Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 305

A New Kind of Aurora on Mars

Solar storms are brutal events on Mars. Without a global magnetic shield for protection, the planet gets battered by the radiation from super-hot plumes of plasma. Today, Mars’s atmosphere is mostly made up of carbon dioxide. During solar storms, the planet is bombarded with sun particles moving a million miles an hour, and Mars loses oxygen atoms at a rate 10 times greater than what occurs on Earth under the same conditions.

Now, new research from the MAVEN mission finds dramatic climate change on Mars may have been driven by solar storms, too. These violent storms may be key to helping humans understand what happened to Mars’s atmosphere, the loss of which transformed the planet from something that might have once resembled Earth to the dry wasteland it is today.

“When we look at ancient Mars we see a different type of surface, one that had valleys that look like they were carved by water, lakes that were standing for long periods of time,” said Bruce Jakosky, the principal investigator at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, in a press conference on Thursday. “The climate must’ve been very different, warmer and wetter, and the atmosphere must’ve been thicker at that time in order to sustain a warmer climate. So what happend to the carbon dioxide from that early atmosphere? What happened to the water on early Mars?”

Earlier this year, over the course of a few weeks in late February and early March, a team of MAVEN researchers observed a “major interplanetary disturbance,” prompted by one of the most dramatic solar storms recorded in the past decade. The coronal mass ejections that take place during this kind of solar storm are so strong they can make the entire surface of the sun appear to ripple. Here’s a video from the Solar Dynamics Observatory of one significant solar flare that occurred at the time:

And here’s a look at the size of our planet compared with the magnitude of a particularly powerful solar flare that was observed on March 11, 2015, and given the X-class designation, reserved for the most intense solar flares:

NASA / SDA

It was days after that flare when planetary scientists first noticed a surprisingly bright, ultraviolet aurora glowing deep in the Martian atmosphere, “a new kind of aurora was observed at Mars that, frankly, surprised us,” said Dave Brain, a MAVEN co-investigator. This storm, Brain and his colleagues would later learn, didn’t just create a strange aurora. It drastically altered the overall structure and flow of the magnetosphere on Mars and had a “major impact” on the upper atmosphere, too.

Normally, when Mars isn’t being blasted by solar wind, “there are roughly 100 grams of atmosphere escaping every second, or about a quarter-pound of atmosphere escaping every second,” said Brain. (“I can’t help but imagine hamburgers flying out of the Martian atmosphere, one per second,” he added.)

During a solar storm, the new data shows, atmospheric escape rates go up by a factor of 10 to 20 at least. MAVEN's work represented the most comprehensive mapping of ion loss on the planet to date.

The findings, which researchers detailed in Science on Thursday, also suggest that solar winds play a major role in atmospheric loss on Mars. Scientists believe much higher escape-rates early in Mars’s history were dominated by storm events. Which means that by observing the way that ions flood out of Mars’s upper atmosphere before and after the solar storm in March, scientists believe they are able to piece together how Mars lost so much of its atmosphere.

Another new paper from MAVEN researchers focuses on the new kind of auroral display identified on Mars.

This new aurora is similar to Earth’s Northern Lights in some ways, but powered by a different mechanism, scientists found. While both kinds of auroras involve accelerated particles along electromagnetic fields, Earth’s auroras are driven by the magnetism of the planets poles, whereas the aurora observed on Mars seems to be driven at least in part by remnant magnetism of the planet’s crust. (Other areas of magnetism on the Red Planet are associated with solar-wind fields, magnetic plasma that gets draped around Mars, and changes location around the planet over time.) The effect is a light show that spans a much wider area on Mars. “Diffuse auroras on Mars could therefore occur practically anywhere, and potentially nearly everywhere, on the planet,” researchers wrote in their paper.

And although scientists haven’t yet seen these diffuse auroras with the naked eye, the visual effect is potentially awe-inspiring. “It's possible that the new kind of aurora lights up the entire night sky over much of the planet,” Brain said. “So that if you’re standing on the night side of Mars ... you could see the whole sky lighting up... It would be magnificent.”

These findings also underscore the unusual magnetism of the planet, which has implications for our understanding of its stark atmospheric changes over time.

