Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 347

Inside the 2015 Man Booker Shortlist

“Love those U.S. books on #ManBooker2015 longlist, but also kinda feels like going to London and shopping at Bloomingdales,” Ron Charles, the editor of The Washington Post’s Book World, tweeted in July as the second year of the expanded version of the prestigious British literary prize competition got under way. For 45 years, eligibility was restricted to fiction written in English by authors from the U.K. and the Commonwealth, along with the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe. Since 2014, any novel written in English and published in England can be nominated, which has stirred fears of an American takeover.

Today’s announcement of the 2015 shortlist has quelled that anxiety for the second year in a row. Among the six novels chosen from the longlist of 13 announced on July 29, only two are by Americans, the same number as last year. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler join a group that hasn’t busted out of the old Commonwealth boundaries, but has stretched them. Marlon James (who teaches at Macalester College in Minnesota) is the first Jamaican writer ever to make it onto the list, with A Brief History of Seven Killings, and The Fishermen, by Chigozie Obioma, a Nigerian (who teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln), is a first novel. Two novels by British writers round out the finalists, Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, and Sunjeev Sahota’s second novel, The Year of the Runaways.

Perhaps we can call it a Harrods experience, after the grand London store that has boasted a global, flexible motto for more than a century, Omnia Omnibus Ubique—All Things for All People, Everywhere. After all, at Harrods, upscale cachet meets up-to-date flair and lots of flavors. (That Food Hall!) I’m very sorry not to see Marilynne Robinson’s Lila make the shortlist, but if the impulse behind leaving her out is what I imagine, the reason is institutional not personal. These days, literary awards can seem to blur into one another, as the same contenders crop up on different lists, and those lists play out in similar ways: In 2013, America’s National Book Awards copied the Man Booker longlist and shortlist suspense-building strategy. Robinson has by now made the rounds with Lila. It was shortlisted for the NBA in 2014, and won the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize in 2014. The Man Booker judges were ready to turn the page.

Reviving a feature we tried out two years ago, we’ll bring you a weekly commentary on the finalists the judges will be rereading and debating between now and October 13, when one of the lucky six writers will win £50,000 and yet more renown. Six of my colleagues will offer thoughts on their reading, perhaps sharing any literary gossip they pick up and hazarding some predictions, too. Stephanie Hayes begins today with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.

Follow the posts, perhaps even read along, and you too can be (or at least sound) highly informed when the winner is announced at last.

Read the first installment, on Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, here.

The Heartening Success of The Carmichael Show

It’s usually easy to tell when a network doesn’t have much faith in one of its new shows. The sitcom The Carmichael Show premiered on NBC in the summer, after the network television season had formally concluded. Only six episodes were aired, rather than the usual 22 a new show would hope for. But the show—a resolutely old-school multi-camera sitcom that smartly addressed current events without forgetting to be funny—overcame those obstacles to get a second season from NBC after its brief run was hailed by critics and set a summer ratings record.

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The Carmichael Show is centered around the comedian Jerrod Carmichael, who plays himself, his liberal-minded girlfriend Maxine (Amber Stevens West) and his more conservative family, including his father, Joe (David Alan Grier), and his god-fearing mother, Cynthia (Loretta Devine). Each episode tackles a sensitive topical issue head-on, with the blunt theatricality of a much older sitcom like All in the Family or Good Times, and in such politically polarized times, the throwback style is extremely refreshing. Episodes titled “Protest,” “Gender,” “Prayer,” and “Guns” sound like they’d be didactic, but they actually allow for varying voices and opinions to be heard, while still being funny sitcom entries.

Unexpectedly, the show became the most-watched summer comedy on network TV in eight years, and actually pulled in more viewers in the second episode than the first. The only other show that accomplished that jump this year was Fox’s Empire, which also features a majority African American cast. In other words, 2015’s TV ratings continue to demonstrate that there’s a major appetite for more diverse TV programming, whether on networks or premium cable.

