Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 321

Arson at Joseph’s Tomb

Palestinians rioters set fire to Joseph’s Tomb, a holy site in the West Bank town of Nablus that is revered by some Jews, damaging the structure, in the latest sign of escalating tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.

Protesters, who threw Molotov cocktails at the structure, were dispersed by Palestinian security forces. Local firefighters extinguished the flames.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the incident “irresponsible” and said the site would be repaired. A spokesman for the Israel Defense Force tweeted:

Overnight #Palestinians set ablaze Joseph's Tomb, in a blatant violation of the basic value of freedom of worship. pic.twitter.com/qsOCRFg205

— Peter Lerner (@LTCPeterLerner) October 16, 2015

The site is believed to be the resting place of the biblical Joseph. Jewish worshippers gathered to pray at the site every month, in visits coordinated with the Palestinian Authority. But Haaretz reports there were recent tensions over uncoordinated visits to the tomb. Here’s more from the Israeli newspaper:

Joseph’s Tomb was not included in the grave list of holy sites which was transferred to the Palestinians as a result of the second Oslo agreement signed in 1995. When the IDF pulled out of Nablus that same year as a result of the agreement, Od Yosef Hai, a yeshiva founded in the 1980s, it's name a Biblical reference, became a Jewish and Israeli enclave in the area. But in 2000, because of the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel completely withdrew from the grave, as it was too difficult to defend.

The attack on the site comes a day after Abbas spoke to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry about the recent violence, which in the past month has seen eight Israelis killed in attacks by Palestinians, and 31 Palestinians, including 14 attackers, killed by Israeli fire. The numbers come from the Associated Press.

As my colleague Adam Chandler, who has been following the violence, reported earlier this month, the slow burn has been going on for more than a year, raising questions about whether a third intifada is already here. Here’s more:

In recent months, amid failed peace talks, continued fallout from the latest war in Gaza, politically motivated riots and car attacks, deadly rock-throwing and deadly responses to rock-throwing, stabbings, fatal  arson and shootings, clashes at holy sites, the expansion of settlements and price-tag attacks, the rhetorical canceling of both previous peace deals, and the future peace process, the answer seems to increasingly be this: A Third Intifada is here and it doesn’t resemble the previous two. …

The character of the recent violence has also changed from previous years, which has made it more difficult to contain. The rise of more “lone wolf attacks,” be it by settler youth in the West Bank or more pedestrian Palestinian attacks that come without coordination from terrorist groups, have given some sense of spontaneity to the violence. As a result, the tensions have remained at a low simmer, never fully escalating and never fully receding.

Indeed, a Palestinian man attacked an IDF soldier with a knife in the West Bank town of Hebron. He was shot and killed. The soldier was moderately injured.

In Steve Jobs, a Fascinating Subject Remains Elusive

Leave it to the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to describe the life of Steve Jobs in the form of a behind-the-scenes showbiz tale. He did it for sports with Sports Night, for sketch comedy with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and for news with The Newsroom. Now, with Steve Jobs, he’s done it for the tech revolution. In keeping with this framework, the film presents its titular subject as one part visionary, three parts impresario, and narcissist all the way through.

The movie, directed with customary panache by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire), is a canny narrative told in three distinct acts, each involving the launch of a particular product and each presented in its own aesthetic style. The unveiling of the Macintosh in 1984 is shot on grainy 16mm film and scored with vintage synthesizers. The introduction of the NeXT computer, which took place in 1988 during Jobs’s hiatus from Apple, uses 35mm film and a full orchestra. And the 1998 launch of the iMac, following his triumphant return to the company, is shot digitally and features a contemporary electronic score.

The result is a film that almost advertises its own artificiality—Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that almost all of the dialogue is fictionalized—and, as such, one that’s more akin to a stage play than to a conventional biopic. In the minutes preceding each product launch, Jobs (Michael Fassbender) interacts with a recurring array of friendly antagonists: his right-hand woman and “work wife,” Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet); the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen); the onetime Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels); the engineer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg); and Jobs’s daughter, Lisa (played by three different actresses at different ages). I doubt I’ll be the first to note the resemblance to A Christmas Carol and its ghosts of past, present, and future.

