stories—about his boat, for example, or his speeding-ticket record—have bounced off him harmlessly. One reason is that the expectations have been  so inflated that the resulting story ends up being underwhelming. These stories tend to be fairly technical, too, not simple black-and-white cases. Moreover, though, what is the audience that will be swayed by allegations against Rubio? Credit-card debt and the threat of foreclosure are experiences shared by many Americans, and Rubio, just like Richard Nixon before him, has also deftly turned these questions into a populist selling point.

The Carson case is more complex. First, CNN asked some pointed questions about Carson’s childhood. In his book Gifted Hands, Carson portrayed himself as an angry young men, notably in a set piece in which he tried to stab a friend but luckily struck the friend’s belt-buckle instead. On Friday, Politico expressed doubts about Carson’s claim that he was accepted to West Point and offered a full scholarship; the Detroit News piled on. Then The Wall Street Journal found some questionable assertions about his time at Yale.

Then came the pushback. Politico seemed to overstate its case on what Carson had claimed, and it quietly toned down the language in the piece. Carson says that one reason CNN couldn’t find his childhood friends is that he used fictitious names for them (something that another presidential candidate, one Barack Obama, also did in his memoir). His campaign posted a story that partly—though by no means fully—validated one recollection from Yale.

In some cases, the pushback isn’t entirely convincing. It remains the case that Carson was not accepted at West Point, and that all students at the military academy receive full scholarships. The conflicting recollections of Carson and his acquaintances in his childhood and Yale days are peculiar. A stickup that Carson alleged took place at Popeye’s is still hard to pin down. The Journal’s reporting finds that a story about Carson being named the “most honest” student in his class is—ironically—completely uncorroborated.

“You know, when you write a book with a co-writer and you say that there was a class, a lot of time they’ll put a number or something just to give it more meat,” Carson said on ABC this weekend. “You know, obviously, decades later, I’m not going to remember the course number.”

That’s hard to swallow. Carson stood behind the book as factual, and could have checked the statements. Moreover, a president has to choose people he or she can trust and delegate tasks to them; it’s not flattering to Carson’s judgment for him to say he simply couldn’t trust a collaborator. Yet it’s also true that Carson told many of these stories in the context of his career as a motivational speaker, where embellishment for effect and inattention to specifics would be more acceptable than in a presidential race.

That’s not the only audience problem in the Carson-vetting stories. Conservatives remain deeply sensitive to the appearance of bias in the press, a sensitivity that Carson has exploited in responding to these stories. During the last debate, he was asked about his relationship with Mannatech, a questionable supplement provider, and simply denied he had one. That untruth worked on stage, but it was dismantled quickly by reporters, including conservatives ones.

When an outlet like Politico oversells a scoop, however, it drives even conservatives who aren’t big Carson fans or who endorse scrutiny to look askance. Erick Erickson wrote a quick post deeming the Carson revelations major, then struck through the original piece after consideration. Many agreed with this sentiment from The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes:

Both things are true: 1) Ben Carson's candidacy/claims should be subject to media scrutiny. 2) Media far tougher on GOPers than Dems.

— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) November 9, 2015

The extent to which the media is or is not tougher on Republicans is probably impossible to determine definitively, and some liberals claim the opposite. (NBC counted the many stories about Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers during Obama’s 2008 campaign, though that’s not enough on its own to settle the matter.) For political purposes, though, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true that the press is harder on Republicans; what matters is that many conservatives firmly believe it, and that this conditions their response to questions about Carson, especially sloppy ones.

Vetting of both Carson and Rubio will continue. The steady stream of reports documenting discrepancies in Carson’s record shows no sign of abating, and there may be a tipping point at which the weight of exaggerations and errors starts to harm him.

But for the time being, Carson is at the top of the polls. The former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon was once mentioned on The Wire. Perhaps the media should take a lesson from another Baltimore folk hero on that show: If you come at the king, you best not miss.

Many Police Departments Have Dismal Body-Camera Laws

In the past year, protestors and activists have accused the U.S. police departments of systemic racism and abuse.

The nation has an app for that: Police body-worn cameras.

Since last fall, outfitting every cop on the streets with a body camera has moved from a fringe issue to de facto national policy. The federal government has provided $23 million in funding for the technology; cities have flocked to buy devices for their departments. Cameras are the country’s single most unified reply to accusations of police abuse and systemic racism.

But according to a new report from an umbrella organization of major national civil-rights groups, the city laws that govern body cameras—in other words, the very thing that will determine how body cameras work in the field—are deeply, sometimes fundamentally, inadequate. Many of the nation’s largest police departments do not address important aspects of body-camera use or have policies directly contrary to those that civil-rights organizations believe to be necessary.

The policy scorecard was developed by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a policy and lobbying organization for more than 200 major U.S. rights groups, and Upturn, a technology consulting firm that often advises on civil-rights issues. It examined 25 police departments across the country, including the 15 largest city forces that have deployed cameras. The report is the most comprehensive summary of municipal body-camera laws across the country to date.

“Body worn cameras are not operated by concerned citizens and are not directed at officers,” says Wade Henderson, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference. “They are recording members of the community.”

