Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 338

It's Democrats Who'll Miss Boehner Most

The way that partisans of both stripes reacted to John Boehner’s departure goes a long way toward explaining his decision to step down as speaker and leave the House.

“Speaker John Boehner is a decent, principled conservative man who tried to do the right thing under almost impossible circumstances,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the presumptive next Democratic leader of the Senate, said in a statement. “He will be missed by Republicans and Democrats alike.”

Current Senator Minority Leader Harry Reid—whom Boehner once instructed to do something unprintable during a heated feud—was positively gushy: “To say that I will miss John Boehner is a tremendous understatement.”

Even Boehner’s opposite number in the House, Nancy Pelosi, declined to express any pleasure about his resignation. Who says politics is too polarized?

Of course, these Democrats have ulterior motives: All of them used the occasion to point out what they think is a strain of intractability and extremism in the Republican caucus, which they blamed for pushing Boehner out.

The reaction on the other side of the aisle was rather different. Amid widespread shock, some members of the House close to Boehner expressed sorrow. But many of the GOP's most prominent standard-bearers were openly pleased.

Senator Ted Cruz, whom House Republicans have accused of meddling in House business, was positively delighted when he learned of the resignation from reporters while at the Values Voters Summit. Cruz is running for president.

“We’ve had Republican majorities in both houses of Congress for coming up on a year now, and what on Earth have they accomplished?” he said. “Immediately after the elections we came back and leadership joined with Harry Reid in passing a spending bill filled with corporate welfare. Then Republican leadership took the lead in funding ObamaCare. Then they took the lead in funding executive amnesty. Then they took the lead in funding Planned Parenthood. And then Republican leadership took the lead in confirming Loretta Lynch as attorney general.”

Senator Marco Rubio, another presidential hopeful, was less gleeful, but hardly broken up. “It’s not about him or anyone else, and I’m not here to bash anyone, but it is time to turn the page,” he said. As for what the conservative voters who attend the Values Voters Summit thought, see this video of Rubio breaking the news to them:

The crowd reacted with raucous applause and a standing ovation.

It’s not hard to see why the Democrats will miss Boehner. He’s a pragmatist. Despite their disagreements with him, they see him as someone who fundamentally wants to make Congress work, isn’t interested in pursuing strategies that can’t succeed, and doesn't want to shut down the government. But the hardcore conservatives see all that as a bug, not a feature. They’d rather shut down the government—over Planned Parenthood, the debt ceiling, whatever—than accept a compromise.

The question is what they’ll get from the next speaker. Already, some influential conservative observers are warning of danger ahead:

I think conservatives have no clue how bad the Boehner resignation is for them.

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) September 25, 2015

Boehner isn’t a squish ideologically, but he’s able to count votes. The next speaker will face the same problems, but Boehner’s long tenure in the House made him an accomplished operator who knew the chamber’s ins and outs and had ties across the aisle. Whoever succeeds him is likely to have less experience in those ways. And he (or maybe she, but probably he) will have to deal with the same factions, and still have to either disappoint conservatives or else plunge the chamber into total chaos and likely shutdown. (There’s a reason Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader and early favorite to succeed Boehner, hasn't been agitating for his ouster.) Democratic leaders seem to see this already. Republican leaders may see it but recognize the political winds won’t reward for pointing it out. As for conservative activists and lawmakers, they may soon discover that Boehner wasn’t the problem, but that removing him only made it worse.

Sam Smith’s Radically Wimpy James Bond Theme

“Every Bond song establishes a relation between Shirley Bassey’s ‘Goldfinger’ and the year of its film’s release—differently, depending on the sensibilities, age, and styles of the artists involved, as well as the particularities of that year’s top-40 pop,” write Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold in their new book The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism. “… Bond songs are about the early ’60s, yes, but they’re also about how their own moment differs from the ’60s.”

This is true for “Writing’s on the Wall,” Sam Smith’s newly released theme for the forthcoming Spectre, though Smith and his producers may want it to seem otherwise. In a promotional video, Smith said that instead of making a “big pop song” he wanted to have listeners say, “That’s Bond, that sounds like a Bond theme.’” Accordingly, there has perhaps never been a more defiantly retro title song in the history of the franchise, which is saying something. In fact, “Writing’s on the Wall” hearkens to a time before “Goldfinger,” before Bond on screen, or at least to a tradition that has run parallel to the Bond sonic universe: that of music without rock-and-roll influence, music where no one craves propulsion, rhythm, or groove.

