Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 311

An Award for a Jailed Saudi Blogger

Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced last year to a decade in prison and 50 lashes a week for 20 weeks—a punishment that has been carried out once so far—for the crime of insulting Islam on his website. On Thursday, the European Parliament awarded Badawi the Sakharov Prize, its human-rights award.

“The conference of Presidents decided that the Sakharov Prize will go to Saudi blogger Raif Badawi,” Martin Schulz, the parliament’s president, said. “This man, who is an extremely good man and an exemplary good man, has had imposed on him one of the most gruesome penalties that exist in this country which can only be described as brutal torture.”

Schulz called on Saudi King Salman to release Badawi, who was arrested in 2012 and initially sentenced to 600 lashes and seven years in prison—a punishment that was increased to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison after an appeal. Badawi was accused of insulting Islam on his website Free Saudi Liberals, which served as a forum for debate.

Badawi received 50 lashes in January, but subsequent rounds of punishment have been postponed because of his health and international pressure. In June, the country’s Supreme Court upheld the sentence.

This week, his wife, Ensaf Haider, who fled to Canada with their children after the conviction, said she expects the punishment to resume soon, citing an “informed source.”

Flogging as a means of punishment is prohibited under the Convention against Torture, an international treaty to which Saudi Arabia is party. The kingdom is a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council, and heads an influential panel on that council.

Badawi was one of the three finalists for the award, which is named for the Soviet dissident and scientist. The other finalists were Venezuela’s democratic opposition and Boris Nemtsov, the slain Russian opposition leader.

Previous winners of the prize that honors those who defend human rights and fundamental freedoms include Nelson Mandela and Malala Yousafzai. Last year, the prize was awarded to Denis Mukwege, the Congolese gynecologist who has campaigned against the use of rape as a weapon of war.

China: One Child No More

China, the world’s most populous country, is ending its one-child policy nearly four decades after it first adopted the practice.

Here’s Xinhua, the state-run Chinese news agency:

China will allow all couples to have two children, abandoning its decades-long one-child policy, according to a communique issued Thursday by the Communist Party of China (CPC).

The move by the party’s Central Committee, which came on the final day of its fifth plenum, is not unexpected. The policy was unpopular among ordinary Chinese, and those who violated it faced punishments ranging from fines to forced abortions.

Beijing had eased the policy several times since it was first adopted in 1979. Two years ago, at a similar party conference, China allowed couples to have a second child if one parent was an only child. Before that, it allowed couples to have a second child if both parents were only children.

NPR reported at the time that despite the policy’s easing, not many Chinese couples were likely to have a second child because “raising a child in China is now very expensive,” particularly in the cities.

Indeed, despite estimates that the tweak would add up to 2 million extra births a year, only 700,000 couples applied to have a second in 2014, Chinese officials said.

One reason for the policy change: demographics. The policy that was introduced to slow China’s population growth worked—too well.

As NPR’s Frank Langfitt noted:

China’s labor is peaking, and state demographers have actually been talking to the central government for years begging them to change the policy, and they say, ‘We’re going to head into a real labor shortage coming up because of the policy.’”

Writing in The Atlantic, Adam Pasick noted the long-term consequences of the policy change in 2013: a larger labor force; more consumer spending; happier people; a smaller gender gap; a healthier housing market; and increased strain on natural resources.

It is estimated that the one-child policy prevented the births of 400 million children since its adoption. China is home to 1.37 billion people, making it the most populous nation in the world, but its growth rate has slowed, increasing 0.5 percent in 2013; that’s against 0.7 percent in the U.S. and 1.2 percent in India, the world’s second-most populous nation.  

Ben Carson's Mannatech Problem

During Wednesday’s GOP presidential debate in Boulder, Colorado, CNBC moderator Carl Quintanilla asked Ben Carson, a leading GOP contender and an accomplished pediatric neurosurgeon, about his relationship with a controversial nutritional-supplement company.

“There’s a company called Mannatech, a maker of nutritional supplements, with which you had a ten-year relationship,” Quintanilla asked. “They offered claims that they could cure autism and cancer. They paid $7 million to settle a deceptive-marketing lawsuit in Texas and yet your involvement continued. Why?”

