Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 340

Tig Notaro and Christina Ricci Head Up Amazon’s Six New Pilots

The streaming TV revolution is well underway, although for all the hoopla, Netflix is still the only online network with a large stable of well-known, award-winning shows. But after some big-ticket triumphs at the Emmy Awards, Amazon Studios is poised to build on the success of its comedy Transparent with a slate of new pilots featuring big-name stars (Tig Notaro, Christina Ricci) and even bigger-name producers (Louis C.K., Sacha Baron Cohen).

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Amazon’s methodology retains a unique approach in the world of TV programming. Every season, the pilot episodes the studio orders are posted online for Prime viewers to watch, allowing viewers to help inform the process of what gets ordered to series. But after a few years in which dozens of pilots were left abandoned online, the success of Transparent (which won five Emmys last Sunday) has encouraged a more focused approach, and attracted bigger names to the network. Where Amazon’s first “season” had 14 pilots, this seventh cycle has only six, and on paper each has the kind of star power and creative clout to earn a full 10-episode order. The network’s early democratic approach encouraged existing users to participate but failed to significantly boost its user base; now, Amazon is taking the more traditional approach of trying to attract new viewers with recognizable names.

Like the comedian Tig Notaro, whose comedy special performed well for Netflix this year and who’s seen great success since her groundbreaking, candid 2013 stand-up set Live, in which she discussed the death of her mother and her cancer diagnosis. Her pilot Our Mississippi is loosely autobiographical, with Notaro playing a comedian who returns to her childhood home, with Casey Wilson (Happy Endings) playing her girlfriend. The series was shepherded to screen by Louis C.K., who originally encouraged Notaro to release the recording of Live (which was an unplanned, spontaneous piece of comedy), and is directed by Nicole Holofcener, a master of melancholic comedic films like Lovely & Amazing and Enough Said.

Our Mississippi sounds like it will occupy the same genre-blurring territory as Transparent, which is classified as a comedy but contains some of the best dramatic acting on TV right now. The same might go for Good Girls Revolt, based on the landmark sexual-discrimination cases fought by female Newsweek employees in 1969, chronicled by Lynn Povich in her non-fiction book of the same name. Of the strong ensemble, perhaps the most intriguing name is Grace Gummer, who plays Nora Ephron—continuing the legacy of her mother Meryl Streep, who played a character based on Ephron in the 1986 film Heartburn.

The slate sounds like it could belong on HBO, spanning various historical periods and offering complex riffs on more-established genre television.

Other pilots include Edge, a grim-sounding Western set after the Civil War, created by Shane Black of Lethal Weapon fame (as well as the more recent cult classic Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). The offbeat comedy Highston, from the Nebraska writer Bob Nelson, is about a teenager who is friends with celebrities only he can see (allowing Shaquille O’Neal to make a cameo in the pilot) and is executive produced by Sacha Baron Cohen. The political thriller Patriot, written and directed by Steven Conrad (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty), sounds like a darkly comic take on Homeland, with an intelligence officer taking a middle-management position at a Midwestern factory. The biographical series Z zips to yet another period setting, exploring the life of Zelda Sayre (Christina Ricci) in the 1920s Jazz Age, as well as her tumultuous marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Unlike earlier Amazon pilots, which were largely cheaply made and set in the present day, this slate sounds like it could belong on HBO or any other top-flight premium network, spanning various historical periods and offering complex riffs on more-established genre television. The next stage retains the network’s open-source approach—the pilots will be posted online and viewing information and user reviews will supposedly help inform Amazon’s decision-making process regarding what to order to series. But as the shows get more expensive, complicated to produce, and easier to advertise, those decisions may become largely academic for a company that’s doing everything it can to snag new annual-subscription fees.

The Colbert Trump

Last night, Donald Trump appeared as a guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. You could also say that Colbert had Trump as a guest, but that grammar wouldn’t be quite accurate to the spirit of the interview. Because, last night, Colbert was trumped.