The Carmichael Show’s success was mostly thanks to how it offered a fresh perspective on age-old issues. Flavorwire’s Pilot Viruet has written about how the show brilliantly deployed “gallows humor” to deal with current events, like police shootings of unarmed African Americans and the question of how to respond in protest. Other stories the sitcom tackled during its short run featured a teenage basketball player who confides to Jerrod that he’s transgender, and Jerrod’s real fear that his father’s poor diet of fried foods is going to lead him to an early grave.

It’s hard to know whether NBC predicted The Carmichael Show would be a success. Running a sitcom in the summer is traditionally seen as a death sentence, referred to as “burning off,” because there’s very little chance for it to find an audience in August’s ratings doldrums. But the rom-com Undateable achieved a similar feat in 2014 for the same network, and has now moved from a summer schedule to primetime. Based on the creative promise shown in its first six episodes, The Carmichael Show should be on the same trajectory.

What Can the New Ferguson Report Achieve?

In the months since Michael Brown was shot to death on a street in Ferguson, the state of the city and the St. Louis region have been painstakingly studied. That has included two detailed Justice Department reports and an incredible amount of journalistic coverage. Now comes yet another report: the findings of the “Ferguson Commission” created by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon.

The report, “Forward Through Ferguson,” is a sprawling project, laid out in a slickly designed website and a 189-page document. It offers detailed recommendations for reforming the police, the courts, and the education system with an eye toward racial justice.

But while the report looks like a policy recommendation, the authors shy away from that: “Our primary audience for this report is the people of the St. Louis region,” they write. “With that in mind, we have written this report to speak to an audience of average citizens— not lawyers, legislators, academics, politicians, or policy wonks.” In addition, they caution that “while this report includes many specific policy calls to action, it is not an implementation plan.”

They’re on to something. The report is so vast as to raise questions about its utility or even its point. Many of the proposals in the report fit with what other people have recommended, including the portions on police reform. Others appeal to a fairly basic, if left-leaning, common sense: If schools are better, fewer children will end up in the justice system; proving affordable health care to impoverished communities will improve their well-being. Creating a public-transit system will enable the poor to work more easily.

The police section is particular detailed, calling for, among other things, less use of force; more rigorous and consistent training; culture-responsiveness training; and civilian review boards.

But it’s a long way from saying these things to make them happen. Who will pay for a transit system? Who will retrain police departments across the state? Each section helpfully includes a list of accountable bodies for each item, but that just reinforces the challenge: The list includes everything from discrete individuals (the governor) to abstract groups (the philanthropic community), and dozens of governmental agencies across all three branches. Politically, state-wide overhauls will be a tough sell with Missouri’s Republican-controlled legislature. (Nixon is a Democrat.)

The New York Times talked to some members of the community, who expressed reservations.

“What this group has done over the last year has just put into written form what so many people have already voiced for years about change that needs to happen in the St. Louis region, but identifying a problem and fixing it are different,” Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who has been active in protests, said on Sunday.

Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a Democratic state senator, said she feared that the commission’s findings would be announced with great fanfare, “but then we’re just going to hear crickets, crickets, crickets.”

She added: “The practicality of getting any of this done is close to null.”

Their pessimism is understandable. “Forward Through Ferguson” is an impressive collection of ideas and research, but whether a document that has such a sweeping scope but no clear path to implementation can fix what ails Ferguson is a question that remains unanswered.

Justin Bieber's Instagram: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

For anyone in need of a dose of surprise pathos, I direct you to the Instagram video of Justin Bieber attempting to shotgun a can of Corona. The setting is Las Vegas; a dance version of Zombie Nation’s  sports-arena classic “Kernkraft 400” booms overhead; girls in bikinis mill about. As a Bieber buddy—black baseball cap, sunglasses—downs his beer with ease, the 21-year-old pop star in a park-ranger hat cocks his head at an awkward angle and sloppily, slowly slurps. “I lost,” Bieber’s caption says, “but I didn’t go to college.”

