Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 313

Race and Discipline in the South Carolina Schools

The viral video of a Richland County, South Carolina, sheriff’s deputy tackling a student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia has understandably outraged many people.

Whatever new information emerges about what precipitated Deputy Ben Fields’ decision to drag the student out of her desk and handcuff her, the case is unusual. Fields has been placed on leave, and the Department of Justice is investigating the incident.

But however extreme the Columbia case may be, it is not unusual for school discipline to fall heavily on black students, either in South Carolina or nationwide. Across the U.S., African Americans are more likelier to be disciplined and to face harsher sanctions. One reason may be the increasing presence of police in schools. The video “shows the dangers of increased police presence in schools …. we are seeing this conflation between safety and discipline,” Janel George of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund told The Guardian.  

At the same time, however, school discipline is its own universe, but one that reflects the way the criminal-justice system handles adults. In both systems, African Americans, and African American men in particular, tend to be penalized at higher rates and more harshly.

South Carolina is one of the 19 states that still allows corporal punishment in schools.

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According to Palmetto State law, “The governing body of each school district may provide corporal punishment for any pupil that it deems just and proper.” Unlike in some states, there’s no need to get parental permission first. (Corporal punishment delivered in loco parentis is also exempt from state law governing child abuse.)

Nationwide, corporal punishment is doled out far more to black children than white ones or Hispanic ones. “Black children were nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to be corporally punished than White children, and nearly eight times more likely to be corporally punished than Hispanic children,” the Children’s Defense Fund calculated in 2014. CDF found that 838 students are hit a day in U.S. public schools.

South Carolina isn’t one of the biggest states for corporal punishment, with about 150 cases in 2011-2012, according to Department of Education figures. But those students who are punished are highly likely to be African American. Black students make up 36 percent of South Carolina schools, but they account for 58 percent of corporal punishment cases.

Expand out to discipline overall and the disparities get starker. A University of Pennsylvania study found that 60 percent of suspended students in South Carolina are black. (The analysis found large disparities across the South, as compared to the national average.) A 2013 report by the South Carolina Advisory Commission to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found something similar by studying three specific districts.

“In all three school examined districts, African Americans were significantly more likely to be suspended and placed into alternative education programs than white students,” the committee found. “In addition, in two of the three districts African American students were also much more likely than white students to be expelled.”

These problems tend to snowball: Children are suspended and fall behind on school work; once behind, they misbehave more and are disciplined further, creating a vicious cycle.

The USCCR report continued:

As the public education system appears to work effectively for many white children, regardless of household income status, the noted racial disparities in school discipline prompt the South Carolina Committee to wonder why public education does not seem to work so well for children of color in this country. If there is no racial bias in the administration of discipline, as school officials insist, why do children of color “act out” more in school than white children?

While South Carolina offers a strong case study in these problems, it’s not unusual. The “discipline gap” is a subject of concern among educators and researchers nationwide. In January 2014, the Departments of Education and Justice issued guidance to districts on how to try to close the gap.

What explains the gap? Perhaps in some cases it is outright racism. But more often, it is likely muddier. Take implicit bias, for example. Just as studies have found that blacks are prosecuted for marijuana at higher rates than whites—even though whites are actually more likely to use it—black students in one North Carolina analysis were found to be suspended more frequently for the same offenses than white ones. Socioeconomic factors may likely play a role, though many of those are attributable in part or full to structural racism. Other speculation points to cultural differences.

One of the more striking things about the videos from South Carolina is the impassivity of the other students in the classroom. Other than the student filming, the others look on, somewhat frozen. Perhaps that’s because seeing a black student harshly dealt with simply didn’t register as unusual for them.

Wicked City: A Juvenile Serial-Killer Drama

It’s time to bury the serial-killer drama on TV. The genre’s official time of death comes about five minutes into ABC’s Wicked City, an unbearably trite new “event series” set in Los Angeles in 1982. A handsome creep named Kent Grainger (Ed Westwick) hits on a girl at the famed Whiskey a Go-Go and drives her into the Hollywood Hills at night. She proceeds to perform oral sex on him in his car ... until he reaches for a knife and stabs her to death. Hollywood has long casually mixed sex and violence in poor taste, but Wicked City feels especially egregious: It’s a desperate play to be a dark, adults-only story that comes off instead as purely childish.

