Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 323

Can a Jay Z Song Violate Your Moral Rights?

More than 15 years after Jay Z and Timbaland’s “Big Pimpin’” thumped in ubiquity across the suburbs of America, the two men are ensnared in an unusual copyright-infringement trial.

According to the AP, a lawyer for the heirs of the Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi, whose 1950s song “Khosara Khosara” was used in the hit, have “accused the men of violating Hamdi’s ‘moral rights,’ a legal concept he said is well-established in Egypt that would have required them to get permission to use elements of ‘Khosara Khosara’ in a song celebrating a promiscuous lifestyle.”

The American way of thinking goes that the two men, having repeatedly paid the copyright fees for the song, should therefore be free to do whatever they wish with the music. But, in 2011, a California judge said not so fast.

In either a much-belated salvo in the East Coast/West Coast feud or some considerable deference to Egyptian law, Judge Christina Snyder said the lawsuit had standing and gave the blessing to let a jury decide “whether the use of ‘Khosara Khosara’ was outside the scope of the licenses at issue.”

In other words, “economic rights” are just one aspect of copyright laws in Egypt. In this case, the “moral rights” afforded Hamdi’s heirs could actually limit the way a song sample could be used. On Tuesday, the trial finally began.

The question of what “Big Pimpin’” is about is pretty cut and dry. The music exegesis website Rap Genius describes the song as an “ode to the ‘pimping’ lifestyle: sex with girls without becoming emotionally attached to them.” For what it’s worth, the song was also part of an album given a parental advisory warning for its “explicit” content by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Rap Genius points to an interview NPR’s Terry Gross conducted with Jay Z in which she asked him what she calls “the bitch and ho question,” specifically, why so many male rappers demand respect from women, but don’t reciprocate.

In a reply that predates the lawsuit, Jay Z lists “Big Pimpin’” as part of a continuum in which his attitude toward women evolves as he raps less and less about his younger self.

I mean, a song on my first album was “Ain’t No Nigga”—I guess ya’ll can bleep that out. You know, and it was like, this careless relationship. And then that went to “Big Pimpin’” in ’99. And on that same album was a song called “Song Cry,” and then “Song Cry” became “Bonnie & Clyde” on 2004, which became “Venus vs. Mars” on my last album. So there’s a steady growth in the conversations—that’s being had as it pertains to women, you know, as I grew.

(For more on this, read Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argued in 2012 that misogyny in hip-hop may be more profane, but is no more pernicious than many other forms of art.)

Will any of this influence a jury? Probably not. But with royalties and concert revenue at stake, Jay Z and Timbaland appeared in court for the opening of the trial on Tuesday in Los Angeles.

‘Removed’: A Photographer Captures the Isolation Effect of Cellphones

Are you reading this on a handheld device? There’s a good chance you are. Now imagine how’d you look if that device suddenly disappeared. Lonely? Slightly crazy? Perhaps standing next to a person being ignored?

More From Quartz Photos: Stunning Winners From the 2015 iPhone Photography Awards Photos: Parents Capture Their Kids Learning the Lost Art of Unplugged Play How Our Photo Obsession Is Threatening Our Memories

As we’re sucked in ever more by the screens we carry around, even in the company of friends and family, the hunched pose of the phone-absorbed seems increasingly normal. So the American photographer Eric Pickersgill created “Removed,” a series of photos that remind viewers how strange that pose actually is.

In each portrait, electronic devices have been edited out so that people stare at their hands, or the empty space between their hands, often ignoring beautiful surroundings or opportunities for human connection. The results are a bit sad and eerie—and a reminder, perhaps, to put our phones away.

Eric Pickersgill Eric Pickersgill Eric Pickersgill Eric Pickersgill Eric Pickersgill Eric Pickersgill Eric Pickersgill Eric Pickersgill

From Whitewater to Benghazi: A Clinton Scandal Primer

Things ought to be looking a little brighter for Hillary Clinton this week.

The House Benghazi committee, her main source of irritation for months, is now going through its own harsh turn in the spotlight. After Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy seemed to suggest on TV that the panel was created largely to hurt her, there’s been increased scrutiny of its mission, and McCarthy himself ended up withdrawing from the race for speaker of the House. Meanwhile, a fired staffer has gone public with allegations that the committee had become politicized and was more interested in harming Clinton—just like McCarthy said—than it was in finding out the truth about the September 11, 2012 attacks in Libya.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s unfavorability numbers, which have taken a beating in recent months, now seem to be ticking up slightly. Though Bernie Sanders remains strong in Iowa and New Hampshire, poll after poll shows her comfortably leading the Democratic field, even if Joe Biden decides to run.

