Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 334

The Rise of Buffy Studies

When Joss Whedon’s classic show Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air in 2003, its cult status was still very much nascent. Cue the novels, comics, video games, and spinoffs, not to mention fan sites, fan fiction, conventions, and inclusion on scores of “Best TV Shows of All Time” lists. But while it remains good fun to watch a seemingly ditzy teenager and her friends fight the forces of darkness with super-strength, magic, and witty banter, the show’s seven seasons have also become the subject of critical inquiry from a more intellectually rigorous fanbase: academics.

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Buffy, along with critically acclaimed series like The X-Files and Twin Peaks, came before The Sopranos and the beginning of the Golden Age of Television, but helped pave the way for scholars to treat television shows like The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad as sprawling works of art to be dissected and analyzed alongside the greatest works of literature. Academics have found Whedon’s cult classic to be particularly multi-dimensional—trading heavily on allegory, myth, and cultural references—while combining an inventive narrative structure with dynamic characters and social commentary.

As a result, hundreds of scholarly books and articles have been written about Buffy’s deeper themes, and an entire academic journal and conference series—appropriately called Slayage—is devoted to using the show and other Whedon works to discuss subjects such as philosophy and cultural theory. Buffy as an allegorical spectacle of postmodern life? Check. Buffy as a progressive, feminist challenge to gender hierarchy? Check. Buffy as a philosophical examination of subjectivity and truth? Why not?

Douglas Kellner, a professor at UCLA, has written that popular television does a particularly good job of expressing the subconscious fears and fantasies of a society, and that Buffy is an especially useful example. The show’s fantastical elements, he said, provide “access to social problems and issues and hopes and anxieties that are often not articulated in more ‘realist’ cultural forms,” like cop shows or sitcoms. But even popular dramas with similar surface-level conceits like Teen Wolf and Vampire Diaries, which focus mostly on soap-opera romance and teen issues, lack Buffy’s allegorical elements, which elevate the show and make it fascinating for scholars to study.

In Buffy, monsters act as physical stand-ins for societal differences and threats: Vampires symbolize sexual predators, werewolves represent bodily forces out of control, and witches tap into tropes about how female power and sexuality is seen as threatening. By fighting the “Big Bad,” Buffy and her friends fight the monsters everyone faces—oppressive authority figures, meaningless rules, confining social norms, sexual awakening, loneliness, redemption—in other words, the terrors of growing up and finding one’s way in the world.

Buffy scholars have taken dozens of different approaches to understanding the television show or using it to further work in other disciplines. In the decade since it went off the air, a Stanford University population ecologist used mathematical formulas to determine potential vampire demographics in Sunnydale, the fictional California town where the show is set. A strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the prominent Washington, D.C. think tank, compared Buffy’s war against the forces of evil to the U.S.’s war on terror and named a new paradigm in biological warfare after the fictional vampire slayer. An English-language historian and linguist published a lexicon of ‘Buffyspeak,’ the insider name for the particular slang and expressions used in the show (Examples include: “Love makes you do the wacky,” “What’s with the grim?” and “She’s the Do-That Girl”).

“Whedon seems to be an almost inexhaustible source,” said David Lavery, an English professor at Middle Tennessee State University who teaches courses on Mad Men, Doctor Who, and Lost as well as Buffy, and co-founded the Whedon Studies Association, an academic organization devoted to analyzing the works of the eponymous writer, producer, and director. “There’s the complexity, intertextuality, authenticity of his stories that makes them so rich for study. If he keeps making stuff for the next 10 years, I think Whedon studies will be going on for quite a long time.”

By fighting the “Big Bad,” Buffy and her friends fight the monsters everyone faces.

Even though it helped set the stage for prestige shows like Mad Men to be studied in an academic context, Buffy lacks some of the same gravitas those series do. The New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum has lamented that Buffy doesn’t look the way “worthy” television should look, which has made it difficult for her to convince friends and peers of its quality. (In early seasons, she noted, “the werewolf costume looked like it was my great-aunt Ida’s coat.”) Still, Buffy’s sometimes Dr. Who-esque campiness itself has merited critical essays. Meanwhile, other scholars have unpacked the complex relationship Joss Whedon has to his universes, examining him as an auteur on par with show creators such as Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner, and Shonda Rhimes.

Beyond Buffy, the field of popular-culture studies is rising in universities across the country. Students are critiquing Madonna, Jay-Z, and Harry Potter, as well as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Lost. These scholars—many of whom are fans of the works they study—sometimes brush up against an academic culture that looks down upon their texts of choice, despite television’s formal and thematic similarities to other well-established areas of study.

