Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 343

The Saddest Honeymoon

Last year in Nautilus magazine, the composer Jonathan Berger explained how sound can do that very thing Prince says it can do—stop time.

Music creates discrete temporal units but ones that do not typically align with the discrete temporal units in which we measure time. Rather, music embodies (or, rather, is embodied within) a separate, quasi-independent concept of time, able to distort or negate “clock-time.” This other time creates a parallel temporal world in which we are prone to lose ourselves, or at least to lose all semblance of objective time.

Perhaps Lana Del Rey read the essay. She certainly understands the concept. Her career is all about music as a time warp, with her languorous croons over molasses-like arrangements meant to make clock hands seem to move so slowly that it feels possible, at times, they might go backwards. In the four years since she arrived, famously shakily, on the SNL stage, her pout and her unapologetic nostalgia—flowers in hair, Super 8, Nancy Sinatra and Leonard Cohen, Fellini and Polanski films, icky gender relations, cigarettes—have become objects of parody. But there’s meaning in her shtick. Desire, loss, love: All are rooted, somehow, in a desire to regress.  

The concept of her third album, Honeymoon, is in its title. She’s obsessing over, and trying to defy, the finitude of bliss. At one point she counts the hours spent beneath the covers with a lover, and at another she refers to the entire era after a breakup as a single “blackest day.” Of course, time can’t actually be tamed. The title track opens the album with a cello moan and high, creeping violins and then floats for nearly six minutes as Del Rey promises glorious, aimless freedom—“We could cruise to the blues / Wilshire Avenue if we choose.” But she sounds utterly alone. You suspect she’s singing to someone who’s long gone.

The imagery surrounding Honeymoon also centers on lonely vacationing, with Del Rey holed up in a beach house, or taking a solitary Hollywood stars tour, or just standing by herself, hair in the wind for eternity. (You can contrast this with the many hunks and silver foxes populating her previous videos and GIF sets.) Appropriately, her music is more cavernous than ever. After an excursion into rock reverb and claustrophobia for her 2014 album Ultraviolence, she and producers Rick Nowels and Kieron Menzies have brought back the “cinema score + hip hop” template of her fabulous and filthy debut, Born to Die. But whereas her early songs were ironic, morose party-starters, Honeymoon is all about wallowing. The drum machines skitter at a geological pace, sometimes seeming to sputter out and die even as the orchestration—flutes, flame sounds, guitar spindles—gets thicker and thicker.

This may all sound intolerably self-involved, or boring, and sometimes it is. But it helps that Del Rey is a great writer—funny, specific, knowingly over the top. Previously, the cleverness and irony often kept her from achieving real-seeming sentiment, but here those things just makes the emotions heavier. One highlight is the bridge to “Terrance Loves You,” a spare, opera-flavored elegy for a musician she loved. When the drums finally kick in, Del Rey sings about putting the radio on and holding the guy’s memory in her head, and then interpolates David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” to communicate insurmountable distance. It’s arch, post-modern pastiche, yes. It may make you cry.

The purest slice of melodrama here is “Blackest Day,” with multi-tracked vocals and harp strumming and Del Rey appealing to god. Expect it to be in a movie trailer soon. And yet even that song has black wit, with sentences broken up to create little, funny plot twists:

Give me all, got my blue nail polish on...
it's my favorite color…
and my favorite tone of song.
I don't really wanna break up, we got it going on...
is what you gathered from my talk...
but you were wrong

On the next track, “Swan Song,” she considers retirement, pleading for her listener/lover to don the “white tennis shoes” of procrastination that Ayn Rand wrote about and leave the workforce with her forever. It’s perhaps the most relatable moment on an album full of visions of impossible escape. In the chorus, she promises, “You won't work another day / I will never sing again.” After such a sumptuous performance, it’s hard to root for her to get what she wants.

Sleeping With Other People: When Rom-Coms Rebel

About 10 or so years ago, two things happened that arguably doomed romantic comedies for the decade to come. The first was the release of The Notebook in 2004, which sparked the beginning of the Nicholas Sparks Industrial Complex, sucking up all available emotional sincerity into a giant vortex of tears and walks on the beach and American towns preserved in time. The second was the ascendancy of Judd Apatow, whose brilliance prompted filmmakers everywhere to adopt the now-well-worn formula of kidults trying to find love. No longer would circumstance get in the way of two people getting together; instead, it was the people themselves whose assholery or manbabyness or sadomasochistic tendencies were the issue that had to be overcome.

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Leslye Headland’s Sleeping With Other People is a film very much in the contemporary rom-com mold, in that there’s very little standing between its two protagonists other than their own worst tendencies, and thus not a whole lot to enjoy other than a series of increasingly exhausting attempts to be subversive. Lainey (Alison Brie) and Jake (Jason Sudeikis) meet in 2002, when he sees her drunkenly attempting to break down the door of a TA in his dorm and intervenes before she’s thrown off campus. Striking up an instant rapport, the pair lose their virginity to each other and then never talk again until a second run-in at a sex-addiction meeting 12 years later.

