Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 367

The Fat Jew: Internet Celebrity and Joke Thief

Glance at the popular Instagram account of “The Fat Jew,” a comedian with 5.7 million followers who just signed with the Hollywood talent agency CAA, and you’ll see nothing of particular note. His feed is a collection of Internet memes, with some screenshots of funny tweets and other joke snippets, that he’s somehow parlayed into a modeling contract, a personal wine brand, and a book deal. But the Fat Jew (real name Josh Ostrovsky) is also a poster child for the nebulous world of online joke plagiarism, cherry-picking and re-broadcasting other comedians’ jokes while giving them slim to no credit for it.

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Whose Joke Is It Anyway?

In one way, his deal with CAA feels like ironic commentary on Hollywood’s lack of originality. All Ostrovsky does is take other people’s material and package it into an easily viewable, if trashier, format—not unlike popular shows such as Tosh.0. But the news was greeted with a wave of outrage from comedians from who’ve been pointing out his practices for years. While Ostrovsky now usually makes sure to note his sources on Instagram, either with a barely visible watermark on the image or a link in the description below, there are dozens of notable instances where he’s failed to do so, sometimes offering thin excuses for the error.

The debate over Twitter joke theft has escalated in recent years as people find more and more ways to monetize their feeds. Ostrovsky’s joke “curation” on Instagram (and Twitter, where he has 255,000 followers) might seem harmless, but he reportedly makes thousands of dollars anytime he endorses a product online, a smaller-scale version of the endorsement empire created by celebrities such as Kim Kardashian. Simply by taking a screenshot of whatever jokes were trending any given day, Ostrovsky somehow parlayed his way into a pilot development deal with Comedy Central, although Splitsider reported that the deal has fizzled out after huge protest from other comics.

While the comedy community isn’t divided on Ostrovsky, the idea of joke “ownership” seems less concrete to the wider public, considering that the age-old concept of joke-telling seems built on the idea that no one can claim the rights to a particular concept or line. One aggrieved Twitter user, Robert Kaseberg, who sued Conan O’Brien for telling similar jokes on his late-night show to ones Kaseberg had tweeted, doesn’t have much legal ground—it’s hard, after all, to prove that two people didn’t have the same idea, especially about a topical event.

For all the jokes one could make about Hollywood unoriginality, Ostrovsky may quickly vanish into obscurity.

But Ostrovsky’s approach is more obvious and direct—he snaps a screenshot of jokes, crops out the original user’s name, and posts it. It’s easier, by contrast, to claim ownership of a joke when your actual online footprint is there for all to see. That’s why Ostrovsky makes a half-hearted effort to credit the original creators of his curated feed, but without drawing too much attention to them.

The incentive for CAA to hire a content aggregator is unclear, and Ostrovsky may end up vanishing into obscurity. As the comedian Andy Richter pointed out on Twitter, it’s one thing to get representation in Hollywood, but another to create material the industry actually wants to produce. Well-curated aggregation is a way to generate interest online, but it creates no audience loyalty, and it’s hard to imagine why the Fat Jew’s many Instagram followers would feel compelled to follow his brand to an entirely different venture.

The backlash within the comedy community matters, too—comedians might not be able to control who collects followers online, but it speaks volumes that Comedy Central is no longer doing business with Ostrovsky. Though Twitter remains slow to address copyright complaints and spambot accounts that recycle other comedians’ material, comedians have always self-policed. Their show of force against Ostrovsky is the kind of thing the industry notices, even if many casual Internet users remain unaware of the issue. Ostrovsky may have already booked time at New York Fashion Week in September (presenting “an eclectic collection of apparel”), but it’s much more of a stretch to imagine him breaking into the comedy industry he’s plumbed for material over the years.

What Do Donald Trump Voters Actually Want?

Last week, I asked Donald Trump supporters why they believe that the billionaire real-estate developer will treat them any better than the career politicians they mistrust.

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A Letter to Donald Trump Supporters With One Big Question

The dozens of replies that I received from across the United States make up the largest collection I’ve encountered of Trump supporters setting forth their thinking in their own words. And having read through this non-representative sample, I understand the candidate’s rise better than I did before. Broadly speaking, the men and women who wrote fall into two categories: Those who earnestly believe that Trump is the best choice to lead America and those who are motivated by giddyness at the chaotic spectacle of his success. Of course, anyone polling at the top of a major party is going to have supporters with all sorts of backgrounds and world views, and while the correspondence below includes several recurring themes, many of the rationales are singular.