I lost but I didn't go to college @sammy

A video posted by Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) on Sep 12, 2015 at 6:00pm PDT

It’s all too easy to see this scene as a symbol of Bieber in 2015, straining to prove himself as All Grown Up and not completely pulling it off. That he would eventually struggle in this way has been part of Bieber’s narrative all along. “Naturally, none of this can last," The Atlantic James Parker wrote in a 2011 appraisal of the young Canadian. “His collision with biology can be postponed no longer. Gravity, muscles, sag, paunch, depression, hair growing in the ears … All too soon, all too soon.”

The same prophecies have been made about all child entertainers, of course, from those that those who managed lifelong stardom to those who disappeared into obscurity. But there’s a unique poignance to Bieber’s efforts to transcend his status as a hero to children and a punchline to everyone else. Perhaps that’s because, unlike with the most recent and famous example of post-teen male success, Justin Timberlake, Bieber’s story is one of self creation—he came up through amateur YouTube singing, not through the Disney pipeline, and has what appears to be a deep and sincere connection with his fandom. Perhaps it’s that he’s been the symbol of Facebook-era teenagedom, and it’s not quite settled yet what his generation’s adulthood looks like. Perhaps it’s just those puppydog eyebrows. My best theory, though, is that Bieber’s story is compelling because it’s suspenseful—it’s very clear what Bieber wants, but it’s also clear that whether he gets it is not entirely up to him.

His musical output this year has so far consisted of electronic ballads as plaintive as the questions that give them their titles—“Where Are Ü Now” (released by Jack Ü, Diplo and Skrillex’s collaboration) and “What Do You Mean?” As pop, they’re fascinatingly restrained, discarding the chipper come-ons and pep-rally-ready choruses of Bieber’s past work and of rivals like One Direction. And unlike with Timberlake or Bieber’s contemporary Nick Jonas when they attempted to evolve, these tracks are not overt announcements of sexual maturity (though one of the videos is). Rather, they try to show off sonic curiosity and emotional complexity.

Bieber isn’t shy about his ambitions for these songs. At the VMAs last month, he performed them on a stark stage, dancing with try-hard verve and then breaking down crying when it was over. He later told Jimmy Fallon what the tears were about: “Last time I was at an awards show I was booed. I worked so hard at this album—I worked so hard at becoming the man I want to become … It was authentic and real … I was just wanting it so bad.”

Get More: 2015 VMA, Artists.MTV, Justin Bieber, 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, 2015 VMA, Artists.MTV, Music, Justin Bieber, Full Episodes

Now, “What Do You Mean?” has become his first No. 1 hit, and also one of the few songs in history to premiere at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. So: Mission accomplished? Not quite yet. At Slate, Chris Molanphy notes that the song’s placement on the charts is a “triumph of market-timing over hitmaking,” propelled—through downloads, video streams, and social-media support—by “the same rabid ‘Beliebers’ who’ve been screaming for him since 2009.” The true gatekeepers of mainstream musical success, radio programmers, have not embraced the song with as much enthusiasm. “People with jobs, degrees, and fully developed pituitary glands are the bread-and-butter of radio audience measurement and advertising, and even back to the heyday of Backstreet Boys and N Sync, radio has been cautious about overplaying boy bands and TRL fare, putting a glass ceiling over the chart success of many teenpop acts,” Molanphy writes. “That goes double for Bieber.”

What Bieber still faces, then, is a perception problem—the need to be seen as a grown-up. Who can’t relate, thinking back on or looking forward to their early 20s? Whether he can get what he wants that after six years of mop cuts and sophmoric scandals being seared into the public memory will be answered soon enough, when the initial burst of fan support for “What Do You Mean” dies down and wider audiences decide if they accept him. For now, his yearning is almost a performance in itself.

A Brief History of ‘Thank You For Being a Friend’

“Thank you for being a friend … (duh-duh-DUH-DUH) … traveled down the road and back again … (duh-duh-duh-duh-DUH) … your heart is true … you’re a pal and a confidante ...”

