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The Worst Witch: A Halloween Appreciation

1986 wasn’t a spectacular year, especially if you were Oliver North, or one of the few hundred people who purchased the first New Kids on the Block album and were promptly blinded by Donnie’s sweater. Still, there were highlights: The Oprah Winfrey Show debuted. Pixar Studios was founded. Lady Gaga was born. And HBO and Central Independent Television inexplicably partnered to produce a 70-minute children’s movie featuring some of the greatest actors and worst special effects of the past three decades.

The Worst Witch was based on a British children’s book series by Jill Murphy, and is almost like a feminist precursor to Harry Potter—except all the characters are constantly trying to undermine each other, and students and teachers alike share a ferocious crush on the lone male character (the Grand Wizard, played with demented panache by Tim Curry). The heroine is Mildred Hubble (Fairuza Balk), an endearing but terrible student at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches. Mildred is, Miss Cackle (Charlotte Rae) informs her early on in the movie, “the worst witch in the entire school.”

The obvious question is: What is Charlotte Rae, star of The Facts of Life, doing in this movie? The answer: playing not one but two roles. Rae is both Miss Cackle, a good witch with a refined British accent who nevertheless could use some advice on the art of the pep talk, and Miss Cackle’s evil sister, Agatha, a witch with bright pink hair, a Southern drawl, and a coven of punk-inspired crones, who’s disgusted at her sister’s goodness and hell bent on turning all the girls at Miss Cackle’s Academy evil. She even has a song explaining her plan:

If you’re filthy
Smelly
Evil wicked and cruel
You’ll be right at home
In my little school

Does this sound familiar? Agatha is indeed the Voldemort to Miss Cackle’s Dumbledore (with sibling rivalry adding an extra frisson of tension in the relationship), while Mildred, like Harry, is plagued by two school bullies, the patrician and snotty Ethel Hallow (Anna Kipling), and the terrifying potions mistress Miss Hardbroom, played by the former Bond girl and old-school Avenger Diana Rigg. Rigg’s Miss Hardbroom is more Professor Snape than Snape himself: She appears out of nowhere in a puff of green smoke while Mildred and her friend Maud are gossiping about her late at night, and terrifies Mildred every time their paths cross in the school hall. She sports a topknot. She embodies the word “glacial.” She is the best thing in the movie apart from Tim Curry.

At some point during the casting of The Worst Witch, someone decided it wasn’t enough to have Charlotte Rae, and Diana Rigg, aforementioned icon and classical actress, and Fairuza Balk, tiny moppet star of Return to Oz and future coven regular. So they added Tim Curry, whose resume included playing a transvestite alien in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a child-murdering clown in Stephen King’s IT, and Rooster, Miss Hannigan’s no-good brother, in Annie. And decided to make his appearance the centerpiece of a 1986 music video accompanying the song “Anything Can Happen on Halloween,” in which he stands in front of a green screen and serenades a skeleton, a pumpkin, and a giant black cat whose eyes expand until they fill the entire screen, and Curry’s head pops out of the pupil.

Much of the kitschy splendor of The Worst Witch lies in its transparently low-budget special effects, which are of a kind not seen since the VHS home-workout boom of the late ’80s. The nadir is during Curry’s big number, but a scene in which Mildred tries to master her broomstick—and persuade her wayward kitten, Tabby, to cling on—is almost as hokey. But to pick apart the mechanics of stunts that presumably thrilled children at the time is to miss the heart of the film. Unlike The Boy Who Lived, Mildred is an outcast, a misfit, and a terrible, sloppy, disorganized student, but she redeems herself by being brave and gets to fly around on Halloween with the most desired man in witchdom. But none of this matters as much as the fact that all these people are in the movie.

So, if you watch one Halloween-themed production this weekend, you could do worse than The Worst Witch. It’s inspirational (mostly in that it’s a reminder of how valuable CGI actually is, and how everyone has something on their resume they’d rather not remember). It’s got groovy musical numbers. And most importantly of all, it’s available to watch in its entirety on YouTube.

Is There Any Hope of Fixing the Republican Debates?

Updated October 30, 2015 1:04 p.m.

With Republican candidates already in open revolt against the Republican National Committee’s approach to debates, RNC Chair Reince Priebus has taken a dramatic step in an attempt to quell concerns. Priebus sent a letter to NBC saying the RNC is suspending its agreement to a debate on NBC News in February:

The CNBC network is one of your media properties, and its handling of the debate was conducted in bad faith. We understand that NBC does not exercise full editorial control over CNBC’s journalistic approach. However, the network is an arm of your organization, and we need to ensure there is not a repeat performance.

Priebus said the RNC intends to go forward with the debate, along with the already-announced conservative-media partner, National Review. The suspension seems like a rather dramatic overreaction to CNBC’s moderation. But as Dave Weigel points out, it’s not unprecedented—Democrats similarly pulled out of a Fox News debate in 2007.

Can’t somebody get some control over the Republican primary debates?