The table of contents has internal links for those who want to jump to a given entry, but don’t rely too heavily on the titles and short excerpts that I’ve chosen: Many of the responses contained so many rationales that summing them up proved impossible. Below the table of contents you may find all the letters, presented in their full text, in no particular order.

In Donald Trump's first political book, The America We Deserve, Donald Trump writes:

America is experiencing serious social and economic difficulty with illegal immigrants who are flooding across our borders. We simply can’t absorb them. It is a scandal when America cannot control its own borders. A liberal policy of immigration may seem to reflect confidence and generosity. But our current laxness toward illegal immigration shows a recklessness and disregard for those who live here legally.
The majority of legal immigrants can often make significant contributions to our society because they have special skills and because they add to our nation’s cultural diversity. They come with the best of intentions. But legal immigrants do not and should not enter easily. It’s a long, costly, draining, and often frustrating experience-by design. I say to legal immigrants: Welcome and good luck. It comes down to this: we must take care of our own people first. Our policy to people born elsewhere should be clear: Enter by the law, or leave."–– The America We Deserve , by Donald Trump, pages 143-45, Jul 2, 2000.

On the two primary issues as to why I'm supporting Mr. Trump he has remained stunningly consistent.

Even if he is unable to get Chinese currency manipulation to stop, his support of a tariff and bringing back protectionist trade policies, which turned the U.S into one of the most prosperous nations in the world, would be a welcome reprieve from the Chamber of Commerce cartel politicians like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush who drive American workers out of their jobs, depressing their wages with foreign labor.

(Jump to table of contents)

is lacking in one fashion or another, replaced by spin and sleight of hand. Mr. Trump is standing tall above the tainted political refuse beneath. We stood for something once. None of us wants to hear we as a nation are defective from the Oval Office.

(Jump to table of contents)

In summation, it’s because WE still believe our country can be great again and WE need a leader to go before us that embodies our beliefs, one whose life is affected by our lives.

A few hundred years ago, our ancestors came to this country for a fresh start because their homeland had become unbearable to live in. This land was the LAST frontier! Our backs are against the wall now: we do not have any other land to which we can all sail our rickety boats with our few belongings! We do not have any other leader who embodies all that we believe. Our forefathers may have thought "America or Bust"––we are now at the "Bust" part and if we don’t fix our great country! So in conclusion, he is our Joan D'Arc, repeatedly betrayed by his own kind and given to lead us at his own expense! He is fighting OUR battle and it is OUR responsibility to back him!

p.s. Oh, and did I mention: he is NOT politically correct and Americans are so fed up with political correctness. You cannot imagine how refreshing it is to see a human that talks like we talk, who is passionate about his beliefs, and who maybe words things not quite right, but who the hell cares? No one gets it right the first time.

Hell, I rewrote parts of that email to you 6 times hahaha - enjoy!!!

(Jump to table of contents)

Trump is like a train wreck. Not the kind where hundreds of people get hurt. No, Trump's candidacy is like the train wreck in Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss––it just keeps getting more and more absurd as it careens down the mountainside and finally plunges off the cliff. It's funny, even to a 3-year-old. In many ways, Trump is the ultimate comedic actor who never breaks character. We are all watching a mockumentary and I, for one, am not ready for the show to end quite yet.

(Jump to table of contents)

The Zulily Acquisition and QVC's Quest for a Mom Audience

Liberty Interactive, the parent company of home-shopping network QVC, is acquiring shopping website Zulily in a $2.4 billion cash-and-stock deal.

Some are calling the deal a bailout: A couple years ago, Zulily was at the top of its game—but the company failed to meet sales projections (and the expectations of its investors) this year. Despite more than $1 billion in net sales in 2014, Zulily’s sales growth has been slowing, and its shares are down 66 percent in the past 12 months.

The National Retail Federation suspects that online consumers might simply be tired of this way of shopping: “Many flash-sale sites are trying to adapt to consumer ‘deal fatigue’ by highlighting elements like community and personalization. The jury’s still out on whether it will be enough.”

