Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 331

The Aftermath of the Airstrike on Doctors Without Borders

Doctors Without Borders, whose trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was bombed by an apparent U.S. airstrike early Saturday morning, announced Sunday that it has completely withdrawn from the northern Afghan city where its medical center now lies charred and inoperable.

A spokeswoman from the global medical charity —which is also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières—told the AFP that “the MSF hospital is not functional anymore” after the attack and that “all critical patients have been referred to other health facilities and no MSF staff are working in our hospital.” The facility’s emergency rooms and intensive care unit were struck, according to accounts from multiple staff members.

Staff and patients have now been evacuated from Kunduz. After the bombing, 19 people, some of whom were children, were reported killed, and dozens injured. The death toll rose to 22 on Sunday, after three people died of their injuries. Twelve Doctors Without Borders staff members and 10 patients are among the dead.

The organization condemns the event as a “grave violation of international law” and is calling for answers from the U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan that carried out the attack.

“We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings. I cannot describe what was inside,” one Doctors Without Borders nurse recounted. “There are no words for how terrible it was. In the intensive care unit six patients were burning in their beds.”

Afghan forces had been fighting all week in the area with the Taliban, which recently overtook Kunduz in its first major capture since 2001. The U.S. military said that the airstrike targeted Taliban fighters who were directly firing on military personnel, and “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” The Afghan Ministry of Defense said Taliban members were hiding in the hospital and were using it as a “human shield.”

But Doctors Without Borders denies any Taliban fighters were on the hospital’s grounds, which were closed during the night.

The organization’s hospital in Kunduz was the only functioning medical center in the area. Since fighting between the Taliban and Afghan forces first broke out on Monday, the hospital treated 394 wounded, and it provided care to more than 22,000 patients in 2014.

Afghan and American forces are investigating the bombing, for which U.S. President Barack Obama expressed his “deepest condolences” in a White House statement. Doctors Without Borders has demanded an independent investigation. Its president, Meinie Nicolai, said, “We cannot accept that this horrific loss of life will simply be dismissed as ‘collateral damage.’”

The Contest for House Speaker Heats Up

Jason Chaffetz, the representative from Utah, said Sunday he will run to be House speaker, joining the race just days before Republicans cast their ballots.

Chaffetz made the announcement during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. Several news outlets had reported Friday that the lawmaker was planning to run.

“I didn’t plan on running for speaker, but I don’t see anyone else stepping up,” the Republican lawmaker said in an interview with Politico this weekend. “I know I’m the underdog.”

Chaffetz is indeed a long-shot candidate compared to the front runner, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, the second-ranking Republican in the chamber, and who has extensive support among members of the House Republican Conference. Hours after John Boehner said he would resign last month, McCarthy was already making calls to colleagues. He announced his bid three days later. Daniel Webster of Florida joined the race the day Boehner resigned, but he is not considered serious opposition to McCarthy.

Boehner has said he believes McCarthy “would make an excellent speaker.”

Chaffetz disagrees. “We need a speaker who speaks,” he told Politico. “We lose the communication war time and time again, and I think the conference wants a proactive communicator.”

Chaffetz pointed to McCarthy’s comments to Sean Hannity this week that suggested the congressional committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack was created as a political tool to use against Hillary Clinton. McCarthy’s spokesman later walked back the comments, but the damage was done. Clinton supporters jumped on his words, saying they publicly affirmed what Democrats have long said and Republicans have long denied.

Chaffetz was first elected in 2008. “He's not exactly a conservative hardliner,” as my colleague Russell Berman notes, but he chairs the powerful Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has held often contentious hearings on high-profile cases like the Planned Parenthood controversy, Secret Service blunders, and the IRS’s treatment of conservative groups. McCarthy arrived to Congress a year earlier, and has spent most of his tenure in senior leadership. The Washington Post recently pointed out that McCarthy would be the least-experienced House speaker since 1891. By its measure, so would Chaffetz. Boehner, meanwhile, had been in Congress for 20 years before he became speaker nearly five years ago.

It’s not yet clear whether Chaffetz could become a significant challenge to McCarthy. Republicans will vote in private for their speaker on Thursday, and a floor vote will take place later this month.