And yet Clinton isn’t quite in the clear. On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported on how the setup of Clinton’s private email server may have made it vulnerable to hacking. The Washington Post has a report on how Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills, implausibly spent her first four months on the job working as a volunteer—at the same that she drew a paycheck from New York University for work that included negotiating with the government of Abu Dhabi on the college opening a branch there.

Even during what ought to be a good week, Clinton can’t seem to escape the drip-drip of controversies that have helped bog down her presidential campaign so far.

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Among the Hillary Haters

The email controversy is turning into a classic Clinton scandal. Her use of a private email account became known during the course of an investigation into the 2012 deaths of U.S. personnel in Benghazi, Libya. Thus far, the investigations have found no wrongdoing on her part with respect to Benghazi, but Clinton’s private-email use and now the referral concerning classified information have become stories unto themselves. This is something of a pattern with the Clinton family, which has been in the public spotlight since Bill Clinton’s first run for office, in 1974: Something that appears potentially scandalous on its face turns out to be innocuous, but an investigation into it reveals other questionable behavior. The classic case is Whitewater, a failed real-estate investment Bill and Hillary Clinton made in 1978. While no inquiry ever produced evidence of wrongdoing, investigations ultimately led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice.

With Hillary Clinton leading the field for the Democratic nomination for president, every Clinton scandal—from Whitewater to the State Department emails—will be under the microscope. (No other American politicians—even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush—have fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.) Keeping track of each controversy, where it came from, and how serious it is, is no small task, so here’s a primer. We’ll update it as new information emerges.

Clinton’s State Department Emails Secretary of State Hillary Clinton checks her phone on board a plane from Malta to Tripoli, Libya. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? Setting aside the question of the Clintons’ private email server, what’s actually in the emails that Clinton did turn over to State? While some of the emails related to Benghazi have been released, there are plenty of others covered by public-records laws that haven’t.

When? 2009-2013

How serious is it? Serious. Initially, it seemed that the interest in the emails would stem from damaging things that Clinton or other aides had said: cover-ups, misrepresentations, who knows? But so far, other than some cringeworthy moments of sucking up and some eye-rolly emails from contacts like Sidney Blumenthal, the emails have been remarkably boring. The main focus now is on classification. We know that some of the material in the emails is now classified. The question is whether any of it, and how much of it, was classified at the time it was sent. Clinton has said she didn’t knowingly send or receive classified material on the account. In addition, some emails that Clinton didn’t turn over have since surfaced.

Benghazi A man celebrates as the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi burns on September 11, 2012. (Esam Al-Fetori / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? On September 11, 2012, attackers overran a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Since then, Republicans have charged that Hillary Clinton failed to adequately protect U.S. installations or that she attempted to spin the attacks as spontaneous when she knew they were planned terrorist operations.

When? September 11, 2012-present

How serious is it? Benghazi has gradually turned into a classic “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” scenario. Only the fringes argue, at this point, that Clinton deliberately withheld aid. A House committee continues to investigate the killings and aftermath. But it was through the Benghazi investigations that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server became public—a controversy that remains potent.

Conflicts of Interest in Foggy Bottom Kevin Lamarque / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What? Before becoming Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills worked for Clinton on an unpaid basis for four month while also working for New York University, in which capacity she negotiated on the school’s behalf with the government of Abu Dhabi, where it was building a campus. In June 2012, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin’s status at State changed to “special government employee,” allowing her to also work for Teneo, a consulting firm run by Bill Clinton’s former right-hand man. She also earned money from the Clinton Foundation and was paid directly by Hillary Clinton.

Who? Both Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin are among Clinton’s longest-serving and closest aides. Abedin remains involved in her campaign (and she’s also married to Anthony Weiner).