Because they record citizens, not police, many civil-rights leaders believe that laws to govern body-camera use must be especially stringent. Body cameras could easily turn into another tool of government surveillance, they say.

Despite federal support, there are few federal laws or guidelines for the use of body cameras. Rules are set piecemeal city-by-city. There are vast differences between how even the largest departments, like New York and Chicago, handle film from body cameras.

“We’re now left with a patchwork of policies that have been developed without community input,” said Sakira Cook, a legal counsel at the Leadership Conference.

As such, a coalition of major civil-rights groups released guidelines for optimal rules in May. The report released on Monday is the first to survey how many local departments stack up.

The results are not good. No city police department was ideal. Two departments stood out in particular as having especially dreadful rules: Atlanta and Ferguson, Missouri. In every category that researchers examined, Atlanta and Ferguson either had a poor policy or failed to specify any policy at all.

City departments in Philadelphia, Detroit, San Antonio, and Albuquerque also did not fare well. All four cities have deployed body cameras but have no stated policy regarding their use.

Often the most optimal policy is only law in one or two cities. Only police departments in Parker, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., for instance, give people captured by body cameras a specific way to access that footage. (The ACLU recently hailed the small town of Parker as having one of the best body-camera laws in the country; the scorecard agreed.)

Only Baltimore prohibits the use of facial-recognition algorithms and other biometric-identifying software in conjunction with body-camera footage. Every other police department did not have a specific policy.

Almost every department examined allowed officers to watch video of an incident before filing a report. This “gives officers an undue advantage over other witnesses in a court of law,” says Harlan Yu, a technologist at Upturn.

Not every policy question was as dismal. The report found that many cities specified when officers should and should not have their cameras on while in the field. And some departments, including New York and Chicago, specifically limits the distribution of footage of more vulnerable subjects, like victims of domestic or sexual abuse.

Other civil-rights organizations have also taken a look at the consensus forming around body cameras. Last week, We the Protestors—a group of activists that emerged from organizing in Ferguson—issued their own body-cam scorecard. It also found that many cities failed its expectations. Only two departments—Chicago and Louisville—met two of its four stringent guidelines.

What's Happening at the University of Missouri?

Update on November 9 at 2:26 p.m. ET

Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri, resigned Monday amid criticism over how he and the school’s administrators handled a series of racist incidents on campus this fall.

“I am resigning as president of the University of Missouri system,” Wolfe said, reading from a prepared statement. “My motivation in making this decision comes from love. I love MU, Columbia, where I grew up, and the state of Missouri. I’ve thought and prayed about this decision. It’s the right thing to do.”

Wolfe’s resignation, which was accepted by the Board of Curators, the university’s governing body, came after mounting criticism—including from the governor, faculty, and students—over how the school handled racist incidents on campus.  

“I stand before you today and I take full responsibility for this frustration,” Wolfe said. “And I take full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred.”

Professors at the school had walked out of class in support of students who were calling for Wolfe’s resignation.

What’s Happening at the School?

As my colleague Marina Koren reported Sunday, at issue is the school administration’s handling of several racist incidents that occurred this fall. In September, Peyton Head, a senior and the president of Missouri Students Association, said he was called racial slurs as he walked near campus.  

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“I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society,” he wrote in a Facebook post.

That incident was followed by one on October 5 when members of the Legion of Black Collegians were called the N-word while rehearsing for homecoming festivities. Three weeks later, on October 24, a swastika was drawn with human feces at a university residence hall.

The School’s Response

The university, at first, was muted in its response. On October 10, members of Concerned Student 1950, a student group named for the year the first black graduate student was admitted to the university, blocked Wolfe’s car as it moved through a homecoming parade. The Columbia Missourian newspaper reports: “Wolfe did not respond to the group’s concerns while he was in the car. His driver revved the convertible’s engine, and the car bumped into” Jonathan Butler, a graduate student who is one of the group’s members.

A week later, Wolfe met with members of the group, and on November 6 he apologized: “Racism does exist at our university and it is unacceptable,” he said.

Too Little Too Late?

That’s Butler’s view. He began a hunger strike on November 2. He says he will continue it until Wolfe resigns or he (Butler) dies. Butler is being supported by Concerned Student 1950, but the group also has other demands. The Columbia Missourian newspaper has more:

Concerned Student 1950 is pushing for the removal of Tim Wolfe from office, but the group has several other demands.

According to previous Missourian reporting, the demands include:

Enforcement of mandatory racial awareness and inclusion curriculum for all faculty, staff and students, controlled by a board of color.

An increase in the percentage of black faculty and staff to 10 percent by the 2017-18 academic year, and the development by May 1 of a 10-year plan to promote a safer, more inclusive campus.

An increase in funding to hire more mental health professionals for the MU Counseling Center, particularly those of color, and more staff for the social justice centers on campus.

Butler does not share all of these demands. (For more on his view, read the Missourian’s extensive coverage of this story.)

After Wolfe’s resignation, Butler told his supporters: “You saw what we did here. We chose to fight for our community. We chose to do what was right during this time.”

What Does Wolfe Say?