First, the Republican National Committee tried. But after what was widely regarded as a debacle Wednesday night, the candidates want to take a shot at handling it themselves. Politico reports:

On Thursday, many of the campaigns told POLITICO that the RNC, which has taken a greater role in the 2016 debate process than in previous election cycles, had failed to take their concerns into account. It was time, top aides to at least half a dozen of the candidates agreed, to begin discussing among themselves how the next debates should be structured and not leave it up to the RNC and television networks.

The event specifically excludes the RNC. It’s reportedly being organized by the campaigns of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham—a fascinating coalition of two outsider candidates who have benefited handsomely from the debates so far and two establishment candidates who have been mired in undercard debates so far. (Carson and Trump also led a charge against CNBC’s rules ahead of the most recent debate, forcing the network to make changes.)

The candidates complain, among other things, that the rules of the debates are unfair and that they’re being picked on by the liberal media. Some of you will be old enough to remember when the RNC was taking command of the debates to save the party and its candidates from, well, exactly these complaints. “Our debates will be good for our candidates and for voters—not a field day for the media,” RNC Chair Reince Priebus said in August 2014. He told The Washington Post that the 2012 primary debates were “a dog-and-pony show” and “an embarrassment and ridiculous.”

Among the changes Priebus oversaw ahead of this campaign: The RNC would limit the number of debates to six, rather than the 20 of the previous cycle, and it would demand control over who the moderators were. The RNC approved the new plan by a wide margin. At the time, the RNC said that prospective candidates had reacted generally positively, though few opted to say anything publicly.

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Clearly the plan hasn’t worked as intended. In addition to the candidates’ gripes, which have been growing with each debate, the party’s last two nominees have spoken out against the system. Priebus, for his part, placed blame for Wednesday night’s issues on CNBC. (Democrats have had their own acrimonious battles over the debates this cycle, but they’ve been much less consequential—largely because there’s a smaller field and two obviously dominant candidates.)

But can the candidates really do better, or will it just be the inmates running the asylum? There’s precedent for candidates organizing debates; the earliest primary debates in the modern era, between Republicans Harold Stassen and Thomas Dewey in 1948 and between Democrats Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver in 1956, were brokered by the candidates.

One reason it might not work so well this year is that while all the candidates seem to agree that the moderators are one problem, their diagnoses sharply diverge from there. Trump wants to limit every debate to two hours. Some of his rivals really want there to be opening and closing statements. The candidates who have struggled to get speaking time at the main debate—Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, in particular—want equal exposure. The candidates who have been banished to the undercard debate want to be allowed into the main event—but of course adding more lecterns would be at odds with Bush’s desire for more time to talk.

Oh, and about those moderators they hate so much? Even if the candidates can agree amongst themselves, they would have to get the media outlets to agree to the changes. The Trump-and-Carson led charge forced CNBC’s hand, but they had some leverage because the front-runners demanded the changes so close to the event that CNBC largely had to give in. But the networks naturally want to maintain as much control as they can over the debates, and they have qualms about ceding editorial control to the campaigns. It’s not hard to imagine them balking at demands to change debates for which they’ve already agreed to terms with the RNC.

Here’s the heart of the matter: Given the choice between being asked tough questions and not being asked tough questions, candidates are always going to opt for fewer tough questions. Candidates are also always going to want more face time at huge nationally televised events. That’s particularly acute for the ones polling worse, and in fact those Republican candidates complained in 2012, and they complained in both parties in 2008. (Critics also assailed the media sponsors in 2008.)

What all four of these primaries share—Republicans in 2008, 2012, and 2016, and Democrats in 2008—are huge, widely varied, fractious fields. That explains many (though not all) of the complaints about the debates so far. It explains why the candidates’ revolt faces an uphill battle to succeeding. And it also likely explains why the only solution to the debate woes will be for the field to start shrinking.

Blackface Halloween: A Toxic Cultural Tradition

It’s hard imagining a scenario where Rachel Dolezal isn’t one of the most popular costumes of this year’s Halloween season. For a specific type of person, Dolezal hits all the necessary notes: A weird and troubling story that captured the attention of the national media, a readily identifiable character, an easy costume to assemble. All it takes is a skirt, micro braids, and an industrial tub of bronzer, and voila: the former president of the Spokane NAACP. (Granted, it also requires a certain lack of empathy, or, barring that, common sense.)

Indeed, what Dolezal tried to pass off as “transracialism” becomes all too common during this time of year, as the winds cool, the leaves lose their color, and some white folks suddenly seem to gain more pigment. Watch as Pumpkin Spice season slowly yields to a Blackface Halloween. (It should be noted: In Holland, Blackface Christmas is far, far worse.)

Maybe Dolezal’s deception shouldn’t have been so surprising. Every Halloween, it’s more than apparent that segments of Americans don’t see any problem with playing dress-up in someone else’s identity.

Each year around October 31, give or take a few days, the photos and videos start to trickle out online. The couple dressed as Ray Rice and his wife Janay. The friends outfitted like George Zimmerman and a bloody Trayvon Martin. It’s already started this year, with the white elementary school teacher who dressed up as Kanye West. And the Florida teenager who thought it was a good idea to cover herself in shoe polish to pull off an authentic Nicki Minaj.

