Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 322

A Guilty Plea for Dennis Hastert

On October 28, the day before House Republicans are scheduled to elect the next speaker of the House, the man who held the office longer than any other Republican will walk into a federal courtroom in Chicago and plead guilty to a felony.

For the many GOP lawmakers now eying the speaker’s gavel, the abrupt fall from grace of Dennis Hastert is another sobering reminder—as if they needed any more—that the post just two spots below the presidency hasn’t brought much glory to its occupants in recent years. Hastert led the House from 1999 to 2007, and it appears that neither the financial crime he’ll be copping to nor the “misconduct” he tried to keep secret occurred while he was speaker.

The 73-year-old Hastert was charged in May with violating banking law and lying to the FBI about withdrawals of more than $1 million. Prosecutors said the money was intended as “hush money” to cover up allegations of sexual misconduct against a man when Hastert was a high-school wrestling coach decades ago. The guilty plea would prevent Hastert from having to admit those past misdeeds, but it reportedly will not keep him out of prison.

Hastert knew well the tarnished lineage of recent House speakers—he only got the job after Republicans ousted Newt Gingrich and the man initially pegged to replace him, Bob Livingston, abruptly resigned amid allegations of marital infidelity. It was later revealed that Gingrich, too, had been having an affair when he was leading the House’s impeachment of President Clinton for lying about his own extramarital dalliances.

The last two Democratic speakers, Nancy Pelosi and Tom Foley, have been pushed out by will of the voters as opposed to scandal. But Foley’s predecessor, Jim Wright, resigned in 1989 after just two years because of an ethics scandal. Indeed, it has been more than a quarter century since Tip O’Neill became the last House speaker to leave office completely on his own terms. Hastert, whose political career ended with the Democratic wave election of 2006, was known as a genial speaker who turned a blind eye to ethical lapses in the House under his watch. There’s little doubt, however, that his forthcoming guilty plea will overshadow that legacy, even if the full details of his misconduct never come to light.

By a coincidence of timing, Hastert will be in court at a moment of high drama for the House, as Republicans wait for Paul Ryan to decide whether he wants to be speaker. The party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee has a host of factors to consider, both political and personal, and none more important than whether the polarized chamber is governable at all. But the job’s recent checkered past might be one more reason to give him pause.

Thoughts on GQ’s Taylor Swift Profile, From a Corn Maze in Maryland

Wandering through the corn maze at Summer’s Farm in Maryland this past weekend, there were times when I didn’t think about Taylor Swift at all. From eye level, corn is corn; you can’t really tell you’re in a passageway contoured to resemble Taylor Swift’s nose or mouth or microphone to anyone high up enough to appreciate the view (helicopters, satellites, God).

But then there’d be waymarkers featuring Taylor Swift biographical information (did you know she wrote her 2010 album Speak Now all by herself?) where you’d have to answer a Taylor Swift trivia question to make the correct turn (was it her mom or her computer repairman who taught her to play guitar?). Or another maze-goer, usually a kid, would shout something like “Taylor Swift sucks!” At which point it became impossible not to consider what it means to be so famous that your face is a suburban fall adventure for the whole family.

In the cover story for this month’s GQ, Chuck Klosterman makes the case that Taylor Swift is a cultural uniter of historical proportions. “If a record as comparatively dominant as 1989 had actually existed in the year 1989, it would have surpassed the sales of Thriller,” he writes “There’s simply no antecedent for this kind of career: a cross-genre, youth-oriented, critically acclaimed colossus based entirely on the intuitive songwriting merits of a single female artist.”

You can make strong arguments with that assertion, definitely. But the corn maze has me, at least, sold. At Summer’s Farm, previous designs have paid tribute to the Baltimore Ravens after they won the Super Bowl, the 2012 presidential race (bipartisanly), and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It’s hard to think of any other young musician—or even any other young famous person—who could join the ranks of innocuous Americana imagery so easily.