Wolfe had until Monday refused to step down. He met with Butler last Friday, five days after the hunger strike began, and apologized in a statement.

“I regret my reaction at the MU Homecoming Parade when the Concerned Student 1950 group approached my car. I am sorry, and my apology is long overdue,” he said. “My behavior seemed like I did not care. That was not my intention. I was caught off guard in that moment. Nonetheless, had I gotten out of the car to acknowledge the students and talk with them perhaps we wouldn't be where we are today.”

But as Marina noted, things went quickly south.

On Friday night in Kansas City, a group of University of Missouri students approached the school’s president, Tim Wolfe, outside of a fundraiser at a performing arts center he had attended. They asked him to give his definition of systematic oppression.

“I will give you an answer, and I’m sure it will be a wrong answer,” Wolfe said. Then, “Systematic oppression is because you don’t believe that you have the equal opportunity for success.”

The students reacted in shock. “Did you just blame us for systematic oppression, Tim Wolfe?” one shouted. “Did you just blame black students?”

On Sunday, Wolfe responded: “We want to find the best way to get everyone around the table and create the safe space for a meaningful conversation that promotes change. We will share next steps as soon as they are confirmed.”

Those steps culminated in Monday’s resignation.

Who Else Is Protesting?

Besides the faculty who said they would walk out Monday, 32 members of the Missouri Tigers football team said they would go on strike. The school’s athletics department’s response:

STATEMENT (1): The department of athletics is aware of the declarations made tonight by many of our student-athletes.

— Mizzou Athletics (@MizzouAthletics) November 8, 2015

(2): We must come together with leaders from across our campus to tackle these challenging issues and we support our athletes right to do so

— Mizzou Athletics (@MizzouAthletics) November 8, 2015

Upon receiving news of Wolfe’s resignation, the Tigers said they would play again. The team takes on Brigham Young University in Kansas City on Saturday.

A Shooting in Jordan

Updated on November 9 at 3:42 p.m.

A Jordanian policeman shot and killed five people—two Americans, a South African, and two Jordanians—at a training center near Amman, state-run Al-Rai newspaper reported.

The newspaper quoted Mohammed al-Momani, the minister of state for media affairs, as saying the policeman opened fire at the facility before being shot and killed. Two Jordanians who were wounded in the shooting died later, Momani said. Two American trainers and two Jordanians were injured.

The BBC reports the shooting occurred at the Jordan International Police Training Center, a facility that is funded by the U.S. It trains mainly Palestinian and Iraqi officers.

An investigation is underway to determine the motive for the killings, the newspaper reported.

The Associated Press reports “the attacker was a police captain who worked as a trainer at the facility.” He was married and had two children.

The Wall Street Journal reported that at least one of the slain Americans was an employee of DynCorp International Inc., a major contractor for the Pentagon and State Department.

At the White House, President Obama said the U.S. will “be working closely with the Jordanians to determine exactly what happened.”

Jordan, a key American ally in the Middle East, is one of two (the other is Egypt) Arab countries that have peace treaties with Israel. It also is part of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State.

Mizzou's Football Team Tries to Sack the School's President

On Friday night in Kansas City, a group of University of Missouri students approached the school’s president, Tim Wolfe, outside of a fundraiser at a performing arts center he had attended. They asked him to give his definition of systematic oppression.

“I will give you an answer, and I’m sure it will be a wrong answer,” Wolfe said. Then, “Systematic oppression is because you don’t believe that you have the equal opportunity for success.”

The students reacted in shock. “Did you just blame us for systematic oppression, Tim Wolfe?” one shouted. “Did you just blame black students?”

The encounter was filmed and posted on Twitter by a student, and was widely circulated. The students were members of Concerned Student 1950, which has been staging protests on the university’s campus in Columbia this week against what they say is the school administration’s poor handling of several racist incidents that occurred this fall. The group, named for the year the University of Missouri accepted its first black students, has called for Wolfe to resign.

In a statement released on Sunday afternoon, an apparently defiant Wolfe said he is committed to “listening to all sides,” and that he is “dedicated to ongoing dialogue to address these very complex, societal issues as they affect our campus community.” He mentioned ongoing work on a “systemwide diversity and inclusion strategy,” due to be completed in April. But he said nothing about stepping down or otherwise meeting students’ demands.

Students have held rallies on campus, boycotted buying school merchandise, and stopped attending football games. Jonathan Butler, a graduate student, is on the seventh day of a hunger strike in protest of the school administration. Butler is refusing food “until either Tim Wolfe is removed from office or my internal organs fail and my life is lost,” he wrote in a Facebook post on Monday.

The latest development in the protests came Saturday night, when 32 members of the Missouri Tigers, the school’s football team, announced that they would go on strike until Wolfe resigned.

We are no longer taking it. It's time to fight. #ConcernedStudent1950 #MizzouHungerStrike pic.twitter.com/mnPZBviqJF

— LBC (@MizzouLBC) November 8, 2015

A University of Missouri spokesman could not be reached for comment about the student athletes’ announcement on Sunday. ​The athletic department acknowledged the strike on Twitter Saturday, saying “we must come together with leaders from across our campus to tackle these challenging issues and we support our athletes right to do so.” One player tweeted that “our coaches are 100% behind us. Including the white ones.”