Mars only has a partial magnetic field, and it comes from magnetism locked into the crust billions of years ago. On Earth, the internally generated magnetic field is like a protective cocoon that surrounds that globe. Mars’s auroras are more like the ones that occur on Venus and some of Jupiter's biggest moons, which also lack global magnetic fields.

Better understanding how and why certain kinds of auroral displays are generated on Mars is another way of getting at the question of how its atmosphere was lost. That’s because increased rates of atmospheric escape are associated with diffuse auroras, the kind scientists have identified on the Red Planet. In other words, the same solar storms that can generate intense auroras across Mars appear to be responsible for accelerating planet’s atmospheric loss.

This is, however, only part of the puzzle. “Mars lost its atmosphere,” said Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, in a press conference Thursday. “The atmosphere of mars could have frozen out, it could've been turned into rocks, it could've been knocked off by asteroids or comets, or it could've been stripped off by the solar wind.”

And although scientists may be able to eventually determine with confidence how the Martian atmosphere went away, they already know it isn’t coming back.

“People talk about terraforming Mars, taking the [carbon dioxide] that might be locked up in the crust and putting it back in the atmosphere,” said Jakosky. “If that’s where all the [carbon dioxide] had gone, that might be possible. But with it having been stripped away from space, it’s not there. It’s been removed from the solar system entirely, so it’s not possible to bring it back.”

A Suspected Iranian Hack of White House Officials

U.S. officials say they believe the Obama administration was recently targeted in a cyberhack conducted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, an elite branch of the country’s military.

“U.S. officials were among many who were targeted by recent cyberattacks,” one official told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday evening. The hacks were thought to include the email and social-media accounts of administration officials.

While the White House has refused to comment directly on the accusations, the report is the latest incident thought to reflect a push by Iran’s hardliners to weaken or scuttle the nuclear deal the country signed with the United States and other world powers earlier this year.

As my colleague Krishnadev Calamur noted last week, Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American businessman, was detained while on a trip to the country. He joins Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter, and at least two other Iranian Americans being held by the government. Others, including Iranian journalists and activists, have also been detained.

These developments dovetail with a ramping up of hostile rhetoric including, as Thomas Erdbrink at The New York Times details, the unveiling of anti-U.S. billboards in Tehran. On Tuesday, a knock-off Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Tehran was reportedly shuttered by local officials just days after it opened.

That same day, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, marked the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Iran by declaring that “Death to America” remains a national motto. To the comfort of dozens, he clarified the slogan isn’t targeted at America as a country, just its policies.

The slogan ‘death to America’ is backed by reason and wisdom; and it goes without saying that the slogan does not mean death to the American nation; this slogan means death to the U.S.’s policies, death to arrogance.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who pushed for the nuclear talks and who has been touted as a moderate leader in the country, criticized the arrests and ongoing crackdown.

Let us not go and arrest one person here, another there, based on an excuse and without any reason, and then make up a case and aggrandize it, and finally say this is an infiltration movement.

As Hadi Ghaemi of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran told The Guardian, this recent surge in activity could weaken Rouhani ahead of parliamentary elections in February.

“I read this as an attempt,” he said last week, “to undermine Rouhani’s policy of jumpstarting the economy through interactions with the diaspora.”

A Canadian Cabinet for 2015

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named the most diverse government in his country’s history on Wednesday, the first to feature an equal number of men and women, saying he wanted to “present to Canada a cabinet that looks like Canada.”

The new cabinet was unveiled publicly as Trudeau and his ministers gathered at Rideau Hall in Ottawa for their formal swearing-in. Among its 30 ministers are two aboriginal politicians, two persons with disabilities, and three Sikhs. The cabinet is smaller than its 39-member predecessor and younger overall than past Canadian governments.

Leading the Canadian defense ministry is Harjit Sajjan, a first-time member of parliament representing South Vancouver. A Sikh whose family emigrated from India to Canada when he was five years old, Sajjan worked as a detective in the Vancouver Police Department before joining the Canadian military. There he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and served a tour in Bosnia and three tours in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Sajjan’s appointment would be significant under normal circumstances, but it seemed especially symbolic after an election campaign that challenged Canada’s multicultural identity. Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other Conservatives wielded the use of the niqab during Canadian citizenship ceremonies and the Syrian refugee crisis as wedge issues as he sought a fourth term. But he was defeated in a Liberal landslide that resulted in Canada’s most diverse parliament yet.

