Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 309

No Survivors in Russian Airliner Crash in Egypt

A Russian passenger plane carrying 224 people crashed Saturday morning in a remote area of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian officials said.

There are no survivors in the crash, the Russian embassy in Cairo said on Twitter. Most of the 217 passengers and seven crew members are believed to be Russian citizens, according to the BBC.

The commercial plane, operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia under the brand name Metrojet, was bound for St. Petersburg, Russia. It took off shortly before 6 a.m. local time from the airport in Sharm el-Sheikh, a popular Red Sea tourist spot for Russians, located at the northern tip of the peninsula, according to the Associated Press. About 20 minutes after taking off, the aircraft disappeared from flight-tracking systems. It had been flying at an altitude of about 30,000 feet when communication was lost.

Egyptian authorities have found the wreckage in the mountainous Hassana area, south of the city of el-Arish. Egypt had dispatched 50 ambulances to the scene. The cause of the crash is not yet known.

“Together with Egyptian aviation authorities, we will investigate this accident at the site,” Maxim Sokolov, Russia’s transportation minister, said Saturday, according to Russian news agency TASS. “We can already say that it was not an incident. A catastrophe happened with our airliner.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Sunday to be a national day of mourning and ordered an investigation into the crash.

Reuters has details of the crash site in Sinai:

"I now see a tragic scene," an Egyptian security officer at the scene told Reuters by telephone. "A lot of dead on the ground and many who died whilst strapped to their seats.

"The plane split into two, a small part on the tail end that burned and a larger part that crashed into a rock. We have extracted at least 100 bodies and the rest are still inside," the officer, who requested anonymity, said.

Reuters has video here of the tearful scene at St. Petersburg, where people were waiting to greet passengers aboard the downed plane.

Egyptian security forces have been fighting an Islamic State insurgency in the northern region of the Sinai peninsula, but there’s no indication militant activity had downed the plane, according to The Guardian.

AP reports that Russian investigators are searching the Moscow offices of the airline company and are questioning its employees.

This is a developing story, so we’ll update here as we learn more.

Mythbusters and SXSW: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Mythbusters and the Rise of Fact-Checking Everything
Christopher Bonanos | Vulture
“More than that, though, MythBusters revealed something striking: a national hunger for data-driven authority, and the methodology that delivers it. One of the great things about the show has been its transparency about method. At least outwardly, and within the limits of a reality-TV show, the experiments carried out by Savage and Hyneman were pretty transparent and fairly rigorous.”

SXSW’s Video Game Fiasco Proves the Tech World Can’t Be “Neutral” on Harassment
Sarah Seltzer | Flavorwire
“The critique SXSW has faced this week forces the realization that if the targets of well-publicized harassment campaigns were powerful and famous, they wouldn’t be blamed or punished for their own predicament, and everyone involved would find a way to make the show go on. Because they are simply women who have spoken out, they’re not taken as seriously. But the reality we’ve witnessed over the past several years is that any woman who speaks up about sexism in tech or gaming is vulnerable to threats.”

The Hateful Life and Spiteful Death of the Man Who Was Vigo the Carpathian
Shaun Raviv | Deadspin
“Most people will only ever know Norbert Grupe as Vigo the Carpathian. But Norbert Grupe—a Nazi soldier’s son, boxer, professional wrestler, failed actor, criminal, and miserable human being who was never so happy as when he could make someone hate him—was once a man so beautiful that other men wanted to paint him.”

The Radical Promise of TV’s Mentally Ill Women
Alyssa Rosenberg | The Washington Post
“The most interesting element of UnREAL, though, and one that I hope Crazy Ex-Girlfriend tackles at some point, is the idea that mental illness is an appropriate response to certain social conditions and expectations for modern women.”

Why Are Sports Bras So Terrible?
Rose Eveleth | Racked
“Sports bras aren’t just a piece of sports equipment. They’re not like a bat or a baseball mitt or shin guards — designed, for the most part, for maximum functionality. They’re cultural objects, they’re fashion objects, and as such they’re laden with all kinds of baggage about how a woman is supposed to look.”

For the First Time in History, the World Series Is Between Two Teams That Were Never Segregated
Dave Zirin | The Nation
“Here is that pitiless mirror baseball holds up: The National Pastime has become perhaps our clearest cultural reflection of how globalization, de-industrialization, and the subsequent gentrified looting of urban America have wrung so many US cities dry. Baseball, with its need for leagues, coaching, equipment, and players has suffered more than any other urban endeavor.”

The Other Autistic Muppet
Jennie Baird | The New York Times
“Would knowing Fozzie had autism have changed the way we looked at him? Maybe. Would knowing Fozzie had autism have made it easier for his parents and friends to understand his behaviors as he grew into himself? Also maybe. And that is the struggle parents of children on the higher-functioning end of the spectrum face.”

