Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 336

How Edgy Can The Daily Show Be?

There should really be a word for the particular audience-produced sound that isn’t technically a boo—what audience actually, literally “boo”s anymore?—but that conveys the idea of boo-ness. That low, buzzing hum of disapproval—the collective gasp, the collective did they really just say that, the collective horror emoji, manifested as sound—that expresses, wordlessly, “too far” and “too soon” and all the now-classic responses to tasteless comments. For lack of a better word, maybe we can call it, provisionally, a “noo”?

If so, Trevor Noah was nooed twice during his debut as the host of The Daily Show last night.

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The first came when Noah was explaining the significance of John Boehner’s retirement. “You cannot make a law without the Speaker’s approval,” Noah noted. “John Boehner has final say about which laws come in and which laws don’t. He’s basically the bouncer at Club Congress.”

As a classically Daily Showesque visual of Boehner’s-face-on-a-bouncer’s-body popped up next to him, Noah continued, “Which is probably the worst club ever. I mean, first of all, there’s hardly any women in the club. There’s always a bunch of old guys talking about laying pipe” (at which, cue a visual of the Keystone Pipeline).

He paused for a second. “Oh, and everyone at the club has AIDS.”

The crowd gasped. Then promptly nooed.

“Aides!” Noah interjected, with a what’s-wrong-with-everyone tone. “The people that help you! You are just—ugh.”

The crowd, to that clarification—it was just the old pun, get it?—sort-of applauded. A few whooped.

“Too late!” Noah said, mock-offended.

The second moment of Noah-offense-intended last night came when Noah was talking about hard-line conservatives’ reaction to the news of Boehner’s retirement. [This reaction: unmitigated glee.] “Even John Boehner, the man once ranked the eighth most conservative man in Congress, wasn’t right-wing enough,” Noah said, wonderingly. “It’s like crack telling meth that it’s not addictive enough.‘Yo, man, you gotta step yo game up, crystal! You make teeth fall out, big deal. I took down Whitney Houston!’”

Cue the noos.

“Too soon?” Noah asked, impishly.

If you have to ask, of course, the answer is probably “yes.” But Noah, who has a long history as a boundary-pushing comic, knows that better than anyone. The (slight) surprise was that he took that schtick to The Daily Show, as the show’s host. He was antagonizing his audience, gently. He was charming one moment—he devoted several lines of the show to the debt he owes to Jon Stewart—and noo-inducing the next. He was negging his viewers. While John Boehner and Ted Cruz and Mars were the butt of Noah’s jokes, in classic Daily Show style, so were the members of his audience—in the studio and elsewhere. And so, by extension, were the audience’s quaint ideas of what might, and what might not, be said in polite company.

Sometimes, definitely, the just-on-the-edge stuff worked for Noah. Lots of his jokes landed. When he was riffing on headlines about Pope Francis’s visit to the States (chyron: A PRAYER HOME COMPANION), he cut to a news clip that showed adoring fans greeting the Pontiff when he landed at Andrews Air Force Base. Noah made a comment about the Fiat Francis travels in. He adopted a knowing tone. “Oh, that’s a tiny car,” he said. “Somebody’s under-compensating!”

He paused. “I’m saying the Pope has a huge [bleep]—that was the joke.”

He paused again.

“And what a waste.”

He collapsed into a series of “did I just say that?” giggles.

The crowd guffawed.

So, caveat: It’s the first episode of the new Daily Show. You can’t judge a show or a host or anything, really, by the first episode. And, as my colleague David said, it’s remarkable and rare how much confidence Noah showed in his debut. That could bode well for his ability to move The Daily Show, new and maybe improved, out from under from Jon Stewart’s long shadow.

One way to do that: to gently offend. To push boundaries in ways that are uncomfortable but possibly productive. To get some noos. Stewart, after all, had cultivated, in his version of the Daily Show studio, a particular place for progressives of a particular bent to come together. By the end, especially, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart had the whiff of religious revival, where the converted come to pray and no one comes to be converted. Echo chambers, filter bubbles, Overton windows—ideas about the fragmentation of mass culture that can cause such angst in social scientists—were on display. Stewart was preaching to the choir.

Noah’s impish antagonism of his audience last night suggests that, under his guidance, that might change. It suggested that he might try, actively and maybe even productively, to make his audiences—in the studio, and across America—uncomfortable. One of Noah’s, uh, aides last night was the “Mars Correspondent” Roy Wood Jr. The two talked about the recent discovery of water on Mars, about how that discovery might make the planet more colonizable for humans. Wood made jokes about how he and Noah, both men of color, would not be included among the colonizers. (“Black people ain’t going to Mars!” Woods told Noah. “And that includes you!”) The segment was excellent. It was slightly uncomfortable. It was productively edgy. It was not at all noo-inducing.