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Colbert’s strategy for the interview seemed a play on the one that political journalists have long relied on: Start with softballs, cajole, win over, and then progress to the heavier stuff. Thus, Colbert’s first question: “Are you shocked at all about the amazing reaction you get from crowds?” He added, “Because you shocked the Republicans.”

Trump, for the record, is not at all shocked about that. He’s Donald Trump.

Colbert then mentioned Trump’s most recent polling numbers. (“You see Zogby?,” Colbert asked. “Thirty-three percent! That came out today. Thirty-three percent, it’s incredible!”)

“I’m liking him a lot,” Trump told the crowd, in response.

“I’m liking you, too,” Colbert replied. “I’m liking you, too.”

Then, Colbert ramped it up. A bit. Some of his questions:

“[The] Republican party has been a bigger pusher of the idea that money is speech. And you’re a $10 billion mouth! You’re their worst nightmare. They really want to stop you. Do you think they can stop you?”

“You say that people who gave money to politicians owned them. What politicians did you own when you were giving money?”

[Invoking Ted Cruz’s appearance on The Late Show the night before] “He asked me to ask you if you would give him a billion dollars.”

“You seriously want the job?”

And then there was this.

Colbert: You’ve got the hat. Let’s talk about the hat. It’s a great hat. It’s called “Make America Great Again.”

Trump: It’s a hot hat. The New York Times did a big story on it.

Colbert: Oh, the hat! The hat should be your running mate.

Trump: I would like it.

Colbert: Trump/Trump Hat 2016. But that implies that America is not great now. You’re not saying America is not a great country or it’s not full of great people. You’re not blaming America, are you, sir?

“No, I’m not blaming America,” Trump replied, predictably. He was blaming, he continued, “people that have run the country—for many years, in all fairness.” He proceeded to go on a long lark about the Iraq war and wounded veterans and the destabilized Middle East and ISIS and his belief that “Iran is going to take over Iraq” and that “we’ve handed everything to everybody on a silver platter, and it shouldn’t have happened.”

This was a good segue into a discussion of the Iran nuclear deal. Colbert’s question: Would Trump sign a copy of his book The Art of the Deal for his next guest, Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz?

Trump acquiesced, gamely. They cut to a commercial break.

Then came round two.

Colbert, apologizing for his treatment of Trump over the years, asked him, “Is there anybody you’d like to apologize to, yourself?” (Trump’s reply was basically a physical ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, which in words manifested as “uhhh … no.”)

He followed up with, “I know you believe that illegal immigrants should all be deported. True?”

“That’s true,” Trump replied.

Then, Colbert tried role-playing. He asked Trump to imagine himself, as president, informing the Mexican president of his plan to make Mexico pay for the wall he has said he wants to build between the U.S. and its southern neighbor. It was a cheeky approach, but it backfired. Trump played along. Worse, Colbert’s rendition of the Mexican president involved him adopting a Speedy Gonzalez-esque voice and uttering responses to Trump that included the line, “Oh! Oh! My corazón! No, no, no!”

Trump managed to turn the game into a discussion of the “big, beautiful wall” he wants to erect on the Mexican border, China-in-220 B.C.-style, which, he claimed, will stop illegal immigration, curb crime, “stop problems,” and generally Make America Great Again. “The money comes out, the drugs come in,” he declared. “We’re gonna stop it.”

To which Colbert replied: “Okay, well, that’d be good. That would be good. That’d be good.”

Then he gave Trump a chance to acknowledge, once and for all, that Barack Obama was born in the United States.

Trump’s reply: “You know? I don’t talk about it anymore,” launching into a list of all the other things he does care to talk about.

The Big Question about Colbert’s place in late night has been how he would negotiate precisely this kind of interview.

This—Trump’s tacit acknowledgement that his approach to both his own mistakes and the world’s inconvenient truths is simply to ignore them—might have offered the perfect segue into Colbert’s final gambit, a game that asked Trump to identify whether a given line was uttered by Trump or by the “over-the-top conservative character” Colbert used to play. It could have been brilliant. Instead, Trump got every single question right. (That’s including a trick question Colbert threw in at the end: “The real strong have no need to prove it to the phonies.” Trump’s guess: “It’s not me. It could be you.” He was right: It was Charles Manson.)  