“Well, it’s easy to answer,” Carson quickly replied. “I didn’t have an involvement with them. That is total propaganda and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda.” He then backtracked a little. “I did a couple of speeches for them. I did speeches for other people, they were paid speeches,” he told the crowd before switching back to a full denial. “It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of relationship with them.” Then he again acknowledged a role. “Do I take the product? Yes, I think it’s a good product.”

Presidential candidates frequently stretch the truth. Some of them have made fantastical claims about President Obama’s birth certificate, for example, or their ability to construct a giant wall on the Mexican border that Mexico will pay for. But Carson's outright denial seems egregious even by that standard. His relationship with the company is lengthy and well-documented, which makes his response even more bizarre.

Carson first spoke out in favor of Mannatech products over a decade ago when he claimed that the Texas-based company’s “glyconutritional supplements,” which included larch-tree bark and aloe vera extract, helped him overcome prostate cancer.

The company doctor “prescribed a regimen” of supplements, Mr. Carson told its sales associates in a 2004 speech. “Within about three weeks my symptoms went away, and I was really quite amazed,” he said to loud applause, according to a YouTube video of the event.

The candidate today is cancer-free after surgery. He told associates of the company, Mannatech Inc., that he initially considered forgoing surgery and treating the cancer with supplements only.

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Carson’s relationship with the company deepened over time, including “four paid speeches at Mannatech gatherings, most recently one in 2013 for which he was paid $42,000, according to the company.” The company disputes that Carson was a “paid endorser or spokesperson,” according to the Journal, and claims his financial compensation went to charity.

National Review also highlighted Carson’s connections to Mannatech in January and how Carson’s team went to great lengths to distance themselves from the company. Some of his video appearances have been removed from the Internet, but those that remain appear to show a deeper affiliation than Carson claimed during Wednesday’s debate.

In one video for Mannatech last year that remains online, Carson discusses his experiences with nutritional supplements while seated next to the company’s logo. “The wonderful thing about a company like Mannatech is that they recognize that when God made us, He gave us the right fuel,” Carson explained. “And that fuel was the right kind of healthy food … Basically what the company is doing is trying to find a way to restore natural diet as a medicine or as a mechanism for maintaining health.”

Carson stopped short of making substantive medical claims about Mannatech’s products. “You know, I can’t say that that’s the reason I feel so healthy,” he said. “But I can say it made me feel different and that’s why I continue to use it more than ten years later.” His apparent hesitation is understandable. Seven years before Carson appeared in that video, then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican who was elected governor of Texas last year, sued Mannatech for running a illegal marketing scheme under the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Abbott claimed that the Dallas-based company and its sales representatives repeatedly exaggerated the medical efficacy of their products.

“Texans will not tolerate illegal marketing schemes that prey upon the sick and unsuspecting,” Abbott's office said at the time. “Aided by an army of multi-level sellers and their fictitious claims about its products, Mannatech has aggressively marketed supplements to countless unwitting purchasers.” Abbott also emphasized that the company’s claims were “not supported by legitimate scientific studies, nor are its products approved as drugs by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

Mannatech paid a $6 million settlement in 2009 in which the company admitted no wrongdoing. “Under the agreed final judgment, Mannatech agreed not to advertise or otherwise claim that its dietary supplements can cure, treat, mitigate, or prevent disease,” according to Abbott’s office. The settlement also levied a $1 million fine against company founder Samuel Caster and banned him from working for Mannatech for five years.

Carson is neither the first nor the only high-profile doctor to endorse nutritional supplements with dubious scientific backing. A Senate subcommittee excoriated Dr. Mehmet Oz last year for promoting “miracle” pills and “magic” weight-loss solutions on his nationally televised daytime talk show. My colleague James Hamblin noted that Oz’s endorsements helped fuel a “sordid, under-regulated” market for self-proclaimed miracle cures. The industry is largely shielded from regulatory scrutiny by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which does not require dietary and nutritional supplements to be approved by the FDA before their sale in the United States.

The debate question could have provided Carson with an opportunity to clarify his relationship with the company and his views on nutritional supplements. Instead, his denial will only increase public scrutiny of his interactions with a controversial industry.

The Budget Deal Clears the House of Representatives

The final major vote of John Boehner’s drama-filled tenure as House speaker turned out to have very little drama at all.

A bipartisan majority in the House on Wednesday afternoon easily approved the two-year budget agreement that Boehner negotiated with fellow congressional leaders and the Obama administration. The vote was 266-167. Every Democrat voted in favor of the measure, while two-thirds of Republicans voted no. The deal increases federal spending by $80 billion and raises the debt ceiling through March 2017, all but ensuring that the president is done with the fiscal crises that have marked his last five years in the White House.