The Battle for Kunduz

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani vowed Tuesday to retake the city of Kunduz from the Taliban, a day after the militant group seized the capital of the province of the same name. The U.S. conducted an airstrike over the city even as militants fanned out over Kunduz, their first major gain since they were forced from power in 2001 following the U.S.-led invasion.

In a televised address to the nation, Ghani, who is marking the anniversary of his ascent to the presidency, said Afghan forces had launched a counteroffensive in Kunduz, a city of 300,000 people, and are “retaking government buildings.” He said reinforcements, including special forces and commandos, are either in the city or on their way there.

Dowlat Waziri, a deputy spokesman for the defense ministry, told The Guardian that reinforcements had been sent from Kabul and Balkh provinces.

“The Taliban are being pushed back,” Waziri said. “In a few hours, the city will be free from their hands.”

But it may not be that easy—even with U.S. airstrikes.

Colonel Brian Tribus, a spokesman for the U.S. and NATO missions in Afghanistan, said the airstrike conducted early Tuesday was mean to “eliminate a threat to coalition and Afghan forces.” It is unclear if there will be more.

As we reported Monday:

The Taliban had besieged Kunduz for months. The northern city is not only an important transport hub, but it was also the Taliban’s northern stronghold before the U.S. invasion. The group already controls large parts of the province.

Mohammad Yousuf Ayoubi, the head of the Kunduz provincial council, told The New York Times on Monday the government’s response to the months-long Taliban buildup had been inadequate. He called the local officials in Kunduz “incompetent.”

The AP reported Tuesday that Taliban gunmen were patrolling the streets of Kunduz, “searching for government loyalists and sealing off exit routes for anyone who wished to escape.”

The Guardian adds:

As of noon on Tuesday (07.30am GMT), public hospitals in Kunduz had received 172 injured and 16 dead bodies, according to spokesman Wahidullah Mayar. In addition, Médecins Sans Frontières said their hospital in Kunduz had admitted more than 100 casualties, and was operating on full capacity.

Kunduz’s fall is a major setback to Ghani’s attempt to bring order to Afghanistan, which has been wracked by decades of conflict. Violence has steadily increased since the departure of U.S. and NATO troops last year, and Afghan security forces have been unable to fill the gap.

But the city’s fall is a major victory for the Taliban, which has been riven by factionalism since the death of its leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was confirmed in July. It’s likely to not only bolster the group, but also strengthen Mullah Akhtar Mansour, its new leader.

Catalonia's Winding Road to Secession

One day after parties that want Catalonia to secede from Spain won an absolute majority in the region’s elections, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy issued a politely phrased rejection of their ambitions.

“I am ready to listen and to talk, but not in any way to liquidate the law,” he said on Monday. “I am not going to talk about either the unity of Spain, or sovereignty.”

In Sunday’s vote, the Junts pel Sí (“Together for Yes”) party scored 62 of the 135 parliament seats. Coupled with the pro-independence Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP) party, which netted 10 seats, groups that support Catalan independence from Spain won the majority of seats in an election billed as a referendum on whether to pursue secession. Junts pel Sí, which is led by Catalan President Artur Mas, wants Catalonia to be an independent state by 2017.

Catalonia represents at least one-fifth of Spain's GDP and many of its residents feel as if they are disproportionately taxed by the government in Madrid. Catalan leaders have also called for more recognition of the region’s distinct culture and language. (For more on that, read Irene Boada’s piece about how efforts to ban the Catalan language under Spanish dictator Francisco Franco may have ensured its survival.)

In the past, Rajoy has said that he will use the power of the courts to block any statehood initiative. Rajoy is aided by the fact that, despite the strong numbers in the pro-separatists bloc, the groups failed to win a majority of the vote—finishing with just 48 percent.

Also, while Sunday’s outcome may have delivered control of the regional parliament to pro-independence parties, the visions of the two groups don’t entirely align. Junts pel Sí, which is founded on the desire to cede from Spain, draws from the right and left of the electorate and supports austerity while CUP is a far-left party that wants Catalonia to leave the EU, the Euro zone, and NATO. They also don’t want Junts pel Sí head Artur Mas to remain Catalonia’s president.

According to recent polls, Catalan residents remain evenly split about whether to become independent, but a majority of residents support holding a referendum on whether to leave Spain. Meanwhile, Rajoy faces re-election in December, after which everything could change.

The Long, Slow End for CSI

One of America’s most beloved TV shows in recent years, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, ended its 15-year run on Sunday night with a feature-length special, ironically titled “Immortality.” CSI quickly became America’s most-watched show when it debuted in 2000, but like so many former hits, it faded out after years of declining ratings and multiple attempts to reboot its cast. The finale got a respectable 12 million viewers, but was beaten by ABC’s new show Quantico, and barely matched its final season’s average viewership.

