Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 308

Volkswagen: A Widening Scandal

The EPA says Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests on more diesel cars than previously believed.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a second notice of violation (NOV) of the Clean Air Act to the automaker, covering about 10,000 model year 2014 diesel cars sold in the U.S. In addition, the notice covers an unknown volume of 2016 vehicles. The cars all have 3.0-liter engines. Here’s more from the agency:

The NOV alleges that VW developed and installed a defeat device in certain VW, Audi and Porsche light duty diesel vehicles equipped with 3.0 liter engines for model years (MY) 2014 through 2016 that increases emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) up to nine times EPA’s standard. The vehicles covered by today’s NOV are the diesel versions of: the 2014 VW Touareg, the 2015 Porsche Cayenne, and the 2016 Audi A6 Quattro, A7 Quattro, A8, A8L, and Q5.

The latest allegation are part of a scandal that came to light in September when the EPA and the California Air Resources Board accused Volkswagen of installing “defeat devices” in its model year 2009-2015 diesel cars that allowed it to cheat on emissions tests. My colleague Robinson Meyer explained how those devices worked:

These devices, essentially, let the cars pretend to not break the law. The software could sense when the car was undergoing emissions testing and activate its pollution-control systems accordingly. When the car was being driven during normal use, these systems largely did not activate—making the car a much heavier polluter in real-life than it looked on paper.

At the time, Volkswagen acknowledged that 11 million cars fitted with 2.0-liter engines were affected worldwide. The scandal cost the company’s CEO his job, and has hurt its reputation.

Last week, a peer-reviewed study said about 60 Americans had died prematurely as a result of the “defeat devices.” As Rob pointed out: “If the cars are not recalled, turned in, and adequately fixed, about 140 people will eventually die in the United States as a result of the car manufacturer’s malfeasance.”

The EPA says it will order a recall of the vehicles only when it is confident that Volkswagen’s software fix will work.

The Hunger Games Theme Park and the Death of the Disney Dream

It probably won’t involve violently slaughtered children, but you never know. The Hunger Games, The New York Times is reporting, may soon go the way of Harry Potter and Cinderella: The trials and triumphs of Katniss Everdeen are becoming what The Hunger Games’s distributor, Lionsgate, calls “location-based entertainment,” and what the rest of us call a theme park.

Actually, a series of theme parks, per the report—with individual rides that might be licensed to existing locations. (A Capitol train-esque roller coaster? Check. A be-simulated hovercraft tour of Panem? Check.) As for the theme parks themselves, there are currently two of them being planned for the U.S. (near Atlanta) and China (near Macau). They’ll join a pre-existing Lionsgate zone at Motiongate, a $3 billion entertainment complex currently under construction in the United Arab Emirates. Lionsgate also has attractions based on Divergent, Step Up, Now You See Me, and Twilight in the works for its new parks, The Times reports, but the Motiongate site will primarily focus on The Hunger Games:

After passing through the gates, visitors will arrive in a re-creation of the fictional District 12, a mining region where Katniss grew up. There will be costumed characters and real-life versions of Peeta Mellark’s bakery and the Hob black market.

District 12, Main Street USA’ed! You could read these planned IRL Panems as Lionsgate’s attempt not just to expand its properties’ footprint in the cultural consciousness, but also to offer the studio a bit of brick-and-mortar insurance against whatever technological change might come along to disrupt the industry. You can’t pirate, after all, a trip to the Capitol. Parks can be risky propositions—many will fail before they’re opened, and many others will go the way of Freedomland U.S.A.—but they can also provide that most sought-after of things: alternate revenue streams. (Lionsgate stands to generate $100 million from its existing parks and recreation efforts over the next few years—and that’s not including gift shop sales.)

Lionsgate is also, however, presenting the theme park as a way to turn the characters and plots and ideas it owns into something new. Something that will both serve current fans of The Hunger Games movies and possibly generate new ones. As Tim Palen, Lionsgate’s chief brand officer, explained, the point of the parks is “not just to create something smart and captivating that Hunger Games fans would love, but to bring all of our franchises alive in new ways.” (The parks and rides will join the upcoming Hunger Games stage show in London.)

Lionsgate isn’t the only studio to attempt to blend movies and reality in this way. Comcast’s NBCUniversal and 21st Century Fox are investing billions of dollars in transferring movies from megaplexes to megaplaces. (The Fox properties Avatar, Ice Age, and Planet of the Apes are, if you live in the Middle East, coming soon to an amusement park near you.)

Which is all another way of saying the obvious: that “location-based entertainment” is, for Lionsgate and its fellow studios, a thoroughly commercial proposition. It’s about brand extension and brand loyalty, about fanning the flames of Katniss fandom between film releases and after the series comes to a close later this month. It’s about turning the messages of The Hunger Games—the value of justice and youth and personal strength—into money.

In all that, it’s impossible not to compare the upcoming Panem parks to Disneyland and Disneyworld and their many iterations abroad. Disney parks, today, are of course commercial behemoths. They, too, have found ways to convert a widespread love of Dumbo into dollars. And they have always done that, of course. In the beginning, though, they were about more than simple entertainment. They were political. They were, in their way, philosophical. Disneyland, when it opened in 1955, was a testament not just to the various productions of the Walt Disney Company, but also to the accomplishments of the American experiment. It was brimming with optimism. It was a kind of permanent World’s Fair.