How could anyone survive this level of fame? At one point, Klosterman witnesses Swift taking a call from Justin Timberlake, who asks to play a song with her on a tour stop. She seems flabbergasted, repeating the phrase “this is so crazy.” The first impulse for a lot of people might be to see this reaction as her patented pseudo-naiveté a la the famous Taylor Swift Surprise Face. But Klosterman sees genius here:

Now, inside my skull, I am thinking one thought: This is not remotely crazy. It actually seems like the opposite of crazy. Why wouldn’t Justin Timberlake want to perform with the biggest entertainer in America, to an audience of 15,000 people who will lose their collective mind the moment he appears? I’d have been much more surprised if he’d called to turn her down. But then I remember that Swift is 25 years old, and that her entire ethos is based on experiencing (and interpreting) how her insane life would feel if she were exactly like the type of person who’d buy a ticket to this particular concert. She has more perspective than I do. Every extension of who she is and how she works is (indeed) “so crazy,” and what’s even crazier is my inability to recognize just how crazy it is.

As the profile goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer how powerful that perspective is. Talking about social-media, she precisely diagnoses the public narratives that have surrounded her: “In 2010, it was She’s too young to get all these awards. Look how annoying she is when she wins. Is she even good? And then in 2013, it was She just writes songs about guys to get revenge. She’s boy-crazy. She’s a problematic person. It will probably be something else again this year.” And when he mentions that she’s sometimes called “calculating,” she recoils and then takes aim at the idea that building a career with planning and smarts is a bad thing.

The most fascinating passage comes when she talks about her childhood obsession with episodes of VH1’s Behind the Music:

I would see these bands that were doing so well, and I’d wonder what went wrong. I thought about this a lot. And what I established in my brain was that a lack of self-awareness was always the downfall. That was always the catalyst for the loss of relevance and the loss of ambition and the loss of great art. So self-awareness has been such a huge part of what I try to achieve on a daily basis. It’s less about reputation management and strategy and vanity than it is about trying to desperately preserve self-awareness, since that seems to be the first thing to go out the door when people find success.

It’s both an unsurprising example of a celebrity in a magazine profile trying to communicate humility, and a concise explanation for why Swift has gotten as big as she has—and why she might stay successful for years. Self-awareness about self-awareness might be the signal trait for maintaining sanity in the Internet age, and it’s one that relatively few celebrities—or even normal people—successfully pull off. She’s in the maze, and she’s seeing it from above.

A Subversive Act on the Set of Homeland

A group of graffiti artists hired to bring authenticity to the set of Homeland, the critically acclaimed Showtime series about the war on terrorism and the people fighting it, say they used the opportunity to introduce subversive messages about the show in Arabic, including “Homeland is racist.”

That message—seen in the image on the top of this page—made it to the second episode of the fifth season, which aired earlier this week, as Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) walks past a wall with Arabic script.

The three artists responsible—Heba Amin, Caram Kapp, and Stone—call Homeland “thinly veiled propaganda,” and say they accepted the job to work on the show’s Berlin set in June after receiving a call from a friend who had been contacted by Homeland’s set-production company. The show, they said, was looking for street artists to lend authenticity to a set of a Syrian refugee camp on the Lebanese-Syrian border. Here’s more:

Given the series’ reputation we were not easily convinced, until we considered what a moment of intervention could relay about our own and many others’ political discontent with the series. It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.

The artists said little attention was paid to their actual graffiti, which included messages such as “Homeland is a joke, and it didn’t make us laugh” and “#blacklivesmatter.”

The artist’s wrote: “In their eyes, Arabic script is merely a supplementary visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the Middle East, a poster image dehumanizing an entire region to human-less figures in black burkas and moreover, this season, to refugees.”

Responding to the graffiti and the claim of racism, Alex Gansa, Homeland’s showrunner, told Deadline: “We wish we’d caught these images before they made it to air. However, as Homeland always strives to be subversive in its own right and a stimulus for conversation, we can’t help but admire this act of artistic sabotage.”

That the show is being accused of racism isn’t new. It has been called “the most bigoted show on television,” and almost since it began airing in 2011, critics have complained about its portrayal of Arabs and Muslims. But the show also has its defenders, including this piece in The Atlantic, which said Homeland challenges—not reinforces—stereotypes.

