Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 342

The IAEA's 'Significant Progress' on Iran

The head of the U.N. nuclear-watchdog agency says his visit over the weekend to Iran’s Parchin military site is “significant progress” in the organization’s investigation of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities.  But Yukiya Amano, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, also noted that environmental samples taken at Parchin were collected by Iranian officials before the IAEA’s visit.

Here are Amano’s comments on his visit—the first time the IAEA has been allowed access to the facility:

We entered a building which the Agency had previously only been able to observe using satellite imagery.

Inside the building, we saw indications of recent renovation work. There was no equipment in the building. Our experts will now analyse this information and we will have discussions with Iran in the coming weeks, as foreseen in the Road-map.

As I have stated in my reports to the Board, the extensive work that has been conducted at the location since early 2012 undermines the Agency’s ability to conduct effective verification there.  

Before our visit, certain IAEA safeguards activities were carried out at the particular location at the Parchin site. These included the taking of environmental samples.

Sample taking is a complex process.

As a result of experience gained over the years, the Agency has, in certain circumstances, permitted States’ representatives to carry out activities in support of the Agency’s verification work. This is done in a way that ensures that the Agency’s verification processes are not compromised.

In the case of Parchin, the Iranian side played a part in the sample-taking process by swiping samples.

The Agency can confirm the integrity of the sampling process and the authenticity of the samples, which were taken at places of interest to the Agency at the particular location in Parchin.

Authentication by the Agency of the samples was achieved through use of an established verification process. The process was carried out under our responsibility and monitoring. The samples have been brought to Vienna and will be analysed by Agency experts.

Amano’s assurances notwithstanding, the collection of samples by the Iranians is unlikely to assuage concerns about the nature of the deal struck between Iran and the U.S. and other world powers over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Here’s Reuters:

The IAEA has come under criticism over a confidential agreement with Iran governing how inspections are conducted at Parchin. Critics of the big powers’ deal with Iran have argued that the IAEA’s approach limits its ability to investigate and gives Iran too much influence in the collection of samples.

Under that arrangement, the samples would be taken by Iranian technicians while IAEA experts present at Parchin would observe and oversee the process, Western diplomats told Reuters.

Reuters also reported that Behruz Kamalvandi, a spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told an Iranian news agency that the samples taken this week at Parchin were given to the IAEA’s experts.

“He did not rule out IAEA inspectors being present for future samples being taken,” Reuters added.

The Mets and the Magic of Baseball

In the days leading up to the 2015 baseball season, the Washington Nationals were anointed the Team to Watch. They had won 96 games in 2014, they’d just added the former Cy Young winner Max Scherzer in the winter, and their precocious superstar, the outfielder Bryce Harper, seemed on the verge of fully tapping his enormous potential. Of the 88 ESPN writers polled before the season’s start, nearly all predicted the Nationals would win their division, and they were the top pick to win the World Series. One of Sports Illustrated’s season preview issues featured Scherzer and Harper on the cover, next to a headline positioning them as a rare superteam in an age of parity.

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Those high hopes have since vanished. Two weeks ago, the New York Mets beat the Nationals 5-3, capping a series sweep and growing their division lead over the Nats to seven games with the regular season coming to a close. This nearly universally unpredicted outcome was the result of divergent strands of fortune: The Nationals had endured a season marred by injury and underperformance from some segments of their celebrated roster. Meanwhile, the Mets, largely thought to be chum for the purported D.C. leviathan, managed to hang in the division race for most of the summer before starting their impressive stretch at the beginning of August.

There are more exhaustive explanations than the one above for how the National League East has unfolded. Of the major American professional sports, baseball is the least stylistically variable and has the most data points over its 162-game season. As such, it’s the ideal laboratory for the now-encompassing movement of sports analytics. Managers have a firmer grasp on individual players’ values than at any point in history, and projection systems tasked with playing out entire seasons before the first pitch has even been thrown. Which is to say: The ESPN writers who picked the Nationals to skate to a division title had a great deal more than gut feelings and appraisals of pluck to go on. They can also do a great deal more than shrug their shoulders by way of explaining what went wrong.