The Definitive Book Review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me
Kelley Calkins | The Establishment
“Finally, the relative minuteness of the memoir’s pages enables their quick turning, further enhancing an already satisfying reader experience and inviting in a strong sense of accomplishment … Overall, Between the World and Me would make for a powerful addition to any bookshelf, lap, bedside table, hand, or desk. Its masterful lettering, mostly monochromatic jacket, and appropriately thick pages are a treasure to behold.”

Brand Echh: Sandra Bullock and Billy Bob Thornton Can’t Save the Lame Our Brand Is Crisis
Alex Pappademas | Grantland
“The worst thing about this movie isn’t the fuzziness of its politics; it’s that it assembles pretty much the best supporting cast you could ask for — from Dowd and Mackie to Scoot McNairy and Zoe Kazan — and gives them nothing to do but stand around in conference rooms asking dumb questions for the audience’s benefit.”

Growth Spurt
Hua Hsu | The New Yorker
“The Internet is often considered a distressingly permanent space, where one’s youthful mistakes are preserved forever, but it can also be transparent and emboldening, hospitable to a casual, low-risk approach that allows an artist to explore and edit his personality, and to be prolific in the process.”

Can Rugby Finally Conquer America?

While football flounders in an ethical mire, a sibling game—one with origins in the same medieval brawls over a pig’s bladder—is poised to enter the big leagues of American sport. Outside North America, rugby is already the world’s second most popular game, behind soccer, and a major money-maker. The 2011 Rugby World Cup attracted a cumulative audience of nearly 4 billion viewers. The 2015 World Cup, which culminates on Saturday in a face-off between Australia and New Zealand, has topped that figure, with television coverage in 207 territories, including Libya and the Scott Station near the South Pole.

And yet rugby’s true final frontier and television’s biggest prize isn’t the South Pole, but the United States. As Tony Collins explains in his new book The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby, rugby is becoming American. The U.S. men’s team, defeated in this year’s pool matches, is seeded 16th in the world; the women’s team is fourth. A Chicago-based consortium is planning a national, all-pro league, modeled on the league that launched American soccer in the 1970s. If the prospect of Americans embracing rugby like they do other major sports seems outlandish, it seems even more remarkable when you consider the game’s exclusionary origins, as detailed Collins’ groundbreaking book.

To be sure, rugby enjoyed a surge of popularity in the U.S. a century and a half ago, but it didn’t last. Ivy League colleges in the Northeast, joined by colleges in California, took up a sport that had already sprawled outward from its Victorian roots at the British boarding school it’s named after. Emigrants had carried rugby across the British Empire, and expats in the U.S., as in Europe, had started clubs. But even gold medals for the American rugby teams in 1920 and 1925 weren’t enough to prevent it being eclipsed altogether in the following years by football, which Collins notes was quickly growing from a regional to a national game.

Even compared to football, rugby has a particularly violent reputation—unlike the American sport, rugby is fast, fluid, and played without helmets or body armor. Growing up in London, I played rugby from the age of 8 to 18, every winter, four afternoons a week. Even in the snow, we scrimmaged wildly in cotton shirts and shorts, socks rolled down to the ankles. The terms of the game themselves conjure up a vision of animalistic mayhem: “rucks,” when players converge after a play goes awry and the ball is on the ground; and “mauls,” organized brawls among the eight forwards who do the dirty work on the team. (Seven backs, who do the running and kicking, support them.) Meanwhile, the classic rugby tackle is perhaps best compared to trying to grab the rear legs of a galloping pony that’s wearing cleats.​

In addition to being a rugby fanatic, Collins is also a social historian who trains his eye on the less savory parts of the sport’s history. As as he describes in The Oval World, no other game carries such a burden of snobbery and racism. Soccer, the saying goes, is “a gentleman’s sport, played by hooligans.” Rugby is “a hooligan’s sport, played by gentlemen.” The Victorians who wrote the rules believed in the amateur ideal—playing for the love of the game, not for money, which turns out to be an expensive habit. This approach thrived in the posh precincts of Britain’s public schools, where elitist bigotry did too. Rugby’s ruling class, the founders of the Rugby Football Union in 1871, despised the plebeians who also loved the game. When the clubs of England’s industrial north seceded in 1895 and formed a professional Rugby League with rules of its own, the amateur RFU closed ranks: A Union player caught talking to League officials could be banned for life.

Soccer, the saying goes, is “a gentleman’s sport, played by hooligans.” Rugby is “a hooligan’s sport, played by gentlemen.”

In The Oval World, Collins does a thorough job of describing how the soul of the game was bound up in class war and imperial ambition. Faithful to the amateur ideal, the Victorian officer class believed the empire might run on money, but that the imperial character must not and needed to be strengthened in other ways. “The leaders of British society, industry, and empire had to be educated in the competitive spirit that drove the engine of economic expansion,” Collins writes. Yet rugby’s creators didn’t foresee how the rapid popularity of team sports in general would eventually create a ticket-buying public, and sportsmen who played for money.