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The finale special mostly functioned as a piece of fan service—the most a network can do for a show that once served as its flagship product. The episode brought back all of CSI’s original characters and had the central pair Gil Grissom (William Petersen) and Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) resolving a long-dangling romantic subplot that was all but abandoned years ago when the actors moved on.

It also served as cross-promotion for the show’s one remaining spinoff, CSI: Cyber, with Ted Danson’s character joining the Cyber team after five years manning the ship on CSI. Danson’s presence underlined the central paradox of maintaining such a long-running show: As CSI stayed on the air, its actors became more and more expensive, but when the original cast left, CBS needed new stars to draw new viewers. Laurence Fishburne was the first replacement, then Danson, but they couldn’t stop a ratings slide (the show averaged 26 million viewers in 2005, 15 million in 2010, and 11.5 million in 2015). In the end, those steadily sagging ratings couldn’t justify rising costs.

It’s a decline experienced by many a former hit show. Before CBS even had CSI, NBC’s Law & Order was an Emmy-winning ratings bedrock for the network that spawned many a spinoff and ran for decades. Even as critical attention disappeared and new actors began cycling through the show, it clung on with decent ratings mostly due to name recognition, and then sputtered out with little fanfare (its series finale was a drama-light whodunit like any other). CSI’s spinoffs had a similar life cycle: CSI: Miami was almost as big a winner as the original show but petered out in 2012 after 10 seasons, and CSI: New York followed in 2013, after nine.

ER lost the entirety of its original cast over 15 seasons and only saw ratings boosts when old favorites like George Clooney or Anthony Edwards popped back in for a special episode. The X-Files creator Chris Carter dreamed of carrying his show on for another 10 years with new actors after David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson left, but an abortive attempt at that formula saw ratings crater and a finale quickly followed. (Lo and behold, Fox has decided to revive the show with the original cast next year.)

Some shows, for better or worse, go out roughly on top. Friends was still hugely popular when it finished after 10 years (spoiler: Rachel gets off the plane), but NBC knew its cast was too expensive to keep on the air forever, no matter the numbers. Seinfeld went out as America’s most popular show, with its creator declining millions of dollars to keep it running, but its maligned finale probably reflected a coming critical downturn that Jerry Seinfeld wisely sought to avoid. The last episode of M*A*S*H remains the most-watched non-sports broadcast in TV history, but even that show, having run longer than the Korean War, knew its time was up.

There’s the rare hit that ends on its own terms rather than at network insistence—Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse famously drew a line in the sand over scheduling an end date. Breaking Bad and Mad Men were two hits on AMC that followed that example, with their creators understanding the value of not outstaying their welcome. But eventually, no matter how big a phenomenon a show is, economics become a concern. HBO’s Game of Thrones is, ratings-wise, the network’s biggest success in years, but it has the advantage of a cast that’s locked into a seven-season deal. Once those seven seasons transpire, keeping that huge ensemble onscreen will be costly and hard to justify. Ensemble sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family might be big earners for their networks, but like any show, their ratings have started to flatten out, while their production costs have only risen: the same equation that sunk CSI.  Every show, no matter how popular, has an end date—the only real question is how many people will care when it eventually rolls around.

Disclosure, CHVRCHES, and the Anxiety of Influencing

One of the more counterintuitive rules of pop music says that the least original artists often end up being the most imitated ones. That’s how Elvis can be simultaneously remembered as the person who made America rock and the guy who stole from the true creators of rock; it’s how there are so many Google results for the phrase “Oasis knockoff.”

Two bands that just released sophomore albums exemplify the idea that nostalgia and creative theft can be forward-thinking. When they arrived in the popular consciousness in 2013, Disclosure and CHRVCHES were widely and plausibly called “derivative”; today, they’re widely and plausibly called “influential.” What happens to a band when their use of old styles helps repopularize those styles?

The two British brothers of Disclosure duplicate the sounds of ’80s and ’90s Chicago house music and U.K. garage—skittering high-hats, melodic synth burbles, soul vocals. On their 2013 debut Settle, they placed those elements into tightly scripted pop-song structures with hooks that were as sticky as anything on the radio, featuring a handful of young vocalists who seemed on the verge of breaking through into stardom themselves. Though the icy, controlled template contrasted with the shuddering, bombastic dubstep sounds ruling mainstream and dance pop at the time, the creators didn’t really claim to be innovators: One of the brothers, Howard Lawrence, bragged to The Guardian that he could drop songs of theirs into a DJ set and “no one could name what decade they’re from.”

The album ended up selling well, with their Sam Smith collaboration “Latch” making a strong play for Song of the Summer 2014. Soon, a lot of bands started sounding like Disclosure sounding like classic electronica. As Pitchfork’s Meaghan Garvey recently summarized, Settle “opened the doors for pop-adjacent neo-house acts like Duke Dumont, Years & Years, and Rudimental (not to mention for Sam Smith). ‘That sound is everywhere now,’ [Disclosure member] Guy [Howard], now 24, admitted in an L.A. Times profile this summer. ‘The same old bass lines, the same old samples. We’re a bit bored by it.’”