Neither is actually a sex addict—Lainey is obsessed with the TA from the first scene, now a dull gynecologist (Adam Scott) who’s been cheating on his fiancée with her, and Jake is the kind of guy who sleeps with his girlfriend’s best friend and then blames her getting upset about it on the “societal insecurity” that pits women against each other.

There is, to be clear, absolutely nothing preventing them from acting on their obvious mutual attraction, but also nothing else to draw out the next 90 minutes. So for reasons that remain mysterious, Jake and Lainey decide to be just friends: Friends who go lingerie shopping together and teach each other how to masturbate (a new low for mansplaining) and have a safe word (“mousetrap”) for when they feel they’re getting too turned on by each other. And it almost works, mostly because Brie gives Lainey a frenetic, goofy energy that makes her sympathetic when she should be insufferable, and Sudeikis has always excelled at making narcissistic sleazeballs more compelling than they have any right to be.

The pair are buffeted by a superb cast of supporting actors who mostly seem more worthy of their stories being told. Adam Brody excels in a too-short scene as Lainey’s douchepoet Brooklynite boyfriend; the kind of deeply supportive and sensitive individual who loudly touts his feminist credentials until something happens to provoke his latent misogyny. (“You’re not a sex addict,” he sobs to Lainey after she reveals she’s cheated on him. “You’re just a whore.”)

Jason Mantzoukas and Andrea Savage play Jake’s best friend and his wife, who’re charmed rather than irked when Jake and Lainey show up to their child’s birthday party rolling on molly and steal scenes to the extent that they’re given the closing credits to themselves. Scott, disguised by clear-rimmed glasses, a well-manicured mustache, and an air of total charmlessness, makes the case that he’s the most versatile comic actor of his generation. And Natasha Lyonne plays Kara, a friend so lazily written she leaves a message on Lainey’s voicemail wishing her a “happy Christmas, or Hanukkah, or whatever you’re into” because she doesn’t know what her BFF’s religion is.

There’s very little standing between these two protagonists other than their own worst tendencies.

Still, Brie and Sudeikis struggle occasionally with their dialogue, which gets weighed down heavily by Headland’s roots writing for theater (her breakout play, Bachelorette, about a group of toxic women whose manifold addictions are provoked when the girl they used to bully gets married, was adapted into a 2012 movie starring Kirsten Dunst and Rebel Wilson). “I do believe there are exactly three points we should discuss,” Jake says while chasing his girlfriend down the street, sounding more like he’s participating in a Republican primary debate than having an actual conversation with another human person. “Sometimes I dress up in lingerie just to feel something,” Lainey adds, apropos of nothing. And the pace is ponderous, with Jake getting caught up in a side relationship with his boss (Amanda Peet, almost impossibly charming) and Lainey dating a handsome but basic lawyer (Marc Blucas) who mostly serves as scenery.

Despite its persistent efforts to defy propriety (a Gatorade bottle acting as a makeshift vagina, Lainey doing an MDMA-fuelled slow-mo striptease in front of six-year-olds), Sleeping With Other People lives and dies by rom-com tropes. There are meet-cutes, screaming fights in the rain, drawn-out dinners in crappy restaurants that act as verbal foreplay, nights when Jake and Lainey share beds and gaze at each other without going any further, and walks in the park on idyllic New York days. It is, Headland has said, “When Harry Met Sally for assholes.” The virtue of subversive rom-coms is that they’re as messy and difficult and maddening as real-life relationships are; the peril is that watching people who are resolutely stuck in their teenage mindset try to figure out growing up is harder to make charming than it seems. And how rebellious can something be, after all, when it’s been the standard for more than a decade?

The Allure of an Ad-Free Internet

Well, that happened fast. After 36 hours as the No. 1 paid app in the App store, the programmer Marco Arment is pulling his ad-blocker, Peace, from the market.

“Even though I’m ‘winning,’ I’ve enjoyed none of it,” Arment wrote in a blog post on Friday. “That’s why I’m withdrawing from the market. It’s simply not worth it.”

Ad blockers are controversial for good reason. To the person scrolling or clicking through a website, online advertising can feel like trip wire designed to trick you into clicking. Depending on the strength of one’s wifi connection and the reserve of one’s patience, navigating this ad-speckled landscape can be tolerable or aggravating. On mobile devices, where mere scrolling can trigger the unwanted click of an ad, the experience can be rage-inducing. So it’s understandable that ad-blocking apps seem to be gaining popularity now that iOS9, Apple’s latest operating system, enables such software.