However sumptuously it used big-band jazz and classical orchestration, Bond’s early music, under John Barry, still dabbled in the modern. It still had drums; the main theme’s riff, remember, is all surf guitar. The initial flare of strings and horns on “Writing’s on the Wall” recalls a lot of Bond music, but most especially the opening to 1965’s “Thunderball” from Tom Jones, incidentally the last British solo male performer to tackle Bond before Smith. But that song was a slow dance with pulse; Smith’s is no-dance—percussion-free other than piano and an occasional rumble of what sounds like a timpani. This fits with Smith’s mission statement, published in GQ earlier this year: “I miss the days when girls would wear full long dresses and just stand onstage and sing.”

Smith’s quavering voice and fussy phrasing have already made him the rare modern pop star who’s controversial for purely musical reasons, and lo, the kneejerk reaction on Twitter to “ Writing’s on the Wall” has been to compare the song to the sound of cats mewling. But as people sit with the song and notice the way it drifts and simpers and contemplates putting down the revolver for romance, they may realize what actually makes the song a departure, and what it actually says about the era we live in.

All the previous men to create 007 anthems performed over-the-top virility: In Jones’s case, it was with lounge-singer swagger and adventure-narrator drama; in the cases of Paul McCartney, or Jack White, or Chris Cornell, it was with seething rock edge. Smith is doing something else entirely—going supremely emotional, vulnerable, weak (the closest Bond predecessor for this unapologetic wimpiness might be to A-ha’s Morten Harket, whose contribution most fans have tried to forget). He’s self-consciously pathetic and pining, entering a cartoonishly high register when at the lyrics’ most abject point:

How do I live? How do I breathe?
When you’re not here I’m suffocating
I want to feel love, run through my blood
Tell me is this where I give it all up?

Smith sounds so fragile there that you could argue he’s subverting the franchise, or betraying it. The James Bond character is lizardlike and amoral, a sex machine who’s always made to regret the rare instances when he allows a woman to hold power over him. The Daniel Craig era has complicated this notion, but not to the extent that Smith now has. Handwringing about a supposed cultural assault on masculinity awaits, no doubt.

Sam Smith has written plenty of songs like this, of course. But he says “Writing’s on the Wall” is supposed to be from Bond’s perspective—“I wanted a touch of vulnerability from Bond, where you see into his heart a little bit,” he told NPR. This, for the record, was not necessarily his assignment. Many previous entries have been about Bond, or about a villain, or about more nebulous concepts, often sung from the perspective of a smitten admirer. It’s radical enough for the openly gay Smith to choose to inhabit arguably the most aggressively heterosexual hero that Western society has; using that chance to imagine Bond ending his “lifetime running” for gushy committed love can quite plausibly be seen as heretical. Or perhaps it’s a spoiler for Spectre’s plot, in which case the conversation over the newly openhearted James Bond has barely yet begun.

The Almost-Greatness of Sicario

Sicario, the new film by the French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, is in effect two separate movies. One is terrific and one quite good, but the two coexist in uneasy tension.

The first movie-within-the-movie, which takes up two thirds or so of the overall running time, is essentially a war film involving two nations—the United States and Mexico—that are not technically at war. On one side is the Sonora drug cartel; on the other, a variety of elusively defined covert U.S. agencies and one moderately bewildered FBI agent.

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The film opens with a bravura sequence, as that FBI agent, Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt), and members of her heavily armed kidnap-response team converge on an unprepossessing house in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, Arizona. The team makes its entrance by bursting into the living room. In a tank. Once the gunfire subsides, it turns out that there are no kidnappees on the premises to rescue. But stashed within the walls of the house are dozens of decomposing corpses that loom like hellish apparitions, quasi-mummified and with plastic bags cinched tight over their heads.

A special task force is charged with dealing with the root sources of what the television news is calling the “House of Horrors.” And owing to her reputation as a “thumper,” someone who’s “been kicking in doors since day one,” Kate is invited to join on behalf of the FBI. The head of the task force is Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), who is vaguely described to Kate as a “DoD consultant.” He is irreverent enough to attend high-level meetings in a T-shirt and flip-flops, and important enough to have no one mention it.

The task force’s objectives are obscure: Matt describes them initially as “to dramatically overreact” and later, “to stir the pot.” To begin with, they involve taking a heavily armed contingent across the border to Juárez to pull a cartel man out of a Mexican prison and bring him back the States. What follows is a sequence of stunning cinematic virtuosity and the most thrilling exercise in sustained suspense to come along in a good while. The caravan of five black Chevy Tahoes—containing Matt, Kate, a dozen or so “friends from Delta,” and a mysterious additional operative, Alejandro (Benicio del Toro)—rumbles over the border bridge and is met by a fleet of Mexican police trucks bristling with machine guns, which underscore the present danger far more than they mollify it.

