Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 359

Is U.S. Analysis of Progress Against ISIS Skewed?

The Pentagon’s inspector general is looking into allegations that military officials skewed intelligence assessments about the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq against ISIS to make them seem optimistic, The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing several officials familiar with the investigation.

Here’s more from the newspaper:

The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command—the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State—were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said.

Fuller details of the claims were not available, including when the assessments were said to have been altered and who at Central Command, or Centcom, the analyst said was responsible. The officials, speaking only on the condition of anonymity about classified matters, said that the recently opened investigation focused on whether military officials had changed the conclusions of draft intelligence assessments during a review process and then passed them on.

ISIS—also called ISIL, Islamic State, and Daesh—controls large parts of Iraq, including its second-biggest city Mosul. It also occupies large parts of neighboring Syria. The U.S. and its allies have been carrying out a campaign against the group in Iraq, and has announced some recent successes. But the group continues to hold onto territory across a vast swath of Iraq and Syria.

The Times’ report could explain why accounts vary about U.S. successes against ISIS. The newspaper notes that the inspector general’s investigation is unusual because differences of opinion among national security officials are common.

You can read the Times story here.

A Website for Gay Escorts Gets Busted by Homeland Security

A website on which male escorts advertise just got busted. The CEO of Rentboy.com and six of its employees have conspired to promote prostitution, according to an indictment unsealed by Kelly T. Currie, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York; Glenn Sorge, a Department of Homeland Security official; and William Bratton, the Commissioner of the New York City Police Department.

Prostitution is illegal. And if the graphic criminal complaint can be trusted, there’s strong evidence that the site facilitated and encouraged prostitution.

On the other hand, having pondered how many man hours the Department of Homeland Security should spend trying to stop men paying other men for consensual sex, there’s a strong case can be made that the answer is “zero.” I find it hard to believe New Yorkers want the NYPD working this beat. And can’t federal prosecutors find more threatening conspiracies to thwart?

Even if this case didn’t represent a dubious use of scarce criminal-justice resources, I’d still argue that, in the end, it will leave the world a worse place than it is today.

Gay prostitution is not a riskless enterprise. Like all intercourse, it can spread sexually transmitted diseases. Just like maids, masseuses, plumbers, and babysitters, gay prostitutes enter the homes of strangers, making them vulnerable to being attacked; and just like straight sex workers, football players, attorneys, and politicians, some gay prostitutes will always stand behind their past choices while others will feel that the job caused them some degree of physical, mental, or spiritual injury.

But I’ve seen no evidence presented that Rentboy.com has even a single victim. Human trafficking doesn’t seem to be a large concern among gay prostitutes; there’s some evidence that homeless gay youth may be particularly likely to turn to sex for survival, but it’s difficult to understand how shutting down the site would improve their situation. The practical effect of the site and others like it has been to move prostitutes off the street and onto the web and to enable safer, more predictable encounters for prostitutes and customers. And there is zero chance that taking the site down will end gay prostitution.

Then there are the seven people who’ve been charged.

Instead of earning a living facilitating consensual exchanges, they’re taking up time on a court docket. If prosecutors get their way, they’ll be locked up at taxpayer expense. The majority of the public whose lives are unaffected by the gay prostitution scene will be no better off, despite footing the bill; and the small number of people whose lives are touched by the scene will mostly be worse off.

At Reason, Scott Shackelford sympathizes with a hypothetical customer.

“Not all gay men look like they belong in gym ads,” he writes. “While the increased acceptance of homosexuality has made it easier for gay men and women to come out earlier in their lives, we still have untold numbers of older gay men who came out late (or still aren’t comfortable coming out at all) and didn’t move to big gay metropolises like New York City or San Francisco to find love. Gay men (and women!) are still a small part of the population. It is inaccurate—even heartless—to assume that all gay men are able to find a sexual companion through conventional means ... Say you’re a pudgy, lonely 55-year-old in southern Illinois with a fetish for something very kinky. You’re a minority within a minority. What do you do if you can’t find somebody around you who shares your interest?”