Still, for a century, the widely beloved game remained a prisoner of its hierarchical origins. In the 1970s and 1980s, all-white Union rugby teams broke the anti-apartheid boycott and toured South Africa, where in 1974 their brawlers left their opponents looking “as if they had been in a road accident,” according to Collins. In the 1980s in England, class divisions still ran deep. The forwards had day jobs as grocers and policemen; the backs were officer class, Oxford and Cambridge men who worked as lawyers and bankers. Only in 1995, two years before Britain left Hong Kong, did the old guard surrender and professionalize the game for the first time. This came after Australians and New Zealanders threatened to secede, in pursuit of television fees that could only be garnered legally by a professionalized sport. Since then, World Rugby, known as the International Rugby Board, has modified the rules and turned the television-friendly game into a phenomenally lucrative business.

Today, the amateur ethos survives only in the most professionalized of societies: the United States, where since the 1970s rugby has caught on again quietly but dramatically. And as the rugby revival in the U.S. demonstrates, inclusion rather than exclusion is the spirit of the American game . The country has led the way in the diversification and democratization of rugby. Women’s rugby, pioneered in America in the 1970s, is now a global game too. In 1981, the first wheelchair rugby team formed at the University of North Dakota. In a second innovation, their sport, known as “Murderball,” fielded the first mixed-sex teams. In 2001, the Washington D.C. Renegades hosted the first gay-friendly rugby tournament.

As the rugby revival in the United States demonstrates, inclusion rather than exclusion is the spirit of the American game.

American rugby has outclassed the game’s past, which is no guarantee that it will avoid the risks of popularity and a well-paid future. Yet so far, rugby has become commercialized without the corruption that disgraces football and soccer. A case can even be made that professionalization has raised the sport’s tone. With no urine testing, Collins notes in his book, amphetamine abuse had once been commonplace among the amateur teams. The Oval World describes how in 1986, the French team took a “little blue pill” the team doctor had put by their lunch plates before playing an especially intense game against New Zealand. The All Blacks’ Wayne “Buck” Shelton lost his four front teeth in one ruck, was knocked out in another, and required stitches on his scrotum after being caught on the ground in a third.

Televised rugby just might win an American fan base, but Collins doesn’t expect it to eclipse football—at least not in the men’s game. ​If the sport turns out to have staying power this time, its core ethos of fairness and balance may face a new kind of challenge with the rise of the women’s rugby team. (Even the more developed sport of soccer has seen top-ranked women’s players treated like amateurs compared to mediocre men’s players.) Now ranked third, the USA Eagles women’s team is within sight of winning the World Cup one day. If they do, or if the U.S. men’s team ever defeats England at its home base in Twickenham Stadium, the sport’s traditionalists may mourn the crushing of amateur ethics by television money, and the sullying of rugby’s soul.

Yet the moral value of rugby comes not from amateur ideals, but from the physical courage required to play the game, professionally or not. It’s a sport where mutual responsibility is assumed, where every player is the last line of defense. Pared down to its most basic elements, rugby is a kind of moral tutor, teaching “passion, pride, and meaning,” Collins says. As the sport deepens its roots in the U.S., his book offers a well-timed and deeply informed global history of the game. From now on, he seems to say, we’re all living in the oval world.

How Much Do Marco Rubio's Personal Finances Matter?

Marco Rubio had two answers he was ready to nail in Wednesday night’s GOP debate. One was about missing votes in the Senate, and he managed to both shut down Carl Quintanilla’s question and deal a body blow to Jeb Bush’s campaign with his reply.

The other was about his personal finances, and his answer was a slam dunk there, too. “You accidentally intermingled campaign money with your personal money. You faced foreclosure on a second home that you bought. And just last year, you liquidated a $68,000 retirement fund,” CNBC’s Betsy Quick noted. “In terms of all of that, it raises the question whether you have the maturity and wisdom to lead this $17 trillion economy. What do you say?”

Related Story

The Oppo File on Marco Rubio: Why He's an Unlikely Veep Pick

Rubio pounced with a triple-pronged answer. He derided the question as Democratic talking points. He plugged the paperback edition of his book, grinning winsomely. And he turned a personal liability into a political asset.

“I know for a fact how difficult it is to raise children, how expensive it’s become for working families. And I make a lot more than the average American,” Rubio said. “Imagine how hard it is for these people out there that are making $40, $50, $60,000 a year, and they’re trying to provide for their families at a time when this economy is not growing.”

That was the end of that, at least for the evening. But the issue hasn’t gone away. On Thursday, David Catanese got his hands on the full version of a PowerPoint slideshow that Bush aides showed at their weekend retreat and regroup. One of the major takeaways from the retreat was that Bush would attack Rubio, his ascendant home-state rival, and the slideshow included this:

The same day, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza argued the story of Rubio’s finances is “a big deal.” “Rubio is about to go through a period of much more intensive media scrutiny,” Lizza wrote. “Complaining about media bias won’t be enough to get him through it.”

I wrote in a little more detail about the various questions about Rubio’s finances in 2012, as speculation about who Mitt Romney would choose as his running mate heated up. In addition to what Quick mentioned, Rubio improperly used a Republican Party credit card for personal expenses. He was fined for campaign-finance violations. He was accused of living lavishly on donations. Perhaps most damaging is his close friendship with David Rivera, a former congressman under investigation for various improprieties, as mentioned in the slide above. (There’s more detail and links here.)