For a certain strain of fan, though, teasing out the reasons for the flipped script is less rewarding than simply basking in it. As baseball has become smarter, it’s also become more predictable, and supposedly sure things are surer than ever before. A team like the present Mets, then, carries with it the hopes not only of a single fanbase but also of those who miss a certain kind of shock baseball once seemed more inclined to provide, back when its mechanisms were more inscrutable and its explanations tipped toward the mythic.

* * *

This Mets season is best appreciated not as a culmination of years of modern baseball preparation—scouting, analyzing, player development, budgeting, free-agent signings, cheap buys, and timely sells—but as a mad, miraculous rush. The complaint common about “Based on a True Story” Hollywood films is that they sand down rough edges and confine everything to a tidy package of causality and archetype. But I defy fans to watch the Mets for even an hour without giving into the urge of turning the players into characters in a story.

There are the gifted kids—the long-coiffed pitchers Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard. There are the wizened old hands—the 42-year-old pitcher Bartolo Colón and the 36-year-old infielder Juan Uribe, both well past their All-Star primes but beloved for their clubhouse tutelage and sense of joyful ease. David Wright, a third baseman and lone holdover from the last Mets team to win the division, missed much of the season due to injury but hit a soaring home run in his first at-bat back. Matt Harvey, the All-Star pitcher who set off a brouhaha recently when he and his agent raised the possibility of an innings limit after Harvey missed 2014 recovering from elbow surgery, provides ability and controversy in equal measure. Yoenis Céspedes, the trunk-torsoed and omni-talented outfielder brought to New York at the trade deadline, both bats third and personifies the optimism surrounding the team—their hottest stretch of the season coincided with his arrival.

I defy fans to watch the Mets for even an hour without giving into the urge of turning the players into characters in a story.

If portions of the Mets’ essence belong to its individual members, the soul should be divided equally between Terry Collins and the utility man Wilmer Flores. The former, a 66-year-old baseball lifer, has helmed three Major League teams for a total of 10 seasons, never reaching the postseason; the Mets’ current postseason drought stands at eight years, nearly a mirroring decade. The latter wept on the field one night in July, using his sleeve to dry his eyes so as not to disturb his glove, when he heard he was about to be traded. He had been a part of the Mets organization since he was 16 years old, when the team signed the young Venezuelan to a minor-league contract. The rumor turned out to be unfounded, or the trade rescinded, and Flores has since become a cult hero in Queens, the rare athlete whose care fans can be sure isn’t just a projection of their own.

Hanging over everything is the pall of persistent trouble, the cloudy skies that lend noble tales heft. One part of the trouble comes from lore—these are the Mets, after all, kid brothers to the dapper and well-funded club a borough over, seemingly fated to receive forever the bad breaks balancing the Yankees’ good fortune. Their champions dissolve instead of calcifying into dynasties; their fallow periods span decades. Another part of the trouble comes from that rough luck’s latest iteration. The Mets owner Fred Wilpon invested with Bernie Madoff a few years back; since then, his hamstrung ballclub has spent sparely. The young pitchers may soon age out of affordability, and there’s no telling if Céspedes, a free agent at year’s end, will receive enough of an offer to convince him to stay in New York.

With all this—the franchise’s financial straits, its sorry history, the knowledge that whatever gains are accrued this year may evaporate with the season’s final out—it would take a robotic temperament to resist viewing this season through the lens of narrative, to consider it anything other than evidence of baseball’s sub-statistical, human pulse. Successes, in the Mets’ current climate, seem to owe less to sheer compiled talent than to interplays of experience and optimism and gravity. Failures become sustenance, morsels of worldliness stocked for the next time around.

* * *

Can Wright’s return homer, Céspedes’s timely line drives and heat-seeking throws, and Colón’s jolly dugout counseling signal anything other than the efficacy of this team’s mix of tabloid fervor, clubhouse guidance, youthful fearlessness, and hard-earned aspiration? Of course they can. The Mets’ run from afterthought to contender is unusual but, in the long history of professional baseball, hardly unprecedented. It fits neatly within the game’s tradition of aberration and has many of the common causes, for those looking for them. There were injuries and regression on the Nationals’ side; undervalued talent, timely acquisitions, and some fortuitous bounces on their own.