Unlike other flash-sale sites, such as MyHabit or Gilt, Zulily isn’t focused on high-end designer goods, but rather on Millennial moms. That might shed some light on why this deal might be audience expansion for QVC: The company’s image in our collective memory is one of old-school shopping for housewives and people who stay up all night buying stuff they don’t need. In some ways, that resembles the definition of the new shopping mom: Women who stay up nights and buy stuff on their mobiles. QVC’s mobile growth has been tremendous—it now makes up nearly half of its online orders.

Philadelphia-based QVC has since the late 1980s expanded its reach to Japan, Europe, and most recently France. Its ability to reach 300 million viewers worldwide along with $8.8 billion in revenue last year still makes it a retail force to be reckoned with.

Should Everyone Get to See Body-Camera Video?

Since the technology debuted on the national stage last August, one of the most critical questions asked of police departments adopting body cameras has been: Who gets to see?

If a police officer has a hostile encounter with a teenager on the street, but neither of them are badly injured, does the teenager have a right to see video of the incident recorded from the officer’s body camera? If an officer is invited inside the home of a domestic-violence victim, will that victim be able to tell the cop not to record?

And, most importantly, if someone is killed in an altercation with an officer, could that officer watch the video before testifying to a grand jury? Because if so, critics say, that cop would be able to alter his or her account of the event to match what was on video—even if their initial account was wildly different.

Hanging over all these hypotheticals is a question about what body-camera footage is: Is it a public record created by the government and available to the people, or is it personally identifiable information that’s confidential and off-limits? The government, after all, can release town-hall-meeting minutes but not personal tax returns.

These questions—many of which have only received provisional answers—will direct how and whether body cameras actually work as they’re supposed to: as a method of holding officers accountable, not as a method for the government (or members of the public) to surveil other citizens. And one of the places these questions have played out most intriguingly is Washington, D.C.

Earlier this year, its mayor, Muriel Bowser, proposed that its new body-camera program would require some key adjustments. In order to quickly adopt body cameras city-wide, said Bowser, the District would exempt all body-camera footage from its open-records law. At the time, a spokesman for the mayor’s office told me that the cost of redacting the footage would be too prohibitive.

Civil rights leaders disagreed, arguing that the whole point of footage was that the public could see it. And other city leaders spoke up, too, including unlikely figures like the chairman of D.C.’s police union.

“They are the people’s records. The people bought them,” the chairman, Delroy Burton, told me in April.

A few weeks later, the body-camera proposal went away for a little while.

Now, Bowser has proposed a new set of regulations. They aren’t perfect, but compared to laws the rest of the country is considering, they’re remarkable. According to The Washington Post, which obtained an internal memo from the city, citizens could secure a silent copy of any body-camera video recorded outside, including during traffic stops and encounters on sidewalks.

The city would not release footage shot in private places, though any citizen captured by a body cam could go to a police station up to 90 days after the incident and watch the footage. And academic researchers would also have “unrestricted access” to any footage captured by the camera.

Finally, “all video, whether from public or private locations, would be withheld from public review in cases of domestic violence or sexual assault,” reports the paper.

I don’t know of a state considering a program of similar scope, though some cities (notably, Oakland) come close. Illinois, for example, just passed an otherwise widely praised police-reform bill that mostly exempts body-cam footage from the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

D.C. hasn’t passed these guidelines yet, so they are still subject to change. But if it ratifies even approximately similar policies, then one of the most vibrant laboratories in the nation’s ongoing techno-political body-cam experiment will be its own capital.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and His Response to the Times Story

Over the weekend, The New York Times published a long, brutal piece about what it is like to work at Amazon.

Here’s an excerpt that’s typical:

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

Many of the newcomers filing in on Mondays may not be there in a few years. The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,” one former Amazon human resources director said. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.

The Times relied on interviews with more than 100 former and current employees at the retail giant for its reporting.

In a memo to his company’s 180,000 workers late Sunday, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos called the practices depicted in the story as “shockingly callous,” but said: “The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.”

Still, he urged employees who knew of such incidents to email him directly.

Here is the full memo, courtesy of the folks at GeekWire:

Dear Amazonians,

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to give this (very long) New York Times article a careful read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html

I also encourage you to read this very different take by a current Amazonian:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu

Here’s why I’m writing you. The NYT article prominently features anecdotes describing shockingly callous management practices, including people being treated without empathy while enduring family tragedies and serious health problems. The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day. But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.