The Martian and the New Soundtrack of Space

In an early scene in the The Martian, people on Earth realize that an astronaut, Mark Watney, left for dead on the surface of Mars, is still alive. With plaintive music—woodwinds, strings—straining in the background, leaders at NASA debate what to do with that information. How should they save him? Should they even try? As Vincent Kapoor, NASA’s director of Mars operations, points out: “He’s 50 million miles away from home, he thinks he’s totally alone, he thinks we gave up on him—I mean, what does that do to a man, psychologically? What the hell is he thinking right now?”

Cut to Mars, where at that moment Watney—fresh from a shower, with disco beats pulsing the air in his NASA-built habitat—is thinking that he is really, really sick of his soundtrack. “I’m definitely going to die up here if I have to listen to any more of this disco music,” Watney tells his video journal. “My God, Commander Lewis,” he complains to his ABBA-loving crewmate, “couldn’t you have packed anything from this century?”

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The answer, sadly for him but delightfully for the rest of us, is no. The Martian’s music, for the most part, is not the stuff of traditional space opera, but something decidedly less epic. In the director Ridley Scott’s sonic vision—an element ported directly and cannily from the plot of the book that inspired the film—the soundtrack of Mars is, for the most part ... disco. So much disco. The worst, which is often also the best, of disco. It’s a running gag throughout the movie that Watney hates the songs (“Starman,” “Love Train,” “Turn the Beat Around,” and other four-on-the-floors) that were left behind on Melissa Lewis’s laptop. He plays them, though, because they are literally all he has to listen to save for his own voice and his own breathing. The songs are also, of course, acoustic connections to Earth. They help keep him sane. And they serve, in their way, as musical versions of the phrase that doubles as a verbal refrain in the film: “Fuck you, Mars.”

So, while The Martian is full of delightful little ironies, one of them is this: Some of the most regrettable entries in the canon of human culture—one of them being, in this case, ABBA’s “Waterloo”—end up helping to save a symbolic human as he battles for survival on the surface of a hostile planet.

The music also helps, in its way, to save the film whose beat it turns around. Just as the book version of The Martian is redeemed by Watney’s cheerful optimism and his charmingly sarcastic sense of humor (“Mark Watney, space pirate!” the bearded, stranded star-sailor takes to calling himself), the cinematic version is lightened considerably by its cheeky-cheesy soundtrack. The “I Will Survive” joke here pretty much writes itself. And, for the viewer, it’s hard to become too depressed by Watney’s situation—Mars’s particularly cruel interpretation of Murphy’s Law—when “Hot Stuff” is playing in the background.

It’s hard to become too depressed by Watney’s situation when “Hot Stuff” is playing in the background.

Which is not to say that The Martian is solely soundtracked by Donna Summers. Scott’s film, in the grand tradition of the Epic Space Movie, does have an orchestral score—one that aims to evoke, The Martian’s composer, the Hans Zimmer protégé Harry Gregson Williams has said, Mars’s menace and hostility and loneliness. That score makes excellent use of tense strings and sharp winds to put its viewers in the mind, and body, of Mark Watney. (Take a particularly powerful moment when the stranded astronaut is performing surgery on himself: The music rises to a terse, sharp crescendo in accordance with his pain.)

Still, in this epic battle set in this vague future—Mark vs. Mars, man against the expanses of nature—the soundtrack belongs mostly to the pop music of the ‘70s and ’80s. And that in itself marks a notable change from the cliché of space-movie music, which pretty much dictates that cosmic scores will be ponderous and/or hopeful and/or haunting. That tradition was established long ago. There’s “The Planets,” Gustav Holst’s seven-movement orchestral suite inspired by, and named for, the (then) nine planets of the solar system. There’s the subgenre of New Age that has been dubbed space music—synthesized and psychonautic, meant to call to mind the sensation of floating, the feel of flying, the general sense of an end to endings. There’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its frenzied chorals and its iconic bummm … bummm … bummm … BUMBUM. In movies, in particular, from the climactic crescendos of 2001 to the avant-garde creepiness of Alien to the Sousa-inflected patriotism of The Right Stuff to the cathedralic organs of Interstellar, audiences have become accustomed to music that sears and soars and strains with a kind of sonic spirituality, evoking wondering humans and wandering stars.

No offense to the Hues Corporation, but “Rock the Boat”—“Rock the boat (don’t rock the boat, baby)! / Rock the boat (don’t tip the boat over)!”—is not, whatever else it may be, terribly epic. (Astronauts may technically be named for sailors, and space-faring vessels may technically be called “ships,” but beyond that, the maritime metaphor will not extend.) In using it, though—and, in general, in creating a soundtrack that might as well be nicknamed Now That’s What I Call Disco—The Martian is doing some boat-rocking of its own. It is effectively rejecting the traditions and clichés of the space movie. It is rejecting the standard, soaring spirituality of the typical space score in favor of something that is smaller and more human. It is trading Holst for Houston.