But the fan’s memory is unscientific, and it’s hard to remember a team in recent history that has made fortune look as much like fate as this one. New York now stands almost 10 games up on the collapsed Nationals, and a division win and postseason appearance seem more certain by the day. After that, nothing is assured; the short series of October are fickle and can make any team look blessed. The happy kismet of the 2015 Mets may carry to early November, or it may fizzle out a couple weeks from now. In any event, this team will stick in the mind of anyone who grows tired, now and again, of the notion of a baseball season as a proof to be solved. Its story will be remembered, if only for being a story in the first place.

An Extradition Hearing for Kim Dotcom

In January 2012, the FBI shut down Megaupload, a file-sharing site, and accused its founder, Kim Dotcom (that’s his legal name), of copyright infringement, racketeering, and money laundering. Dotcom was in New Zealand at the time of the raid, and there he has remained ever since. On Monday, after three years of legal wrangling, Dotcom—and three of his associates—faced an extradition hearing that could see him sent to the U.S.  to face trial.

As you might expect with an Internet millionaire who goes by the name Kim Dotcom, it’s not a straightforward affair. As NPR pointed out soon after Dotcom’s arrest, the entrepreneur “has been fighting both a legal war and a public relations war against the U.S. government and he’s become a kind of patron saint of those in favor of a free Internet.” He continued that battle before Monday’s proceedings:

  

This case is not just about me. This case is about how much control we allow US corporations and the US government to have over the Internet

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 20, 2015

The judges on this case can become the champions for billions of Internet users or a handful of US content billionaires. #Hope

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 20, 2015

I love the Internet. I will continue to fight for you.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 20, 2015

U.S. official say Dotcom and his associates generated $175 million by allowing users to share and store copyrighted material on Megaupload.

Stuff, the New Zealand-based news website, reported that Monday’s extradition proceedings in Auckland “immediately got bogged down in technical, legal argument.” Here’s more:

While the first day’s business of the hearing was mainly procedural, with lawyers for the United States and those representing Dotcom and his co-accused arguing over what order different parts of the case should be heard, the outcome could impact on whether the extradition hearing was delayed again or possibly put off altogether.

Much of the news coverage of Monday’s proceedings were focused on Dotcom’s size, his ergonomic chair, his all-black garb, and his Mercedes G55 V8 Kompressor. Here’s how Steve Braunias, a columnist for the New Zealand Herald, described Monday’s extradition proceedings in Auckland:

Today’s proceedings were devoted to the niceties of legal wrangling. In common parlance, they were devoted to bitching and moaning.

Crown lawyer Christine Gordon QC, a picture of grave authority in her pin-striped pant suit, moaned about the defence applications for a stay of proceedings. She told Judge Nevin Dawson they lacked an “air of reality”.

The air, filled with her voice, was too much for one character who sat in the public gallery. He fell asleep, and was turfed out by a security guard who had a tattoo reading RIP DAZ on his massive forearm.

Grant Illingworth QC, acting for van der Kolk and Ortmann, addressed the court after Gordon finished her soliloquy. His suit was grey, his hair was grey, his bitching was consistent.

“I submit we have to adjourn ... Paragraph four ... Impossible task ... Natural justice ... Frustrating ... Paragraph seven”, etc.

The hearing is expected to take weeks.

A ‘Clear Mandate’ in Greece

Alexis Tsipras is back as Greece’s prime minister—just months after his Syriza party lost its majority in parliament after he secured a controversial bailout from his country’s creditors.

In election results announced Sunday, the far-left Syriza won more than 35 percent of the vote—short of a majority. It will rule in a coalition with the Independent Greeks, a nationalist party that won 3.6 percent. The opposition New Democracy, a conservative party, gained 28 percent and the far-right Golden Dawn was third with 7 percent.