Florida Democrats were eagerly pushing out background on all of it at the time. The cryptic line in the Bush slide that “those who have looked into Marco’s background in the past have been concerned about what they have been found” is widely being interpreted as a reference to the 2012 veepstakes—so much so that a top Romney aide decided to come forward to insist Rubio passed vetting.

Questions about finances do seem to strike closer to character and how a candidate might run an administration than, for example, whether or not he’s showing up for largely inconsequential Senate votes. They can reveal either sloppiness or duplicity—traits that many voters feel matter for a president.

But none of this seems to have slowed Rubio’s rise yet. There are a few possible reasons for that. One is that even for a politician with national attention like Rubio, the media vetting for a leading presidential contender is on another level. But so far, stories like a New York Times consideration of his boat have bounced off him harmlessly. A second is that Quick approached the question as many journalists have—asking Rubio whether it was a political liability, a question he’s prepared to shut down, rather than drilling into whether he made any serious mistakes with the money.

“I know how difficult it is to raise children, how expensive it’s become for working families. And I make a lot more than the average American.”

But a third is that maybe people just don’t care. Voters haven’t hesitated to elect presidents with financial irregularities in their past before. Rubio is basically following Richard Nixon’s playbook from his famous 1960 “Checkers speech," in which he dispensed with accusations of financial improprieties by appealing to voters as a man of little means: “We lived rather modestly. For four years we lived in an apartment in Parkfairfax, in Alexandria, Virginia. The rent was $80 a month. And we saved for the time that we could buy a house …. This will surprise you, because it is so little, I suppose, as standards generally go, of people in public life.”

Nor did financial irregularities block Bill Clinton’s path to the White House. He and his wife, Hillary Clinton, whom Rubio would be likely to face if he wins the Republican nomination, faced questions about their financial past as well. There were issues about unpaid taxes on a car, returns on commodity investments, and most famously their investment in Whitewater, a failed real-estate development. Despite these various questions, Clinton was elected and re-elected as president. (That isn’t to say they were harmless: After years of investigation and millions in expenses, inquiries into Whitewater failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing—but the investigation ultimately spiraled into Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.)

Nixon and the Clintons were able to convince voters that these irregularities were the result not of dishonesty or intentional wrongdoing, but of honest mistakes by people who didn’t come from money. The president’s job isn’t to be accountant-in-chief, and the most business-astute presidents have tended to be mediocre at best in the White House, while failed haberdasher Harry Truman is well regarded. That means questions about Rubio’s finances are perhaps most useful as a litmus test about his probity. Since voters seem to generally find Rubio trustworthy, that’s a battle he’s in a good position to win in the absence of clear evidence of wrongdoing.

Suffragette and the Perils of Inspiration Porn

The marketing materials for Suffragette have included not just a series of unfortunate t-shirts, but also a series of Banksy-esque posters. One of them, set against a hot-pink background, features a smart phone thrust into the air by a hand that, judging by the hot-pink nail polish that decorates it, belongs to a woman.  

Focus Features

Another relies solely on text to make its point. “DO SOMETHING / CHANGE SOMETHING / FIGHTSNOTOVER.COM,” it reads, a tad confusingly.

Focus Features

They go on in this way: “FIND YOUR VOICE.” "DEEDS NOT WORDS.” “NEVER GIVE UP.” And then, in the end: “THIS IS YOUR MOVEMENT!” they all insist, reassuringly and aggressively at the same time. “POST THIS AND TAG 3 WOMEN WHO NEED TO SEE THIS MOVIE,” they continue, apparently lacking the picas for a polite little “PLEASE.”

The posters make clear what Suffragette is trying to be: a movie that is not just about a specific thing—votes for women in Britain, long fought for and finally won in 1928—but about, instead, very broad things: equality. Justice. Feminism. (Or, if you’re Meryl Streep, humanism?) And also, more literally, about very broad things. Suffragette is, the marketing makes clear, a chick flick. It is a movie that is for the most part, of, by and for the ladies. The marketing here doesn’t even try to appeal to men—or, for that matter, to anyone who wouldn’t be roused by a bland encouragement to “FIND YOUR VOICE.”

Suffragette is also, in all that, extremely optimistic about the role movies can play in bending the arc of history. The campaign, with its faux-graffitied images and its fortune cookie-esque messaging, reveals basically nothing about the movie itself—its story, its stars, its quality as an artistic product. The focus here is, instead, on the viewers. And, more specifically, on the act of viewership. The campaign is treating the simple, traditionally passive act of watching a movie as a political act unto itself. There are women, apparently, who NEED TO SEE THIS MOVIE.