The bill now goes to the Republican-controlled Senate, where supporters are expected to overcome opposition from conservatives and in particular, three of the GOP’s 2016 presidential candidates. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul have all come out against the deal, and Paul has vowed to “filibuster” the agreement once he returns to Washington from the Republican debate in Colorado. But there appears to be little that Paul can do beyond delivering one of his trademark long speeches, given that well over 60 senators are expected to support the deal, and the nation does not face a potential debt default until November 3.

A final hurdle in the House was cleared in the hours before the vote, when members of the Agriculture Committee said they would support the budget agreement despite cuts to a crop insurance program that were included to offset spending increases for the Pentagon and domestic programs. Those lawmakers said party leaders assured them they would address the cuts in a future spending bill, National Journal reported.

The budget deal won late endorsements from Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker-elect, and from Senator Bernie Sanders, the liberal Democratic presidential candidate. Ryan had earlier complained that the secretive, last-minute process used to complete the agreement “stinks,” but he said that on substance, the agreement was good enough. “What has been produced will go a long way toward relieving the uncertainty hanging over us, and that’s why I intend to support it,” he said. “It’s time for us to turn the page on the last few years and get to work on a bold agenda that we can take to the American people.”

What Ryan did not mention was that the measure was similar in structure to a budget deal he negotiated with Democrats two years ago and that as speaker, he will be responsible for securing passage of an omnibus spending bill based on the parameters of Boehner’s agreement. He must do so by December 11 to avoid a government shutdown.

The Budget Deal Clears the House

The final major vote of John Boehner’s drama-filled tenure as House speaker turned out to have very little drama at all.

A bipartisan majority in the House on Wednesday afternoon easily approved the two-year budget agreement that Boehner negotiated with fellow congressional leaders and the Obama administration. The vote was 266-167. Every Democrat voted in favor of the measure, while two-thirds of Republicans voted no. The deal increases federal spending by $80 billion and raises the debt ceiling through March 2017, all but ensuring that the president is done with the fiscal crises that have marked his last five years in the White House.

The bill now goes to the Republican-controlled Senate, where supporters are expected to overcome opposition from conservatives and in particular, three of the GOP’s 2016 presidential candidates. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul have all come out against the deal, and Paul has vowed to “filibuster” the agreement once he returns to Washington from the Republican debate in Colorado. But there appears to be little that Paul can do beyond delivering one of his trademark long speeches, given that well over 60 senators are expected to support the deal, and the nation does not face a potential debt default until November 3.

A final hurdle in the House was cleared in the hours before the vote, when members of the Agriculture Committee said they would support the budget agreement despite cuts to a crop insurance program that were included to offset spending increases for the Pentagon and domestic programs. Those lawmakers said party leaders assured them they would address the cuts in a future spending bill, National Journal reported.

The budget deal won late endorsements from Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker-elect, and from Senator Bernie Sanders, the liberal Democratic presidential candidate. Ryan had earlier complained that the secretive, last-minute process used to complete the agreement “stinks,” but he said that on substance, the agreement was good enough. “What has been produced will go a long way toward relieving the uncertainty hanging over us, and that’s why I intend to support it,” he said. “It’s time for us to turn the page on the last few years and get to work on a bold agenda that we can take to the American people.”

What Ryan did not mention was that the measure was similar in structure to a budget deal he negotiated with Democrats two years ago and that as speaker, he will be responsible for securing passage of an omnibus spending bill based on the parameters of Boehner’s agreement. He must do so by December 11 to avoid a government shutdown.

The Mindy (Parenting) Project

For a season that began in fantastical fashion—complete with an alternate reality where Joseph Gordon Levitt played the title character’s seemingly picture-perfect husband—The Mindy Project’s recent episodes have tackled issues of much more general concern. The central focus of “The Bitch is Back” and “Stay-at-Home MILF” was the agonizing internal debate Mindy faced on whether to go back to work after giving birth to her son, and how to communicate her decision to ultimately do so to her fiancé Danny.

The show’s latest episode, “Mindy and Nanny,” dodges this question while Danny is away visiting his sick father, and instead highlights the challenges of balancing work and childcare (at one point, Mindy hides her son in a cardboard box in the supply closet at her office), and of finding someone Mindy can trust to help watch over Leo while she temporarily returns to work.