To people who rely on ad dollars to run their businesses—most media companies and some major leaders in tech—ad blockers represent a serious threat. And it is a threat most publishers seem unprepared, or at least unwilling, to confront. We contacted 28 major media companies to ask about how ad blockers affected revenue and none would provide specifics, nor would they characterize what percentage of visitors to their sites used the software.

Those who advocate for ad blockers say they’re a way for users to force the media companies they like to adapt. Users want better experiences, the argument goes, and ad blockers provide them. Choking off a business’s main revenue stream, others argue, is a peculiar way of showing a company you value that you want it to improve.

If you hate advertising, don't read/view ad-supported media. Stop offloading your responsibility and follow through on your beliefs.

— Jason Kottke (@jkottke) September 17, 2015

Either way, ad blockers represent a microcosm of the much larger changes happening online—shifts that will reverberate through the media and technology industries in ways that are fully underway but still difficult to parse. And though major media organizations like The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN, and The New York Times declined to provide information about how ad blockers are affecting their revenue, the threat they pose to these businesses is clear.

Other organizations have been more forthright. Readers are already blocking ads on a quarter of pageviews at The Awl's suite of websites. That’s according to Casey Johnston, who quoted the site's publisher as having told her that up to 85 percent of The Awl's revenue is blockable as a result. If you want to get really deep into the ad-blocking frenzy this week, Johnston’s piece is a must-read, along with articles by Nilay Patel, and Annalee Newitz, in The Verge and Gizmodo, respectively.

The rise of ad blockers isn’t just a clash of sensibilities, though. The major leaders in tech are all trying to leverage their advantages at the expense of their competitors. “So it's Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook, all with their own revenue platforms,” Nilay Patel wrote, in his article for The Verge. “Google has the web, Facebook has its app, and Apple has the iPhone.” It’s also no mistake, as Newitz pointed out, that Apple starting allowing ad blockers on the same operating system that features a news app that can’t be deleted from people’s homescreens.

“The content is not purely advertising and not purely organic. It will merge into this mysterious combination.”

But Facebook has a layer of protection that many other media organizations don’t. On phones, its ads mostly display in apps—and Apple’s new ad-blocking capabilities only affect the phone’s browser. "In our case specifically, ad blockers haven’t had as much impact—in part because the bulk of ads shown on/by Facebook are delivered on Facebook and in other apps that integrate with us," Adam Isserlis, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement he provided. Facebook’s latest earnings report shows mobile ad revenue represented approximately 76 percent of overall advertising revenue for the company in the second quarter of this year, up from 62 percent in the same period the year before.

Which isn’t to say Facebook isn’t concerned about ad-blocking technology. "We generate substantially all of our revenue from advertising," the company wrote in an SEC filing in April. "The loss of marketers, or reduction in spending by marketers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business… [including] the impact of new technologies that could block or obscure the display of our ads.”

Still, given the dominance of Facebook’s app, the likely result of ad-blocking on the mobile web is a further consolidation of the company’s power. If Google struggles to deliver ads, that money will flow to platforms whose ads can’t be blocked—like Facebook.

Media companies are, in effect, watching two business models crumble at once: their traditional business, and whatever business they were able to cobble together on the desktop. Many publishers are still struggling to meet revenue goals in the shift from print to desktop, to say nothing of the shift from desktop to mobile. The latest earnings report from The New York Times shows revenue from digital advertising made up about one-third of overall advertising revenue; $48.3 million out of $148.6 million total. The “digital first” movement that emerged among print media companies in response to the Internet has been replaced with a “mobile first” attitude. But that maxim still falls apart on the business side. For many legacy companies, print advertising revenue still dwarfs revenue from desktop and mobile ads. Throw ad blockers into the mix, and the picture is further complicated.

To Andrew Moore, a former vice president at Google and now the dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, the rise of apps over the mobile web makes the question of ad-blocking almost moot.

“I actually do not think this is going to be an important issue for much longer,” he said. “It is moving so much from the browser to devices that the really big disruptor—and the thing people are freaking out about on business models for devices— [is] you cannot have the same ad-supported revenue models as you did when you had a browser,” he said.

In other words, for many companies, apps were already destroying the online advertising revenue stream. The question that emerges for Moore, he said, is what comes next. The businesses that end up surviving won’t give up advertising but may stop serving up ads that can be obviously blocked, he said. This will come in the form of sponsored articles designed to look like editorial, and search results paid for by companies who want to rank first on Google—only the lines will, Moore believes, become increasingly blurry.

“Users will be incredibly offended if they ask a question like, ‘Where’s the best Caribbean restaurant in Pittsburgh?’ and the question-and-answer system answers in favor of the restaurant that's paying… But that's what you're going to see,” Moore said. “There will still be a lot of controversy in this area but it will be about how the content is not purely advertising and not purely organic. It will merge into this mysterious combination.”