It was a great night for Trump. It was a considerably less-great night for Colbert. Coming off of his tough interview with Cruz the night before, the host was repeatedly bested by his guest. The grammar was all off, with Trump as the subject, and Colbert as, repeatedly, the object. Was he intimidated by Trump? Was he reprimanded for the harshness of the conversation with Cruz? Did he simply not take Trump seriously as a contender for the highest office in the land?

The Big Question about Colbert’s place in late night has been, pretty much as soon as it was announced that Colbert would take over for Letterman, how he would negotiate precisely this kind of interview. An interview with a high-profile politician. An interview with a high-profile politician who is extremely different from Colbert when it comes to questions of ideology. An interview with high stakes, not just for Colbert as an entertainer, but for Colbert as a kind of pseudo-journalist.

Had the Trump interview occurred on The Colbert Report, it would have been—or, well, it could have been—quite a match-up. Two blowhards, blowing hard against each other! But, of course, it wasn’t the character “Stephen Colbert” who conducted last night’s interview. It was Stephen Colbert, the affable late-night host. And that Stephen Colbert—the funny one, the charming one, the complicated one, the one who needs to keep booking politicians for his show—seemed unable to stand up to a man whose response, when asked whether there’s anything at all he would like to apologize for, is a simple “no.”

Exit, Volkswagen's CEO

Martin Winterkorn, the chief executive of Volkswagen, has resigned amid a scandal involving software that allowed 11 million of the automaker’s diesel vehicles worldwide to cheat emissions tests.

In a statement, Winterkorn said he was “not aware of any wrong doing” on his part, but was resigning in the company’s best interests.

“I am shocked by the events of the past few days,” he said. “Above all, I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group.”

Winterkorn’s resignation was widely expected, though as recently as Tuesday the CEO said he would stay on. The move came after a crisis meeting held by the executive committee of Volkswagen’s supervisory board.

That panel, in a statement after Winterkorn’s resignation said it expected “further personnel consequences in the next days.” It added a criminal investigation into the scandal may be necessary, and that it was submitting a complaint to the state prosecutors’ office in Brunswick, Germany.

About Winterkorn, the panel said:

The Executive Committee has great respect for Chairman Professor Dr. Winterkorn’s offer to resign his position and to ask that his employment agreement be terminated. The Executive Committee notes that Professor Dr. Winterkorn had no knowledge of the manipulation of emissions data. The Executive Committee has tremendous respect for his willingness to nevertheless assume responsibility and, in so doing, to send a strong signal both internally and externally. Dr. Winterkorn has made invaluable contributions to Volkswagen. The company’s rise to global company is inextricably linked to his name. The Executive Committee thanks Dr. Winterkorn for towering contributions in the past decades and for his willingness to take responsibility in this criticall phase for the company. This attitude is illustrious.

The scandal came to light last Friday when the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Volkswagen to recall about 500,000 cars that were installed with “defeat devices” to cheat emission tests.

My colleague Robinson Meyer explained how those devices worked:

These devices, essentially, let the cars pretend to not break the law. The software could sense when the car was undergoing emissions testing and activate its pollution-control systems accordingly. When the car was being driven during normal use, these systems largely did not activate—making the car a much heavier polluter in real-life than it looked on paper.

With those systems deactivated, the car’s emissions violated the Clean Air Act and California’s state pollution-control regulation.

Then on Tuesday, the automaker said it had installed the “defeat devices” in 11 million cars worldwide—and it would cost about $7.25 billion to fix the deception. Regulators were not amused, and several countries recalled the cars and ordered inquiries. The automaker faces fines of up to $18 billion in the U.S., as well as class-action lawsuits worldwide.

The company’s stock price—as well as its reputation—has taken a beating. But in many ways, it was a scandal of Volkswagen’s own creation. As my colleague Bourree Lam reported, the automaker denied the allegations for years. The only reason it came to light, Reuters reports, was because the EPA and California’s Air Resources Board threatened to withhold certification for Volkswagen’s 2016 diesel model.