The cinematography is by the great Roger Deakins (more on this in a moment) and under his lens the low-lying sprawl of Juárez itself becomes a character, as menacing as the Mogadishu of Black Hawk Down or the Baghdad of The Hurt Locker. (The difference, of course, is that it’s a stone’s throw away from El Paso.) I will not describe the outcome of the mission except to say that there are, inevitably, bumps along the way. I’m confident that never before have the phrases “red Impala, two lanes left” and “green Civic, three lanes left” conveyed such imminent peril.

I’m confident the phrases “red Impala, two lanes left” and “green Civic, three lanes left” have never conveyed such imminent peril.

From there, Sicario (the term is Mexican slang for “hitman”) proceeds as a high-intensity procedural—except for the crucial distinction that there’s little or nothing in the way of recognizable “procedure” on display. Matt’s paramilitary plans remain unexplained, and almost certainly illegal, and that’s to say nothing of the inscrutable Alejandro. Moreover, the reasons for Kate’s inclusion on the task force become less and less clear: Initially, it seemed she was being brought along for her SWAT-team grit. But it quickly becomes evident that Matt has all the firepower he needs, and in any case, as the increasingly frustrated Kate points out on more than one occasion, “I’m not a soldier!”

Blunt builds on her recent work in Looper and (especially) Edge of Tomorrow, presenting another portrait in rugged femininity, all wary eyes and chiseled jawline. Brolin brings to Matt a jocky swagger reminiscent of his lead performance in W, and Del Toro, hiding behind beard and sunglasses, offers a heavy, enigmatic charisma as Alejandro. As director, Villeneuve again demonstrates (as he did with Prisoners, also shot by Deakins), a knack for ominous mood and for ratcheting up, almost painfully, the tension of a moment.

As for Deakins, what further accolade can be thrown to arguably the best cinematographer working today? (Oh, that’s right: he can finally win an Oscar after a dozen unfulfilled nominations. Someone get on that.) Deakins plays with a variety of tricks in Sicario: aerial and landscape shots (some reminiscent of Cary Fukunaga’s work on the first season of True Detective), night vision, thermal imaging. There are powerful echoes of his magnificent border-state work in No Country for Old Men as well. The overall result is the best-looking film of the year to date.

In the end, though, it is unlikely to be the best film, full-stop. In its latter acts, the script, by Taylor Sheridan, veers onto a different, narrower course. What began as (apparently) a serious political film instead settles for the less demanding obligations of genre, as the plot becomes more far-fetched, edging toward fable. The narrative point of view mistakenly shifts from Kate to Alejandro, and what began as a critique of violence comes to resemble a stylish exercise in it. This second movie-within-the-movie is not a bad movie, merely a different one. But it does, to some degree, betray the extraordinary promise of what came before. This is the risk with having set its own bar so high: Sicario is a remarkable, thrilling, intermittently brilliant film—and yet nonetheless a mild disappointment.

The Intern: A Paean to the Power of Gentlemen

In The Intern, the businesswoman Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway) and, by extension, the writer and director Nancy Meyers, has a question: Where did all the “real men” go? Jules mourns not for the bossy, sexist fools of the Mad Men era, but for grown-ups, men who could rock a pocket square, who had a handkerchief at the ready, who had a good head on their shoulders and ambitions for existence. Into this vacuum walks Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro), her new senior intern, a magical old man blessed with the wisdom of his generation but none of the baggage, ready to bring balance to her life.

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It’s easy to scoff, but The Intern is clearly a Nancy Meyers movie. Her previous films (Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated) saw heroines bemoan the romantic appeal and destructive foolishness of alpha dogs played by Jack Nicholson and Alec Baldwin. The Intern tweaks this formula by making its central relationship platonic: Its main character, Ben, is free of foibles and is a helpful fountain of paternalistic advice. Thanks largely to performances by De Niro and Hathaway, The Intern is a gentle, enjoyable fantasy—and certainly Meyers’s best film in more than a decade.

As befits a modern generation-gap comedy, The Intern is set at a start-up: a successful shopping website Jules founded called About the Fit that’s colonized a converted factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn. (As she has many other locales, Meyers fetishizes the borough’s architecture, giving it an almost artificial sheen.) Ben is a retired widower with plenty of time on his hands and a seemingly bottomless reserve of can-do spirit who applies to a senior internship program. Once he’s assigned to Jules, his inexhaustible patience with her mild Type-A personality makes them an unbeatable team as she weathers the bumps of expanding her company and balancing work and her personal life.