The Tigers are scheduled to face the Tigers of Brigham Young University on Saturday.

The recent conversation about racial tensions at the University of Missouri began in earnest in September, when a Facebook post by Payton Head spread quickly on social media. Head, a senior and the president of Missouri Students Association, said people riding in a pickup truck had shouted racial slurs at him as he walked near campus. “I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society,” he wrote.

On October 5, members of the Legion of Black Collegians were verbally harassed during an on-campus, late-night rehearsal for homecoming festivities by a visibly intoxicated white male student, who referred to the students with the N-word. Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin apologized for the incident, and a few days later the university announced it would require all students, faculty, and staff to take diversity training—the “strategy” that Wolfe referenced in his statement Sunday.

On October 10, Concerned Student 1950 protesters blocked Wolfe’s car as it moved through a homecoming parade until they were removed by police. The group sent a list of demands to the university on October 20, including an apology for the incident from Wolfe and Wolfe’s resignation. The president met with members of the group a week later, and on November 6 publicly apologized for the parade incident. “Racism does exist at our university and it is unacceptable,” he said.

In the fall of 2014, the University of Missouri had a student population of 35,441, according to its website. Of those, 77 percent were white and 7 percent were black, in a state where 12 percent of the population is African American. Last year, hundreds of students participated in an on-campus demonstration in protest of high-profile cases of fatal police shootings of black men, including Michael Brown, who was killed in Ferguson, which is about 115 miles east of Columbia.

The Citizens of Nowhere

Greg Constantine has spent a decade photographing people with no documentation, and no rights. Working with various refugee groups and non-governmental organizations, Constantine has visited stateless communities in 18 countries—including Sri Lanka, Kenya, Kuwait, Crimea, Italy, and the Dominican Republic. 

His new book, Nowhere People, gives an unparalleled view of what it is like to be denied citizenship. "In most cases, they cannot work legally, receive basic state health-care services, obtain an education, open a bank account or benefit from even the smallest development programs," Constantine said. "As non-persons, they are excluded from participating in the political process and are removed from the protection of laws, leaving them vulnerable to extortion, harassment and any number of human-rights abuses." Without passports or any identification papers, these families typically cannot travel to pursue a better life, and at the same time, are at risk of deportation from their own homes.

The images in Nowhere People negate the idea that these men, women and children are non-persons. Hope and determination explode through the black and white frames. Personal stories and interviews populate the book as well, adding rich layers of language and history, and show Constantine’s commitment to bearing witness. By capturing the lives of these stateless people on camera, Constantine creates a kind documentation that governments have long denied them.

Below is a selection of images from his powerful book as well as captions provided by the photographer.

Live From New York, It's Donald Trump

To protest Donald Trump’s appearance on Saturday Night Live this week, the group DeportRacism.com offered $5,000—in cash—to anyone on set or in the audience who would disrupt Trump in his hosting role. And who would do that, specifically, by calling him a racist.

Trump was, in the end, called a racist on live TV. But the interrupting slur didn’t come from the audience or from SNL’s crew; it came from Trump’s co-cast member, Larry David, who was on-hand on Saturday to play Bernie Sanders during the show’s cold open.

“Trump’s a racist!” David announced, as Trump delivered his monologue. The audience gasped. It was impossible to tell whether the shock was real. It was also impossible to tell whether David’s accusation was sincere. Until, that is, Larry David went full Larry David: He explained that his interruption was in response not to Trump, but to DeportRacism.com’s offer. “I heard if I yelled that, they’d give me $5,000,” David said, deadpanning.

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To which Trump replied, “As a businessman, I can fully respect that.”

SNL then tweeted the exchange, noting cheerily that “Larry David couldn’t miss this opportunity.”

This—heckling, threatened and pre-empted and converted into PR—perfectly set the tone for the show itself, which vacillated between pandering to Trump and passive-aggressively mocking him. And which was also, both despite and because of all that, extremely unfunny.

Perhaps that was because SNL’s writers weren’t sure how to write for a politician who is also a front-running presidential candidate. (As PBS put it, “Despite a 40-year history of lampooning politicians while inviting some to mock themselves as on-air guests, booking a presidential candidate to host the NBC sketch-comedy show is almost unprecedented.”) Perhaps they weren’t eager to write good sketches for the man who once equated Mexican immigrants with rapists and with whom NBC had previously severed ties. Perhaps they felt, like the many protestors that picketed SNL’s studios on Saturday with “DUMP TRUMP” signs, that the network was selling out in providing Trump with yet another platform for free media. (Fox News’s headline before the show: “Trump hosts Saturday Night Live, with surrounding controversy expected to bring big ratings.”)

Whatever the cause, though, the show couldn’t seem to figure out what to make of Trump, or what to do with his second turn as SNL host (he’d done it once before, in 2004, shortly after the debut of The Apprentice). The candidate’s monologue, Larry David’s heckle-for-hire aside, was essentially a stump speech freed of obligations to policy and positioning and politics in general. (“People think I’m controversial,” Trump confided. “But the truth is, I’m a nice guy.” Later, he’d add that “part of the reason I’m here is that I know how to take a joke.”)