When? January 2009-February 2013

How serious is it? This is arcane stuff, to be sure. There are questions about conflict of interest—such as whether Teneo clients might have benefited from special treatment by the State Department while Abedin worked for both. To a great extent, this is just an extension of the tangle of conflicts presented by the Clinton Foundation and the many overlapping roles of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Clintons’ Private Email Server Jim Young / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What? During the course of the Benghazi investigation, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt learned Clinton had used a personal email account while secretary of state. It turned out she had also been using a private server, located at a house in New York. The result was that Clinton and her staff decided which emails to turn over to the State Department as public records and which to withhold; they say they then destroyed the ones they had designated as personal.

When? 2009-2013, during Clinton’s term as secretary.

Who? Hillary Clinton; Bill Clinton; top aides including Huma Abedin

How serious is it? It looks more serious all the time. The rules governing use of personal emails are murky, and Clinton aides insist she followed the rules. There’s no dispositive evidence otherwise so far. The greater political problem for Clinton is it raises questions about how she selected the emails she turned over and what was in the ones she deleted. The FBI has reportedly managed to recover some of the deleted correspondence. Could the server have been hacked? Some of the emails she received on her personal account are marked sensitive. Plus there’s a entirely different set of questions about Clinton’s State Department emails. The FBI is investigating the security of the server as well as the safety of a thumb drive belonging to her lawyer that contains copies of her emails. And the AP reports that the setup may have made the server vulnerable to hacking.

Sidney Blumenthal Blumenthal takes a lunch break while being deposed in private session of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? A former journalist, Blumenthal was a top aide in the second term of the Bill Clinton administration and helped on messaging during the bad old days. He served as an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and when she took over the State Department, she sought to hire Blumenthal. Obama aides, apparently still smarting over his role in attacks on candidate Obama, refused the request, so Clinton just sought out his counsel informally. At the same time, Blumenthal was drawing a check from the Clinton Foundation.

When? 2009-2013

How serious is it? Some of the damage is already done. Blumenthal was apparently the source of the idea that the Benghazi attacks were spontaneous, a notion that proved incorrect and provided a political bludgeon against Clinton and Obama. He also advised the secretary on a wide range of other issues, from Northern Ireland to China, and passed along analysis from his son Max, a staunch critic of the Israeli government (and conservative bête noire). But emails released so far show even Clinton’s top foreign-policy guru, Jake Sullivan, rejecting Blumenthal’s analysis, raising questions about her judgment in trusting him.

The Speeches Keith Bedford / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What? Since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, both Clintons have made millions of dollars for giving speeches.

When? 2001-present

Who? Hillary Clinton; Bill Clinton; Chelsea Clinton

How serious is it? At one time, this seemed like the most dangerous of the bunch, but it has since gone dormant—which isn’t to say that it’s dead. For the couple, who left the White House up to their ears in legal debt, lucrative speeches—mostly by the former president—proved to be an effective way of rebuilding wealth. They have also been an effective magnet for prying questions. Where did Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton speak? How did they decide how much to charge? What did they say? How did they decide which speeches would be given on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, with fees going to the charity, and which would be treated as personal income? Are there cases of conflicts of interest or quid pro quos—for example, speaking gigs for Bill Clinton on behalf of clients who had business before the State Department?

The Clinton Foundation A brooch for sale at the Clinton Museum Store in Little Rock, Arkansas (Lucy Nicholson / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? Bill Clinton’s foundation was actually established in 1997, but after leaving the White House it became his primary vehicle for … well, everything. With projects ranging from public health to elephant-poaching protection and small-business assistance to child development, the foundation is a huge global player with several prominent offshoots. In 2013, following Hillary Clinton’s departure as secretary of State, it was renamed the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

When? 1997-present

Who? Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; Chelsea Clinton, etc.

How serious is it? If the Clinton Foundation’s strength is President Clinton’s endless intellectual omnivorousness, its weakness is the distractibility and lack of interest in detail that sometimes come with it. On a philanthropic level, the foundation gets decent ratings from outside review groups, though critics charge that it’s too diffuse to do much good, that the money has not always achieved what it was intended to, and that in some cases the money doesn’t seem to have achieved its intended purpose. The foundation made errors in its tax returns it has to correct. Overall, however, the essential questions about the Clinton Foundation come down to two, related issues. The first is the seemingly unavoidable conflicts of interest: How did the Clintons’ charitable work intersect with their for-profit speeches? How did their speeches intersect with Hillary Clinton’s work at the State Department? Were there quid-pro-quos involving U.S. policy? The second, connected question is about disclosure. When Clinton became secretary, she agreed that the foundation would make certain disclosures, which it’s now clear it didn’t always do. And the looming questions about Clinton’s State Department emails make it harder to answer those questions.