The article goes further than reporting isolated anecdotes. It claims that our intentional approach is to create a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard. Again, I don’t recognize this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either. More broadly, I don’t think any company adopting the approach portrayed could survive, much less thrive, in today’s highly competitive tech hiring market. The people we hire here are the best of the best. You are recruited every day by other world-class companies, and you can work anywhere you want.

I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company.

But hopefully, you don’t recognize the company described. Hopefully, you’re having fun working with a bunch of brilliant teammates, helping invent the future, and laughing along the way.

Thank you,

Jeff

That “very different take by a current Amazonian” that Bezos refers to is by Nick Ciubotariu, who heads Amazon’s search experience. Ciubotariu posted a long rebuttal to the Times’s reporting. Here’s the tldr version:

Step 1: Have bias
Step 2: Find ex-employees with anecdotal stories that fit in with your bias
Step 3: Gather old stories and criticism while glossing over changes made to improve on that, and completely ignore that it’s still significantly better than industry practice
Step 4: Take half-truths and spin spin spin!!
Step 5: Publish article

It’s worth noting here that the Times, in its reporting, pointed out that Amazon declined to make Bezos available for the article, but offered up other Amazon executives instead. Many of the people the Times spoke to spoke on the record; others requested anonymity because of agreements preventing them from speaking to the media.

But Ciubotariu’s sentiments were echoed by former White House spokesman Jay Carney, who is now a senior vice president at Amazon, who told CBS News:

This is an incredibly compelling place to work. I think the fundamental flaw in the story is the suggestion that any company that had the culture The New York Times wrote about, sort of a cruel, Darwinian or Dickensian kind of atmosphere in the workplace, could survive and thrive in today’s marketplace.

The allegations about challenging working conditions at Amazon are not new. In 2013, the BBC reported that an investigation into a U.K. warehouse found conditions that could cause “mental and physical illness.” And in 2012, the Morning Call, in a series of stories on the online retailer, detailed harsh working conditions for contract workers at Amazon’s warehouses. What was different about the Times’s story was that is focused almost exclusively on the company’s white-collar workers.

An Explosion in Bangkok

Updated on August 17, 2015, at 12:53 p.m. ET

A massive explosion inside one of Bangkok’s most popular tourist attractions has killed at least 16 people and wounded dozens of others, Thai news reports say.

The blast occurred at the Erawan shrine, a Hindu place of worship that is popular among Thais as well as tourists from around the world.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Thai PBS, the country’s public broadcaster quoted Major General Sansern Kaewkamnerd, a government deputy spokesman, as saying those who have lost power were suspected. But Prawit Wongsuwan, the deputy prime minister and defense minister, said it was too soon to say who was behind the attack.

“But it was clear that the perpetrators intended to destroy the economy and tourism, because it occurred in the heart of (Bangkok's) business district," he said.

Thai media also reported that most of the dead and injured are Chinese tourists.

The Bangkok Post reported the death toll as 18 and the number of injured as 117. The newspaper reported that an improvised-explosive device placed inside the shrine’s detonated shortly before 7 p.m. local time. A second device placed nearby was defused, news reports said.

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, The New York Times reports, none has been this powerful.  

China's Response to the Tianjin Explosions

Chinese authorities are still trying to determine what caused last week’s deadly blasts in the city of Tianjin. The toll from those explosions, they now say, is 114 dead and 70 still missing.

The explosions on August 12 displaced nearly 6,000 people from Tianjin, and damaged some 17,000 homes. On Monday, a group of about 100 residents whose homes were damaged sought compensation from the government at the hotel where officials have held daily news conferences.

The Associated Press reports that one banner read: “We victims demand: Government, buy back our houses.” Another said: “Kids are asking: How can we grow up healthy?”

Public dissent in China is rare, and the government quickly clamped down on Chinese websites for “spreading rumors” about the blasts. But this incident—and the response to it—has prompted questions even in state-run media.

The People’s Daily criticized “the way public concerns have been addressed in the press conference held for the Tianjin blasts: things wouldn’t have been that hard to explain if officials could speak less jargon, more down-to-earth language and address them in a more candid way.”