Wicked City is, in short, gross: headless corpses, murder mid-coitus, and Westwick’s leering face. But it’s gross with no deeper purpose. Everything about the show feels cribbed from greater efforts on similar topics, like BBC’s The Fall or Showtime’s Dexter. So when Kent stabs his victims in his car, it’s easier to roll your eyes at the tastelessness than to actually feel horrified. On top of that, Wicked City features a tortured cop: Jack Roth (Jeremy Sisto), an LAPD homicide detective who seems to be the acknowledged expert on serial killers. His diagnosis on this new one? Probably mommy issues, he pronounces. In other words, Wicked City makes it clear from the start that it has no intentions of bringing anything original to an already crowded TV subgenre, and that it hopes to lure fans of better shows.

Unlike NBC’s Aquarius, a summer dud about the Charles Manson killings, Wicked City is not based in truth, but has conjured its “Sunset Strip Killer” from plenty of established serial-killer tropes. He’s a sexually dysfunctional wounded soul, who’s supposedly charming (he’s able to talk women into his car). He forms a connection with a nurse named Betty (Erika Christensen) after his attempt to murder her goes awry; the show seems to be setting her up as his future accomplice. And he’s trying to get the attention of the media, publicly displaying his victims’ dismembered bodies so that Roth will be assigned to the case.

But like Aquarius and Fox’s The Following—another slasher drama on network TV that almost seemed too proud of its proclivity for sexual violence—Wicked City has all the beats of a standard cop show, with juvenile attempts at “mature content” mixed in. Roth is two steps away from the grizzled straight-arrow Sisto played on Law & Order, but he’s meant to seem more flawed and dangerous by the fact that he’s having an affair. Kent’s method of killing women is absurd from a procedural standpoint: He stabs them while they’re on top of him, practically bathing in their DNA, but on Wicked City, the more garish the deaths, the better.

Wicked City has all the beats of a standard cop show, with juvenile attempts at “adult content” mixed in.

Perhaps most hilariously, Wicked City’s backdrop is 1980s Los Angeles, which the show renders as shallowly as possible. Several scenes are set at the Whiskey, a rock club that launched the careers of groups like Van Halen and Motley Crue. Accordingly, gleeful hair metal pervades the soundtrack as the body count rises, and a supposedly dramatic final scene is set to ... a Billy Idol concert. This isn’t to disparage the high-energy output of these peroxide-blonde gentlemen, but there’s no good reason to make the Rock of Ages soundtrack the musical backdrop for slaughter. (Any chance at seriousness is immediately lost at the sound of “White Wedding.”)

The performances don’t help the show much either: Westwick’s main misstep is acting obnoxiously sinister from the get-go. He became well-known for playing a creep before, Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl, but that show started out with him as a villain and worked to slowly rehabilitate his character. On Wicked City, viewers know Kent is depraved, but he’s supposed to be able to switch on the nice-guy charm to lure ladies out of the Whiskey and into the hills. Instead, Kent seems even scarier when he’s hitting on women than when he’s stabbing them to death, making it hard to root for his poor victims.

Christensen doesn’t fare much better as a seemingly well-meaning single mother, partly because all her darker notes come off too obviously. For example, in one scene she has a friendly conversation at work, but then she goes and sadistically sticks a patient with a needle while sewing up his stitches. Later, she puts her cute kids to bed and then goes outside and squashes a spider with murderous joy. It all feels a bit uninspired, and the show doesn’t really offer any backstory to explain her grim behavior.

Wicked City might have gotten away with all of this if it were clearly going for camp, but the tone is too muddled, and Kent’s crimes are nauseating, rather than cheekily gory. He’s no Zodiac Killer, even if the show wants him to be. Like The Following and The Fall, it seems to be setting up an epic cat-and-mouse game between Kent and Roth that can only end one way. As a 10-episode “event,” Wicked City will likely wrap with Kent’s death and/or capture (this is still network TV). But if ratings were good, it’d come back in some form or another, perhaps with a new killer. The Following managed to last for three putrid seasons, killing and reviving its anti-hero more than once, but here’s to hoping Wicked City doesn’t have that kind of luck.