There’s an especially American strain of ingenuity when it comes to turning ignorance, or just historical obliviousness, into costuming. Halloween has become the holiday of choice not just for people eager to coat their body in grease paint, but for those who don’t see a problem with being a naughty Indian princess, or a naughty geisha, or a domestic abuser, or a murdered teenager. Every year, without fail, come the jack o’ lanterns, the haunted-house decorations, and the performative racism.

Blackface, and redface, and yellowface, have a long history in this country. Minstrel shows relied on blackface and crude caricature of African Americans for the entertainment of white audiences. While the practice fell out of favor over the decades—spurred in large part by the civil-rights movement—you could still find white actors relying on makeup or a lazy pastiche of ethnic stereotypes in films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The King and I, and Laurence Olivier’s Othello.

It’s also easy to think of it as something from the intermediate past, until you remember Soul Man, and Johnny Depp’s turn in The Lone Ranger. It was only last month the Metropolitan Opera decided to stop putting the title character in blackface for Otello. (Not to forget White Chicks, which manages to pull off the photo-negative version of blackface.)

Halloween, at least in theory, is supposed to be a time for fun, where people can indulge in a masquerade that offers escape from their normal lives. So what does it say that so many continue to treat the state of being black like an outfit, akin to a Frankenstein mask you can pull on or off? It’s a reminder of what’s already clear: Being a minority in this country still means being seen as “other.”

It’s why “All Lives Matter,” but black lives continue to be a costume. It’s why, when black men are gunned down, they suddenly become super human or supernatural. It wasn’t a teenage boy shot by a police officer; it was a demon, a zombie, or the hulk. This is just one of the ways parading around in someone else’s culture is dehumanizing. Jessica Metcalfe, creator of the Native American fashion blog Beyond Buckskin, summed it up in a 2012 interview with Jezebel:

When people know of us only as a ‘costume,’ or something you dress up as for Halloween or for a music video, then you stop thinking of us as people, and this is incredibly dangerous because everyday we fight for the basic human right to live our own lives without outsiders determining our fate or defining our identities.

Like most people, I appreciate the chance to dress up on Halloween, and early on, a theme emerged regarding what I wore each year. Batman. Superman. Captain Kirk. The intergalactic entrepreneur Lando Calrissian. Daryl Hall (of & Oates, fame). The paranormal investigator Peter Venkman. Burt Reynolds.

The clear trend here is that I make great decisions. Or, that I’m an unapologetic nerd. But it’s also hard to ignore the other trait most of those characters share: With the exception of the chief administrator of Cloud City, they’re all white. And—this is the surprising part—at no point did I reach for the pancake makeup to get that legitimate Caucasian look.

Maybe I thought the actual clothes I was wearing would be explanation enough. It’s also possible I didn’t do it because I was worried my family would have disowned me. But it’s just as likely that, as a person of color, I know how hurtful it is when someone carelessly treats your life like something they bought off the rack. It’s also true that when you feel overlooked by entertainment, you start to bend your heroes to look like you. Ask any cosplayer who’s attended a comics convention.

How people choose which costume to wear is heavily influenced by culture—books, movies, comics, music, and films; public scandals and instant memes. And it’s hard to escape the fact that popular entertainment is still awash in whiteness. Even at a point when the film and TV industries are making marginal progress, shows like Empire, Scandal, Fresh off the Boat, and Jane the Virgin can’t hide the fact that white (and male) remains the default setting for most protagonists in the popular culture.

Blackface isn’t just another costume. It’s a mask of privilege, the kind of unchallenged power that comes through denying the experience of others.

That creates a larger effect that, as Dayna Chatman, a researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, put it in an interview with The New York Times, “makes whiteness the norm.”

Which is why representation in the media matters so much now. Fixing TV and film isn’t an automatic cure for the bigotry and intolerance America has built up over time.  Thought it does help to currently have a mixed-race Spider-Man, a black Captain America, and what appears to be a new young Jedi a few shades darker than Luke Skywalker. They prove that, yes, people of color can be center stage and can be the hero. They’ll make great costumes—assuming there’s no makeup involved.

And this is the simple fact to come back to: It’s possible to dress up as any black celebrity or fictional character without changing the color of your skin. Acceptance is the recognition that with the right clothes, props, and effort, someone will figure out their Nicki Minaj or Kanye costume without the aid of an artifact of America’s racist past.

It should be a relatively simple concept to grasp: Blackface isn’t just another costume. It’s a mask of privilege, the kind of unchallenged power that comes through denying the experience of others. And, for some reason, in 2015 it’s harder for some people to simply acknowledge that than have someone at a party ask, “Who are you supposed to be?”

EL VY: White Guys, Interrupted

In a recent episode of Billy on the Street, the comedian Billy Eichner dons a football jersey and rounds up a pack of hooting dudes to put a fratty twist on his regular shtick of quizzing random strangers about pop culture. “Bro, bro!” Eichner shouts at a Manhattan-sidewalk passerby in a baseball cap and sunglasses. “True or false: Masculinity is a prison?” “True,” the guy replies, and the man-herd roars. Later, there’s a tailgate for Wicked.