The Golden Girls YouTube

Gold, the son of the Oscar-winning composer Ernest Gold and the singer Marni Nixon—she provided the singing voice for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Natalie Wood in West Side Story—performed his song in a decidedly soft-rock kind of way. He sang it like like this:

NBC repurposed the song in a condensed form for the 1985 premiere of The Golden Girls, replacing Gold with an appropriately female voice: the jingle singer Cindy Fee—who was also the voice behind the Hoover vacuum cleaner (“Nobody does it like you”) and Pontiac cars (“Get on your Pontiac and ride”) and Wheaties (“Now go tell your momma … ​what the big boys eat”).

Fee performed “Thank You For Being a Friend,” famously—and, warning, ear-wormily—like this:

Once it became associated with the lanai-tastic leisurewear of The Golden Girls, “Thank You For Being a Friend” took on a familiar trajectory: It became loved, in the kind of ironic-nostalgic way that makes the love, in a pop-culture context, endure. It was played during World Series games, and at the end of Super Bowl XL, and in, in a modified form, a cheeky NFL ad. (The lyrics in that case were adjusted to “thank you for being a fan,” natch.) It got meme-ified. It got tattooed. It got a replay, courtesy of Lenny, on The Simpsons. It got a death-metal rendition on Saturday Night Live. It got sassily ska-ified.

Quite a lot for a song that started life as “just this little throwaway thing.”

Novak Djokovic, the Best Player in Men’s Tennis

So much of the hype at this year’s U.S. Open surrounded Roger Federer—from a sneak-attack move that flustered his opponents to his nearly impenetrable service game. Caught up in all the chatter, the tennis community seemed to ignore a simple truth: Novak Djokovic is the best men’s player in the world. By far.

Djokovic’s 6-4, 5-7, 6-4, 6-4 victory over Federer in the U.S. Open men’s championship on Sunday served as a pointed reminder that the ATP Tour is his party and every other player should feel fortunate just to be invited.

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As championship matches go, it was an odd affair. The game was delayed for three hours due to rain, and there was a noticeable breeze, despite reports that a semi-completed roof over Arthur Ashe Stadium offered near total relief for the once gusty court. Djokovic took a violent tumble early in the match. The normally pro-Federer New York crowd turned more aggressively partisan after the first set—the jeers aimed at Djokovic flew in the face of tennis decorum. And also making history was the chair umpire Eva Asderaki-Moore, who became the first woman to oversee a U.S. Open men’s final, and almost stole the show by correctly overruling a multitude of calls missed by the match’s line judges.

Amidst this mix of novelty and chaos, Djokovic’s supremacy as a tennis player slowly emerged. There was a brief moment in the third set when it seemed as if Federer had rediscovered enough of his shot-making prowess to overcome early match jitters and recapture the U.S. Open title, which he’s won five times. But Djokovic quickly powered through it with a few brilliant service games and enough breaks of serve to win the third set. From there the match turned into a slow and depressing seminar on why fundamentally sound defense so often thwarts high-octane offense. Federer emptied his bag of tactics: drop shots, SABR (Sneak Attack By Roger) returns, desperate volleys. But Djokovic, like the impenetrable brick wall he so often resembles on a tennis court, took Federer’s best balls and sent them back with enough velocity to make the Swiss maestro look slow at certain points and downright awkward at others.

You could say that the match boiled down to mental fortitude. That Djokovic played the bigger points with more confidence, which allowed him to save 19 of the 23 break points he faced on his own serve and convert six of the 13 break points he earned on Federer’s. At one point during the match, the ESPN commentator Patrick McEnroe spoke highly of Djokovic’s “steely reserve,” a weary sports cliché that somehow doubled as the only appropriate way to describe Djokovic’s on-court disposition.  

That phrase serves not only to explain why Djokovic was able to trump an in-form Federer in a major final for the second time in a few months, but also to reinforce a larger narrative that’s been slowly taking hold within the men’s game: Djokovic is staking a claim as one of, if not the most, consistent men’s tennis player ever to swing a racket. Consider that he’s not only won three grand slams this season—the second time he’s accomplished that feat—but also made the final in every major tournament (Masters 1000 series or higher) that he’s entered. His presence in the ultimate matches of major tennis events is nearly as inevitable as death and taxes.

Djokovic is staking a claim as one of, if not the most, consistent men’s tennis player ever to swing a racket.