REI: ‘Black Friday Has Gotten Out of Hand’

American retailers have been opening earlier and earlier for Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year. At first, some stores opened at the crack of dawn, then it crept up to midnight, and finally stores started opening on Thanksgiving evening to lure diehard deal hunters after dinner. Some of the more aggressive stores keep marathon store hours, operating continuously from Thursday evening till Friday night.

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But then came the backlash: A group of retail chains, including Nordstorm and Costco, announced they wouldn’t open on Thanksgiving day. Some framed it as giving their employees a break before the holiday season, and others hoped to elicit the goodwill of their customers.

Now one company is taking this ethos even further: The outdoor-equipment retailer REI announced on Monday that it plans to close its distribution centers, all 143 of its stores, its headquarters, and even its website on Black Friday this year. There will be no special promotions that day, either.

For the company’s 12,000 employees, Black Friday will be a paid holiday. It’s up to them to decide how to spend their time, but the company is hoping that they will follow a simple mandate: Go outside and do something.

“We’re closing our doors, paying our employees to get out there,” said Jerry Stritzke, the president and CEO of REI, in a press release. “We think that Black Friday has gotten out of hand and so we are choosing to invest in helping people get outside with loved ones this holiday season, over spending it in the aisles.”

According to USA Today, Black Friday is one of REI’s top sales days of the year. So while it’s costly, it’s a strong positive statement. “It seems consistent with REI's mission and ownership and does a great job making the organization's values clear to their employees and customers,” said Zeynep Ton, a business professor at MIT who researches how companies can offer better jobs. “Good for them for standing up for something.”

This keeps with REI’s overall spirit. It is a business, but it’s also a cooperative, meaning that its customers can pay a $20 membership fee, which gets them, among other things, annual “dividends” that come in part from the company’s profits. REI currently has about 5.5 million members.

More generally in the economy though, Black Friday fatigue has been on the rise. Last year, there was a wave of Change.org petitions and social-media campaigns calling for both retailers and consumers to boycott Black Friday. While it’s still one of the biggest shopping days of the year in the U.S., a report from the National Retail Federation found that only 55 percent of holiday shoppers spent money on Thanksgiving weekend last year, and that 42 percent of their spending was online. REI’s announcement reflects more than just how tired its customers are of Black Friday; it reflects how tired many Americans are as well.

Blood Orange, Black Lives Matter, and the Cost of Political Art

Blood Orange is the recording name of Dev Hynes, an R&B producer who has worked with the likes of Solange Knowles, Carly Rae Jepsen, and the Chemical Brothers. Today, he released a new song called “Sandra’s Smile,” a slowly swaying ballad whose lyrics are about black people killed in police custody.

The Sandra of the song title is Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old woman found hanging in a Florida jail cell after a traffic stop earlier this year. Most of the images of her online do indeed show her smiling. Hynes posted one of these photos along with the song’s lyrics, which begin, “Who taught you how to breathe / then took away your speech?”

As the song goes on, the focus turns inwards, toward the narrator’s own feelings. Hyne’s vocals are smooth, but the words are drawn out, mournful, tired: “Can you see it in my face? I’ve had enough for today.” Later, he mentions Trayvon Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton, who has said that she has not forgiven the man who killed her son:

Look, about an hour ago
I read Sybrina’s quote.
Why should she forgive?
Do we lose you if we don’t?

As the Black Lives Matter movement has risen, there have been two competing narratives about the cultural response to it. One asks about why more prominent musicians and artists haven’t spoken up; it wants to know where the protest music has gone, and what happened to hip-hop’s political streak. The other narrative points out the performers that have made songs clearly meant to reflect the headlines—the D’Angelos and Janelle Monaes and J. Coles and Killer Mikes and Kendrick Lamars—while also noting that music can, and often is, political even when it doesn’t sling obvious slogans.