The Bad Old Days Supporter Dick Furinash holds up cardboard cut-outs of Bill and Hillary Clinton. (Jim Young / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What is it? Since the Clintons have a long history of controversies, there are any number of past scandals that continue to float around, especially in conservative media: Whitewater. Troopergate. Paula Jones. Monica Lewinsky. Vince Foster.

When? 1975-2001

Who? Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; a brigade of supporting characters

How serious is it? Not terribly. Some are wholly spurious (Foster). Others (Lewinsky, Whitewater) have been so exhaustively investigated it’s hard to imagine them doing much further damage to Hillary Clinton’s standing. In fact, the Lewinsky scandal famously boosted her public approval ratings. But that doesn’t mean you won’t hear plenty about them.

The Problem With Ryan Murphy’s Wannabe Divas

Ryan Murphy has a weakness for women having breakdowns. The TV show creator and director lives for the broken lady: the delusional, tempestuous middle-aged woman who’s lost all self-control, like the totalitarian cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on Glee, or the actual witches of American Horror Story: Coven. In his latest horror anthology, Scream Queens, Murphy gives viewers the broken woman in her purest form—the still-young, still-pretty sorority president who hasn’t yet reached rock bottom. But she’s spiralling downward, and the audience has a front-row seat at her prolonged unraveling.

Scream Queens asks its viewers to root for the campus killer, who offs victims while wearing a shiny devil costume. Yet the most irresistible sin at the center of the series and all of Murphy’s shows isn’t devil worship. It’s diva worship: taking pleasure in the bad behavior of gorgeous women, like Joan Crawford abusing her children, or Naomi Campbell throwing a phone at her assistant. But Murphy’s divas never quite earn icon status—their hysteria is too deliberately constructed, and their hyper-articulate speeches are so obviously written by a gay man who wants viewers to adore them. They have two things that a gay icon simply can’t have: self-awareness and composure, meaning they’re so in control of their own madness that they’re never really at their worst.

More than your standard love-to-hate relationship with charismatic villains, the form of tender revulsion that Murphy champions comes from a long tradition of gay-male diva worship. Like many other gay men—including myself—Murphy finds beauty and high style in scenes of disgraced femininity: tantrums, train-wrecks, and freak-outs, and the runny mascara, wild eyes, and frizzed-out hair that come along with them. When Scream Queens’s Chanel throws a fit over her not-hot-enough pumpkin-spice latté, you can’t help but think of Faye Dunaway screaming about wired hangers in the gay cult classic Mommie Dearest.

The deep admiration Murphy has for the women he loves to watch melt down is a distinctly queer feeling—a mode of relating to female characters that tons of gay men experience. This queer infatuation with broken women isn’t so much schadenfreude as it is a complicated mixture of identification and dis-identification, at once a shared struggle and a well-earned condescension. The femininity that humiliates these divas is, after all, the same femininity mainstream culture often associates with gay men.

At their lowest, these women become heroes. In How to Be Gay, David Halperin describes the unlikely valor gay divas achieve through debasement: “Femininity in them gathers force, intensity, authority, and prestige,” he writes. “Femininity may lack social seriousness, but it is not bereft of passion or fury or dominance ... Divas disclose a form of power that gay men can claim as their own.”

The transformation of a woman into a gay diva is almost always an accidental, unintentional event—which is precisely what makes these heroines so magical. The divas who gay men worship are subjects of straight culture who become unintentional objects of queer obsession: Think Elizabeth Berkley water-boarding herself as a sex act in Showgirls, Little Edie doing an impromptu runway walk in the detritus of her Hamptons estate in Grey Gardens, Kim Richards making chicken salad alone in her kitchen on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Part of the fun of gay cultural appropriation is the very process of it, finding the things in straight culture that horrify or repulse other people and bringing out their hidden allure, their secret brilliance.

This is why, as Halperin points out, lots of gay men “routinely cherish non-gay artifacts,” why they “prefer Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives” to overtly gay shows like Queer as Folk, since the former give gay men opportunities to turn them “into vehicles of queer affirmation.” That the hallmark of Murphy’s horror fictions is their gross-out sensibility speaks to their underlying queerness. He challenges viewers to see, in these awful images, the unlikely elegance he does.

