Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 366

No More Superheroes: A Fall Film Preview

As the summer comes to a close and Hollywood shovels its final franchise efforts into the engine for another year, audiences can look forward to a more varied fall film season, as Oscar races begin and release schedules are suddenly free of sequels and superheroes. There’s the odd tentpole movie in the mix, including the final episode of The Hunger Games and the first James Bond film in three years, but those are mixed in with a more highbrow collection of biopics, dark dramas, and festival favorites before the holiday season arrives.

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Spies, Screams, and Muppets: A Fall TV Preview

That’s not to say there isn’t a chance for some real genre efforts, such as M. Night Shyamalan’s return to horror with The Visit (Sept 11), a found-footage film about a brother and sister who go to stay with their two scary grandparents. A string of flops (After Earth, The Last Airbender) have made Shyamalan the butt of jokes in recent years, but he may work best constrained by a tiny budget and a plot built for jumps.

Black Mass (Warner Bros.)

Johnny Depp has also been a recent target of parody thanks to bombs like Mortdecai, but he’s making a play for Oscar legitimacy with Black Mass (Sept 18), a Scott Cooper-directed biopic about the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, in which Depp looks unrecognizable, if nothing else. Another biopic, Pawn Sacrifice (Sept 18), sees Tobey Maguire playing the chess genius Bobby Fischer during his famed match against Soviet player Boris Spassky. The month’s most controversial retelling of true events is Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall (Sept 25), a departure from the Independence Day director’s usual bombast that has been criticized pre-release for its alleged whitewashing of the famous 1969 riots that are seen as a turning point in gay rights. (Emmerich has defended the film, saying his cast is more representative than the trailers suggest.)

Another major release that tackles LGBT issues is About Ray (Sept 18), which stars Elle Fanning as a teenager transitioning from female to male, with Naomi Watts playing her mother and Susan Sarandon her grandmother. The true-story adventure thriller Everest (Sept 18), sees an ensemble that includes Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, and Jake Gyllenhaal ascending the mountain and encountering a terrible blizzard, with the story based on a horrifying 1996 disaster. For lighter fare, try Nancy Meyers’s latest, The Intern (Sept 25), starring Robert De Niro as a senior citizen hired to work for Anne Hathaway’s fashion company, with (one assumes) wryly hilarious results and a healthy spoonful of sap. At the end of the month comes Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk (Sept 30), a fictionalized take on the tale told in the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire, featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit and dazzling-looking 3D renderings of a high-wire walk between the Twin Towers.

The Martian (20th Century Fox)

Another tale of life and death arrives soon after with Ridley Scott’s The Martian (Oct 2), though this one is fully fictional, based on the hit novel by Andy Weir. Matt Damon stars as an astronaut manned on Mars after a NASA mission goes wrong, with an ensemble of character actors (Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Michael Pena, and Chiwetel Ejiofor among them) trying to get him back. The long-gestating Apple biopic Steve Jobs (Oct 9), once intended for David Fincher and Christian Bale, finally arrives directed by Danny Boyle and starring Michael Fassbender; its script is from Aaron Sorkin, and if the trailer is any indication, the walk-and-talk speechifying will run rampant. But the biggest news in October is probably the return of Steven Spielberg with Bridge of Spies (Oct 16), the first film he’s directed since 2012’s Lincoln. Another true-story period drama, this one sees Tom Hanks as a civilian lawyer thrust into negotiations between the U.S. and Soviet governments over an exchange of captured spies. Mark Rylance co-stars, and perhaps most interestingly, the script is from the Coen Brothers (alongside the British playwright Matt Charman).

If that’s the month’s surest bet, its wildest is Joe Wright’s Pan (Oct 9), a visually sumptuous-looking prequel to the Peter Pan tale starring Hugh Jackman as the pirate Blackbeard and Garrett Hedlund as a handsome, charming, and heroic Captain Hook. Eyebrows have been raised over its goofy premise and its casting of Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily, but Wright seems most focused on the visuals. The same may be true of Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak (Oct 16), a rip-snorting Gothic adventure set in 19th century Northern England that sees Mia Wasikowska battling ghosts at her new husband’s haunted manse. Looking a good deal less scary is Goosebumps (Oct 16), a hodge-podge, family-friendly adaptation of R.L. Stine’s popular horror books that sees Jack Black playing the author as a fop confronted by his real-life creations. The month’s more grounded dramas include the cooking drama Burnt (Oct 23), with Bradley Cooper playing a chef out of rehab looking to regain his fame, and Suffragette (Oct 23), about the turn-of-the-century women’s voting movement in Britain, starring Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, and Helena Bonham Carter.

Spectre (MGM)

Things take on a more blockbuster-friendly flavor in November, with the most worrisome being The Peanuts Movie (Nov 6), an adaptation of Charles Schulz’s beloved comic strip that will have to tread carefully to avoid upsetting the many devotees Snoopy and co. have earned in the last 65 years. A more solid bet is Spectre (Nov 6), the 24th James Bond film, the fourth starring Daniel Craig, and the second directed by Sam Mendes. By reintroducing some of the classic ’60s Bond elements—the titular evil organization, a mysterious German villain played by Christoph Waltz—but including a more personal “family history” plot for Bond, the film looks like it will continue in the successful vein of Skyfall. That stacked week also sees the release of Brooklyn (Nov 6), director John Crowley and writer Nick Hornby’s adaptation of the Colm Tóibín novel of an Irish immigrant’s (Saoirse Ronan) journey to 1950s New York.