In that, The Martian calls to mind Guardians of the Galaxy, which owes a hefty portion of its considerable charm to its ’70s- and ’80s-era rock soundtrack (not to mention the sweet dance moves Chris Pratt showed off while listening to the songs in the movie). And Apollo 13, which blends popular rocks songs of the late ’60s and early ’70s with its orchestral music. It even calls to mind 2001—which, on its way to becoming the quintessential “space opera,” complemented its original score with strains of an older version of pop music: Strauss’s “The Blue Danube.”

The soundtrack may be telling of a new attitude toward space—one that replaces wonder with whimsy.

These are cinematic production decisions that may also be telling of a new cultural attitude toward space travel in general—one that replaces a sense of wonder with a sense of whimsy. We’re now talking, in pragmatic terms, about colonizing Mars, about terraforming and space elevators and “space tourism.” Astronauts document their lives aboard the International Space Station on YouTube. William Shatner chats with them over Twitter. Space travel is becoming normalized. In the process, space itself ceases to symbolize the possible; now, increasingly, it represents the probable. The “other worlds” it contains are now simply, for better or for worse, part of our world.

In that sense, the music of The Martian becomes a metaphor not just for an exploratory approach to the cosmos—space, the final frontier and all that—but for a colonial one. “People of the world! Join hands! Join the love train—love train!” becomes not just an invitation, but a kind of political declaration. And “Rock the Boat” calls to mind not just lazy lyrics and some sweet syncopation, but also, in its way, the Niña and the Pinta and the Santa Maria. Straining on the surface of Mars, as a human surveys and sows and generally claims the land for himself, the song isn’t simply a desperate entertainment or an even more desperate grasp at sanity. It is also something bigger, and something smaller. It is the music of one planet—wonderful and terrible in equal measure—brought to the surface of another.

Hillary Clinton Shows a Sense of Humor on 'Saturday Night Live'

Hillary Clinton introduced the New Hillary Saturday night, but this time as Val the bartender during the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live.”

Clinton made a guest appearance on the show alongside Kate McKinnon, who impersonates her on “SNL.” The skit took place in a pub where McKinnon, as Clinton, meets the real Clinton—only she’s a bartender named Val. McKinnon says she’s blowing off steam after a “hard couple of 22 years,” as Clinton pours her drink. But just who is Hillary Clinton? “First, I am a grandmother. Second, I am a human, entrusted with this one green Earth,” McKinnon said.

The skit was an opportunity for Clinton to rejuvenate her campaign. It’s no secret that the Democratic frontrunner has been trying to put forward her more personable self. Peppered through the skit were occasional comments from McKinnon on Clinton being “real.”

In the exchange, McKinnon poked fun at how long it took Clinton to come to the conclusion that she opposed the Keystone XL Pipeline. (Clinton stayed mum on the issue for months until weighing in last month.) McKinnon also noted Clinton’s late embrace of same-sex marriage. And, of course, there was one person that was impossible to ignore—Donald Trump. Clinton impersonated the Republican frontrunner: “Uh, you’re all losers,” she said in Trump-fashion.

Former “SNL” cast member Darrell Hammond also made a cameo as Bill Clinton. “My god, they’re multiplying,” he said, when faced with the two Hillarys.

Clinton’s appearance on “SNL” is the latest in the Democratic frontrunner’s attempt to portray herself as authentic. She did a skit with Jimmy Fallon on NBC’s “Tonight Show,” where she also impersonated The Donald. And she danced the Nae Nae with Ellen DeGeneres.

This isn’t Clinton’s first appearance on the “SNL.” In 2008, she appeared alongside Amy Poehler, who played her on the show then. Like then, Clinton wanted to be president—a point McKinnon reiterated on Saturday night.

“I wish you could be president,” McKinnon said, as Hillary. And with a fist pump, Clinton agreed, “Me too.” And, if all else fails, maybe she can consider a career in bartending.

How a Selfie Got Car Thieves Arrested

The words “selfie” and “arrest,” combined in one Google search, already yield a pretty astonishing batch of results. There are people who took photos of themselves while getting arrested, people who got themselves arrested by taking illicit photos, and so on, and so forth.