Yair Rosenberg wrote:

In other words, the show questions the security state, reveals the horrific collateral damage of America’s drone program, and pointedly demonstrates how such unaccountable power can lead to corruption. In episode after episode, monochromatic moral thinking—an “us or them” mentality—is shown to be the true villain, rather than one particular nationality or ethnic group.

Yes, the show gets details of Islamic faith and Arab culture wrong … But ignorance should not be mistaken for bigotry, any more than the show’s mangled rendition of the Jewish mourning prayer of Kaddish in its season finale—recited by the CIA officer Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) without the required prayer quorum, and with a line of nonsensical Aramaic at the end—should be mistaken for evidence of anti-Semitism. Error-ridden portrayals of religion are a common offense in Hollywood. More important, though, is whether faith is presented in good faith—which it is.

My colleague Sophie Gilbert, reviewing the new season of Homeland earlier this month, notes “its surprising show of force.”

“There are … plenty of ways in which the show shows its sophistication and complexity, typically when its star is out of the frame,” Sophie says. “When it isn’t hustling for the gotcha moment, jolting viewers awake with surprise after surprise, it’s offering a remarkably insightful take on the compromised morality of everyone involved in the war on terror, regardless of allegiance.”

Here’s more:

[T]he series shows its timeliness when it comes to current affairs, tackling ISIS, Hezbollah, surveillance, hacking, an Edward Snowden-esque security breach that dangerously tarnishes the CIA, and the long-term ramifications of the drone strikes Carrie approved when she was in Islamabad. Its situations are never simple; its solutions are never ideal. In one scene, a bearded man of Middle Eastern descent walks shiftily through a station in Berlin, the camera lingering on his bag. In forcing the viewer to confront their own assumptions about what he might be doing, Homeland shows how shrewd it can be. In making none of its characters obvious good guys, even while it presents a handful of cartoonishly alluring baddies, it offers one of the most honest portrayals of contemporary affairs in culture.

Just Let Die Hard Die

When you think of Die Hard, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? If the answer isn’t Bruce Willis, I humbly submit that you are lying. True, there hasn’t been a particularly good Die Hard film in 20 years, and recent efforts to jump-start the franchise have met with critical derision. But 20th Century Fox’s latest idea adds insult to injury. Die Hard: Year One will reportedly focus on a young John McClane fighting crime in the 1970s, played by a new actor, with Willis perhaps filming some scenes in the present day to help pass the torch.

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Reports of the death of Hollywood originality may be exaggerated—amid the explosion of superhero franchises, there have been plenty of strong non-sequels (The Martian, Inside Out, Trainwreck) atop the box office this year. But Die Hard: Year One represents the cheapest form of sequel: the “character reboot,” or taking a role uniquely associated with one aging actor and giving it to a younger star. There are multiple such plans in the works, with on-and-off chatter about an Indiana Jones reboot, perhaps starring Chris Pratt. Disney has also set a release date for a Han Solo film that focuses on his younger days. But these are no ordinary sequels: They’re savvy business ploys.

They date back to the decision Eon Productions made in the late ’60s to replace a disgruntled Sean Connery as James Bond with first George Lazenby and then Roger Moore, setting a pattern for a series that more than 50 years in shows no sign of flagging. But Bond was an established literary character—he was Ian Fleming’s creature more than he was Connery’s, no matter how iconic the actor’s performance became. McClane, on the other hand, is Bruce Willis. There is nothing else in the Die Hard franchise that feels particularly distinctive—the films are otherwise fairly standard cat-and-mouse thrillers between a lone-wolf hero and a new coterie of villains. The Die Hard model has indeed become so formulaic that the title is now established shorthand for describing the plot of a hundred action movies.

So whatever Fox might be thinking, it’s highly unlikely a Die Hard film centered on a young actor that features only a winking cameo from Willis will draw people back to the franchise. The film will apparently be directed by Len Wiseman, who made 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard, the most financially successful entry in the franchise, although it underperformed relative to its softened PG-13 rating. In 2013 came A Good Day to Die Hard, which returned the series to its R-rated roots and cast the Australian up-and-comer Jai Courtney as McClane’s son. It made a weak $67 million domestically but cleaned up at the worldwide box office, where Willis is still a bankable star. Die Hard: Year One would probably muster similar success in foreign markets if Willis was involved, and the hope would be that his mantle would successfully be passed to whichever young star replaces him.