On a technical level, Steve Jobs is a triumph. Although talky in the extreme, it almost buzzes with electricity. The dialogue is an intracardiac injection of pure, adrenalized Sorkin. And, as David Fincher did in The Social Network, Boyle imbues the performers’ many backs and forths with the narrative velocity of a car chase.

Fassbender is remarkable in the title role, offering arguably his best performance to date. When playing a figure as well known as Jobs there are two courses that a performer can typically steer. One is straightforward mimesis: capturing the character’s look (possibly with prosthetic assistance), mannerisms, and intonations—as, for instance, Cate Blanchett did, frustratingly, with Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator. The other is to leave such feats to the impressionists and instead seek to inhabit the person beneath the tics and accent—as Christopher Plummer did, brilliantly, with his portrayal of Mike Wallace in The Insider. (Readers may recall, alas, which role won an Oscar and which was not even nominated.) Fassbender opts for the latter path here, to tremendous effect. His Jobs is by any reasonable measure an awful person: stubborn, ungracious, and utterly self-absorbed. Yet his vitality is such that it lends magnetism to his mania. Even at his worst, it’s hard to look away.

Jobs’s vitality is such that it lends magnetism to his mania. Even at his worst, it’s hard to look away.

The rest of the cast is strong as well, despite being given little opportunity to do more than offer themselves up as mirrors to Jobs’s megalomania. All five supporting characters are principally defined by the fact that they are, at least in contrast to the man they orbit, relatively normal, decent human beings. Woz wants Jobs, always obsessed with the new, to offer a mere acknowledgement of the old Apple II product team that made the company an initial success. Sculley wants to let bygones be bygones. And everyone wants Jobs to treat his daughter, Lisa, with some minimal degree of parental attention and affection. (Late in the film, Jobs complains, “It’s like five minutes before every launch, everyone goes to a bar, gets drunk, and tells me what they really think of me.” It’s a clever nod to the film’s strict architecture, at once self-indicting and self-inoculating.)

It is the fitfully improving relationship between Jobs and Lisa that offers the central narrative arc of the film. (In the first act, he denies his paternity and unpersuasively declares that Apple’s earlier “Lisa” computer was not named after her.) This subplot makes for a tidy tale, but a rather narrow one. And it is hard to shake the sense that the filmmakers are to some degree intent on advertising their “scoop” in getting the real-life Lisa to talk to them, much the way a newspaper article leads with any new scrap of proprietary reporting, however incremental or irrelevant. (Sorkin’s script is otherwise adapted principally from Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, with which Lisa declined to cooperate.)

The result is a redemptive fable (though one in which the redemption comes rather cheap), at once artful, elegant, and clean. If there is a complaint to be made—and I believe there is—it is that it is too clean. I have no particular grievance with the movie’s many departures from fact. (It seems ungenerous to deny the filmmakers their own “reality-distortion field.”) But by stripping out any and all complications from the story it wishes to tell, the movie denies itself the opportunity for nuance and puts a ceiling on its own ambition. In order to make the Jobs-Lisa relationship the ultimate measure of the man, for instance, no mention is made of the fact that by the final act in 1998, Jobs was married—a union that lasted two decades until his 2011 death—and had two younger children, soon to be three.

I enjoyed Steve Jobs a great deal, and I suspect most moviegoers will feel the same way. But I left the theater with no better understanding of its subject than when I arrived. For all its exceptional craftsmanship, the film ultimately lacks a true inner life. In this way it resembles the NeXT computer that Jobs unveiled in 1988: a beautiful, obsidian cube that, alas, didn’t have an operating system.

‘We Are Muslims Like All Libyans’

Four years ago next week, Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi was killed amid an armed uprising, backed by a NATO air campaign, against his 42-year rule. At the time, his death seemed like an opening for the kind of democratic transition demanded by Arab Spring protesters. Today, Qaddafi’s demise has given way to chaos, civil war, and the slow-motion implosion of the Libyan state. Recently, in New York, I met representatives from one fragment of that state, who told me how they planned to make the country whole again.