The transformation of a woman into a gay diva is always an accidental, unintentional event.

Murphy’s hags, crones, glamazons, and mean girls have all the makings of gay icons. They have the zaniness of Britney Spears, the unpredictability of Amy Winehouse—yet their self-awareness precludes them from becoming true divas. The defining quality of Murphy’s broken women is their preternatural eloquence—their astonishing facility with language. Their monologues are polished to the point of lifelessness. “That obese specimen of human filth scrubbing bulimia vomit out of the carpet is Ms. Bean. I call her ‘white mammy’ because she’s essentially a house slave,” Chanel says in the first few minutes of the Scream Queens pilot, delivering every word with nauseating lucidity.

And then there’s Sue Sylvester in Glee. “I hate you, Will Schuester,” she tells her glee-club rival without the slightest trace of hesitation. “And I will stop at nothing until I see you homeless in the streets drinking gutter runoff and allowing passersby to perform lewd acts on your butt-chin for money. You are a fatuous, dim-witted borderline pederast who tears up faster than a gay jihadi in a sandstorm.” Murphy’s messy women are too clean—in their prose, their poise, their overall precision. With their readiness and willingness to sate viewers’ desire for disgrace, they are coherent, sanitized, practiced. They’re not just in on the joke—they’re making the joke for us.

This is what happens when the appropriator assumes the position of creator, when the diva-worshipper becomes her author. In writing these female characters, Murphy is less a storyteller than a Dr. Frankenstein who misguidedly builds his creatures from the parts of others. The results are monsters missing a heart, woman grotesqueries without a soul.

In the Scream Queens series premiere, viewers meet the Kappa Kappa Tau pledge class—misfits the dean forces Chanel to allow in. The seeming biggest loser is Jennifer, a self-described candle vlogger who posts online reviews of her favorite scented candles. Many gay diva-worshippers recognized the cutaway clip of her sniffing a candle top on YouTube as a nod to real-life candle vlogger Angela Julius—YouTube user Az4angela—whose video recounting a bad experience at a Bath & Body Works in Wisconsin went viral last year. Her strange, hypnotic, rage-filled rant resonated particularly strongly with young gay men, one of whom went so far as to ask fellow Tumblr users, “Do you accept az4angela as your lord, savior, and true gay icon?”

But Murphy’s fictional version of Angela lacks the thing that unexpectedly endeared the original candle queen to a gay audience: her vulnerability. The confessional intimacy with which Angela addresses her camera is inimitable, iconic. To even try to replicate it is futile.

Murphy is less a storyteller than a Dr. Frankenstein who misguidedly builds his creatures from the parts of others.

Murphy is at his funniest when he’s in uncharted territory—not referencing past icons but making new ones. Take, for example, Tiffany DeSalle, the Scream Queens pledge known as Deaf Taylor Swift. A hearing-impaired Taylor superfan, she mistakes everything around her as a Taylor Swift reference. When her friends are screaming in response to the killer approaching behind with a lawnmower to decapitate her, she thinks they’re all singing “Shake It Off.” The bit is downright weird, wrong, and awfully delicious—a sign not of divadom but of Murphy’s own brand of perverse, offbeat humor.

In American Horror Story: Hotel, Murphy has cast Lady Gaga as his newest diva, introduced as a “blood-sucking fashionista.” The choice seems safer than anything he’s done before—to hire an actual gay icon to play the role of an outsized diva. The two pop titans are well-matched collaborators: Both Gaga and Murphy have been central forces in the larger move to mainstream gay culture. Like AHS and Scream Queens, Gaga's early music videos made queer images that were once subcultural into prominent, widely appreciated pleasures. The assimilation of gay sensibility into the norm is a noble project, but it also takes away from the subversive potential of queer feeling and thinking.

The point of gay-male diva-worship is that decision to take a woman everyone else dismisses or ignores and transform her into something special. A diva written or created by a gay man is too easy, too obvious—there’s no interpretive work for its consumers to do. Murphy would do a better service to his viewers, gay and straight alike, if he made them work harder for better laughs: The pleasures of popular entertainment are worth more when you have to look for them yourself.