Which is not to say that Disclosure has left that sound behind. Caracal, the duo’s new album, feels like an acknowledgement of their influence, a show of power from two guys whose taste and talent landed them at the center of popular music. A number of guest spots go to huge names like The Weeknd and Lorde; it’s not unlike how Empire returned for Season Two with a host of superstar cameos that the show couldn’t have landed before it blew up. And while the band still uses the same sonic textures as before, metallic and cold, they’ve also subbed in slower grooves—backbeats derived from R&B rather than techno, the very same tempos that those huge guest stars already sing over on their own material.

As a result, Disclosure’s sacrificed energy while still sounding derivative. Part of the success of “Latch” came from how the sped-up whirring and clicking of the arrangement made Smith’s wailing almost feel inhuman, like that of a malfunctioning machine—the appeal was intensity, not, as is often the case with Smith, melodrama. But here, even when they do crank up the BPMs, as on “Echoes” or “Jaded,” it’s like a yet-more-tasteful refinement of the already-tasteful sonic mix from their debut. While the results aren’t offensive, they do give the impression of a group that feels more comfortable than they should. There’s no sense of rediscovery, of giddy dress-up, that helped make Settle so striking.

CHVRCHES’s debut, The Bones of What You Believe, came out a few months after Disclosure’s did in 2013. Electro-pop had already been an indie-rock staple for years, but the Scottish trio distilled it with study melodies, bright blocks of sound, and Lauren Mayberry’s clean, sharp voice. Each song was essentially a more emotionally serious version of Men Without Hats’s 1982 hit “Safety Dance” or one of its contemporaries. Fittingly, CHVRCHES opened up for Depeche Mode on a few dates; Mayberry then wrote an fannish blog post about the tour that also, inadvertently, nailed why her group’s take on an old sound was gaining so much traction: “In today’s musical climate of disposable pop with little to say versus deliberately obscure electro where all hints of a topline are buried beneath layers of effects and fear of seeming mainstream, Depeche Mode still stand alone, unafraid to foreground melody and imbue music with emotion in a way few other songwriters can.”

Two years later, it’s common for write-ups of Taylor Swift’s new shtick, or Carly Rae Jepsen’s latest songs, or any number of other ’80s synthpop-influenced popular tunes, to mention a resemblance to CHVRCHES. Like with Disclosure’s second album, the band’s sophomore effort, Every Open Eye, doesn’t ditch the sound that made them famous. But unlike with Disclosure, you get little sense that CHVRCHES feels secure in the fact that their favorite genre is newly trendy. From the nearly atonal blasts that open the album to the immediately earwormy chorus of “Bury It,” it feels like the band’s working very hard to keep people’s attention.

Sometimes, the results of this hard work can be faintly embarrassing; one track, “Make Them Gold,” is so sugary and wannabe-inspirational that it feels desperate. But other songs lace their sumptuous melodies with just enough grit and ambivalence to create a powerful sense of tension/release. When singing along with the spiky, multi-segmented chorus of “Leave a Trace,” for example, it doesn’t matter that the band’s copying has been widely copied; no one’s doing this sound quite as well as them.

And in a super-savvy move, the highlight of the album is one that overtly nods at the past while sounding like the future; the TV comparison here might be to Sam Esmail using a cover of Fight Club’s signature Pixies song during a crucial moment of Mr. Robot. The CHVRCHES track at issue is “Clearest Blue,” a thrilling delivery system for ever-escalating momentum: New Order-y synth drones, the kind of rhythmic loops that recall gears turning. After two minutes of increasing enthusiasm, the song explodes into a riot of sounds that unmistakably references the hook of “Just Can’t Get Enough” by the one and only Depeche Mode. Giving credit where it’s due has rarely sounded so joyful.

Putin’s Syria Gambit

The last time Vladimir Putin addressed the UN General Assembly, there was no Islamic State, the Syrian civil war was years away, and Crimea was Ukrainian.

Back then, in 2005, the Russian president spoke for five minutes. On Monday, he went on for about 20, starting with a defense of Russia’s role on the UN’s Security Council disguised as a history lesson.

“When the UN was established, its founders did not in the least think that there would always be unanimity,” Putin said, adding that disagreement among council member states is “absolutely natural.”

Last spring, Russia ignored one UN resolution that deemed its annexation of Crimea illegal, and blocked another that called for the Syrian conflict to be considered by the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes war crimes. It was the fourth time Russia had stymied a resolution involving the Syrian government run by Bashar al-Assad, a longtime ally of Moscow that Washington wants removed from power. These actions have, unsurprisingly, exasperated at least some of Russia’s fellow council members, especially the U.S., but Putin remains unfazed.