What Rugby Can Teach America About Honoring Indigenous Culture

As Brazil or Italy is to soccer, New Zealand is to rugby. And aside from their superior performance on the pitch, the All Blacks—as the country’s national team is known—are perhaps most famous for a special pre-game ritual.

Before each match, the All Blacks, who are set to play Namibia on September 24 in the 2015 Rugby World Cup, perform “the haka”—a traditional, full-body dance and accompanying chant derived from Māori culture. (The Māori are New Zealand’s indigenous people.)

Historically, the haka is a ceremonial act intended to welcome visitors to a Māori community. Contemporarily, however, it is performed at all manner of special occasions, including birthdays, weddings, and funerals. In a video that went viral earlier this summer, thousands of students bid farewell to a recently deceased (and much beloved) teacher in the town of Palmerston, by way of the haka:

“Ka Mate,” arguably the most popular haka, was composed in the 1820s by the Māori chieftain Te Rauparaha. It has since been adopted by the All Blacks, who first began performing it before matches in 1905.

As the World Cup unfolds in England, the haka remains an incredible sight to behold. And one that, regardless of one’s national affiliations, is bound to hit you with a rush of adrenaline. The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor describes it as a “perfect act of nationalism.”

I would venture a step further: The All Blacks’ rendition of the haka is indeed a superb act of nationalism, but also a heartening example of postcolonial cohesion. (Rugby has a knack for this.) As Tharoor puts it, “the haka, in its growling intensity, captures … the solidarity of warriors—both of Māori and non-Māori descent—fighting for a common future.”

It’s also an instance of a sports team paying homage to an indigenous culture without simply appropriating it. In this way, the All Blacks stand in stark contrast to controversial U.S. franchises such as the Cleveland Indians, the

The Psychology of Voldemort

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in J.K. Rowling’s series, Voldemort is back, big time. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, essentially the embodiment of all evil in the Potter universe, was resurrected from the dead in the fourth book, and in the fifth, revealed himself at the Ministry of Magic, quashing the doubts of wizards who said he couldn’t possibly have returned.

But though the sixth book, which is 10 years old this year, ends with a bang (an Avada Kedavra, more like), the first two-thirds of it are remarkably calm, considering the whole wizarding world is supposed to be at war. The Harry Potter books straddle a variety of genres, taking the basic British children’s boarding-school story and adding fantasy to the mix. But in Half-Blood Prince, Rowling seems to be using the conventions of true-crime books to enhance her magical world. The story is primarily dedicated to Harry and the Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore building a psychological profile of their antagonist.

Throughout the book, Harry takes special lessons with Dumbledore, and their meetings are spent sifting through the memories of people who knew Voldemort as a child, back when he went by his birth name, Tom Riddle.

At one point, Harry asks:

“Sir … is it important to know all this about Voldemort’s past?”

“Very important, I think,” said Dumbledore.

This isn’t quite the same as the criminal profiling that the FBI and forensic psychologists do, because of the critical difference that we already know who the perp is (Pale, tall, snake slits where his nose should be). In criminal investigations, the point is to take the crime and figure out what the psychology might have been behind it, in the hopes of catching the criminal. The “why” is employed in service of the “who.”

Of course, when the killer you’re after is the most powerful Dark wizard of all time, simply knowing who he is isn’t enough to catch him. And catching him isn’t enough to stop him, since he inconveniently split his soul into seven pieces and hid six of them in objects called Horcruxes. To kill him, all seven pieces must be destroyed. Harry and Dumbledore are wading through memories to confirm Dumbledore’s suspicions that Voldemort created Horcruxes, and to figure out which objects he might have chosen. The “who” is employed in the service of the “what” and the “why.”

The young Tom Riddle conforms to many of the classic stereotypes about serial killers.

As in real criminal profiling, this endeavor involves a lot of inferences and conjecture. “From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of the wildest guesswork,” Dumbledore says.

What they discover about young Tom Riddle conforms to many of the classic stereotypes about serial killers—his parents were unhappy, he was a loner, he bullied other children and tortured animals.