An Ailing Lamar Odom

Lamar Odom, the former NBA and reality-TV star, is in hospital in Las Vegas after being found unresponsive in a brothel in Crystal, Nevada. There’s been no word of his condition.

A statement from the Nye County Sheriff’s Department posted on Facebook said the dispatch center had received a call about Odom’s state at about 3:15 p.m. local time on Tuesday from Dennis Hof’s Love Ranch. Odom, 35, was transported by ambulance from the brothel to Desert View Hospital where he was stabilized. He was taken by ambulance to Las Vegas because the 6-foot-10-inch, 230-pound Odom was too large to be taken by helicopter.

The reason for Odom’s condition is unclear, but he has previously had problems with alcohol and drugs. In 2013, he was arrested for driving under the influence, USA Today reported, and checked himself into a center that treats drug and alcohol addiction.

Hof, who owns several brothels in Nevada, told The Associated Press, his staff had picked up Odom on Saturday from a Las Vegas home.

“He just wanted to get away, have a good time, and relax,” he told the AP.

Odom was “happy [and] ... sleeping every night,” he said, but the former NBA star was found face down and unconscious on Tuesday when two women went to check on him. He said when they turned Odom over at the direction of the 911 operator, Odom began “throwing up all kinds of stuff.” Hof also said Odom had been taking herbal Viagra and had drunk part of a bottle of cognac since arriving at Love Ranch.

TMZ, which first reported on Odom’s condition, said Khloe Kardashian, one of reality television’s Kardashian sisters, is at his side in Las Vegas. The couple was married in 2009;  Kardashian filed for divorce in 2013, but they remain on good terms.

Mark Medina, a reporter who covers the Lakers for the Los Angeles Daily News, tweeted that several members of the Los Angeles Lakers, including Kobe Bryant, visited Odom at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas.

Odom won championship rings with the Lakers in 2009 and 2010. He also played with the Miami Heat, Los Angeles Clippers, and Dallas Mavericks. His professional career ended last year.

A Russia-Backed Ground Offensive in Syria

Multiple forces are preparing for a ground offensive against insurgents in the Aleppo area, Reuters reported Tuesday.

The Syrian military, along with Iranian and Hezbollah forces, will be backed by Russian airstrikes, the wire service said, citing two senior officials in the region. The officials said “thousands” of Iranian troops have arrived there to participate in the attack, which will occur “soon.” More from Reuters:

“The big battle preparations in that area are clear,” said one of the officials. “There is a large mobilization of the Syrian army ... elite Hezbollah fighters, and thousands of Iranians who arrived in stages in recent days,” said the official.

The second official, who is close to the Syrian government, said: “The decision to launch the battle of Aleppo has been taken ... It is no longer hidden that thousands of Iranians are now in Syria and their role is fundamental.”

The Syrian government, anti-Assad opposition forces, and the Islamic State are currently fighting for control of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. In 2012, rebel groups controlled large chunks of the city, but lost ground the following year to Syrian troops backed by Hezbollah. In recent weeks, Islamic State militants have driven some rebels out of city limits.

The U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State has carried out airstrikes in the northern part of Aleppo. Late last month, Russia began launching its own strikes, saying it would target the terrorist group, but

A Brief History of Seven Killings Wins the 2015 Man Booker Prize

In a Man Booker field with one skinny, experimental novel (Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island) and two luridly violent fat ones (A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life), you might have predicted—I did—that one of the middle-sized contenders would prove the consensus candidate. I was betting on Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (as was the mystery gambler Mr. Smith, recently written up in The Telegraph, who picked last year’s winner by perusing reviews and the judges’ Wikipedia entries, not by reading the books). It’s hard to think of a subject more topical than the migrant experience; plus, here was a suitably dark entry in a generally grim shortlist, but less gory than some.

Instead, Marlon James’s big and bloody A Brief History of Seven Killings is the winner. We’ll never know, of course, whether big and verbally bloody battles edged out Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which the bookies had pegged a front-runner. Perhaps it’s worth noting that, over the past month or so, initially sensational acclaim for A Little Life has made way for controversy, as detractors—and doubters, like Stephanie Hayes in our Man Booker read-along—have begun weighing in. With Marlon James, the prize goes to a Jamaican for the first time, putting to rest for a second year the fears that Americans might be taking over. More important, a novel like his sets high standards for risk-taking ambition.