While Mindy’s conflicting feelings on the subject of staying home—she wants to be there for her son, but remains passionate about her job as an OB-GYN—are clear throughout the season so far, what’s most powerful about these episodes is what’s left unsaid.

Although Danny (a fellow doctor) continuously prods her to consider staying home, he’s never once asked what his choice would be. True, his character has long been depicted as the epitome of an alpha male, but Mindy has also typically been portrayed as the archetypal alpha female navigating work, dating, and now, motherhood—so it’s surprising that while he may not question this assumption, she doesn’t either.

Instead, it’s simply taken for granted that if anyone were to leave work to be a long-term primary caregiver, it would be Mindy. (And in this case, the salary of either partner doesn’t seem to be a deciding factor, given that the show has previously hinted that Danny and Mindy attended medical school together and have what appear to be comparable jobs as OB-GYNS at their practice.)

The Mindy Project’s overall portrayal of parenting provides a spot-on reflection of the current moment, but doesn’t dare to question its constraints. “Being a working mom is really tough,” says Danny in “The Bitch is Back,” glossing over how hard it is to be a “working dad.” In a recent interview with our business editor, Becca Rosen, Anne-Marie Slaughter notes that the term “working dad” isn’t even part of broader vernacular because the responsibilities of fatherhood and work have long been viewed as ones that don’t coexist.

The assumption that Danny wouldn’t even consider being the stay-at-home parent—all other things equal—captures the prevailing nature of existing norms about parenting and the need for a fundamental shift in perspective. The question shouldn’t by default be, “Will Mom stay home?” if parents decide this would be best for their child, but rather: “Which one of us will?”

Have You Seen This Blimp?

Updated Wednesday, October 28 at 3:31 p.m.

A missing military blimp has descended somewhere in central Pennsylvania and is near the ground. NORAD tweets:

Update: JLENS aerostat drifting northward & has descended near the ground. Anyone seeing the aerostat notify law enforcement & remain clear

— NORAD & USNORTHCOM (@NoradNorthcom) October 28, 2015

If you see a large, cigar-shaped white balloon in the sky, you’re not seeing things, but you should get in touch with 911.

An unmanned JLENS blimp has come unmoored at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland near Baltimore. (That’s “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System,” which explains why they use the acronym.) The blimps—technically aerostats, which are helium balloons tethered to the ground—are stationed at the Army facility, where they can detect cruise missiles, airplanes, drones, and vehicles on the ground, with a range of 340 miles.

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InFocus: Airships

In theory, and when they’re tied down, that is. Some time around 1 o’clock Wednesday afternoon, one them came loose. The 242-foot blimp isn’t a cheap piece of equipment, either. The average cost of the Raytheon-made airships is around $175 million dollars. In 2010, a civilian balloon broke loose and destroyed a blimp on the ground that had run $182 million.

As The Baltimore Sun noted in a devastating investigation last month, the blimps haven’t really performed anywhere near as hoped:

After 17 years of research and $2.7 billion spent by the Pentagon, the system known as JLENS doesn’t work as envisioned. The 240-foot-long, milk-white blimps, visible for miles around, have been hobbled by defective software, vulnerability to bad weather and poor reliability … JLENS is a stark example of what defense specialists call a “zombie” program: costly, ineffectual and seemingly impossible to kill.

In its most high-profile failure, the system failed to spot the postal worker who flew an gyrocopter onto the Capitol lawn in 2014, just the sort of incursion the blimps were meant to spot.

In an FAQ posted online, Raytheon assured readers that it was unlikely the aerostats would come untethered: “The chance of that happening is very small because the tether is made of Vectran and has withstood storms in excess of 100 knots. However, in the unlikely event it does happen, there are a number of procedures and systems in place which are designed to bring the aerostat down in a safe manner.”

The escaped aerostat has launched many a mocking tweet, and even gotten Edward Snowden’s attention:

Remember the $2.7b giant surveillance blimps? Something went wrong, and it's on the loose. https://t.co/Oa7gqI14Hm pic.twitter.com/Db6T8VWURq

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 28, 2015

Blimps may seem harmless and silly, but it’s hard out here for a blimp. The JLENS’s struggles notwithstanding, airships have a long, noble, and sometimes tragic history serving U.S. national defense. Following German deployments of Zeppelins against Britain in World War I, the U.S. began toying with rigid airships in the 1920s. The U.S.S. Shenandoah flew for two years before crashing in a storm in 1925, killing 14.