But to what end? No matter how many half-baked sequels are churned out, almost every franchise has to die eventually. The first Die Hard came out in 1988; Bruce Willis is now 60 years old. Its time is probably up. There’s certainly a new young actor waiting to be scooped out of relative TV obscurity, just as Willis was decades ago; why saddle him (or her) with a role so deeply tied to another star? It’s nice to be needed, as John McClane might say, but there comes a point when every action hero needs to confront the reality of retirement.

The Refugee Crisis: The View From Turkey

A two-day EU summit on the migrant crisis that starts Thursday centers on efforts to increase cooperation with Turkey to slow the flow of refugees. But whether the incentives Europe is offering to Turkey—home to more Syrian refugees than anyone else—are enough is unclear.

The five-year-long Syrian civil war has created more than 4 million registered refugees. More than 2 million of them live in neighboring Turkey. By contrast, about 507,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in the EU’s 28 states. But Europe, which is seeing more migrants cross its borders than at any time since World War II, is bitterly divided over how to handle the newcomers. The government of some newer EU members such as Hungary have been resistant to the refugees (though others such as Bulgaria have not), and even governments of countries that have been welcoming—like Germany—are finding growing resistance at home, and questions about how the newcomers will affect jobs, schools, and social services.

More than 200,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war. Turkey, which does not have the luxury of a body of water separating it from Syria, has had little choice but to take in people fleeing the fighting between President Bashar al-Assad and an array of rebel and militant groups, including the Islamic State. The government in Ankara opposes Assad’s government.

Turkey has spent at least $4.5 billion on its response to the crisis—though other estimates put the figure at $6.5 billion—which includes some of the best facilities for refugees ever built.

“It’s one of the most humanitarian responses I’ve seen anywhere," Rae McGrath, from the U.S. aid agency Mercy Corps, told Reuters. “There is an acceptance that, however inconvenient, Turkey must help its neighbor.”

But Turkey is also feeling the strain from the refugees—especially in towns near the border where Syrian newcomers exceed locals. Sinan Ulgen, chairman of the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, told Reuters: “Many people are trying to understand the limits of how much Turkey is prepared to do. I think we are reaching those limits.”

Indeed their presence is becoming an election issue ahead of a vote in November. A plan to allow the refugees to work was shelved because of a backlash, and Turkey is feeling the financial pressure of hosting 2 million people while its own economy sputters.

The bigger threat to Turkey, as Soner Cagaptay wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, is Russia’s bombing raids in Syria in support of Assad, which threaten to debilitate the moderate rebels and boost the extremists “while leaving Turkey to deal with two unruly neighbors: Assad and ISIS.” Here’s more:

And that same border with Syria offers a gateway for ISIS attacks inside Turkey. In July, after the Islamic State claimed credit for a suicide bombing in the Turkish town of Suruc that killed more than 30 people, Erdogan agreed to open Turkish bases to U.S. planes and drones, and pledged to join the U.S. campaign to bomb ISIS targets in Syria. In doing so, Erdogan has ensured that ISIS sees Turkey as an enemy, and the group will inevitably, and unfortunately, attack Turkey again. The only question is when, and how severely.

Indeed, ISIS is the main suspect in the weekend’s suicide bomb attack on Ankara that killed 97 people and injured 246 others.

Amid this backdrop, EU leaders at the bloc’s two-day summit recognize that there can be no progress on the issue with Turkey.

“Most war refugees that come to Europe travel via Turkey,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament Thursday. “We won’t be able to order and stem the refugee movement without working together with Turkey.”

Frans Timmermans, the vice president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, put it this way: “The EU needs Turkey and Turkey needs the EU.”

The EU summit would, among other things, help Turkey deal with the migrants and patrol the country’s coastline with its permission.

​And what Turkey wants from the EU is this: Money to pay for the refugees it is hosting, visa-free travel for its citizens in the Schengen zone, and progress on its long-stalled application for EU membership. Turkey also wants a safe haven for refugees in northern Syria, but that idea is opposed by Assad and his main ally, Russia.