The world’s latest selfie-related arrest involves three suspected car thieves who snapped a picture of themselves while driving in a stolen car, using the owner’s stolen phone—only to have it inadvertently upload to the owner’s computer. Lucille Lavoie of Winnipeg, Canada saw the photo automatically appear on her laptop and immediately brought it to local police, who found and arrested the suspects in less than a week.

Lavoie was carrying groceries out of her car when it was stolen by two young men and one young woman. Later that night, back at home, she opened her laptop.

“I clicked on it, and, my goodness, there it was, yeah the three of them," she told a local Canadian news source, adding that it “felt like it was Christmas.”

Beyond serving as a remarkable example of horrible criminal planning, the ordeal highlights exactly how wild the selfie craze has become around the world. Selfies are so popular that there are names for specific photo tropes, and selfie-enabling devices—also known as selfie sticks—are so ubiquitous that they’re being banned in many places for posing a danger to public safety. The phenomenon has also been linked to some darker societal problems, such as narcissism, mental illness, and body dysmorphia.

But police departments, at least, aren’t complaining too much. As evidenced in the Winnipeg case, it certainly makes their jobs a lot easier.

Police Say Oregon Shooter Killed Himself

The gunman in an Oregon shooting that left nine people dead this week shot and killed himself as officers arrived on the scene, police said Saturday.

A medical examiner made the determination about the shooter, 26-year-old Christopher Mercer-Harper, according to the Associated Press.

Shots broke out at Umpqua Community College, a school of about 3,000, in Roseburg, Oregon, on Thursday morning. Nine people—eight students and one teacher—were killed, and seven others were injured. Police swarmed the campus, and officers exchanged fire with Harper-Mercer, shooting and wounding him, The New York Times reports. Harper-Mercer fled and then shot himself, and he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Hundreds of people gathered Thursday night for a candlelight vigil for the victims. “In our sorrow, we will remember and honor those lost here today,” Oregon Governor Kate Brown said at the vigil. “And in this way, they will live forever in our hearts.”

Hours after the shooting occurred, President Obama, in his 15th speech on mass shootings since he took office, renewed his call for congressional action on stricter gun laws. “This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America,” he said.

Officials said the gunman left a “manifesto” at the scene that they described as a message for law enforcement, the AP reports. Police have found 14 weapons in Harper-Merce’s home. Here’s more on the shooter, from my colleague Krishnadev Calamur:

Those who knew Harper say he was withdrawn, close to his mother, and sought a community online. A post on MySpace that appears to belong to him shows a young man with a shaven head holding a gun. He also apparently expresses sympathy for the Irish Republican Army. Another picture on the site shows him wearing a tuxedo on his sister’s wedding day. Multiple news reports cite a profile of Harper’s on an online dating site in which he describes himself as “not religious, but spiritual.”

The motive for the shooting is not yet known.

Tracking Joaquin

Updated on October 3 at 3:21 p.m. ET

Hurricane Joaquin moved away from the Bahamas on Saturday, after pelting the region 36 hours’ worth of heavy rains, damaging winds, and flooding.

Joaquin caused widespread power outages on the three-hardest hit islands of the Bahamas, and reportedly destroyed about 85 percent of homes in a settlement on one island. A cargo ship carrying 30 crew that was sailing near the island chain has gone missing.

Joaquin is the third hurricane of this year’s Atlantic season. The latest measurements showed the storm was packing winds up to 130 miles per hour.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center classified the hurricane as a Category 3 hurricane late Friday, down from its previous Category 4 ranking. Joaquin is no longer expected to make landfall in the United States on its northeast path. But states up and down the East Coast should expect to feel its wrath in the form of rain.

Record-setting rainfall and flooding is expected, especially in low-lying areas and coastal regions, like the Outer Banks in North Carolina. North Carolina, Maryland, and New Jersey are operating under states of emergency.

President Obama declared on Saturday afternoon a state of emergency in South Carolina in response to severe flooding, which means the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will coordinate all disaster relief efforts there. Here’s the scene in Charleston, from the Associated Press:

Portions of some streets were flooded, with water roughly 8 to 12 inches deep, reaching the wheel wells of cars in some spots. Police have stationed officers and set up barricades all over the city blocking roads. No one is being allowed into Charleston, and once people drive out, they won't be allowed back in until the flooding subsides.

