Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 319

Eddie Murphy and the Long-Awaited Cosby Joke

When Saturday Night Live aired its 40th anniversary episode in February, many hoped it might be the perfect occasion for Eddie Murphy to return to stand-up comedy. They were off about the timing—but only by a little. The moment fans had been waiting 28 years for finally came when Murphy did five minutes of material while accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center on Sunday night. His target: Bill Cosby. Though that might be the comedic equivalent of low-hanging fruit these days, Murphy’s jokes marked a deliberate shift in his own thinking on the subject in recent months.

Related Story

The Justice Bill Cosby’s Accusers Can’t Receive

Murphy’s impression of Cosby is already legend. It memorably leads off his film Raw, where he recalls Cosby chastising him for using too much bad language in his previous stand-up set, Delirious. Murphy was asked to reprise his act for SNL 40, in a sketch that mocked Cosby’s shattered public image. But he turned down the opportunity, only giving a brief “thank you” speech on the show and telling no other jokes. (Kenan Thompson did the sketch.) “There’s nothing funny about it,” he told The Washington Post. “If you get up there and you crack jokes about him, you’re just hurting people. You’re hurting him. You’re hurting his accusers.” So what changed?

At the Twain Prize ceremony, which will air on PBS on November 23, Murphy noted that Cosby had won the prestigious comedy award in 2009, and hadn’t yet been asked to give his trophy back. He then launched into an impression of a foul-mouthed Cosby refuting such a demand, further jabbing at the contrast between his clean image and the horrifying accusations of sexual assault that more than 50 women have made against him. Ironically, Cosby twice turned down the Twain Prize before accepting it, because he was unhappy at the “profanities used” in the 1998 ceremony celebrating the inaugural winner Richard Pryor.

Murphy has long seemed to understand Cosby’s hypocrisy, at least since the release of Raw marked the end of the former’s stand-up work. And he reportedly worked hard on the material he debuted at the Kennedy Center, running through the jokes with Arsenio Hall and Chris Rock in a D.C. hotel room beforehand. “[Eddie] said, ‘Because Cosby gonna get sick of this soon, he’s gonna get sick of people hating, and eventually he’s gonna have to say something,’” Hall told The Washington Post. “And we were like, ‘That is funny, man. Are you willing?’”

So why did it take until now for Murphy to rise to the occasion? The SNL sketch represented a perfect opportunity, but the stage may have been too grand—the viewing audience was huge, and Murphy may not have wanted to make his return performing material he didn’t write (the sketch was Norm Macdonald’s creation). “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m coming back to SNL for the anniversary, I’m not turning my moment on the show into this other thing,’” he told The Washington Post.

So it was a pleasant surprise to see one of the most famous comedians alive returning to the stage on his own terms, and the fact that he used the platform to mock Cosby will likely make even bigger waves. Murphy has become more reclusive in recent years. He’s even stopped appearing in mediocre Hollywood comedies, which were the backbone of his career in the 1990s and 2000s. His Kennedy Center appearance might signal the start of the third act in a storied career, or might just be a fascinating throwback to remind fans of his legacy. Either way, it’s still clear that if Murphy tells jokes, people will listen.

The Yin and Yang of Post-Disney Pop Stars

“You’re met-ah-phor-ic-al ginandjuice” is a roughly phonetic transcription of how Selena Gomez delivers the most fascinating line on her new album, Revival. The song is “Hands to Myself,” an instantly catchy homage to Janet Jackson in seduction mode—all breathy, clipped enunciation and lightly clicking percussion. But how wonderfully bizarre is “you’re metaphorical gin-and-juice” as a phrase? It rebukes the idea that Millennials like the 23-year-old Gomez don’t get the meaning of “literal”; is a redundant description given that it’s unlikely she’d be singing to an actual cocktail; and is further proof of Long Beach gangsta rap’s grand influence.

It may or may not be coincidence that echoes of Snoop Dogg’s 1994 hit about the joys of a highball also show up on Demi Lovato’s Confident, another proclamation of grown-and-sexiness from another former child star, released one week after Gomez’s. “Got my mind on your body and your body on my mind,” Lovato coos on her queer-coded single “Cool for the Summer,” swapping corpuses in for Snoop’s cash as producers Max Martin and Ali Payami tack big-budget studio roar onto a piano hook that sounds lifted from The OC’s theme song.

“Gin and Juice” references are way common across popular music, but it still feels remarkable to have these two particular stars mining this same particular source material. As kids, Lovato and Gomez starred in Barney & Friends together; they ruled the Disney channel at roughly the same time; they have now released albums, co-written and produced by some of the same hit-makers, seven days apart. Are they two friends indulging a shared love for g-funk? Are they and their teams simply raiding the same source of clichés, perhaps without even thinking about what that source is? Or is someone in their writers’ room playing a joke about the derivativeness of pop, like the graffiti designers who subverted the Homeland set they’d been hired to decorate?

Both Lovato and Gomez have recently emerged from a young-entertainer pipeline even sleeker than the one that spat out the first class of new-millennium teen idols (Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera). It’s common knowledge that for all such figures—past and present, Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande included—eventually comes a moment where they loudly announce that they’re in charge of their careers and occasionally make visits to the family-planning section of CVS. The irony is that such declarations of independence signal that they’re moving from one system of corporate control into another one: From Disney (or Nickelodeon) to what John Seabrook’s new book title has coined as The Song Machine, a network of major-label handlers, producers, and writers who collaborate on chart-beating double entendres about sex.