Nowadays in Libya, disparate militias are regularly battling each other, buffeted by two competing governments. One is the General National Congress (GNC), a group of disbanded lawmakers whose military arm, Libya Dawn, seized the capital of Tripoli last year. The GNC is not recognized internationally and has reportedly forged alliances with various Islamist militias and groups, including Ansar al-Sharia, which the United States considers a terrorist organization and has accused of being involved in the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

The other is the internationally recognized House of Representatives (HoR), which governs from the eastern city of Tobruk. The HoR is also allied with militias as well as Khalifa Hifter, a military general and onetime Qaddafi ally who some suggest has designs on becoming the next strongman to rule Libya.

Earlier this month, representatives of the two Libyan governments were supposed to finally sign a UN-brokered peace deal in New York—and work to end a war that has killed thousands, cost the country tens of billions of dollars in lost oil revenue, accelerated the migrant crisis in Europe, and allowed ISIS to take root in the country.

But the parties ultimately walked out on the talks before a ceasefire could be reached. Hours later, in a surreal turn, I was contacted by representatives of the unrecognized government of Libya for a meeting before they left town.

The next morning, my cab pulled up at the appointed meeting place: the Midtown Hilton just off Yitzhak Rabin Way. I joined six GNC lawmakers and handlers in the hotel’s closed dining room, where we discussed Libya’s civil war while the anodyne pop hits of Hozier and James Morrison sounded from the ceiling above us.

I was particularly interested in meeting Abdulrahman Suwehli, who was only able to be in New York because Russia and China had vetoed a proposal by the United States, France, Spain, and Great Britain to seize his assets and ban his travel back in June. Last year, he was shot by armed rioters who stormed the Libyan Parliament in Tripoli.

Suwehli, a GNC member and a (currently boycotting) member of the HoR, ended up doing most of the talking. He sought to portray the GNC as the best hope for a democratic Libya, give or take some Christians.

“We are Muslims like all Libyans, but we are not extreme,” he said. “We are democratic. We want to build a new democratic Libya, but we don’t [want] the old [Qaddafi] regime to return under any banner, which they have been trying [to do] for the last two years of this crisis.”

When I asked him about the GNC’s affiliations with Islamist militias, he responded: “These people are the people who fought in [the Libyan uprising of] 2011 and sacrificed their lives and their limbs to get rid of Qaddafi. At that time, nobody described them as extremist or Islamist. They are the same people who are underground at the moment fighting for the revolution.”

“These are the people who in 2011 sacrificed their lives to get rid of Qaddafi. At that time, nobody described them as extremist.”

But what about the GNC’s ties with the al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia? Iwad Abdulsask, the head of the GNC delegation, claimed that the GNC is actually fighting against extremists and particularly ISIS, even if “the international media and the West is not as clear on that.”

A key part of the GNC’s platform is to bar anyone affiliated with the Qaddafi regime from power. When I mentioned that this policy sounded a lot like de-Baathification, the U.S.-led process that kept former members of Saddam Hussein’s ruling party out of power in Iraq, and turned out to be a disaster because it fueled a Sunni insurgency in the country, Abdulsask defended the approach.

“We don’t throw them into jail, we did not detain them, we did not harshly treat them,” he said. (Amnesty International reported earlier this year that Libya’s “justice system remained paralyzed by violence and lawlessness” and that the Ministry of Justice in Tripoli “exercised only nominal control over many detention facilities holding perceived Mu’ammar al-Gaddafi loyalists,” adding that “[a]s of March, only 10 percent of the 6,200 detainees held in prisons under the Ministry of Justice had been tried, while hundreds continued to be held without charge or trial in poor conditions.” The internationally recognized government in Tobruk has been accused of similar human-rights abuses involving detainees.)

Qaddafi loyalists “ruled for 42 years in a dictatorial regime,” Abdulsask said. “They never believed in democracy or exchange of power.” Study the American and French revolutions, he added, and “you’ll find that the old regime will be put aside so that there’s a new beginning for others.” The GNC wants the same for Libya, he argued.