As Walt Disney told his visitors:

To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.

This was patronizing, sure. But it was also, in its way, inspiring. The Disney parks were premised on the conviction that “location-based entertainment” could be, in the end, about much more than entertainment alone. Today, as Lionsgate contemplates turning the Capitol into a different kind of spectacle, it’s clear how quaint that notion has become.  

The Zombie Kings of Baseball

To score their first World Series title in 30 years, the Kansas City Royals had to win 11 playoff games. They completed the feat on Sunday night in Queens, beating the New York Mets 7-2 in a 12-inning game.

But like most of their 11 post-season victories, this last one was seemingly summoned from the ether. The Royals were losing 2-0 as the game went into the 9th inning. Facing Mets’ ace Matt Harvey, who had limited them to four harmless singles all game, the Royals somehow scratched out two runs to tie the game before pouring on five more runs in the 12th inning. Next came the champagne.

It was the eighth time that the team had come from behind to win a playoff game this year. That includes all four wins in the World Series.

Still marveling over Royals' postseason run. Eleven wins, 8 of them come-from-behind, 1.13 relief ERA, .325 AVG from 7th inning on.

— Tristan H. Cockcroft (@SultanofStat) November 2, 2015

In baseball, conventional wisdom gets chewed and scattered across dugouts like so many sunflower seeds or clods of tobacco dip. Likewise, there is probably no data set that can explain how the Royals managed to get their hitting and pitching on track at the very moment that the team seemed all but dead.

Of its eight come-from-behind wins, the team was trailing by at least two runs in seven of those games. The New York Yankees previously held that playoff mark with five such wins in 1996.

As Jayson Stark notes at ESPN, no playoff team had previously ever won so many games by staging late-inning comebacks. The Royals won six games despite being behind as late as the 6th inning. “And just in this World Series,” he writes, “the Royals not only trailed in all five games but won three games in which they trailed in the eighth inning or later.”

The result, if you’re a fan of the three teams the Royals bested on their way to winning the World Series, has been some serious heartbreak. My beloved Houston Astros were six outs away from eliminating the Royals in the American League Division Series when Kansas City stormed back from a 6-2 deficit to win the game 9-6, on the road. Down 2-0 in the decisive next game, the Royals scored seven unanswered runs to advance.

Less than a week later, in the American League Championship Series, the Royals were down 3-0 to the Toronto Blue Jays heading into the 7th inning. A loss would squandered Kansas City’s home-field edge in the series. Final score: Royals 6, Blue Jays 3. “I’m still not ready to talk about that,” one Blue Jays fan wrote in an email on Monday.

The World Series started much as it ended. Down 3-1 in the first game, the Royals eventually tied the Mets on 9th -inning home run, which sent the game to extra innings. The Royals scored the winning run in the 14th inning. My colleague David Sims, a forlorn Mets fan, declined to contribute to this article.

Star Trek Returns to a New TV Landscape

CBS’s announcement that it’s working on a new Star Trek TV series, while welcome to many fans, doesn’t ultimately feel very surprising. Since the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005, the franchise has rebounded with two blockbuster films directed by J.J. Abrams, but its heart has always been in television. While the idea of another Trek show might have prompted shrugs from network executives 10 years ago, the TV landscape has now shifted so radically that Star Trek is no longer a cult favorite but the kind of big-name franchise that can launch a whole new streaming network. Come January 2017, CBS says, the new show will be the backbone of its subscription-only “All Access” service.

Related Story

The Next Generation of Star Trek Should Be a TV Show

It’s the latest example of how everything old can be made new again. Star Trek: Voyager was the launch show for the fledgling UPN in 1995, debuting to a stunning 21.3 million viewers, but though it ran for seven seasons, it never soared to the critical or commercial heights of its forbears. Neither did UPN, which eventually merged with the WB to become the CW in 2006 after 11 years as TV’s basement network. But the audience Voyager drew, while small for the mid-’90s, was a committed one, and that matters far more than blockbuster status these days. CBS’s All Access, which costs $6 a month, currently gives customers the network’s new shows and its vast archive of past episodes (including the voluminous Star Trek archive). But once the new Star Trek launches, this will be the only way to see it.

As a business decision, it makes perfect sense. Last year I argued that a streaming site like Netflix would be the perfect spot for a Star Trek show, since devoted fans are like gold nuggets to subscription-based services. The classic network-programming model is geared toward casual viewers, who flick through channels or see what’s on after a show they like. But Star Trek always existed on the fringe of that, clinging to life with a devoted fanbase. Of the many shows produced over the years, only The Next Generation was a real ratings hit; the others stayed alive, against worsening odds, until confronted by financial realities and slipping viewership. But the Trek fanbase has never diminished, and CBS has no doubt decided that enough people will be happy to part with $6 a month in exchange for a new show to make the venture worthwhile.

There are other factors to consider: The old network model is focused on U.S. TV, but Star Trek is popular everywhere, and distributing it through an online network might make it easier to battle online piracy. “Every day, an episode of the Star Trek franchise is seen in almost every country in the world,” said Armando Nuñez, the CEO of CBS’s Global Distribution Group. “We can’t wait to introduce Star Trek’s next voyage on television to its vast global fan base.”