The show’s first Trump-starring sketch was set in the White House in 2018, and it consisted of Trump’s staff informing him how wonderfully the country was doing under the Trump Administration. A representative bit of dialogue:

Staffer: Well, Mr. President, you did it.
Trump: Just like I promised, right?
Staffer: Halfway into your first term, and prosperity is at an all-time high. In two years, you really made America great again.
Melania: See, I told you, it’s more than just words and a silly hat.
Trump: First Lady Melania is 100 percent correct.

Later, Trump asked a general, “How are we doing in Syria?”

The general’s reply: “Well, ISIS is completely eliminated, sir. The whole country’s at peace. All the refugees have returned, and they have great jobs as blackjack dealers in the Trump Hotel & Casino in Damascus.”

Pause for LOLs, etc. The sketch went on in this way, with mentions of Putin “withdrawing from Ukraine” after Trump called him a loser (“he cried for hours!”), and with a lengthy discussion of the single biggest problem facing Americans under the leadership of President Trump: “They’re just sick of winning!” a staffer explained. “They’re winning so much! It’s just too great, sir!”

‘Well, you know what, I don’t have to get specific. With me, it just works. You know? It’s just magic.’

The whole thing was ostensibly meant to poke fun at Trump’s sweeping, swashbuckling assurances of his unique ability to Make America Great Again; it was, in other words, meant to be a joke about Trump that was uttered by Trump itself. Which would have been quite a coup! But what this litany of President Trumpian accomplishments ended up doing, on the contrary, was simply to give Trump another chance to talk about how great he is. And to add to his long list of reasons for his greatness one more item: the fact that he can totally take a joke.

During the sketch’s Oval Office lovefest, a staffer admitted, breathlessly, “I have no idea how you did it, sir!”

Trump replied:

Well, you know what, I don’t have to get specific. With me, it just works. You know? It’s just magic. It’s always been that way my whole life.

This is another way of saying that “Donald Trump,” the SNL character played, on Saturday, by Donald Trump, is apparently going to accomplish the Re-Greatening of America by way of miracle and magic. And the lines certainly make fun of the similarities between Trump’s campaign and a Marquezian brand of magical realism. What the lines also do, though, is to absolve Trump of the absurdities of his own claims, to excuse his declarations that he will solve problems with a series of strategic miracles. Of course that’s absurd! It’s a joke, after all!

So while Trump’s SNL episode was unfunny in the immediate sense—there were no laughs in Mudville—it was also unfunny in a broader one. The show was doing what it always does, which is to make light of current events; it was also, however, hitting extremely close to home in its light-making. It was taking things that Trump has already said in earnest and imbuing them with levity. In that Trump 2018 sketch, the president of Mexico pays a visit to the White House to give Trump a check to pay for the U.S.’s enormous border wall (and to apologize “for doubting you”). Trump adds, after the check is given and received: “And changing Telemundo to all English for me—you changed that to all English—it’s the greatest thing. I’m so proud of you.”

The schtick is simply an ongoing impression. It’s Donald Trump, doing a mean Donald Trump.

That is … not #toosoon, really, but #tooclose. You could see Trump actually saying something about Telemundo being converted into an English-speaking network. This is a real thing that could be talked about in the height of campaign silly season. The humor in SNL’s political sketches has traditionally come from either satire or impersonations; the Trump schtick presented itself as satire, but was in fact simply an ongoing impression. It was Donald Trump, doing a mean Donald Trump.

And so: The show’s digital short—a video that functions as a mockery of and homage to Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video—featured Trump dancing and singing (“you used to call me on my cell phone…”) in a rhythmic incarnation of a #dadjoke. Another sketch found Trump live-tweeting the performance that he is “too busy” to participate in, with his typical vitriol applied to actors. (“Who would marry @TaranKillam? He’s an over-rated clown.” / “I love SNL. SNL loves me. But everyone in this sketch is a total loser who can bite my dust.” / “An extremely credible source told me that Kenan Thompson’s birth certificate is a fraud.”)

There were also moments, however, when the show tried to get the better of Trump—mostly, by getting him to mock himself by way of extremely terrible costumes and extremely awkward sketches. A particularly unfunny sketch had Trump dressed in a shimmering cape and playing the “laser harp”; another had him playing a skeevy music producer—complete with orange shades, worn indoors—and uttering lines like, “You’re gonna be a massive star, babe.” An even worse sketch—featuring former porn stars, stumping for a man they referred to as “Donald Tramp”—ended with the real candidate stepping out to make clear, “I’m Donald Trump, and I in no way, shape or form approved of this message.”

On “Weekend Update,” the recurring “Drunk Uncle” character came on to explain to Colin Jost why, exactly, he’s supporting Trump. “I don't just like him, Colin,” Drunk Uncle said, slurrily. “I love him. He’s going to make America grapes again! I mean, he's got it all, Colin. He's got everything. He’s got money women TV shows Plaza Miss America orange hair. He’s beautiful! He’s like a big old orange-haired Monopoly man!” Later, Drunk Uncle added that he supports Trump because the candidate is “finally going to get rid of all of the every single one of them!”