And yet, the chances for a fresh start in Libya appear to be growing more remote by the day. On Tuesday, both governments voiced their objections to the particulars of a new United Nations plan that would install a unity government in the country. It might have been the first thing they agreed on.

Beasts of No Nation: A True Horror Story

Beasts of No Nation, which arrives simultaneously on Netflix and in theaters Friday, is the latest example of a work that’s dissolving the distinctions between television and film. For starters, it’s written and directed by Cary Fukunaga, who’s achieved notable success in both mediums with the movies Jane Eyre and Sin Nombre, and his Emmy-winning work on the first season of True Detective. But as much as Netflix has revolutionized distribution, it’s still best to head to theaters to experience the full visceral impact of Beasts, which is driven by the horrifying experience of an African child soldier.

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Fukunaga’s script is based on Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel of the same name, and follows a West African boy, Agu (Abraham Attah), who’s torn from his family by militants and eventually inducted into a mercenary unit by a charismatic, unnamed Commandant (Idris Elba). This is a film much more concerned with the business of indoctrination than the details of whatever conflict Agu is involved in. That’s where Beasts of No Nation both succeeds and fails: The ambiguity of the plot allows it to tell a more universal story, but the powerful vagueness hurts the film’s ability to do more than straightforwardly depict the brutal life of a child soldier.

The film opens on Agu’s peaceful life in an unnamed village in West Africa, which is quickly shattered by the incursion of a larger civil war that seems reminiscent of events in Sierra Leone, Liberia, or Nigeria. Abandoned and walking through the jungle, he’s picked up by a child militia commanded by Elba’s unnamed soldier. Rather than dismiss or kill him, in the film’s most telling moment, the Commandant instructs his charges to respect Agu’s potential. “A boy is a dangerous thing,” he lectures, and indeed Agu soon becomes one of his surrogate sons, toting an AK-47 and executing captured prisoners on orders.

Attah is incredible in his film debut, never quite losing Agu’s childish gait but visibly dulling the light in his eyes as he sinks deeper into his new world. Elba exudes his typical magnetism in the film’s first half, playing the Commandant as not a psychotic general barking orders, but a charming, often frightening father figure who sometimes taps Agu on the head, reminding him that he spared his life. As the civil war continues and the Commandant’s grasp on authority slips, that’s where Elba truly comes into form, looking vulnerable and sad without quite shedding his natural charisma.

Beasts tells a broadly traumatic story well, but lacks the specifics that could make it a truly memorable film.

Fukunaga is a brilliant visual stylist who has always managed to maintain a story’s humanism through the most bravura sequences, and that’s one of the biggest strengths of Beasts of No Nation. It includes a 15-minute “horrors of war” set-piece in the middle of the film that features the kind of long takes and surreal motifs that distinguished True Detective. (An ambient score by Dan Romer gels slightly more awkwardly, but at least avoids the obvious trope of using more traditional African music to fit the setting.) But coupled with that is a frustrating lack of detail on what’s happening or why, placing the audience in the same indoctrinated state as Agu. Beasts tells a broadly traumatic story and tells it well, but lacks the kinds of specifics that could make it a truly memorable film.

Hence: If you’re going to see Beasts of No Nation, try to see it in a theater, or at least lock yourself in the room with your television. Fukunaga’s greatest achievement is how he communicates the hopelessness of Agu’s situation without shying away from the evil acts he eventually commits. Netflix’s experimentation with film distribution—it partnered with the indie label Bleecker Street to show Beasts in a limited theatrical release—is a fascinating one, because it immediately grants a much wider audience than most art-house films get on release. But it also lets you press pause and walk away, which seems beside the point with an unflinching film like this one.

To his credit, Fukunaga is obviously trying hard to avoid making Beasts of No Nation an “issue” movie, one tackling a specific conflict for viewers to be outraged about. Instead he wants to investigate the broader emotional and spiritual damage suffered by the world’s estimated hundreds of thousands of child soldiers. A voice-over by Agu keeps viewers in his mindset, never letting go of his adolescent language and viewpoint, even while he murders strangers on command. But since there’s no larger story to hold on to, the film’s two hour, 16-minute running time does drag, and the inevitable third-act collapse of Agu’s unit happens in excruciating slow motion even though its broad strokes are easy to predict. Beasts of No Nation succeeds on a visceral level, but lacks the unique perspective on the horrors of war its subject could have afforded.