It’s understandable why tennis analysts spent most of the U.S. Open openly wondering if—and maybe secretly hoping that—Federer would find a way to win his 18th grand slam championship. Federer’s style and general likability have long made him a fan favorite and media darling, and there’s always something fun about rooting for a cagey veteran vying for one last bit of glory. (Had Federer won the match, he would have become the oldest player to win a grand slam title in tennis’s Open Era.)

Djokovic has never held as much appeal. There’s something Ivan Drago-ish about his persona. His highly regimented workout and diet and his ruthless style of play can make him come across as “the perfect tennis machine,” as commentators have noted in the past. He lacks the transcendence of Federer, the infectious energy of Rafael Nadal, and the scrappy lovability of Murray. He’s complete, yet uninspiring. Though coached by Boris Becker, he’s eerily reminiscent of Ivan Lendl, the domineering Czech whom John McEnroe once referred to as “a robot” and the player who helped introduce the power-baseline game that Djokovic has taken to a whole new level. And like Djokovic, Lendl was rarely the crowd favorite.

Yet it seems likely that sooner rather than later fans at the U.S. Open and other major tennis championships will come to applaud Djokovic with the same fervor they continually shower upon Federer. They’ll do this if for no other reason than Djokovic is slowly earning the right to be loved by winning big tournaments with unfathomable consistency—and in sports consistent winning is still the only surefire way to accumulate mass adoration. His dominance will translate into appeal.

When Federer defeated Djokovic earlier this summer in the finals of the Western & Southern Open, he was asked in a post-match interview what his goal for the U.S. Open was. He said that he hoped to make the final. At the time, it seemed like an understandably modest answer from a player who hasn’t won a grand slam since 2012, but in hindsight Federer’s answer seems strikingly prescient. So long as Djokovic continues to play with the brilliance he’s displayed throughout the 2015 season, all opposing players can reasonably hope for is to make the finals at any grand slam Djokovic enters, because beating him in those finals is a nearly impossible task. Yes, there’s always a chance a player will explode and find a way to stun Djokovic, just as Stan Wawrinka did at this year’s French Open in an upset that ranks only a few Richter Scale levels below Roberta Vinci’s defeat of Serena Williams. But more likely than not they’ll succumb to Djokovic’s soul-crushing consistency, like Federer did on Sunday.

When the Fifth Golden Girl Was a Man Named Coco

The first thing you should know about the first episode of The Golden Girls, which premiered 30 years ago to widespread acclaim, was that one of the girls in question was actually, briefly, a guy. His name was Coco, and he was a cook, and he was gay, and he worked for Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose in their be-wickered Miami ranch house as a kind of friend-slash-manservant, and if you imagine Hank Azaria in The Birdcage, only slightly less flamboyant and slightly more amenable to the bathrobe-with-shoulder pads look, then you have a pretty good idea about Coco. The main thing Coco does in the Golden Girls’s pilot is to make his friend-bosses “enchiladas rancheros,” though at one point he also offers them tea and, when drama ensues, a lightly padded shoulder to lean on.

Coco—“the fancy man in the kitchen,” Sophia takes to calling him—was part of that first show, in some part, because The Golden Girls was, in its way, so revolutionary. Its whole point, from its conception, was to be slightly subversive—it was to be about women, according to Warren Littlefield, NBC’s then-vice president for series, after “society has written them off, has said they’re over the hill.” A sitcom that didn’t just star women, but that starred only women! And: older women! This was a fairly new and weird thing in 1985, a thing that NBC executives weren’t sure, as the old saying goes, “America was ready for.” They needed some kind of buffer, they thought, to defeminize the whole thing just a little bit, to make it more 1985-America-friendly. They needed a man. But not a man who would bring sexual tension into the house: That was a job for Stan Zbornak and the parade of mostly expendable suitors who would cycle in and then out of the girls’ pink living room. The temporary solution was, as it so often will be, a manservant named Coco.