But throughout history, yesterday’s lowbrow is often tomorrow’s cultural classic. Rhonda Wilcox, who also co-founded the Whedon Studies Association, frequently compares the episodic format of television to 19th century serialization of novels, like those of Charles Dickens. Dickens, as well as Shakespeare, was considered “pop culture” and thus unworthy of study by close-minded academics who maintained that epic poetry was the most legitimate text. Literary studies and film studies as they’re known today both underwent similar battles for legitimacy that television studies is currently facing. “I think that we’re slowly getting people to recognize that television studies needs to be taken seriously. It’s a general prejudice because it’s fun,” Wilcox says.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whedon himself supports the rise of the discipline. In an interview with The New York Times in 2003, he said, “I think it’s always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it’s successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.”

Will Kevin McCarthy Be Any Different Than John Boehner?

For all of the palace intrigue consuming the Capitol in the wake of House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation, there’s really only one thing most people want to know about the 50-year-old Californian who is likely to replace him, and to his credit, Kevin McCarthy himself put his finger on it during a Tuesday evening appearance on Fox News.

“The question you really want to ask me,” he told a stammering Sean Hannity, “is how am I going to be different? What am I going to do differently?”

What would change under a Speaker McCarthy? Would he cater more to the conservatives who forced Boehner out, or would he sideline them in favor of more compromise with Democrats?

McCarthy’s problem is that he didn’t really have an answer to his own question. After stumbling into a classic Kinsley gaffe about Hillary Clinton and the House Benghazi committee, he talked about how under his leadership, Republicans would go to battle against Democrats with a “strategy” and would “fight to win.” The implication, naturally, was that John Boehner lacked an effective strategy, but McCarthy didn’t lay out how exactly he would succeed where Boehner failed, either in corralling the cranky conservatives or in actually winning fights with President Obama.

It’s not that Kevin McCarthy is woefully unprepared to lead the House. Yes, he would be the least experienced speaker in nearly 125 years, but he has served in the senior party leadership for nearly six out of his nine years in Congress. McCarthy became the Republican whip—the third-ranking post—after playing a critical role in the GOP majority-winning wave in 2010, and he was easily elevated to majority leader last year after Eric Cantor’s stunning primary defeat. (He was a fast-climber in California, too, having become minority leader of the state assembly just a year after his election.)

“At the end of the day, Kevin’s really the only one eligible to be speaker,” said Representative Devin Nunes, a fellow California Republican who has known McCarthy for 25 years. Nunes meant that not in the technical sense but in the political sense: With Boehner and Cantor gone, McCarthy is the only House Republican left who has done the spade work of traveling around the country, recruiting candidates, and raising money for the party that really defines the role of a modern-day party leader. McCarthy would never be mistaken for a policy guy, like his good friend and fellow “Young Gun,” Paul Ryan. But the speakership is not really a policy job. “If you’re going to be in any one of those top three jobs, you have to be political,” Nunes told me on Wednesday. “I mean, that’s the number one requirement. It’s most of the job.”

“If you’re going to be in any one of those top three jobs, you have to be political. I mean, that’s the number one requirement. It’s most of the job.”

Boehner and McCarthy both share a well-earned reputation for affability. They’re back-slapping types, each quick to rib fellow lawmakers, aides, and often reporters. But while Boehner joked around with everybody, for important decisions he turned most frequently to his oldest congressional buddies—most of whom were House veterans who rose to power with him long before McCarthy first arrived in Congress. “It’s a generational difference,” said Representative Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican elected in 2010.

McCarthy has always been much closer to the younger, more aggressive Republicans who have given the leadership so much trouble. But those relationships didn’t help much when he was responsible for wrangling votes as the party whip, and it’s not yet clear whether they’ll be any more useful for him as speaker. (Unlike Boehner, McCarthy has virtually no relationship with top Democrats, be it Obama or congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.) Depending on how much Boehner can “clean the barn up” before he leaves, McCarthy could begin his tenure facing politically-difficult decisions over the budget, the debt limit, and highway funding. “It’s going to be a tricky minefield,” Nunes said.