Given the shared lineage, it’s tempting to talk about Gomez and Lovato’s new releases in terms of what they have in common, which is a lot. The two women announced the reparation of their once-wounded friendship in a suspiciously well-timed Instagram parlay; both albums have thesis-statement keywords as titles; both feature the same, specific tropes of 2015 pop (background vocals pitchshifted way high like ghost chipmunks or way low like ghost Eeyores; heavy-lidded affect probably learned from Lana Del Rey); and both echo each other in strange ways (conspicuously casual swearing; the word “kerosene”; Lovato has a song that shares a title with Gomez’s last album). But the similarities make it so it’s easier to see the contrasts—how natural talents and public narratives, filtered through the same pop apparatus, create two very different artistic identities.

It’s silly to say, but this Barney & Friends clip featuring Lovato and Gomez provides an all-too-easy metaphor for their perceived differences in the cultural eye. Gomez serenely practices her patty-cake skills with a boy on the playground; Lovato, bespectacled and confused, plays trumpet to the slight annoyance of Gomez, her buddy, and the Purple Dinosaur who unites them all. In the years since, Gomez has often played “cool girls” on TV; Lovato has more often been cast to portray awkwardness or shy strength, and is more clearly the natural musician. And so it goes that in the tabloids, Gomez has always seemed unflappable, even though she has had little reason to be—she dated Justin Bieber, and she recently revealed that she went to chemotherapy for Lupus. Talking about body-shaming on the Internet, Gomez recently reflected “I actually had never experienced it before,” a statement of implicit contrast with Lovato, who over the years has talked about her fight with bulimia and other mental-health issues. Lovato makes headlines for taking a fall on stage, or going out with her makeup unblended; intentionally or not, she breaks with the Beyoncé-style pop ideal of flawlessness.

The public personas jibe with their musical abilities; Gomez’s vocal range is limited, but part of her appeal is in the fact that she doesn’t make sudden moves. Her past hits have often been mid-tempo come-ons—“Come & Get It,” “The Heart Wants What It Wants”—and now, there’s the luscious “Good for You,” all about dressing up and shimmying slowly for a lover. Throughout Revival, her producers bring in a vague world-music vibe—Latin guitar, Bollywood textures, and the kind of loping rhythms that you hear in W Hotel lobbies—while Gomez sings about empowerment as transcendence, whether in the new-agey poem that opens the album, the song title and the carefree whistles of “Kill ‘Em With Kindness,” and the gospel hip-hop inflections of “Rise.” Gomez’s personality and deeper desires remain mysterious, but her calm power is infectious; put the album on when you need to get the rest of the world off your cloud.

Lovato’s Confident, though, is for times you need to fight. Accordingly, it’s as bombastic a pop album we’re likely to get until Lady Gaga makes her true return. With digitized horns and jock-jam drums, she charges out on the opener/title track much like Shania Twain on “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” and then goes near a capella in the chorus to taunt, “What’s wrong with being confident?” The surging lesbian tease of “Cool for the Summer” comes next, followed by “Old Ways,” which pairs trap-rap swagger with a big pep talk of a chorus. The template—aggression, hunger, sweating for self-determination—is set. By track four, Lovato settles in pining-balladeer mode, where she stays for much of the rest of the album: shout-singing and lurching octaves as the production mimics battering rams and ’80s-metal slow dances. Sometimes all this noise and straining is moving; often, it’s tiresome; at all times and unlike Gomez, as people in the age bracket of her fanbase might say, Lovato has no chill.

Sit with it for a while, and Lovato’s album starts to feel like the more distinctive one, the result of an excellent vocalist with an on-record personality that feels more human, more vulnerable, than any of her peers. You could see all of this on display on SNL this past weekend, where Lovato sang one of her new ballads, “Stone Cold.” When she cried and her voice cracked, it felt less like she was making mistakes and more like she was showing evidence of a talent that can’t be manufactured—the soul in the machine of post-Disney stardom.

Stranded in Serbia

Updated on October 19 at 3:34 p.m.

Thousands of refugees and migrants were stranded in Serbia on Monday after Hungary sealed off a border for the second time this year.

Hungary has constructed razor-wire fences along its borders with Serbia and Croatia to prevent the entry of people who have fled their homes in the Middle East and Africa and entered Central Europe in record numbers. The fence along the border with Serbia went up in September, leading migrants and refugees to turn to Croatia to continue their journey northward. The barrier along the Croatian border went into effect early Saturday.

The latest closure has forced refugees west; on Saturday, 5,000 people entered Slovenia, which says it will accept 2,500 refugees per day. The closure has also created a huge bottleneck along Serbia’s border with Croatia.

“It is like a big river of people, and if you stop the flow, you will have floods somewhere,” Melita Sunjic, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told Reuters of the backlog. “That’s what’s happening now.”

More than 10,000 people entered Serbia from Macedonia on Sunday, according to the UN refugee agency, Reuters reported. Early Monday, 6,000 were stranded along the Serbia-Croatia border after a cold night of rains. By Monday night local time, Croatia had opened its border with Serbia, allowing people to pass through, according to Sunjic.