But the deteriorating security situation in Syria has forced both countries to see a common threat: the Islamic State. On that issue, too, there has been disagreement, but also hints of reconciliation.

It began earlier this month, when Russia quietly sent military personnel and tanks into Syria. U.S. officials were alarmed by the sudden movement. Shortly after, Washington agreed to begin military-to-military talks on the Islamic State, and Obama and Putin agreed to meet on the sidelines of the General Assembly—though accounts differ on who made the first move.

Then, this weekend, Russia announced an intelligence-sharing agreement with Syria, Iran, and Iraq in their fight against Islamic State, a move The New York Times says caught U.S. officials completely off guard. “It was another sign,” Michael Gordon wrote, that Russia “was moving ahead with a sharply different tack from that of the Obama administration in battling the Islamic State … by assembling a rival coalition that includes Iran and the Syrian government.”

In Monday’s speech, Putin positioned himself, as Observer’s John Schindler described, as the “new sheriff in town.” When it comes to the Islamic State, the Russian president said, the U.S. isn’t doing it right.

“We think it is an enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces, who are valiantly fighting terrorism face-to-face,” Putin said. “We should finally acknowledge that no one but President Assad’s armed forces and Kurd militia are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria.”

He suggested a “broad international coalition against terrorism” that would be similar to the World War II-era coalition that united the Soviet Union, the U.S., Britain, France, and China against Hitler’s Germany despite their various disagreements. He said Russia, as the current president of the Security Council, will soon convene a ministerial meeting on extremist threats in the Middle East.

Putin followed President Obama, who spoke twice as long. Both leaders said they are willing to work together to resolve the conflict in Syria. But their speeches were also chock-full of digs at each other. Obama, visibly frustrated, asked the room to “imagine if instead Russia had engaged in true diplomacy” in Ukraine. Putin, visibly snarky, derided the “single center of domination” that believes “if we are so strong and exceptional then we know better than anyone what to do.”

Obama and Putin will meet face-to-face for the first time in nearly a year this afternoon to discuss the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. But after these speeches, it almost doesn’t seem necessary.

Behold, the Manic Pixie Dream Grandpa

When, earlier this year, Joan Didion posed for an ad for the French fashion house Céline, “the fashion Internet,” The New York Times gushed, “quivered in a way it hasn’t at least since Kim Kardashian stripped nude for Paper magazine.” Some of the quivering, certainly, was due to the fact that Didion, who has long since passed into “icon” status, has served as a role model for young writers for years. But the rest of it came from something more basic: the sight, at once refreshing and revolutionary, of an older face—a face filled with soft wrinkles—in the pages of Vogue.

I thought about that ad when I watched The Intern this weekend. On the one hand, the film suffers from all the stuff recent Nancy Meyers films have suffered from (Rich People Problems, White People Problems, a general veneer of bland entitlement and perky malaise); on the other hand, though, it is, in the universe of recent Nancy Meyers Films, probably the best. That’s largely because of subtle, compelling performances from Anne Hathaway and particularly Robert De Niro, but it’s also because of the particular kind of rom-com The Intern is: one that takes an expansive approach to the “rom,” blessedly precluding the possibility of a sexual relationship between a 70-year-old man and a 30-something woman. (Thank you for that, Nancy Meyers.)

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But The Intern’s primary storyline also eschews the tired cliches of the rom-com by making the obligatory Thing That Divides the Couple in Question not circumstantial, but generational. Ben (De Niro) is older; Jules (Hathaway) is younger; this is the key plot-driver of the film. The premise of The Intern—unquestioned and insisted-upon—is that Ben has something to offer Jules: advice that is bolstered by wisdom. Caring that is nurtured by life experience.

Call it the swami-com: The Intern is at core the story of the relationship—softly nurturing, mutually satisfying—that develops between a mentor and a mentee. And while there are many, many complaints to be made about it as a piece of film and a piece of culture (see above, and also pretty much every review that’s been published about it thus far), the most redeeming thing is this: The film respects, insistently, the wisdom of experience. It values what so many other cultural products, implicitly and less so, do not. It makes an assumption that is both traditional and subversive: that the older person, here, has something to offer the younger person. Not just because of who he is, but because of how old he is.

This should not be such a strange premise for a film. It should be, actually, an extremely boring premise. And yet: It’s hard to think of other recent pieces of culture that adopt a similar attitude toward age. And it’s hard, as well, to think of portrayals of mentorship that take place outside the confines of the family. Sure, there’s Whiplash. There’s 30 Rock, which makes repeated gags of the rules governing Jack’s mentorship of Liz. There’s Gibbs in NCIS and Dr. Bailey in Grey’s Anatomy and Diane in The Good Wife and all the reality TV shows—Project Runway, The Voice, Top Chef—that endow their experts with some combination of barking authority/gentle guidance/guruhood.