And the Global Times, in an editorial, said:

During the first dozens of hours after the blasts, there was scant information offered by Tianjin authorities. In the two or three days after the first post-blast press conference, the efficiency of information release was not sufficient either. Until Sunday, no officials above deputy mayor-level showed up once at news conferences. …

Tianjin is not an exceptional case in terms of the inadequate disaster-response work. After the tragedy, officials will be at the scene for rescue efforts but few would show up at press briefings to answer the public's inquiries.

The explosions occurred, as we told you last week, at a warehouse for hazardous material. Sodium cyanide, a toxic chemical, was being stored there in amounts that violated safety rules. Chinese media reported that rules permit the storage of about 10 tons of sodium cyanide. The warehouse, officials said Sunday, was holding several hundred tons, prompting fears of contamination in the port city. The AP adds:

Chinese work safety rules require such facilities to be at least 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) away from residences, public buildings and highways. But online map searches show the Ruihai International Logistics warehouse was within 500 meters of both an expressway and a 100,000-square-meter (1-million-square-foot) apartment complex. Those apartments had walls singed and windows shattered, and all the residents have been evacuated.

At a news conference Monday, He Shushan, the city’s deputy mayor who is in charge of work safety, said the sodium cyanide within a 1.86-mile radius of the blast would be neutralized by the end of the day.

Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, in a visit to the area Sunday, vowed to punish those responsible.

“We owe the families of victims, Tianjin people and all Chinese an answer,” he said.

Show Me a Hero: Welcome to Yonkers

Each week following Show Me a Hero, David Sims, Brentin Mock, and Lenika Cruz discuss the controversial efforts to build low-income housing in Yonkers in the ’80s, as depicted in HBO’s six-part miniseries.

David Sims: “Gentlemen, our object is not to create martyrs, or heroes. Our object is to get this housing built.” That’s Judge Leonard B. Sand (Bob Balaban), calmly pleading with the officials of Yonkers to comply with his court order to build affordable housing in the historically white eastern part of the city. It’s a request that seems nothing more than humane and the furthest thing from hysteria-inducing. But HBO’s Show Me a Hero charts the maelstrom of anger that court order created in Yonkers, and the vast gulf of understanding that existed (and still exists) regarding race relations in this country. In the hands of the writers David Simon and Bill Zorzi, and the director Paul Haggis, it lands a powerful, but considered, punch.

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What struck me most about the first two (of six) episodes was how intently Yonkers’ segregation played out onscreen. The show charts the young Councilman Nick Wasicsko’s (Oscar Isaac) rise to the mayoralty at age 28, while also following the city’s resistance to comply with a court order demanding desegregation of public housing and various personal stories playing out in the city’s communities of color. At no point do any of the furious opponents of desegregation interact with the people they’re trying to keep out of their neighborhoods; even the city’s politicians seem completely insulated from them. It’s an issue that stirs up sound and fury, but the protesters’ fears seem to be fueled by their own ignorant nightmares, rather than any real-world context.

There’s one exception: At one point early in his run for mayor, Wasicsko tries to pass a leaflet to Skip Watts (J. Mallory McCree), an asthmatic young man from the projects wrapped up in a tender romance and life as a drug dealer, which stops him from seeking medical help for a condition that ends up claiming his life. Skip shows no interest in Wasicsko’s pleas for his vote, nor should he, really—it’s not as if Wasicsko is a man of particular principle. Isaac plays him as a likable charmer who seems mostly concerned with projecting an image as a reliable leader, perhaps wrapped up in his own neuroses about his young age and dead father. His commitment to obeying the court order is born not from idealism but practicality: More than anything, he wants to avoid plunging Yonkers into bankruptcy.

That might be why Judge Sands’s line about martyrs and heroes resonates so strongly. The court order is simply enforcing the constitutional civil rights of Yonkers’s residents, stringent as it might seem to the petty councilmen who object to the small parcels of affordable housing that will be placed in their districts as a result. It seeks nothing more than some zoning agreements from the city’s officials, but in forcing Wasicsko’s hand (he’s elected out of kneejerk opposition to the previous mayor’s approval of the housing plan, then required to enforce it), it turns him into a perplexing sort of hero to the audience, and a traitor to the cause for the angry mob that elected him.