Area Gambling Regulator Regulates Gambling

The Nevada Gaming Control Board ruled Thursday that daily fantasy-sports games constitute gambling under state law, dealing a significant blow to the multi-billion-dollar industry as it comes under increasing scrutiny from state and federal law-enforcement agencies.

Under federal law, daily fantasy-sports sites like FanDuel and DraftKings are considered games of skill. But Nevada defines gambling as “any game played with cards, dice, equipment or any mechanical, electromechanical or electronic device or machine for money, property, checks, credit or any representative of value.” Because daily fantasy sports involves “wagering on the collective performance of individuals participating in sporting events,” the board ruled, it constitutes gambling and must receive a license to operate in the state. Since no such sites currently hold a license, all of them must cease operations in the state immediately.

Although the board’s decision only applies in the Silver State, Nevada’s preeminence in American legal gambling could persuade other jurisdictions to revisit the sites’ legality. An exemption in the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 allows pay-to-play fantasy sports to operate under federal law, but state regulations can forbid the practice. Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, and Washington already prohibit pay-to-play daily fantasy-sports games.

Fantasy-sports sites saturated TV broadcasts with thousands of advertisements in September and October, trumpeting easy entry and million-dollar payouts. DraftKings and FanDuel, the two largest betting sites, spent a combined $203 million in the ad blitz. The National Football League implicitly blessed the ventures when it sanctioned player appearances in the ads in September.

That visibility brought increased scrutiny. On October 5, The New York Times reported that a midlevel employee at DraftKings leaked inside information as he simultaneously placed bets at rival site FanDuel, where he won $350,000 the same week. Both companies subsequently revealed that their employees had placed bets on their competitors’ sites, raising the specter of unfair advantages. Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada and a former chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, called the revelations a “warning shot” and urged Congress to investigate the matter.

Law-enforcement agencies are also probing the industry. After the Times report, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters to both DraftKings and FanDuel on October 7 to request details on employee access to proprietary data and where the companies' servers are located. The FBI also reportedly opened an investigation this week and began questioning participants and employees about possible predatory tactics.

The Nevada board’s cease-and-desist order only applies to unlicensed daily fantasy-sports sites, raising the possibility that the sites could return to Nevada under regulatory supervision. But the sites are unlikely to seek those licenses because it could weaken their efforts to persuade other jurisdictions that fantasy-sports games are games of skill, and not games of chance.

So Long Bobby Jindal?

Thursday could mark the beginning of the end for Bobby Jindal’s increasingly slim presidential hopes.

The Louisiana governor’s campaign reported having just $260,000 to spend at the end of September after raising a little over half a million dollars and spending significantly more than that in the third quarter. It’s a paltry sum compared to his rivals, and if Jindal can’t jumpstart his White House bid soon, he could be headed the way of Rick Perry and Scott Walker, who ended their campaigns when their coffers ran dry.

Jindal’s haul—or lack thereof—was the most ominous signal that came from the quarterly FEC filing deadline on Thursday, which showed that the top two Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, each raised more money between June and September than any of the 15 Republicans still in the race. (Donald Trump, of course, has access to more money than any of them through his own personal wealth.) Clinton raised $28 million and Sanders raised $26 million. Ben Carson’s rise to a close second in the polls was reflected in his fund-raising, as he led the GOP field by taking in $20 million in the third quarter.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, each raised more money between June and September than any of the 15 Republicans still in the race.

The GOP donor and consultant class is poring over the reports for signs of how each candidate is managing their campaign. Advisers to Jeb Bush, for example, put out word to Politico that they’d be cutting back on spending, a day ahead of a filing that showed his “burn rate” was unsustainably high. Bush raised more than his Florida rival Marco Rubio, but because Rubio has run his campaign more frugally, he has more cash on hand—nearly $11 million to Bush’s $10.3 million. Bush’s fund-raising slowed over the summer as his poll numbers dipped. In cash reserves, Rubio trails just Carson and Ted Cruz, who leads all Republican contenders with a reported $13.5 million.