In the short term, ad blockers will make web pages cleaner, faster, and more mobile-friendly. “I still believe that ad blockers are necessary today,” Arment wrote. Maybe so. But they won’t be a lasting buffer against advertising. Depending on what they target, ad blockers encourage a more pervasive form of advertising—a kind that’s harder to avoid, harder to identify, and impossible to shut out.

The Slow Shredding of the Cuban Embargo

On Friday, the United States announced it would

Is It Unfair to Ask About Hillary Clinton's Accomplishments?

Of Carly Fiorina’s many zingers Wednesday night, the one that offers the best preview of the general election was this: “If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them to name an accomplishment of Hillary Clinton.”

Politico Magazine put that question to the test, and found a slew of Democrats with ready responses. But Fiorina’s quip is like many great political slams—although not factually airtight, it points to a broader truth. The Clinton campaign hasn’t solved the problem of finding a way to communicate just what it is that Clinton has accomplished—particularly during her most recent role as secretary of state, but also in the earlier stages of her career.

The folks Politico canvassed had no shortage of answers, but some are rather thin. Bill Burton, a former Obama aide, cited her “women’s rights are human rights speech,” given 20 years ago; “her role in killing Osama bin Laden” (a nebulous answer, though it’s true she counseled in favor of the raid); and an even vaguer “management of the State Department.”

The multiplicity of answers may reveal the trouble: No one or two accomplishments rise to the top. (The most commonly cited answer is marshaling sanctions against Iran, an essential prerequisite for the nuclear deal that followed, and for which John Kerry has claimed most credit.) Clinton herself has struggled with the question. Last year, when asked what her proudest accomplishment as secretary was, she came up tongue-tied: “I really see my role as secretary, and, in fact, leadership in general in a democracy, as a relay race. I mean, you run the best race you can run, you hand off the baton.”

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Fiorina has become the Republican Party’s chosen messenger on these issues in part because it seems less politically risky to have a woman attacking Clinton than a man. Her attack does force a reckoning with Fiorina’s own record, which includes no public offices, just a widely panned tenure as CEO of HP.

Jamelle Bouie argues that this question is beside the point. “Few of the people who get to presidential politics do so on the strength of a signature accomplishment,” he writes on Twitter. “What gets them there is ambition, political talent, a constituency, and the ability to capitalize on & respond to the wants of party actors. I'll put it this way: What was Abraham Lincoln's greatest accomplishment before becoming president? FDR's?”

Accomplishments before reaching the White House may have little connection with a president’s success—hi, President Truman!—but as a matter of politics, this line of questioning can’t be so easily dismissed. Lincoln and FDR each had the advantage of running for office against the status quo at a time of national crisis. (And they did have accomplishments.) The U.S., despite the many citizens who say the nation is on the wrong track, isn’t facing a new Civil War or Great Depression at the moment.

And Clinton’s entire campaign is built on the premise that experience and accomplishments matter. Unlike charismatic candidates who have campaigned on promises of change—Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan—Clinton mostly stresses  her long track record and her steady competence. (Not to mention that she used Obama’s short record in the Senate against him in 2008.) That makes articulating her accomplishments all the more pressing, and her struggles to do so all the more glaring.

Another complaint is that the question is out of line, as Elias Isquith suggests. This argument can’t go very far—how does a campaign expect to run on its record without talking about its record?—but there’s an intriguing gender component to the question. As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum reported this summer, Senator Amy Klobuchar argues that female candidates are more likely to run on emphasizing their own record and specific goals they want to accomplish. One reason for this may be that women, facing a more challenging path through the political process thanks to gender bias, feel that their best bet is to use specifics, which male candidates can sometimes get away with omitting. Many other women simply self-select out of electoral politics.

Clinton’s own track record in some ways conforms to this template, but with a twist. Some ambitious legislators aim to pass plenty of impressive-sounding but ultimately low-impact bills, thus giving them a nice record to brag about. Clinton has tended to privilege process over discrete items. Her colleagues in the Senate—many of whom were initially skeptical, viewing her as a celebrity politician on the make—tended to come away impressed with her commitment to low-profile but important issues and to keeping her head down and working with colleagues. At the State Department, she focused on improving management and coordination, which was by many accounts badly needed.

But even as competent management may be an essential skill for a successful president, it’s hard to convey to voters, which is likely why she seized on the mileage she traveled as secretary: It’s a concrete figure. (One reason the controversy over her emails and the general disarray of her campaign are so potent is not just that they place her on the defensive, but they undermine her efforts to to make an affirmative case for her managerial competence.)

A common line among both Clinton’s supporters and some of the more coolheaded political analysts has been that Clinton may be facing some challenges, but it’s still very early in the campaign cycle. Yet it’s getting later, and 18 months after it was first raised, she still hasn’t found a good answer to this question. Sooner or later, Clinton will have to either come up with a convincing way to explain why her track record qualifies her for the presidency—or else articulate some other rationale.