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The way that segment mocks bro-culture while also reveling in it reminds me, weirdly, of EL VY’s great debut album, Return to the Moon, out today. For a certain kind of music listener, this is a supergroup, bringing together Matt Berninger of the cult-beloved rock act The National and Brent Knopf of Menomena and Ramona Falls. If those credentials don’t scream bro! they do conjure a different male archetype: Indie rock has been shaped by all sorts of people, but in practice it has often been ruled by guys who look a lot like Berninger and Knopf. Conde Nast inadvertently gave a reality-check to the genre’s self-image as eclectic and inclusive when an exec shouted out Pitchfork’s “Millennial male” audience recently. And the conversation around Ryan Adams’s cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989 offered a reminder that indie’s stereotypical mode—solemn airings of pain and alienation—has often dovetailed with the sexist notion that men’s emoting is inherently more serious than women’s.

But sometimes it seems like Berninger has conquered this genre only to make fun of it. His cartoonishly morose voice often satirizes what other singers might present as insights—the notion of fatherhood as martyrdom, or the idea that angst is intrinsically meaningful, or the claim that vanity and lust can be transcended. A lot of critics have missed this, taking the lush gloom of The National at face value, as if it were music for Brooklyn dinner parties instead of music ruthlessly about them. But EL VY makes the humor and the politics in Berninger’s words harder to miss. In place of the sumptuous rock blur of The National, Knopf builds bright, crisp, loop-based arrangements that sometimes sounds like they’re made with kids’ instruments; the songs wiggle and careen, instead of gliding. Meanwhile, Berninger seems to be working from a prompt: He’s said Return to the Moon is more autobiographical than anything he’s done before; he has also talked about it as a sort of rock opera involving invented characters.

I will admit to not really being able to decode the storyline. But that’s okay because the songs on their own are legible and entertaining. The best might be “I’m the Man to Be,” which Berninger has said is from the “perspective of a pathetic self-aggrandizing rocker alone in a hotel room. Something I know a lot about.” As Knopf puts guitar peels over a swampy groove, Berninger’s narrator ponders his life while engaging in what seems to be an auto-erotic asphyxiation session. Pitchfork even appears: “I can’t even look at reviews anymore / I score an 8.6 on a fucking par 4,” he says, presumably referring to the rating that The National’s Boxer received in 2007. His indie cred is also masculine cred—I’m the man to be—and neither seem to be helping with his abject emotional state. One verse has our hero missing his sister, crying to room service, and “drinkin’ Malin and Goetz under the bed.” (Malin and Goetz is a New York City “indie skincare” store.)

Rather than killing joy, Berninger’s brainy self-deprecation deepens the music’s playfulness and makes the album’s openhearted moments more precious. The title of the opener, “Return to the Moon (Political Song for Didi Bloome to Sing, with Crescendo),” is probably in part a joke about the The National’s reputation for “crescendo rock,” and the song does indeed deliver a satisfying swell of sound after a few minutes of chipper, ’50s-prom-floor shuffling. There’s also a big buildup on “No Time to Crank the Sun,” where Berninger keeps his lyrics fairly straightforward, perhaps so as not to distract from the song’s pretty, gospel-like pleasures.

And on the lovely “Paul Is Alive,” over acoustic picking and a muffled drum loop, Berninger sings earnestly of falling in love with the Cincinnati rock scene. But he doesn’t allow himself to indulge too much in golden nostalgia; the song opens with him acknowledging the privilege inherent in, and the ridiculousness inherent in, his regrets:

I had a sugar-coated childhood
The stars were in my soup
But given the opportunity
I’d start over and change it all

Beatlemania made my mother
Think the way she does
She always said
“Don’t waste your life wishing everything was how it was”

The next song, “Need a Friend,” is a rock anthem of tension and release, with guitars surging for a chorus in which Berninger yells, “this is heartbreaking, heartbreaking, heartbreaking.” But the anger feels almost like a joke, given the smallness of the grievance described: a buddy flaking out on a concert. “You were supposed to be here before the last song,” Berninger scolds. “You were supposed to bring me your brother’s weed.” This is the joy of his music: It embraces the fact that banal problems can seem apocalyptic in the moment, but it also keeps those problems in perspective.

Berninger is by no means the only self-critical rock songwriter; many of his sonic predecessors—Leonard Cohen, the Silver Jews’s David Berman—had the same tendencies, and The National’s contemporaries Pissed Jeans and Titus Andronicus use their own forms of macho music styles to skewer male rage. But at a time when some white male artists are trying to sabotage new calls for diversity of voices in the arts, and others are wondering whether they should make art at all given how over-represented their viewpoint has been in history, singers like Berninger offer a solution. Write what you know, but not quite how it’s been written before.

An American Arrested in Iran

Iranian officials have reportedly arrested a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen, multiple news organizations are reporting, citing family members and friends of Siamak Namazi.

Namazi, the head of strategic planning at the Dubai-based Crescent Petroleum, was visiting Tehran at the time of his arrest on October 15 from his family’s home by security agents. IranWire, a news organization run by Iranian expatriates, reports the agents “ransacked the house, confiscated property, and took the dual national to Evin Prison.” It quoted unnamed sources for its story on the arrest. The New York Times quoted “people close to him” for its report and The Washington Post cited “a family friend who did not want to be identified.”