What will the new show involve? It’s hard to say. Though no writer is attached, it’ll be produced by Alex Kurtzman, who wrote and produced the two most recent Trek movies. Kurtzman has worked on shows like Alias and helped develop Fringe and Sleepy Hollow, but he has since graduated to producer/mogul status and will likely have little creative influence on the show. The Star Trek universe is fractured enough that a show could go in any creative direction: The J.J. Abrams films positioned the original 1960s series in a new timeline, allowing contemporary actors to play Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest. A new show could exist in that same altered timeline, with the same throwback style. Or, it could pick up in the truly far-flung future, beyond the timelines of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, tapping into their complex, developed universe of exploration, diplomacy, and war on a galactic scale.

More than that, the show will be able to take advantage of technology that makes it easier and easier to depict space travel on an epic scale without a huge budget. (It’ll have CGI, as opposed to the recycled sets the old shows used.) The show will also be free of the creative team that shepherded the last four Trek series into existence: Rick Berman, who helped develop The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, became somewhat of a hated figure among Trekkers by the time he crafted his final effort, the prequel series Enterprise. There will be plenty of fan suspicion around Kurtzman’s involvement, too—the rebooted film series is regarded by some as too bombastic for a classically cerebral franchise—but whichever writer he brings on board should have room to find his or her own take on the show.

That’s the most exciting prospect—even with the subscription fee, and Internet-only television replacing cable packages, this new Star Trek might be in the most creatively advantageous position of its 50-year history. There’ll be no week-to-week ratings to worry about, no network interference (if CBS really is serious about making this a flagship show), and no concern about appealing to any viewership beyond the devoted base. That can lead to self-indulgence, but it’s the kind of creative freedom that has sparked a TV renaissance in the years Star Trek has been off the air. It’s about time Trek got a piece of it.

There’s Nothing Like a Dame (or a Knight)

Australia is dropping knights and dames from its list of honors.

“The Cabinet recently considered the Order of Australia, in this its 40th anniversary year, and agreed that Knights and Dames are not appropriate in our modern honors system,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in a statement.

He said Queen Elizabeth II agreed to the recommendations to remove the titles from the Order of Australia.

Australia is a former British colony and the queen is its head of state. Turnbull had previously campaigned—unsuccessfully—to turn Australia into a republic.

The government’s decision comes a year after Tony Abbott, Turnbull’s predecessor as prime minister, reintroduced the two honors and granted a knighthood to Prince Philip for his “service and dedication.” That decision was widely condemned in Australia—the media labeled it a “knightmare”— and was seen as a factor that contributed to Abbott’s ouster in September as leader of the center-right Liberal party and, consequently, as prime minister. Abbott later conceded that the decision to honor Prince Philip had been “injudicious.”

As my colleague Matt Ford reported at the time:

Many former British colonies abandoned the “imperial honors system” and created their own national orders of merit and recognition, including the Order of Australia in 1975. “While in past centuries knighthood used to be awarded solely for military merit, today it recognizes significant contributions to national life,” explains the British monarchy. “Recipients today range from actors to scientists, and from school head teachers to industrialists.” No Australians have become knights or dames since 1983. …

The move also threatens to re-open a national debate about the future of the monarchy. Australian Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a prominent leader of the country’s republican movement, which wants to abolish the monarchy, tried to assuage the fears of fellow republicans by observing that “most countries have an honours system and many of them have an order of knighthood,” including France, Italy, Peru, Argentina, and Guatemala. France still calls its lowest rank in the Légion d’honneur “chevaliers” despite abandoning monarchy in the 19th century, for example.

Australian republicans, who support dropping the queen as the head of state, welcomed Monday’s decision.

Peter FitzSimons, who heads the Australian Republican Movement, called the move a “relief for Australia.”

“Good on the prime minister,” he told Australia’s ABC, adding he believed the announcement would be the first in many moves away from the monarchy.

Australian monarchists, however, criticized the decision.

“The scrapping of knighthoods ... gives all who value constitutional security and stability cause for concern that this is just the beginning of another campaign of republicanism by stealth,” the Australian Monarchist League said in a statement.

Australia dropped the system of awarding knighthoods and damehoods in 1976. The titles were reintroduced, briefly, in 1986 before being dropped again. Abbott brought them back last year. Still, the monarchy remains popular in Australia, and Monday’s decision does not affect existing knights and dames—so Prince Philips’s knighthood is safe.

What Caused the Crash of the Russian Airliner in Egypt?

Updated on November 2 at 10:51 a.m. ET

The Russian Airbus that crashed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board, could have only been brought down by external forces, a senior airline official said.   

The comments by Alexander Smirnov, a deputy director for Kogalymavia, which was operating under the name Metrojet, came the same day a spokesman for the Kremlin said terrorism could not be ruled out, and as the Russian aviation agency said it was premature to attribute a cause to what caused the crash.

Metrojet Flight 9268 crashed Saturday shortly after takeoff from the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh en route to St. Petersburg, Russia. As my colleague Marina Koren reported over the weekend, of the 217 passengers, all were Russian except for four Ukrainians and one Belarusian. The seven crew members were all Russian.