Most importantly: “The young Tom Riddle liked to collect trophies,” Dumbledore says. “You saw the box of stolen articles he had hidden in his room. These were taken from victims of his bullying behavior, souvenirs, if you will, of particularly unpleasant bits of magic. Bear in mind this magpie-like tendency, for this, particularly, will be important later.”

The collection of trophies from victims is another serial killer trope, and it comes back into play with the Horcruxes—Harry points out that Voldemort could store his soul in any old thing, making the Horcruxes impossible to find.

“But would Lord Voldemort use tin cans or old potion bottles to guard his own precious soul?” Dumbledore replies. “You are forgetting what I have showed you. Lord Voldemort liked to collect trophies and he preferred objects with a powerful magical history. His pride, his belief in his own superiority, his determination to carve for himself a startling place in magical history; these things suggest to me that Voldemort would have chosen his Horcruxes with some care, favoring objects worthy of the honor.”

Dumbledore proves to be right about that.

In this storyline, the sixth Harry Potter book in part resembles a true-crime book, and is intriguing for a lot of the same reasons. Stories of real-life serial killers captivate less because of the crimes they commit and more because of people’s desire to understand why someone would do those things. As I previously wrote in a story about serial-killer celebrity:

As the retired NYPD homicide detective Dave Carbone [said] when asked about the public’s interest in serial killers, “The why is the wow.” Or in the words of Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist … “It’s not really about the victims. It’s more about the puzzle—the interesting labyrinth of human emotions and human motives.”

Voldemort is motivated by immortality, superiority, racial cleansing, and more than a bit of self-hatred. Many of these things are shown in earlier books in the series, but become crystallized in the sixth. Tom Riddle has a witch mother and a Muggle father, making him a half-blood wizard. But as Lord Voldemort, his ideology is centered around the superiority of “pure-blood” wizards, and his desire to rid the world of Muggle-born wizards and half-bloods like himself. Rowling has acknowledged that Voldemort is similar to Adolf Hitler in this way.

It’s actually notoriously difficult to predict who will become a serial killer. Human behavior is just too complex. For example, research has shown that presence of the famous “Macdonald Triad”—animal cruelty, setting fires, and bed-wetting—in childhood is not necessarily predictive of adult violent behavior.

But this is fiction, and it makes perfect sense that Rowling would pepper Voldemort’s past with clues people can recognize and understand. In fact, in this tale of good versus evil, it would be easier to just let Voldemort be a tautology—he’s evil because he’s evil. Instead, Rowling grounds his evil in comprehensible human flaws, and shows that to defeat evil we not only have to fight it, but to try to understand where it comes from in the first place.

Al Jazeera Journalists Are Pardoned

Updated on September 23 at 8:56 a.m. ET

Al Jazeera journalists Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed were among 100 people pardoned Wednesday by Egyptian leader Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi on the occasion of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha.

The news was reported by Al Ahram, the influential newspaper. Fahmy’s lawyer, Khaled Abu Bakr, confirmed to the Associated Press his client had been pardoned. It is unclear if the two men have left prison. Fahmy holds dual Egyptian and Canadian citizenship, and it is not yet certain whether he will be remain in Egypt.

Others freed include youth activists Sanaa Seif and Yara Sallam, who had violated Egypt’s controversial law restricting the right to protest. But it is the release of the two journalists that is likely to garner most attention in the West as Sisi heads to the UN General Assembly on Thursday.

Fahmy and Mohamed, who were arrested in December 2013, were sentenced last month, along with their colleague, the Australian Peter Greste, to at least three years in prison. Their crime: “broadcasting false news.” Greste was deported in February.

As Matt Schaivenza noted last month:

The three were detained in December 2013 during a crackdown ordered by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who wrested control of Egypt from Mohamed Morsi that year and has ruled the country ever since. al-Sisi, who has sent thousands to prison for political reasons, has little tolerance for independent journalism. Earlier this month, Egypt passed an “anti-terrorism” law that imposes steep fines for anyone who strays from government statements in publishing.