Carly Fiorina parlayed her breakout performance in the GOP debates into a solid money quarter, raising $7 million, although she still trails Carson by a wide margin, according to a Wall Street Journal breakdown of the numbers. The fund-raising reports also point to the importance of getting into the prime-time Republican debates as opposed to the undercard. Fiorina was the only candidate to advance from one to the other, while both Perry and Jindal were relegated to the B-team twice and likely struggled to raise funds as a result. Both Chris Christie and Rand Paul, for example, have lagged in the polls but maintained their spot in the main debates, and their money foes are not as pronounced as Jindal’s.

With the exception of Sanders and Trump, most of the candidates have millions more behind them through Super PACs that are boosting their candidacies, but as both Perry and Walker found out, they can’t totally compensate for a lack of hard money that can fund campaign staff and travel. Perry ended his campaign with barely anything left, while Walker has reportedly amassed $1 million in debt. As Jindal might be learning, bad polls are one thing, but it’s when the cash is gone that a campaign’s death knell sounds.

A New Look at the Lockerbie Bombing

Nearly three decades after the disaster, there is a new wrinkle in the case of the Lockerbie bombing. On Thursday, a spokesperson for a top Scottish prosecutor announced that it would be seek to join American investigators in interviewing two new suspects.

“[T]here is a proper basis in law in Scotland and the United States to entitle Scottish and U.S. investigators to treat two Libyans as suspects in the continuing investigation into the bombing of flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie,” the statement read.

The infamous 1998 attack killed all 259 passengers aboard Pan Am Flight 103, many of whom were American, as well as 11 people on the ground in Scotland.

The bombing remains largely unsolved; Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, once a Libyan intelligence officer, was the only person convicted of the crime. (al-Magrahi didn’t stand trial until 2001 and was eventually released  in 2009, a few years before he died of prostate cancer.)

According to a U.S. official, the two suspects are thought to be Abu Agila Mas’ud, a Libyan bombmaker, and Abdullah al-Senussi, who served as an intelligence chief under deposed Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.

As The New York Times notes, the bombing was largely thought to be a retributive act ordered by the Libyan government:

Two years before the attack, in April 1986, President Ronald Reagan ordered airstrikes against the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation for the bombing of a West Berlin nightclub club frequented by American armed service members.

The new development follows the airing of a three-part PBS Frontline investigative series on the bombing by Ken Dornstein, whose brother David was killed on the plane. The program also noted that Mas’ud, one of the new suspects, is currently in jail in Libya.

The Tao of the Listicle

The 10 Commandments. The 95 Theses. The 127 Hours and the 27 Dresses and the 10 Things I Hate About You. The mix tape. The menu. The card catalog. The grocery list. The top ten list. The to-do list. The bucket list. The lists of lists. The lists of lists of lists.

We are a culture, and we have long been a culture, that loves lists. The list-o-mania runs counter to the logic of the list itself, in that it is both broad and inclusive: From the accounting of Mesopotamia—believed to have been the occasion for humans to create the mixed blessing that is writing—to the Count of Sesame Street, we have relied on lists both to include and exclude, to delineate and declare, to instruct and remember. “The list is the origin of culture,” Umberto Eco, himself famously a fan of the list, put it. “It’s part of the history of art and literature.”

He added:

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.

And also, these days, through quasi-journalistic rankings (seasons of The Wire, ranked; pumpkin-spice foods, ranked; rankings, ranked). And through Wikipedia (lists of Lego sets‎, lists of blue plaques, lists of events‎, and—to engage in a bit of ranking, myself—my personal favorite: lists of things considered unusual‎). And through Facebook (“favorite movies,” “favorite books,” “favorite music,” etc.). And through apps that promise to bring even more efficiency to that most aspirationally efficient of things: the to-do list. And through entire websites devoted to lists. And through articles that promise to help you on your journey toward self-discovery, 27 very specific problems at a time.