The Intern’s stakes are appreciably low—there’s a major set-piece revolving around an inappropriate email that Jules accidentally sends—but the challenges of running a company make for a good narrative spine to build around. Meyers often struggles to make her central premises remotely relatable—It’s Complicated was about the expensive remodel of a Santa Barbara kitchen—but Ben is such a do-gooder that you’re instantly rooting for him to win Jules’s favor. Once she accepts him as a person with valuable insight to contribute, her life is suddenly besieged by a million tiny crises for him to solve.

The Intern is a gentle, enjoyable fantasy—and certainly Meyers’s best film in more than a decade.

Meyers has some fun with traditional fish-out-of-water humor: Ben struggles to set up a Facebook account, astonishes his fellow twenty-something interns by carrying a briefcase, and dispenses chivalrous dating advice that basically amounts to “maybe go easy on the texting.” But the pivotal piece of generational commentary comes when Jules gets drunk at a bar with her interns and starts bemoaning the arrested development of her generation’s men, doofuses who have no concept of their career goals or even how to dress beyond business casual, supposedly outstripped by her generation of women raised in the “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” era.

Chief among these offenders is Jules’s househusband Matt (Anders Holm), for whom the film has a hilarious lack of respect compared to Ben. Jules is late to meetings and a bit of a micromanager, but as start-up CEOs go, she’s pretty angelic: Her major conflict is finding time to be at home with Matt and their precocious moppet Paige (JoJo Kushner). Ben is there to gently nudge Jules away from the idea that she should scale back her life’s work out of some societal ideal of womanhood. But as is often the case, Meyers has her characters articulate each side of the debate a little too obviously, then fashions an ending that tries to have it both ways.

The Intern works, however, mostly because of the strength of its leads. De Niro hasn’t played anyone this mild-mannered in years, but he’s cute and reserved in the right ways, giving his trademark squinty nod-grins anytime they’re needed. Ben spends much of the first hour in a slightly melancholy mood, hovering on the outside of Jules’s life just waiting to be given a purpose again, but De Niro makes him sympathetic. Hathaway, too, takes Jules right up to the edge of being annoying over and over again, then pulls back each time with just the right amount of self-awareness. The various chuckleheads who constitute the supporting cast (including Adam DeVine, Zack Pearlman, and Nat Wolff) function as easy but weak punchlines for how feckless their generation of men have become. But The Intern has a solution: Two hours of concentrated Baby-Boomer wisdom and a drawer full of pocket squares, it posits, are all it takes to right even the most wayward path to adulthood.

The Resignation of John Boehner

Updated September 25, 2015 1:36 p.m.

John Boehner will resign as speaker of the House at the end of October and leave Congress, choosing to end his tumultuous tenure rather than fight a conservative revolt against his leadership.

Boehner had battled conservatives aligned with the Tea Party for most of his nearly five years as speaker, and in recent weeks they had threatened to try to oust him from power if did not pursue a strategy of defunding Planned Parenthood that would have likely led to a government shutdown. Conservatives said that if Boehner failed to fight on the government spending bill, they would call up a procedural motion to “vacate the chair” and demand the election of a new speaker. Facing the likelihood that he would need Democrats to save him, Boehner instead chose to step down. In one of his last acts as speaker, Boehner is now expected to defy conservatives by bringing up a funding bill that would prevent a government shutdown beginning next week but that would not cut money from Planned Parenthood.

Boehner announced the news to House Republicans in a private party meeting in the basement of the Capitol. “It is my view,” he said in a statement afterward, “that prolonged leadership turmoil would do irreparable damage to the institution.” In the afternoon, he walked into a press conference like a man unburdened, singing the old Disney classic “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” and alternating between laughs and tears.

Boehner told the assembled reporters he had planned to leave Congress at the end of 2014, but his plans changed after his chief deputy and likely successor, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, lost in one of the biggest electoral upsets in U.S. history. Boehner’s decision comes just a day after what was arguably his most memorable moment as speaker: The Irish Catholic son of a barkeep hosted Pope Francis in the first-ever address by a pontiff to Congress. And it seemed the pope’s message had at least some impact on the timing of the speaker’s decision.

Boehner said he had originally wanted to announce on November 17—his 66th birthday—that he would step down at the end of the year. But the conservative threat to depose him moved up the timetable, and when he woke up Friday on the morning after meeting the pope, he said to himself, “Today is the day I’m going to do this.”