Namazi, who is reportedly in his 40s, has a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Tufts University and a master’s in urban and regional planning from Rutgers University. He is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a former public policy scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., who advocates for closer relations between the U.S. and Iran. In 1998, he founded Future Alliance International, a consulting company focused on the risk of doing business with Iran, according to his bio on the Wilson Center’s website.

The Post adds:

Namazi, the son of a former governor in the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan, comes from a prominent Iranian family. Namazi’s family came to the United States in 1983 when he was a boy, and he later returned to Iran after graduating from college to serve in the Iranian military. He has consulted on business opportunities in Iran for more than a decade.

Namazi’s arrest is the first by Iranian authorities of an American since the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, including the U.S. He is the fourth American with dual citizenship ​currently being​ held by Iran. The others are Jason Rezian, the Post reporter who was arrested in July 2014 and convicted this month; Amir Hekmati,  the former Marine who was sentenced to death for espionage; and Saeed Abedini, a convert to Christianity who was detained in 2012 and sentenced to eight years in prison.

In addition, Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent, disappeared in Iran in 2007; Iranian officials say they have no idea where he is.

Iranian officials have not publicly commented on Namazi’s arrest. In a statement, the U.S. State Department said it is looking into the reports of his detention.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Finds Its Groove

When Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. debuted in 2013, it was pitched as a blockbuster superhero series on the small screen that could tap into the Marvel movies and a rich comic-book universe. At first, S.H.I.E.L.D. fell short of its potential and felt more like a cop show than a sci-fi melodrama, though it eventually found its lane by moving away from villains of the week. Despite this progress, the show’s latest episode, “4,722 Hours,” felt like a quantum leap of ambition; it was the kind of epic tale that a previous generation of viewers couldn’t have dreamed of one day seeing on television.

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S.H.I.E.L.D.’s improvement has followed the same path as a lot of niche sci-fi shows that initially tried to appeal to a wide audience. Like Fringe, Grimm, or Sleepy Hollow, it first promised to be a series you wouldn’t have to watch weekly to keep up with, with its central characters facing a new supernatural threat every episode. That approach drew yawns from critics and audiences, and so the show revamped its strategy—eliminating the titular agency, having its heroes go renegade, and building out a complex mythology revolving around alien artifacts and an explosion of the superpowered population. Wednesday’s“4,722 Hours” was an impressive mini-movie within this larger arc—and it finally delivered on the show’s grand storytelling promise, proving it’s no longer just an afterthought to the formidable Marvel film franchise.

It’s a little surprising it took Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. this long to find its groove. After all, it was created by Joss Whedon: a TV veteran who brought comic-book storytelling to the small screen with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and who was once a creative mastermind behind the Marvel movies. But Agents didn’t pick up until the April 2014 release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which revealed that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been infiltrated by supervillains and was rotten to the core. Before that, the stodgy cast had been obeying the orders of an unseen bureaucracy; with that bureaucracy removed, they could burrow into larger, wackier mysteries about alien experimentation, Nazi mysticism, and portals to other worlds.

In the second-season finale, the plucky scientist Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) got sucked into said portal, and was only recovered months later. “4,722 Hours” chronicled her journey on the alien world she got stuck on, audaciously never cutting back to the present day or to her Earth-bound colleagues. The episode even had Henstridge’s name come first in the cast order, a rare TV phenomenon (she’s usually sixth-billed). “4,722” bore a superficial (and likely unintentional) similarity to The Martian, but with a more foreboding atmosphere: Simmons was trapped on a planet where the sun seemingly never rose, beset by hallucinatory dust storms, and her only companion was a long-stranded astronaut that NASA had sent through the same portal years before and left to die.

There aren’t many TV shows that could pull an episode like this off. Even the obvious forebears, like the various Star Trek series, would have done so as cheaply as possible, finding some abandoned quarry or quiet forest to shoot in. Simmons’s planet, which was mostly a desert, still felt appreciably alien thanks to moody lighting and foreboding blue camera filters. Her trial to get back home, which viewers knew would end in success, still felt hard-earned, and should powerfully inform her character and the way her team tries to adjust to her presence again.

There aren’t many TV shows that could pull an episode like this off.

Aside from the terrific “4,722 Hours,” this season has been building up in other interesting ways. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s first season took place mostly on an airplane, a roving base for the team that could take them to any location in the world but ended up serving as the dull setting for 80 percent of every episode’s action. Now, the show’s expanded cast is scattered across the globe, chasing story threads that occasionally knit together before expanding out again. Fortunately, Agents is laying the foundation for its own stories rather than serving as a larger cog in the Marvel universe. Simmons didn’t visit an alien planet to introduce viewers to a location Thor might visit one day; her tribulations simply existed to deepen her character and tease at some other mysteries.