UNHCR reported a shortage of food and blankets in the area. Reuters photos showed some refugees burning shoes to create bonfires to warm themselves. Many were “out in the open, they cannot sleep on the ground because of knee-deep mud,” says Sunjic. One doctor in Serbia said some were suffering from hypothermia. “We don’t have a chance to treat; we don’t have the actual medicine to be given out; we don’t have any more raincoats,” he told the BBC. At least 2,000 people had slept on a train held on the Croatian side of the border.

Central European countries are passing around the blame for the bottleneck. Slovenia says Croatia ignored its quotas for migrants and is transporting large groups of people to their border. Croatian officials say Slovenia has changed several times the number of migrants it says it is willing to accept, and accuse Greece of not doing enough to slow the flood of people entering the region. Serbia quarreled with Croatia last month over the latter’s border restrictions, which have since been lifted. And Hungary blames pretty much everyone.

The bottleneck is expected to only get worse. More than 5,000 people cross into the region from Greece every day.

Jane the Virgin Proves Diversity Is More Than Skin Deep

As the only show currently on network television with a predominantly Latino cast, Jane the Virgin matters. The CW’s comedy-drama, loosely adapted from a Venezuelan telenovela and now in its second season, coincides with a reinvigorated debate about immigration, citizenship, and Latinos in America. At a time where getting people of color into more colorblind roles is widely viewed as the end goal for diversity on TV, the show stands out by going in  the opposite direction—by fully drawing on the complexity of its characters’ Latino culture.

Jane the Virgin doesn’t just make its Latino characters visible: It makes their point of view the dominant lens of the show and filters their stories through the socially aware telenovela format. True, this means it inhabits an outlandish world of hyperbolic gestures and emotions. But the telenovela is a important cultural touchstone for many Latinos—the second-season opener even begins with a flashback showing Jane as a young girl fretting over the future of the couple on her favorite telenovela. As such, the format is uniquely suited to amplify how gender and race shape the lives of Jane and her family, making Jane the Virgin the rare diverse show that embraces the cultural origins of its characters on multiple levels.

Among the many issues it cares about is the concept of Latina womanhood—not that there is a monolithic Latina womanhood, or that Jane the Virgin is the first show to star Latinas. The series focuses on three different generations: 23-year-old Jane (Gina Rodriguez), her mother Xiomara, and her grandmother, Alba. But unlike the short-lived ABC sitcom Cristela, Jane the Virgin doesn’t construct Latina-ness through pointed racial or ethnic humor. And unlike Ugly Betty, it doesn’t play off many of its racially loaded storylines by making them about social “awkwardness” or “not fitting in.”

Instead, it takes the more daring route of understanding its female characters. Latin American telenovelas often rely on problematic portrayals of women that fall into two types: sexy, fiery, and brazen, or cloyingly sweet, naïve, and submissive (though this has changed in recent years). Jane’s mother and grandmother are modeled after these opposing versions of Latina femininity. Alba (Ivonne Coll) is a warm-hearted, endearing grandmother. Because she’s also a devout Catholic, her granddaughter’s virginity is important to her. But Alba’s preoccupation with Jane’s purity is also a result of her daughter’s teen pregnancy. Xiomara (Andrea Navedo), now a 39-year-old aspiring pop star, is the counterbalance to her mother. She’s flighty, sassy, and often forces Jane into the role of caretaker. Even though telenovelas often present these two types of womanhood as irreconcilable, Jane the Virgin spends a lot of time teasing out their hidden complexities.

In the pilot, an accidental artificial insemination leaves Jane pregnant and seriously contemplating whether she wants to be a mother. When Jane asks Xiomara if she regrets not getting an abortion, Xiomara replies in a roundabout way, seemingly confirming Jane’s feeling that her birth derailed her mother’s plans. Jane fears her mother would have chosen an abortion if Alba had allowed it, but the show doesn’t allow that interpretation to last long. Later, Alba confesses to Jane that she, in fact, advised Xiomara to get an abortion, but Xiomara refused. By subverting what’s typically expected of characters like Alba and Xiomara, the show makes the telenovela format its own and adds dimension to characters who could otherwise be flat and unoriginal.

Jane the Virgin doesn’t play off many of its racially loaded storylines by making them about social “awkwardness” or “not fitting in.”

Similarly, Jane’s status as a “virgin,” cemented in the show’s title, seems destined to define her. Instead, she quite literally “tries on” various types of womanhood as episodes progress. In scenes that play out in Jane’s imagination, and that combine Pedro Almodovar’s satirical edge with Amélie’s whimsy, she becomes a sexy maiden, a damsel in distress, a girl-next-door, a saint, and a rom-com heroine. Her flights of fancy evolve into more elaborate set pieces, a change that coincides with Jane accepting her ambitions to be a writer. Over time, she learns some roles “fit” her better than others. Sometimes Jane is strikingly similar to the virtuous telenovela heroines who overcome obstacles with a little help and a lot of luck. Sometimes Jane is more proactive, relying on her own resourcefulness and gumption. Jane the Virgin’s attempt to legitimize and revise the representation of women in the telenovela makes it clear that it takes its characters and its Latina viewers seriously.