November’s biggest question mark is surely Angelina Jolie’s new film By the Sea (Nov 13), a small-scale drama about a couple wrestling with fractures in their marriage that stars Jolie and her real-life husband, Brad Pitt. It’s their first appearance on screen together since Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but Jolie’s work as a director has yet to strike a major chord with critics. A safer bet is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (Nov 20), the final and surely darkest entry in the franchise, which should be all action after last year’s tense meditation on life in a bunker. The season wraps up with one dark drama—Todd Haynes’s Carol (Nov 20), a 1950s-set lesbian romance starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara—and two sure-fire crowd-pleasers: the Rocky semi-reboot Creed (Nov 25), starring Michael B. Jordan as Apollo Creed’s son, and Pixar’s latest, The Good Dinosaur (Nov 25). Following that comes winter, featuring the remaining meat of the Oscar season and a few big blockbusters, but by that point, the only word on anyone’s lips will be Star Wars. All the more reason to enjoy the smaller-scale, more eclectic stories of this coming season in film.

Women, History, and the Army Ranger School

Updated on August 18, 2015, at 11:34 p.m. ET

This Friday, two female soldiers will make history when they become the first women to graduate from the Army Ranger School.

The 61-day training program is grueling, and the two women will graduate with 94 men at Fort Benning, Georgia. Here’s what they had to go through:

During the course, students learn how to operate in three different environments: woodlands in Fort Benning, mountainous terrain in Dahlonega, Georgia, and coastal swamp in Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Highlights of the course include a physical fitness test consisting of 49 push-ups, 59 sit-ups, a five-mile run in 40 minutes, and six chin-ups; a swim test; a land navigation test; a 12-mile foot march in three hours; several obstacle courses; four days of military mountaineering; three parachute jumps; four air assaults on helicopters; multiple rubber boat movements; and 27 days of mock combat patrols.

In a statement Monday, Army Secretary John McHugh said:

Each Ranger School graduate has shown the physical and mental toughness to successfully lead organizations at any level. This course has proven that every Soldier, regardless of gender, can achieve his or her full potential. We owe soldiers the opportunity to serve successfully in any position where they are qualified and capable, and we continue to look for ways to select, train, and retain the best Soldiers to meet our nation’s needs.

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who lifted the ban on women in ground combat roles in January 2013, told Foreign Policy the development was “proof that if we open up these opportunities to women that there are qualified women that can be able to engage in combat.”

“I always believed that, without having to change the qualifications, that there were women who could live up to the same standards that we required of others to be able to become Rangers and to be part of Special Forces,” he told the magazine.

But the two female soldiers cannot apply to join the 75th Ranger Regiment, the elite special-operations force, because the unit remains closed to women, and has its own requirements.

Here’s more about the two, from The Washington Post:

The women have not been identified by the Army, but both are officers in their 20s and graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., Army officials said. The female graduates started Ranger School on April 20 alongside 380 men and 17 other female soldiers in the first class to ever include women. The female soldiers were allowed into Ranger School as part of the Army’s ongoing assessment of how to better integrate women.

The issue of women in combat roles has been controversial. There was much skepticism over whether standards were being lowered to allow the women to graduate.

But Sgt. Major Colin Boley, the operations sergeant major for the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade, told Foreign Policy, the women “have changed my mind.”

“I didn’t think that they would physically be able to bear the weight and I thought they would quit or get hurt, and they have proved me wrong,” he said.

How Literature Inspires Empathy

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

Doug McLean

Alaa Al Aswany, the author of The Automobile Club of Egypt, is no stranger to activism. One of Egypt’s most recognizable literary celebrities, he was a high-profile fixture of the 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations. A New Yorker profile established Aswany’s political clout with a dramatic opening anecdote: His onscreen confrontation with Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik led, in the morning, to Shafik’s resignation. But despite his role as a pro-democracy figurehead and cultural arbiter, Aswany seems to feel his main work takes place at the writing desk. In our conversation for this series, he explained how a favorite line from Dostoyevsky dramatizes literature’s ability to inspire empathy and affect positive social change by changing the way we live and see.

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The Automobile Club of Egypt is set in 1940s Cairo, during the last days of British colonial rule. The titular club is a kind of DMV for elite European colonizers, in a country where most Egyptians aren’t allowed to drive. The book subverts the opulent setting by casting its narrative lot with the underclass, the servants and sycophants who serve oppressive masters but mock them behind their backs. With an ensemble performance that recalls his most famous book, The Yacoubian Building, Aswany shows a society at the boiling point, as tensions mount and a nation prepares to fight for a better, freer future.

The New Yorker has called Aswany “the most popular writer in Egypt and the most prominent Egyptian writer in the world.” The Yacoubian Building, which became a movie and then a TV series, has been translated into 23 languages and has sold over a million copies worldwide. Aswany, who is a practicing dentist, is also the author of the novels Chicago and The Papers of Essam Abdel Aaty. He spoke to me by phone from Cairo.