He resisted, however, the notion that conservatives had forced his hand.
“I can tell you, if I wasn’t planning on leaving here soon, I would not have done this,” Boehner said. The famously-emotional speaker broke down several times during his 15-minute news conference, most notably when he recounted a private moment he shared with Pope Francis. As they were leaving the Capitol on Thursday, the pontiff took the speaker aside and asked him to pray for him. “Who am I to pray for the pope,” a deeply-humbled Boehner told reporters. “But I did.”

By ballot or by pressure, conservatives have now succeeded in toppling the top two Republican leaders of the House within a span of 15 months. Boehner’s announcement sets off a race to succeed him, with Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, the second-ranking Republican in the House, the early favorite to take his post. Another popular House Republican, Representative Paul Ryan, immediately took himself out of the running, according to the Washington Post’s Paul Kane. “It’s McCarthy,” the 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee said Friday. Ryan later put out a statement in which he called Boehner’s decision to resign “an act of pure selflessness.”

Boehner, 65, was first elected to the House in 1990 and, as he frequently reminds reporters, was himself part of a group of conservative rabble-rousers during his first decade in Congress. He rose to a position in the leadership before being ousted in 1998. He returned to committee work, playing a key role in the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act under President George W. Bush. Boehner then worked his way back up the leadership ladder, first becoming minority leader and then speaker after Republicans reclaimed the House majority in the 2010 election.

While it was well-known that Boehner’s job was in jeopardy, his announcement Friday morning came as a shock. He has insisted in recent weeks that he was unconcerned about the potential conservative mutiny, with his spokesmen saying he wasn’t “going anywhere.” But the end came rapidly, less than 24 hours after Boehner stood weeping next to the pontiff on a Capitol balcony, overlooking throngs of people gathered to see Pope Francis.

Conservatives outside the Capitol rejoiced at the news. When Senator Marco Rubio announced Boehner’s resignation at the Values Voters Summit in northwest Washington, the crowd erupted in cheers. “I’m not here to bash anyone,” Rubio said, “but the time has come to turn the page.”

While Republicans in Congress characterized Boehner’s decision as an act of sacrifice, Democrats voiced sadness and issued statements bemoaning the departure of a man they often berated. At the White House, President Obama told reporters he was “surprised” to hear about Boehner’s resignation as he ended a meeting with the Chinese president and called the speaker immediately."John Boehner’s a good man. He's a patriot,” Obama said.

We have obviously had a lot of disagreements, and politically we’re at different ends of the spectrum, but I will tell you he has always conducted himself with courtesy and civility with me. He has always kept his word when he made a commitment.

Obama said he would reach out to the next speaker, but he warned whoever replaced Boehner not to shut down the government or default on the nation’s debt in the coming months. The next speaker, the president said, should understand what Boehner understood: “You don’t get what you want 100 percent of the time.”

Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader who once infuriated the speaker by comparing him to a dictator, hailed him on Friday as a pragmatic leader abandoned by his party. “To say that I will miss John Boehner is a tremendous understatement,” he said. Senator Charles Schumer, Reid’s likely successor as Democratic leader, called Boehner "a decent, principled conservative man who tried to do the right thing under almost impossible circumstances.” Yet the Democratic praise for the outgoing speaker was more an indication of their fear that Boehner’s replacement will be even more beholden to the Republican right wing than he was.

‘Ashokan Farewell’: The Story Behind the Tune Ken Burns Made Famous

It’s haunting and mournful and hopeful and beautiful. It’s called “Ashokan Farewell,” and it’s the de facto theme song for the Ken Burns miniseries The Civil War, which premiered 25 years ago this week.

I mean, just listen:

“Ashokan Farewell” was not, as both its tune and the miniseries that made it famous would seem to suggest, written in the 19th century. It was written instead at the tail end of the 20th. And it wasn’t a Southern waltz; it was created in the style of a Scottish lament—and in celebration of a town, and a reservoir, in upstate New York. By a guy from the Bronx.

In the early 1980s, Jay Ungar and his wife and fellow musician, Molly Mason, were running the Ashokan Camp, a summer arts school specializing in fiddle and dancing, at the Ashokan Field Campus of SUNY New Paltz. Ungar composed the tune—Mason would later give it its resonant name—to commemorate the conclusion of the 1982 session of the camp. Ungar had traveled through Scotland earlier in the summer, he told me, and he wanted to compose a tune in the style of a Scottish lament—something that would capture the sense of sadness that the camp, and all the camaraderie and community and joy it represented to him, would be ending.