You’ll find the migrant experience in James’s sprawling novel, along with other daunting quests. His book is full of people “hell-bent on escaping the life that fate had all but drawn up in lines with just numbers left to color,” as one of them puts it. And James leads the way in a group of novels that showcase a virtuosic interest in distinctive voices. “What’s remarkable here is the polyvalency of English prose in 2015,” the Observer’s associate editor, the writer Robert McCrum, noted when the six finalists were announced. You can marvel at that profusion of dialects in James’s novel all by itself, as Katharine Schwab did in her entry back at the start of our discussions of the lucky finalists. The Man Booker is a prize for novels written in English, and you’ll discover all kinds of permutations of it among his mesmerizing, and enormous, cast of characters.

But let’s not forget the voices of the runners-up either. As we did in our Man Booker read-along two years ago, we’ll finish by leaving you with the first lines of each of the shortlisted nominees. James’s opening is indeed enough to lure anyone in:

Listen.

Dead people never stop talking.

And here are the other five. Find one that speaks to you, and read on.

Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways:

Randeep Sanghera stood in front of the green-and-blue map tacked to the wall.

Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen:

We were fishermen:

My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives.

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life:

The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking.

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island:

Turin is where the famous shroud is from, the one showing Christ's body supine after crucifixion: hands folded over genitals, eyes closed, head crowned with thorns.

Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread

Late one July evening in 1994, Red and Abby Whitshank had a phone call from their son Denny.

Pitchfork, the Reluctant Men’s Magazine

Monday brought big news for two men’s magazines. First, The New York Times reported that Playboy will stop publishing images of naked women. Then, The New York Times reported that Pitchfork has been bought by Conde Nast.

Yes, Pitchfork—the music-reviews website/video studio/concert organizer/print magazine—is a men’s publication, at least to hear Conde Nast’s Chief Digital Officer Fred Santarpia tell it: The acquisition brings “a very passionate audience of Millennial males into our roster,” he said to the Times.

On Twitter, the amount of ire directed at his comment quickly seemed to eclipse any other sort of reaction to the news that the most influential music publication to emerge in the Internet age, one closely associated with the word “independent,” was being bought by the old-media home to Vogue, The New Yorker, Allure, and more than a dozen other titles. The backlash comes in part from a fact of timing: Though Pitchfork has faced criticism over the years for white-dude-centricism, lately it’s diversified its bylines and stepped up its coverage of gender, race, and identity (sample headlines: “Riot Grrrl and Queerness in the American South”; “Sex Positivity in the Music of Bob’s Burgers”; “The 13 Best Songs About Women Masturbating”). Besides, its mission is to champion music, period—and contrary to certain sexist stereotypes, members of both genders can and do obsess over the same bands. “Women are a huge part of Pitchfork’s staff and readership,” Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber tweeted in response to the outcry. “We’re totally about reaching all music fans everywhere.”

But Santarpia’s quote reveals that Pitchfork’s value to Conde Nast—at least in part—lies not in its ability to reach “all music fans” but rather a very particular segment of them that indeed includes an outsized portion of the publication’s audience. In 2012, the site ran a poll of readers asking about their favorite music to be released in the 15 years that Pitchfork had existed; 88 percent of respondents were male (and perhaps not incidentally, so were most of the poll winners). Traffic statistics by Quantcast—imprecise as they may be—say that men make up 82 percent of the site’s visitors, and that a majority of readers are between the ages of 18 and 34.

Larger discussions around pop culture aren’t always in sync with the business practices shaping pop culture.

This is a group of people that has been of particular concern to ad-supported media companies like Conde Nast in recent years. The 2014 Nielsen report The Men, the Myths, the Legends: Why Millennial “Dudes” Might Be More Receptive to Marketing Than We Thought opened with a new industry stereotype: “Millennial males are, in theory, elusive creatures. They’re commonly thought of as cord cutters who can’t be—and don’t want to be—reached.” But it went on to explain that while Millennial men were watching less TV than other demographic groups and had otherwise shifted their consumption habits in comparison to previous generations, advertisers could still reach them. One of the top observations seems particularly relevant in light of the Pitchfork news:

Millennial men are also heavy music listeners. Eighty-eight percent of all Millennial males in the U.S. listen to radio each week, spending more time than their female counterparts tuned in (11 hours and 42 minutes vs. 10 hours and 46 minutes). They also show greater interest in personalized streaming audio services—think Spotify or Pandora—than other demographics.