Come the second episode of The Golden Girls, though, Coco had disappeared with no explanation. The women were so strong on their own, NBC decided, that a man would not be required to make them America-friendly after all. Contributing to that decision was the addition, to the three primary cast members, of Estelle Getty, who guest-starred in the Golden Girls pilot as Dorothy’s mother, and who ended up uttering several of the sassy lines that were originally intended for Coco. (Blanche explains, in one of that episode’s rare moments of non-deft exposition, that Sophia is as wise-cracking and foul-mouthed as she is because a small stroke had “destroyed the part of her brain that censors what she says”; this medical explanation would, in later episodes, be conveniently forgotten.)

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From then on, The Golden Girls—offering a template for Designing Women and Living Single and Girls and the now-countless other lady-driven shows that would follow—focused on four fully formed women, repeatedly acing the Bechdel-Wallace test. The Golden Girls would run for seven seasons, birthing spin-offs both long-running (Empty Nest) and not (The Golden Palace). It would help to launch the career of writers and producers that included Mitch Hurwitz, who would go on to create Arrested Development. It would give a young Quentin Tarantino the opportunity to extra as an Elvis impersonator. It would become beloved, commemorated in “Thank you for being a friend” tattoos and odes to Dorothy’s personal style and “which Golden Girl are you?” quizzes and “picture it: Sicily” jokes and speculative recipes for Rose’s “Gerneten-flüken cake.” Have you seen the Bea Arthur in Sleepwear with Shoulder Pads Tumblr? It’s awesome.

The most common thing that’s said about The Golden Girls’s legacy, though, is how progressive the series was—not just for its time, but for this one. The show, Tracey Ross put it, “stands out for being one of the last sitcoms where progressive values were part of the show’s DNA.” It made a point of representing (some of) the Americans who had traditionally been under- and un-represented in mainstream entertainment. A 2005 study, Mental Floss notes, determined that “more gays and lesbians watched The Golden Girls than the general population in any given week.”

The Golden Girls’s creator, Susan Harris, had previously created the progressive-for-their-time series Soap and Benson—she had also written the “Maude’s Abortion” episode of Maude—and she made sure that The Golden Girls featured storylines that involved the coming-out of gay characters, crime, abortion, sexual harassment, AIDS, otherness (late in the first season, Rose began dating a little person), and other hot-button issues, many of which remain hot-button today. (“Watch This: The Golden Girls Explain Same-Sex Marriage.”) Harris also made sure that the show dealt frankly with sex. The Golden Girls was an early Sex and the City, basically, its late-night OJs and pastel housecoats paving the way for cosmos and stilettos. (As Rose summed it up, Charlottely, during a seventh-season episode: “Dorothy, you’re the smart one, and Blanche, you’re the sexy one, and Sophia, you’re the old one, and I’m the nice one.”) Refinery29 once calculated all the men the women slept with over the seven seasons of the show, concluding that, finally, Rose slept with 30, Dorothy with 43, Blanche with 165, and Sophia with 25.

Indeed. As Harris told The New York Times just after The Golden Girls’s premiere, “There is life after 50. People can be attractive, energetic, have romances. When do you see people of this age in bed together? Eventually on this show, you will.’’ And: We did!

“We were all so lonely, and then by a miracle we found each other.”

But: only eventually. The sex stuff doesn’t show up too much in the pilot. The episode instead finds Blanche—already comically vain, but not yet fully Samantha Jonesed—being proposed to by, and considering marriage to, a gentleman named Harry. Blanche has only known him for a week, and Rose is suspicious of his motives. Rose also has a vested interest, the episode makes clear, in Blanche staying single: Blanche isn’t just Rose’s friend, but her landlord. (“We can’t afford to buy a house!” Rose wails to Dorothy. “What do we have for collateral—a gay cook?”) Things are resolved in a way that would become a tried-and-true formula for the show: The man turns out to be caddish, the engagement ends up broken, things end with a reaffirmation of sisterhood and friendship and some choice bits of sarcasm from Sophia.