Huizenga said he understood what McCarthy meant when he talked about having “a strategy” and a plan to “fight to win”—as vague as it sounded. Conservatives have faulted both Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in recent years for appearing to surrender fights before they’ve even begun, first dismissing the chances of winning on, say, Obamacare or Planned Parenthood, and then jamming legislation through without much input from the rank-and-file. McCarthy has told Republicans he wants a more inclusive process and to begin strategizing these battles earlier, which would allow GOP leaders more time to make their case to the public. McCarthy has also indicated he’s willing to embrace the role of party spokesman in a way that Boehner did not. “He needed to be out there more often explaining where we were coming from and what the plan was and why we were acting in the way that we were acting,” Huizenga said. “Boehner is not that kind of guy. He didn’t want to be the defacto party leader.” To that end, McCarthy has been all over cable news the last few days, even pledging to do a monthly interview with Hannity, who told him he could never get Boehner to return his calls.

Yet to change the dynamic in Washington, Republicans need McCarthy to be more than a better messenger, and it’s not even clear he’s an improvement over Boehner in that regard. While Boehner took grief for his tan complexion and his frequently weepy displays in public, he knew how to deliver a talking point and stick to it—even when that talking point was a well-timed profanity. McCarthy can be frustratingly prone to platitudes (“The culture in Washington has to change,” he has said repeatedly), and he wasted little time in handing Democrats a gift by saying publicly what every Republican only acknowledged silently: that the Benghazi committee was a political tool designed to bring down Hillary Clinton.

As Nunes sees it, whether McCarthy’s ascension marks a real difference from Boehner depends more on others than it does on him. Changing the speaker won’t give Republicans the presidency or a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for the next 15 months. Will the conservative hard-liners go along with McCarthy any more than they did with Boehner? Will McConnell and McCarthy work in tandem? “We’ll put a strategy in place for the rest of the year, and hopefully the same cast of characters don’t play the same political maneuvers,” Nunes said. “Or else we’re going to be in the same spot.”

The Museum That Resurrected a Slave Ship

In late December of 1794, the São José, a Portuguese ship whose cargo was 400 humans captured from the interior of Mozambique, found itself caught in heavy winds off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. Just over 300 feet from shore, facing heavy waves, the ship struck submerged rocks. Its captain and crew, along with half of the enslaved Africans it carried, escaped alive; the rest of the people aboard the ship perished.

The ship, for its part, sank.

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When it opens to the public this time next year, in late September of 2016, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will exhibit pieces of the São José. Those pieces will include the iron ballasts used to weigh the ship down and the copper fastenings that held the various wooden pieces of the ship together. They will be small pieces, but they will be meaningful.

And that will be in some small part because of how rare it is to see this particular kind of exhibit. As the museum’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, has noted: “There has never been archaeological documentation of a vessel that foundered and was lost while carrying a cargo of enslaved persons.”  

Finding the São José was a distinct challenge—and only partially because, when he started, Bunch hadn’t realized that it was the São José he was looking for. He simply knew that he wanted to bring a slave ship—not just a diagram, but an actual ship—to the museum’s visitors.

“As I began to think about what this museum should be,” Bunch told The Atlantic’s Margaret Carlson during the Washington Ideas Forum on Wednesday, “I realized that even if we made it the most technologically sophisticated museum, it would fail, because at the Smithsonian, people go to see the Greensboro lunch counter or the Wright flier.”

“So I thought, ‘What it is it that people haven’t seen?’ And I thought, ‘a slave ship.’”

Bunch figured that finding such a ship would be fairly simple—this was the Smithsonian, after all, and there had been many, many slave ships in operations—but that assumption didn’t take into account the fact that, as he put it, “almost every slave ship was on the ocean floor.”

So Bunch and his team created a project with scholars from around the world—a project, basically, to map the ocean floor. They talked with government officials, attempting to acquire ships. (“We thought we had a slave ship that went to Cuba—oh, I can tell you for hours about negotiating with the Castros about getting the slave ships from Cuba,” Bunch told Carlson.)

Finally, the ocean-scouring team found the São José. Or, more specifically, the wreckage of the São José. The ship, it turns out, Bunch has said, “represents one of the earliest attempts to bring East Africans into the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”

But then came the logistical problems. “I didn’t want to bring up an entire ship, because it’s in pieces,” Bunch told Carlson. “I just wanted to have a few almost religious-like relics.” Even small pieces—even those relics—would allow people, Bunch thought, to “not think of the slave trade as something that where 15 or 20 million people were involved.” He wanted instead something smaller-scale. Something that had been, literally and otherwise, touched by humans.