Dev Hynes’s work and public statements over the last year or so help reconcile these two points of view. To follow him on social media is to be reminded of how painful, how draining it can be to try and maintain conscientiousness and make art that addresses intractable problems. In a published conversation between himself and Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, Hynes talked about facing racial harassment when playing clubs, festivals, and abroad. He also talked about the difficulty of releasing music about it. After attending a Trayvon Martin rally in New York’s Union Square, Hynes said, he wrote a “whole album of songs that were just about how I was feeling about the entire thing.” But, he continued,

My goal was to create a fake email account and email it to publications for free to put out, because I wanted it to be out … and this is a problem that I have in general, but I didn’t want ME to be the aesthetic. I didn’t want myself to be in the way of what I was thinking and what I wanted to say.

His wariness about associating his recording persona with politics is a reminder that speaking up is not a neutral act—it can have consequences for one’s career, safety, and mental health. Kanye West, not known for staying silent on his opinions, has said he refrained from commenting on the death of Michael Brown because West’s father asked him not to, explaining, “He was just trying to be protective of his son.” Questlove has invoked the Bush-era backlash to the Dixie Chicks when talking about the challenges of making protest songs: “We were like, ‘Man, if a white woman can lose her career in the United States for speaking up for what’s right, then shit, we’ll get the electric chair.’”

In Hynes’s case, it seems, there came a point when he couldn’t hold back anymore. In the wake of the Charleston church shooting earlier this year, he released an 11-minute track called “Do You See My Skin Through the Flames?” Greg Cwik at Vulture called it “less a protest song ... than a self-vivisection”; in it, Hynes speaks about the fact that his last name is a slave name, derived from the Irish word for “servant.” And as for what moved him to release the track, Hynes posted this explanation:

America is in the middle of an act of terrorism right now, and black people are being attacked and killed every day. Every day I wake up and it becomes harder for me to interact with my friends and the world around me. I am scared, scared for myself, for my family, for my brothers & for my sisters ... It is an incredible sadness & heaviness. Being told that we do not matter on and on and on day to day to day. America likes to act like a super human yet continues to blame human error for these horrific acts. I don’t know what to do anymore.

His music on the topic is less about solutions to or causes of injustice than the psychic cost of having to think about it all the time. Often it’s said that artists have an obligation to speak up politically, but reading Hynes’s words you can see just how much of a loaded statement that is. Art can help escape, it can help distract. Using art instead to amplify one’s own pain and delve into huge problems is a choice, and it often isn’t one that can be made easily.

The Lies the Quiet Car Tells

The problem began, as so many problems will, on the Quiet Car. A little before 10 Eastern Time on Sunday morning, Chris Christie, following an appearance on Face the Nation in Washington, boarded a northbound Amtrak train just before it pulled away from Union Station. Christie, in his haste, boarded the Quiet Car. He did not realize that fact. He began to make a phone call. He was promptly shushed. A scene ensued.

It was thus that the governor of New Jersey, like so many Amtrak riders before him, found himself the victim of Quiet Car Justice.

Then, this being Amtrak and Christie being Christie, the incident was promptly tweeted, and then blogged about and opinion-pieced and mocked. In response to which, Christie’s spokeswoman issued the following statement:

On a very full train this morning, the Governor accidentally took a seat in Amtrak’s notorious quiet car. After breaking the cardinal rule of the quiet car, the Governor promptly left once he realized the serious nature of his mistake and enjoyed the rest of his time on the train from the cafe car. Sincere apologies to all the patrons of the quiet car that were offended.

The statement is dripping with sarcasm, and rightly so: The Quiet Car is notorious, for reasons that are at once extremely legitimate and extremely silly. The Quiet Car is less a travel cabin than a kind of rolling social experiment; its existence is wholly contingent on its temporary community’s adherence to fairly arbitrary social codes. (While some of its Amtrak-stipulated rules are clear—“phone calls are not allowed and all portable electronic devices must be muted or used with headphones (passengers using headphones must keep the volume low enough so that the audio cannot be heard by other passengers)”—others are open to interpretation: “Guests are asked to limit conversation and speak in subdued tones.”)

So while in theory, definitely, the Quiet Car is wonderful—a bit of silence in a loud world, a refuge of civility among the various indignities of travel, an embodiment of all that is wrapped up in the old and romantic idea of Riding the Rails—in practice, the Quiet Car can end up being a pretty terrible place. And for reasons that Governor Chris Christie made clear in his inadvertent brush with it.