An Opening on Syria

Updated on September 18 at 12:54 p.m. ET

The United States is ready to start talking to Russia about Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday during his trip to London that the Obama administration wants to engage in military-to-military talks with Moscow about its recent military buildup inside Syria. Russia had offered to begin the conversation, according to the Associated Press.

“The president believes that a military-to-military conversation is an important next step, and I think, hopefully, it will take place very shortly,” Kerry said.

Shortly after those comments, the Pentagon said Defense Secretary Ash Carter had a “constructive conversation” with Sergei Shoygu, the Russian defense minister, on the situation in Syria. Here’s more:

The secretary and the minister talked about areas where the United States and Russia's perspectives overlap and areas of divergence. They agreed to further discuss mechanisms for deconfliction in Syria and the counter-Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) campaign. The secretary emphasized the importance of pursuing such consultations in parallel with diplomatic talks that would ensure a political transition in Syria. He noted that defeating ISIL and ensuring a political transition are objectives that need to be pursued at the same time. Both the secretary and the minister agreed to continue their dialogue.     

Earlier this month, Kerry called his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to inquire about U.S. intelligence reports that suggested Moscow was sending troops to Syria. A week later, Israel’s defense chief said several Russian forces had arrived there for the purpose of fighting Islamic State militants. The movements put U.S. officials on edge. Russia is a close ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has supplied his government with weapons throughout the course of the country’s five-year-long civil war. Russia’s relationship with the U.S., meanwhile, has been frosty since last spring.

Kerry said the forthcoming talks will help “define some of the different options that are available to us as we consider next steps in Syria.” More, from The New York Times:

“Our focus remains on destroying ISIL and also on a political settlement with respect to Syria, which we believe cannot be achieved with a long-term presence of Assad,” Mr. Kerry said. “But we’re looking for ways in which to try to find a common ground. Clearly, if you’re going to have a political settlement, which we have always argued is the best and only way to resolve Syria, you need to have conversations with people, and you need to find a common ground.”

Russian officials have criticized the Obama administration for not working with Assad in the air campaign against the Islamic State inside Syria’s border. Russia and the U.S. both agree the terrorist group must be stopped, but they have not found common ground on how to do so. The countries also have not agreed on a solution to the Syrian civil war. The U.S. wants Assad gone as part of any political settlement in the country; Russia has only increased its support for the Syrian leader in recent years.

Lavrov will travel to New York later this month for the 70th U.N. General Assembly, where he will meet with Kerry. Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend, too, after skipping last year’s, and the White House is split on whether Obama should meet with him.

State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner said during a press briefing Friday afternoon that “we’re trying to seek out more information about what the Russians are doing and what their intentions are.”

Toner pushed back against a reporter’s question about whether the Obama administration, by accepting Russia’s offer to start talking, is easing up on its commitment to remove Assad from power.

“I don’t think we’ve resigned ourselves to anything,” he said, adding later: “We don’t want to see him getting any more support.”

Cosby: The Women Speak and the Power of Reality Television

He came after me like a wild animal … And I was coherent enough to fight, and scratch, and scream, and cry, and try to wrestle my way out of there. He had me pinned to the bed with his elbow over my chin, and was ferociously trying to remove his belt buckle … and I fought so hard that he eventually just threw me away off the bed.

He had sex with me. I was not a participant. It was not consensual.

And if there is any question about why women don’t report rape, it’s because it’s so damned humiliating, you don’t want to ever talk about it again.

The stories are familiar at this point. The drinks. The druggings. The assaults both violent and hazy. The sense of confusion, and fear, and betrayal. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Dr. Huxtable, Dr. Huxtable,’” one woman recalls. Statutes of limitations prevent most of Bill Cosby’s accusers from filing criminal charges or lawsuits against him; too much time has gone by. So what they have at this point, the new A&E special Cosby: The Women Speak suggested, is their stories. And the fact that there are, collectively, many of them to tell.

“He’s given us all a purpose; a sisterhood purpose,” Lise-Lotte Lublin says during the show. “We’re going to make a change in the world. We’ve already started.”

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Cosby: The Women Speak, which aired Thursday night, is something of a televised (and, production-wise, unrelated) follow-up to New York magazine’s recent “Bill Cosby’s Accusers Speak Out” cover story. “More than 50 women have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, drugging, or rape,” the show’s intro card, stark in black and white, reads. “Their allegations span five decades. He has never been charged with a crime with regard to any of these accusations. His attorneys have said Bill Cosby denies all the allegations.”