Simon’s work always has a polemical edge that he couches within warm characterization and attention to detail. Show Me a Hero is an intensely political work that never drops the thread of the human lives in the balance; between every scene of municipal grandstanding and courthouse speeches, we cut to Skip trying to break out of the drug trade, or the nurse Norma (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) struggling with the diabetes-induced loss of her eyesight, or Carmen (Ilfenesh Hadera), torn between returning to her home country and the life she wants to offer her children in America. And it doesn’t lose sight of Wasicsko’s homespun appeal even as he’s sucked into the debate that will prove his undoing.

The protesters on the sidelines, and bigoted council members like Henry J. Spallone (Alfred Molina) are less well-shaded, but their villainy seems so much a product of ignorance and pettiness; the one activist who gets more of a grounded arc, Mary Dorman (Catherine Keener), seems troubled by said ignorance, even though she has a long way to go before confronting it in herself. There’s a lot of groundwork being laid for a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, hinted at in the opening scene and easily Googleable (this is all, of course, a depressing real-life tale), but even by the second episode Wasicsko’s efforts seem intractable. He’s a personable guy, not interested in grandstanding or capitulating to an angry mob, but also not fired by the conviction that desegregating the city is a moral imperative. That coolness seems to protect him to an extent, but it’s hard to tell if that façade can maintain. There’s only so many Maalox and Stoli cocktails one can down. Brentin and Lenika, what did you think of the show’s approach? Is there enough human drama here to cut through the municipal details, or is Simon too bogged down in relating the history of the situation to get to anything else?

Brentin Mock: If anything, Simon hasn’t related the history of the situation enough. It will be interesting to see whether this proves to be a liability. Viewers are introduced to 1987 Yonkers in the first episode via a snapshots-of-America montage that Simon usually saves for the denouement of his stories, as he did with The Wire and Treme. Next, we’re treated to aerial views of the city, as developers helicopter over it, scouting areas to place the low-income houses that viewers eventually will realize are the story’s central tension points. They pan over the east part of Yonkers, where we can see mansions that look like castles and large open park spaces; and then to the far denser west side, which is cluttered with apartment buildings and row homes.

It could be any city in America, and you wouldn’t know it was Yonkers if not for the caption. The story begins, dialogue-wise, inside a generic city council chamber room, where two women explain the distribution of partisan power amongst the mayor and council members. We’re then introduced to a few black and Latino non-leading characters, families of Yonkers’ middle and underclass, followed by a short clip of Councilman Nick Wasicsko getting wooed to run for mayor. We’re a good 14 minutes into the show before it directly clues us in to the central drama.

It’s a very convoluted lead-in, and it’s a gamble. It assumes that the audience will care enough about what happens to this city, especially after they learn that the city is Yonkers. It also assumes that most viewers are sympathetic enough to the cause of low-income housing that they’ll want to see how this drama plays out, in all of its ugliness.

Here’s why I think the series could’ve used a little more history. For me, the more compelling parts of the story, as told in full in Lisa Belkin’s eponymous book, are the fights waged by civil-rights and fair-housing advocates that presage episode one of the HBO series. Those battles, started by a lawsuit filed by the NAACP in 1980, were followed by a federal court finding in 1985 that Yonkers intentionally segregated black families from white families. This happened 20 years after the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act were passed, and not in Mississippi but in the liberal, Democratic stronghold state of New York.

We can only hope, then, that viewers will indulge Simon’s starting point, after those hard-fought NAACP battles, where much of the original true grit of conflict and tension lie. By starting the drama in 1987, with the resistance of the all-white city council to court-ordered integration (emboldened by their constituents’ vitriolic ire), and by hanging the story on the rise of Wasicsko to mayor, Simon risks exalting and privileging white men above all other characters—hero worship of the palest font.

If anything, Simon hasn’t related the history of the situation enough. It will be interesting to see whether this proves to be a liability.

Or maybe Simon starts here because he wants to examine the role of white people in not only undoing their own racism, but also in putting in the work to remedy the consequences of their racism. This is always a tricky crossroads when dealing with racism in popular culture: Focus too much on black people’s fight and the takeaway is that the burden is on the victims to overcome white supremacy. Focus too much on white people’s fight to battle the racist beast within, though, and you risk assigning them messiah status. Navigating this effectively entails ensuring that black characters are afforded adequate agency and humanity throughout the story. But give them too much agency, or even their accurate measure—especially in a real-life drama like this—and historians will come out the woodwork with accusations of black romanticization, as Ava DuVernay unfortunately learned with Selma.