But the real focus of the episode is aging, as seen most superficially through discussions of wrinkles and youth-envy and the gradual suddenness of “goldenness.” (Dorothy tells Rose about conversation she had with fellow teachers at the school she works at—women in their 20s—and how at home she felt with them. Then: “I got in the car, and caught a glimpse of myself,” she says, “and I almost had a heart attack. This old woman was in the mirror. I didn’t even recognize her.”) They make jokes about plastic surgery (“Lord, I’d love to get a facelift by 8 o’clock,” Blanche tells the girls before a date with Harry.) There’s also a lengthy-to-the-point-of-awkwardness conversation about nighttime urination. (“Every morning like clockwork at 7 a.m., I pee,” Sophia confides to her new roommates, and to her new audience. She pauses. “Unfortunately, I don’t wake up ‘til 8.”)

Age, though, isn’t presented primarily as a physical phenomenon. It’s presented as a social one. “We were all so lonely, and then by a miracle we found each other,” Rose says, lamenting the effect that Blanche’s marriage will have on all of their lives. Dorothy points out that the “miracle” Rose is referring to consisted of the two of them answering the “roommates wanted” ad Blanche had posted in a grocery story. To which Rose responds:

To me it was a miracle. Because we’re happy. It’s not fair, you know: I mean, we get married, we have kids, the kids leave, and our husbands die. Is that some kind of a test? You don’t work that hard—you don’t go through everything we go through—to be left alone.

We are alone, Dorothy. We really are. Our families are gone, and we’re alone. And there are too many years left, and I don’t know what to do.

This is not the typical stuff of “fluffy ‘80s sitcom.” This is cultural criticism, and literature, and a plaintive request for empathy. Right off the bat, The Golden Girls is doing what Susan Harris promised it would: It’s exploring the often quite cruel treatment of older women at the smooth hands of a youth-obsessed culture. And it’s doing it with a mixture of seriousness and humor. (In response to Rose’s admission that “I don’t know what to do,” Sophia will suggest: “Get a poodle!”) What the pilot promises, though, and what the show delivered during its seven years on the air, is that Rose would figure out what to do with all those years she has left. She and her friends, and to some extent the rest of us, would figure it out together. Thirty years later, the show is still as groundbreaking as ever—both despite and because of the fact that its insights come from four women. Coco’s loss is our gain.

Kim Davis's First Day Back

Kim Davis is back in the office, and she hasn’t changed her mind.

"Effective immediately, and until an accommodation is provided, by those with the authority to provide it, any marriage license issued by my office will not be issued or authorized by me," she said Monday, NPR reported.

The Kentucky county clerk returned to her job days after she was released from jail. She spent five nights there after refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Rowan County. Davis said Monday she won’t stop her deputies from issuing licenses to gay couples. But “any unauthorized license that they issue will not have my name, my title or my authority on it,” she said. “Instead, the license will state that they are issued pursuant to a federal court order.”

Davis had not issued the documents to gay or straight couples since shortly after the Supreme Court decision in June that legalized same-sex marriage, citing her religious beliefs as an Apostolic Christian. In July, four couples, two gay and two straight, sued Davis, saying that she must fulfill her duties as an elected official despite her religious objections. In August, a federal district judge ordered Davis to begin issuing licenses to all legally eligible couples. She continued to turn couples away, however, and was held in contempt of court. Davis was released from jail after her deputy clerks did the paperwork in her absence.

“Davis shall not interfere in any way, directly or indirectly, with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples,” the court order for her release stated.

Brian Mason, a deputy clerk in Rowan County, told Kentucky's CBS affiliate WKYT that the office had issued 10 licenses, seven of which were to same-sex couples, while Davis was in jail. Mason said he would continue to grant licenses, even if Davis tells him not to.

Here’s what Davis saw when she came back, per USA Today:

Upon returning to work in Morehead, Davis was greeted by a billboard installed by a non-profit organization that advocates for LGBTQ rights.The billboard erected by Planting Peace reads: “Dear Kim Davis, The fact that you can’t sell your daughter for three goats and a cow means we’ve already redefined marriage.”

A New Prime Minister in Australia

Australia has a new prime minister after the ruling Liberal party voted to replace Tony Abbott with his rival Malcolm Turnbull.