The show weaves Cosby’s story—his rise to fame, his role as a powerful celebrity and a cultural critic, his one-time status as “America’s dad”—with those of his alleged victims. But the interviews, the women’s stories, are the focus. Shot in sterile, white studios, and conducted by unseen producers, the interviews air in roughly chronological order, starting with the women who met Cosby in 1969, and ending with women who met Cosby in the early 2000s. There’s the model Beverly Johnson. There’s the comedy writer Joan Tarshis. There’s the former Playboy Bunny Victoria Valentino. And the pseudonymed former flight attendant “Elizabeth.” And Sarita Butterfield. And Charlotte Fox. And Barbara Bowman. And Beth Ferrier. And Chelan Lasha. And Eden Tirl. And Heidi Thomas. And Louisa Moritz.

Their stories and recollections range—the settings, the decades, the drinks given—but most of them involve offers of mentorship and career guidance, followed by assaults and threats and silence.

It was literally like being under anesthesia, and you’re trying to wake up, but you can’t.

And as he was leaving and zipping us his pants, he said, “Don’t forget. Don’t make me mad. I’m going to be your best friend.”

I never really felt any danger from him, at all. And so I took the pill. And I couldn't keep my head up. I started to feel nauseated.

The next morning I just slipped out of bed. Feeling lower than dirt.

I was so disappointed. It was like a family member had done something to me.

I hate that I met him. My life changed for the worse since I met him.

We get a brief note on Cosby’s perspective in all this—largely through a clip of his lawyer, Monique Pressley, appearing on Good Morning America and declaring that “the sheer volume or number of people who are saying a particular thing does not make it true”—but the show is unequivocal about Cosby’s guilt. The many instances of the word “alleged” in the show’s narration read like lawyer-inserted afterthoughts.

Which is a bit ironic, because the law itself is actually a co-star in the show. The special concludes with a brief discussion of the statutes of limitations that prevent the women from taking legal action against Cosby. Some of the women are speaking out, they say, because they want to change the laws that prevent those suits. (Lise-Lotte Lublin recently lobbied, successfully, for such a change in Nevada: The state now allows for the prosecutions of assaults alleged to have occurred as many as 20 years ago.) There is a distinct sense of advocacy here.

But: To what end? Given the familiarity of the stories—given the New York article that went viral this summer, given the fact that Cosby has been effectively tried and condemned in the court of public opinion—what does a special like this end up accomplishing? Does it exploit the women? Does it glibly turn their experiences into entertainment? Does it romanticize what might actually be achieved by “telling one’s story”?

These women know better than anyone the transactions involved in justice, when that justice is mandated by the media.

Yes, a little. All of those things, a little. For the most part, though, Cosby: The Women Speak seems aware of the pitfalls it’s navigating. It cannily frames itself not just as a short documentary, but as a kind of extra-earnest reality show. The interviews in it include shots, in their white-washed studio settings, of cameras and rigs and studio umbrellas. The special’s logo, spliced between ad breaks, is its title situated between analog film strips. There’s a tacit acknowledgement, with all this, that any show aired for public consumption on the Arts & Entertainment Network will have an element of exploitation.

That, ironically, is part of what gives the show its power. The women—many of whom work in Hollywood, many of whom were not believed until their stories became part of a broader, media-driven assumption about Cosby—know better than anyone the transactions involved in justice, when that justice is mandated by the media. They are willing to make those exchanges, their show makes clear, because the alternatives—silence, disbelief, injustice—are worse. The women’s stories may be familiar at this point. That is precisely why they need to be told, and retold, and told again. There’s a sense in all this that complacency was Cosby’s best, if alleged, accomplice.

And so: “We have the right to speak our voice,” Beverly Johnson says. “I don’t need people to validate my opinion and what happened. What I need to do is tell my story.”

Pawn Sacrifice and the Quest to Understand Bobby Fischer

The director Edward Zwick is, with all due respect, a master of the formulaic true story. Many of his best-known works—Glory, The Last Samurai, and Love and Other Drugs—are biopics of one kind or another, telling inspirational and dramatic tales of history crammed into neat three-act plot structures. With his latest film, Pawn Sacrifice, Zwick encounters his greatest challenge yet: trying to fit the life of the publicly paranoid, narcissistic chess genius Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) into the most straightforward narrative possible. Like all of Zwick’s works, it’s perfectly watchable fare, but it’s often infuriating for its refusal to dig deeper into its incredibly compelling subject.

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Which Bobby Fischer Should We Remember?

Pawn Sacrifice hits all of the grace notes of the biopic genre. Viewers see Fischer as a child, raised by a socialist, Jewish single mother (Robin Weigert) whose views he’d later rebel against. He takes to chess at a young age and blasts to stardom, becoming the U.S. champion in his teens and by his mid-20s turning his eye toward the World Championship, held by the enigmatic Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber). The famed Fischer-Spassky match is the narrative crux of the film—it’s both Fischer’s greatest triumph and the beginning of his public meltdowns, which ruined his career and eventually saw him exiled from the United States. Zwick doesn’t want to shy away from this part of Fischer’s life, but he also has no idea how to engage with it meaningfully, which hobbles the film’s ambitions.