Jody Wilson-Raybould, the new justice minister, is one of eight aboriginal MPs in the new parliament. Hailing from the Kwakwaka’wakw people of coastal British Columbia, Wilson-Raybould served as a Crown prosecutor before becoming a prominent indigenous leader in the province. In 2009, she was elected regional chief of the British Columbian Assembly of First Nations. (“First Nations” is the preferred Canadian term for what Americans would call Native American tribes.)

Canadian political observers interpreted her appointment as a sign of the Liberal government’s intent to focus on tribal legal issues, particularly Canada’s missing indigenous women, after almost a decade of perceived indifference from Harper’s government. Wilson-Raybould specifically cited her distaste after a meeting on indigenous issues with Harper in 2013 as a key factor in her decision to run for parliament.

Maryam Monsef, the first Canadian MP born in Afghanistan, was appointed minister for democratic institutions, a position that focuses on parliamentary and electoral reform. Monsef fled her native country as a child after her father and uncle disappeared under suspicious circumstances during and after the turbulence of the Soviet invasion. Canada granted her and her remaining family refugee status and Monsef settled in Peterborough, Ontario, which she now represents in Parliament.

Other cabinet members include Carla Qualtrough, a legally blind paralympian and lawyer who served on the Canadian Human Rights Commission, as minister of sport and people with disabilities; former journalist Chrystia Freeland as international trade minister; Inuk legislator Hunter Tootoo as fisheries minister, a portfolio of significant importance for Canada’s Inuit community; and Jane Philpott, the

Master of None Is Aziz Ansari’s Best Work Yet

It would be easy to call the new Netflix comedy Master of None Aziz Ansari’s version of Louie. The show (released on Friday) follows his semi-autobiographical character Dev, an actor living in New York, through the mundane confusions of dating and dealing with his family. It’s also shot more like an indie film than the network sitcoms Ansari made his name on. But while Louie is often aggressively dreamlike, Master of None feels like a perfect distillation of Ansari’s best comedy. It picks apart the social conventions of his generation, ponders the insidiousness of racism and sexism in entertainment, and obsesses over his inability to form romantic connections—a smart comedy of manners that has more in common with Seinfeld than its contemporaries.

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Master of None, which Ansari co-created with the Parks & Recreation writer Alan Yang, presents each of its episodes as a half-hour mini-movie with its own title card, and while there’s a loose plot thread running through the season, this is no typical Netflix binge experience. Ansari’s romantic travails form the spine of the pilot episode, an enjoyable hook that only hints at the show’s larger strengths. But the second covers his relationship with his parents (played by Ansari’s real mom and dad) and the dynamics that play out between the first and second generations of immigrant families, and it’s a tremendous achievement—easily one of the best TV episodes of the year. Master of None’s 10 entries vary in quality and subject matter, but that experimentation is a perfect use of the Netflix format.

Perhaps Ansari’s biggest achievement is that he dials back his own natural, exuberant energy—the live-wire persona that shot him to fame as a stand-up and quickly won him roles on TV and in film after his debut in the MTV sketch show Human Giant in 2007. As Tom Haverford on Parks & Recreation, he was a sarcastic, cocky entrepreneur prone to hyperbole; in films like Funny People and 30 Minutes or Less, he was a foul-mouthed sidekick. In Master of None, Ansari is basically a less successful version of himself, but he’s not a stand-up comic: He isn’t trying to explore his entertainer gene, and the show is better off for it. Yes, Dev is a struggling actor who attends auditions and has a small part in a B-list action movie, but those facts are mostly used as jumping-off points for other stories. This is no showbiz satire, and Ansari plays the straight man rather than the wacky supporting roles he’s often handed.

As a result, Master of None avoids some of the pitfalls Ansari fell into with his latest comedy special, Live at Madison Square Garden, and his book Modern Romance. On stage, he grappled with his own fame and how it had changed him, having reached the arguable peak of a stand-up’s existence by selling out a stadium. In print, he worked with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg to try and unpack the dynamics of dating in the smartphone era. Both were worthy efforts that felt like they were trying too hard to shed what had come before, while Master of None feels like Ansari is finally writing the material he’s been intending to create his whole life.

Master of None feels like a perfect distillation of Ansari’s best comedy.