He wanted something more celebratory, too: “The tune,” he says, “was my attempt to get back to a feeling of connectedness.”

The song, Ungar remembers, “sort of wrote itself.” While “it’s a bit hard to remember now, because it’s been 30 years,” he notes, he does remember that the writing of “Ashokan Farwell” “wasn’t a long process—maybe in the first 20 to 40 minutes, I had most of it.” He experimented on his fiddle. And since “it’s very easy to drift away from your initial inspiration,” he turned on a cassette recorder to make sure his experiments were captured.

“Maybe after an hour or so,” he recalls, “I put it away and then listened.”

Which is not to say that the writing process was strictly a matter of craftsmanship. The emotion that comes through in the final version was there for Ungar, too. “In writing it,” he says, “I was in tears, but I didn’t know why, or what was happening.” There was a kind of “tingling feeling,” he remembers, as the song took shape in his mind and on his fiddle.

But when the song was written down—when Ungar was satisfied that he had made the tune what he wanted it to be—he kept it to himself. He wasn’t sure how others would react to it. But when he was finally ready to share the tune, he was pleasantly surprised: It seemed to affect others as deeply as it had affected him.

That “a Scottish lament written by a Jewish guy from the Bronx” would become the de facto anthem of the Civil War makes some sense.

And so Ungar and Mason—and their group, Fiddle Fever—recorded the song, including it as part of their 1983 album Waltz of the Wind. The inclusion meant that the song would need a name. Mason suggested “Ashokan Farewell.” Ungar liked that. It was simple, but elegantly evocative.

The release of the album generally coincided with the years Ken Burns spent researching and producing The Civil War. In 1984 in particular, Burns was on the lookout for songs that could serve as the soundtrack for the documentary. He heard Fiddle Fever’s album. He heard “Ashokan Farewell.” He got in touch with Ungar and Mason. He asked for permission to use the song in the documentary. They consented. They ended up playing many of the other songs—all of them, save for “Ashokan Farewell,” composed in the 19th century—on the documentary’s lush soundtrack.

For Ungar, the fact that “a Scottish lament written by a Jewish guy from the Bronx” would become the de facto anthem of The Civil War—and, by extension, of the Civil War itself—makes a certain amount of sense. “The music had connected us to our past in important ways,” he says; it was “a living thing.” And you could say the same thing about The Civil War, which leveraged that quintessential medium of the 20th century—television—to tell the story of that quintessential event of the 19th. The Civil War, in the end, was 11 hours long; nearly an hour of that time—59 minutes and 33 seconds—features some version of “Ashokan Farewell.”

Which helped to ensure that the tune would become, like the series that propelled it to fame, an instant classic. It got played at concerts. It got covered on fiddle and flute and piano and acoustic guitar and electric. Oh, and on the theremin. There’s a polka version of it.

What does Ungar think of all those covers—and of the fact that many people who love the song have no idea about its contemporary origins? “I love it,” Ungar says. “I think it’s a great thing. Most people who record it will tend to stay very, very close to the original. They treat it almost like it’s sacred.”

China, the World's Biggest Polluter, Commits to Cap-and-Trade Carbon Emissions

China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, will announce a nationwide cap-and-trade program to limit carbon emissions, according to a White House statement provided to The New York Times.

The program, which Chinese President Xi Jinping will commit to in Washington on Friday, will begin in 2017. It was first announced in September of last year. The program will be the country’s most significant climate policy to date, and it follows a landmark U.S.-China deal in November 2014 to roll back both countries’s emissions.

In a cap-and-trade program, a government sets a hard limit on how much carbon-dioxide will be released into the atmosphere annually, through the burning of fossil fuels like gasoline and coal. It then offers a set number of credits up to that limit, and companies bid on them for the right to pollute. The success of a cap-and-trade program in stemming emissions depends in part on what the cap is. So far, I can find no mention of hard numbers associated with China’s nationwide program.

But we do have a sense of what the country is aiming for. It has previously committed to aim to peak emissions before 2030; the Times reports that, between the country’s faltering economy and slowing industrial boom, it may be possible to peak them in 2025. China has already operated carbon markets with some success in seven of its provinces, including Guangdong, the country’s most populous.

China will also announce other climate-change commitments on Friday. These include committing to renewable-energy sources and making a large monetary contribution to the global fund to help poorer countries prepare for climate change.

Most of the climate news this month is facing the upcoming UN negotiations on the issue, which begin at the end of November in Paris. That’s why—despite how hard it will be for China to implement cap-and-trade—the move so excites Obama administration officials.