While that may be a canny marketing trick, this message of the morality of movie-ing is, it’s worth noting, ridiculously at odds with the movie itself. The story of Suffragette—partially fictionalized, for purposes of narrative convenience—focuses on working-class women who sacrificed the few comforts they had (and in some cases their families, and in some cases their freedom, and in some cases their lives) for purposes of, in poster parlance, actually CHANGING SOMETHING. As the critic A.O. Scott puts it, “One of the ways Suffragette escapes the traps of its genre is to focus not on the leadership but on the rank and file, on an ordinary woman whose life is changed by political engagement.”

It’s true. The point here is the very commonality of the women in question: the fact that, perhaps—had I lived in a different time, or a different place, or a different circumstance—I might have become one of them. Maybe you might have, too.

Suffragette reveals the often painful physicalities of progress; in fact, it revels in them.

And so: Suffragette is satisfyingly small in scope, a human-scale story of epic change. And that allows it to, among other things, portray with depth and respect the deliberative aspects of progress itself. Suffragette, ultimately, is the story of the hard work that is required to bring about political change. And that’s refreshing and productive. There’s a pernicious view in the culture right now—perpetrated not just by the denizens of Silicon Valley, but by a general, corporate-influenced obsession with “innovation”—that progress itself, the forward march of history, can fairly be taken for granted. The spate of shows that revel in the ironies of time’s trajectory—Mad Men and the like—help to solidify that view. They endow “the future” not just with the sheen of inevitability, but with the promise of inevitable improvement. So: Progress being what it is, we will get healthier. We will get smarter. We will get more respectful toward each other. We still stop smoking at the doctor’s office.

Suffragette fights against that assumption. It reveals the often painful physicalities of progress; in fact, it revels in them. For one thing, it is so lush in its production that you can almost smell the sweat that lingers in the air of London’s factories and city streets. More importantly, though, the movie emphasizes the many arguments that the suffragettes had over the best ways to bring about the change they’re fighting for. (Was violence the best strategy? Passive resistance? Better PR?) And, perhaps most importantly: It suggests, in the end, that only some of these methods would have successfully altered the status quo. The suffragettes could have, ultimately, failed. Progress’s march could have easily been halted, because it takes a combination of extremely good luck and extremely hard work to change the course of history.

Which is why the marketing campaign surrounding Suffragette—one premised on the self-satisfactions of slacktivism—are so frustrating. They belie some of the best aspects of the movie they’re meant to advertise. “THIS IS YOUR MOVEMENT,” they shout, without clarifying what the “this” might entail. And they suggest that, whatever the movement may be, it can be moved forward through air-thrust smartphones and the posting of images on one’s Facebook page. The best thing about Suffragette is its insistence that political change requires struggle and sacrifice. (As Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep) puts it during her brief appearance in the movie, “Now we have realized that deeds and sacrifice must be the order of the day.”) The worst thing about it is the way it is being presented to the public: with an implication that political change, contra the lessons of the movie and of history itself, can be won with the click of a button.

St. Louis Church Arsons: A Suspect Is Nabbed

St. Louis-area police have arrested David Lopez Jackson, a 35-year-old black man, in connection with the burning of churches around the area. Jennings has been charged with two counts of second-degree arson.

There have been seven fires in St. Louis and nearby Jennings over the course of October. The arsons struck a range of denominations, but mostly black churches. A sixth church was racially mixed, while the seventh was predominantly white. The fires ran the gamut from minimal to serious damage.

Related Story

Who's Burning Black Churches in St. Louis?

Because of the long history of arson attacks on black churches—including several this summer and a long spree in the mid-1990s—and because of the tense race relations in St. Louis since the death of Michael Brown in August 2014, the fires immediately raised the specter of hate crimes. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives said, “We believe that this fire-setting activity is meant to send a message.” But Pastor David Triggs of New Life hesitated to point to color. “It could be a black man coming against black churches,” he told The Washington Post earlier this month. “We don’t know if there’s any race barrier to this; but we know it is a sin issue and it has to be addressed as such—through prayer.”

Indeed, the suspect arrested Thursday is black, and authorities didn’t offer any indication about a motive during a news conference Friday afternoon. Police have only charged Jackson with fires at the New Life Missionary Baptist Church and Ebenezer Lutheran, but they said he’s a suspect in the others. His car was spotted near the New Life, and forensic evidence tied him to Ebenezer; there were also gas containers in his car, police said. All seven fires were similar in type and location, generally around doors.

The news conference brought together Mayor Francis Slay; officials from St. Louis police, St. Louis County police, and the ATF; and pastors of two burned churches. They emphasized the close collaboration and sense of urgency, and the quick arrest seemed to be a relief to a city where relations between people of color and the police have been strained.

“I am overjoyed right now,” Triggs said at the event. “What this has shown me as a community is that we can set our differences aside and come together in a unified state in an emergency situation like this.”

Goodnight and Thank You, Grantland

When ESPN launched Grantland four years ago as a website built around the hyper-popular writer Bill Simmons, predictions of its irrelevance and death abounded. In The Atlantic, Nicholas Jackson predicted that “the new site is doomed,” saying it wouldn’t “be distinct enough to draw the audience it needs.” He was wrong—Grantland quickly became the premier location for intelligent, thoughtful, unique writing on a whole range of subjects in sports and culture, and featured some of the Internet’s best reporting and podcasting, delivered by a staggering lineup of talent on staff. But on Friday, ESPN decided to abruptly pull the plug on the site, months after abruptly firing Simmons.