In 1921, the Navy’s smallest blimp broke loose and went on what The New York Times described as a “rampage,” drifting for more than three hours at a height of 5,000 feet before peacefully coming down on a farm in Scarsdale, New York.

The U.S.S. Akron, which flew in the 1930s, was the world’s largest helium airship and the first flying aircraft carrier; it could launch an airplane. (The ship was named for its hometown in Ohio, where Goodyear built it. The tire company still builds its signature blimps there, though the newest is actually a semi-rigid airship.) Here’s the Akron launching a plane during tests:

U.S. Navy

But the Akron crashed in 1933, killing 73 of 76 crew members. During World War II, the military made more than 150 more blimps in Akron, which were used as effective escorts for ships, because they could spot submarines.

Now, however, the hunter has become the hunted. Rather than assisting the military in stopping attacks—whether from submarines or from cruise missiles aimed at Washington—NORAD has scrambled two F-16s to track the airship as it drifts away from Aberdeen, headed toward Pennsylvania, perhaps confused about how to get to the World Series in Kansas City. Who’s laughing at the blimp now?

Treehouse of Horror: An Appreciation

In the 26th edition of “Treehouse of Horror,” The Simpsons’s Halloween special series, the villainous Sideshow Bob finally achieved his dream of murdering Bart Simpson, using a wacky reanimation machine to do it over and over again. He whacked him with a hammer, fed him to a lion, and pulled his guts out and wore them like a backpack. To hear it described, it doesn’t sound funny—and it wasn’t, but not for the reasons you’d think. In its glory days, “Treehouse of Horror” was television’s best mix of non-sequitur jokes and genuinely creepy short storytelling, even if it’s now more like a parody of its former brilliance.

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The Simpsons Are Separating: A Rant

Sideshow Bob’s triumph in “Treehouse of Horror XXVI,” which aired Sunday as part of The Simpsons’s 27th season, was a meta-joke about the character’s long-running string of appearances where he tries, and always fails, to take revenge on Bart for getting him arrested in the show’s first season. Each “Treehouse” episode has three short segments that take place outside of the show’s continuity, so anything can happen. This has turned into a blank slate for the show’s writers to indulge in postmodern jokes, but at its best, “Treehouse of Horror” transforms absurdity into art.

This year, a spoof of Godzilla turned into a fourth-wall breaking story about Hollywood remakes of foreign horror films, and the episode ended with aliens Kang and Kodos bemoaning their lack of story time and getting squeezed into an old-fashioned square aspect ratio as punishment. “Just because it looks like season four, doesn’t mean it is season four,” Kodos told the audience, a common refrain in The Simpsons’s later seasons.

Early “Treehouse of Horror” episodes were particularly avant-garde in their lack of emphasis on laughs. Though The Simpsons was a ratings smash, in its early years it was first and foremost a family sitcom that hadn’t yet developed the larger world of Springfield. After a successful debut season, the show tried out its first Halloween special in the second season, inspired by Halloween anthology comics of the 1950s, The Twilight Zone, and the thrill of telling a story “out of canon”—allowing the show to kill off characters or turn them into monsters without harming The Simpsons’s larger continuity. The first “Treehouse of Horror” has two straightforward horror-comedy segments (the family in a haunted house; the family getting abducted by Kang and Kodos), and ends with a surprisingly straightforward adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” which has Bart in the titular role but otherwise mostly adheres to Poe’s text.

I’ve written about the audacity of “The Raven” before when discussing the legacy of Sam Simon, one of the show’s developers. He insisted on doing the segment despite the creator Matt Groening’s fears that it’d come off as too pretentious, and produced a lovely six-minute piece of animation that summarizes Poe’s famed tale for a family audience without sacrificing its dark core. Perhaps no other “Treehouse of Horror” segment would ever be as artful, but the episode’s success allowed the writers to continue pursuing nightmarish little tangents once a year, with enough jokes to keep the creepiness in check.

The early “Treehouse of Horror” episodes were particularly avant-garde in their lack of emphasis on laughs.