Turnbull defeated Abbott 54-44 to become Australia’s 29th prime minister elect.

“There are few things more important in any organization than its culture,” Turnbull said after the vote. “The culture of our leadership is going to be one that is thoroughly consultative, a traditional, thoroughly traditional cabinet government that ensures that we make decisions in a collaborative manner.”

He said he assumed that the country’s Parliament will serve its full term, and added that ministerial changes will follow.

We should note here that unlike the U.S. system of presidential politics where voters ultimately select a candidate for the presidency, in the parliamentary form of government—followed in Australia and many other former British colonies—voters choose a party, whose members then elect a leader. Should that leader become unpopular within the party—as Abbott had become—his fellow party members can replace him. That’s what happened in Australia on Monday.

The Guardian adds:

Long-simmering leadership tensions exploded on Monday when Turnbull declared a challenge, arguing Abbott had shown himself unable to make the case for policy change or turn around the Coalition’s political fortunes.

Abbott pleaded with his party not to repeat the Labor party’s mistakes, and his backers immediately mobilised a counteroffensive, seeking to build momentum during the five hours between Turnbull’s declaration and the ballot.

They insisted electorate offices were being “swamped” with calls from Liberal party members aghast that the party would consider removing a sitting prime minister and providing a parade of ministers to urge the party to stick with the current prime minister.

It’s a reversal of fortunes for Abbott who had ousted Turnbull in 2009 as the Liberal party leader. But under Abbott, the conservative Liberal party was languishing in the polls behind the left-wing Labor party. The Sydney Morning Herald, in its live blog of the events, reports:

Mr Turnbull is asked if he will change the government’s direction on climate change and marriage equality.

Mr Turnbull says he supports the existing policy on climate change but does not directly address the issue of marriage equality.

Environmental groups had criticized Abbott’s government for its stance on climate change. The ousted prime minister was also an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage. Turnbull has previously expressed his support for same-sex marriage, as well as more action to tackle climate change.

Abbott, who became prime minister in 2013, was a deeply divisive figure. He survived a challenge from his fellow lawmakers in February. Turnbull, the prime minister elect, is a former communications minister. The BBC reports that he is “well-liked across the political divide.”

Abbott’s ouster is part of a recent tradition of sorts in Australia. Turnbull would be the fifth prime minister since 2010.

An EU Meeting on Migrants

European interior ministers are meeting in Brussels Monday to discuss a controversial plan to distribute 160,000 migrants across the EU’s member states.  

The meeting comes a day after Germany closed its borders to those without valid travel documents after being overwhelmed by migrants entering the country. Austria and Slovakia followed on Monday.

Europe is in the midst of the worst migrant crisis since World War II, many of them fleeing the civil war in Syria and unrest in other parts of the world. Germany has been the most welcoming of the European nations, and is on track to take as many as 800,000 migrants this year.

The EU officials meeting in Brussels will vote on a plan proposed last week to distribute the 160,000 migrants among 23 member states. Germany and France are the plan’s strongest backers, but newer EU members such as Hungary oppose it. As we reported last week:

Jean-Claude Juncker [the president of the European Commission] told European lawmakers in Strasbourg that the burden of dealing with the asylum-seekers must not be left to Italy, Greece, and Hungary, where they first arrive. He said the bloc must come up with a common list of safe countries of origin that will enable member states to fast-track asylum applications.

Jucker called for a permanent relocation mechanism that will allow the EU to deal with crisis situations more swiftly, for stronger joint efforts to secure the EU’s borders, and a legal migration package for the bloc.

Meanwhile, the Austrian government said Monday it is deploying troops to help deal with the influx of migrants, and would tighten its border with Hungary, which has become the unwilling focus of the crisis.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said Sunday the various border-control measures announced by European governments “only underlines the urgency of establishing a comprehensive European response.” It added:

UNHCR is concerned that the combination of different, individual measures might create a situation where large numbers of refugees seeking in Europe the protection they are entitled to receive in line with international law, will find themselves moving around in legal limbo.