The episode about his parents manages to be about Ansari’s own guilt without seeming self-indulgent. When Dev complains about his parents’ harmless requests (can he set up their iPad, can he call them once a week), the show flashes back to his father’s hard-scrabble adolescence in India and his painful and isolating journey to America as an immigrant who’s distrusted at work and mocked by his children. To get into every detail would spoil it, but it’s simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious to watch these mini-movies play out alongside Dev’s meaningless whining, while also summing up the unending guilt Dev will always face when dealing with his parents, who worked to provide him with opportunities to squander every day.

Ansari is exploring race not only as it relates to his upbringing and family but as it subtly plays out in his industry. A subsequent episode looks at the tortured casting processes South Asian actors have to go through to play stereotyped cab drivers and restaurant owners on television, and the lack of opportunities for more dynamic parts. Master of None tackles those heavier topics while also doing whole episodes on Dev’s fumbling love life; the Saturday Night Live alum Noel Wells is radiant as a recurring love interest who hovers on the outskirts of the show. (Throughout the series, Dev crashes through awkward situations with guest stars played by actors so famous, it’s worth keeping them a surprise.)

So many Netflix shows, like Orange Is the New Black or BoJack Horseman, are novelistic, building to grand emotional finales throughout the course of a season, but Master of None feels more appropriate to the streaming form. It’s an anthology show where any of its episodes could be immediately put on and enjoyed, but watching it quickly and in order (as many Netflix viewers are wont to do) reveals larger threads and recurring themes that deepen the whole experience. It may be exhausting to hear it, but Master of None belongs in the teeming pile of great TV worth the time, and hopefully marks the beginning of a new and excitingly improved chapter in Ansari’s career.

Celebrating Eighty-Odd Years of Monopoly

On November 5, 1935, two things may have happened in the history of Monopoly. Either Parker Bros. began selling what would become one of the most popular board games in the world, or, Elizabeth Magie Phillips, the creator of “The Landlord’s Game,” traveled to Washington, D.C. to sign over the patent to George Parker for $500.

The contested origin of the Community Chest and its environs is a tale that weaves together economic theory, an out-of-work heating contractor, and of course, an old boot. According to Mary Pilon, the author of The Monopolists, Phillips initially created the game with two sets of rules: “An anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.”

It was the more adversarial variant that grabbed the world’s attention—leading to versions of the game in 103 countries and 37 languages. Here, we take a look at the changing look of the game and its players, as well as its influence on popular culture.

It’s Not a Sandwich

Every once in awhile, with a regularity that is both astounding and reassuring, Americans will gather together to raise their voices, lock their eyes, and engage in a passionate, high-stakes debate about one of the grand questions of our time. Is a hot dog a sandwich?

You really can argue it both ways, which is of course what gives the debate so much, er, meat. On the one hand, hot dogs, structurally, hew to that most sandwichy of arrangements: They are processed protein, surrounded by processed carbohydrate. On the other hand, though, hot dogs are cylindrical, rather than sandwichily prismatic, in shape. And vertical, rather than horizontal, in orientation. Oh, and there’s the broad fact that we don’t call them sandwiches, which might suggest that the matter, ongoing debates notwithstanding, has already been settled.

Except, of course: It hasn’t been. Maybe it will never be. The latest reminder of all this frankfurterian fighting came this week, and from that most American of institutions: the NFL. A sports journalist, chatting with the Buffalo Bills’ quarterback Tyrod Taylor, asked Taylor the nitrate-loaded question: “Is a hot dog a sandwich…?”

Taylor replied:

Bills QB @TyrodTaylor on hot dogs vs. sandwiches. Makes u think tho. (cc: @PFTCommenter) pic.twitter.com/6uvx9iX6m4

— Jonah Javad (@JonahJavad) November 4, 2015

And then, as it always will, taxonomic chaos ensued.