For one thing, within most every Quiet Car will be seated, almost inevitably—call it Christie’s law—an individual who either does not realize or does not care about the assorted sanctities of the Quiet Car. A person who do not recognize that “Quiet” is capitalized in Amtrak’s parlance because quiet, here, is not so much a description as an ethical edict. A person who—in the moral cosmology of the Quiet Car, at any rate—is kind of a jerk.

As my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates noted last year, “Somewhere around 75 percent of the time that I’ve ridden in the quiet car, somewhere has decided that there is a cell-phone conversation they must have, or a song that they must play so that all can hear its melody blaring out the headphones.” (He added: “It’s almost as if the offenders regard the regular cars as a public lavatory, and the Quiet Car as a private bathroom where they may repair to handle their shit.”)

The Quiet Car is a place of unattainable ideals. The stuff it symbolizes will almost always be shattered by human inevitability.

And then, inevitably, there is the Quiet Car Vigilante, the person who takes it upon him or herself to right the wrong that has been done against the good people of the Quiet Car—and, indeed, against the spirit of the Quiet Car itself. (“Spot a notable Quiet Car violator or silent patriot?” the Twitter account @IsQuietCarQuiet exhorts. “DM us and let accountability ring. On silent.”) Often, the vigilante-ing will be louder than the offending conversation itself. Often, it will escalate. “Ever since I quit hanging out in Baltimore dive bars,” the writer Tim Kreider noted in a widely shared New York Times essay in 2012, “the only place where I still regularly find myself in hostile confrontations with my fellow man is Amtrak’s Quiet Car.”

Which is to say: The Quiet Car is a place of unattainable ideals. The stuff it symbolizes—silence, civilization (the aspirational logic of the Quiet Car does not recognize a discrepancy between the two)—will almost always be shattered by human inevitability. And that translates, too, to the other things the Quiet Car represents, or claims to: the pleasures of silence, and the notion that quietude itself has become a kind of luxury good, and the primacy we have, as a culture, placed on the search for calm in a chaotic world. The popularity of yoga, the ubiquity of noise-canceling headphones, the rise of the word “mindfulness,” the deeply, desperately held conviction that environmental calm can bring existential calm—all of these, in their way, are baggage stored within the neat receptacles of the Quiet Car.

But what Chris Christie’s dramatic (and appropriately loud) ejection from the Quiet Car reminds us of—indeed, what any Quiet Car Shamee will remind us of—is how unobtainable silence, literal or otherwise, actually is. We can get to Penn Station early, jockeying for space in the Quiet Car. We can pay extra for silent lounge areas in airports, put down $300 for a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. We can try to buy silence like any other commodity. But those efforts will be, at least in part, futile. Because there will always be a Chris Christie. There will always be someone who is either ignorant or dismissive of the niceties of quietude. While technology has allowed us to control many, many things—among them, in some senses, nature itself—there is one thing that will always be out of our control: other people.

Congress Is Poised to 'Clean the Barn'

John Boehner might get to “clean the barn up” before he leaves, after all.

The departing speaker and Democratic negotiators are closing in on a fiscal agreement that would bring budget peace—and more federal spending—to Washington for the remainder of the Obama presidency while staving off the possibility of a debt default through March 2017, according to a senior congressional official briefed on the talks. The deal could still fall through, but party leaders hope to complete it Monday night so that the House could vote by Wednesday, just a day before Boehner is expected to hand his speaker’s gavel to Paul Ryan. And in a sign of optimism, House Republicans called an emergency meeting of the conference for Monday evening to discuss the talks.

If completed, the agreement would be the most significant spending accord in two years and perhaps since 2011, when the White House and congressional Republicans enacted deep spending cuts in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling. Obama and some Republicans have been trying to undo part of those cuts, known as sequestration, ever since—GOP defense hawks want to lift budget caps for the Pentagon, while the president has refused to do so unless he can get an equivalent increase in domestic spending. Under the emerging agreement, that’s what would happen. Money for defense and non-defense accounts would go up by about $50 billion this year and another $30 billion in fiscal 2017, according to Politico. The deal would also prevent steep premium increases for millions of Medicare beneficiaries, the House official said, in a win for Democratic negotiators. (The official spoke on condition of anonymity, because the negotiations are ongoing.) CNN is reporting that the spending increases would be offset by oil sales from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, higher fees for telecommunications companies, and changes to the crop insurance program.