“My goal was to humanize history and make it accessible to people,” Bunch said. And a ship—even, and especially, pieces of a ship that have long laid on the ocean floor—achieves that, he thinks. Those pieces speak, silently and eloquently, to a history that is all too human. They say, whisperingly but insistently, “Here were 400 people touched by this.”

Congress Keeps the Government Open

The federal government will stay open for at least another two months after the House and Senate on Wednesday passed legislation to avert a shutdown, which would otherwise have begun at midnight.

The Senate passed a continuing resolution to extend funding through December 11 by a vote of 78-20, and the House signed off on the bill around 5 p.m. with a 277-151 vote. In both chambers, the only opposing votes were Republicans who wanted the stop-gap bill to explicitly defund Planned Parenthood.

The drama of the shutdown fight largely ended when Speaker John Boehner announced his resignation last Friday. Conservatives had threatened to try to oust Boehner if he did not make an all-out bid to strip taxpayer money from Planned Parenthood, and the speaker chose to quit rather than wage another battle that he believed the party would have lost. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is next in line to replace Boehner, voted for the spending bill on Wednesday.

Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are now negotiating with the White House on a budget deal that would set spending limits for the 2016 fiscal year that began on Thursday. If they cannot reach an agreement, another temporary measure would be required to avoid a government shutdown in December.

Oklahoma Halts Execution of Richard Glossip

Updated on September 30 at 5:30 p.m.

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin issued a last-minute stay of execution for Richard Glossip on Wednesday afternoon amid questions about the drugs purchased for his lethal injection.

“Last minute questions were raised today about Oklahoma’s execution protocol and the chemicals used for lethal injection,” Fallin said in a statement. “After consulting with the attorney general and the Department of Corrections, I have issued a 37 day stay of execution while the state addresses those questions and ensures it is complying fully with the protocols approved by federal courts.”

Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol uses a three-drug cocktail of midazolam, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride to sedate, paralyze, and kill the inmate. According to the governor’s executive order, the state purchased potassium acetate instead of potassium chloride, and is currently exploring whether it can lawfully use potassium acetate to execute Glossip.

The stay raises new questions about Oklahoma’s secretive lethal-injection protocol. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state’s use of the controversial sedative midazolam in executions in the wake of the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April of 2014. Glossip was the lead plaintiff in that case, and would have been the first person executed by Oklahoma since the decision. His next execution date is November 6.

Updated on September 30 at 4:06 p.m.

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a stay of execution for Richard Glossip, a death-row inmate in Oklahoma whose claim of innocence had attracted international attention, paving the way for his execution Wednesday evening.

Breaking: Supreme Court denies stay of execution for Richard Glossip pic.twitter.com/PxAVE9VNBV

— Matt Ford (@fordm) September 30, 2015

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals had granted Glossip a two-week stay of execution on September 16 to review new evidence. On Monday, they rejected his appeal and allowed the execution to proceed. Glossip then petitioned the Supreme Court for a stay of execution and filed a writ of certiorari in which he argued he is innocent. On Wednesday evening, the court rejected his appeal.

An Oklahoma jury sentenced Glossip to death for his role in the murder of motel owner Barry Van Treese in January 1997. Glossip worked at the motel Van Treese owned, but did not kill him. Justin Sneed, another motel employee, claimed that Glossip paid him to bludgeon Van Treese to death. No direct physical evidence linked Glossip to Van Treese’s murder, though prosecutors cited his erratic behavior on the day of the murder at trial. In exchange for his testimony, Sneed received a life sentence.

Glossip’s lawyers argued that Sneed lied about their client’s involvement. They submitted affidavits from two of Sneed’s former cellmates that cast doubt on his version of events. According to Joseph Tapley, with whom Sneed shared a cell before his trial, Sneed described the murder in detail on multiple occasions and never mentioned Glossip’s involvement or any payment. Michael G. Scott, who occupied the cell across from Sneed in state prison for most of 2006, said in an affidavit that Sneed frequently said he had lied about Glossip’s involvement.

Oklahoma City District Attorney David Prater had dismissed the last-minute appeals for Glossip and increased public support for him as a “bullshit PR campaign.” Shortly after Tapley and Scott submitted their affidavits in support of Glossip, both men came under renewed legal scrutiny from the Oklahoma City District Attorney’s office, according to The Intercept, raising concerns about witness intimidation.

The Supreme Court’s precedents place a high threshold on post-conviction innocence claims. In his majority opinion in the 1993 case Herrera v. Collins, Chief Justice William Rehnquist ruled that a death-row inmate must make a “truly persuasive demonstration of actual innocence” to receive relief from the federal courts. Rehnquist cited “the need for finality” in capital cases and the “very disruptive effects” of multiple retrials as justification.