A Russian aviation official said Sunday the plane broke up in midair before it went down in the Hassana area of the Sinai. The Airbus A321-200 was flying at about 30,000 feet when it disappeared from flight-tracking systems. As Marina reported:

Egyptian aviation officials say the pilot had reported technical difficulties and was planning to land the Airbus A321-200 at the nearest airport before losing contact with air traffic controllers. Russian officials dismissed a claim by a local affiliate of the Islamic State that it “brought down” the plane. Preliminary reports suggest technical malfunctions.

But Smirnov, said at a news conference Monday, said the crew did not get in contact about the plane’s rapid loss of speed and altitude.

“We are certain that neither technical malfunction nor pilot error” caused the crash, he said.

He added: “The only possible explanation is a mechanical force acting on the aircraft. There is no combination of system failures that could have broken the plane apart in the air.”

Smirnov said the investigation was ongoing, and other airline officials at the news conference dismissed suggestions the aircraft was too old to fly, or that it had problems caused by damage to the tail in 2001.

But the head of Rosaviatsia, Russia’s federal air transport agency, urged caution.

“It is completely premature to speak about the reasons of this as there are not grounds,” Alexander Neradko told Rossiya-24 television. “And I’d like to call on the aviation community to refrain from any premature conclusions.”

At the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman, was asked if terrorism was to blame for the crash. His reply: “We cannot say what version of a possible cause of the crash will be a basis of the investigation.”

Egyptian officials have recovered both the plane’s black boxes, which will be used to determine what caused the aircraft to crash.  

The bodies of 144 of the victims arrived in St. Petersburg Monday. A second aircraft will bring the others.

The Walking Dead: Uncaged

Each week following episodes of season six of The Walking Dead, David Sims and Lenika Cruz will discuss the adventures of Rick Grimes and his group as they try to rebuild in the zombie apocalypse.

Cruz:  I expected to resent this episode, with AMC pulling an absurd stunt last week by undoing the almost certain fate of Glenn (more on that reversal here, but also later). But despite all that nonsense, “Here’s Not Here” proved to be a strong interlude, even a welcome respite, from the disastrous events in Alexandria and out on the road. As expected, the episode flashed back to Morgan’s experiences after he left his hideout in season three’s “Clear” and before arriving in Alexandria at the end of season five. Also as expected, the episode explained how Morgan came out of his deep post-traumatic stress, with the help of a sensei-savior figure in Eastman, played with grace, humor, and emotion by John Carroll Lynch (American Horror Story, Fargo, Zodiac).

After stumbling around in the forest for a while, killing anything in his path (zombies, people), Morgan found Eastman, a former forensic psychiatrist who owns a goat named Tabitha and who practices Aikido—a Japanese martial art whose central creed rejects all forms of killing. Though Morgan, in a paranoid and somewhat dissociative state, was trying to kill him with an assault rifle, Eastman simply knocked him out with his stick (Eastman’s “sorry” was a nice callback to Morgan’s apology before hitting the Wolf at the end of “JSS”). And he kept Morgan in a cage (unlocked, it turns out) until he eventually came around.

This episode was the closest The Walking Dead has ever come to a buddy comedy. It had banter. (“Kill me!” said Morgan, when Eastman asked his name. “That’s a stupid name; it’s dangerous. You should change it,” Eastman replied.) After much coaxing, and after some scuffles, Eastman taught Morgan a new hobby. (That training montage felt like a commercial for your local Aikido studio.) They chatted about good nonfiction. (The Art of Peace is a real thing!) They grubbed together. (Sample menu: oatmeal burgers, falafel, avocado, tomatoes. #eatclean)

I can see how the extended air time was necessary to tell this story properly: To squeeze it into a normal-length episode, the show would’ve had to resort to more hackneyed shorthand to make people care about Eastman. Given the necessary notes the episode had to hit—that it was going to be about Morgan’s spiritual journey toward pacifism, that Eastman was definitely going to die by the end—“Here’s Not Here” achieved surprising depth and emotional resonance, mostly by giving Eastman a tragic and memorable backstory rather than gesturing at some vague loss.

The Walking Dead has had its share of characters hesitant to kill, but “Here’s Not Here” was the show’s most fully articulated case for avoiding murder at all costs. I also think it dodged criticisms of naivete by showing how Morgan’s and Eastman’s anti-killing ideals didn’t form in a vacuum, but in a crucible. The episode smartly eliminated the possibility that Eastman just didn’t have the stomach for murder—forcing the man who massacred your family to starve to death over 47 days is about as unflinching as you can get. While “Here’s Not Here” showed the unfeasibility of refusing to kill in the zombie apocalypse, it also made me sympathetic as to why someone might choose that path.

Morgan’s and Eastman’s anti-killing ideals didn’t form in a vacuum, but in a crucible.

Admittedly, I still groaned at the contrived staging of Eastman’s death (really, a martial-arts expert, who used only a stick to take down a grown man with an assault rifle, got eaten by a shuffling zombie? He couldn’t have just killed the zombie or knocked Morgan out of the way without fully turning his back on the walker?) But what elevated the episode for me was the framing: “Here’s Not Here” opened with Morgan telling his story to an unknown listener and ended by revealing that person to be the Wolf who almost killed him at the end of “JSS.”