It’s easy to castigate ESPN’s thinking: Simmons left after clashing with management, mostly for calling out his parent company’s coverage of recent NFL scandals. After he was gone, the company didn’t find a permanent successor for the site (instead tapping Chris Connelly as an interim editor-in-chief), and subsequently, much of its deep bench of talent departed, some to a new project being set up by Simmons. Still, there were numerable writers and editors left on staff who heard about their site closing via press release today, though ESPN will apparently honor their contracts.

Grantland was sometimes pigeonholed as a “speciality site” or a “special project,” a prestige undertaking for ESPN that didn’t need to succeed in terms of raw traffic. But by any yardstick, it exceeded expectations. Throughout his tenure, Simmons remained himself: He hosted his super-popular B.S. Report podcast, wrote a weekly column, and occasionally weighed in on aspects of pop culture. But he also showed an eye for fantastic talent and let his staff explore diverse topics well outside of ESPN’s normal purview. His early adoption of the podcast format encouraged many great productions: the loss of Girls in Hoodies, NBA After Dark, Do You Like Prince Movies, and Hollywood Prospectus has already been keenly felt.

It’s difficult to apply traditional narratives about the death of longform media, or the troubles of digital publishing, to Grantland’s saga and the boardroom power plays that brought it in and out of existence. No doubt media reporters like Jim Miller (who’s already delved extensively into ESPN’s management troubles) will continue to explore the complex dramas that led to Grantland’s birth and death. But for now, it’s wisest just to mourn the passing of a site that will long be remembered in the history of web journalism for sheer quality.

U.S. Special Operations Forces Are Syria-Bound

Updated on October 30 at 1:18 p.m. ET

The U.S. is sending a small group of Special Operations Forces to Syria to coordinate with local groups against the Islamic State, the White House announced Friday.

John Earnest, the White House spokesman, said fewer than 50 troops will be sent to northern Syria to enhance the capacity of moderate forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Their job, he said, is to train, advice, and assist moderate Syrian rebels.

“These forces do not have a combat mission,” Earnest said. Their “mission is to build the capacity of local forces so that they can be even more effective than they have been.”

The announcement comes a little more than two years after President Obama said he would not put “boots boots on the ground in Syria.”

But Earnest said Friday: “Our strategy has not changed.” But he did add: “This is a dangerous place on the globe. And they are at risk.”

The authorization comes just days after Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the U.S. will step up its operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, including through “direct action on the ground.”

Part of the strategy outlined by Carter before the Senate Armed Services Committee: the support of moderate Syrian rebels who have made territorial gains near the Raqqa, the Islamic State’s stronghold and administrative capital, and in northern Iraq.

Earnest said Friday that the U.S. was redoubling its efforts in places like northern Iraq where its support of rebel forces has worked, and “shown our willingness to scale back parts of the strategy that aren’t showing results.”

The comments appear to signal acknowledgment that the strategy against the Islamic State has had limited success. Last month, General Lloyd Austin, the head of U.S. Central Command, said the $500 million American effort to train 5,400 troops had resulted in some “four or five” fighters still in the field.  Carter announced this month the U.S. was looking at other ways to train support the rebels.

Last week, the U.S. revealed that U.S. and Kurdish forces took part in an operation that resulted in freedom for about 70 hostages of the Islamic State. An American service member was killed in the operation in Iraq. At the time, Carter said: “I expect we’ll do more of this sort of thing.”

Friday’s announcement from the White House comes as diplomats from 17 countries, including the U.S. and Iran, a key ally of Syria, are taking part in talks in Vienna over Syria’s future.

Trick or Angry Tweet

It happens every year with a predictability that is both reassuring and frustrating. Someone wears a Halloween costume—or sells a Halloween costume—that blurs the line between “provocative” and “offensive.” He went as Caitlyn Jenner. She went as Sexy Ebola. How dare he. How could she. Word of that costume spreads among media both social and traditional. Indignation ensues. The indignation escalates to outrage. The outrage spreads. Those most Halloweeny of things—pitchforks—come out.

Recent participants in the gripe cycle of All Hallows Eve have included:

The (white) girl who dressed up as Nicki Minaj The (white) guy who dressed up as Kanye West The “Pashtun Papa” costume, sold at (and then revoked by) Walmart The “Israeli Soldier for Kids” costume (same) The “Call Me Caitlyn” costume, complete with bustier and wig and marketed, for apparently maximum lols, to burly men The “Pussy Magnet” costume (featuring a neck pillow-esque plush “magnet” with plush cats appended to the tips) The “Lion-Killer Dentist” costume The Rachel Dolezal costume

And, of course, there are many more. So many more. The phenomenon—inevitable idiocy, inevitable indignation—has gotten so widespread that Gawker, this year, identified a subholiday of All Hallows’ Eve: “Racist Halloween.” The festivities, which have long celebrated the outrageous, now also celebrate, simply, outrage.