In “Nightmare Cafeteria” (from “Treehouse of Horror V”), Bart and Lisa find out their school is cooking misbehaving children and serving them as lunch; the episode is intense enough that it has them wake up at the end of it, dismissing it all as a horrible dream. As they wake, Marge assures the kids there’s nothing to be afraid of, “Except for that fog that turns people inside out.” Said fog seeps through their windows, and within minutes, an inside-out Simpsons family is doing a number from A Chorus Line to close out the episode—a brilliant example of how the show’s horror could turn on a dime from unsettling to funny and back again without inducing whiplash.

The following year’s “Treehouse of Horror VI” had a particularly bizarre dream-like quality that the show never equaled. In the first segment, giant advertising statues come to life and start rampaging through the streets of Springfield. The second, a spoof of A Nightmare on Elm Street, featured several scenes actually taking place in the dreams of Bart and Lisa, and embraced their unsettling lack of logic. The last was the then-revolutionary “Homer Cubed,” fully rendered in 3-D animation, which saw Homer venture into a peculiar CGI world and then the real world. Jokes became fewer and farther between, and each segment always managed to cram a traditional three-act story into a six-minute piece, retaining an old-fashioned campfire story vibe.

The mix of strict time limits and wide creative freedom in “Treehouse of Horror” led to stories that could be immeasurably wacky but satisfying at the same time. But in later years, the decline of “Treehouse” mirrored the decline of the show in general. Celebrity cameos became commonplace, and rather than spoofing classic horror movies or old Twilight Zone episodes, the show parodied recent blockbusters like Avatar and Harry Potter, even though they had tenuous connections to the horror genre.

In many ways, the appearance of Sideshow Bob on Sunday marked both a low point and a fitting salute for a show that seems to only survive on Fox’s airwaves because of profit-margin calculations. The Simpsons has run for so long that it now seems able to spoof itself, giving a well-worn character a chance to do something new. There was nothing particularly scary or memorable about watching Bob hack away at Bart over and over again, but the audacity served as a reminder of the creative freedom The Simpsons pioneered for years and years. Sideshow Bob may not be able to make killing Bart interesting anymore, but his recurring attempts pay homage to one of the real highlights of Simpsons history.

The Rise of Paul D. Ryan

The Republican Party may have 15 presidential candidates and a deeply frustrated voter base, but as of Wednesday afternoon, it has a new de facto leader: Paul Ryan.

In a secret-ballot election, House GOP lawmakers formally nominated the 45-year-old Wisconsinite to serve as speaker, ending a month-long search to find a replacement for the departing John Boehner who could united the fractious party. Ryan received 200 votes versus 43 for Florida Republican Daniel Webster. The full House will hold a public floor vote on Thursday, after which Ryan is expected to become the youngest speaker since Reconstruction.

As speaker, Ryan would be the highest-ranking Republican in government and second in line to the presidency—a notch below the office he fell short of winning in 2012. But at least for the next several months, he will hold sway over a party that has been tossing out one leader after another for the last year and a half. First it was Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who was ousted in 2014 primary. Boehner resigned under pressure from conservatives last month, and his would-be successor, Kevin McCarthy, abruptly withdrew his candidacy for speaker after House hard-liners endorsed a little-known Floridian, Webster.

Ryan has remained personally loyal to Boehner, but his brief statement following the GOP election had the hallmark of a challenger who had just turned out a long-serving incumbent. “This begins a new day in the House of Representatives,” said Ryan, who was flanked by the rest of the Republican leadership team with the exception of Boehner. “John Boehner served with humility and distinction, and we owe him a debt of gratitude, but tomorrow we are turning the page.”

“We are not going to have a House that looked like it looked the last few years,” Ryan continued. “We are going to move forward. We are going to unify. Our party has lost its vision, and we are going to replace it with a vision.”

Webster, a former speaker of the Florida House, extended his candidacy even after Republicans coalesced around Ryan. But by the time rank-and-file lawmakers entered the closed-door voting session on Wednesday, Ryan’s election by the Republican caucus was a formality. The remaining drama for Thursday’s floor vote is how many members of the uncompromising House Freedom Caucus will oppose him. (Boehner lost 25 votes when he won reelection in January, a modern record.)