Schiavenza previously reported:

Traditionally, international journalists have avoided punishment in Egypt, a country with virtually no history of press freedom. But Al Jazeera aroused al-Sisi’s ire with its critical coverage of the former general's coup against Morsi. The network is headquartered in and financed by Qatar, a Persian Gulf emirate whose government backed the Morsi regime.

Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the Vindication of Taylor Swift

Looking at it now, it all seems so simple: Taylor Swift and guitar music were built to fall apart, and come back together. For 1989, she left behind all the trappings of singer/songwriter seriousness—her stringed instrument, her claim to writing entire albums on her own, deep heartbreak as emotional muse—that had made her the pop star dads could support along with their daughters. So it was probably inevitable that a dad-rocker would reverse-engineer the sparkling, synthetic results. Which is not to say that Ryan Adams’s 1989 sounds like Swift’s early albums. Only that, unlike its source material, it sounds like something few people would describe as a guilty pleasure.

This fact alone, in an ideal world, should be enough to neutralize the snobberies that created the idea of “guilty pleasures”: the notion that musical worthiness depends on authorship, or that songs pieced together by computers are fraudulent, or that Max Martin is the devil. Ryan Adams’s 1989 by traditional standards sounds like “real music” while the original sounds “fake,” but how real can it be when it’s all material written by Taylor Swift and the same folks who created Britney Spears’s career? Adams says he connected emotionally to Swift’s original album and decided to cover it during a period of loneliness, post-breakup, over the holidays; his versions have, according to social-media testimony, sent people into tears. Isn’t that enough evidence to show that music made “by committee,” performed by someone who didn’t write it, is art?

Adams has, blessedly, done more than simply transpose Swift’s songs into the genre of acoustic grizzled seriousness. There’s an intelligence and point of view to these reworkings. By my count, exactly one song is an unambiguous improvement: “Welcome to New York,” whose simplistic synths and flat, robotic vocals originally made it seem like an arrival song for someone from another planet rather than another part of America. Adams brings it back to Earth and adds some drama by putting it into the Born to Run rocker template. Most crucially, he breaks with the Martin school’s famous obsession with making syllables align, delivering words in accordance with their meaning rather than out of a desire to bore a hole into the listener’s memory. The results are an homage to New York as place to be free, rather than twee.

The most devastating part of the “Blank Space” cover comes from one of the rare instances in which Adams chooses not to switch pronouns.

That song is a bit of an anomaly. The general trend on the album is for songs that once communicated confidence in the face of uncertainty—Swift’s big, brash pep rallies for the soul—to become tentative and sad and wistful. “Wish You Would” and “Wildest Dreams” are as close as the album gets to imagining if Swift never left country music—maybe a joke on the nostalgic sentiments of the words, but undeniably lovely nonetheless. “Style” amplifies the sexy danger of the original with careening rock fuzz; Adams wails as if he’s seen death itself and replaces Swift’s mentions of James Dean with references to Sonic Youth. Speaking of changed lyrics: The swaggering hip-hop textures of “Blank Space” fall away for finger-picked guitar, but the most devastating part of the cover comes from one of the rare instances in which Adams chooses not to switch pronoun genders. “Oh my god, who is she?” no longer jealously refers to a rival but to the object of the singer's affections; Adams sings the line in a tone of fear and wonder.

That’s one of the many newly heartbreaking and gorgeous moments on the album. Still, it’s hard to avoid reminders of what made the original 1989 so interesting: the production, which went beyond ’80s revival to stranger places than it got credit for. If Adams’s ghostly formal experiment “Shake It Off” showed up on one of his solo albums, critics would more naturally label it an original song that quotes Taylor Swift than a cover—how can “Shake It Off” exist with neither sound of nor mention of “this sick beat” (clap clap clap)?

Another example: “Out of the Woods,” stretched here to six minutes and adorned in REM-ish guitar chiming. It presents the lyrics’ desire for stability as passive pining—moving and relatable, yes, but the kind of emotion we’ve heard in rock ballads for decades. The original, though, was truly weird: booming gated drums, stentorian backup chanting, Swift’s jumbled, repetitious chorus, all of which conveyed a blend of hope and neuroticism—the feeling that bliss is so close yet so elusive that you can’t stop thinking about it. Next to that, Adam’s campfire profundity feels generic. Maybe that’s why she left the likes of it behind.