Alaa Al Aswany: My father, a writer as well, advised me not to read Dostoyevsky before university. “This is the greatest novelist,” he told me, “and you'll be too young to understand.” So I read didn’t Dostoevsky until I was 20 years old. I was a student at Cairo University, in the school of dentistry—and by that time my father had passed away. But I remember the experience well. The writing made such a strong impression, I read all his novels in a row. It was a discovery of another life, of a new world.

Dostoyevsky was born in 1821, and in 1849 he was arrested because he participated in some revolutionary circles. He was sentenced to death. At the last minute, the sentence was changed by the Emperor to four years in Siberia. But we are lucky he had this terrible experience, because he wrote one of the masterpieces of literature about it—it's called The House of the Dead.

This novel was about Dostoyevsky’s experience living in a Siberian labor camp for four years. It was torture, and since he came from a noble family, the other prisoners never felt comfortable with him. At that time it was legal in Russia to physically punish prisoners by lashing them, which Dostoyevsky describes with great feeling. Ultimately, because of the book, the Emperor stopped the punishment of lashing—so this novel played a very important role in Russian society.

There is a scene in the novel where one criminal, a young man, is dying. As he dies, another criminal stands watch before his bed, and he begins to cry. We must not forget that these are people who committed terrible crimes. The narrator describes how a soldier was looking at him because he was crying for another prisoner. And the prisoner says:

He, also, had a mother.

“Also” is the important word in the sentence. This man committed crimes. He was not useful to the society. He did terrible things. But he is also a human being. He also had a mother like we have. To me, the role of literature is in this “also.” It means we're going to understand, we're going to forgive, we're not going to judge. We should understand that people are not bad, but they can do bad things under particular circumstances.

For example: An unfaithful spouse is, usually, in our daily lives, seen as a bad thing. But you have two novels, masterpieces, which refuse to condemn that behavior: Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. In those two novels, the novelists try to explain to us why the wife became unfaithful. We do not judge them, but to try to understand their weaknesses and their mistakes. Literature is not a tool of judgment—it’s a tool for human understanding.

Accordingly, if you are a fanatic, you will never appreciate literature. And if you appreciate literature you will never be a fanatic. Fanaticism is about black and white: People are either good or bad. People are either with us or against us. On the other side, literature is absolutely the contrary. Literature gives us a broad spectrum of human possibilities. It teaches us how to feel other people suffering. When you read a good novel, you forget about the nationality of the character. You forget about his or her religion. You forget about his skin color or her skin color. You only understand the human. You understand that this is a human being, the same way we are. And so reading great novels absolutely can remake us as much better human beings.

A dictator can never be comfortable with literature, for many reasons. First, the novelist feels absolutely free to write whatever he wants. Second, fiction has a very strong influence over the people, much more than political speeches, because it requires us to use our imagination. Finally, dictators never feel comfortable with novelists because they don't feel secure. They believe that even if you aren’t talking directly about them, you mean to portray them indirectly. Under Mubarak, I wrote some animal stories, like the fables of Jean de la Fontaine. One of them featured a very old elephant who is no longer capable to rule the forest, and is trying to push his son to become king. But the young elephant is clearly stupid, unable to do anything but play with the water. The generals of security were very, very angry about these articles—you cannot imagine. They believed I meant old elephant is Mubarak, and the young elephant is his son—which was true. They put severe pressure on the owner of the newspaper to stop the articles. This is just one example.

It’s very hard when you write, and you try and try to do your best, and you cannot reach your readers because of censorship. It's a terrible experience. In Egypt, I was refused [the opportunity] to be published by the government, which was the only way to get published at that time. During the 1990s, I was refused three times: 1990, 1994, and 1998. And in ’98, I was refused in a very impolite way: not only refused, but refused and humiliated. I got so frustrated, I decided to quit. I was working on a new novel, and I decided to finish that novel and that would be it. I said to my wife, “I gave literature ten years of my life, and she gave me nothing but very bad moments.” I said I wanted to emigrate, and she accepted. But when I finished the novel, The Yacoubian Building, it became a phenomenon. And that changed everything.

I write to help people understand how terrible it is to live without freedom. I don’t write about “politics.” We don't have political lives in Egypt because we don't have a democracy. We have a one-man show. We have, always, a dictator who decides for everybody. But we do have a struggle for democracy. We have a struggle against torture, against dictatorship, against oppression and repression. And to reflect this is part of my duty as a writer. I cannot write about flowers while the people are killed in the streets. I cannot, because I always write what I feel—and I'm living in Egypt, and I see how people suffer, and I belong to these people. So I try to find the literary, the artistic, inside their suffering, or through their suffering. I write about human beings—and part of the suffering of the human being is living under a dictator who is willing to kill anybody, and torture everybody, to keep power. I write about how being free and keeping our dignity is a very important thing. And if people can be convinced by novels about that, they are going to revolt.

I don't think literature is the right tool to change the situation right now. If you would like to change the situation now, go out into the street. Literature, to me, is about a more important change: It changes our vision, our understanding, the way we see. And people who are changed by literature, in turn, will be more capable to change the situation.