“Wait, don’t say it,” Jost said.

“Crime, Colin! I was gonna say crime,” Drunk Uncle clarified. “He’s gonna get rid of crime, man.”

He paused. “Crime perpetrated by immigrants!”

“Weekend Update” made more direct objections to the show’s host, too. When Michael Che mentioned Trump’s latest book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again—out, naturally, this week—the “Weekend Update” co-host remarked on the title. On, specifically, that revealing “again.” “Whenever rich old white guys start bringing up the ‘good old days,’” Che said, “my Negro senses start tingling. After all those years of progress, Trump’s gonna go, ‘I think we had it right the first time.’”

Those moments of real talk were good. But they were rare. For the most part, this was Donald Trump, yet again trumping everyone else. Including, and especially, SNL’s staff. “They have 100 writers,” Trump told Bill O’Reilly on Friday. “I walk into the room, there are 100—and they’re all about 17 years old, okay? They’re all young and all up in your face.”

He added: “But they come up with many, many skits and you pick the ones you think you like.”

Oprah’s High Priestess of Public Shaming

Iyanla Vanzant can make a grown man cry with very little effort. The reality-television host, whose eponymous show runs on the Oprah Winfrey Network, has an aura of emotional seriousness about her: a penetrating, hellfire-and-brimstone stare; a booming, movie-announcer-style voice; the body language of a diva. Surely she has emotional fluffers who sit with her interviewees before taping, holding their eyes open Clockwork Orange-style as scenes from Steel Magnolias stream by. It’s uncanny. They just melt.

Iyanla—and she’s definitely an Iyanla, just like Oprah is an Oprah and Madonna is a Madonna—didn’t invent the genre of “fix my life” reality television, but she’s elevated it to an art form. She has Dr. Phil’s tough-love self-righteousness and Oprah’s no-nonsense questioning skills, but with a twist: Her sheen of authority comes not from psychology or journalism, but religion. She is a Yoruba priestess—the tribal rituals of Nigeria’s Yorubaland are part of her ancestry. She was raised in a Pentecostal church, but later gravitated toward New Thought, a strand of Christianity related to Christian Science that emphasizes the immaterial nature of the self. She has done, in her own words, “an investigation into the metaphysics of spirituality.” This spiritual-ish-ness makes her show distinctive: When people bring her their problems, she’s not just examining their lives; she’s peering into their souls.

After five seasons, Iyanla: Fix My Life is still somewhat niche—it’s only available on OWN, which is a premium-cable channel. It’s fairly popular, though: According to OWN, this season is averaging 1 million total viewers, and is consistently among the most popular cable series watched in African American households. It’s centered on a deep human need: People are broken, and they want to be fixed. Sometimes, this is a matter of common sense. Stop fathering babies with handfuls of women; stop cheating on your spouse; stop crutching on meth. More often, though, it takes the pattern of a spiritual healing: confession, penitence, absolution. This emotional performance is a reminder that religion has never faded from American culture; its rhythms echo everywhere, even reality television. The satisfying spiritual flayings of Iyanla: Fix My Life embody a specific kind of secularism: light on metaphysical details, but still deeply yearning for meaning, morality, and salvation.

* * *

Usually, when Iyanla tackles people’s problems, they’re fairly run-of-the-mill: mother-in-law conflicts, relationship drama, marital boredom. In season five, though, she took up a complicated religious problem in a three-part “mega-fix” of two gay pastors in Louisville, Kentucky, who had not yet come out to their congregations. Homosexuality is “a secret that's been buried in the African American community for far too long,” Iyanla says in the intro. The goal, as she says repeatedly, is to get the men, Mitchell and Derek, to “tell the truth.”

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Iyanla’s method is a little reminiscent of another throw-back reality-television giant, Supernanny. She meets people in their homes; she sits in their living rooms and grills them on their deepest, darkest secrets; she tells them, solemnly, that they must change their ways. Soon into the “mega-fix,” we hear a lot of dirt on the pastors: how Mitchell married a single mom even though he knew he was attracted to men and soon started having affairs (tear count: moderate). How Derek fears that God doesn’t love him (tear count: astronomical). Iyanla has little patience for Mitchell, who gives her some ’tude, so she hazes him a little: She makes him look into a pink hand-mirror labeled “man” and tell her what he sees in it. It takes her a while, but she finally breaks him down; he retreats to a bed, bawling, and in a solemn voiceover, Iyanla details how this vulnerable state requires him to be swaddled and massaged, to “move the energy out of his body.” Derek’s big bombshell comes later, when Iyanla forces him to confront his family about his sexuality; he confesses that he was sexually assaulted by an older man when he was a child, as if this were a normal thing to share for the very first time when you’re on national television.

If confessional narratives make for great reality TV, then some 15th-century Spanish Inquisitors at least deserve a line in Iyanla’s credits. Public expressions of brokenness, of being essentially flawed in a way that has led to wrong-doing, have long been a central preoccupation of organized religion. Confessions take different forms across faiths, but they often involve symbolic rituals (like the mirror), physical components (like the swaddling), and verbal professions (like the family confrontation). Iyanla’s show depends on the idea that confession brings absolution; the “fix” she provides is a highly stylized airing of dirty laundry, followed by a hug-it-out round of benediction.