Maybe that man looks elsewhere on the web, making the government’s action pointless. Maybe he looks on the street, creating a negative externality that comes with street prostitution. Or maybe the oldest profession endures, as it always will, but at the margins there’s a lonely 55-year-old that makes do with pornography instead. If you want to foot the bill for the prisons, courts, and law-enforcement agencies necessary to bring about that “best-case scenario,” support existing prostitution laws and prosecutors. If not, it’s hard to see much to celebrate in the announcement.

The Florida Republicans Who Couldn't Draw a Map

When the Florida legislature convened for a special summer session earlier this month, lawmakers had, literally, one job: to redraw the state’s congressional districts after a court had thrown out the last map they came up with.

They failed. After two weeks of bickering, the Republicans running the House and Senate gave up and sent their members home, tossing the hot potato of redistricting—for the moment—back to the judiciary. This being Florida, the legislative whiff was not entirely a surprise: Despite one-party rule, Republican leaders in the Sunshine State have gotten along no better than Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid do in Washington. The Senate even sued the House earlier this year in a health-care dispute.

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But the quandary they faced in drawing new districts was more tortuous. The Florida Supreme Court had invalidated the legislature’s original congressional map because the justices ruled it improperly favored Republicans, which is in violation of a constitutional amendment on redistricting adopted by voters in 2010. They ordered the GOP-led legislature to make it less favorable, or more fair. Your appendix needs to come out, the court told the lawmakers. Here’s the scalpel.

“Reapportionment is existential,” Jon Mills, the former Democratic speaker of the Florida House, told me. “It’s personal for everybody.” Mills, who has worked on redistricting issues as a lawyer and law professor at the University of Florida, recalled when it was Democrats who controlled the legislature and were forced to redraw districts in the early 1990s. “It doesn’t matter who’s in control. It’s difficult for anybody,” Mills said. “And for those in control, they’re going to get blamed.”

The House and Senate each came up with their own proposed map for Florida’s 27 congressional districts, but the chambers couldn’t agree on a compromise. Democrats are expected to gain one or two seats based on population changes from the census regardless of how Republicans draw the maps, meaning that at least one Republican congressional incumbent would lose his or her district. The map approved by the state Senate, for example, moved the line of the 15th House district so that its current GOP representative, Dennis Ross, now lives outside it by just a couple dozen feet. To stay in Congress, Ross would likely have to face another Republican, Representative Tom Rooney, in next year’s election.

“There are two directly conflicting emotions here. One is they don’t want to lose control. Two is, we don’t want to make somebody mad.”

But the House refused to budge on its own proposal, resulting in an impasse. The chambers can’t even decide who should draw the map at this point; the House wants the court to do it, while the Senate doesn’t want to give up the legislature’s power to determine congressional districts. The matter is now back before the Florida Supreme Court, which could decide to pick one of the two proposals, appoint an independent body to draw a map, or just do the thing itself. The court could also order the legislature back into another special session to meet its October deadline.

A major complicating factor in reapportioning Florida’s districts is race. For nearly a quarter century, the state has had three majority-minority districts and three African American members in its congressional delegation. Yet one of the districts invalidated by the court earlier this summer was the snake-shaped fifth district represented since 1993 by Corrine Brown. Under the latest Senate proposal, Brown’s district would be radically changed, almost like a lever pulled 90 degrees upward. Where it now begins in Jacksonville near the northeast corner of the state and drops south in a jagged line toward Orlando, the new map would make it shoot west from Jacksonville toward Tallahassee along the northern border with Georgia. (The Orlando Sentinel has a good illustration here.) Brown has accused the Senate of intentionally seeking to dilute the power of African Americans by moving the district so far north, and she’s already filed a federal suit to prevent the Florida courts from requiring a new congressional map that violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Florida Supreme Court had cited the fifth district and its serpentine shape as an egregious example of gerrymandering designed to protect incumbents, but Brown has fought that perception. “My name is not Corrine ‘Gerrymandering’ Brown,” she said in announcing the lawsuit earlier this month. In a separate statement, she said communities of similar interests should be kept together in redistricting.