The Herrera ruling stunned Justice Harry Blackmun, who had voted to revive the death penalty in 1976. “Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent,” he wrote in dissent. “The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.” The following year, citing the Court’s decision in Herrera among others, Blackmun renounced the death penalty altogether.

Russia’s Expanded Role in the Syrian Conflict

Updated on September 30 at 2:33 p.m. ET

Russia says its warplanes struck Islamic State positions in Syria, though a video released by the country’s Defense Ministry purportedly showing targets being hit was geolocated to a town miles away where other groups are battling President Bashar al-Assad.

The Free Syrian Army, the anti-Assad rebel group that is backed by the West, said it was the target of the Russian strike, adding one its leaders was killed in the airstrike. In Washington, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said, “It does appear that they were in areas where there were probably not ISIL forces,” adding Russia’s operation was “doomed to failure.”

The Russian strikes came hours after President Vladimir Putin received permission from the upper house of Parliament to use military force overseas.

“In accordance with the decision by Supreme Commander of Russian Armed Forces Vladimir Putin, aircraft from the Russian Aerospace Force began today an operation which involves precision airstrikes on Islamic State land-based targets in Syria,” Major General Igor Konashenkov, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said.

John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad had been given an hour’s notice of the airstrikes. He said a Russian official there “requested that U.S. aircraft avoid Syrian airspace during these missions.”

Kirby added: “The U.S.-led coalition will continue to fly missions over Iraq and Syria as planned and in support of our international mission to degrade and destroy” the Islamic State.

U.S. officials and others also said at least some of the strikes appeared to be against anti-Assad groups allied with the West.  Speaking at the UN on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. would have “grave concerns” if Russia targeted other groups.

Putin’s request to the Federation Council—and the body’s unanimous vote--followed a formal request from Assad for Russian help. Sergei Ivanov, the Kremlin’s chief of staff, said the approval was purely in the “national interests of the Russian Federation.” He added the action would not be open-ended.

“The operations of the Russian air force cannot of course go on indefinitely and will be subject to clearly prescribed time frames,” he said, but did not specify what those time frames were.

Russia’s operation in Syria would mark its first military action outside Europe since its battered troops left Afghanistan in the late 1980s.  But Ivanov reiterated Putin’s remarks that the use of Russian ground troops had been ruled out, adding the aim of the mission was to help Assad against the Islamic State.

The approval of airstrikes and their use against targets outside the city of Hama on Wednesday are likely to raise tensions with the United States. The U.S. and a coalition of countries is also carrying out limited airstrikes in Syria against the Islamic State, but they also say a future Syria must not have Assad at its helm because of his brutal actions against his own people. Those actions, they say, have led to the five-year-long civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and created a massive refugee crisis.

Russia, however, is a staunch ally of the Syrian leader—a relationship forged during the Soviet era when Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, ruled the country. Russia’s sole Mediterranean naval base for its Black Sea fleet is located in Tartus, the Syrian port.

Russia maintains the U.S. and allied operations in Syria are not only ineffective, but also illegal because those airstrikes do not have UN approval. Its actions, however, are legitimate, Moscow says, because they were prompted by a formal request from Syria’s government. But as my colleague Marina Koren has reported, Russia, a permanent, veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council, has blocked any attempt to bring the Syrian issue up at the world body.

The Federation Council’s vote came just days after Putin and President Obama first traded barbs and then met at the UN. There, Putin called for a broad coalition against the Islamic State; Obama said he was willing to work with anyone, “but we must recognize that there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the prewar status quo.”

Over the past month, Russia has sent both military personnel and tanks into Syria to aid Assad. Last weekend, Moscow announced an intelligence-sharing agreement with Syria, Iran, and Iraq in their fight against Islamic State. The U.S. has watched the moves warily because the recent buildup of Russian troops elsewhere—and Federation Council approval—has usually presaged an invasion, as in Crimea last year.

The Very Sudden Arrival of Hurricane Joaquin

Although science may be capable of proving humanity’s disdain for Mondays, this past Monday wasn’t so bad. The world found out there is water on Mars. Many of us had just enjoyed a supermoon-cum-lunar eclipse. And, just two days ago, the heavy rain predicted to hit the East Coast was not attached to a hurricane.