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The latest entrant into the grand and growing field of human list-making is, appropriately, an app. It is called, with apt simplicity, The List App, and it is the creation of the writer and actor B.J. Novak and a team of developers. It’s a social list (not to be confused with a socialist) app, designed to make and share lists that are meant to evoke, lists that are meant to argue, lists that are meant to inform, lists that are meant to delight. It will allow its users, the app’s explanation notes, to “share your experiences, opinions, and expertise and enjoy lists from friends and the leading voices in TV & film, music, food, sports, news, fashion, comedy, and more in a vibrant and positive community.”

Novak and his team add to their introduction some context that the famous historical list-makers Leonardo da Vinci and John Lennon and Ben Franklin and Hunter S. Thompson would likely include on lists of things they appreciate. “Human beings are innately inclined towards structuring information,” they note; “it’s one of our primary means of understanding. Lists are simple, powerful; the gold standard of sorting and sharing information for thousands of years.”

They are right, of course. Humans have long felt overwhelmed by the information—facts, history, social codes—swirling around them. We have long sought to add order to that chaos through lists, both literal and less so.

“The list is the origin of culture,” Umberto Eco put it. “It’s part of the history of art and literature.”

And yet there’s something about this particular moment that is particularly suited to lists. It’s not just all the anxieties about “information overload” that the Internet has occasioned. It’s not just that lists promise, in form if not in action, to bring a sense of order to the world, offering an elegant antithesis to the end of endings.

It’s also that, in their framework, lists are obsessed with—indeed, they are premised on—the social dynamics of inclusivity and exclusivity. All those “30 Under 30” lists. All those “you know you’re a Millennial when” lists. All those rankings—of cultural products and, implicitly and sometimes very much not, of people. BuzzFeed may be most famously associated with the demolisticle, the list that aims to create a community by virtue of excluding other people from it; every list, though, on some level, has that function.

Thus the tao of the listicle. Which is, these days, often meant to provoke—and sometimes troll, and sometimes outrage—via, specifically, its exclusions. Sometimes the exclusions are intentional; sometimes they are not. By design, however, the list is clubby. It makes an argument about belonging. As Vulture explains of its “Millennial 100” list, also known as “100 Pop-Culture Things That Make You a Millennial”:

The concept here is a simple one: These are the 100 pop-culture markers that resonate most with the Millennial Generation. We’ve placed it in ranked list form (very Millennial) and are publishing it for you to read on the Internet (super Millennial), where you will likely criticize it vociferously (Über-Millennial).

And as The New Yorker put it in explaining its “20 Under 40” list:

The habit of list-making can seem arbitrary or absurd, leaving the list-makers endlessly open to second-guessing (although to encourage such second-guessing is perhaps the best reason to make lists).

Indeed. The list, in that formulation, is both a declaration and a provocation, both a question and an answer, both a beginning and an ending. And all of those boths, on some level, reflect one of the biggest anxieties of our cultural moment: Who is included at a particular event, or in a particular product, or within a particular community? Whose voice is heard? And whose, more importantly, is not? Black Lives Matter, Gamergate, #changetheratio, #tcot—all of those movements, on some level, aim to grapple with those questions. And, for all their differences, they have one other question in common: What is a community—what is a culture—if not, on some level, a list of people?

As Descartes might say, had apps been around when he was making his own sense of the world: “I list, therefore I am.”

A Whistleblower Steps Forward on Drones

Writing in The Atlantic in May, Chris Woods highlighted two aspects of America’s first drone strike, which took place 14 years ago this month, just weeks after September 11.

The first is that the strike missed its target, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s leader in Afghanistan who lived to fight for another dozen years. The second is the strike, conducted by the CIA, set off a still-unresolved quarrel between the agency, the military, and the White House over control of the instrument, the rules that govern its use, and the chain of command in combat.

Much has been written about America’s drone campaigns in places like Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen, where the efforts have successfully targeted terrorists, but the strikes are also thought to have strengthened groups like al-Qaeda and inadvertently killed countless civilians.

In one specific tally earlier this year, Micah Zenko of the Council for Foreign Relations told The New York Times that of the eight Americans killed by U.S. drone strikes, only one of them was identified and deliberately targeted. One of those killed was Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker, who had been kidnapped by al-Qaeda in 2011. Six of the others were thought to have affiliations with al-Qaeda.