Since S.H.I.E.L.D. began to find its creative footing, ABC has been looking to exploit that success with multiple spin-offs. Its first effort, last year’s Agent Carter, worked because it was a prequel, revolving around the creation of the agency in 1946. The next planned work, apparently titled Marvel’s Most Wanted, will revolve around Bobbi Morse (Adrienne Palicki) and Lance Hunter (Nick Blood), two characters who brought renewed energy to the second season. The impulse to double down on what’s working makes perfect sense, but it might be a bad idea to start trimming away at its cast.

S.H.I.E.L.D. newfound success has mostly come from taking full advantage of its myriad of storytelling options: Rather than just having its agents take on one problem a week, it has a worldwide network of characters working in loose tandem to solve much larger mysteries. This year, “4,722 Hours” had the guts to temporarily abandon that sprawling approach and focus on specific characters for a whole hour. If S.H.I.E.L.D. keeps that kind of ingenuity up, it can elevate itself from a fun sci-fi show to an enduring classic of its genre.

Volkswagen Lied, 60 People Died, Scientists Say

About 60 Americans have already died prematurely as a result of the “defeat devices” that Volkswagen installed in 500,000 cars to avoid federal pollution requirements. 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.

Those numbers are according to the first peer-reviewed study of the phenomenon, which was published Thursday in Environmental Research Letters, an open-access journal. Its estimates are notable not only for their methodology, but also for their size. All previous estimates of the defeat device’s consequences were conducted back-of-the-envelope by news organizations, and they were all comparatively smaller: The New York Times estimated 40 additional deaths in the U.S., Vox calculated between five and 27 deaths, and the Associated Press approximated to between five and 20.

Steven Barrett, a professor of aerospace and energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the equivalent costs of Volkswagen’s pollution came to about $450 million over the period the cars were sold. Eventually, the cars could cost Americans an additional $910 million. But there is some good news.

“If people do turn in those cars, most of those 140 deaths would be averted,” Barrett told me.

The study also was the first to estimate additional medical costs attached to the company’s diesel cars. Additional nitrous-oxide and particular matter released by the cars led to Americans (especially those with a chronic respiratory condition, like asthma) suffering about 30 cases of chronic bronchitis, 120,000 restricted activity days, and 210,000 days of lower respiratory-system functioning. It also caused people to use bronchodilator drugs—like albuterol—33,000 more days than they would otherwise.  

Barrett said that researchers would likely next turn their attention to Europe, where diesel cars, especially those manufactured by Volkswagen, constitute a much larger percentage of cars on the road. Many of those countries, as well, have more stringent nitrous-oxide rules.

“The U.K. alone has 1.2 million of these affected vehicles for example. That’s twice as many cars, and in a more densely populated country, so that suggests there are other countries beyond the U.S. worth looking into,” he said.

The Atlantic has reached out to Volkswagen for comment, and will update this story with any response.

The Rise of the #Ladycrush

On Wednesday, as part of its ongoing series on “The Changing Lives of Women,” NPR got a hashtag going. Not #wcw—the shorthand for Woman Crush Wednesday, a weekly, be-hashtagged celebration of notable women, both famous and less so—but a much more specific one: #grownladycrush. The idea, as NPR explained it, was to highlight “amazing older women on Twitter today.” And the results of this effort were pretty awesome:

At @NPR we are highlighting older women. My #GrownLadyCrush is La Gloria, the original #feminist @GloriaSteinem pic.twitter.com/B9UeI5MjqF

— Lulu Garcia-Navarro (@lourdesgnavarro) October 28, 2015

And

My Aunt Laura stepped up after my mom’s stroke to be an advocate for her medical care. #GrownLadyCrush #wcw pic.twitter.com/KKgYKgFpCS

— Tanya Ballard Brown (@TdoubleB) October 28, 2015

And

Helen Mirren....need I say more? #GrownLadyCrush pic.twitter.com/p9J22ftcMe

— Tina (@tbo51972) October 28, 2015

The subtext of all this celebration, of course, was the fact that older women—“grown ladies,” in NPR’s (lightly) euphemistic parlance— are generally not celebrated in a culture that fetishizes youth. Crushes, today, are generally associated with, and perhaps also wasted on, the young.

NPR’s hashtag was a playful effort to change that. But it was also part of a larger transition, one that has to do with the be-hashtagging of “crush” itself. #Grownladycrush is a more specific iteration of the #ladycrush, and also of the #girlcrush, and also of the #mancrush, and also of the #boycrush, all of which are in turn iterations of the more basic #crush.

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There’s an irony, implicitly, to all of these hashtagged declarations of affinity and attraction. A real crush, pretty much by definition, isn’t something to be shared so publicly. A #crush, though—the hashtag there doing the work that a hashtag always will, which is to create and convene a community—is meant to be shared. #Crush (and also #____crush) are powerful as declarations precisely because they’re not strictly romantic. They’re taking the basic, familiar sense of the crush—giddy, giggly attraction to someone—and, by publicizing it and amending it, broadening its basic meaning.