Ryan entered the race reluctantly, having repeatedly professed a lack of interest in the speaker’s gavel and his preference to remain as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. He changed his mind only under heavy pressure from party big-wigs, including Boehner, McCarthy, and Mitt Romney, who picked him as his running mate three years ago. Sensing leverage, Ryan declared his candidacy with a list of demands—that the party unify around him, that he have more time than previous speakers to spend with his family, and most controversially, that the House change its rules to make it harder for dissident lawmakers to depose him, as they had threatened to do to Boehner. Conservative hard-liners largely acceded to Ryan’s first two conditions, but not the third. Only after a pair of private meetings did the Freedom Caucus decide to support him, virtually ensuring Ryan’s election.

“We are going to move forward. We are going to unify. Our party has lost its vision, and we are going to replace it with a vision.”

Although he launched his candidacy with trepidation, Ryan has since made a full-on effort to lock down support and fend off an uprising from outside conservative groups which have attacked his support for immigration reform and accused him of being too close to Boehner. Ryan backed off—for the moment—his demand for protective rules changes and told conservatives he wanted to change the rules that empower rank-and-file members, as they’ve requested. And he’s sworn off any push to overhaul immigration laws while President Obama remains in office.

The vote on Wednesday suggested Ryan has more work to do in unifying a party that Boehner was rarely able to corral. Forty-five Republicans—nearly one-fifth of the House conference—voted against him, and he’ll need more than a dozen of those opponents to support him on the floor in order to get the 218 votes he’ll need to win. (McCarthy received a single Republican vote despite withdrawing his candidacy, and Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee earned another.) In tone and substance, Ryan addressed his remarks after the election to the few dozen conservatives who had forced Boehner to resign, as opposed to the 200 or so whose support he retained.

Will he have any trouble on Thursday? Even Republicans who voted against Ryan in the party meeting suggested he should be fine. Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, a strong Boehner critic, predicted Ryan would win all but a dozen or so Republicans in the floor vote, giving him a safe cushion. “A lot of folks who voted for Webster will respect the will of the conference and vote for the conference nominee on the floor,” Mulvaney said. “I think he gets 230 votes tomorrow.”

In the days leading up to the vote, Ryan began to address some of the nuts-and-bolts concerns that rank-and-file conservatives had raised. He criticized the process that Boehner used to strike a two-year budget deal (it “stinks,” Ryan said), even though he ultimately endorsed the agreement on Thursday. Before Republicans cast their ballots Wednesday, he assured them he would seek to avoid the kind of crisis-driven legislative moves that the House has turned to time and again. And he said he’d take a more confrontational approach with the Senate, which has been the same source of frustration for House lawmakers under Republican control as it was when Harry Reid ran the floor.

Finally, Ryan took care of one last thing before facing Republican lawmakers: He

Volkswagen's Big Losses

On Wednesday, Volkswagen posted a quarterly loss for the first time in 15 years. In a press release accompanying the announcement of the $1.8 billion net loss, Volkswagen Group emphasized that the company had been generating profit before “special items”—the  company’s polite term for expenses related to its emissions scandal—emerged. Volkswagen has set aside $7.4 billion to cover the costs of the fallout, though some analysts suspect that that number will go up. Volkswagen’s stock rose 4 percent on the earnings report, as the net loss is lower than some investors had feared.

“The figures show the core strength of the Volkswagen Group on the one hand, while on the other the initial impact of the current situation is becoming clear. We will do everything in our power to win back the trust we have lost," said Matthias Müller, the chairman of Volkswagen, in the press release.

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The Academic Paper That Broke the Volkswagen Scandal

In September, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Volkswagen to fix nearly half a million of its vehicles after charging that the German car-maker installed illegal devices intended to cheat emissions testing. After admitting to the existence of “defeat devices” in some 11 million cars, Volkswagen has repeatedly apologized to its customers and replaced its CEO.

Earlier this month, German authorities ordered a mandatory recall of 8.5 million Volkswagen cars in Europe, with the deadline for repairs set at the end of next year. The company has announced plans to retrofit the affected cars, but most of the details on how exactly Volkswagen will fix the vehicles still remain unclear.

Details are even more scant regarding an official recall in the U.S., but there are reportedly already 350 lawsuits filed against Volkswagen in response to the emissions scandal. The EPA told Reuters earlier this month that it was awaiting a software fix from Volkswagen, which would require evaluation and approval before it can be implemented. But one hurdle in the U.S. will be convincing Volkswagen owners to comply with the eventual recall and repair their vehicles—many are worried that the fix will compromise performance. The Atlantic has reached out to the EPA for comment on the progress on the recall, and will update this story when we get a response.