Whether there’s an agreement will become clear on Friday when European leaders wrap up their summit—the fourth to focus on migrants in six months.

Netflix, Not So Chill

It’s the original king of streaming television, it’s winning Emmy Awards, and it’s about to release its first feature film, but nevertheless, the bloom may be off the rose for Netflix: The company’s latest earnings reports reveal that its profits have plummeted by 50 percent compared to last year. Shares in the company are also dipping thanks to the news that the company is adding new subscribers at a depressed pace—a fact it blames on “involuntary churn” around the introduction of new chip-based credit cards, but which might have more to do with its increasing competition from Amazon and Hulu.

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In terms of streaming networks, which seem to represent the future of home TV and film viewing, Netflix remains the most visible brand. Its original programming, which includes Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, and Daredevil, has become crucial to maintaining its subscriber base, but is also very expensive to produce, while deals securing rights to first-run movies have also become more and more costly. The company still made $29.43 million in its last quarter (against a forecast of $31 million), but that figure is considerably less than the $59.29 million it made in the same period in 2014.

As a result, the company is raising its subscription fees (to $10 a month for its most-used streaming-only plan) while it continues to expand around the world, hoping to tap subscriber bases outside of America before its competitors can mount similar growth plans. Netflix’s advantage has always been in its huge back catalog of TV shows and films for subscribers to browse through. But Hulu recently poached films owned by the cable distributor Epix, and Amazon continues to try and ape the Netflix model by signing exclusive deals with critically acclaimed shows like The Americans and Mr. Robot, hoping to promote the kind of binge-watching that made Breaking Bad a cult sensation.

Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, naturally states he’s untroubled by the news. “It is clear that Internet TV is becoming increasingly mainstream and traditional media companies are adjusting to the shift from linear to on-demand viewing,” he said in a statement. “It is a great time to be a creator of content because studios make content to sell content (not to withhold it) and there are new bidders for their product. Some studios will choose to license content to SVOD services like Hulu, Amazon Prime Instant Video, and Netflix. Others may not. We have a lot of content to select from.”

He’s not wrong. In this era of supposed “Peak TV,” there are more and more shows to go around, and for cord-cutters abandoning their cable subscriptions, signing up with Netflix and Hulu would still represent a huge slim-down in their monthly bills. Still, as streaming TV becomes the norm, competition will only get more furious, and Netflix may soon find itself wistful for the days when it was the only fish in a much smaller pond.

Losing Bunny: The (Surprising) Identity Politics of Playboy

This summer, Buzzfeed announced its discovery of a new species of man: the “nouveau bro.” This new form of human dude is supposedly “more sophisticated than bros of the past,” its ranks including “some of the most desirable men in popular culture,” among them Calvin Harris, Ryan Gosling, and Michael B. Jordan.

Qualifications for/symptoms of Nouveau Bro-ness, according to Buzzfeed’s bullet-pointed anthropology, include:

Drinking Diet Coke
Being proud of being into rosé
Shopping at Uniqlo
Shopping at J. Crew
Wearing jeans that fit
Wearing colorful socks
Wearing Warby Parkers
Asking you if you watch Game of Thrones
Being surprised that you don’t watch Game of Thrones

Etc.

Buzzfeed’s list plays out in the manner that all such lists will: Its qualifications are exclusive enough to be legitimately formulated as a list, but inclusive enough to allow for maximum anxiety among their readers. (Wait, am I a Nouveau Bro? What does it mean to be a Nouveau Bro?) The list is remarkable, however, in its general focus on the buyability of bro-iness. “Bro” here isn’t quite a commodity, but it’s something that is presented—in the manner of the “basic bitch”—as a largely commercial proposition. Whatever your age, whatever your location, whatever your race—whatever, indeed, your sex—you, too, can buy some select stuff on jcrew.com and thus, yourself, become a Nouveau Bro.

Which is also to say that the list is offering a version of masculinity—albeit a version that leans toward wealthy, often white masculinity—that is largely divorced from inconvenient facts of biology and culture. One’s identity, instead, is there for the purchase. The Nouveau Bro, it seems, is also the Buyable Bro.