The Great Hot Dog Debate is raging in the Bills locker room. What a blessed day. (cc: @PFTCommenter) pic.twitter.com/7RIKucJQ5H

— Jonah Javad (@JonahJavad) November 4, 2015

And:

Seantrel Henderson, is a hot dog a sandwich? #Bills pic.twitter.com/QrJU72PyO5

— Joe Buscaglia (@JoeBuscaglia) November 4, 2015

And:

Leodis McKelvin, is a hot dog a sandwich? #Bills pic.twitter.com/PZrlFvf3po

— Joe Buscaglia (@JoeBuscaglia) November 4, 2015

And:

And lastly, Bacarri Rambo, is a hot dog a sandwich? #Bills pic.twitter.com/vgbtXgnyeS

— Joe Buscaglia (@JoeBuscaglia) November 4, 2015

And:

Final ruling from @Boobie24Dixon & @Karlos_29_SR: A HOT DOG...IS...A SANDWICH. (cc: @PFTCommenter) pic.twitter.com/qAm9mDhbUd

— Jonah Javad (@JonahJavad) November 4, 2015

It was anarchy, basically. And it made newly clear what has been obvious for a long time now: In the name of unity and harmony and the American experiment, we really should end this beef. Or this pork, or this mechanically separated turkey, or whatever else. (Sorry, that joke was the wurst.)

Anyhow, though: Last year, in an entirely unsuccessful attempt to bring closure to the Great Hot Dog Debates, we at The Atlantic developed a grand unified theory of the sandwich: a simple test to determine whether a given composite food product does indeed operate in the tradition of the peckish earl. The Sandwich Index we created consisted of four points:

To qualify as “a sandwich,” a given food product must, structurally, consist of two (2) exterior pieces that are either separate or mostly separate; Those pieces must be primarily carbohydrate-based—so, made of bread or bread-like products; The whole assemblage must have a primarily horizontal orientation (so, sitting flush with a plate rather than perpendicular to it); and The whole assemblage must be fundamentally portable.

So. Under this definition, a burger is a sandwich. So is an ice cream sandwich. So is an Oreo. So is a grilled cheese.

Things that are not sandwiches, however, include the wrap (fails #1), the burrito (same), the taco (fails #3), the KFC Double Down (fails #2), the drastically misnamed open-faced “sandwich” (fails #1 and #4) … and, yes, the hot dog. Which—though it, like the taco, exists in a fuzzier taxonomic realm than its fellow foodstuffs—is primarily vertical in its orientation, thus failing test #3.

It’s also worth noting that defining the hot dog away from the broader category of “the sandwich”—essentially, giving it its own gastronomic classification—is also to honor the great American sausage product with the specialized treatment it so richly deserves. But it’s mostly worth noting that the hot dog is, categorically and existentially, simply not a sandwich. That’s according not just to the science of the Sandwich Index, but also to one of the people who is vying to lead the nation during these taxonomically troubled times. At a campaign event last month, Carly Fiorina weighed in on the great wiener debate. “A hot dog is a unique thing,” she declared.

She added, so there would be no confusion about her strong stance on the issue: “A hot dog is not a sandwich.”

George H.W. Bush Settles Old Scores With Cheney and Rumsfeld

One of the benefits of being 91 is you don’t have to hold back anymore—you can say what you want. And in a new biography, former President George H.W. Bush tells Jon Meacham just what he thinks about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s work in his son’s administration, as reported by Fox News and The New York Times.

“He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” the elder Bush said of the man who served as his secretary of defense. “Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.” He said Cheney built “his own empire.”

“I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here—iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,” George H.W. Bush said. (One takeaway from the book is Bush’s love of the phrase “iron-ass,” which seems at once like a dated Yankee descriptor and also delightfully vivid.)

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He was even harsher about Rumsfeld, who he deemed an “arrogant fellow.”

“I think he served the president badly,” Bush said. “I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything. I’ve never been that close to him anyway. There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that.”

Bush—or 41, as the family calls him, in contrast to his son, 43—doesn’t let George W. Bush off the hook entirely.

“The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department,” he said. “I think they overdid that. But it’s not Cheney’s fault. It’s the president’s fault.” He also told Meacham, “I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there—some of it his, maybe, and some of it the people around him.”

The scathing remarks may be explicitly about what happened between 2001 and 2009, but they’re rooted in much longer disagreements and feuds, running back some four decades.

Most prominently, Bush and Rumsfeld have been rivals for power since Gerald Ford was president. Rumsfeld was Ford’s chief of staff, while Bush—who had chaired the Republican National Committee in the closing days of the Nixon White House—was appointed envoy to China. The resignations of Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew had left the vice presidency open, and Bush was a top candidate for the post. Rumsfeld, however, pushed hard for Nelson Rockefeller, who ultimately got the job, thinking he was a greater asset at the ballot-box. During the search process, news emerged of potential campaign-finance irregularities during Bush’s unsuccessful 1970 campaign for Senate from Texas. Some observers believed that it was Rumsfeld who had leaked the news in an effort to hurt Bush’s chances. The scandal kept popping back up to hurt Bush throughout the rest of his political career.