Conde Nast’s Details, GQ, Wired, and Reddit, theoretically, already reach many of these young men. But Santarpia’s quote indicates that the company would like to reach more of them. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Pitchfork will be pushed back towards catering more to male readers (the site’s press release touted its continued editorial “integrity”), and it doesn’t even mean that Conde Nast won’t be interested in the site’s female readership. But it does serve as a reminder that larger discussions around pop culture aren’t always in sync with the business practices shaping pop culture. The day’s other big media news contains the same lesson. To hear Playboy tell it, the magazine didn’t nix its nudity because of feminist criticism for how it commodified bodies; it did it because online pornography made its photos less exciting to the kind of people who used to subscribe. In other words, it changed because of the spending habits of some of the same men that Conde Nast just paid to reach.

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Can Donald Trump Still Mock Himself?

Donald Trump’s poll numbers may be plateauing, but his brand as an entertainer is continuing to bounce back. The news that he’ll be hosting Saturday Night Live on November 7 was greeted with the kind of attention Trump could only have dreamed of a year ago, when his NBC show The Apprentice was sagging in viewership. In June, the network announced it had cut ties with him due to “derogatory statements regarding immigrants” in his presidential campaign. But on TV, ratings matter more than anything, meaning Trump will come roaring back on NBC, if only for a week.

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Politicians appear on the show all the time—Hillary Clinton had a cameo on its 41st season premiere earlier this month—but it’s comparatively rare for them to land a hosting gig while they’re campaigning for office. Jesse Jackson did in 1984, as did Steve Forbes in 1996 and Al Sharpton in 2003. Like Trump, they were all “outsiders” (whether anointed as such by themselves, the media, or both), and their candidacies had an appealing edge of unpredictability. But Trump is a little different in that he’s hosted the show before and been a television personality for years, and has brought that bizarre showman energy to the stump. As it’s progressed, his candidacy has seemed more and more like an SNL sketch—unhinged and surreal. So why not bring the whole thing full circle?

It’s worth noting that Trump was a surprisingly good host on his last SNL appearance in 2004. He repeatedly spoofed The Apprentice, met his on-show doppelganger (then played by Darrell Hammond), and was the star of a strangely on-point commercial parody for a restaurant called “Donald Trump’s House of Wings,” complete with catchy jingle set to the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump.” Trump mocked his mid-aughts status as glorified pitchman with relish, donning a gold blazer and tie and introducing the sketch by saying, “Cock-a-doodle-doo, folks, I’m Donald Trump.”

But since then, Trump has only gotten more thin-skinned, which makes him that much easier to lampoon. Seth Meyers, who played a dancing chicken in the House of Wings sketch, famously tore into Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner over his repeated claims that President Obama might’ve been born in Kenya. C-SPAN’s camera cut to a stone-faced Trump in the audience after every line, and he seemingly never got over it, criticizing Meyers’s work at the Emmys three years later in a typically mean-spirited tweet.

That Seth Meyers is hosting the Emmy Awards is a total joke. He is very awkward with almost no talent. Marbles in his mouth!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2014

Trump seemed similarly ill-suited to his Comedy Central Roast, where he grimaced politely through insults from Anthony Jeselnik and Gilbert Gottfried. As a presidential campaigner, he’s grown accustomed to berating any critic who challenges his newfound political primacy, be it a fellow candidate or a journalist or a whole organization. Part of the fun of appearing on SNL is being able to self-deprecate. That was once part of Trump’s DNA as a media personality, but there’s been little sign of it in recent years (and no word yet as to what he thinks of the show’s new impression of him as performed by Taran Killam).

Of course, that’s the exact tension SNL is looking to exploit. Though the show sometimes gets political, it’s mostly looking to entertain, and Trump looking awkward or grumpy would likely be as interesting as if he were to play along gamely. Despite all his appearances on talk shows, including with satirical masters like Stephen Colbert, Trump has yet to find someone who can beat him at his own game, forcing him to look self-consciously foolish. Saturday Night Live and NBC may be hoping that he can do that himself—but even if not, the ratings should speak for themselves.