Maguire, who is 40, still has the baby face to play Fischer, and he does just fine with the role. It’s perhaps a backhanded compliment to say the A-list actor excels at playing jerks, but that’s Maguire’s forte these days—the unhinged, the prickly, the malcontented. Though he’s rarely acted since leaving the Spider-Man franchise, he did especially strong work in 2009’s Brothers as an unstable military veteran and in 2013’s The Great Gatsby as a particularly neurotic Nick Carraway. His Fischer is an irascible pain, in a weirdly charming sort of way. He tells everyone what he thinks of them to their face, brazenly raves about his own genius, and barks non sequiturs in a Brooklyn accent at his closest friends, a patriotic lawyer named Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his fellow chess player William Lombardy (Peter Sarsgaard), as they try and coax him toward the 1972 World Chess Championship.

It may be impossible to know just why Fischer became so troubled, but Pawn Sacrifice doesn’t offer any theories.

It’s pretty quickly obvious that Fischer isn’t an average genius with a few foibles. He’s a dangerously paranoid man who spouts anti-Semitic views at random and is convinced both the FBI and KGB are spying on him. Zwick tries to some extent to get at the maddening conflict between Fischer’s chess genius and his mental illness, but Pawn Sacrifice always keeps its subject at arm’s length. Most of the plot follows Lombardy and Marshall trying to lure Fischer out of hotel rooms and guest houses so that he can play Spassky, treating him like a dangerous alley cat who could go wild at any moment, but never finding substance beneath that frustration. It may be impossible to know just why Fischer became so troubled, but Pawn Sacrifice doesn’t try to offer any theories beyond some garden-variety mother issues.

It doesn’t help either that chess is a tough sport to dramatize, although there have been films that capture the electricity of watching such a battle of wills unfold, like Steven Zaillian’s 1993 great Searching for Bobby Fischer (which actually had nothing to do with Fischer himself, but rather the fruitless hunt for his successor). Fischer’s matches with Spassky were some of the most significant in the history of chess, but Zwick chooses to dwell instead on his exasperating tics (loudly objecting to audience noise and creaking chairs). Schreiber gives Spassky burly, threatening physicality, but doesn’t get much else to do except growl some lines in Russian.

Really, it doesn’t feel like Pawn Sacrifice hits its stride until it cuts to black at the end and displays some title cards explaining what happened to Fischer after the notorious match. Zwick loves a meaty story, but he wants to tell it as simply as possible. When he’s dealing with heroes like Glory’s 54th Massachusetts Infantry, or Defiance’s Nazi-fighting Bielski partisans, that’s easier to pull off. But with a protagonist as difficult and fascinating as Bobby Fischer, it’s too short an order.

Lady Gaga's Latest Surprise: A Rape PSA

After a period in which a costumed future-pop diva went totally normcore—collaborating with Tony Bennett, covering Julie Andrews, getting engaged—the sudden release of a Lady Gaga single is, inevitably, an object of international curiosity. Is she back back? What’s her sound this time? Did she spot Ellie Goulding trying to take her lane in the music world and say nuh-uh?

With those questions in mind … click “play” on Gaga’s new video and feel a wave of shame for caring about the pop-star rat race.

“Til It Happens to You” is a rock ballad about the aftermath of trauma, with Gaga embodying someone who’s told “it gets better … you’ll be fine” and replies fiercely—“How the hell could you know?” Written with Diane Warren (who had a successful string of similarly epic slow-dances in the ‘80s and ‘90s, including Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” and Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”), the song expresses that some things have to be experienced to be understood. It also expresses that Gaga’s a really great singer. Even with such somber subject matter, her booming delivery and dramatic phrasing will probably remind people of the time when “Bad Romance” ruled the radio.

The video takes lyrics that could be applied to all kinds of life challenges and associates them with a very specific one: campus sexual assault. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Thirteen), it is literal and stark, showing a handful of women being raped, grieving, and then finding solace in friendship. It’s shot in black and white; and the women express their emotions by writing on themselves in marker. At the end, text states that “One in five women will be sexually assaulted this year unless something changes” and directs those in need to call 1-800-656-HOPE. At the beginning, there’s a trigger warning.

Though not available online till now, the song was made for The Hunting Ground, a documentary about campus sexual violence that was released last February (proceeds from sales will go to assault survivors). Gaga herself has a connection to the cause, having spoken about being raped by a record producer when she was 19. And her previous music has had a political bent, advocating for LGBT acceptance and against bullying. Still, it’s surprising to see her release what amounts to a PSA—though a catchy, well-produced, and moving one—so long after the movie it’s attached to has come out, when the only thing she’s been in headlines for lately has been American Horror Story. Then again, Gaga’s always been good at surprises, and unfortunately, no time is better than any other when it comes to discussing the issues she’s singing about.