So while the crush may be a long-standing feature of human nature (“Wintie is weeping because her crush is gone,” Isabella Maud Rittenhouse wrote in her journal in 1884), the #crush, as a proclamation, is a product and a reflection of the digital age. Particularly when caveated and categorized—#ladycrush, #mancrush, #grownladycrush, etc., etc.—it suggests the range of human experience that the Internet itself implies. And it also suggests that the basic elements of a crush (omg, she is SO AWESOME) are just as valid, and maybe even more valid, when it comes to broader forms of attraction: from simple appreciation to the ardent sense that other people can be really great.

Which is also to say #ladycrush and all its forms are essentially reclaiming the crush from the realm of the sexual. They’re gently, and optimistically, political. They’re descriptive, but they’re also aspirational.  

The crush may be a feature of human nature, but the #crush is a product and a reflection of the digital age.

And that’s another element of digital crush: It’s an extension, in a way, of another hashtagged declaration: #goals. #Squadgoals, #relationshipgoals, #stylegoals, and the like are ultimately about admiration. Similarly, the object of a #girlcrush, often—especially when the crush-haver is a fellow girl—is someone who, in some sense, you want to become. (“I have a girl crush on a girl from a band,” Urban Dictionary puts it in its top example of the phrase. “she can sing, she’s GORGEOUS, she’s doing an awesome degree and she's intelligent. i want to BE her.”) The Little Big Town song “Girl Crush,” significantly, is not in the vague manner of Katy Perry, but in the vague manner of Single White Female:

Hate to admit it but
I got a heart rush
Ain’t slowing down
I got it real bad
Want everything she has

Same thing with #grownladycrush. Which carries the added sense of mentorship and respect for the wisdom that comes with age. A sense of push-back against the currently popular idea of generational flattening. And there’s a more gendered push-back, too: against, basically, the status quo. In a time of Lean In and Lenny Letter and billboards blaring FEMINISM, women are coming together, more and more, to celebrate each others’ awesomeness. The #ladycrush, as it defines itself against sex, also defines itself against sexism.

My #GrownLadyCrush is my 100 year-old great aunt Martha. I still want to grow up to be just like her. pic.twitter.com/U0IyFSoVLq

— Ariel Zambelich (@azambelich) October 28, 2015

You could certainly also, if you wanted to, read a little bit of gay panic in all this crush-caveating. “Ladycrush” and “mancrush” and the like, qualified as they are, go out of their way to make clear that the crush in question is not, you know, a crush-crush. It’s not about sex, okay? the phrase insists. There’s a whiff, perhaps, of insistent #nohomo to the whole thing. The narrator of “Girl Crush,” after confiding that she wants “everything” the object of her crush has, makes clear that the “everything” includes the crushee’s boyfriend.

For the most part, though, the #crush and its variations are productively inclusive. They insist that the crush’s seductions, soft and sweet and swoony, are an equal-opportunity affair. That generality isn’t a new thing, necessarily: As Cole Porter put it in 1929, “I’ve got such a crush on you / My heart’s in a state of stew” ... and, really, who among us hasn’t experienced a stew-state? But the semantic breadth of the “crush” is ultimately very much of the current moment. We’re living in a time that increasingly sees sexuality as a spectrum rather than an either/or proposition. A time when lines are blurring between friends and family, and between romance and friendship, and between childhood and adulthood. The crush, vague and largely universal, is a fitting concept for that time.

And so is the #crush. Which is, in the end, a celebration not of otherness, but of oneness. And a concept that is less about the isolation of a couple, and more about the possibilities of a community.

Can Paul Ryan Fix the ‘Broken’ U.S. House of Representatives?

If John Boehner, the often-weepy son of a bartender, was the humble speaker of the House, Paul Ryan looks to be the earnest one.

In a formal transfer of power that was equal parts celebratory and emotional, the 45-year-old Wisconsin Republican on Thursday won an election on the House floor to replace the departing Boehner, who resigned last month rather than try to head off a conservative revolt. Nine Republicans cast their votes for a long-shot challenger, Daniel Webster of Florida, denying Ryan the unanimity he sought but allowing him to claim a measure of unity from a divided Republican conference.

Ryan now has a job he said he never wanted, and he immediately set about to fix a legislative chamber that he bluntly declared to be broken. “We’re not solving problems. We’re adding to them,” Ryan said in his first speech from the House’s highest chair. It was a statement with which few lawmakers—Republican or Democrat—would disagree.

But it was awkward nonetheless.

Just moments earlier, Ryan led the House in giving Boehner a sincere and laudatory send-off. The affable Ohioan presided over the election of his successor with his customary goodwill and humor—and a bucketful of his famous tears. As he rose to deliver a farewell address, Boehner turned behind him and asked staffers for a box of tissues. Holding them aloft with a nod to the chamber, he won the first of several ovations.

“I leave here with no regrets or burdens,” Boehner said. “If anything, I leave as I started—just a regular guy humbled by the chance to do a big job. That’s what I’m most proud of—that I’m still just me.” How well he did that big job will remain a matter of debate. Democrats believed he too often lacked the backbone to confront the most recalcitrant in his party; conservatives howled that he shut them out and took the path of least resistance to cut mediocre—or worse—deals with the White House.