Related Story

Blackface Halloween: A Toxic Cultural Tradition

Halloween used to revolve around, and revel in, familiarized fear—as the night before All Souls’ Day, it was historically celebrated as a time of communion between the living and the dead. (In some incarnations, the historian Ronald Hutton notes, it was “a night upon which supernatural beings were said to be abroad and could be imitated or warded off by human wanderers.”) The holiday’s modern marketing, definitely, carries on the assumption that the day itself, and the days leading up to it, are primarily about the assorted delights of the spookyscary: all those FrightFests, haunted houses, horror marathons on Bravo, etc. etc.

But Halloween, as actually practiced and celebrated—largely, through the costumes people don in its honor—is no longer primarily about fear. Instead, it’s primarily about fun. Spectacle long ago replaced scariness as the core driver of Halloween festivities among both kids and adults, aided by the Costume Industrial Complex and the assorted quirks of the “one night stand” and the “Freudian slip” and the “cereal killer,” and also of the “9 Clever Costumes for Punny Procrastinators” and the “21 Insanely Clever Costume Ideas for You and Your Friends” and the “29 Halloween Costumes That Will Make You Nostalgic” and the “67 Awesome Halloween Costume Ideas.”

Halloween has long celebrated the outrageous; it now also celebrates, simply, outrage.

Which is also to say the obvious: that Halloween, like pretty much every holiday out there, has become heavily commercialized. In the States, in the 1930s, the theatrical-costume maker Ben Cooper, his business suffering in the Great Depression, struck a deal with the Walt Disney Company to produce costumes based on Disney characters. His company went on to be-costume superheroes like Spider-Man and Batman in the ’60s and characters from Star Trek and Star Wars in the ’70s. Costumes, under Cooper’s influence, not only became mass-produced, but they also expanded beyond the traditional ghost-and-goblin fare. Soon, candy-beggars on Halloween night included TV characters, movie stars, and politicians. Monsters would still be in the mix, definitely, but they would no longer be in the majority.

And as media got increasingly into the Halloween game—Roseanne’s elaborate costumes, Modern Family’s crazy haunted house, Matt Lauer’s many appearances in drag on The Today Show, etc.—everyday people themselves began emphasizing over-the-top creativity in their cosplay. Punny costumes (“Lorde of the rings,” etc.) became popular. So did extremely elaborate ones, rented at high hourly and daily rates from professional outfitters. And the rise of image-oriented social media, of course, has put even more of a premium on cleverness, with the logic of the “best costume” competition ported into everyday Halloweening. People dress up for the fun of it; they also, often, do it for the ‘gram.

All of which, on the one hand, has made Halloween really awesome! Who among us will not giggle at a Donald Trumpkin displayed on a porch this weekend, or at the many clever incarnations of “Netflix and Chill” that will be, inevitably, tricking and treating? The kooky is often much more delightful than the spooky. (One of the many jokes in “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah,” Tracy Jordan’s novelty Halloween video, is how extremely unfrightening all its “spookyscariness” actually is.)

What all the revelry also means, though, is that Halloween, in its low-key competition for creativity, has put a new premium on the pushing of boundaries. If everyone is keeping up with the Indiana Joneses, people will find ways to push that competition to extremes. Costumes, by their nature, are about thwarting social norms (the word stems from the Latin consuetudinem, or “custom, habit, usage”); when they collide with the current culture’s emphasis on creativity, however, they transform Halloween from a holiday into an excuse. For experimentation, for crossing lines, for dabbling with otherness. Our forebears may have spent All Hallows’ Eve fighting against goblins and ghosts; we, for our part, battle our Ids.

Our forebears spent All Hallows’ Eve fighting against goblins and ghosts; we, for our part, battle our Ids.

Thus, all the Sexy Librarians. And all the displays of offensive cultural appropriation. Racist Halloween can be understood in one way as an extreme form of Halloween’s boundary-pushing. White teen-as-Nicki and Kelly Osbourne as Rachel Dolezal and Heidi Klum as Kali and Julianne Hough as Crazy Eyes and all the other #toomuches and #toosoons and #waitseriouslys and #howdaretheys … these are both terribly tasteless and terribly telling. As the marketing copy for the “Pashtun Papa” getup reads, revealingly: “Nothing is sacred this Halloween. Shock your friends with this Islamic costume.”

Shock, indeed. Which also means that an inevitable aspect of Racist Halloween is the inevitable Backlash Against Racist Halloween. “Call Me Caitlyn” and “Pashtun Papa” and Osbourne and Klum and Hough and all the other dresser-uppers will be, in short order, dressed down—on CNN and The Huffington Post and Mashable and TMZ, not to mention on Twitter and Facebook. The teenager who Minajed herself may have her college applications sabotaged. The teacher who dressed up as Kanye could lose his job. And the outrage comes at a simmer, too, as well as a boil. Earlier this week, ABC informed its readers: “Dad Outraged at ‘Cute’ Halloween Costumes for Girls; Creates #MoreThanCute Campaign.”