The context in which telenovela characters develop is distinct from U.S. soap operas or primetime television. The telenovela is a historically and politically aware genre; it attends to the class conflicts and institutional problems that its audiences face. As such the telenovela’s focus on love, marriage, and the reconstitution of the nuclear family comes from an effort to romanticize stability. Cinderella stories of impoverished “good” girls who fall in love with rich men temper concerns about poverty and social mobility. In Jane the Virgin, these themes play out in much the same way, and the question of the women’s financial security is woven into romantic storylines. Alba’s backstory reads like a fairy tale: She fell in love with a rich boy who came from Venezuelan oil money, but her parents didn’t approve. He gave up his fortune and decided to move to America with her. When Xiomara rekindles her romance with Rogelio, a rich and famous telenovela star, she too seems headed for her own happy ending.

But telenovela heroines must earn their happy endings—by establishing their moral superiority over their rivals. Morality and religion play a big role in telenovelas, much like they do in the everyday lives of many Latinos and Latin Americans. In Jane the Virgin, Catholicism is deployed to test the women’s views on sex and motherhood, as seen in the abortion storyline of the first episode. This comes up again in a later episode when Jane, already pregnant, decides to have sex with her fiancée, Michael, despite initially wanting to wait until marriage. The show renders their decision a practical one—after all, what does Jane have to lose now that she’s pregnant? But it’s harder than anticipated for Jane to let go of Alba’s well-intentioned but overwrought proclamations about the sacredness of Jane’s “flower.”

But perhaps the most important way Jane the Virgin reveals itself as a show with an inherently Latino perspective is how it deals with issues of citizenship. In an unlikely sequence of events, Alba ends up in the hospital in a coma. Xiomara is informed that because Alba’s in the country illegally, she’ll be deported when she wakes up. At this moment, text appears onscreen that reads, “Yes, this really happens. Look it up. #immigrationreform.” The possible separation of Alba from Jane and Xiomara threatens the stability of the show’s emotional center, but this medical-repatriation plot point isn’t just played for dramatic effect. It’s of the same tradition as other telenovelas like Tierra de Pasiones (Land of Passions) and El Alma Herida (The Wounded Soul) that also explicitly deal with immigration issues.

Jane the Virgin is the rare show that builds the culture of the people it’s depicting into its very DNA. It so expertly deploys tropes, styles, and themes familiar to Latino audiences—while still being accessible to a broad range of viewers—that it almost seems crass to call it a successful case study of what happens when a network commits to “diversity.” What Jane has accomplished in its first season is admirable, and not all shows depicting underrepresented groups can strike a perfect balance between entertainment and political awareness. Perhaps to blame is the prevailing belief that actors of color should most aspire to roles with no racial component. But color-blind casting just makes televisual worlds look more like reality: As Jane the Virgin proves, the messy, beautiful specifics are what bring that reality to life onscreen.

Seeking ‘Clarity’ in Jerusalem

Secretary of State John Kerry sought “clarity” on the status of a religious site in Jerusalem that Jews revere as the Temple Mount and Muslims as the al-Aqsa mosque.

Kerry’s comments in Madrid appeared to reject a French proposal for the presence of an international observer who would oversee the status quo at the site. Tensions over the site have resulted in the worst violence between Israel and the Palestinians since the end of the second intifada in 2005. Israel, which rejects the French idea, summoned the French ambassador to the foreign ministry and expressed its “firm opposition” to the plan.

Under the status quo arrangement, Jews are allowed to visit but not pray at the site, which is under Muslim religious administration. Some Palestinians believe Israel is trying to slowly change that arrangement by allowing prayer there—and idea Israel rejects. The site is sacred to both Islam and Judaism: Al-Aqsa mosque is Islam’s third-holiest site and the Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site.

“Israel understands the importance of the status quo and ... our objective is to make sure that everyone understands what that means,” Kerry said at a news conference in Madrid.

He added: “We are not seeking a new change or outsiders to come in, I don’t think Israel or Jordan wants that and we’re not proposing it. What we need is clarity.”

Last week my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg wrote about the roots of the tension surrounding the site:

In September of 1928, a group of Jewish residents of Jerusalem placed a bench in front of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, for the comfort of elderly worshipers. They also brought with them a wooden partition, to separate the sexes during prayer. Jerusalem’s Muslim leaders treated the introduction of furniture into the alleyway in front of the Wall as a provocation, part of a Jewish conspiracy to slowly take control of the entire Temple Mount.

Many of the leaders of Palestine’s Muslims believed—or claimed to believe—that Jews had manufactured a set of historical and theological connections to the Western Wall and to the Mount, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, in order to advance the Zionist project. This belief defied Muslim history—the Dome of the Rock was built by Jerusalem’s Arab conquerors on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in order to venerate its memory (the site had previously been defiled by Jerusalem’s Christian rulers as a kind of rebuke to Judaism, the despised mother religion of Christianity). Jews themselves consider the Mount itself to be the holiest site in their faith. The Western Wall, a large retaining wall from the Second Temple period, is sacred only by proxy. …

The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel—a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives—is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews.

The violence, meanwhile, continues. As my colleague Adam Chandler reported Sunday an Israeli soldier was shot dead by an Arab citizen of Israel at a bus stop in Beersheba. The attacker was shot dead by a security guard, who also shot an Eritrean asylum-seeker. The Eritrean was then beaten by a mob who mistook him for the gunman’s accomplice. He later died in hospital. Israel said it’s investigating his death.

Conspiracies About the New 'Star Wars' Poster

Let’s face it, James Taylor was wrong. Sunday morning ain’t easy; it's for the faithful. Churchgoers go to church, political junkies swerve between the Sunday shows, and pro football fanatics tailgate or dabble in unregulated activity. All told, a pretty sizable swath of America seems decidedly busy on Sunday mornings.