The results are a dramatic turnaround for Tsipras, who was first elected in January by campaigning against the austerity measures imposed on Greece by its creditors. He was vilified across Europe for taking Greece to the brink of an exit from the euro zone, the group of European countries that uses the common currency, and then criticized at home for securing a deal with Greece’s creditors in the EU, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—a deal that caused a rift in his own party.

“I feel vindicated because the Greek people have a clear mandate to carry on fighting inside and outside our country to uphold the pride of our people,”  Tsipras told supporters in Athens.

The BBC adds:

They expected victory, but not by this kind of margin. Only days ago, pollsters and pundits were predicting a tight-run contest, Syriza neck-and-neck with its conservative rivals, New Democracy. Instead, Syriza can comfortably form a coalition government with its previous partner, the nationalist Independent Greeks.

Critics wondered whether it was worth holding a contest which left Greece with the same government as before. But Syriza's leader, Alexis Tsipras, is now in a stronger position, his decision to accept austerity measures in return for bailout cash apparently vindicated by the result.

Yet celebrations have been muted - hundreds not thousands gathering to sing, dance and wave flags. This country has more tough times ahead - tax rises, perhaps further cuts to wages and benefits. The re-elected prime minister has an in-box that no-one could envy.

The EU congratulated Tsipras on his victory, and pointed out that much work had to be done to overhaul Greece’s recession-hit economy, which has not recovered from the global economic crisis on 2008.

“There is a lot of work ahead and no time to lose,” Margaritis Schinas, a spokesman for the European Commission, said.

Indeed, as The Guardian notes:

The new government’s first task – with a new €3bn tranche of aid at stake – will be to revise the 2015 budget to take into account major pension and income tax reforms. It must also finalise a procedure to recapitalise Greek banks by December and move fast to remove capital controls imposed this summer to prevent a full-blown bank run.

Ben Carson Says No to a Muslim U.S. President

GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that the United States should never elect a Muslim president. “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that,” he told host Chuck Todd. When asked if he believed Islam “is consistent with the Constitution,” Carson answered, “No, I don’t, I do not.”

That would probably be news to the Founding Fathers. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom to protect adherents of all faiths throughout the commonwealth and and to disestablish a state church. The statute subsequently influenced the First Amendment’s drafting and is considered a cornerstone of American religious pluralism. Jefferson later cited it among his greatest accomplishments.

Many years later, in 1821, Jefferson wrote that the Virginia legislature had explicitly rejected the idea that the statute applied only to Christians.

Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read, "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.

“Muslim” has replaced “Mohametan” as the preferred nomenclature, but the principle endures. Forbidding a Muslim president by law would be stupendously unconstitutional. Even if the First Amendment didn’t protect freedom of religion, Article VI of the Constitution forbids all religious tests for any public office.

Instead, Carson believes in a cultural norm against electing a Muslim president. Carson’s opposition to a Muslim president seems to be prophylactic: There are no Muslim presidential candidates, nor are any high-profile American Muslims currently considering a bid for the nation’s highest office. None of this nation’s estimated 2.8 million Muslim citizens, he apparently believes, have the capacity to lead the United States.

Protestant anxieties about religious compatibility for the presidency are nothing new. Mitt Romney, who is Mormon, faced similar fears from conservative evangelicals during his 2012 campaign. Anti-Catholic sentiment also helped defeat Democrat Al Smith’s 1928 bid for the presidency. Many of the allegations against Smith drew on nativist tropes of foreign influence and theocratic subversion; they strongly resemble those lobbed against American Muslims today.

Opponents blanketed the country with photos of the recently completed Holland Tunnel, the caption stating that this was the secret passage being built between Rome and Washington, to transport the pope to his new abode. Countless copies of a small cartoon appeared on lampposts and mailboxes everywhere. Titled “Cabinet Meeting — If Al Were President,” it showed the cabinet room, with the pope seated at the head of the table, surrounded by priests and bishops. Over in the corner was Al Smith, dressed in a bellboy’s uniform, carrying a serving platter, on top of which was a jug of whiskey. Summing up, the minister of the largest Baptist congregation in Oklahoma City announced, “If you vote for Al Smith you’re voting against Christ and you’ll all be damned.”