As meteorologist Ryan Maue told the AP: “It's going to be a slow-motion disaster.”

Airstrike Hits Hospital in Afghanistan

Updated October 3 at 12:15 p.m. ET

Early Saturday morning, a Doctors Without Borders trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan—the only functioning medical center in that part of the country—was unexpectedly hit by a U.S. airstrike. At least 12 staff members and seven patients were killed, and 37 people were injured.

A NATO coalition spokesman said the U.S.-led forces intended the strike as a response against a perceived Taliban threat nearby.

A spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders said “all parties to the conflict, including in Kabul and Washington” had clearly been informed of the exact GPS coordinates of the international charity’s trauma center. The charity, also known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières, posted on its website that—since fighting in the area first broke out between the Taliban and the Afghan military on Monday—the hospital has treated 394 wounded. Over 80 medical staff members and 105 patients were on site when the strike rocked the building.

“MSF urgently seeks clarity on exactly what took place and how this terrible event could have happened,” the spokeswoman said, adding that bombing continued for more than half an hour after military officials on both sides were contacted.

The organization is “deeply shocked by the attack, the killing of our staff and patients and the heavy toll it has inflicted in Kunduz," said operations director Bart Janssens in a statement. Outrage is also pouring in from the International Red Cross, whose Afghanistan operations director condemned the strike as an “appalling tragedy” that undermines “the capacity of humanitarian organizations to assist the Afghan people at a time when they most urgently need it.”

The U.S. is investigating the strike. U.S. forces have been bombing the Taliban in the region in response to the group’s capture of Kunduz earlier this week, its first takeover of a major Afghan city since 2001.

Saturday’s damage also bears uncomfortable similarities to another event last year, when a United Nations shelter in Gaza was pelted by Israeli forces from the air, leaving 16 dead and hundreds injured.

Tweets from Doctors Without Borders show some of the damage:

Photos of damage done by bombing of #MSF #Kunduz hospital + staff treating patients in parts still standing ©MSF pic.twitter.com/hKOBIyLttI

— Doctors w/o Borders (@MSF_USA) October 3, 2015

Following bombing of #Kunduz hospital & Op-Theatres damaged, surgery set-up in undamaged room http://t.co/Ak475bTKIM pic.twitter.com/AqOC9anKja

— MSF Australia (@MSFAustralia) October 3, 2015

#MSF #Kunduz trauma center aflame after aerial attack this morn. Staff tending to patients, each other, in aftermath pic.twitter.com/o6toDwivym

— Doctors w/o Borders (@MSF_USA) October 3, 2015

Airstrike Mistakenly Hits Hospital in Afghanistan

Updated October 3 at 12:15 p.m. ET

Early Saturday morning, a Doctors Without Borders trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan—the only functioning medical center in that part of the country—was unexpectedly hit by a U.S. airstrike. At least 12 staff members and seven patients were killed, and 37 people were injured.

A NATO coalition spokesman said the U.S.-led forces intended the strike as a response against a perceived Taliban threat nearby.

A spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders said “all parties to the conflict, including in Kabul and Washington” had clearly been informed of the exact GPS coordinates of the international charity’s trauma center. The charity, also known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières, posted on its website that—since fighting in the area first broke out between the Taliban and the Afghan military on Monday—the hospital has treated 394 wounded. Over 80 medical staff members and 105 patients were on site when the strike rocked the building.

“MSF urgently seeks clarity on exactly what took place and how this terrible event could have happened,” the spokeswoman said, adding that bombing continued for more than half an hour after military officials on both sides were contacted.

The organization is “deeply shocked by the attack, the killing of our staff and patients and the heavy toll it has inflicted in Kunduz," said operations director Bart Janssens in a statement. Outrage is also pouring in from the International Red Cross, whose Afghanistan operations director condemned the strike as an “appalling tragedy” that undermines “the capacity of humanitarian organizations to assist the Afghan people at a time when they most urgently need it.”

The U.S. is investigating the strike. U.S. forces have been bombing the Taliban in the region in response to the group’s capture of Kunduz earlier this week, its first takeover of a major Afghan city since 2001.

Saturday’s damage also bears uncomfortable similarities to another event last year, when a United Nations shelter in Gaza was pelted by Israeli forces from the air, leaving 16 dead and hundreds injured.