People go through ritual rounds of tension and resolution all the time—that’s one of the core parts of having human relationships. That these performative confessions are on television, though, makes things complicated. “I don’t go into my work and my ministering to people with the thought that this is public and this is on television,” Iyanla told me in an interview. “In fact, one of the first things I say to my guests is, ‘I’m not here to do television. I’m here because you wrote me. The fact that these cameras are here is not our concern.’”

“You can be cripple, you can be a whoremonger, you can be a lot of things in the black church. But Lord, do not be gay.”

This is, of course, debatable. Iyanla is a Brand who profits directly from the televised confessions of others, and this show is the culmination of a long career aimed at finding her spotlight. In the 1990s, when she was giving relationship advice on The Oprah Winfrey Show, she and Oprah hit a rift: Iyanla wanted her own talk show, but Oprah didn’t think she was ready. Iyanla jumped ship for a short-lived show on another network, and the two didn't talk for more than a decade—until, appropriately, they went through a very public, televised reconciliation in 2011. Now that she’s back in the queen of media’s good graces, Iyanla is one of the top stars in the OWN universe.

On the show, the cameramen do their part to keep the drama going; in one scene from the gay pastors special, we see one of them slowly, steadily pushing open a door, behind which one of Iyanla’s subjects has retreated to cry in private. It’s a moment almost worthy of pity—except the people who go on her show aren’t dumb. They know they’re signing up for a public flogging. The draw of this is inexplicable, but also nothing new in the reality-television universe; Jerry Springer was getting messed-up people to spill their stuff way before Iyanla came along. The difference with Iyanla, though, is that the callback to religious ritual is more explicit.

This is due in part to the religion and spirituality references Iyanla likes to pepper into conversations. “We are not to be in shame,” she told me, speaking about the pastor Derek. “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a sound mind, and power, and strength. To thine own self be true, you know?”

Ok, so, one Shakespeare line misattributed to God, no big deal. The more interesting references aren’t Bible fact checks, though—they’re the vague spiritualisms. After growing up Pentecostal, “I really became more interested in the metaphysics of spirituality rather than the dogma of religion,” Iylana said. “Spirituality, for me, is about what goes on beyond the physical. Whereas I find religion, while they teach you the tenets and the dogma, they don’t teach you the intangibility of spiritual principles.”

These principles, presumably, are where much of Iyanla’s vocabulary comes from—“oneness,” “energy,” and the like. They are, admittedly, a little hard to pin down. Here’s a chunk from our interview, for example:

It’s not a method. It’s a way of being. And when you understand the metaphysics of spirituality—what is beyond the physical—I mean, quantum dynamics and psychology, we all know that thoughts have energy. Thoughts have energy. And energy can never be destroyed once it’s created. It can transformed, but it cannot be destroyed. So if you have repetitive thoughts, which is what consciousness is, and if you have repetitive habitual thoughts that are negative, unproductive, unsupportive, unloving, unaffirming—you create an energy.

Theologically, Iyanla is equally hard to pin down. Even though she pushed the gay pastors to publicly confess their sexuality to their congregations and family members, she wouldn’t say in an interview whether or not she approves of homosexuality, or thinks it’s morally wrong. “I’m not for or against—I’m not saying do it or don’t do it,” she said. “I don’t know what they’re going to have to pay on the other end, but I do know this: that God already knows their heart, and when they get to wherever they’re going, they’re still going to meet a forgiving God.”

This ambiguity is a little ironic, given how hard she rides black communities for gay-shaming. (“You can be cripple, you can be a liar, you can be a whoremonger, you can be a thief, you can be a lot of things in the black church. But Lord, do not be gay,” she says in the show.) But maybe something in the topics she picks, and the way she talks about them, speaks to her specific audience appeal. Her subjects tend to be black, although not exclusively, and she said that’s not an accident.

She pushed the gay pastors to publicly confess their gayness, but she wouldn’t say whether she approves of homosexuality.

“It’s more frequent in the African American community that everybody in the family knows of me, and they trust me,” she said. “I don’t enjoy that same privilege in the white community.” Her show’s vague spiritualism may very well appeal to religious black Americans, who tend to attend services, pray, believe in God, and say they value religion more than whites, Asians, Latinos, and other racial groups.  

Iyanla has tackled race on her show in the past. Last fall, she visited Ferguson, Missouri, during the weeks of protest following Michael Brown’s shooting death by a police officer. “When God puts something on my heart, I do it; I don’t question it,” she said. These big, cultural conflicts—racism, police brutality, violence—also fit into the Iyanla narrative arc of confession and absolution.

“We’ve got to call it what it is. It’s racial division. It is racial superiority. It is racial insensitivity, on both ends. But we haven’t told the truth about what it is, so we cannot address it and we cannot solve it,” she said.  