I define fiction this way: It’s life on the page, similar to our daily life, but more significant, deeper, and more beautiful. What is significant in our daily lives should be visible in the novel, and deeper because we live many moments which are superficial—not deep, not profound. The novel should be more significant, more profound, and more beautiful, than real life. If you get to make a novel more significant and more profound, it will become beautiful.

I remember a quote by a great man, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was a Greek intellectual in Italy, and the founder of my Italian publishing house, Feltrinelli. He said, “I only know two kinds of novels: dead novels and living novels.” My job is to publish living novels. The most important thing is for the text to be living. To convince the reader that there are real people in the text, real characters. Anybody, after a course in creative writing, could write a novel. It’s not difficult. But what is really very difficult is to be able to induce life in the novel: to feel I know these people, see them on the screen of my imagination. To feel them, and believe they do exist. This is a living novel. The dead, theoretical novel, anyone could write.

But every writer has to find a unique path to the living novel—there is not one single formula. It's very hard at the beginning because you can’t rely on the experience of other people: You have to discover how it works for you. I found my way through years of struggle. This is how it works for me: I begin the sketches of several novels, feed them with the days. And, at some point, there is a click. I feel I'm going to write this novel, and not the others.

The click happens when I feel that the characters are visible to me. I try at the beginning to imagine the characters. I imagine details. If you're talking about a lady, I must see on the screen on my imagination how she looks and how she talks. And if she smokes or not. And if she smokes, what kind of cigarette. And then, at some point, I feel her. And when I feel the character, I feel they do exist—at this point, the click happens. At this point, I know I have the novel in my head, and I know it's just a matter of time: I will get this novel done.

A Suspect in the Thai Bomb Attack

Thailand’s leader is calling Monday’s bomb attack at a popular shrine in the capital, Bangkok, the “worst incident that has ever happened” in the country. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s remarks came as police attributed the explosion to a man seen in a security video.

Officials raised the toll from the attack to 20 dead and more than 100 others wounded.

Police released several images of the man seen in a security video apparently from the Erawan Shrine. In some, the man who is wearing a yellow T-shirt is carrying a backpack; in later images, he is seen without the backpack. Police described the man as a “suspect.”

Police Lt. Gen. Prawut Thavornsiri later told The Associated Press: “The yellow shirt guy is not just the suspect. He is the bomber.”

Chan-ocha, the prime minister, said in a televised address to the nation that the government will quickly “find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.”

Before Monday’s Cabinet meeting he  said: “This is the worst incident that has ever happened in Thailand. There have been minor bombs or just noise, but this time they aim for innocent lives. They want to destroy our economy, our tourism.”

Thailand’s economy is heavily reliant on tourism, and the explosion at a popular attraction is likely to have an impact. Of the 20 people killed in the attack, Thai officials said, five were Thai, two Malaysian, two Chinese, two from Hong Kong, one from Singapore.  Eight victims are still unidentified. One hundred and seventeen people were hurt in the blast.

Hong Kong advised travelers to avoid nonessential trips to Thailand. The Chinese Embassy in Bangkok urged its citizens in the country “to strengthen awareness of their surroundings, attend to their travel safety and make rational travel plans.”

Chinese tourists are the biggest group of foreign visitors to Thailand.

Investigators at the scene of Monday’s blast collected evidence from the scene. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Defense Minister Prawit Wongsuwan said Tuesday investigators were close to determining who was behind the blasts.

“It is much clearer who the bombers are, but I can't reveal right now,” he said. “We have suspects. There are not many people.”

Meanwhile, police said there was an explosion Tuesday at a ferry pier in the capital. There were no injuries.

As we said Monday:

It is worth noting that Thailand has a history of political unrest: In May 2014, the country’s military overthrew the elected government and seized power. Since then, protests against the junta in Bangkok and elsewhere are common, and while a few low-level explosions have been reported … none has been this powerful.  

Crime and ‘A-RU-Gula’: My Blue Heaven Turns 25

In the late 1980s, a weird thing happened: Hollywood became enamored of a government bureaucracy. The Federal Witness Protection Program was created in the mid-’60s in an effort to encourage legal testimonies against the leaders of organized crime; formally established in 1970, it soon became the basis for a number of feature films, from Witness to The Client to Goodfellas to Eraser to Bird on a Wire to Sister Act. The program’s appeal, as an instrument of entertainment as well as justice, is pretty much self-explanatory: Implicit in the witness protection conceit is a fish-out-of-water tale that finds people and cultures rubbing up against each other, sometimes awkwardly and often quite hilariously.

At the height of witness-protection fever—25 years ago, in August 1990—came My Blue Heaven. Related to its 1950 predecessor only in the song both took their names from, the movie concerns a witness who’s made to live not in a convent or on a farm, but in a closed environment of a different strain: sunny suburbia. Vincent “Vinnie” Antonelli is set to testify against mafia kingpins; in the meantime, he’s obliged to wait out his court appearance under the watchful eye of the fastidious FBI agent Barney Coopersmith. Both of the men’s wives, in short order, leave them; hijinx, if not hilarities, ensue.