And now, there’s Hurricane Joaquin, which by some accounts, may make landfall by the weekend and is already eliciting comparisons to previous disasters:

Sandy? #Joaquin pic.twitter.com/DvPUyd2PUp

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) September 30, 2015

Heavy Joaquin-related precipitation is already expected with the potential for over a foot of rain in the Bahamas. While meteorologists still aren’t certain if the hurricane will hit land, some are predicting that downpours from other weather systems, very strong winds, and some flooding will happen regardless of weather Joaquin reaches the United States. Others yet are warning that the storm could strengthen as it reaches warmer water.

By late Wednesday morning, the National Hurricane Center updated its projection to show the likely possibility of Joaquin meeting with the mid-Atlantic states before carrying north. As Eric Holthaus at Slate notes,“Basically, all options are still on the table, but the characteristically deliberate NHC seems increasingly on board with an East Coast landfall.”

Despite the uncertainty, the sudden specter of a serious storm going from North Carolina to Massachusetts is a reminder of the remaining limitations of our ability to predict disasters. (For more on that, my colleague David Graham recently wrote a must-read piece about how emergency planners prepare for natural disasters in the United States.)

In the meantime, we’ll keep you updated on Joaquin’s path as the forecasts adjust.

When Republicans Oppose Local Government

The North Carolina General Assembly gaveled out its legislative session in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, bringing an end to eight months of work. Like most of the recent sessions in Raleigh, it was a wild one, including a budget bill that arrived 76 days late. But conservative legislators managed to squeeze in a little last-minute excitement Tuesday with a controversial bill that would have stripped local governments of several key powers.

Under the bill, city governments couldn’t have passed higher minimum-wage laws, established affordable-housing mandates, or instituted rules about landlord-tenant relations—and any existing ordnances would have been superseded. It appears the bill would have have superseded and blocked any rules against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation—sweeping restrictions on local authority that certainly seem at odds with the traditional Republican preference for local control. The last-minute legislation set off a wild scramble to figure out what was in the bill, what it meant, and whether it would pass. The bill was eventually set aside.

How did such a sweeping and controversial idea sneak through to the end of the session without getting any attention? Easily: As it turns out, the provisions only became public on Tuesday, and they weren’t in the bills that passed both houses of the legislature. Instead, they were added during conference committee, inserted into a drastically rewritten version of a bill designed to regulate the licensing of professional counselors. As The News & Observer drily noted, “Neither chamber’s original versions had any provisions regarding substantial changes to local government powers.”

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Democrats, a beleaguered minority in the general assembly, managed to stop the bill by sending it to the legislature’s rules committee, which voted it down—though even members of that committee seemed confused about where that left things.

The strange spectacle of Republicans trying to roll back local control makes a bit more sense in context. For years, Democrats mostly controlled both the statehouse and the governorship. But Republicans captured the legislature in 2010, and the governor’s mansion two years later. Ever since, they’ve been busily passing a series of very conservative measures, some of which I explained here. The rightward shift inspired a prolonged series of protests in Raleigh and other major cities called “Moral Mondays.”

The large demonstrations, combined with their general impotence to stop the legislature—internecine GOP struggles, and not public opposition, have generally killed the most controversial measures—illuminate what’s going on. Rural-urban divides are a fixture of American politics, and they’re a particularly powerful force in North Carolina right now. Its urban centers tend to be far more liberal, while the rest of the state is far more conservative. The liberals can gather large, impassioned crowds to rally against conservative moves, but they don’t have the numbers (so far) to elect a majority in the state legislature—especially after post-2010 redistricting that made the map more favorable for Republicans. (Barack Obama narrowly won the state in 2008 but lost it in 2012.)

Despairing of Raleigh, progressives have often pursued their priorities at the local level. That’s exactly what the state bill was intended to stop. When Congress does this to state and municipal governments, it’s known as preemption—it’s a bedrock constitutional principle that federal laws trump state laws. With a Democrat in the White House, though, there are limits to what the Republican Congress can pass. But the GOP has been gaining seats at the state level for years, and now controls most state legislatures. Cities often tilt left, even in very red states, but conservative state governments around the country have begun passing laws that preempt municipal legislation. Last year, for example, Matt Valentine chronicled how state governments are overturning much stricter gun laws passed by cities with preemption laws.

Another measure this session would have forced city governments to seek approval from the state Board of Transportation before installing any bike lanes. Cities like Raleigh and Durham have been working to expand bike-lane mileage, and they noted that new lanes already required approval from engineers at the Department of Transportation. The proposal was later dropped.