Hillary Clinton Opposes Keystone XL

Hillary Clinton has ended her game of chicken with the Obama administration over the Keystone XL pipeline.

For years, the White House has avoided either giving approval to the pipeline or rejecting it—though there have been numerous false alarms that a decision was near. And for months, Clinton, who as secretary of state oversaw earlier stages of the process of making a yes or no recommendation, waited to see where the president would come down before wading into a messy fight.

On Tuesday, she ended the game of chicken, offering a terse answer: “I oppose it because I don't think it's in the best interest of what we need to do to combat climate change.” The Democratic candidate had fired a warning salvo on Friday, saying, “I have been waiting for the administration to make a decision. I thought I owed them that. I can't wait too much longer. I am putting the White House on notice. I am going to tell you what I think soon because I can't wait.”

Cynics noted that she made the announcement almost literally at the same time that Pope Francis was arriving in D.C.—a fortuitous choice of timing for a news dump. Clinton may have had little political choice in the matter: Democratic primary voters don’t like the pipeline, and with Bernie Sanders running unexpectedly well against her, she’s being tugged to the left on a variety of issues.

An interesting question is whether Clinton’s announcement will pressure Obama politically, just as she reacted to political pressure. The White House has said it won’t make a decision until it receives a recommendation from the State Department—Secretary John Kerry’s past support for environmental causes is said to incline him against it—and it hasn’t received that yet.

A Controversial Plan to Redistribute Migrants in Europe

European Union ministers approved a plan to distribute 120,000 migrants among the bloc’s member states in the face of strong opposition from four Central European countries.

Under the deal agreed to in Brussels on Tuesday, migrants now in Greece, Hungary and Italy will be moved to other countries over the next two years. Of the three EU members that have an opt-out agreement with the bloc on migration, Denmark and Ireland are part of Tuesday’s deal. Britain, the third country, is not—though it is accepting 4,000 refugees this year, and 20,000 over the next five.

Tuesday’s decision in Brussels was made by a majority vote—a rarity in a bloc that typically operates through consensus. The dissenters were the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Finland abstained while Poland, which opposed the deal, voted in favor. The Guardian adds:

Of the 120,000 to be divided between the remaining EU states, the nine countries of central and eastern Europe are being asked to take only around 10,000, while Germany and France between them will take double that number.

The divisions at Tuesday’s vote underscore the deep divisions in Europe over the migrant crisis—the region’s most severe since World War II. The crisis has been exacerbated by the Syrian civil war that has produced 4 million refugees. Although the vast majority of them live in camps in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, hundreds of thousands have made their way to Europe. Germany, which says it expects 800,000 asylum-seekers this year, is their top destination.

But while Germany, Austria, France, and Sweden have welcomed the migrants, the European Union’s newer members have not—and some of them have closed their borders, stranding the refugees. Some of that opposition was on display after Tuesday’s vote in Brussels.

Czech President Milos Zeman said via his spokesman “only the future will show what a mistake [the deal] was.” The Czech Cabinet will meet Wednesday to discuss how to proceed. The BBC reported that the Czechs will appeal the decision to the European Court of Justice.

Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico told TA3 news channel his country would not take in the migrants.

“I would rather go to an infringement against the Slovak Republic than to respect this diktat of the majority, which was unable to push through its opinion using rational arguments and reach a consensus within the EU,” he said, according to Agence France-Presse.

Zoltán Kovács, the Hungarian government spokesman, told The Guardian that while his country accepted the vote, the deal is unworkable.

“We believe it will be impossible to keep people assigned to, say, Slovakia if they want to go to Germany,” he said. “How do you keep people in one country if they want to go join their relatives who live in another EU country or want the more favorable social welfare benefits in that [second] country?”

Many of those objections are likely to be raised when EU leaders meet Wednesday to ratify the plan.