Ford later regretted taking Rumsfeld’s advice, choosing Bob Dole over Rockefeller for the ticket when he unsuccessfully ran for reelection in 1976.*

The Economic Impact of the European Refugee Crisis

Three million refugees and migrants could arrive in Europe by the end of 2017, the European Commission says in its economic forecast for the fall of 2015.

The report says the newcomers will have a “relatively small” economic impact in the medium term, with GDP rising between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent above the baseline by 2020. But, the EC notes, that could vary by country—with destination countries—such as Germany—seeing a more significant impact than transit countries. Here’s more:

The impact from higher public spending and a larger labour force with a skillset similar to the existing one in the EU is expected to: − contribute to a small increase in the level of GDP this year and next, compared to a baseline scenario, rising to about ¼% by 2017. This however is less than the rise in the underlying population, implying a small, negative impact on GDP per capita throughout the period; and − strengthening the outlook for employment (which is expected to improve gradually to about 0.3% more employed persons by 2017), in part from a wage response.

The EC reports points out that, typically, non-EU migrants typically receive less in individual benefits than they contribute in taxes and social contributions. And their employment is the most important factor of net fiscal contribution.

The influx—excluding failed asylum applications—will increase the EU’s population by 0.4 percent, the forecast says.

The report further says:

For Member States with an ageing population and shrinking workforce, migration can alter the age distribution in a way that may strengthen fiscal sustainability—yet, if the human potential is not used well, the inflow can also weaken fiscal sustainability. Moreover, while migration flows can partly offset unfavourable demographic developments, earlier studies have shown that immigration could not on its own solve the problems linked to ageing in the EU.

Economic models examining the integration of 3 million extra people over the next two years notwithstanding, Europe is deeply divided over how to handle the most severe refugee crisis since World War II. More than 760,000 refugees and migrants have entered the EU in the first nine months of this year, but the bloc has only agreed on relocating 160,000 of them. Of these, as we reported Wednesday, 116 have been sent to their new homes.  

About 1.2 million people have sought asylum in the EU since the start of 2014. Many of them are people fleeing the Syrian civil war, and unrest in Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and elsewhere. Others, however, are economic migrants, and will likely be turned away by Europe.

What Does Paul Ryan's Stand on Immigration Reform Mean for 2016?

There’s a lot that no one knows about Paul Ryan’s nascent tenure as speaker, from what his new roadmap for the House GOP will be to how long the party’s conservative wing will give him a break. But one thing that’s certain is there won’t be immigration reform any time, soon, he says.

“The House of Representatives will not vote on comprehensive immigration legislation as long asPresident Obama is in office,” Ryan writes in USA Today. “And the reason is simple: The American people can’t trust him to uphold the law.” Ryan continues:

He has tried to go around Congress by ordering his administration to create a new legal status for undocumented immigrants. Even a federal district court says he has overstepped his bounds. The first principle of any immigration reform has to be securing our border and enforcing the laws already on the books. But that is the very principle the president has violated.

No one was sitting around with high expectations for immigration reform between now and January 2017, but Ryan’s column confirms that the door isn’t just shut; it’s locked. Still, the decision could have an impact on the presidential campaign—and in particular on the prospects of another young conservative rising at the same time: Senator Marco Rubio. The most plausible scenario for Rubio, lately deemed the great establishment hope for 2016, is that it could be a boon during the Republican presidential primary but a drag during the general election.

Following the 2012 election, a Republican National Committee autopsy famously called for the party to embrace immigration reform. “If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only,” the post-mortem report said. “We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.”

Not every Republican agreed, and many of the party’s grassroots remained (and remain today) strongly opposed. But one politician who took up the challenge was Rubio, who joined the bipartisan group seeking an immigration overhaul. When the effort foundered, Rubio distanced himself from reform. Nowadays, he’s more likely to talk about the importance of enforcing laws.