And the two countries seem to have made progress in advance of the talks. For more than 20 years, UN climate talks have bifurcated countries into two categories—“developed” and “developing”—to decide who gets to emit the remaining carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere. That divide is inherited from the first and most successful international environmental treaty, the 1987 Montreal Pact which halted ozone depletion, but it has proved more troublesome in the climate context. Politico reports that in advance of the talks, U.S. and Chinese officials have agreed to drop those categories, hewing instead to “a form of differentiation which depends on countries’ actual real circumstances.”

China’s program will benefit Chinese citizens first and foremost, who will have longer, healthier lives due to the reduction in smog; and to the degree that it slows anthropogenic climate change, it will benefit people all over the world. But it could potentially change some of the U.S. climate debate—or, at least, change the Republican talking-point response to any proposed climate policy.

At the GOP presidential debate earlier this month, many candidates did not so much reject mainstream climate science as say that America was powerless to do anything about it.

“America is not a planet. And we are not even the largest carbon producer anymore: China is. And they’re drilling a hole and digging anywhere in the world that they can get a hold of,” said Senator Marco Rubio of Florida at the debate. “The decisions that the left want us to make … will make America a more expensive place to create jobs.” This isn’t an argument made from science, but from economic game theory: If we adopt climate-change-mitigation policies, Rubio is saying, we won’t be able to compete with China. But China has now committed to a carbon-reduction program second in size only to the European Union’s.

Obama proposed a cap-and-trade program during his first term but was not able to get it through Congress due to Republican obstinacy. As a result, he instead enacted his signature climate policy through the Environmental Protection Agency, as regulation meant to alter the electricity industry. Which means that the state of global climate regulation in the mid-2010s is a wonderful irony: China, the largest self-avowedly communist nation in the world, has created a market to reduce its carbon emissions. And the U.S., the anchor of global capitalism, will limit them through government command-and-control.  

A New CEO for Volkswagen

Updated on September 25 at 1:32 p.m.

Volkswagen’s board has picked Matthias Mueller, the chief executive of Porsche, to be its new CEO. Mueller replaces Martin Winterkorn, who resigned Wednesday over the emissions-cheating scandal that is hurting Europe’s largest automaker.

“My most urgent task is to win back trust for the Volkswagen Group—by leaving no stone unturned and with maximum transparency, as well as drawing the right conclusions from the current situation,” Mueller said in a statement.

Mueller’s appointment was one of several major changes announced Tuesday by Volkswagen’s Supervisory Board in response to the scandal that has affected 500,000 diesel cars in the U.S., and 11 million worldwide.

The scandal, as we have been reporting, came to light September 18 when the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Volkswagen to recall about 500,000 diesel cars that were installed with “defeat devices” to cheat emission tests. Those devices would activate pollution-control systems when the car was being tested for emissions, and they mostly weren’t activated during routine use. This made the cars worse polluters than the automaker claimed,violating the Clean Air Act and California’s state pollution-control regulation.

Volkswagen’s claims of clean diesel, on the face of it, were a lie. The company acknowledged as much, announcing this week that the “defeat devices” were installed in 11 million diesel cars worldwide. European officials called for a EU-wide investigation over the deception, South Korea said it would recall Volkswagens, the company faces fines and class-action lawsuits around the world, and Norway announced Friday that its economic-crimes unit was investigating the fraud. The company’s stock price has taken a beating.

The EPA announced Friday it had sent letters to “all automakers that we are stepping up our testing activities in response to VW’s alleged violations.” The agency also said Volkswagen does not have a 2016 model year EPA Certificate of Conformity or an executive order from California’s Air Resources Board for its four-cylinder diesel vehicles because the two agencies “are not yet convinced that the data and evidence presented by Volkswagen demonstrate the vehicles will perform as required by the regulations.” This essentially means the automaker cannot sell 2016 model year diesel cars in the U.S.

The scandal is also raising questions about the activities of other German carmakers. Auto Bild, a German newspaper, reported Thursday that BMW’s diesel engines exceeding regulatory limits, sending the luxury carmaker’s shares down. CNBC reported that SEAT, the Volkswagen-owned Spanish carmaker, installed more than 500,000 of the tampered diesel engines into its vehicles.

Stuart Pearson, an analyst at Exane BNP Paribas, told the Financial Times that Vokswagen is unlikely to have been the only car company to game the system.

“The artificial gaming of emissions tests threatens to become the car industry’s Libor moment,” he told the newspaper.