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I mention all this because of Playboy. News broke on Monday that the iconic naked-lady-and-also-news-and-literature mag will now, in the U.S., be simply a news-and-literature mag: Playboy Enterprises will cease to include images of fully nude women in its pages. Cue the “I read it for the articles” joke.

It’s undeniable that Playboy, in its capacity as a magazine that turned pornography into iconography, was largely disgusting and non-feminist and in fact anti-feminist in ways that are so obvious today that they hardly seem worth pointing out. (For an eloquent summary, though, I’d point you to the story that resulted when Gloria Steinem posed as a Playboy Bunny to document how terribly the company treated its tail-and-ear-wearing women.) And yet. Today—in a world of Snapchat and YouPorn, a world in which images and videos that are often degrading and sometimes violent toward women are available to pretty much anyone with access to Google—Playboy seems, at this point, to evoke a softer, gentler attitude toward female nudity. Many of the write-ups of the news about Playboy’s decision have gone out of their way to call the magazine, as it exists in 2015, “quaint.” They are not wrong.

But with all that acknowledged, Playboy also emphasizes, in its way, the same thing Buzzfeed’s “Nouveau Bro” list does: the broad notion that sexuality (male heterosexuality, in this case) is a commercial—and thus choosable and buyable—aspect of one’s identity. Masculinity as sold in Playboy’s pages isn’t presented as a biological reality, immutable and therefore inevitable, but rather as a kind of lifestyle choice. Like the wearing of Warby Parkers, like the watching of Game of Thrones, the magazine has been something you buy in order to gain access to a very particular identity. Masculinity in Playboy’s conception isn’t about maleness so much as it’s about manliness. Which is also—per Playboy’s catchphrase—about gentlemanliness.  

There are, again, many, many problems with that proposition: heteronormativity, the blanket endorsement of male aggression and female acquiescence, the blithe assumption of privilege, the slippery slope of commercialized sexuality and of sexuality that involves “choice,” the general objectification of women, etc., etc. Hugh Hefner, a man who put fluffy tails on the rumps of females and generally treated those females as inconveniently human sex dolls, should by no means be celebrated. Nor, on the whole, should his magazine or any of the other brand extensions that function as fiefdoms in his worldwide empire. When Carrie Bradshaw sported a Playboy bunny necklace in the second season of Sex and the City, it was unfortunate both as a fashion statement and a political one.

Playboy treated pornography, shadowy and shame-filled, as something that should be celebrated. It took American puritanism and gave it bunny ears.

And, again, yet. Playboy is, in addition to being retrograde, also surprisingly ahead of its time. The magazine—in its implied promise that sexuality, and masculinity, are things that can be bought and sold—understood many of the anxieties that inform the world of 2015. Anxieties about race and class and sex and gender that have stewed and mixed and finally culminated in what Wesley Morris has called “the year we obsessed over identity.”

Just as that obsession has led us, and forced us, to negotiate a new and more permissive understanding of identity itself, Playboy did something similar with sex. First, it treated pornography—its “quaint” version of it—as something that should not be shadowy and shame-filled, but rather something that should be celebrated. It took American puritanism and gave it bunny ears. It also, however, served as a kind of ongoing rite of passage—to adulthood, to women, to the notion that sex was both basely human and culturally transcendent. In asserting its own particular, and ridiculous, and self-consciously narrow, interpretation of male sexuality—bunny hops and bowties and perfectly shaken martinis—Playboy also suggested a relatively progressive idea: that gender and sexuality, left to their own devices, can exist on a continuum. That sexuality and its manifestations can form their own kind of marketplace. That there are, indeed, multiple ways to be a bro.

In The Atlantic a few years ago, Natasha Vargas-Cooper discussed the rise of online pornography and argued that porn exists the way it does because male sexuality is guided, on a kind of primal level, by violence. There is something both intransigent and dangerous, she argued, about the male drive when it is unfettered and left to its own devices, uncurbed by the softening forces of social constraint. And what is the Internet, she suggested, if not a kind of morally libertarian free-for-all?

Vargas-Cooper wrote with the kind of sad resignation that is the only logical tone for an argument that the male sex drive is both immutable and, for women, kind of terrible: We are animals, she suggested, and differing attitudes toward sex are a simple matter of biology that neither men nor women can escape.