John F. Kennedy later succeeded where Al Smith failed when he was elected the nation's first Catholic president in 1960, and Pope Francis will address Congress next week. Six Catholics also now serve on the U.S. Supreme Court alongside three Jewish justices. No Protestants currently hold a seat on the nation’s highest court, which is charged with final interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and all laws under it. Yet the republic endures.

The Newest Runway for Fashion Week: Instagram

In a cloud of Yeezy-inspired populism and lots and lots of lace, another New York Fashion Week has come to a close. This season’s lineup of shows featured a series of over-the-top, theatrical approaches to set design including beach-as-runway, red-carpet-as-runway, and swimming-pool-as-runway. But one of the most intriguing concepts, championed by the up-and-coming designer Misha Nonoo didn’t include much in the way of physical props at all. Instead, it lived exclusively on Instagram.

Last weekend, Nonoo became the first designer to debut her collection solely via the picture-sharing platform—releasing a series of individual photos that came together to form a complete panoramic image when viewed in tandem. Spectators could see the “Insta-show” by following the handle @mishanonoo_show and gain access to the mosaic of images, which went live at 10 a.m. EST on Saturday morning. The photos showcase models clad in contemporary chic against white walls and exposed brick—a visual closely resembling that of an editorial magazine spread. By turning their phones horizontally and scrolling, viewers could walk themselves down the runway.

Nonoo has cited several reasons for presenting her collection in this way, including the opportunity to make Fashion Week more inclusive and accessible to a broader audience, the freedom to be more creative about her staging and styling choices, and the chance to use the money she would have otherwise spent on the show for charitable purposes. In an interview with CNN, she described the flexibility this kind of presentation provided, as a counterpoint to many of the restrictive elements inherent to Fashion Week: “With digital, there are so many new opportunities that do not have any geographical limitations, timing conflicts, or seating restrictions. And that's what I am motivated by.”

Viewers can scroll horizontally to travel down the show’s runway. (Misha Nonoo / Instagram)

Nonoo has also noted that her decision wasn’t financially driven, but rather emerged from a conversation she had with Sheryl Sandberg during the course of a visit to Instagram. The app has developed an increasingly prominent presence in the fashion world, with the former Lucky editor-in-chief Eva Chen even joining the company’s ranks earlier this year as its head of fashion partnerships. So why couldn’t it offer a fresh perspective on the age-old cornerstone of the industry—the fashion show itself?

Models in Nonoo’s show. (Misha Nonoo / Instagram)

The photos from Nonoo’s Insta-show are vibrant, colorful, and filled with energy, yet their static presentation serves as a stark contrast to the flurry of activity and movement that’s such a definitive feature of events at Fashion Week. Nonoo has said in an interview with Elle, “As much as you want to plan, the best moments on social media happen organically.” By removing the opportunity for an audience to participate in the creation of those organic moments, a vital aspect of the show feels like it’s missing.

Fashion Week events, while flawed in many ways and carefully orchestrated themselves, continue to offer a sense of communal engagement that can’t quite be captured by pixels alone. The shortcomings of Nonoo’s show lie less with her content and more with the limitations of Instagram as a platform. Although the photos that live on it are often strikingly beautiful, filter or #nofilter, there’s one thing they simply can’t offer—the live experience.

Japan Curtails Its Pacifist Stance

Seven decades after its surrender ended World War II, Japan took its most significant step away from the pacifist foreign policy that shaped 70 years of its post-war history.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spent considerable effort to push a bill reinterpreting Article 9 of the country’s constitution through the Diet, Japan’s legislature. On Thursday, legislators brawled when opposition politicians tried to physically block a vote on the legislation. It passed Friday after three days of raucous debate in the House of Councillors, the upper house of the Japanese parliament, marking a historic shift in the nation’s approach to international affairs.