By ruling out immigration reform, Ryan seems to be doing Rubio a favor in the short term, during the Republican primary. While Rubio’s rivals—Chris Christie and Donald Trump, recently—love to bring it up to attack him, it’s good news for him if immigration isn’t a major topic in the news, because it serves to remind GOP primary voters of Rubio’s dalliance with comprehensive reform.

But come the general election? If the RNC autopsy was right, having immigration reform off the table could hurt Rubio—or any other Republican nominee, for all the reasons the report’s writers laid out then. Because Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, is Hispanic, he might be able to dull the effect, but not taking up reform might very well be a drag on Republicans in 2016.

What if it’s enough of a drag to elect a Democrat? As much as President Obama’s assertions of executive power to reform the immigration system have infuriated Republicans, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (and for that matter Martin O’Malley) have vowed to go even further with executive actions if elected. Given that Republicans are likely to hold on to the House, that could mean that Ryan’s pledge might actually hold on for much longer than just the Obama presidency.

What Is ‘Fine Dining’ Anymore?

The classic chef's outfit, passed down from the French masters of the 19th century, consists of a coat of thick cotton, double-breasted and secured with cloth-covered buttons, a hat (toque) that roughly resembles a piece of rigid rigatoni, and accessories that include an apron and a neckerchief. Everything, per tradition, is bright white. It is a uniform that is meant, like all uniforms, to give the illusion of order—the neat lines of the buttons, the meaningful ornaments (it is said that the 100 folds in the classic toque represent the 100 ways a master chef will be able to prepare eggs)—and also, in its insistent whiteness, of cleanliness.

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The chef’s outfit acknowledges something else, too, though: the messy physicalities of the professional kitchen, with its open flames and sharp blades and varieties of boiling liquids and hot human bodies jockeying for extremely limited space. The buttons on the chef's coat are covered in cloth so they won’t melt or scald during the hours spent hovering over stovetops. The apron serves not just as a barrier against stains to the chef’s coat and pants, but also as a makeshift mop. The toque is tubular so as to conduct the heat of the kitchen away from the chef's head—a design meant to minimize both sweat on the chef’s forehead and in turn the dripping of perspiration into the food the chef serves to her guests.

Burnt, featuring Bradley Cooper in only his second-best turn as a chefbro, explores the tension embodied by the toque: the chef’s aspirations for artistry versus the vaguely martial realities of the professional kitchen. And: the chef's aspirations for commercial legitimacy as well as cultural. What does it mean to be a chef—per the word’s etymology, a leader—at this particular point in culinary history? What does it mean, at this moment, to bring innovation to that most basic and also that most contentious of things: nutrition?

These days, the closer a restaurant can be to a food truck, for the most part, the better.

Burnt is, to be clear, not a good movie. It is in fact a pretty terrible movie. Its plot lacks tension, its characters are underdrawn, its female lead sacrifices both herself and her young daughter, inexplicably, to the whims of an only marginally charismatic chef. (Its entire plot revolves around the question of whether or not Adam Jones (Cooper) will earn a third Michelin star. That audiences are meant to become invested in this goal in the first place reveals a lot about its flaws.) But the film, like the chef’s coat, is also revealing in its insistence on the purity of the culinary project: Burnt, in its loving celebration the art of fine dining, ends up making clear how outmoded the notion of “fine dining” has become.

Burnt comes during the time—maybe even during the height—of the celebrity chef and the Food Network and Smitten Kitchen and Instagram and “food porn” and Guy Fieri. It comes during a time not just of the democratization of food culture (indeed, during a time when “food culture,” as a phenomenon, seems more legitimate than ever), but also of a widespread focus on the details of food’s production and preparation and politics. Locavorism. “Sourcing.” Food deserts. Farmers’ markets. Blue Apron. Spatchcocking and canning and pea guac and GMOs.

Burnt nods, in its way, to those shifts: We get scenes of Jones—a chef whose career was almost derailed with drugs and booze but who is staging a culinary comeback—at food stalls, in markets, in hole-in-the-wall dining establishments we are meant to understand as “ethnic.” When he’s feeling overwhelmed in his quest for that third Michelin star, he goes to a fish market to find his peace. Which: Local! And soulful!

For the most part, though, Burnt—remarkably, considering that almost all of its action takes place in a kitchen—is a celebration not of the process of cooking, but of the result. Here, food is presented not as much as a production, the result of the messy thermodynamics of work, but rather as an artistic representation that happens, almost inconveniently, to be edible. Food is fetishized not as nourishment, but as a kind of aesthetic triumph.