North Carolina Republicans have passed a passel of measures they say are necessary to make the state more business-friendly. “We don’t want to have a patchwork of laws in North Carolina with regard to how businesses do what they do,” said Senator Chad Barefoot, an author of Tuesday’s preemption measure. “It makes it clear that North Carolina’s going to have a uniform system of commerce.”

In other words, it’s a classic case for big-government uniformity. Faced with these bills, Democrats in turn tend to make a strikingly conservative argument: Local people know best, and they ought to have the right to make their own rules about how they live, as long as it isn’t negatively affecting their neighbors.

“It’s an unwarranted intrusion on local authority,” a commissioner in Wake County, home of Raleigh, wrote in an email Tuesday, as reported by the N&O. “The word outrageous barely covers how truly disgusting this kind of ‘government’ is.”

For now, he and other local officials can relax: The general assembly is gone and probably won’t be back in session until late April. The rural-urban divide, and resulting preemption pushes like this, aren’t going away in North Carolina or elsewhere.

When the Wedding Crasher Is a Drone

Here is the celebrity wedding planner JoAnn Gregoli, telling The New York Times last month about a new problem that has emerged in her field:

Really only in the last year, these magazines are buying drones. They are able to launch them, hover them low. You could drop a drone outfitted with video cameras into a property almost undetected. At one event I did recently in the Hamptons, one came in over the water. There is no way we could have stopped it. They are a lot more annoying than helicopters ever were. Before, with a helicopter, you had a TV crew on board, and you’d have to wait for the show to air. Now with drones, they can put it on YouTube, on Periscope, on Twitter, almost in real time. To the world of celebrities, that is horrible. What do you do: shoot them down?

For the record, you cannot shoot them down. It’s potentially dangerous; it’s destructive; and, for both of those reasons, it’s also illegal.

So what can you do?

In a talk at the Washington Ideas Forum this morning, the Atlantic contributor Amanda Ripley, discussing the rapid normalization of drones and “what the world might be like once these drones become truly commonplace,” told the story of a wedding planner in the Hamptons. The planner was organizing an event for an unnamed celebrity, and she ended up facing, in her efforts, an unexpected foe: a paparazzo’s drone.

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The robot flew overhead, Ripley, recounted, as the ceremony was taking place. The planner caught sight of it. She grabbed the videographer she had hired to document the ceremony—he, too, had been using a drone to get aerial shots of the event—and said, “Send up your drone! You need to fight the other drone!”    

An epic aerial battle might have taken place, save for the fact that drones are expensive. The photographer had no interest in an aerial battle with the anonymous drone, sacrificing his piece of equipment to the cause of celebritorial privacy. Instead, the pair came up with an ad hoc solution: They used the photographer’s drone simply to block the shot of the other one. They flew the drone so that it hovered directly in front of the invading one.

And that strategy that came, er, on the fly is now part of the wedding planner’s standard repertoire. “From now on,” Ripley said, “she places a lookout at every celebrity wedding standing guard looking for drones.”

Celebrity weddings, of course, are quite different from the celebrations of normals. And drones are simply the latest entry in the long history of celebrity wedding planners cleverly battling paparazzi (staging weddings under tents, blocking the shots of helicopter-carried cameras, eliminating brushes and shrubs to prevent camouflaged paparazzi, etc.). Most brides and grooms, thankfully, will not have to worry about their ceremonies being interrupted by flying robots.

But Hamptons Wedding Problems can nonetheless be revealing for everyone else: Drones have recently, and rapidly, increased in popularity as a tool for documenting weddings. Last year, the New York representative Sean Patrick Maloney hired a local videography company to get drone-shot aerial footage of his Hudson Valley wedding. Media outlets regularly offer headlines like “The Complete Guide to Shooting Your Wedding via Drone” and recommendations for “The Best Flying Camera Drone for Wedding.” As the cinematographer Justin Fone told The Washington Post earlier this year, “Drones are definitely the hot topic in wedding photography and cinematography.” He added that 50 percent of his potential customers express interest in aerial footage.

That gives couples—and wedding planners, and wedding guests—yet another thing to think about and worry about as they engage, in their own way, in the wedding industrial complex. Drones aren’t just another expense; they also represent one of those classic cases of technology outpacing the law. The FAA has previously declared the kind of photography Fone engages in to be generally illegal, since filming an event for pay is technically a commercial, rather than recreational, use of unmanned aerial vehicles. (Instead, the FAA issues individual exemptions for operators.) Love itself may not be a battlefied, but weddings, for the moment, may be.