In general, though, those portrayals of mentorship, when they’re to be found, are presented primarily from the perspective of the mentee, with audiences meant to identify with the struggles of the advised-to, rather than of those who dispense the advice. And they’re up against all the other many, many recent shows and movies, from New Girl to The League to You’re the Worst to Drinking Buddies, that carry on in the tradition of Friends and Girlfriends and How I Met Your Mother: portrayals that celebrate the power of the friend group not just as a unit of social organization, but as a unit of wisdom. Parents, bosses, mentors in general—they’re largely absent from these universes. Advice is exchanged horizontally.

There’s a “Magical Old Man” quality to Ben, who swoops into Jules’s life, fixes her problems, and dries her tears with his handkerchief.

This probably has something broadly to do with the longstanding fetishization of youth, the rise of Facebook, the rise of the Grups, the fact that some of the world’s most powerful companies are run by wunderkinder in hoodies, the hope that 60 is the new 40, the reality that, because of the web’s flattening effect, “youth culture” is, increasingly, simply culture. And so, while it may not be the case, as A.O. Scott argued last year, that we are collectively witnessing the death throes of adulthood in that culture, what may be truer is that age itself—the raw data of experience—has lost its place as a determining factor of cultural authority. We have found a way, culturally, to replicate the cruelty of the ice floe.

The Intern, bless its treacly heart, rejects all that. It celebrates age as a value unto itself. (“Intern,” here, is of course ironic, as it’s the intern who ends up teaching the boss, etc., etc.) Jules runs a successful business (an e-commerce startup). She’s capable and hard-working, but she may be too young, her investors think, to run her business now that it’s a bona-fide company. And Ben, for his part, is looking for something to do after his retirement and the death of his wife. (“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not unhappy,” Ben confides in a voiceover. “I just know there’s a hole in my life, and I need to fill it.”) Long story short(er): Things work out well for both of them.They both help each other get what they want, and maybe even what they need.

This is not the stuff, to be sure, of deep philosophy. The glib Benjamin Buttoning—Ben and Jules meet in the middle, emotionally!—is not subtle. There is, as my colleague David pointed out, a “Magical Old Man” quality to Ben, who swoops into Jules’s life, fixes her problems, and dries her tears with his omnipresent handkerchief. (And there’s the fact that he’s a man, with all the freight that brings.) The younguns here also come in for a drubbing: Jules rides a bike through the company’s converted-loft office space, ridiculously, and there are a lot of jokes at the expense of both digital technology and the say-anything proclivities of the young. (“I’m 24,” Jules’s assistant, Becky, tells Ben, quickly adding: “I know, it’s the job—it ages you. Which won’t be great in your case.”)

And yet. You know who comes out looking great in all this? Ben. This is his film, through and through. And there’s something powerful in that, in the simple fact that The Intern is so sympathetic to its older character—so resolutely on the side of a person who might, in other contexts, be dismissed. The Intern is in some sense the cinematic version of that Céline ad: It celebrates age for the wisdom it brings along with it. Ben’s resistance to the complacencies that are so often ascribed to the elderly could double as a rallying cry for older people as a group. People who may be retired, but who are not yet tired. People who will not go with the floe. “I read somewhere that musicians don’t retire,” Ben tells The Intern’s audience. “They stop when there’s no more music in them.” He pauses. “Well, I still have music.”

Donald Trump’s Amazingly Conventional Tax Plan

Maybe Donald Trump isn’t such an unconventional politician after all.

The Republican presidential frontrunner released his tax plan on Monday morning, and the most noteworthy thing about the proposal is how utterly plain-vanilla it is. Yes, Trump’s plan would dramatically reshape the tax code by cutting the current seven income brackets to four, slashing rates for the rich, poor, and businesses, and eliminating a host of loopholes and deductions. But that’s basically what Republican candidates and lawmakers have been proposing for years. Trump is hardly breaking the mold.

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That’s not how Trump described it, of course. Standing next to the now-iconic gold-trimmed escalator in Trump Tower and surrounded by his usual cadre of sign-holding tourist-campaign-supporters, the candidate presented his proposal as if he were Moses delivering the Commandments. “It’s a tax reform that I think will make America strong and great again,” he declared. Trump added later in the press conference: “I think people will be very happy.”

And why wouldn’t they? In Trump’s telling, just about everyone would see a tax cut—except perhaps himself. (“It’s going to cost me a fortune,” he said, although when you look at the details of the plan, it wasn’t clear this would actually be true.) The top marginal income rate would drop to 25 percent from nearly 40 percent, middle-income earners would pay 10 or 20 percent, and anyone earning less than $25,000 a year ($50,000 for married couples) would pay no income tax at all. Trump would scrap the marriage penalty, the estate tax, and the alternative minimum tax. Businesses would pay no more than 15 percent of their income to the government.