So while there are shots of turbot being basted in butter, and of fresh linguine that flutters and falls like thick strands of hair—this is a cooking movie, after all—that action crescendos with lingering shots of finished plates, dainty and fastidious, sauced with squeeze bottles and finished with edible flowers and generally evoking a Pollock-meets-pollock style. There is very little description of the foodstuffs actually contained within the plates displayed. And almost no attempt to describe what the food in question might actually taste like.

‘Never mention what your favorite dessert is. It’s irrelevant.’

What we do get, though, are debates about the moral vicissitudes of the sous-vide bag (is it innovation, or cheating?), and glib judgments about the moral valences of food. (“You’re serving seared tuna,” Adam scoffs to a maître d’ he used to work with. “What happened to your self respect?”) And philosophy-inflected discussions of the moralities of cooking (“God gave us oysters and apples. We can’t improve on them, but it’s our job to try”) and the sensualities of pasta. We get a lot about What Food Means; we get very little about what food is.

So in Burnt, in other words, food is an artistic endeavor, and an intellectual one. The point here is Taste much more than it is taste: Burnt is more interested in food as a normative thing than as a subjective one. Food, in its vision, is a commercial product and a form of media and a kind of intricate performance art in which, improbably, the food itself is largely beside the point. Burnt’s nearly inevitable pre-restaurant-opening montage focuses on shots of Jones’s gleaming kitchen, and of white napkins being ironed to glistening crispness, and of polished cutlery being placed around plates with the help of a ruler, and of latex gloves used to handle wine glasses, so as to leave no evidence of human touch. Everything is polished and pristine.

This is meant to be a good thing. Burnt doesn’t just revolve around the will-he-or-won’t-he of Adam Jones’s third Michelin star; it also plays by Michelin’s rules. It celebrates all the old—old, as in traditional, and old, as in antiquated—ways to make dining, you know, fine.

Thus, the ironic anachronism of a culinary movie released in 2015. It used to be that “fine dining”—a theatrical thing as well as a gastronomic one—was as much about the “fine” as the “dining”: Service and ambiance and the like were integral aspects of the whole dining experience. Many “fine”—which is to say, expensive—restaurants prided themselves on the balletic coldness of their service, on their adherence to a set of codes that they themselves had determined. (Hence: that (in)famous New York Times article, “100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do,” which included admonishments like “Do not announce your name. No jokes, no flirting, no cuteness” and “Never mention what your favorite dessert is. It’s irrelevant.”)

The politics of food—the talk of the organic and the ethical—give eating a sheen of spirituality.

Now, though, the pageantry of the restaurant experience has shifted from a spectacle of service to a spectacle of soulfulness. The emphasis is on the back of the house rather than the front—food is the focus—and restaurants that try too hard on the “fine” front read as stuffy and thus outdated. In vogue now is the hipster lunch counter of Momofuku and the open kitchen of Girl & the Goat and approaches that emphasize a connection between chef and patron, between food producer and food consumer. These days, the closer a restaurant can resemble a food truck, for the most part, the better.

All of which makes “dining”—not just as a word, but as a concept—increasingly antiquated. The fineness in food now comes not just from its artistry—its plating, its ingenuity—and from its flavor, but from something fuzzier, too: its soulfulness. The politics of food—all that attention paid to the organic and the sustainable and the ethical—have given it a sheen of spirituality. And, so, “dining” is giving way to, simply, eating. The pageantry of the past is being overtaken by a performance of democratization. The tagline for “The Sporkful,” the writer and food philosopher Dan Pashman’s podcast, insists that the production is “not for foodies—it’s for eaters.”

Burnt was originally going to be called Chef, before the Jon Favreau movie of the same name was released, to acclaim, last year. It’s striking how different the two films are. Chef—which focuses on not just its eponymous cook, but also on friends and family and food trucks and the drippy delights of the Cubano sandwich—celebrates the communal intimacies of food. It treats food as a means, rather than an end in itself. Set largely in Miami, and also in the convective heat of a truck outfitted with flattops, Chef imbues food with an almost visceral warmth. Burnt, too, may be set for the most part in the heat of a kitchen; it is, for all that, noticeably cold.