Minority communities do not live in compact, cookie-cutter like neighborhoods, and excessive adherence to district “compactness,” while ignoring the maintenance of minority access districts, fragments them across the state, not allowing them to elect a representative of their choice.

The complexities of Florida’s congressional map and the obvious difficulty its elected representatives are having in drawing it raise the question of why the legislature doesn’t mimic other states that have created independent commissions to handle reapportionment. The idea seems especially ripe in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June that upheld the work of a voter-created redistricting commission in Arizona over a challenge from the disgruntled legislature.

In Florida, the opposition from lawmakers has been fairly simple: They don’t want to give up control over something that has historically been their prerogative. Yet as 2016 draws closer with no solution in sight, that attitude might finally be changing. “There are two directly conflicting emotions here,” Mills said. “One is they don’t want to lose control. Two is, we don’t want to make somebody mad. I have to think in the back of some people’s minds is, ‘Ok, let them do it.’”

What's Next for Wall Street After Monday's Selloff?

Updated on August 25 at 4:08 p.m. ET

U.S. stocks reversed their gains Tuesday, as a market rally faded in the last hour of trading. The Dow Jones industrial average—which at one point was up 441 points—shed more than 200. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq also closed lower.

The Dow fell 205 points, the S&P 500 closed below 1,900, and the Nasdaq shed 0.44 percent. It was a second straight day of losses for the markets and it comes amid growing unease about the health of the Chinese economy. Stocks had a roller-coaster Monday, with the Dow shedding more than 1,000 points at the opening bell before closing down 3.5 percent.

It was a different story at noon on Tuesday.  At one point, the Dow was up 441 points. The Nasdaq rose 3.2 percent, and the S&P spiked 2.5 percent, out of correction territory. It ended back there Tuesday evening.

“Whatever triggered the consternation in the last few trading sessions is likely to be replayed again,” Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott, told CNBC. He said a negative close “would be a set up to grind sideways to work out this process, if this rally and enthusiasm can’t last I think it’s an indicator (of that consternation).”

The Dow is now on track for its biggest monthly percentage loss since February 2009. For the S&P 500, it’s the worst month since May 2010.

Stock markets around the world were all healthier Tuesday—except in China. There, the Shanghai composite index, which fell 8.5 percent on Monday, declined a further 7.6 percent. It is now firmly in negative territory for the year.

“Bothering markets yesterday were China and collapsing commodity prices and both of those have given us some relief,” James Meyer, chief investment officer at Tower Bridge Advisors, told CNBC. “And when I look at China I don’t look at the Shanghai market. I look at the Hong Kong market.”

Indeed, the Hang Seng, the index in Hong Kong, closed up 0.72 percent Tuesday.

China’s central bank, which devalued the yuan two weeks ago, showed Tuesday that it was willing to take more steps to bolster the country’s sagging economy. It cut its main interest rate by 0.25 percentage points to 4.6 percent. In apparent response, stocks rallied elsewhere. Most European stocks rose. They closed down 5 percent on Monday.

“It’s encouraging in the sense that they’re [the Chinese] trying to mitigate the impact of the decline,” Peter Dixon, a global economist at Commerzbank AG in London, told Bloomberg. “Investors panicked yesterday, concerned about of the lack of reaction, and this might help.

“Markets are beginning to realize this is a Chinese problem, not a European one. These are specific issues which refer to fundamentals in other markets and do not reflect the situation in Europe.”

Donald Trump's No-Apology Tour Continues

Donald Trump apologizes to no one. Not even to Roger Ailes.