The Walk: A Hokey Drama With a Thrilling Climax

The Walk opens with a spectacular shot of the New York City skyline, complete with the Twin Towers perfectly recreated in faultless CGI, described lovingly in voiceover narration by the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Then the camera pulls back to reveal Petit balanced on the torch of the Statue of Liberty, and the gentle magical realism immediately becomes absurd.

That’s The Walk’s problem: For most of its running time, it can’t do anything visually splendid without crossing into hokey territory. There’s no quiet, poetic moment that isn’t immediately followed by a loud, clunky piece of comedy, an overwrought monologue, or a ridiculous display of technical prowess.

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Still, the movie almost gets away with it, because it closes with its titular set-piece, the famous wire-walk Petit performed between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Its director Robert Zemeckis has, of late, become intently focused on the limits of CGI and how they can impact storytelling on film, making motion-capture animated films like The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol. All of that technological mastery is on display in the film’s final 30 minutes, best seen on the biggest screen possible. But whether you can enjoy the stodgy and formulaic lead-up to that bravura stunt depends on your tolerance for bad accents and worse dialogue.

As anyone who saw the Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire would know, Petit is at heart a showman, a thrilling daredevil, and caddish clown, and The Walk tries to imitate his spirit from minute one. Gordon-Levitt, an actor capable of tremendous brooding subtlety in films like Brick and Mysterious Skin is fully extroverted here, almost acting as if he’s hosting an episode of Saturday Night Live. He’s resplendent in a goofy wig, jarring blue contact lenses, and a heroically silly French accent (a fluent French speaker, he sounds great when speaking the language, but far less so in English).

The film tries its best to match Gordon-Levitt’s carnival-barker performance, but there’s a fine line between charming and strained, and The Walk doesn’t have enough plot to breeze past every ridiculous affectation. Paris is photographed in chintzy black and white, as if viewers were watching newsreel of the Bohemian turn of the century, and it’s a wonder every character isn’t costumed in berets, striped shirts, and rings of garlic, so unsubtle is the rest of the imagery. That tone persists when the film shifts to mid-’70s New York, where every Brooklyn-accented cop looks and acts like he’s on the prowl for the Sharks and the Jets.

There’s an obvious motivation for this kind of pastiche: In personality and actions, Petit is hardly a subtle person, so why not rise to that? But until he gets on that high-wire, there isn’t much for Petit and his gang of misfits—including his girlfriend Annie (Charlotte Le Bon) and photographer buddy Jean-Louis (Clément Sibony)—to do. We see the restless Petit learn the circus trade at a young age from a domineering carnival owner, Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley, sporting an implacable accent of his own concoction,) and then quickly resolving to complete the “coup” atop the Twin Towers once he sees an article about their construction in a magazine.

The Walk undeniably exists for its climax: one stunt it does manage to pull off flawlessly.

The narrative bulk of the film is Petit’s meticulous planning and spy-work inside the Towers, building a case for a task the audience already knows he will accomplish. To embellish this, Zemeckis shows just what his camera can do combined with state-of-the-art CGI, sweeping up and down the 115 stories of the World Trade Center with ease and showing off the surrounding views, rendered in immaculate period detail. For anyone made queasy by heights, these are the moments that are easily the most dizzying. Once Petit is on his wire and ready to put on a show, The Walk finally settles down, pulls back on the plot and character stereotypes, and lets its images speak for themselves.

From a dramatic perspective, the most notable thing about Petit’s wire-walk was that it was relatively crisis-free, and the film is happily faithful to that fact. Zemeckis allows himself a couple of wobbly moments (will a specific cinder block break?) but mostly understands that the very sight of Petit between those towers is engrossing enough without any further tension. Once everyone has stopped talking and The Walk’s technical wizards (along with Gordon-Levitt, who really did perform on a wire, though not 1,350 feet in the air) do their work, the film finds the grace it’s been seeking all along, and its self-serving narration finally feels necessary to the show, rather than thuddingly obvious.

As a piece of storytelling, The Walk has nothing on its documentary forebear, tripping over its lame attempts at humor and suspense too many times. But as something to see—akin to, say, a trip to the Planetarium, or a 20-minute IMAX movie—its set-piece cannot be ignored. Zemeckis’s failing is his inattention to every other detail, but The Walk undeniably exists for its climax: one stunt it does manage to pull off flawlessly.