Last year my colleague Conor Friedersdorf wrote a piece titled Drone Strikes Never Kill 'Humans' that pokes at the dynamic in which many killed in lethal drone strikes are dubbed “militants” or “suspected militants” by government officials and, subsequently, media outlets. “Applied so loosely, the term is wildly misleading,” he argues.

This guilt-by-association component of targeted killings is a key part of a series on U.S. drone policy released on Thursday by The Intercept. Using classified documents leaked by a whistleblower, the series focuses on American drone use from 2011 until 2013, and the source accuses the government of (among many things) minimizing civilian casualties.

The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA — “enemy killed in action” — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or “unlawful enemy combatants,” EKIA remained their designation, according to the source. That process, he said, “is insane. But we’ve made ourselves comfortable with that.

Given the popularity of drone strikes among Americans—a poll from last May shows nearly 60 percent approval—these disclosures should cause serious alarm.

Consider this assessment of Operation Haymaker, which took place in Afghanistan from 2012 until 2013. “During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets,” one report notes, adding that estimates in Yemen and Somalia, where American intelligence is more limited, may be worse.

Despite the marketing of targeted killings by drones as precision operations, from the very first strike in 2001 until now, the moral and technical legacies remain checkered. The Intercept’s source put it more forcefully:

This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong.

An About-Face on Afghanistan

Updated on October 15 at 2:06 p.m. ET

President Obama announced Thursday that U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan past 2016.

The president said the U.S. will maintain 9,800 troops in the country through most of next year. They will focus on training Afghan security forces and counterinsurgency efforts. After that period, 5,500 troops will remain in a small number of bases, including Bagram, Kandahar, and Jalalabad, he said.

The “cessation of our combat role has not changed,” Obama said, adding: “This is consistent with the overall vision that we’ve had.”

But the move, on which we reported Wednesday, is a reversal of the president’s previous position that all U.S. troops withdraw from the country by the end of next year, but it comes as the Taliban continues to grow in strength, al-Qaeda remains in pockets, and the Islamic State gains ground in Afghanistan.

Obama said that while Afghan security forces continued to “step up, … they are still not as strong as they need to be.” He noted that the Taliban had made gains, particularly in rural Afghanistan. He said the situation in Afghanistan remained “still very fragile, and in some places there’s the risk of deterioration.”

The Obama administration had previously planned to reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan by about half, and then keep about 1,000 troops at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

“I expect that we’ll continue to evaluate going forward, as will the next president,” Obama said on Thursday’s decision.

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Ash Carter added that the decision on troop levels was made because “America’s national security remains very much at stake.” He said the U.S. was “not going to give up the gains we fought so hard to achieve.”

At the White House briefing, spokesman Josh Earnest was asked when the U.S. would reduce the number of troops to embassy-only levels. His reply: “I think the question you're asking is ultimately one that will answered by the next commander in chief.”

As we reported Wednesday:

The apparent White House rethink has been prompted by a confluence of factors: The Taliban’s capture of Kunduz late last month, the group’s biggest prize since it was removed from power by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001; the fact the militants are more spread out across Afghanistan than at any point since 2001; the continued presence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan’s mountains; and inroads being made by the Islamic State, a group whose tactics and brutality the world is becoming increasingly familiar with in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.

Even before the recent gains made by the insurgents, the Obama administration had been under pressure from the military, some members of Congress, and the Afghan president to rethink the original plans for a troop drawdown.

“Obviously, we’re mindful of the dynamic security situation, and we’re watching and seeing how the Afghan security forces engaged quite tenaciously in the fighting for Kunduz,” the New York Times quoted a senior administration official as saying. “But this posture and this number has all been under discussion for months.”

But continued involvement in Afghanistan comes at a cost: Despite being in the country for 14 years, and training Afghan troops—an effort that has cost $65 billion—Afghanistan remains restive. The inability of Afghan security forces to hold onto Kunduz in the face of a long-planned Taliban onslaught, and their retaking of the city only with U.S. help are only likely to raise more questions about what the U.S. hopes to achieve past 2016.