Playboy treated sexuality itself—the identity aspect of sex—as something that, like food and clothes and other commercial goods, can be bought.

Playboy contradicted that idea. It framed male sexuality not in the manner Vargas did (which is also, really, the manner that so much of human culture has done)—as something animalistic and base and violent. Instead, the magazine treated sexuality itself—the identity aspect of sex—as something that, like food and cars and clothes and other commercial goods, can be bought. And also opted into and opted out of.

Which is another way of saying that Playboy was, in its way, an early adopter of the Buzzfeed listicle. It understood that what it was selling was not actually sex, but a sense of self. It took pornography—one of the longest-standing human art forms—out of the realm of the animalistic and into the realm of the aspirational. Andrew Derkrikorian, a 27-year-old former Playboy reader, told U.S. News and World Report that, as a teenager, he read Playboy—despite the ubiquity of naked women on pretty every other media platform—because, “besides just the nudity, there was a purpose behind every image.” And because, “compared to the girls in the photos today, that was art.”

It’s an idea that has carried on, in a much more banal if slightly less porny way, in the new breed of “gentlemen’s magazines.” They, too, sell both a promise of identity and a premise of subtle anxiety (the death of the patriarchy, the death of adulthood, the death of charm, the end of men). They, too, assure their readers that sex, like clothes and cars, is on top of everything else a commercial proposition. This week, Esquire (catchphrase: “Man at His Best”) announced the winner of its annual Sexiest Woman Alive contest. The lucky lady was, this time around, Game of Thrones’s Emilia Clarke. To celebrate her win, the magazine put her on its cover, her artfully airbrushed image surrounded by the words FOOD, SEX, and CARS. (There are, the magazine helpfully explains in tiny text, revolutions going on in each of those three things.) She poses, belly down and naked save for a rump-covering sheet, on a mattress. She looks directly at the camera. She looks both close and distant, both accessible and very much not. She looks very much like a Playboy Bunny.

Why Bernie Did Better Than the Pundits Thought

It can be easy to forget in an era when conventional wisdom congeals faster than cold gravy, but primary debates are not actually winner-take-all affairs.

Yes, Hillary Clinton did very well on Tuesday night. She was sharp and quick on her feet, well-prepared, aggressive when she needed to be, and flashed humor that didn’t sound like it was pre-tested by a staff of consultants. Just about all the pundits—including a few from The Atlantic—said so.

But don’t be surprised if it’s Bernie Sanders who benefits just as much as Clinton from his performance at the Democratic debate—and possibly even more. For an insurgent like the Vermont senator, these initial contests are the first real chance to introduce himself to the country, and judging from the Democratic debate record of 15.3 million people who tuned in to CNN, there was a lot of interest in seeing Sanders take on Clinton. (It’s probably still a safe assumption that viewers weren’t all eager for a first look at Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb, or even Martin O’Malley.) Sanders has been drawing enormous crowds on the campaign trail, but the multiplier of a prime-time television audience is incomparable. And viewers got to see a lot of Sanders: While Republican debaters have had to fight for a few minutes of airtime as they shared a stage with 10 other contenders, Sanders spoke for nearly a half hour on Tuesday, just a few minutes less than Clinton.

So did members of that audience like what they saw? It seems so. While pundits declared Clinton the winner, television focus groups and initial online polls went decisively for Sanders. Those are admittedly a wholly non-scientific pair of metrics, but the results got the attention of former advisers to President Obama, who said they saw the same dynamic play out during the debates eight years ago.

Clinton had a great night, but Sanders winning the focus group and online polls, but losing the pundits is reminiscent of Obama in 07-08

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) October 14, 2015

Sanders asked for donations during the debate, and viewers responded with an impressive $1.3 million, his campaign said. In tone and style, the candidate they saw on the debate stage was the same one who has drawn tens of thousands to campaign rallies—passionate, serious, and unbowed by political convention.

He wasn’t flawless. Clinton successfully ambushed Sanders early in the debate, and he lapsed into the language of a Beltway insider as he tried to defend his mixed record on guns.