The head of Fox News on Tuesday demanded an apology from the real estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate for his tweetstorm Monday night against Fox News host Megyn Kelly. “Donald Trump rarely apologizes, although in this case, he should,” Ailes said in a statement, calling the tweets “unacceptable” and “disturbing.”

Too bad, Trump responded. Here’s his statement, per Politico:

I totally disagree with the FOX statement. I do not think Megyn Kelly is a quality journalist. I think her questioning of me, despite all of the polls saying I won the debate, was very unfair. Hopefully in the future I will be proven wrong and she will be able to elevate her standards to a level of professionalism that a network such as FOX deserves.

Ailes’ statement is the first time the Fox News chairman has publicly reacted to Trump’s dispute with Kelly, which began in earnest earlier this month when Trump described Kelly’s tough line of questioning during the first GOP presidential debate.

“You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her—wherever,” he told CNN a day after the debate.

The backlash to that comment was huge. Many people, including other Republican presidential candidates and far-right leaning conservatives, called the verbal attack offensive. Trump, however, did not apologize.

Trump became the human embodiment of #sorrynotsorry for controversial remarks as soon as he entered the 2016 race in June. He refused to apologize for calling Mexicans who enter the U.S. illegally as “killers” and “rapists” in the speech announcing his candidacy. A month later, he refused to apologize for saying Senator John McCain—who served in Vietnam, where he broke both arms and legs when his aircraft was shot down and was tortured in a prison camp—was not “a war hero.” “Deal with it,” instructed Trump’s unwavering gaze on the cover of TIME magazine last week.

Trump explained his rules for apologizing to The Hollywood Reporter last week:

People say, “He won’t apologize for anything”—well, I was right on illegal immigration. [John] McCain blew it because he’s done a poor job of taking care of the veterans. And then the third element so far, you had Megyn Kelly, and I think you’ve seen what happened with that. I feel quite confident in my position. At the same time, I believe in apologizing. But to apologize for me is very difficult. I definitely would apologize if I were wrong on something.

Asked to recall the last thing he apologized for, Trump said: “It was too many years ago to remember. I have one of the great memories of all time, but it was too long ago.”

#sorrynotsorry, Roger.

Prestige TV: The Next Franchise Frontier

This week, 10.1 million people watched the premiere of AMC’s new series, Fear the Walking Dead. That’s not only a record-breaking debut for cable, it’s the kind of viewership most shows would happily aspire to in this day and age, and it caps a good year for AMC following the success of Better Call Saul. It also puts the network in a unique position: Rather than developing original high-quality dramas, AMC is building a foundation of spinoffs—an unusual gamble in the world of prestige television.

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Just nine years ago, AMC was a nobody in the world of original programming, but the 2007 debut of Mad Men made the network an instant quality-TV brand, solidified by the critical hit Breaking Bad and the commercial sensation The Walking Dead—which has grown into a ratings juggernaut that shows no sign of abating. But Mad Men and Breaking Bad have wrapped up over the past two years, and their replacements (including Turn, Halt and Catch Fire, and Humans) have drawn much smaller audiences. In lieu of another out-of-the-box hit, AMC has turned to safer territory—emulating many major movie studios—in taking shows that people watch, and building new versions of them. In an era of “too much TV,” is this the next logical step?

Spinoffs and franchises have long existed on television. The Mary Tyler Moore Show spawned numerous popular successors in the sitcom world, and the producer Dick Wolf has somehow created not one but two connected law-enforcement universes, first Law & Order and its ilk, and now Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. That model has been replicated by cop shows like CSI, NCIS, and Criminal Minds, and shows no sign of abatement, but the procedural mystery show has always been easy to copy. Just move it to a new city, hire some name actors, and bingo, a ratings winner. By contrast, what AMC is doing is more complex: finding new paths for its most critically acclaimed programming without sacrificing quality for ratings’ sake.

Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad quasi-prequel that premiered in February, mostly managed to pull it off. While it’s hard to imagine the show ever fully escaping the shadow of its predecessor, it found a funnier, shaggier tone within the Breaking Bad aesthetic, and snagged a slew of Emmy nominations this summer—exactly the kind of recognition AMC wants. More importantly, it got great ratings—nothing like The Walking Dead, but still, an average of 3.2 million viewers for its first season, not far off of Breaking Bad’s last, and more than Mad Men ever got.

AMC is finding new paths for its most critically acclaimed programming without sacrificing quality for ratings’ sake.

It’s too early to rule on the quality of Fear the Walking Dead—set within the timeline of the zombie drama but in another part of the country—although reviews have been largely friendly. But its massive debut speaks for itself, and for the country’s continued appetite for everything Dead-related. The only other AMC show that gets the kind of viewership that Fear attracted is Talking Dead, a cheap-and-cheerful show that airs after every episode of The Walking Dead to post-mortem the week’s events. It was partly that show’s success that convinced the network people wanted more Dead, and its bet seems to be paying off.

Like movie studios, networks have to find the perfect balance. The CSI franchise did well for itself, but eventually became so sprawling that ratings sagged across the board, with the only remaining entry being the maligned CSI: Cyber. The same goes for Law & Order, which at one point had four separate versions running at the same time, but now only boasts the venerable Special Victims Unit. In the realm of film, questions continue to abound at the sheer number of insta-franchises being built in the wake of Marvel Studios’s success, and the mixed box-office reception to this summer’s superhero movies.

AMC’s bet is a little safer. While Better Call Saul and Fear the Walking Dead have already been renewed for a second season, there’s still room for plenty of other shows, and the rapturous reviews of the second season of Halt and Catch Fire were an encouraging sign that its nurturing of smart programming can still pay off. While the network is still in the hunt for its first truly original hit since The Walking Dead (which debuted in 2010), for now, it’s drawing the viewership it needs to keep taking those chances. The question is, no matter how much audiences love zombies, how long can that goodwill can be sustained in a crowded world of premium TV drama?

The True Meaning of Mayonnaise

What’s in a name? That which we call mayonnaise by any other name would taste as real.

Not true, says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The regulatory agency recently sent a warning letter to the makers of Just Mayo, a vegan mayonnaise spread.

The product from Hampton Creek Foods Inc., a four-year-old food startup based in San Francisco, violates the FDA’s “standard of identity” regulations for the popular condiment. The FDA explains how in its August 12 letter, which was made public Tuesday:

According to the standard of identity for mayonnaise, egg is a required ingredient (21 CFR 169.140(c)); however, based on the ingredient information on the labels, these products do not contain eggs. We also note that these products contain additional ingredients that are not permitted by the standard, such as modified food starch, pea protein, and beta-carotene, which may be used to impart color simulating egg yolk. Therefore, these products do not conform to the standard for mayonnaise.

Just Mayo is made with canola oil, apple cider vinegar, pea protein, and other ingredients. No eggs? Not mayo, according to the FDA.

The FDA’s letter is a win for food-manufacturing giant Unilever, the owner of Hellmann’s “REAL” mayonnaise, arguably the most recognizable brand of mayo in the country. Last November, Unilever sued Hampton Creek for false advertising, or, as Mother Jones’ Rowan Jacobsen put it, to show that “there’s only one way to make mayo, dammit.” Just Mayo’s name and packaging, which featured an egg-shaped image, Unilever claimed, “damages the entire product category.” The company dropped the lawsuit a month later.

The FDA also said in its letter that Hampton Creek’s claims that Just Mayo is cholesterol-free don’t hold up. Hampton Creek has 15 days to respond to the food safety agency’s memo.

Call It the ‘Bechdel-Wallace Test’

It’s come to be known as the Bechdel test, and it goes like so: For a given work of fiction to pass the test, the work must 1) have at least two women in it, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something other than a man.  