In political terms, the agreement would be a victory for three people in particular. Boehner would succeed in his stated goal of (mostly) clearing the deck of big issues for his successor. Ryan, who has barely won the support of hardliners in the House, would be spared the challenge of having to negotiate contentious fiscal agreements within weeks of assuming the speakership. And Obama would walk away victorious in his bid for Congress to relax spending restraints now that the economy has improved and the budget gap has shrunk (at least for the next few years). The president would also get relief in another respect: By removing the shadow of a possible government shutdown or default, he stands a better chance of seeing Congress act on his other priorities—namely criminal-justice reform—in his remaining 14 months in office.

In brief speeches on the Senate floor Monday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Harry Reid confirmed that fiscal negotiations were ongoing but that no deal, as of yet, had been reached. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, delivered a similar message across town. “As I stand here today, not everything has been agreed to. That means nothing has been agreed to,” he told reporters.

Any budget agreement would face immediate condemnation from fiscal conservatives in both the House and Senate, who have fought against any reversal of spending cuts that they see as the GOP’s one concrete policy achievement of the last five years. And although it would be in Ryan’s best interest, its completion this week would make for a difficult 24 hours on Wednesday and Thursday, when he must stand for election first among his Republican peers and then in a public vote on the House floor. The hardliners who have opposed his candidacy for speaker would undoubtedly demand that he fight against the fiscal deal. Yet Congress has shown repeatedly over the last few years that in the rare instances when bipartisan deals are struck between Republican leaders and the White House, the center can hold against opposition from the right and left, especially when Obama can rally Democrats in support of his position.

The potential agreement does not include everything Democrats have sought. It does not, according to the House official, include a long-term transportation bill to replenish the Highway Trust Fund, which runs out of cash this month. (Congress is expected to pass a temporary fix to buy more time otherwise.) And it does not address the Export-Import Bank, which saw its charter expire earlier this year. But a bipartisan coalition looks likely to revive the 80-year-old lending agency through other means, making its inclusion in the budget deal less of an imperative. So Boehner’s barn might not be spotless, but if he can seal a deal that sets a two-year budget and dispenses with the debt-limit drama, it will be a pretty significant sweep.

The Magnitude of the Refugee Crisis

With the various numbers being thrown around about the Europe’s refugee crisis—4 million, 800,000, 100,000—it’s hard to visualize the many people who are crossing into Europe each day. But here’s what a fraction of those numbers looks like, courtesy of Britain’s Channel 4, which posted this video of migrants and refugees crossing into Slovenia from Croatia:

Drone footage shows migrants and refugees crossing farmland

This drone footage filmed near the Croatian border shows thousands of migrants and refugees crossing through farmland on foot.Slovenia has complained it lacks manpower and equipment to handle the recent influx of people crossing through the country.

Posted by Channel 4 News on Monday, October 26, 2015

Over the past 10 days alone, about 76,000 people have entered Slovenia, which has a population of 2 million. Other Central European states have similar numbers: Macedonia, which like Slovenia is a former Yugoslav republic, saw 49,000 people enter last week alone; 300,000 people have entered the country of 2 million people since the start of the year, Mirjana Milenkovski of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told Bloomberg.

Many of the migrants and refugees are fleeing the fighting in Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and elsewhere. Their presence in Europe has become a political and humanitarian issue—especially with winter fast approaching. Most are making their way to points west and north, mostly Germany.

But the European Union’s response to the most serious refugee crisis since World War II has been fragmented. Countries like Germany and Sweden have welcomed the newcomers; others like Hungary and the Czech Republic have not. Germany’s calls for a more equitable sharing of the migrants is strongly opposed by many of the EU’s newer members. As my colleague Marina Koren pointed out, Hungary has constructed razor-wire fences along its borders with Serbia and Croatia to prevent the entry of refugees and migrants.