Don’t you worry: None of this would add any money to the deficit. How does Trump pay for it? He’d start by eliminating loopholes for “special interests and the very rich,” including the much-anticipated scrapping of the preferential tax treatment of “carried interest” for hedge fund managers. But Trump would keep the most popular deductions—a generous standard deduction of $25,000, plus the mortgage interest and charitable deductions. And he’d encourage corporations to bring trillions of dollars in profits back from overseas by charging them a one-time 10 percent “fee.” As tax experts quickly pointed out, these revenue-raisers wouldn’t come close to offsetting the enormous tax cuts in Trump’s plan, and Trump’s campaign made no effort to detail exactly how the numbers would add up.

He did acknowledge there would have to be spending cuts, but in typical Trump-style, they would be the greatest cuts ever.

He did acknowledge there would have to be spending cuts, but in typical Trump-style, they would be the greatest cuts ever. “We will be able to cut so much money,” he said. But he promised that he could cut spending “without losing anything.” The closest Trump got to a specific cut was when he talked about how expensive it now is to ship washers that cost “19 cents" from state to state—literally nuts and bolts. “The waste that I get rid of,” he promised, “is going to have a huge impact, and I’m not even putting that in my numbers.”

Trump’s written plan did have one creative touch. Nearly 75 million households who would no longer pay any income tax would simply get a form saying, “I win,” that they would send back to the IRS, according to his site.

If you are single and earn less than $25,000, or married and jointly earn less than $50,000, you will not owe any income tax. That removes nearly 75 million households – over 50% – from the income tax rolls. They get a new one page form to send the IRS saying, “I win,” those who would otherwise owe income taxes will save an average of nearly $1,000 each.

Yet superlatives aside, in most other respects the Trump proposal falls well within the Republican mainstream: It’s a big tax cut for the wealthy that, despite claims to the contrary, will add trillions to the deficit. “The best way to think about this plan is, start with Governor Jeb Bush’s tax plan and then make it a larger tax cut,” said Kyle Pomerleau, an economist at the Tax Foundation. Bush’s proposal, which he released over the summer, would cut anywhere from $1.6 trillion to $3.6 trillion, depending on how it is scored by budget forecasters. Bush put his top marginal income rate at 28 percent, while Trump dropped it to 25 percent, and Trump included a much larger standard deduction. (The Tax Foundation hasn’t yet done a full analysis of the Trump plan.)

Even the change in the carried interest loophole is more generous in Trump’s plan, despite his promises that the “hedge fund guys” would pay a lot more if it got to the White House. “Getting rid of that is only going to raise about $1 billion per year,” Pomerleau told me, “while the individual tax cuts alone are probably going to be close to $100 billion.”

Trump’s plan won a thumbs-up from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which certified that it adhered to the group’s pledge against raising taxes. It thoroughly confused the conservative Club for Growth, which had been warring with Trump over his past support for Democratic candidates and liberal policies. “His tax plan begs the question,” asked David McIntosh, the Club’s president. “Does this mean you were completely wrong about all your liberal policies on taxes, trade, health care, bailouts, and eminent domain?”

Democrats like Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, found it more amusing than anything else.

hahahahahaha. heeheeheeeheee. hahaha. reading Trump tax plan. hahahahaha. carry on. (muffled) heeheeheeeheee. hahahaha

— Austan Goolsbee (@Austan_Goolsbee) September 28, 2015

As a formal policy proposal, Trump's tax plan might be the biggest indication yet that he’s serious about winning the Republican nomination, and not, say, mulling an independent run. It’s certainly a more important commitment to the party orthodoxy than the awkward “loyalty pledge” he signed this summer. And the proposal should also put to rest the suggestion that the real-estate magnate was embracing a populist economic platform. And the candidate himself admitted as much on Monday. “I’m not a populist,” Trump said. “No, I’m not. I’m a man of great common-sense.”

That’s one way to put it. But judging by his supply-side tax proposal, conventional Republican is another.

The Fall of Kunduz

The Taliban has captured the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, marking the first time the militant group has seized a major city since 2001 when it was driven from power by the U.S.-led invasion.

News of Kunduz’s fall was confirmed by Sediq Sediqqi, a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, who told The Associated Press: “Kunduz city has collapsed into the hands of the Taliban.”

The Taliban’s spokesman had earlier claimed on Twitter that the group had taken  the capital of the province of the same name.

The Taliban had besieged Kunduz for months. The northern city is not only an important transport hub, but it was also the Taliban’s northern stronghold before the U.S. invasion. The group already controls large parts of the province.

Mohammad Yousuf Ayoubi, the head of the Kunduz provincial council, told The New York Times the government’s response to the months-long Taliban buildup had been inadequate.

“The central government is neglecting Kunduz and its people,” he told the newspaper. “The local officials are incompetent, which is a major reason for the presence of the Taliban.”