You can add Star Wars hobbyists to the equation. The build-up to Star Wars: The Force Awakens got very real when a poster for the series’ seventh installment was released on Sunday, exactly two months before the movie’s December 18 premiere. (The first full trailer will premiere during Monday Night Football tomorrow.)

The great reveal sent franchise devotees into a conspiratorial frenzy, divining what plot points and particulars The Force Awakens might remit with the zealousness a new detective might bring to a first crime scene. Here are some of the primary developments.

Death Star 3.0?

The object in the top-right corner of the poster got the most attention right off the bat. Over at Entertainment Weekly, Anthony Breznican explains:

The new poster offers us something both new and ominous – the background of what looks to be an entire planet or moon, but … that’s no moon. It’s split in two and appears to be a massive weapon along the lines of the Death Star. Could this be The First Order’s Starkiller base?

I’m not entirely sure what that last sentence means, but if it is a new Death Star, this would confirm what my colleague David Sims observed earlier this year about the franchise’s recent efforts to trade in nostalgia to get older fans excited again.

Some of them were:

Is that a Death Star...AGAAAAAIIIINNN??????!!?? pic.twitter.com/SkcTpNN0tQ

— Mike Peterson (@MIKESMOIST) October 18, 2015

DUDE LIKE THATS A DEATH STAR HOW ARE WE NOT FREAKING OUT ABOUT THIS RN pic.twitter.com/oi1kNxM5nP

— Austin (@Pamaj) October 18, 2015

Some of them were not:

Death Star 3.0 - Now with an even bigger trench. pic.twitter.com/DKZxIENehb

— Emperor Palpatine (@LordPalpatine) October 18, 2015

The #1 way to make me uninterested in the new Star Wars movie is to be like "oh yeah, there is yet another Death Star." #VPofOutOfIdeas

— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) October 18, 2015

No Luke Skywalker?

Some of the buzz surrounding The Force Awakens has to do with the return of characters from the original three (and much more beloved) Star Wars films. Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Chewie, R2-D2, and others are there on the poster, but where o’ where, is Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill)?

*Sees the new #TheForceAwakens poster* Wait where's Luke Skywalker? *hyperventilates* pic.twitter.com/H9kjI1wjDW

— Scott Skellington (@itsScott_who) October 18, 2015

Y dónde está Luke Skywalker en el afiche oficial del episodio VII de Star Wars ??

— Bernardo Riffo (@briffo) October 18, 2015

For some, his absence raises questions about whether he will live for long in the seventh movie. Others worried that, save for his voice, he was absent from the previous two trailers. Elsewhere, it was conjectured that he was never going to be in the marketing materials.

Other concerns involved the status of Princess Leia’s hair—buns gone, updo enacted and C-3PO’s missing left hand. Expect the intensity of this conversation to double, if not triple, when the trailer drops tomorrow night.

A Shooting Attack in Southern Israel

Jerusalem, Israel, and the Palestinian territories continued to roil over the weekend as riots, stabbings, and a shooting attack added to the growing death toll in the recent spike in violence.

On Saturday, according to the Israeli military, four Palestinians were killed and another was injured while carrying out knife attacks against Israeli civilians and police in Israel and the West Bank.

“At least 34 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since September, including 17 alleged attackers,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “The others died in clashes with Israeli troops in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

On Sunday, an armed Palestinian man attacked a bus station in the city of Beersheva in southern Israel.* One person was killed and eight others were injured in the attack. According to Israeli authorities, four of the six people injured in the attack were police officers. Hamas praised the attack on Sunday evening.

As my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg noted on Friday, the recent violence has been spurred in part by rumors that Israel is seeking to take over the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site and home to the al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site.

Israel vociferously maintains its fealty to the status quo, whereby Jews can visit the Temple Mount, but not pray there. In recent months, however, a small number of religious Jews and right-wing Israeli politicians have made visits to the site and prayed there in defiance of the arrangement. Earlier this month, as the violence grew, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu banned all Israeli ministers and members of Israel’s parliament from the compound.

Others yet point to Israel’s policies and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank as reasons for the violence. Still, there are fears that a political conflict is transitioning into a religious one. On Friday night, Palestinian rioters in the West Bank city of Nablus set fire to Joseph’s Tomb, a site holy to Jews. On Sunday, the Israeli Defense Forces had to evacuate 30 Jewish worshippers who appeared to pray at the site without a permit and were confronted by Palestinians.

International leaders including Pope Francis have urged the two sides to make gestures toward peace. On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed that he would be meeting separately with Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas later this week in an effort to quell the tensions.

What a College Football Miracle Looks Like

On Saturday evening, the University of Michigan’s football team stood ten meager seconds away from a major win against undefeated Michigan State, their in-state nemesis.

Leading 23-21, Michigan’s punting team simply needed to kick the ball away and let time expire. Outside the Big House, Michigan’s massive stadium, which was filled its nearly 110,000-person capacity, a local reporter from Grand Rapids was already delivering a laudatory live segment about the Michigan Wolverines’ hard-earned victory. “People are spilling out of Michigan Stadium into the streets of Ann Arbor celebrating...”