Pacifism formed the nucleus of Japan’s foreign policy in the post-war era. The policy is rooted in the horrors of the Pacific War and Japan’s wartime trauma, including the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Article 9 of the post-war constitution, drafted under U.S. occupation in 1947, declares that the Japanese people “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.”

This constitutional language is common among the former Axis powers. Article 11 of the Italian Constitution declares that Italy “rejects war as an instrument of aggression.” Article 26 of Germany’s Basic Law forbids “activities tending and undertaken with the intent to disturb peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for aggressive war.”

But Article 9 goes even further. The second clause pledges that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained” by Japan, and that “the right of belligerency will not be recognized.” As the name of Japan’s military suggests, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces exist only to protect the Japanese homeland. JSDF forces participate in UN peacekeeping operations and humanitarian missions, but avoided UN-authorized combat missions in Korea or during the Gulf War. (A noncombat unit took part in the U.S. occupation of Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s fall, to considerable controversy.)

The bill passed on Friday does not change Article 9’s language. That would require a constitutional amendment and two-thirds support in both houses of the Diet, which Abe and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party lack. Instead, it reinterprets it to allow for “collective self-defense.”

Japanese forces will now be able to assist the U.S. and other allies if those allies were attacked, although there would still be limits on the scope and scale of Japanese assistance. The BBC notes, for example, that Japan could now shoot down a North Korean missile fired at the U.S. and provide logistical support to South Korea if Pyongyang invaded, but could not deploy Japanese troops to Korea.

The reorientation of Japanese foreign policy is a major triumph for Abe, a conservative nationalist who has long sought a more assertive posture on the international stage. But his long awaited shift did not come without criticism. Tens of thousands of students protested the bill in Tokyo, and opposition leader Tatsuya Okada warned that the bill and other security-related measures would “leave a big scar on Japanese democratic politics.”

As my colleague David Graham noted when Abe visited the United States in April, U.S. resistance to reinterpreting Article 9 has faded as World War II recedes into history. But in China, a major regional rival of Japan where memories of World War II-era war crimes still loom large in the popular imagination, the response to Abe’s victory was much less enthusiastic.

“We demand that Japan genuinely listen to just appeals from both at home and abroad, learning from historical lessons and adhering to the path of peaceful development,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Friday, according to the Washington Post.

Will Democrats Rescue John Boehner?

If John Boehner survives this autumn as speaker, he may owe his job to Democrats.

A group of House conservatives is threatening to try and topple Boehner if he does not risk a government shutdown by making an all-out fight to defund Planned Parenthood this month. Led by Representative Mark Meadows, the conservatives would bring up a rarely-used procedural motion calling for the election of a new speaker. If 30 or more Republicans opposed Boehner, he’d need Democratic votes to defeat the motion and retain the speakership.

It’s a nearly unprecedented choice for Democrats, and one that the party is just now beginning to contemplate. Would they bail out a man who has stymied nearly all of their legislative priorities for five years? Or would they allow Republicans to depose their own leader—a move that might carry political advantages for Democrats but would almost certainly bring about a period of chaos in the House?

Ordinarily, there would be nothing to think about. The biannual vote for speaker is the first the House takes once it convenes after an election, and it is by nature the most partisan: That tally is what formally determines which party controls the majority, and nearly all members simply vote for their own leader. Ousting a speaker in the middle of a term, by contrast, hasn’t been done in more than a century, and if Meadows or another Republican forced a vote on what’s known as a “motion to vacate the chair,” the choice facing Democrats would be Boehner or another Republican, who would almost certainly be more conservative.

By and large, Democrats have longed viewed Boehner as an affable but ineffective speaker. He wants to make deals on issues like immigration and the deficit, but he’s lacked either the political courage or the salesmanship to overcome conservative opposition in his party. “I think most Democrats think the alternative would be worse,” said Representative John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat. Yarmuth told me on Friday that he could see himself voting to keep Boehner in office if it came to it. But his thinking is far from the consensus within the party. Another House Democrat, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, told me it would be “untenable” for any Democrat to vote for Boehner. “No Democrat,” he said, “could go home and say he or she voted for a Republican speaker.” One possible way out for Democrats would be to vote present; because only a majority of those voting is needed, that would lower the bar enough for Boehner to survive as speaker with Republican votes alone. Democrats would, in that case, have kept him afloat without directly voting for him.