Ehsanullah Ehsan, a stabilization manager for DAI, an international development agency, tweeted the developments in Kunduz:

Kunduz city is completely with taliban ANSF are out

— Ehsan (@ehsan_af) September 28, 2015

#kunduz: the city is completely with taliban now, taliban walking inside streets, i am trapped at home

— Ehsan (@ehsan_af) September 28, 2015

Update kunduz photos, taloban inside the city, looking for goverment vehicles pic.twitter.com/WRqqUbVRVr

— Ehsan (@ehsan_af) September 28, 2015

#kunduz: prisoners freed from kunduz main prison pic.twitter.com/DwPRhA8t8y

— Ehsan (@ehsan_af) September 28, 2015

Just took these photos from kunduz main square pic.twitter.com/5R3FDMmiDE

— Ehsan (@ehsan_af) September 28, 2015

#kunduz: taliban looted kabul bank, jewellaries and many govermental banks

— Ehsan (@ehsan_af) September 28, 2015

Kunduz’s fall is a major setback to Ashraf Ghani, who assumed the Afghan presidency exactly a year ago on Tuesday. Violence in Afghanistan has steadily increased since the departure of U.S. and NATO troops last year, and Afghan security forces have been unable to fill the gap.

Bill Roggio, who edits the Long War Journal, points out the fall of Kunduz “would invalidate the entire US ‘surge’ strategy from 2009 to 2012.”

The US military focused its efforts on the southern Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, claiming that these provinces were the key to breaking the Taliban. Little attention was given to other areas of Afghanistan, including the northern provinces, where the Taliban have expended considerable effort in fighting the military and government. Today, the Taliban are gaining ground in northern, central, eastern and southern Afghanistan, with dozens of districts falling under Taliban control over the past year.

Water Is Flowing on Mars

Right now, 140 million miles away, somewhere on the frigid surface of Mars, there is water forming. Scientists announced they have strong evidence that briny water flows on the planet, a critical step toward identifying possible life on Mars.

“Water is essential to life as we know it,” wrote Lujendra Ojha, Mary Beth Wilhelm, and their co-authors in a paper published Monday in Nature Geoscience. “The presence of liquid water on Mars today has astrobiological, geologic, and hydrologic implications and may affect future human exploration.”

If this announcement, which NASA billed as “major” in the days leading up to it, sounds not altogether new, it’s because scientists have been obsessing over the water on Mars for decades. (The sight of ice volcanoes on Pluto this summer had scientists similarly elated.) Astrobiologists have long suspected that Mars was at least partially covered in water at one time—markings on the planet indicate the presence of ancient streambeds. A billion years ago, scientists believe the planet may have had a roiling, primitive ocean. Meandering formations on the surface of Mars suggested water flowed on the planet for a geologically significant period of time. Long enough, perhaps, to have sustained bacteria or other simple life forms.

Scientists believe that the flow of briny water caused these dark streaks on Mars. (NASA / JPL / University of Arizona)

In recent years, it became increasingly clear that water ​in some form​ was still present on Mars—in vast near-surface deposits of ice, in massive glaciers near the poles, and in large sheets in crater and gullies. The knowledge that water existed at all on Mars “completely shifted the paradigm of Mars today from a static, arid world to a planet still being shaped by water. If life evolved there, conceivably it may still survive,” as the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group put it.

In 2013, scientists identified geographic features suggesting “surprisingly abundant” briny water near Mars’s equator, according to a paper that appeared in Nature Geoscience two years ago. Monday’s announcement builds on that finding.

“Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past,” said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters, in a press conference on Monday. Previously, evidence of flowing water on Mars was still considered circumstantial.

An animation showing markings from water flowing across the surface of Mars (NASA)

Scientists used spectral data to more closely analyze those geographic features and found hydrated salts that suggested a seasonal patter of water flow. “The hydrated salts most consistent with the spectral absorption features we detect are magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate, and sodium perchlorate,” the authors wrote in Monday’s paper. “Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that recurring slope lineae form as a result of contemporary water activity on Mars.”

That the water is believed to be briny—not fresh—is another exciting finding. It makes it more likely that the water could support life. Fresh water would freeze on Mars, and likely kill any organisms with it.

“The detection described here warrants further astrobiological characterization and exploration of these unique regions on Mars,” the authors wrote. So this finding answers one huge question about the nature of Mars, but it raises many more.

Mars once had clouds, snowy mountaintops, fresh lakes, and a deep ocean. All that water dissipated over time as Mars’s atmosphere thinned. But scientists still don’t know why that happened.

They also want to investigate how cold and concentrated the brine is—not just to see whether the water supports life on Mars today, but to determine whether it might be a resource for humans visiting the planet in the future.

“Mars is looking more and more—it’s a potential habitat, extant from Earth,” said the physicist John Mace Grunsfeld in a press conference Monday. “The resources are there.”