Meanwhile, inside the stadium, something completely unexplainable was about to take place. There’s video here, but do yourself a favor and push play on the box below, close your eyes, and listen first.

It’s not just that the Michigan center botches the snap.

It’s not just that Michigan punter Blake O'Neill fumbles the ball forward toward the rushing defenders.

It’s not just that when O’Neill  is tackled, the football magically floats into the arms of Jalen Watts-Jackson, the Michigan State defender, who is standing a few yards away.

It’s not just that Watts-Jackson manages to grab the ball and run 38 yards for the touchdown, even after he seemingly gets hemmed in at the 12-yard line and nearly tackled at 10.

It’s not that the last Michigan player tackles Watts-Jackson as just he crosses into end zone and the clock hits zero.

It’s all of that, plus the fact that Michigan State’s chance of winning was already practically zero before any of that happened.

Michigan State's win probability before the punt attempt by Michigan: 0.2% #MSUvsMICH pic.twitter.com/bTknVw9vzo

— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) October 18, 2015

Like all sports, college football is an enterprise particularly vulnerable to tired clichés. But sometimes, even after a team has delivered the 110-percent effort required to win a big game, they can still be bested by a miracle. Michigan State’s announcers are actually struck dumb by the event, issuing grunts and screams.

The chaos didn’t end there. So euphoric was the Michigan State celebration that somewhere at the bottom of the dogpile, game hero Jalen Watts-Johnson had his hip dislocated by his own teammates and had to be carried off the field on a stretcher. Meanwhile...

How every Michigan fan woke up today: pic.twitter.com/E3rBo7feMb

— Bobby Kunz (@UofMDieHards) October 18, 2015

O’Neill received death threats on Twitter and Ann Arbor authorities spent the night putting out off-campus fires.

Over at Forbes, Mike Ozanian notes that the shocking loss almost certainly wrecked Michigan’s chances at contending for a national title. That it came on a fluke play is dispiriting news for Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, whose contract promises a combined $800,000 in bonuses for getting to the college football playoffs and winning a national title.

The term “heartbreaker” would be a little too macabre given that one Michigan fan in the stands suffered a heart attack during the final play of the game. According to Sports Illustrated, the fan is in stable condition.

So We Found Thousands of Zombies Trapped in a Pit

After years on the run, two Atlantic journalists try out the Alexandria Safe Zone solar-powered intranet …

Gould: Hey man, you getting this?

Goldberg: Yeah.

Gould: Wow—technology. Click click click.

Goldberg: I know, right?

Gould: Amazing. Anyway, things have been relatively chill since we got here—I mean, for the most part; some of these people obviously still need their drama to get by from week to week. But whatever. And I don’t want to up the stress or anything. I was just thinking we should maybe do something about that sprawling pit of ravenous zombies we discovered today. What do you think?

Goldberg: Do you remember, before the Zombie Apocalypse, the Iraq War? Long time ago. Well, the Iraq War happened because people had a problem and thought they should do something about it. What is this urge you always have to do something? What do you want to do? March them out of the pit? I say, when you find a pit full of zombies, the first thing you think about should be the consequences of action, not inaction.

Gould: I don’t know, man, I’d argue the Iraq war didn’t happen because people had a problem and thought they should do something about it; it happened because people thought they had a problem they didn’t have. WMDs are scary.

In our case, here’s what we know:

There’s a huge pit very close to us, and there are thousands of zombies in it. Their hideous zombie rasping is attracting more and more of them toward and ultimately into into the pit. Some are getting out. Most are being kept in by an accidental set of barriers, including a semi-trailer truck perched tenuously on a ledge that could give way any time. And when it does, these things are coming east, straight at us. That’s a problem.

You’re totally right, of course—none of this is to say any old action would be better than inaction. I mean, march them out of the pit? Ha! Good one. That would be so stupid. But seriously, what do you think should we do?

Goldberg: I figure we should wait them out. No? Their flesh is decomposing. They can only stay animated for so long. It’s a positive, not a negative, that more and more zombies are being drawn into the pit. Let them all rot together. I’m thinking a couple of days of good hard rain will speed the process.

On the other hand, we could, disquieting though this idea may be, spray the pit with gasoline and then set them all on fire. Finding the gasoline and the means to spray it across a sea of zombies is going to be difficult, though. Perhaps we could fill the pit with dirt and rock. I recognize it’s enormous, but burying them would be appropriate, because they are, technically speaking, dead.

One thing we definitely shouldn’t do is march them out of the pit. That would be idiotic.

Gould: The main issue I see with waiting them out is that some of the barriers keeping them in may be weakening faster than the skin is rotting off their bones. It’s hard to feel good about that truck, you know?

We could try to torch them with gasoline—I kind of like that—but then, we really should preserve as much gas as we can. And it would take a lot. Maybe we could spray them with some other flammable liquid we don’t need so much, like acetone—or canola or something? But I don’t know, the logistics of immolation feel tough.

Also, if we try to bury them, it might just help them crawl out and kill us?

You’re onto something, though: The pit is a weapon. What if we reinforced the barriers where they’re weak—built up an obstruction behind the truck, etc.—and then just … maintained the pit population from there, killing only as many zombies as we need to to keep it from overflowing? It’d be work, but basically it would give us a massive, sustainable zombie trap. Really, if we do this right, it could be a post-apocalyptic game changer.

That’s it. Yeah? It’s almost perfect—as long as, you know, we can keep the zombies in the pit.