But that’s not easy to prove, as John German, a senior fellow with the International Council on Clean Transportation, told NPR.

“It’s the sort of thing you just don’t go around accusing companies of doing unless you’re absolutely sure,” he said.

His group commissioned the tests that discovered the fraud at Volkswagen.

But as Bloomberg points outs: “Almost as soon as governments began testing vehicle emissions, automakers found ways to cheat.”

Indeed, Volkswagens have been implicated in the past, as have Cadillacs, Ford, Honda, and Hyundai.

Prometheus 2: Yet Another Alien Movie

When it comes to film franchises, the noble Roman numeral used to be all you needed to denote a follow-up to a popular film. The advent of Marvel’s “universe” of shared films, which are all set in the same world while advancing their own stories, made things a little more complicated, although its movies generally stick to being sequential. But there’s nothing more confusing than the constantly changing Alien franchise, which boasts normal sequels, crossover prequels, and most recently Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, best described as a “spiritual prequel.” And, now, the newly announced Prometheus sequel, which is titled called Alien: Paradise Lost.

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No flow chart or infographic could help untangle this mess. When Prometheus was originally announced, it was pitched as a prequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece Alien, coming from the same director and answering the question of just how those scary eggs ended up on a remote planet in the first place. By the time Prometheus was released in 2012 to mixed reviews, it was downgraded to simply “sharing DNA” with the Alien franchise, and indeed its plot couldn’t logically match up with Scott’s original film to make it a real prequel. Perhaps Scott has realized that was an error and is now trying to rectify it by making another film that actually does count as part of the Alien series. But his reasoning is a little bit more vague.

“Actually, it’s going to be called Alien: Paradise Lost, so Prometheus 2 isn’t what it’s really going to be,” he told the film site Hey U Guys. “You know the poem? I doubt you’ve ever been through it, have you? The poem’s a book, Paradise Lost! It sounds intellectual, but there’s a similarity to it, and that’s where it stops.”

Let’s leave aside Scott’s amusing literary snobbishness for a second. Here’s the current state of the Alien movies. There are four directly linked films, all starring Sigourney Weaver: Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), and Alien: Resurrection (1997). There are two quasi-prequels that saw the titular aliens battling the Predator monsters from another franchise, Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). Then there’s Prometheus, neither fish nor fowl. Now, we have Alien: Paradise Lost in the works, but there’s also Alien 5, a planned direct sequel starring Weaver from director Neill Blomkamp. As Austin Powers might say, “Oh no, I’ve gone cross-eyed.”

Ridley Scott can and does make whichever movies he wishes, so his plans for a new Alien movie may well win out. But what this illustrates more than anything else is the toxic power of a recognizable franchise name. The Alien movies haven’t been big earners in years—Prometheus’s domestic haul of $125 million in 2012 was the highest gross in the history of the series, and that barely matched the film’s budget. But the name is still well-regarded, the original films still beloved, and the central characters (Weaver’s Ripley and the titular monster) are instantly familiar. In simpler times, that’d be enough to greenlight a sequel, but now it can inspire multiple projects in the hopes that at least one will perform the desired reboot, creating a new series with stars locked into contracts that can earn big bucks for years to come.

Sometimes it works: Look at the Star Trek franchise, or Daniel Craig’s casting as James Bond. Other times, bad reviews and poor word of mouth can doom a reboot, as recently evidenced by Fantastic Four. But whatever the situation, releasing competing sequels with similar titles that exist in entirely different timelines is probably not the way to go. With Alien, no matter how beloved that scaly monster in the middle, something’s gotta give.

Thrashing the Light Fantastic

Jacob Ehrbahn has a dangerous passion: The Danish photographer has spent the last several years wading into mosh pits with a very expensive camera. Why? To capture heavy-metal lovers mid-headbang. “Most of the shots I didn’t look through the viewfinder because it was too dangerous,” he said to Slate. “They’re screaming and flying into your camera. You could end up with the camera in your brain.”

Ehrbahn took nearly 14,000 photos in this hail-Mary manner before selecting less than 100 for his forthcoming book, Headbangers. Thanks to a very bright flash, Ehrbahn is able to freeze the neck-aching maneuver in shocking detail. Vibrating, frizzy balls of hair are transformed into painted strands of light. The frenzy of the music is made quiet. The concertgoers no longer flail with abandon; they are paralyzed in pure euphoria.

Since many of the shots were taken from below, the sky serves as the background, adding another ethereal layer to the images. The traditional tropes of denim and leather are there too, of course, but even if you don’t like Slipknot, Ehrbahn’s images are worth a look.