The test is a blunt, basic measure of gender equality in a given film/show/book/etc. It revels in its own absurd simplicity. And it is often—still, ridiculously—not passed by Hollywood movies. It’s often failed in other settings, too. As the A.V. Club summed up the current controversy at Duke, which involves incoming students’ refusal to read Bechdel’s celebrated graphic novel on the grounds of its sexual themes: “Duke students refuse to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, will probably fail the test.”

The standard got its name from the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who, in a 1985 strip from her comic Dykes to Watch Out For, introduced the idea as a winking criticism of male-dominated movies.

The comic, from Dykes to Watch Out For, that gave rise to the “Bechdel Test” (Wikimedia Commons)

Bechdel, however, wasn’t the originator of the test. She has long attributed the idea of the Bechdel test to her friend Liz Wallace, who mentioned the standard to her as Bechdel was looking for ideas for Dykes to Watch Out For. (Bechdel also attributes the idea, more broadly, to Virginia Woolf—who, in A Room of One’s Own, remarked, “All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple”—and that the women of literature, contrary to the living, breathing, complex women of real life, are almost always depicted only “in their relation to men.”)

But Bechdel—the one who created the comic that resonated with feminists frustrated with women’s depiction in cultural products, the comic that found a new resonance on a virality-enabled Internet—was the one who got credit for the concept.

She’d prefer it not to be that way. In a recent interview with Fresh Air, Bechdel reiterated her debt to Wallace for coming up with the test. “I feel a little bit sheepish about the whole thing,” she told Terry Gross, “because it’s not like I invented this test or said this is the Bechdel test. It somehow has gotten attributed to me over the years.”

She added, “It’s this weird thing. Like, people actually use it to analyze films to see whether or not they pass that test.”

And now that the stuff of a 1985 comic strip has morphed into the stuff of broadly recognized cultural and literary criticism, Bechdel wants to return credit to Wallace. The Bechdel test, after all, came from the very thing it’s meant to celebrate: two women, talking about something other than men. The test’s current name doesn’t recognize that dialogue, though. It does not, actually, pass the Bechdel test.

You know what does, though? The “Bechdel-Wallace test.”

“Since the idea of this criteria was suggested by your friend whose last name is Wallace,” Gross asked Bechdel, “would you like it to be renamed the Bechdel-Wallace test?”

Bechdel’s reply: “I would be very happy if that happened.”

We Want Your Culture Stories: A Call for Pitches

“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”—Camille Paglia

The best Atlantic culture pieces examine questions people have long had but never quite identified. They aim for strong arguments and analysis, exploring the less obvious facets of film, television, books, music, theater, art, design, media, fashion, architecture, language, food, and sports. All these things are much more than entertainment—they’re how people relate to life, and how they ask and answer questions about what it means to be human.

Why does racial diversity matter so much in pop culture? What can the tabloid chatter about a celebrity’s alleged sexual assault say about gender politics? What do a spate of works about drones say about society’s collective fears and concerns about warfare and surveillance?

Thoughtful critiques and rigorous analyses catch our attention more than screeds or paeans do. We’re more interested in writers who’ve done research and reporting rather than those offering up half-baked personal observations. And we’re particularly interested in finding writers whose experiences and opinions are underrepresented in the media.

The types of stories we love:

Reviews or essays that use books/TV shows/films/news to explore larger trends and questions in culture
The Confederate Flag, Pop-Culture Phenomenon
Why Women Choose Not to Have Children
Ending the Internet Outrage Cycle
Why There’s No Conservative Jon Stewart

Pieces that explore issues of race and gender in a nuanced, unexpected, and non-patronizing way
The Unsung Legacy of Black Characters on Soap Operas
On MasterChef Junior, Innate Biases Are Hard to Beat
The Radical Queerness of Kate McKinnon’s Justin Bieber
Why There’s So Much Riding on Fresh Off the Boat
Consent Isn’t Enough: The Troubling Sex of Fifty Shades