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Nora Ephron's Edge

Written by Nora Ephron, just coming off of her success with 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, My Blue Heaven stars the early-’90s power-actor trio of Steve Martin, Rick Moranis, and Joan Cusack. It does not, however, live up to the talent collected in that roster. On the contrary: The movie sags under the weight of the many stereotypes it relies on for LOLs. Coopersmith (Moranis) is Nerdy and Wimpy. District Attorney Hannah Stubbs (Cusack) is Frustrated and Frumpy. The characters, as they fight and dance and avoid hit men dispatched by the mob, interact pretty much exactly as you’d expect them to.

But the worst of it is Vinnie—who, as played by the decidedly not-Italian Martin, spends the film effecting an accent that is 80 percent Don Corleone, 15 percent Arthur Fonzarelli, and 5 percent Super Mario Brother. He utters lines like “a-RU-gala—it’s a VEG-e-tab-le.” He sports a sharkskin suit that he wears while mowing his suburban lawn. He also sports a hairdo that suggests a closer-cropped, grayer-scaled version of the ones preferred by Troll dolls. The whole effect, a contemporary review of the movie put it, is of “a comedy-sketch mutant—a WASP soaked in garlic.”

It’s sometimes said that Nora Ephron was an excellent writer of dialogue, and a much less excellent writer of characters. You can, for other works of hers, quibble with the charge, but My Blue Heaven certainly bears it out. The characters here read more as caricatures than as people, and the ethnic stereotyping, in particular, is blithe and unapologetic. Martin, who was originally slated to play Barney in the movie, was a last-minute replacement for the role of Vinnie. Who was originally supposed to be played by … Arnold Schwarzenegger. (The latter left the project to star as John Kimble in Kindergarten Cop.)

There’s one good thing about My Blue Heaven in 2015, which is that this kind of glib stereotyping is, for a variety of reasons, much rarer today. It’s not just that Hollywood has gotten (relatively) more inclusive when it comes to conceiving and writing and casting films; it’s also that audiences today tend to expect more from their characters than dull caricature—more richness, more depth, more relatability. If caricatures are afoot, we want them to be purposeful and ironized and otherwise justified in their caricature-hood—to diagnose cultural problems rather than advancing them. My Blue Heaven is dated, definitely, but that has very little to do with its age; it has more to do with its ignorance of the fact that the best way to make a movie whose characters endure is to make a movie whose characters are, above all else, human.

Ben Carson Comes to Harlem

On Wednesday, Ben Carson came to Sylvia’s soul food restaurant, an iconic eatery in iconic Harlem, located along Lenox Avenue near 127th Street. The restaurant is a meeting place for black power brokers in this hub of black Democratic support, which Carson, a Republican candidate, wants to tap into in his campaign to become the next president of the United States.

“We Democratic people. We don’t deal with Republicans,” said Eddie Francis, 70, sitting a block from Sylvia’s, under a white tent, where from a table he sold avocados, mangos, and bananas outside a laundromat. “Being a black Republican make it worse.”

Carson has recently surged in the polls, and he holds second place, behind Donald Trump, among likely Republican caucus goers in Iowa. But in black communities like Harlem, he is very much an outsider.

“This has to become of a trend,” said John Burnett, an advisor for the New York State Republican committee, who helped organize Carson’s meeting at Sylvia’s last week with about two dozen business, religious, and community leaders, mostly black and Latino, affiliated as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, “to bring Republican candidates to an iconic symbol of black American culture, which is Harlem. We need the full political process at work to empower black America.”

The black and gold marquee outside the restaurant is synonymous with black soul, black culture, and black achievement. Its matriarch, Sylvia Woods, built the brand from a greasy spoon back when Harlem was flooded with poverty, drugs, and political neglect. Carson, a poor boy from Detroit, turned himself into a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, and an icon of black accomplishment.

Still, Sylvia’s was as an unlikely campaign stop for Carson’s campaign and its brand of conservative politics, both of which have largely resonated with white evangelicals. Carson did not visit Harlem to raise money; his campaign picked up the check at Sylvia’s. Carson came to bring a message, to talk directly to liberal blacks who tuned out of the debates and coverage, and would never entertain the thought of voting Republican. He came to try to put his shared black experience over his political ideology. By breaking bread and shaking hands in an urban black mecca, he also put his Republican opponents and Democratic candidates on notice that he still holds a place in the heart of the black community.

Inside the banquet hall, black and white photos of stars such as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Gordon Parks decked the pumpkin-colored walls. White linens and single red roses dressed the round tables. The sweet smell of soul food magnetized security staff and interns. Carson, 63, dressed in a gray suit and red tie, sat next to Candy, his wife of 40 years, and chatted over bites of fried chicken, collard greens, and three-cheese baked macaroni. He sipped water instead of the signature uptown iced tea. Reverend Vernon Williams, the pastor of Perfect Peace Ministries of Harlem, who works with at risk youth in the neighborhood, offered an opening prayer, thanking God for Carson, his legacy, and the message he was about to deliver.

“So many people have given up on the dream of the United States,” Carson said. And that is what his campaign is about, he said, “bringing hope back, in the right way.”

There was a time when Carson had little hope, he said. Sitting on the “ghetto stairs” of his childhood home in Boston, where he and his mother moved from Detroit after his parents divorced, he realized that they had money for nothing. And, Carson said, he thought: “I will never live to be more than 25.”