No doubt, she is right: America has failed to adequately confront the depth of its structural racism. In her own way, Iyanla is addressing a microcosm of the tangled issues that have come with this racial division: addiction, broken families, tensions surrounding identity. The need is real; the method, though, is a little fuzzier. If Iyanla’s “fixes” help her subjects live better lives and entertain her viewers, that’s well and good. But they also suggest a deep cultural desire, and a deeper absence—a collective callback to old methods of coping with chaos, even as the knowledge and specificity of those methods dim.

Sierra Leone's Long Road to Becoming Ebola-Free

More than 19 months since the first case of the world’s worst Ebola outbreak was reported in West Africa, Sierra Leone has been declared free of the disease.

The World Health Organization said Saturday that 42 days—the length of two incubation cycles of the deadly virus—had passed since the last person confirmed to have the disease cleared a second consecutive blood test.

“The Ebola outbreak has decimated families, the health system, the economy, and social structures,” said Dr. Anders Nordström, the WHO representative in Sierra Leone, in a statement. “All need to recover and heal.”

In Sierra Leone, 8,704 people were infected and 3,589 died of the disease. About 4,000 survived. More than 12,000 children were orphaned as a result of the outbreak, according to a report by the British charity Street Child. The average age of orphans was nine.

The virus killed thousands more in Liberia and Guinea, the other nations hardest-hit by the epidemic. Liberia was declared Ebola-free in September; Guinea saw three new confirmed cases of Ebola in the last week of October.

Sierra Leone now enters what WHO calls “enhanced surveillance”—a period of 90 days during which its staffers will remain on the ground, providing health services as needed.

Thousands of people gathered in the streets of the capital city of Freetown just before midnight Friday in anticipation of the announcement. WHO had said Tuesday that the decisive blood test had come back negative in September, and if no further cases were reported, Saturday would mark the end of Sierra Leone’s battle with Ebola.

The BBC’s Tulip Mazumdar described the scene:

Women’s groups came together to organise a march through the city centre; the final point was a 600-year-old cotton tree which sits on a huge roundabout. Usually, the area is jammed with cars, but last night it was packed with people. Some held up candles, others jumped around dancing and a military band led the procession through the city.

There were waves of celebrations, and then silence as names of some of the dead were beamed on to a screen. Health workers in particular were honoured for their bravery and sacrifice, they were some of the first to die when Ebola struck.

And Lisa O'Carroll and Umaru Fofana, for The Guardian:

A speech by Yusuf Kamara, a healthcare worker who lost 16 members of his family and survived the disease himself, brought tears and a standing ovation. “For us, Ebola is not over. We need your help to treat the many, many health problems we still suffer from. And remember those who died at the hands of Ebola, and especially the children who have been affected by this outbreak,” he said.

The first diagnosis of Ebola in Sierra Leone was confirmed in May 2014 in a rural part of the country, and a surge of cases followed in June. WHO has traced the sudden spike to the May 10 funeral of a traditional healer who had treated Ebola patients from Guinea:

That funeral sparked a chain reaction of more cases, more deaths, more funerals, and more cases in multiple transmission chains. Local epidemiologists eventually traced 365 Ebola-related deaths to that single funeral, which also seeded cases reported in Liberia.

By mid-July, dozens of people were dying each week in Sierra Leone. Sheik Humarr Khan, the country’s only expert on viral hemorrhagic fevers, died of the disease after treating patients. In August, President Ernest Bai Koroma declared a national state of emergency. Whole villages were quarantined. A new law threatened anyone found to be hiding a patient with up to two years in jail.

By winter, the disease had spread to cities. Nearly 400 new cases were reported in the first week of December alone, three times as many as in Liberia and Guinea combined, according to WHO.

Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone had never seen a case of Ebola until the outbreak began in March 2014—the worst since the virus was first discovered in what is now known as the Demo­crat­ic Re­pub­lic of Congo in 1976. The disease crippled the countries’ already fragile health infrastructures, weakened by years of political instability and war. Transmission of the virus was poorly understood by the local populations, and public health workers rushed to draft guidelines. Volunteers went door-to-door to hand out pamphlets about practicing good hygiene, and worked with cell-phone companies to send text messages in local languages.

Local and foreign medical groups set up treatment centers across the region that would quickly become overwhelmed with patients. They advised citizens on how to safely bury their dead; local tradition calls for family members to wash and touch the bodies of their loves ones, but people infected with Ebola are most contagious when they're dead. Some people avoided seeking treatment or threatened physicians with knives and stones, fearing that medical workers were the ones spreading the virus.

There is no known cure for Ebola. The disease is fatal in patients 60 percent of the time when it is caught early, and 90 percent when it is discovered too late. At the height of the epidemic, the most health workers could do was alleviate patients’ symptoms, track transmission chains in an attempt to contain the virus, and wait for the outbreak to peter out. Many breathed a sigh of relief in Sierra Leone on Saturday, but they remain aware of the threat of a potential resurgence. Liberia was first declared Ebola-free in May, but the virus returned two months later, forcing the country to start over on a difficult journey plagued by false starts.

There have been 28,571 confirmed cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea since the outbreak began last year, according to the latest estimates. Of those, 11,299 have died.