After Morgan told the Wolf he believes he can also find peace, the Wolf replied (in maybe one of the creepiest monologues of the series): “I know I’m probably going to die. But if I don’t, I am going to have to kill you, Morgan. I’m going to have to kill every person here. Every one of them. Children too. Just like your friend Eastman’s children. Those are the rules. That’s my code.” As awful as this was, without it, the Eastman storyline would have felt too indulgent and tangential. Morgan choosing to lock the door to keep the Wolf in—rather than leave it open the way Eastman did for him—was the final touch that made this all work for me. (And was that Rick calling out, “Open the gates!” at the end?)

The episode also pointed out one of the show’s inherent storytelling burdens: This is the actual-zombie-apocalypse, meaning all of the Walking Dead characters have at some point or another dealt with post-traumatic stress, which doesn’t always gel with the demands of action, pacing, and character complexity. There’s not a single trauma that characters recover from, but multiple, and everyone’s recovery times overlap with new traumas and intersect each other’s. In this episode, it was nice to isolate one character, especially one played by Lennie James, and to give his mental-health situation the full attention it deserved.

“Here’s Not Here” achieved surprising depth and emotional resonance, mostly by giving Eastman a tragic and memorable backstory.

I’ve had more than a week to stew on this, but I still think the show royally messed up the way it handled the Glenn storyline. To believe that Glenn’s still alive would require you to accept the following: That a person can fall into a sea of zombies, have someone else fall perfectly on top of them, have the zombies only eat him and not the person lying beneath, that the still-alive person can quickly squeeze under a dumpster and remain totally out of reach of the zombies ... in time for a big enough distraction to send those thousands of walkers away, so that person can crawl out and to safety. This, whether you think it plausible or not, is plain, bad storytelling. That so many people even think this scenario is possible is a sign audiences have been subjected to too many rotten tricks by TV shows. For me, Glenn’s “death” undoes so much of the genuinely good storytelling the show has done in the last season or so. I truly doubt the payoff will be worth this … but I want more than anything to be wrong.

Sims: This will be fun, since I kinda disagree with you (and many others) on the import of Glenn maybe-not-dying last week. Last week we were convinced he was gone: He fell into a zombie horde, after all, and it looked like he was being ripped apart by it (he was certainly screaming the whole time), but the producers’ equivocation has certainly left me wondering. If the “death scene,” and the subsequent poeticism of Glenn’s silence on the walkie-talkie, was just a simple fakeout that will quickly get reversed, then that’s indefensible: Part of the appeal of the show is that no one is safe, and a bait-and-switch would reverse that notion.

But if there’s some larger story arc at work, or if Glenn’s revival is staged at some critical, shocking moment, then I could roll with it. The Walking Dead is a comic-book story at heart, and comic-book characters come back from the dead all the time! It’s all about execution—and certainly, the publicity side of this has been horribly executed. But I’ll reserve further judgment until Glenn’s (potential) return.

On to this episode, which I thought was a standout—even though, as you noted, it could have easily swerved into really formulaic territory. It’s arguable whether we even needed a look at the redemption of Morgan. He showed up at Alexandria possessed with near-supernatural calm and wielding a bo staff; we get that he’s found inner peace after all his turmoil, and is trying to reject violence for violence’s sake. Do we really need to know how? Maybe not, but since the show went down that road, I’m glad they handled it so beautifully. Eastman was an unusual zen master, but as played by John Carroll Lynch, he was a fascinating bundle of contradictions, and an interesting beacon of optimism in a show that rarely allows for that perspective.

What I liked most about Eastman was that he wasn’t defined by the zombie apocalypse: Everything crucial about his life and journey happened before the world ended. The Walking Dead is so deep into the end of the world now, people’s sob stories about losing their families don’t hold much originality. That was why I appreciated Enid’s abbreviated backstory in episode two, which found a new spin on the same trope, and that’s why I liked that Eastman’s personal darkest hour came while the world was ending, but didn’t directly relate to it. After losing his wife and family to a psychopath, Eastman took the killer to that cage to watch him die, and the world died alongside him. Except, as Morgan pointed out, the world hasn’t ended, and indeed, Eastman’s life managed to spin on and find new peace.

After losing his wife and family to a psychopath, Eastman took the killer to that cage to watch him die, and the world died alongside him.

I probably sound like a sap. Eastman’s story was certainly a hilariously convoluted mix of coincidences. Despite being a burly white guy, he learned Aikido (a modern Japanese martial art) as self-defense training for his job as a forensic psychiatrist. His experience with an escaped prisoner was about the worst thing imaginable, but it justified him building a protected cabin deep in the woods with a cell inside it, so that Morgan could calm down there and find himself again. As you noted, Lenika, Eastman’s death felt a little too simplistic: After all that, a moment of hesitation from Morgan was all it took to leave Eastman defenseless? Still, it all felt geared toward a larger, more poetic point.