Tweets from Doctors Without Borders show some of the damage:

Photos of damage done by bombing of #MSF #Kunduz hospital + staff treating patients in parts still standing ©MSF pic.twitter.com/hKOBIyLttI

— Doctors w/o Borders (@MSF_USA) October 3, 2015

Following bombing of #Kunduz hospital & Op-Theatres damaged, surgery set-up in undamaged room http://t.co/Ak475bTKIM pic.twitter.com/AqOC9anKja

— MSF Australia (@MSFAustralia) October 3, 2015

#MSF #Kunduz trauma center aflame after aerial attack this morn. Staff tending to patients, each other, in aftermath pic.twitter.com/o6toDwivym

— Doctors w/o Borders (@MSF_USA) October 3, 2015

Hamilton and Ina Garten: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Race, Immigration, and Hamilton: The Relevance of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s New Musical
Kendra James | The Toast
“The cast of Black, Latina, and Asian American leads emphasizes not only the reality of who actually built and expanded America (‘we all know who’s really doing the planting,’ Hamilton spits at Jefferson during Act 2), but also how irrelevant the Founding Fathers’ whiteness is to their claim on the country.”

Questlove on Hamilton and Hip-Hop: It Takes One
Ahmir Questlove Thompson | Rolling Stone
“If you’re a pop-culture obsessive who has spent his life both making things and consuming things that are at the intersection of various art forms (music, television, comedy, politics and technology), and you see a musical that sets you back a step, you want to know what that is, too. If I can’t put my finger on it, it just makes for an itchy finger.”

Ina Garten Does It Herself
Choire Sicha | Eater
“There is something that Ina Garten knows about what we want, or who we want to be, or how we want to feel. ‘There isn’t a letter, there isn’t a recipe, there’s no photograph, there isn’t a font, there isn’t a color, there isn’t a detail that I don’t totally do myself,’ Ina said, so that’s how it’s done.”

The Distributor as Auteur
David Ehrlich | Slate
“When historians of the future try to pinpoint the precise moment that the film industry crawled out of its deathbed and back onto its feet, there’s a good chance they’ll land somewhere in March 2013, when a fledgling distribution company called A24 Films transformed a Harmony Korine movie starring a cornrowed James Franco into a genuine cultural event.”

Me Inc.
Ann Friedman | The New Republic
“Is this crop top on-brand for a networking happy hour? Is this joke tweet-worthy or something I should merely text to a friend? Is this stupid assignment I accepted in order to make rent detracting from my reputation too much? Life is not always on-brand.”

Future Reading
Craig Mod | Aeon
“Containers matter. They shape stories and the experience of stories. Choose the right binding, cloth, trim size, texture of paper, margins and ink, and you will strengthen the bond between reader and text. Choose badly and the object becomes a wedge between reader and text.”

Drake, Fetty Wap, and the Politics of the Co-Sign
Lindsay Zoladz | Vulture
“With each step he takes, Drake is revising the playbook of what is and isn’t acceptable—or achievable—for a pop star of the hip-hop generation. Whatever Drake does becomes the new normal.”

Ellen Page Goes Off-Script
Sam Anderson | The New York Times Magazine
“I often find myself, while watching Page’s films, staring at her forehead. It’s like its own system of expression, signaling quickness and muscularity ... When Page’s emotions begin to rise—skepticism, distress, anger—the forehead becomes correspondingly complex. Those two neat parallel lines swell, protrude, and start to entwine.”

Democracy of Sound: Is GarageBand Good for Music?
Art Tavana | Pitchfork
“Over the last decade, GarageBand has become the Starbucks of digital recording studios: consumer-friendly, global, omnipresent. Pre-programmed into every Apple device, anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or Mac can open the program and record something amazing (or, perhaps more likely, something totally embarrassing).”

Letter to My Younger Brother
Dorell Wright | The Players’ Tribune
“And while we’re talking family, it’s going to be hard for me playing in China this year, because I won’t be around for your rookie season. But I know it’ll be fine. I’ll still be able to watch some games, and when I do, you’re going to get a long text message afterward with all the things I see. I’m sure you’re going to tell me the same thing you said at school: ‘Yeah, my coach told me that already,’ but too bad. I’m never going to stop coaching you and being your big brother.”

Fresh off the Boat Just Aired an Amazingly Revolutionary TV Moment
Dodai Stewart | Fusion
“As someone who’s watched TV for decades, before Fresh off the Boat, I can’t recall the last time I saw an Asian American family sit down at the dinner table together.”