The Internet has brought, among so much else, a kind of enforced empathy: We have a new—unprecedented—access to each other, and that can be wonderful and jarring, often in equal measure. Halloween is in some sense a proving ground for the new insight we’re gaining into the lives, and the minds, of others. People have long done dumb things; the difference is that, now, everyone else can find out about those dumb things. The dumbness is shareable, and commentable. Mistakes can, at the click of an “upload” button, be turned into media.

And outrage, too, can be viral, turning the playful Boo!s of Halloween past into the scornful boooos of Halloween present. It can be used to transform even that most seemingly playful of things—the costume—into a political message. (As Wholesale Halloween Costumes declares of its Israeli Soldier Costume for Boys, “Defend your Jewish heritage proudly by wearing the Israeli Soldier Boy’s Costume!”) And it can turn Halloween into yet another battlefield of the culture wars. It used to be that the things that inspired fear in people, in All Hallows’ Eves long ago, were ghosts and ghouls, undead monsters visiting, unwelcome, from the beyond. We used to be afraid of the supernatural. And while we have largely shed our superstitions, we haven’t quite shed our fear. We’re just directing it, at this point, toward the most natural thing of all: other people.

The Witches and the Power of Children's Horror

Nearly everyone can recall a film that scarred them beyond reason when they were younger—a movie that in retrospect probably wasn’t so bad, but at the time seemed obscenely terrifying. For me, and many other youngsters of the early ’90s, there’s no contest: It’s when Anjelica Huston peels back her face to reveal the twisted, gnarled visage behind it in The Witches. Even rewatching it as a grown-up, it’s hard not to feel apprehensive about that moment, which goes miles beyond anything you could imagine possible in a children’s movie.

Related Story

The Greatest Horror Films of the Past 51 Years

If anything, Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel is even more powerful as nightmare fuel today. It employs makeup and puppetry created by Jim Henson—making the film more scarily tactile than CGI-filled movies today. But the film’s resonance doesn’t just stem from the brilliant design, or Huston’s vampy performance. The Witches takes glee in exploring a specifically childish fear: that grown-ups harbor the desire to kidnap and murder them for no other motivation than pure evil. Hence the particular appeal of child-focused horror: There’s no ambiguity. Monsters are real, and they lurk where you least expect them.

The Witches starts slow, with the young protagonist Luke learning from his grandmother that witches are real and live around the world disguised as regular women. She tells him they kill children because children give off a repulsive scent only witches can smell. Midway through the film, Luke finds himself caught at a national conference of witches and beholds their true, horrible faces. He’s then force-fed poison by an angry horde and turned into a mouse before later being turned back into a boy by a repentant witch. Dahl notoriously complained that the film gave his dark book a happy ending—in the novel, its unnamed hero remains a mouse and chats with his grandmother about the short lifespan he has to look forward to. But not even that new ending could undo the 90 minutes of whimsical terror that precedes it.

Henson’s famed Creature Workshop played a role in many great child-centric horror films: There’s Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, two puppet-heavy classics of the ’80s that grasp the simultaneous appeal and terror of the unknown. You might also recall being terrified by the animated films of Don Bluth (The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven), which have a “dark side of Disney” quality and an obsession with death. Or perhaps The NeverEnding Story, which also used puppet effects and fairy-tale logic. Older cinemagoers might cite the surreal boat journey in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or the shrieking Child Catcher of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (whose screenplay was by Roald Dahl); more recently, the stop-motion director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline) has harnessed animation’s ability to bring life to eerie dream worlds.

What these films all do is explore territory typically unknown to children. They introduce terrifying real-life issues like death and abduction, or in some cases, bring life to nightmares. Coraline plays on the fear that monstrous strangers might pose as your parents, while the loopy dreamscapes of Labyrinth are really just an allegory for the pangs of growing up and big sisterhood. That doesn’t make them any less scary: The great appeal of children’s horror is that it often confronts the most mundane fears. The Child Catcher (a monster whose catchphrase is “I smell children!”) is just a visualization of the warning given to every child to watch out for strangers—Dahl always specialized in exploring that murky territory, since children are always instructed to respect the ultimate authority of grown-ups, but treat most of them as hostile creatures. In The Witches, Roeg finds the dark humor in that. Practically every adult is a villain, except for Luke’s grandmother, but that tension is enough to allow the witches to hide in plain sight.

The Witches also stands alone as a children’s film directed by a veteran of grown-up horror who wasn’t afraid to use his full range of skills. Roeg directed a masterpiece of the genre, Don’t Look Now, a film set in Venice in which a couple mourning their lost daughter are stalked by a mysterious hooded figure. While Roeg has worked in other genres, he’s probably best associated with horror and thrillers, and The Witches manages to be as foreboding as his best work. Henson’s effects and Dahl’s storytelling are essential, of course. But when Huston sniffs theatrically in the air, detecting the scent of a child in her midst, and directs a mob after him? It’s the pure stuff of nightmares, whether you’re a kid or not.