Morgan’s travails on the show have been similarly traumatic, and the loss of his family has been profoundly felt in his past appearances. By all means, he should have the same terrible survivor’s guilt that Rick and others have suffered. I think that’s why we were seeing him move past it: Not just as a counter to the Wolves, who operate without humanity, but perhaps to Rick, whose methods have grown more cold-blooded in the years. His leadership position lacks a significant challenger; I don’t know if Morgan is being set up as the person for the job (Michonne is also weathering her own leadership gauntlet), but this episode was invested with a new philosophy, one that’s less ruthless and more compassionate, a real challenge to the standard view of things in the zombie apocalypse. For that, I appreciated the diversion, and I’m fascinated to see how the show builds on it.

The First Book of Selfies

The popularity of YouTube “haul videos,” fashion vlogs, and shoefies is often derided as a sign of the times, if not a sign of the end times. Combining unbridled narcissism with unabashed materialism, these images—usually self-portraits—rack up millions of hits, and their creators can often become celebrities in their own right. But the impulse to catalogue, classify, and, ultimately, communicate one’s fashion choices is nothing new. Like most everything in fashion, it’s been done before—in Renaissance Germany.

The illuminated Klaidungsbüchlein, or “book of clothes,” compiled by the Augsburg accountant Matthäus Schwarz between 1520 and 1560 is a proto-Kardashian book of selfies. Rendered in rich tempera colors accentuated with costly gilding, the series of hand-drawn portraits meticulously catalogues his extensive and flamboyant wardrobe. The book has been widely known in Germany since the eighteenth century, but the original manuscript—housed in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig—is so fragile that it’s rarely displayed.

Even the historians Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward had to consult it in the company of two curators, who carefully turned the pages for them. Their annotated English translation, The First Book of Fashion, has just been released in both hardback and e-book format, making these 500-year-old images as accessible as The Sartorialist, and just as relevant.

The portraits and their calligraphed captions chronicle the period’s changing male fashions down to the last codpiece, even recording minutiae like the weight of the heavily padded, pumpkin-like nether garments called hose. But they also illustrate how Matthäus advanced politically and socially by carefully managing his image at a time when you were what you wore—much more so than today.

Though remembered for the flowering of humanism and secularism, the Renaissance was still, by modern standards, a repressive era, particularly when it came to clothing. Sumptuary laws regulated which textiles, trimmings, weapons, and even colors could be worn according gender, social class, marital status, and profession. In Utopia (1516), Thomas More may have questioned how anyone could “be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs.” But such distinctions were hardwired into Renaissance society.

Within these strictures, however, there was still a broad scope for personal agency. At the time, people effectively designed their own clothes with the help of tailors, dressmakers, and shoemakers. Albrecht Dürer—Matthäus’ contemporary in nearby Nüremberg—left an annotated design for the wide, flat leather shoes popular in the 1520s, and Matthäus boasted of his savvy color and fabric choices as he planned spectacular new outfits for a bewildering variety of occasions, from falcon hunts to funerals. The book raises important questions about the meaning of self-fashioning, now and then.

“On October 2, 1516, this was my first outfit back in German style in Augsburg, when I wanted to become a huntsman.” (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum)

If 16th-century social hierarchies were more rigid, there was no less emphasis on individualism than among modern Millennials. The Greek philosopher Protagoras, who argued that “man is the measure of all things,” was revered by Renaissance humanists. It was an era of heightened self-awareness, both individual and collective; Matthäus and his contemporaries firmly believed that they were living in a new and more enlightened era of social, intellectual, and religious transformation. Combine this with a growing emphasis on naturalistic observation in the arts and sciences, and you have the perfect climate for epidemic levels of selfie fever.

Fashion was as vital to the Renaissance as painting, architecture, and sculpture, functioning as a visible barometer of unprecedented cultural exchanges and technological advances. The human form was newly prominent in art as well as increasingly visible in mirrors, which encouraged more people to consider what they looked like in the same way that smartphones and social media platforms do today. Augsburg, a city of 30,000, was a cosmopolitan center of politics, finance, and art. The city’s pioneering woodcut printers used multiple blocks and shading effects to create realistic color portraits.

Born in 1497, Matthäus was a member of the burgher (or middle) class. From the age of 23, he kept the books for a man named Fugger the Rich, the head of a famous merchant family whose wealth put them on a par with royalty (they are remembered as “the Medici of the North.”) Almost from his first day on the job, he began work on the Klaidungsbüchlein —an illuminated manuscript consisting of loose pages measuring approximately four by six inches, each bearing a full-length miniature portrait.

“30th July, 1525, in Innsbruck, at Laux Schaller’s wedding in Schwaz in August. The bonnet embroidered with velvet. This is when I began to be fat and round.” (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum)

The images aren’t selfies in the technical sense; Matthäus was an accountant, not an artist, and he enlisted a succession of four local painters to produce the images (the first died of the plague in 1536). But they are, effectively, self-portraits, and selfies in the spiritual sense: Matthäus chose the costume, postures, details, and backgrounds he wanted included, and even commented on the artists’ work (“The face is well captured.”) In this fashion, he assembled 137 images of himself over 40 years—a selfie record unmatched until the advent of photography.