When Boehner resigned, the GOP turned to Ryan, a wonky tax writer who had been a rising star in the party long before Mitt Romney picked him as his running mate in 2012. He ran eagerly for vice president but reluctantly for speaker. And although Ryan agreed to serve only after the party came begging, even he had to make promises to secure the support of the same conservatives who tormented Boehner.

Ryan assured the right he’d run the House differently, promising to shake up the structure of committees and give rank-and-file members a stronger hand in writing legislation that makes it to the floor for a vote. On Wednesday, the Republican conference formally nominated him in a private vote, and on Thursday the House ratified Ryan’s selection in a spectacle unique in American politics—a long, slow reading of each name of the chamber’s 435 representatives, who then rose to shout the name of their chosen candidate.

Ryan needed a majority of the chamber, and by the time the vote began, the only drama was in guessing how many of the 247 Republicans would cast their support elsewhere. All but three Democrats voted for Nancy Pelosi, the veteran party leader. (General Colin Powell got one vote, as did Representative John Lewis, the civil-rights icon, and Representative Jim Cooper, a Tennessee centrist.) The only other Republican to receive votes was Webster, the former speaker of the Florida House, who had initially won an endorsement from the renegade House Freedom Caucus. In the end, Ryan lost only nine Republicans—fewer defections than Boehner suffered each of his last two elections.

The final vote—the 236th for Ryan—came from Boehner himself, who announced Ryan's election and waited for him in the speaker’s chair. “Don’t cry!” the smiling Wisconsinite told him as the two friends embraced. It was, as everyone in the House knew, a fruitless request. After struggling to hold back his emotions for more than an hour, Boehner wept openly as he walked to the back of the chamber, waving to acknowledge a bipartisan ovation that lasted several minutes.

“John Boehner, you are the personification of the American dream,” Pelosi told him as she prepared to hand the speaker’s gavel to Ryan. When he finally got to speak, Ryan paid his own tribute to Boehner. The House applauded again, and Boehner, standing near the back, waved a white handkerchief that he used to wipe away his tears. He gave Ryan an exaggerated salute, turned around, and walked out of the chamber for the final time.

“Let's be frank: The House is broken. We’re not solving problems. We’re adding to them.”

With his large family, and both Mitt and Ann Romney watching from the gallery, Ryan addressed the House as speaker for the first time. Repurposing the words of Harry Truman after he assumed the presidency following the death of Franklin Roosevelt, he asked lawmakers to pray, not for him, but for each other. “Republicans for Democrats and Democrats for Republicans,” he asked. “And I don’t mean pray for a conversion. Pray for a deeper understanding.”

“Wherever you come from, whatever you believe, we are all in the same boat,” Ryan continued.

Yet once Boehner left, Ryan shifted his tone.

“Let's be frank: The House is broken,” he said. Pledging a clean break that wasn’t about “settling scores,” Ryan pledged to restore “regular order”—Congress-speak for empowering committees at the expense of top-down, leadership-dictated policy. He didn’t delve into specifics in his short speech, but he said he wanted the House to overhaul the tax code, improve healthcare, boost support for the military, and bring down the debt. In an echo of both Boehner and Obama before him, Ryan said that while the “cynics may scoff,” “you better believe we will try.”

“We will not duck the tough issues. We will take them head on,” Ryan pledged. “We should not hide our disagreements. We should embrace. We have nothing to fear from honest differences, honestly stated.”

They were pledges warmly welcomed by the entire House, Republicans and Democrats alike. And to a person, they were promises each of them had all heard before—most recently in early January, from the man who minutes earlier had walked out the door. Boehner had tried all of those things, but whether because he was thwarted by his allies or outmaneuvered by Democrats, he had failed to deliver.

The humble barkeep’s son is now on his way back to Ohio, and it’s now the man from Wisconsin’s turn.

A Cooling Economy

The U.S. economy slowed in the third quarter of this year, expanding 1.5 percent, the Commerce Department said, significantly slower than the 3.9 percent growth in the second quarter of 2015.

The deceleration was attributed to companies cutting back on inventories amid robust spending by consumers and businesses.

Economists had expected the economy to expand 1.6 percent, and they said they expected growth to pick up in the fourth quarter of the year.

Bloomberg adds:

Household purchases, buoyed by job and income gains, will probably continue to underpin the world’s largest economy even as weaker demand from overseas customers holds back exports and manufacturing. The quick re-balancing of stockpiles to be more in line with domestic demand heading into the holiday season indicates factory production will soon stabilize, eliminating a source of weakness.

The figures are likely to be closely watched by policymakers in the Federal Reserve who this week decided to keep interest rates near historic lows. They said a decision on rates will be considered at their next meeting, in December.  

“In determining whether it will be appropriate to raise the target range at its next meeting, the committee will assess progress—both realized and expected—toward its objectives of maximum employment and 2 percent inflation,” the Fed  said in a statement.

The New York Times has more:

The case for raising rates hinges in part on the Fed’s forecast that the economy will continue to add jobs at a healthy pace and that inflation will begin to rise more quickly. Moreover, some analysts argue that maintaining near-zero interest rates is now doing more harm than good by encouraging businesses to invest in things like share buybacks to lift their stock price, rather than long-term investments in equipment and developing new products.