When we meet the NAACP folks in episode one, they don’t have a lot of fight left in them. They don’t share the excitement of their non-black attorney Michael Sussman (Jon Bernthal) about going to the mat with the city council over its non-compliance with the federal housing order. The civil-rights activists sound resigned, weighing whether it’s even worth it to put poor, black people in neighborhoods where they’re not wanted, even with the courts on their side. It’s a paradox historically suffered by African Americans: feeling the agony of defeat even amidst victory. Incredulous, Sussman says “The NAACP arguing against integration; who’d a thought it?” The NAACP activist responds that he’s not arguing against it, but that he’s “just tired.”

That exchange is worth unpacking, though this doesn’t happen. There’s little agency in general among the black characters in the first two episodes, something I hope will change in the remaining four. If you know nothing of the Yonkers story then you could easily believe that this lack of agency is because the black characters just don’t have it in them, and that the NAACP is selling out. More specifically, you could easily believe that these poor, black families are just waiting for Superman—Wasicsko—to save them, a notion that would inadvertently reinforce the opposition voiced by white Yonkers residents who believe that these black families need only work harder so that they can buy real housing like real Americans.

It’s only with knowledge of black activists’ struggles that took place in the years before episode one that you would understand their exhaustion comes not from lack of trying, but from being over-tried. You’d have to understand how Martin Luther King felt when he gave up after only months of fighting for the black poor in Chicago, when met by the same hostile resistance from Democratic whites.

Simon only has six one-hour episodes to tell this story, so I understand that everyone can’t be a hero under those time constraints. But the opening parts are already showing signs of what The Nation’s David Zirin rightfully criticized about The Wire, which was that it failed to adequately characterize black organizers and activists in Baltimore who were equally invested in fighting for their communities.

I have no problem in general with giving white people the stage to work out problems like racism that are of their making. But when the word “hero” is in the title, and there’s such a short arc available for showing who that is, the buyer’s remorse for black and Latino viewers might set in quickly, I’m afraid. I can only hope that white viewers will stick around to the end, no matter how messily it portrays them, but especially because of how it captures their messiness. This story, meanwhile, will be important for all to follow given the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent fair housing decision, and HUD’s recently finalized rule on affirmatively furthering fair housing, both of which have everything to do with what happened in Yonkers.

Lenika Cruz: In a neat coincidence, Show Me a Hero’s premiere comes just after This American Life aired its incredible two-part series “The Problem We All Live With,” which examined the modern challenges of integrating U.S. schools—arguably one of the most promising and yet most difficult ways to improve education for lower-income and minority students. It’s perhaps no surprise that so many telling (and depressing) analogues to the Yonkers story cropped up in that story. Both bring to the fore the immense task that comes after the courtroom victories: the politicians or school officials digging in their heels to please constituents and parents, the great pains taken to avoid talking about everything but race, the angry town hall and city council meetings, the reluctance and fading optimism of of minorities facing so much opposition to the prospect of integration.

Brentin, the way the NAACP’s exhaustion was left as a footnote also struck me the wrong way, and I think you aptly unpacked what felt so unsatisfying about the sidelining of black leaders in this fight. I also think you’re right in suggesting that the show may be purposefully focusing his lens on the hypocrisies of white urban Northern liberals and drawing out their ugly NIMBY-ness. As Simon told Slate,

To echo again what [Ta-nehisi Coates wrote in his new book Between the World and Me] ... There are certain fundamental things about America that aren’t up to African Americans to fix. And what happened in Yonkers is what happened every time, everywhere a white majority is asked to share: to share geographic space, to share political power, to share economic viability. We are not very good at sharing in this country.

I’m incredibly interested in how the show will explore this—white Americans being called upon to fix the systemic inequalities that have benefited them. Integration, it seems, is a goal they’d feel good about supporting in theory, and horrified by once they understand what that means in reality. I’m reminded of a moment in the first part of “The Problem We All Live With.”After playing an audio clip of parents from wealthier Missouri school districts complaining about the drug dealing and stabbings that might happen if students from poorer ones were bussed in, the reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones interjects that it might be easy for listeners to judge these Missouri parents. But then she adds that this exact same conversation and pushback would be happening elsewhere—in liberal New York, for example—only school districts there weren’t even trying to integrate. And so good white Northern progressives get to keep feeling good about themselves because they never even try to change the status quo.