Goldberg: The more you talk about it, the more I’m thinking we should do nothing. Maybe it was the moment you brought up the Canola Option. I mean, canola? Where are we going to get 3,000 gallons of canola? We already stripped the Costco bare. I’d rather save whatever cooking oil we have left for eating.

I’m thinking we should just build really high walls around Alexandria. That could do it. All of these go-on-offense schemes sound pretty dubious. I took another look at the quarry. It’s too big for us to handle. I might be game for building up the walls around it a bit, but I don’t think we could do that without getting eaten. I mean, they’ll be all over us if we try to shore up that truck.

Defense. We need to play defense. The costs of action are too high.

Gould: Look, man, burning them was your idea. What I’m saying is …

Hold on, I hear something.

Shit.

AMC

Spring Awakening and the Power of Inclusive Art

The scale and allure of Broadway theater has often made it a window of sorts into the popular American cultural imagination. Within the last year, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s production of Hamilton has shaken up traditional conceptions of the Founding Fathers with its diverse cast and hip-hop soundtrack, while Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Fun Home, explores the complexities of sexual identity. Deaf West Theatre’s revival of Spring Awakening, the rock-musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play about adolescent sexual exploration and tragedy, likewise considers a question that is increasingly relevant in culture: how to tell stories in more inclusive ways.

The production had already achieved commercial and critical recognition in California before it opened on Broadway on September 27. But the acclaim and attention the show—performed in American Sign Language alongside English—has received in the mainstream media speaks to a rising interest in ASL, as well as its cultural potential. The New York Times described it as “thrillingly inventive.” The Wall Street Journal marveled at the accomplishment of combining deaf and hearing actors’ talents, then ranked it “among the most emotionally charged renderings of a musical to come to Broadway in the past decade.” The Washington Post called it “inclusionary, astonishingly alive,” stating, “Sign language unlocks so much in the dialogue and emotion that you might wish more shows follow its example.”

It almost goes without saying that the visual nature of ASL lends itself to this kind of theatrical impact, affecting even predominantly hearing reviewers. Since ASL has no written form, performance has a unique place at the heart of Deaf culture. (Although I will use its lower-case version henceforth, “Deaf” with a capital D refers to a distinct sense of cultural and linguistic identity that many individuals feel, intimately related to using ASL.) Whether in theater, storytelling, or poetry, the power of ASL has long created a sense of vibrancy in deaf communities, with performers such as Peter S. Cook, C.J. Jones, Clayton Valli, and Linda Bove drawing respect for their evocative signed performances in ASL theater and literature (Bove, who had a longstanding role on Sesame Street, was a consulting ASL translator for Spring Awakening). Until recently, many of these ASL performers had bypassed mainstream attention: Perhaps the most recognized deaf artist is Marlee Matlin, who drew wide acclaim for her Academy Award-winning performance in Children of a Lesser God and her appearances on The West Wing, and who makes her Broadway debut in this revival.

Spring Awakening, as innovative as it might feel compared to traditional musicals, isn’t the first ASL-centered show to open on Broadway. The Los Angeles-based Deaf West Theatre, which has been in operation since 1991, received accolades in 2003 for its adaptation of Big River, co-produced with the Roundabout Theatre Company. Similarities exist between the two shows: Both are musicals featuring deaf and hearing actors, and both have been praised for their innovative reinterpretation of classic themes. However, the current relevance of ASL further enables Spring Awakening to bridge the divide between deaf and hearing worlds. The show’s critical success reflects some of the ways in which modern mainstream audiences are encountering ASL anew, but it also presents a vision of how culture can be simultaneously inclusive, revelatory, and thrilling, giving audiences a space to encounter both deaf and hearing experiences of the world.

* * *

Among the many cultural shifts sparked by the Internet is the fact that mass and long-distance means of communication have now become primarily visual rather than auditory. Platforms like YouTube, Skype, FaceTime, and social media have enabled a greater deaf interconnectedness, which has in turn prompted an explosion of creativity among the deaf community. Deaf artists share and promote their videos over outlets such as the Deaf Professional Arts Network (D-PAN). Signing deaf individuals routinely broadcast their thoughts on video blogs (“vlogs”). ASL music videos by deaf artists have risen in popularity. An ASL video of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” went viral last summer, as did (to a lesser extent) a recent rendition of Frozen’s “Let it Go.” On Twitter, a hashtag has emerged: #DeafTalent, proclaiming the importance and power of diversity in culture.

At the same time, the hearing mainstream has increasingly become fascinated with this visual, signing culture. As a deaf individual, I’ve been asked countless times how I can possibly appreciate music. But these days, I’m almost more likely to receive a message from a hearing friend saying, “Look at this ASL music video! How cool!” (Admittedly, whether these viral videos are created by deaf or hearing artists is an ongoing point of contention.) ASL classes are increasingly popular at colleges, and ASL interpreters like Lydia Callis, who played a key role in Michael Bloomberg’s press conferences, have become stars in their own right.

Some of the current hearing curiosity about ASL can feel like voyeurism, without allowing much understanding of the deeper issues that deaf people still face in the U.S. and worldwide. Misunderstandings persist about how to communicate effectively with deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, fraught discussions continue about the medicalization of hearing loss and technologies such as cochlear implants, and deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals are still more likely than their hearing peers to be underemployed. A gap remains between deaf and hearing communities, and culture might be one way to bridge it.