“Because that’s what I saw all around me. Death,” he said. Sirens and gunshots. Bloodied bodies splayed on the street. Two of his older cousins had been murdered, Carson said. His mother, Sonya, who grew up in rural Tennessee, cobbled together no more than a third-grade education. She left the house before dawn to go clean other people’s houses. She could never bring herself to rely fully on public assistance, Carson said. So she worked. And she pushed books, like she saw in the children’s rooms of the houses she cleaned, on her two sons: Carson, a then-feeble student, and his older brother Curtis, who is now a mechanical engineer in Georgia.

“I hear a lot of people, particularly progressive people, who say, ‘Carson is a hypocrite, because he grew up and received stuff, assistance,’” Carson said. “‘And now he wants to take it away from everybody else,’ which is a just a total, blatant lie.” Carson joked how a black woman stopped him at the airport to ask why he didn’t want poor people to have healthcare. “I don’t know where they get that,” he continued. “Well, I do know where they get it from, they have to demonize you. But the fact of the matter is I do believe in safety nets, for people who actually need them.”

Carson campaigns on a political ideology that tells black Americans that, despite their race and their socio-economic status, they can still write their own tickets.

Carson taps into deep strains of black conservatism, a philosophy that asserts that blacks must utilize personal responsibility and self-empowerment to reach economic and social stability. Black conservatism has roots in the social and cultural orthodoxy of the black church, which generally does not support abortion or marriage equality. It traces back before Booker T. Washington, who Carson has said is one of his heroes, an educator who stressed that blacks hard labor would mean social equality. It runs through Pharrell Williams, who faced widespread criticism on social media last year after telling Oprah Winfrey that: “The New Black doesn’t blame other races for our issues.” Carson campaigns on a political ideology that tells black Americans that, despite their race and their socio-economic status, they can still write their own tickets. He tells them that no one else can hold them down.

And, this is where Carson tends to split with some in the black community, where he touts prayers and resolve; where he testifies how books opened his mind and made him see that the poverty he grew up hating was temporary, that he alone had the power to change it; where he warns that society must invest in the “young man walking with his pants hanging down” or become afraid of him later; where he seems to blow by the sturdy, steel structure of institutional racism.

Programs like the multi-billion War on Poverty have been a failure, Carson said. But black unemployment in America is now nearly double the national rate, and twice as high as white unemployment. For black Americans, having access to higher education and high-paying jobs has done little to narrow the wealth gap. Some protesting in Ferguson under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” might cringe over Carson’s take on police-community relations, that officers and black residents need to see each other as “friends” (a remark about community policing that garnered a few nods at Sylvia’s). But one strong message Carson brought to Harlem was what he called the manipulation of the left, liberal programs that he said have not only failed the black community, but actually weakened it.

“I don’t believe it’s particularly compassionate,” Carson said, “when you just pet somebody on the head and say, ‘Here, you poor little thing, and I’m going to take care of your food, housing, give you a telephone and do all this stuff for you. And all you got to do is recognize that I’m the one, and make sure you vote for me.’ You know these kinds of things have not worked.” But the social and economic inequalities in communities like Harlem could turn about, Carson said, if the black community stops being politically predictable.

Across the street from Sylvia’s, Cornelius R. Ricks sat on the corner under a red-black-and-green sign, the colors of the Pan-African flag, that read: “Ferguson is Everywhere.” He also had a banner asking those who read it to: “Stop The Urban Youth Violence. See Black People Living, Loving and Respecting Each Other.” Ricks sells replica Negro League baseball hats at the stand to raise funds for his anti-violence group. He raised the same question as Carson at Sylvia’s. “What has the Democratic Party done for Black Americans?” Ricks said. “When are black people going to hold officials accountable for what they are elected for?” If anything, Ricks said, Carson, based on his journey, may do more than any of the other presidential candidates. “We just need a chance,” Ricks said, “and we can achieve anything.”

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If elected, Carson said, he would restart the country’s economic engine by lowering the corporate tax rate, closing fiscal gaps, like the U.S. borrowing money from China to send aid to Pakistan, and he would replace the current tax system with a proportional income tax. He would use the combined savings, Carson said, to create jobs for the unemployed. He also told those at Sylvia’s that he would build incentives for entrepreneurs, and attitudes to turn over wealth in communities like Harlem, a few times, before residents “send them out.”

“That’s how wealth is created,” said Carson. But wealth creation has stalled in the black community, Carson said, largely because of internal strife. “The purveyors of division,” Carson said, “they have fought very hard to make sure that conservative blacks and liberal blacks don’t ever talk together and never see themselves as having similar causes. They demonize one to the other. As a result, they divide and conquer. Exactly the same attitude that prevailed during slavery.”

At the close of the lunch, Reverend Williams asked the would-be president how he would address the growing number of un- and under-employed black and Latino youth in Harlem, spit out of what Williams called a poor education system and a biased criminal-justice system.

“School choice, I think is critical,” Carson said. “And if that requires a voucher program, so be it. But we have to give people the ability to move. That’s the only thing that’s going to force the improvement of the public school system.” Carson said schools must also restore vocational programs. “Those people make a lot more money than a lot of people who go to college.”