“No Democrat could go home and say he or she voted for a Republican speaker.”

Boehner has voiced confidence he’ll survive a challenge, but reports are rampant that Republicans beneath him are already jockeying for the position in the event of a new leadership race. The Republican next in line is Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, but while some conservatives might prefer him to Boehner, others are likely to push for someone less tied to the establishment and with more credibility on the right.

A floor challenge to Boehner is unlikely to come before October and might well depend on whether he leads Republicans into another government shutdown after federal funding runs out on September 30. Conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus, a relatively new group of hard-right lawmakers, have said they won’t vote for any spending bill that includes money for Planned Parenthood. President Obama has vowed to veto any attempt to defund the women’s health organization, and such a bill would almost certainly be filibustered in the Senate before it reached his desk. (Even Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has deemed the effort foolhardy.)

Boehner has “a tough job, but he’s got to make a simple decision,” said Representative Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont. “Is he going to continue an appeasement policy toward that radical wing of the party, or throw them overboard and work with Democrats and reasonable Republicans?” It’s a similar decision to the one Boehner faced in 2013, when he went along with conservatives and forced a government shutdown over Obamacare. Yet he publicly rued that move, said it hurt the party, and vowed (along with McConnell) not to repeat it.

Officially, Democratic leaders say Boehner’s problems are his own, and they aren’t talking about what they might do if his job was on the line. “This is not our fight. This is their fight,” said Representative Steve Israel, a New York Democrat who is close to Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader. “The problem is that their fight is dragging us toward another government shutdown and towards another fiscal cliff.”

Democrats don’t want to get involved in their internal battles, nor should we get involved in their internal battles. It’s their civil war. It’s not ours.

Still, what began as solely a Republican problem might land on the Democrats’ desk, and the discussion has already turned to what Pelosi might get if  she agrees to help Boehner save his speaker’s gavel. Would it be a sweeter budget deal? A long-term highway bill? Reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank? Connolly said those scenarios may be fun to hash out, but they're equally unrealistic. “I think we’ve all been watching too much House of Cards,” he quipped when I pressed him on the possibility.

More seriously, Connolly argued that whatever standing Boehner had with mainstream House Republicans would evaporate once they found out he cut a deal with Democrats to save himself. For one, he’d be beholden not just to a faction of Republicans, but to the opposition party as well. “There would be a revolt in the Republican ranks that would make the Freedom Caucus look like tiddlywinks,” Connolly predicted. “I mean, he would lose all of his support.” How would Boehner face his members the next day? Connolly mused. “His head would be on a pike coming out of that caucus meeting and paraded all around the Capitol campus for everyone to see,” he said.

Connolly's hyperbole points to a starker reality for Boehner. The House of Representatives is not a coalition government—it is run by a majority party, which must be led by a speaker with the support of his (or her) members. If Democrats have to bail out Boehner this fall, he might hold on to his gavel, but he won’t have a majority of the House truly behind him.

Was Goodfellas the Last Truly Great Mobster Film?

Goodfellas, released 25 years ago today, might be the last great mob film: Not only did it help redefine the genre, but it also spawned many worthy successors (and many more pale imitators). Even Martin Scorsese’s follow-ups in the genre, Casino and The Departed, bear obvious debts to his 1990 masterpiece, which upended every concept of nobility and honor in organized crime without undermining its appeal. When Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) tells the audience he “always wanted to be a gangster,” it’s easy to understand why. But as much fun as the movie is, viewers also understand why they don’t want to be gangsters: Because they’re merciless, violent crooks.