To say, then, that Spring Awakening dazzles mainstream audiences with its staging of that astounding novelty, a deaf musical, might be to overlook the full significance of this show. With every production element, Spring Awakening prompts audiences to consider fundamental questions about the nature of full inclusion and communication. Without being remotely voyeuristic, it invites viewers to engage with the signs and choreography of its deaf and hearing actors, without any further explanation. Whether deaf or hearing, signing or speaking (or singing), the cast appear to the audience simply as individuals.

Their use of sign language, which often includes touching each other’s bodies to create explicit physical and linguistic meaning, heightens the musical’s sexual themes. One scene at the beginning of the musical, talking about love, humorously misplaces the signs for “heart” and “vagina.” Phallic signs abound, as do penetrative ones; the signing actors leave no doubt about how relationships are consummated. By its very nature, signing often communicates openly and without euphemism or elision, making it that rare cultural product that can be open and honest about sex.

I have rarely encountered performance spaces that are neither deaf nor hearing, but open to both.

Even for deaf theatergoers accustomed to gathering meaning through visual language, the design elements of Spring Awakening create such an optically rich experience that audiences have no choice but to engage. The musical’s 19th-century period costuming isn’t elaborate, nor is its set. Instead, the production draws energy from bright lighting, bold music, and choreography, which combines ASL with dance and gesture. It feels hyper-immersive throughout, especially during large musical numbers, when neon lights flood the stage and the actors’ signing creates a sense of pulsating rhythm. The show also pays homage to its rock heritage via the costumes of the hearing alter egos who accompany some of the deaf actors onstage to voice their lines; instead of the corseted dresses and suits worn by the rest of the cast, these actors sport leather jackets and eye-catching jewelry, emphasizing the story’s synergy with rebellion in other eras.

This production thematically connects the plot of the original Spring Awakening to a dark time within deaf history: the now-infamous Milan Conference in 1880, which banned the use of sign language in deaf education. This reference to the rise of oralist methods (which forced deaf students to learn via lipreading and speaking) emphasizes the dangers of marginalization and miscommunication already present in Spring Awakening’s storyline of sexual self-discovery. A sense of oppression lingers in the show, particularly during an early scene in which a schoolmaster (Patrick Page) berates Moritz Stiefel (Daniel Durant) for signing his Latin recitations instead of speaking them aloud. Even as the audience marvels at the musical’s feats of lyric coordination, the context points to the historical divisions that once (as the director Michael Arden puts it) doomed deaf children to a sense of “failure.”

Historical context aside, the seamlessness of Spring Awakening’s musical performance is indeed remarkable. The success of this staging is largely thanks to a highly coordinated system of physical and visual cues that enable its deaf and hearing actors to realize the musical’s artistic vision. The overwhelming impression is one of inclusivity, assuming that members of the audience understand English or ASL (deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals who do not use ASL might be harder pressed to keep up given that the show has few subtitles). The musical often creates an impression of that rarefied state of being: a world where such distinctions as “deaf” and “hearing” might exist, but largely don’t matter.

Perhaps the most remarkable example lies in the relationship between the two signing deaf leads and their hearing alter egos who sing and voice their dialogue, standing often (but not always) in the background. These “doubles” offer a fresh twist on the literary idea of “twinning” or “mirroring.” The musical opens with the character Wendla (Sandra Mae Frank) smiling at her hearing double (Katie Boeck) in the mirror, then drawing upon her encouragement to speak to her mother. Later, Moritz and his hearing double (Alex Boniello) experience a joint moment of crisis, during which the double pulls out the pistol that will lead to Moritz’s suicide. Before Wendla’s own death, she’s forcibly parted from her double, lending visible weight to the idea of worlds being rent apart. Instead of having the hearing actors merely “interpret” or “translate” for the deaf leads, Spring Awakening creates a space for deaf and hearing individuals to enter a relationship that feels two-sided, communicative, and almost unspeakably intimate. The musical suggests that these dimensions, the visual and the auditory, can become two very integrated sides of the same thing.

This intimacy, from an audience standpoint, also feels profoundly personal. As a deaf individual, I have rarely encountered performance spaces that are neither deaf nor hearing, but open to both. My prior experiences of the theater, when they have been accessible at all, have been mediated by an ASL interpreter, which—despite the level of the interpreter’s practice or skill—doesn’t achieve this same thrill of direct communication.

This diversity in outlook is a fundamental reason for Spring Awakening’s appeal, as well as its role in prompting America’s awareness of its vibrant deaf minority. The musical depicts an integration of culture and vision that some theatergoers—and, indeed, many hearing reviewers—might not have known they lacked. I went to see Spring Awakening with a hearing friend who knew no ASL. As the music began and we sat side-by-side, I felt very aware that the two of us were having two rather different theater experiences. When the lights came on for the intermission, I turned to him and asked what he made of it.

He told me the musical was inviting him to engage with different layers of communication he had never considered before. Well, that almost made two of us. Being deaf has made me consider, over and over again, the complexities of how we can communicate with people very different from us. But I, too, had never experienced a performance that did so much to erase those differences. When the encore came around, Spring Awakening, in keeping with its cultural moment but also outside of it, compelled many of us to do something that almost never happens in a mainstream space: forego clapping, together, and instead wave our hands in the air, expressing our admiration in entirely visual terms.