Trend pieces that explain why a phenomenon or fad matters—and not just point out that it exists
How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals
Unmanned: Why Anxiety About Drones Is Creeping Into Pop Culture
The Ascendancy of the ‘Awkward Older Sister’
The Unbearable Darkness of Prestige Television

Pieces that reevaluate forgotten/misunderstood works of the past
The Forgotten Handmaid’s Tale
The Messy, Misunderstood Glory of David Lynch’s Dune
Harry Potter’s Forgotten Predecessor
The Great War Novelist America Forgot

Cultural histories
From Dallas to Spoiler Alerts: The Rise and Fall of the Cliffhanger
Born to Run and the Decline of the American Dream
Cinderella: The Ultimate Postwar Makeover Story
The History of ‘Thug’​

Deep (well-researched) dives into bigger cultural phenomena
The New True Crime
The Unlikely Reanimation of H.P. Lovecraft
The Death of the American Dance Critic

Personal essays with a cultural bent
An Introverted Writer’s Lament
What I Learned Trying to Write a Muslim-American Cop Show for HBO

What we rarely accept:  

-Film or album reviews. Our staff writers generally cover these.
-Q&As. Unless it’s with Steven Pinker.
-Profiles
-Responses or rebuttals to articles on other sites
-Promotional or uncritical stories, or ones that are an excuse to interview an idol
-Wonky, niche, or local stories with narrow appeal
-Pieces that read like academic essays

Pro-tips for pitching that’ll impress us from the start:
-No one- to two-sentence pitches, please. If you’ve already done your research and can flesh out your argument briefly and state why the subject matters, we’ll love you for it.
-Have a news peg in mind for the piece (and unless you’ve written for us before, ideally one that’s at least a couple of weeks away).

Some housekeeping (to borrow from the sentiments of our wonderful colleagues over at the science, tech, and health team—pitch them, too!):

1. We pay for all stories! The amount mostly depends on the type/length of story.
2. Send us your initial pitches to entertainment @ theatlantic.com (instead of our personal emails). We’ll aim to get back to you within a week, but if we don’t, feel free to follow up then (not a day or two after sending your pitch).
3. We want a diversity of voices—including those of women, people of color, sexual minorities, international writers, and people of various geographic and educational backgrounds.

Smite at the Museum: A 12-Year-Old Boy’s Fist Meets a 17th-Century Painting

It’s not quite the story of the Spanish woman who tried to restore a fresco of Jesus, but turned the “once-dignified portrait [into] … a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic”—it’s not even close. But it’s not every day we get to see someone put a hole in a historic work of art.

A 12-year-old Taiwanese boy on a museum tour with his mother Sunday tripped near “Flowers”—a 17th-century oil panting by the Italian artist Paolo Porpora valued at $1.5 million—and punched a fist-sized hole through it.

Thanks to the miracle of technology, you can watch what happened here:

Focus Taiwan News adds that exhibition organizers said the boy was nervous and his family will not be asked to pay for the cost of restoring the painting, which is insured. Taiwanese authorities are not identifying the boy.

The damaged painting is the only one Porpora is believed to have signed. It was part of an exhibition at the Huashan 1914 Creative Park that showcases Italian artists.   

The Guardian has more on the artist:

Porpora was a leading still life artist who produced baroque-style paintings, often of fruit and flowers. The damaged work, 200cm tall, depicts flowers in a vase. …

The Web Gallery of Art, a database of European fine art, said Flowers was the only Porpora work that is signed and was painted in about 1660. Porpora was born in Naples but moved to Rome, where he worked for the Chigi family.

Accidents involving works of art aren’t new, of course. There’s the famous incident in 2006 involving Steve Wynn, whose elbow damaged Picasso’s “Le Rêve,” which the casino mogul had agreed to sell for $139 million. The deal fell through after that, but lest you feel bad for Wynn—or the portrait of Picasso’s mistress—the restored artwork was sold two years ago for a record figure: $155 million.