European leaders have tried—with little luck—to forge a common response to the crisis, and that failure has prompted fears about the future of the bloc. Their efforts have mostly been piecemeal. On Monday, European leaders agreed to create another 100,000 spaces in refugee reception centers: 30,000 will be created in Greece, where many of the refugees and migrants first arrive—nearly 50,000 last week alone; UNHCR will create another 20,000; an additional 50,000 will be created along the western Balkan route that the refugees and migrants use.

You can follow some of our coverage of this story here.

Supergirl Takes Flight

The hero of Supergirl, as promised by the show’s title, is plucky Kara (Melissa Benoist), a flying Kryptonian who wears a red and blue jumpsuit with a cape. But one of the cleverest elements of the new CBS series is the way it acknowledges the elephant in the room: Looming perpetually in the background is “the other guy,” her cousin and fellow resident alien, who made it to Earth years before she did. Supergirl was created in the late-1950s as a lazy knockoff of a hit character—Kara’s like Superman, but female!—but the new show smartly plays on those tropes, presenting a hero who’s easy for villains to misjudge and who cheerfully capitalizes on any sexist low expectations.

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It’d be easy for Supergirl to head into clichéd territory, partly because the character’s origin story is so intentionally unoriginal. Kara Zor-El was Superman’s older cousin, sent from their dying planet to protect him. But since her space-pod got waylaid in the mysterious Phantom Zone, where time doesn’t pass, she arrived after him and thus dons her heroic mantle in his shadow. Like Clark Kent, Kara works for a newspaper (well, a “media conglomerate”), wears glasses in the guise of a “secret identity,” and was adopted and raised by loving human parents. The show’s developers, Greg Berlanti, Ali Adler, and Andrew Kreisberg, wisely embrace the straightforward approach, making Supergirl’s pilot episode a formulaic pitch down the middle.

It’s hard to glean the show’s future prospects, but it’s not the disaster some might have predicted from early advertising that leaned heavily on scenes of a bewildered-looking Kara bantering with her office mates. When David E. Kelley developed Wonder Woman for NBC in 2011, the resulting pilot (which was never picked up to series) was a catastrophe, filled with every sexist trope you could imagine in a show about a female hero in a poorly designed halter top trying to balance her work life and her love life. In Supergirl, Kara is slightly bumbling in the office (again, shades of Clark Kent), but has a good grasp of her powers, and the show delights in watching her surprise anyone who mistakes her for a ditz.

A lot of the credit has to go to the casting of Benoist as Kara—she’s as perfect a fit as Grant Gustin was for The Flash last year (also developed by Berlanti and Kreisberg). Benoist is charming enough to steady the pilot during its shakier moments, most of which involve the dull exposition required to quickly lay the groundwork for every other character in the ensemble. Alex (Chyler Leigh), her adopted sister, serves as a mentor and voice of caution, inducting Kara into a secret government agency that deals with alien threats on earth headed by the morally ambiguous Hank Henshaw (David Harewood). At work, Kara contends with the brusque CEO Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart) and the handsome photographer Jimmy Olsen (Mehcad Brooks), ported over from the Superman universe to deliver advice from, yes, “the other guy,” a much mentioned off-screen presence.

Supergirl delights in watching Kara surprise heroes and villains alike who misjudge her as a ditz.

Supergirl is pitching itself as a straightforward crime-fighting hero show, in line with the hits of the past. The pilot features winking cameos from Helen Slater (who played Supergirl in the eponymous 1984 flop film) and Dean Cain (who played Superman in the 1990s TV show Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) as Kara’s adoptive parents. Her do-gooder deeds include saving a plane that’s about to crash, busting some bank robbers, and stopping an evil alien with her laser vision—classic scenes that the show manages convincingly. Overall, Supergirl is visually impressive (the special-effects budget can’t have been small), and it has just the right amount of self-awareness.

It’s also notable that this is the first show to feature a female comic-book superhero since Birds of Prey, which ran for one short season 13 years ago. No doubt it’ll take a few episodes for the show to find its footing, while Kara fights some easily dispatched villains of the week. Next month, Netflix’s Jessica Jones will continue this progress (albeit with a far darker take), but the dearth of series like it, along with CBS’s slick production and Benoist’s likable performance, makes Supergirl an easy show to cheer for.