Yet while Clinton has tacked to the left in the face of Sanders’s rise, the debate laid bare a fundamental difference in their candidacies: He is the change candidate, and she is not. Clinton embraced Obama’s record, promising to “build on” and “go beyond” his economic achievements. Yet as my colleague Peter Beinart noted, Sanders promised a “political revolution,” making a clean break with the status quo. If this is the year of the political outsider, one in which Donald Trump and Ben Carson are confounding the establishment with their strength in the polls, then it would make perfect sense for Sanders to similarly defy the conventional wisdom with a post-debate bounce.

He is the change candidate, and she is not.

The highlight of the night for Clinton came courtesy of Sanders, who in one exasperated plea—“The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!”—served to absolve her of guilt in the eyes of the Democratic Party. But this wasn’t exactly the entirely selfless act of a kind rival. Sanders has made a concerted effort to distinguish himself from Clintonian politics, to rise above it by pledging that he won’t take corporate money or engage in personal attacks. And this moment afforded him an opportunity to show, in one small but concrete way, what he means by that. Clinton beamed and shook Sanders’s hand. Yes, she won on Tuesday night. But so did he.

A Rethink on Afghanistan?

Updated on October 14 at 3:19 p.m. ET

President Obama is reportedly rethinking the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan because of the recent gains made by the Taliban in that country.

The New York Times, quoting senior officials, reports Obama appears to be willing to retain a military force strong enough to tackle Taliban and al-Qaeda.  The president had wanted to withdraw the remaining 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the time he leaves office next year, and, in fact, most combat troops left the country last year.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters that despite gains, “there continues to be a terror threat emanating from Afghanistan.”

“It’s important in the mind of the president for the United States to preserve our counterterrorism capabilities inside of Afghanistan,” Earnest said.

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.

Here’s more from the Times:

[A]t the very least, those pushing for an expanded mission after 2017 would like to see the United States and its NATO allies maintain at least two or three bases from which drones could be flown and Special Operations Forces could readily strike at militants. The Central Intelligence Agency also wants a larger presence to help protect its assets in Afghanistan.

For now, the option that is being most seriously considered is a proposal made this past summer by Gen. Martin Dempsey, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to keep 3,000 to 5,000 troops for the counterterrorism mission.

The officials said that the Pentagon had also presented other options that range from just an embassy force of about 1,000, which mainly protects American diplomats in Kabul, to maintaining the current force of roughly 9,800, which would also allow American forces to continue training and advising the Afghans.

But the Obama administration is also likely to be wary of continued involvement in Afghanistan. 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 are only likely to raise more questions about what the U.S. hopes to achieve in the country.

The Taliban formally announced Wednesday that it had withdrawn from Kunduz. Afghan security forces managed to retake the city with help from U.S. airstrikes and special forces, but the Taliban attributed its withdrawal to protecting “civilians from bombings and prolonging it [the battle] is a waste of humans and ammunitions.”

A Gun Store Guilty of Negligence

In a trial that pitted the 2nd Amendment against the protection of police officers, the Badger Guns shop in Milwaukee was successfully sued by two wounded officers and city officials.

Officer Bryan Norberg and former Officer Graham Kunisch were both shot in the face in 2009 by a man who bought a semiautomatic pistol at the store using a “straw buyer” because he couldn’t legally buy the weapon. The shooter is serving an 80-year sentence.

“The lawsuit alleged the store was negligent and should have spotted clear warning signs that the gun was being sold to a ‘straw buyer,’” a local ABC affiliate reported.

The two officers were awarded combined sums of nearly $6 million, including $730,000 in punitive damages for Kunisch, who lost an eye and part of his frontal lobe in the shooting. The verdict was reached after nine hours.

The outcome was particularly noteworthy considering gun dealers and the industry at large are widely shielded by a 2005 federal law that grants them legal immunity. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act does provide six instances in which a gun dealer or manufacturer can be sued—negligence is one of them.

But those cases are rare. “It was only the second time in the last decade that a civil lawsuit alleging negligent sales by a gun shop reached a jury,” noted Erik Eckholm of The New York Times. According to lawyers for the defense, the verdict will be appealed.