“20th February, 1538, when I decided to take a wife, the gown was made with green trims of half silk.” (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum)

When Martin Luther complained that Germans spent too much money on imported luxury goods, he may well have been thinking of Matthäus, who often noted the cost of his garments and seems to have taken pride in recording tailoring bills in excess of the materials, a new and important benchmark of luxury at the time.  Matthäus never met a Spanish cape or Siberian squirrel-fur lining he didn’t like. The book depicts suits of armor, embroidered shirts, reversible garments, and hose trimmed with fringe, ornamental metal aglets, or little bells. Such was Matthäus’s addiction to colorful headgear that male friends sometimes gave hi caps as gifts, which were then depicted and described in breathless detail in the book. (One, he notes sadly, was later “pushed into some cow dung. It was useless.”)

“In August 1518, in this manner: the hose trimmed with silk satin. At this time I greatly enjoyed archery.” (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum)

Though Matthäus’ wardrobe seems to have been typical for his time and place, that milieu occupies a rather unique niche in fashion history. With its thriving textile and metalwork industries and its proximity to Italy, Augsburg was, for a brief period between the late 15th century and the Reformation, home to some of the most elaborate male fashions ever worn. The book is bursting with color, asymmetry, stripes, and decorative paning, pinking, and slashing; one especially fabulous white doublet is slashed 4,800 times. The period saw the development of specialist sportswear for fencing, archery, and sledding—activities that required leisure time and permitted social networking. The Klaidungsbüchlein depicts these over-the-top fashions much more precisely and clearly than even Augsburg’s own Hans Holbein, who was one of the century’s greatest portraitists.

“In February 1521, in a gathering at Steffan Veiten’s wedding—or rather the after-wedding—it was not from silk.” (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum)

But fashion wasn’t just an idle pastime or foppish indulgence. It conveyed a multitude of messages, from the financial to the political. Since part of the Fugger merchant empire involved the international textile trade, Matthäus may have boosted his career by advertising the company’s wares. He often strategically selected his outfits to appeal to visiting politicians, wearing the French colors of yellow and blue to welcome King Francis I to Milan, and even commissioning six new outfits to impress Emperor Charles V and King Ferdinand into awarding him a noble title when they visited for the Diet of Augsburg.

“In June 1518, when I wanted to learn fencing. The doublet was silk satin from Bruges.” (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum)

As they do today, appearances played an important role in courtship as well. As a young man looking for a wife in a city overrun with young, unmarried male apprentices and journeymen, Matthäus carried heart-shaped purses in green and red—the colors of hope and desire. He captioned one splendid outfit: “All of this to please a beautiful person.” Following fashion also provided a hobby for all those lonely young men, who generally married late, once they had finished their vocational training, and thus had leisure time, money, and energy to expend on dressing up. It’s no coincidence that “urban young men” were the “drivers of innovative Renaissance fashion,” as Rublack points out. Several of the images in the book record what Matthaüs wore to the weddings of close friends (often matching his attire to that of other members of the bridal party) during his long bachelorhood.

“In June 1524. Three types of Prussian leather as hose and over-hose, everything as shown, without doublet, but three kinds of shirts. The middle one [has attached to it] an 8 minute hour-glass on the thigh.” (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum)

The Klaidungsbüchlein effectively documents most of the rest of Matthaüs’s life. After he got married, his whole wardrobe faded to blacks and browns, and the gaps between images became longer. He grew a beard—a sign of maturity and masculinity—and trades his ornate, form-fitting doublets and hose for long, formal, fur-lined gowns. “This is when I began to be fat and round,” he notes despondently. Then in 1547, he suffered a stroke (“God’s mightiness hit me”). and managed to commission a portrait during his convalescence. Today, this rare Renaissance depiction of an invalid is one of the best known images in the Klaidungsbüchlein. But this is one of the last entries in the book. In the final image, he is a gray-bearded old man, dressed in mourning for his employer’s 1560 funeral. It might as well have been his own funeral: Matthäus lived another 14 years without commissioning a single portrait.

“On 9 July, 1553, in camlet, fresh and healthy with God's grace, when Duke Moritz of Saxony was shot with three other princes, and Margrave Albrecht of Brandenburg ran away.” (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum)

Matthäus’ preoccupation with fashion had always gone hand in hand with a keen sense of temporality and, by extension, mortality. Like his expanding waistline or recurring birthday—both of which he tracked with obsessive and, for his time, unusual assiduity—fashion, which seemed to change “day-by-day,” was a marker of the passage of time; “a vanishing moment of creativity and pleasure,” in Rublack’s phrase. One portrait depicts him with an 8-minute hourglass hanging from his belt. Another jaunty outfit is captioned: “On the 20th August, 1535, when people in Augsburg began to die. 38½ years old.”

But the self-documenting didn’t stop there. Concerned about his legacy, Matthäus pressured his second son, Veit Konrad Schwarz, to continue the family tradition and compile his own Klaidungsbüchlein. Larger in format and smaller in scope, Veit Konrad’s book includes 41 images covering the years 1540 to 1561, but his heart wasn’t in it, His prologue declared that fashion and his father were foolish, and he stopped adding to the book when Matthäus abandoned his. It may have been a classic generational difference, but the portraits of Veit Konrad—reproduced in the new edition—suggest a simpler explanation: Fashion just wasn’t much fun anymore. Matthäus’s son wore little fur, preferred a more subdued color palette, in line with Protestant sobriety, and growing nationalism and trade protectionism tempered the international flavor of Augsburg style.