Thousands of Migrants Are Crossing the Balkans on Foot

On October 17, Hungary closed its border with Croatia, blocking thousands of refugees still traveling from Mediterranean landing points to central and northern European countries, forcing thousands to shift their routes. An estimated 58,000 migrants and refugees heading to Germany and Austria have arrived in Slovenia over the last week alone. The smaller Balkan countries are still straining to cope with the influx of refugees, as they have most of this year. Colder weather has started making the journey even more difficult, as men, women, and children from war-torn and impoverished regions of the Middle East and Africa continue their journey north.

The Adele Machine

Earlier this year, the global music industry moved the agreed-upon weekly date for new releases to Fridays. This robbed poor little Tuesday of its one ensured moment of cultural excitement and also placed music in the same context as new movies: entertainment meant to usher out the week, to accompany Saturday and Sunday fundays, and to be declared a flop or hit by Monday morning.

This Monday’s report: Movie-ticket sales did terribly in the past three days, perhaps because potential filmgoers shut themselves into dark rooms alone and put Adele on repeat. The British singer’s new single, “Hello,” came out Friday morning, broke one-day streaming records on Spotify and Vevo, and appears on track to set a benchmark in the category of one-week U.S. digital song sales. It easily beat competition from a new Justin Bieber song, smashed a record recently set by Taylor Swift, and has already been viewed on YouTube far more times than the Star Wars trailer released a week ago.

It might be helpful to think of Adele as akin to a blockbuster film franchise herself. 25, the album that “Hello” previews, is explicitly the culmination of a trilogy, the Return of the Jedi to 19’s New Hope and 21’s Empire Strikes Back (Adele has already said that the next album won’t be named after her age). And it’s being marketed in a way that has more in common with current Hollywood models than the now-vogue music strategy of ambushing the public with an album and then doing the marketing push afterwards: Adele’s song and CD release dates have been announced in advance, with TV commercials and publicity coordinated to raise awareness.

What’s more, “Hello” sounds like a sequel, which is to say the same as before but bigger. The ingredients are recognizable—piano, orchestra, that enormous voice, that enormous heartbreak—but the ratios are ever-so-shifted away from risk-taking and toward ensuring further dominance. Like Michael Bay ladling in more explosions with each Transformers iteration, Adele and co-writer/producer Greg Kurstin engineer a pyrotechnical hook delivered twice per chorus; each of the song’s three choruses lasts about 50 seconds, and each is under-girded by percussion and strings creating ever-greater amounts of drama. It’s a standard ballad formula, but the way “Hello” alternates from hushed verses of almost no instrumentation to big, walloping crests of sound is a move away from the somewhat inventive spirit that characterized much of Adele’s previous work. “Rumor Has It” or “Rolling in the Deep” crashed around, grooved, and felt a little more variegated; “Someone Like You” featured a lively and distinctive piano part throughout, with a chorus defined far more by the vocal melody rather than production.

It might be helpful to think of Adele as akin to a blockbuster film franchise.

Which is not to say that “Hello” doesn’t feature wonderful vocals. Adele’s as powerful as she’s ever been, jagging her voice upwards and downwards for contours sharp enough to remind us why we call pop melodies “hooks” in the first place. The lyrical conceit, about wanting reconciliation with a long-ago friend or lover, escapes banality through very Adele-ian and very relatable self-effacement—when she says “It’s so typical of me to talk about myself,” it almost comes off like shade toward other pop stars’ conflation of vanity with empowerment. And the motif of the word hello is kind of perfect as pop-poetry: It works within the context of the song, the forthcoming album, and Adele’s comeback narrative.

The commercial dominance of “Hello” owes to all of these things, as well as pent-up demand for the particular brand Adele represents. Pop history has shown that initial sales for albums are often referendums on the success of an artist’s previous release, and Adele’s 21 is one of the most successful albums in history. Plus there’s the fact of market differentiation: To anyone who says they wish for less-manufactured stars than those usually topping the charts, Adele is there—no matter how calculated the roll-out, the song construction, or the producer credits on the forthcoming album (Max Martin and Shellback produced track No. 2). Her brand is set and solid; her instincts and choices so far seem impeccable. The only suspense about 25, right now, is over just how big it will be.