In Defense of Hufflepuff

“Nobody wants to be Hufflepuff.” It’s a fairly common sentiment, but when Mindy Kaling tweeted it on Wednesday, she brought to mind Draco Malfoy’s first appearance in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, when he chats with the book’s hero about the four houses of Hogwarts. “I know I’ll be in Slytherin, all our family have been—imagine being in Hufflepuff, I think I’d leave, wouldn’t you?” As even the normally benevolent Hagrid puts it, “Everyone says Hufflepuff are a lot o’ duffers.”

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The Harry Potter Personality Test

To her credit, the Harry Potter series author J.K. Rowling makes plenty of subtle efforts to elevate the house through the admirable actions of its less-heralded students. Hufflepuffs are supposedly defined by strong loyalty, disinterest in public glory, and a hardworking spirit. Perhaps that’s why they don’t stand out: Hufflepuffs have an ethos of self-improvement, while Gryffindors are brave, Ravenclaws preternaturally smart, and Slytherins deeply ambitious. When translating the four houses into vague personality quadrants for us non-magical Muggles (as many websites do), Hufflepuff comes up especially short. Not extroverted, or cunning, or inherently intelligent? Then you must belong to the other house, which, as Kaling joked, nobody wants. But that doesn’t make much sense considering how much she herself values hard work.

Kaling is certainly not the only person still rolling her eyes at Hufflepuff nearly a decade after the series ended. Covering Wednesday’s Republican debate, The New Republic sorted each candidate into a Hogwarts house, and everyone sorted into Hufflepuff apparently resented it. There was Marco Rubio (“a Hufflepuff who keeps trying to hang out with the kids from Gryffindor, even though they pick on him”), Scott Walker (the same, but for Slytherin), and Ben Carson (who “would beg the sorting hat to be put in Slytherin before being told to take a seat ... at the Hufflepuff table”).

Within the context of the books, the houses aren’t just divided by personality—if so, a place like Slytherin would make no sense. A club full of Machiavellians would just be constantly plotting to stab each other in the back, but Slytherin’s members include pliable bullies like Draco Malfoy’s lackeys Crabbe and Goyle, who seem to have no ambition and carry out whatever awful tasks they’re ordered to. As Rowling built up the expansive universe of her books, she revealed that Slytherin’s founder Salazar was a bigoted old wizard who wanted to only admit “pure-blood” families to his school, and resigned in fury when he was overruled. The series is very conscious of the rigid British class system, and Slytherin is populated with the snobbiest rich kids, disinterested in mixing with anyone outside of their tight circles.

One imagines a large portion of “scholarship kids” going to Hufflepuff to find their place in the world free of prejudice.

Hufflepuff, on the other hand, apparently accepted all kinds of students from the start, placing less emphasis on specific attributes or social backgrounds. One imagines a large portion of “scholarship kids” (represented best within the books as Muggle-born witches and wizards) going to Hufflepuff to find their place in the world free of prejudice, an egalitarian vision that even the brashly heroic Gryffindor seems to lack. The books’ most prominent Hufflepuff is Cedric Diggory, a paragon of modesty who’s named as the school’s representative champion in the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where he competes with Harry and others in a wizarding tournament. He (spoilers) eventually loses his life because he offers to share the championship with Harry, modest as ever, and thus inadvertently gets drawn into a plot to resurrect the evil Voldemort. (Other notable Hufflepuffs include Nymphadora Tonks, Newt Scamander, and the Herbology professor Pomona Sprout.)

The Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore’s eulogy for Diggory is one of Rowling’s better pieces of writing in the entire series. “Cedric Diggory was, as you all know, exceptionally hard working, infinitely fair-minded, and most importantly a fierce, fierce friend,” he says, lionizing every quality Hufflepuff House members could brag about, but of course, never would. In the series’s climactic battle with Voldemort, Hufflepuff is the house with the most students (outside of Harry’s own) taking part, though Rowling takes pains to note that they did so not for personal glory, but for the greater good.

Who would be some real-life Hufflepuffs? According to the actor Tom Felton (who played Malfoy in all eight Harry Potter films), Kanye West is a shoo-in, surely in reference to his tireless work ethic. The author John Green said he was sorted into Hufflepuff on Rowling’s Pottermore website; Rowling herself has said she’d love to be one. Of course, the idea of sorting any celebrity into Hufflepuff might be foolish, since shunning excessive attention is part of the point. In that sense, Kaling is half-right: Nobody in her line of work should want to end up in the house that calls the badger its mascot.

But for everyone else, as Rowling’s eldest daughter Jessica put it, “I think we should all want to be Hufflepuffs.” And for the recently converted, the timing seems about right. Rowling recently declared on Twitter:

This is starting to feel like the dawn of the Age of Hufflepuff... #FantasticBeasts https://t.co/j4kj2nYurr

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 9, 2015