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10 Great American Gangster Movies

Scorsese was drawn to the true story of mobster-turned-informant Hill, and the biography written by Nicholas Pileggi, because he thought it captured the life of gangsters better than any filmed depiction. The Mafia’s cinematic language was steeped in The Godfather movies and their knock-offs: stately, operatic, bound up in codes of samurai-like honor. Then came Goodfellas: a story of a Mafia hanger-on, a wise guy who hustled drugs and hijacked trucks, hung out playing cards in Queens clubs, and helped bury the corpses created by the psychopaths he hung out with. There was no sense of honor outside of asking permission to kill certain people. And yet that cinematic world was still alluring, which is what makes a film about unrepentant monsters such a blast to watch again and again, 25 years on.

There’s almost no part of Goodfellas that hasn’t been analyzed to death since 1990. There’s Liotta’s hilariously self-satisfied narration, which offers no apology or remorse as the bodies pile up. There’s the kinetic, disconnected approach to plotting, zipping between vaguely related scenes with an intensity that belies its 140-minute running time. Contrast that with The Godfather films, which were intricately plotted and ended in epic crescendos of violence. Instead, Goodfellas simply follows Henry and his pals Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) as they hang out, occasionally rip off truck and airplane shipments, and attack people, either for business or nothing at all.

Pesci, who won an Oscar for his role, is Goodfellas’s most memorable actor—so much so that nearly every line he speaks has passed into total cliché. But it’s remarkable how all of the film’s dramatic tension is centered around his character Tommy, who can snap at a moment’s notice. Though there are larger stories told in Goodfellas (the most notable being the famed Lufthansa heist), they don’t really matter to Henry’s life and safety. Even when he goes to jail for four years, he eats like a king (who can forget the clove of garlic sliced with a razor blade), and he ends up arrested not because of the millions earned in the Lufthansa heist, but for a cocaine-dealing business he ran on the side.

Henry is the closest thing audiences get to an anti-hero: His mild shock at every pointless murder feels like moral outrage in the mobster world.

It’s all so gloriously pointless, and yet Scorsese makes the mobster’s life feel like that of a god among men. Liotta has probably never been better—wormy (his braying laughter at Tommy’s bad jokes is wonderfully hideous) and yet somehow sympathetic. Perhaps because he’s placed alongside two truly cold-blooded men, Henry is the closest thing the audience gets to an anti-hero in the film: His mild shock at every pointless murder feels like moral outrage in the mobster world. That’s a dynamic David Chase understood when laying out the world of his TV show The Sopranos (the only true Mafia masterpiece produced since Goodfellas): By making his protagonist Tony a slightly more reasonable person than his violent, thick-headed associates, the character seemed infinitely more relatable.

Scorsese has since come back time and again to the world of crime. The Departed, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director (Goodfellas was nominated but lost to Dances With Wolves), has the same energetic storytelling style but applies it to a more intricate plot of triple agents and informants. The Wolf of Wall Street comes closest to Goodfellas’ fascinatingly blurry territory of depiction vs. endorsement, and stirred up debate in 2013 for making the life of a homophobic, misogynistic, and heartless white-color criminal look like a luxurious commercial. Goodfellas has the same dark heart, understanding that even as the audience watches on with horror, there’s some tiny part of them that has completely surrendered to the madness and the fun. That was Goodfellas’s original genius and, even in retrospect, it seems impossible to equal.

A Glimpse of 1930s Paris

A man stares at a woman in a bar. A couple kisses in the shadows of an archway. A street light flickers and Brassaï is there, taking photographs.

Known for his street scenes of Parisian life, Brassaï teamed up with Henry Miller for the novella Quiet Days in Clichy. Based loosely on Miller’s own experiences as a struggling expat, the novella follows a two writers’ quests for love and life. What made the work unique was that the first edition included Brassaï’s photographs as well.

The images, some of which were published in Brassaï’s seminal Paris de Nuit, are all taken at night. Brassaï was fascinated by Paris in the evening, attracted to the strange shapes and people that emerged in the City of Light once the day had gone. This push and pull between light and dark, seen and unseen, black and white, is emulated by the subjects he chooses to photograph. Men and women are rarely pictured in harmony; they are in competition or isolation together.

A selection of 27 of these images is on display now at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. The gallery has shared 10 of them with us below.