You can find the rest of our coverage of this story here.

The Felt Drudgery of The Muppets

In all of the hoopla over ABC’s new “grown-up” take on The Muppets, far too much attention has been paid to the now-knotty personal lives of America’s favorite felt creations. Kermit has broken up with Miss Piggy and started dating another pig named Denise; Fozzie Bear is embarking on a complex relationship with a human woman, whose parents do not approve of their cross-species union. It’s all very icky if you think about it too hard, which is why the new show doesn’t really want you to. What it does want you to think about is the middle-aged mediocrity that Jim Henson’s creations have now found themselves in.

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The Muppets is the group’s first TV show since 1996’s Muppets Tonight. And, like its predecessors, it’s set behind the scenes of the production, this time on a syndicated talk show hosted by Miss Piggy. Every character is slotted into an assigned role: Kermit is once again a harried producer, Fozzie the cheesy warm-up comic, Miss Piggy the top-billed diva, and other favorites like Gonzo, Rizzo, and Pepe the Prawn litter the writers’ room. Celebrity guests can drop by as themselves, poking fun at their public image, and Kermit’s new beau Denise generates story drama as a network exec. But entirely gone is the manic energy of The Muppet Show, the classic behind-the-scenes formula that gave Jim Henson’s creations their big break. In its place is sardonic drudgery that makes for very unenjoyable viewing.

It’s not difficult to guess why The Muppets has gone for the mockumentary formula that helped make shows like The Office and Modern Family easily digestible hits. It’s a simple way to make a single-camera sitcom that still features easy punchlines delivered straight to camera, and The Muppets takes full advantage. The gang are also always at their best when they’re putting on a show—the Muppets film franchise fizzled out with convoluted stories like Muppets From Space before getting back on track with Jason Segel’s 2011 reboot film, where the gang reunites to save their famous variety show. So in The Muppets, ABC has them putting on a show every week. But rather than the singing, dancing, and comedy sketches we’d expect, the Muppets’ work life has become as drab as if they worked in The Office’s Dunder Mifflin.

Do audiences really want to see Fozzie and Gonzo walking into work clutching coffee like any other regular jobber?

Do audiences really want to see Fozzie and Gonzo walking into work clutching coffee like any other regular jobber? How about Kermit having painful conversations with other mid-level ABC stars like Tom Bergeron? Since the show revolves around the unglamorous work of TV production, the wackier, more traditional Muppets humor (like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew randomly tasering his poor assistant Beaker) sticks out awkwardly. Kermit fills the role of the harried straight man as he always has, but his relationship with Denise gives the whole thing an uncomfortable new dimension: The frog hero seems to be trying to escape the realities of his job and his day-to-day interactions with Miss Piggy by rushing into the arms of a one-dimensional facsimile of her. That notion is far more unsettling than trying to unpack Kermit’s specific predilections for pig-women.

Denise is the perfect representation of a larger problem The Muppets can’t escape: the undeniable fact that since Jim Henson’s death, and the retirement of other puppeteer legends like Frank Oz, any Muppets property feels a bit like a cover version of the great original shows and films. Thus even a brand-new character like Denise feels like a copy of a copy (and it doesn’t help that she’s designed to look more human and less cartoonish than the other puppets, giving her scenes a strange uncanny-valley quality).

That’s an unavoidable problem, though. As long as you accept that The Muppets will never quite reach the heights of its forebears, there’s still plenty of room for the show to grow from its trudging pilot. It has a competent showrunner—Bill Prady, who got his start working on Henson’s shows and later co-created The Big Bang Theory. Though The Muppets’s mockumentary premise is worn-out, it offers a skeleton strong enough to support more drama, and every week can at least hinge some humor on whoever the celebrity guest star is (the long list includes Josh Groban, Jay Leno, and Elizabeth Banks). But your enjoyment of The Muppets will likely balance on just how much you care about seeing these characters on screen again, no matter how depressing the circumstances. And even if you prefer the good old days, there’s nothing you’re missing from skipping this latest entry, the most monotonous Muppet caper of all.