As Carson left Sylvia’s, he turned on 125th Street to tour the storied retail strip, followed by a pack of reporters. Past African vendors selling jewelry, DVDs, incenses, ties, and selfie sticks. Past a gray-haired black woman selling cold bottled water. Past federal postal workers handing out fliers to protest mail services at the Staples. Past a girls’ drill team practicing their steps outside of the H&M to a steady drum beat.

Robert Rice rushed Carson to thank him for changing his life. Rice, 47, a Harlem native, had dropped out of school after the 10th grade, caught up in smoking marijuana, and later consuming other drugs. Or perhaps he left school because he never really learned how to read or write. As Rice later studied for this GED, he said his pastor gave him a copy of Carson’s memoir, Gifted Hands. “Just how he changed his life,” Rice said. “It inspired me.” Rice is now a state chaplain. “Absolutely, I would vote him, why not,” Rice said, grinning. “But it’s going to be a tough to get a Republican in there.”

We Love Disney Is Here to Conquer Pop Culture

The 1997 animated film Hercules arrived relatively late in the period known as the Disney Renaissance, underperformed at the box office, and triggered accusations of cultural insensitivity from the population of Greece. But it did become a classic for many of the kids of the day, at least one of whom, Ariana Grande, grew up to be a pop star. Just 3 years old when the film was released, the former Nickelodeon actress has in recent years called Hercules “the best movie,” and seems to regularly screen it on her laptop in her spare time.

Now, she’s recorded an official cover of one of its songs, “Zero to Hero,” for an upcoming album, We Love Disney, which features tracks from other popular performers such as Jason Derulo, Ne-Yo, Fall Out Boy, and Gwen Stefani, as well as a few newcomers with powerful patrons. The source material stretches across Disney’s timeline, but much of it stems from the ‘80s and ‘90s animated films that cemented the company’s brand in millennial minds. The tracklist:

1. “Friend Like Me” (from Aladdin) – Ne-Yo
2. “Part of Your World” (from The Little Mermaid) – Jessie J
3. “Can You Feel the Love Tonight / Nants’ Ingonyama” (from The Lion King) – Jason Derulo
4. “The Rainbow Connection” (from The Muppet Movie) – Gwen Stefani
5. “Zero to Hero” (from Hercules) – Ariana Grande
6. “In a World of My Own / Very Good Advice” (from Alice in Wonderland) – Jhené Aiko
7. “I Wan’na Be Like You (The Monkey Song)” (from The Jungle Book) – Fall Out Boy
8. “Colors of the Wind” (from Pocahontas) – Tori Kelly
9. “Spoonful of Sugar” (from Mary Poppins) – Kacey Musgraves
10. “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat” (from The Aristocats) – Charles Perry
11. “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” (from Cinderella) – Jessie Ware
12. “Let It Go” (from Frozen) – Rascal Flatts & Lucy Hale
13. “It’s a Small World” – We Love Disney Artists
14. “It’s Not Easy Being Green” (from The Muppet Show) – Brenna Whitaker
15. “A Whole New World” (from Aladdin) – Yuna

For a certain segment of the population, the appeal of the project doesn’t warrant explanation; as Carl Smith summarizes at the teen-focused site Sugarscape, “Our lives just peaked.” But for everyone else, it’s worth stepping back to consider the number of thinkpiece threads We Love Disney ties up into a shiny bow. Finally, the corporate alliances behind the modern Top 40 familiarity machine meet Disney’s ever-more-impressive ability to profit off society’s ever-growing appetite for nostalgia meets the so-called death of adulthood. You can throw the covers boom caused by Vine and YouTube into the mix, too. Grande, whose Peter Pan syndrome is the stuff of memes, was already synthesizing some of these trends into platinum-selling success. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which We Love Disney is the top album of the year.

Judging from the first single released for the project, Ne-Yo’s spry and faithful version of Aladdin’s “Friend Like Me,” the finished product will be a bright, bubbly, and straightforward take on bright, bubbly, and straightforward songs. Why wouldn’t it be? As the success of projects like the Lion King 3D rerelease in 2011 have shown, a cosmetic upgrade is all it takes for a beloved classic to start making new money. Besides, Disney has kept the otherwise ailing art of musical-theatrical storytelling alive in the past few decades by bringing radio-pop instincts into the mix—Elton John, Celine Dion, Randy Newman, and Mandy Moore all made high-profile original contributions to the company’s soundtracks.

It’s worth noting that the last time so many name-brand musicians got together for a Disney homage, the results were fascinatingly different. The 1988 album Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films served up a woozy, strange medley from icons (Ringo Starr, Bonnie Raitt) and iconoclasts (The Replacements, Sun Ra) alike. For a taste, check out Tom Waits’s nightmarish “Heigh Ho (The Dwarfs’ Marching Song).” In an admiring New York Times review, Stephen Holden wrote, “The record swirls with emotional crosscurrents, as mature artists with strong musical personalities revisit the childhood world of Disney songs and in many instances discover the darker sides of material that has traditionally epitomized lighthearted pop innocence.” By contrast, if there’s a dark side to We Love Disney, it won’t be on the surface.