“On 2nd June, 1527, in this manner: the doublet from silk satin, a riding gown from camlet, the bonnet edged with velvet, all of this to please a beautiful person, along with a Spanish gown.” (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum)

Rublack suggests another possibility: that Matthäus’s efforts to make sense of his turbulent times had backfired. “Alarmingly, much of what had been valued in the past could seem misguided and hence suggested that all culture, including art, was a succession of styles that perhaps neither increased sophistication nor achieved timeless beauty,” she writes. “Fashion made the past and present look arbitrary rather than presenting a linear story of progress.” Matthäus may have come to realize that his strenuous efforts to manufacture and control and refine his public image proved less durable than he’d hoped. Rather than bringing order to chaos, his highly personal sartorial narratives only underscore fashion’s elusive and capricious nature.

If The First Book of Fashion is unlikely to propel the Schwarzes to celebrity status, it will reach a wider audience than Matthäus and his son ever dreamed. And it may even prompt readers to reconsider Millennials—with their solipsism and pics-or-it-didn’t-happen visual acuity—as the harbingers of a second Renaissance. While avid shopping vloggers and Instagram style celebrities may continue to face some degree of scorn, The First Book of Fashion serves as a reminder that, like other forms of culture, fashion is a product of its time. And it’s precisely because true permanence is impossible that clothing choices and self-documentation can offer such rich insight into the values of the past.

A Day of Mourning in Russia

Russians observed a day of mourning on Sunday for the 224 people killed in a passenger plane crash in Egypt on Saturday.

People placed flowers and toys at the entrance of Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, where the airliner was headed when it departed from Sharm el-Sheikh, located in the southern part of the Sinai Peninsula, early Saturday morning. The plane crashed about 23 minutes after takeoff, in a remote, mountainous area of the Sinai.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a nationwide day of mourning to last three days. Flags across the country are flying at half-staff. The government has said it would pay compensation to the victims’ families and help organize funerals, according to the Associated Press. In Cairo, people lined the walls of the Russian embassy with flowers.

The cause of the crash is not yet known. A Russian aviation official said Sunday that the plane “broke up in mid-air” before it went down in the Hassana area of the Sinai, the BBC reported. The aircraft was flying at an altitude of about 30,000 feet when it disappeared from flight-tracking systems. Egyptian aviation officials say the pilot had reported technical difficulties and was planning to land the Airbus A321-200 at the nearest airport before losing contact with air traffic controllers. Russian officials dismissed a claim by a local affiliate of the Islamic State that it “brought down” the plane. Preliminary reports suggest technical malfunctions. From The New York Times:

The wife of the co-pilot of the Airbus that crashed told Russia’s NTV channel that her husband had complained about the mechanical condition of the plane, operated by Kogalymavia, a private company flying planes under the name Metrojet. The woman, Natalya Trukhacheva, told the station that her husband had said “before the flight that the technical condition of the airplane left much to be desired.”

On Sunday, the newspaper Izvestia reported that the airline had fallen into financial difficulties recently and owed money to a pension fund. A spokeswoman for the airline said on Saturday that its planes had undergone regular maintenance and were flown by experienced pilots.

Rescue teams reached the crash site hours after the crash. By Sunday morning, about 163 bodies had been moved to Egyptian morgues. Egyptian authorities have begun transporting bodies by ambulance to airports to be flown to Russia. Russian authorities have collected DNA samples from 140 relatives to help in identifying the victims, the Times reported. Inspectors recovered the aircraft’s “black boxes,” which record flight data and audio within the pilot’s cockpit. Russia has established a state commission to investigate the crash.

The 217 passengers included 138 women, 62 men, and 17 children. All were Russian except for four Ukrainians and one Belarusian. The seven crew members aboard were all Russian. Many were families on vacation on Sharm el-Sheikh’s beaches on the Red Sea, a popular tourist spot in wintertime.

Russia’s air safety regulator has ordered Metrojet, the company that operated the plane, to suspend all flights of its Airbus aircraft. Air France, Lufthansa, and Emirates airlines have rerouted flights to avoid the Sinai Peninsula until officials determine there’s no risk of surface-to-air missile attacks. In July 2014, a Russian-made missile brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard.

What Thirty Years of Female Friendship Looks Like

When Karen Marshall started photographing a group of teenage girls on the Upper West Side in 1985, she wasn't sure what would happen. A decade older than they, Marshall was interested in exploring what girlhood looked like in a middle class, urban environment. "I wanted to look at girls who reminded me of how I grew up," Marshall said to The Atlantic. "Most of the photographs I would see of teenage girls were about women under the poverty line or prom queens in the midwest—neither of the things that I grew up with."

Marshall started photographing Molly Brover, a charismatic, curly-haired junior at the Bronx High School of Science, and her group of friends. She photographed them hanging out in Riverside Park, smoking cigarettes, having slumber parties—the mundane and exhilarating rites of puberty. Ten months later, Molly died in a car accident. What Marshall thought was a coming of age story turned into something more complicated—now also about loss, not only of Molly, but of childhood. "I had to see this project through," Marshall said. "I had her in all these photographs—she was still going to remain very much alive and the rest of them would grow older."

The black and white photo essay, Between Girls: A Passage to Womanhood 1985-2015, is now being shown at Hampshire College until November 17. Below is a selection of those images.