Starbucks Adds New Ingredient to Pumpkin Spice Latte: Pumpkin

For Starbucks lovers, few truths hurt more than the one they learned last year: there’s no pumpkin in pumpkin spice lattes.

Last August, food blogger Vani Hari wrote a critique of what’s inside the coffee company’s most popular seasonal drink, which wasn’t publicly available. After back-and-forth emails with Starbucks representatives, Hari got the list of ingredients: milk, caramel coloring “natural and artificial flavors,” lots of sugar, and no real pumpkin.

Hari’s blog post went viral, garnering millions of shares on social media. Many people—who, in 2015, care about where their food comes from than ever before—were outraged. John Oliver captured that outrage well in this hilarious “Last Week Tonight” segment last fall, expressing surprise over the obsession with “the coffee that tastes like a candle.”

Now, just a few weeks before the PSL returns, Starbucks has acknowledged the lack of pumpkin. Peter Dukes, who helped develop the beverage, wrote in a blog post Monday afternoon:

After hearing from customers and partners about ingredients, we took another look at this beverage and why we created it so many years ago. It was simple —espresso, perfectly steamed milk, warm fall spices with delicious flavor of pumpkin pie that reminds you of the cool, crisp days of autumn. So, with that great taste you know and love, the PSL returns this fall, and this time it will be made with real pumpkin and without caramel coloring.

Real pumpkin! Is it fall yet?

The Heroin Statistics That Spooked the White House

Between 2002 and 2013, the rate of people dying from heroin-related overdoses in the U.S. almost quadrupled.

This dramatic increase, as well as a spike in heroin use, is why the White House

The Bandage Dress and the ‘Voluptuous’ Woman

If you have not, yourself, worn a bandage dress, you have probably seen a bandage dress—on a celebrity, on a reality TV character, on a model, in a magazine, in the wild. The clingy dress, most iconically associated with the designer Hervé Léger—composed of Spandex strips sewn together, strategically, to smooth and mold a woman’s body—represents, regardless of its color or cut or length, a marriage of secrets and openness. It shapes openly and unapologetically, undergarment and garment fused into one. In that, the bandage dress acknowledges the obvious: that women have not just “curves,” the geometric phenomenon, but flesh, the human one. The dress would look terrible on a mannequin; it can look wonderful, however, on an actual woman, warm and real and voluminous. Whether you like the bandage dress or not, as a style or as a cultural phenomenon, there’s something quite productive about that fact.

So it was frustrating when, over the weekend, Patrick Couderc, the U.K. managing director of Hervé Léger, was quoted condemning “voluptuous” women for wearing the label’s body-hugging creations. Women with “very prominent hips and a very flat chest,” Couderc said, should not wear the brand’s iconic dresses. (Nor, he added, should lesbians—who, he claimed, “would want to be rather butch and leisurely.”)

In other words: To wear a bandage dress, according to a man charged with marketing bandage dresses, you have to have curves, but not too many of them. You have to have flesh, but for heaven’s sake, not too much of it.

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Bandage dresses first became popular in the early 1980s, when the “King of Cling” Azzedine Alaia introduced them, and ascended again in the mid-’80s, when Léger—the designer most often given credit for bringing them into the mainstream—launched a new line. They were brought back into style in 2007, when the BCBG Max Azria Group, which bought the Hervé Léger brand in 1998, reintroduced the iconic dresses in a series of new colors and patterns and shapes. The bandage dresses, and the body-con trend they brought about, have proven enduring, not just on runways and red carpets, but on the street. They are both a cause and a result of a cultural period that has made a point of emphasizing, rather than downplaying, women’s curves.

So the bandage dress is a story of high fashion distilled into everyday style—and, by extension, the story of fashion’s ability to flatten and spread itself across the culture. What happens on the runways of New York and Paris will, if a design has commercial and cultural appeal, manifest in magazines and movies and TV, quickly trickling down to the sales floors of Neiman Marcus and Macy’s and Zara and Forever 21. That flattening can take place with body-con dresses or with pretty much anything else in fashion. And it means that trends, if people respond to them, can be had across sizes. They can be had across price points. They can be worn by large people and small people and straight people and gay people—by anyone, basically, who decides to wear them.

Which also means: Their designs can’t be patented. The trends they inspire can’t be owned. Fashion creators can’t decide how, ultimately, their clothes will be adopted by the large collective of individuals who have such a fraught relationship with the high-end houses: “everyday people.”

Couderc’s comments are a reminder, though, of how often fashion creators resist all that, and of how much of the high-end stuff is still dictated by designers’ fascination with tall, skinny women. Most of which is, still—still!—designed for women who have very little flesh. (On Project Runway, a show that pays lip service to fashion’s democratization, the challenges that inspire the most complaints from the designer-contestants are not the ones that ask them to construct clothes out of corn husks/seat belts/pet-care products; they’re the ones that ask them to design clothes for “everyday women” and their inconvenient curves.) “Bodycon,” as a style, is short for “body conscious,” but Couderc seems to want to amend that to “body self-conscious.” His comments speak to an enduring, and frustrating, reality about the relationship between women and the clothes they put on every day: that fashion isn’t, at the top, meant for them. That designers can be not just forgetful of the women who ultimately buy their work, but resentful of them.