That’s why I’m curious to see how Mary’s thread plays out—I envision a gradual conversion story for her, but I’m also hoping that the series uses her as a fly on the wall in the anti-housing circles. While I have no desire to sympathize with their cause, I’m always attracted to stories that expose the reasonable motivations and fears of seemingly villainous characters—right now, they’re all just a sonic blob yelling “rabble rabble.”

Despite its possible flaws—the afterthought inclusion of black leaders, the sometimes dry shoehorning of logistical information, the slow start, the maybe-misguided belief of Simon and co. that the average viewer cares enough about affordable housing to stick with the story—I think Show Me a Hero shows a lot of promise given its limited six-hour run. I hope to see the three storylines following the affordable-housing residents—Skip’s girlfriend, Norma, and Carmen—get a little more agency, development, and even more attention from Simon’s empathetic and humanizing eye as the series goes on. I also appreciated the realism of allowing their storylines to unfold mostly separately from the political clashes—a byproduct of Simon (smartly) not forcing them to fit some kind of conventional dramatic template, as Vulture’s Matthew Zoller Seitz pointed out. And as you said, David, how truly likely is it that these other characters would ever cross paths with the politicians dictating their futures?

With any luck, this show will manage to find a balance between conveying enough context while shaping the human drama. It can’t be treated as a journalistic effort, nor can it be divorced from the facts of history. I think Isaac is pretty spectacular in his role as Wasicsko, and I’m glad the show chose to hang this particular story, partly, on his shoulders. He’s certainly not the traditional arbiter of justice—there’s no sense of romantic nobility in the work he’s doing, only a kind of dutiful resignation. He’s implementing the affordable housing order, but it wasn’t his choice and or a fight he won. If he’s a “hero,” Simon certainly seems to be working with a deflated definition of the word—a choice, I think, that will make the rest of the season all the more fascinating to follow in its short run.

Why Indonesia Has So Many Plane Crashes

The Indonesian province of Papua is one of the world’s most remote regions, a place so forbidding that scientists regard it as a “lost world” famous for its many undiscovered animal species. On Sunday, the area played host to human tragedy on a large scale. Hours after air traffic control declared that a Trigana Air flight traveling between the Papuan cities of Jayapura and Oksibil was missing, local villagers

The Tribe: A Silent Movie With a Powerful Voice

As if a movie about deaf, school-aged Ukrainian gangsters made entirely without dialogue weren’t an unlikely enough premise for a hit movie, The Tribe—by writer/director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy—is also a real downer. One reviewer said it had her “sobbing uncontrollably with my hands over my head;” another called it the “deaf Scarface.”

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And yet the film debuted to acclaim at festivals last year, and has been touring around the country with Drafthouse Films, spending a week or two in different cities. The Tribe was shot in 2013 in Kiev, uses only Ukrainian sign language, and features no voiceover or translation. The story is entirely dependent on what the actors are able to communicate with their bodies, and the performances are, for the most part, believable and strong. But although the film is innovative in its storytelling, it’s unclear whether its larger purpose is to tell a larger story about life in modern-day Ukraine, or simply to shake viewers to the core.

The Tribe follows a young deaf man, Serhiy, as he arrives as the new kid at a boarding school for the deaf. He quickly finds himself inducted into a gang of older boys who pimp out their girlfriends and steal from townies under the watch of complicit school staffers. Other than in one stomach-churning scene, the teens’ deafness doesn't seem to hold them back much. The boys’ chief skills appear to be knocking people unconscious and wordlessly conveying blowjob prices to truck drivers. After some initial hazing, Serhiy takes well to the thug life. But things turn ugly when he falls in love with Yana, one of his sex-worker classmates.

The Tribe is riveting, in part because you have to stay riveted to understand what's happening. The only sounds in the movie are those of fists hitting flesh, vodka glasses clinking, and grunts of anger. When there are no words, every grimace means something. The Ukrainian version of Valley-Girl speak gets brilliantly rendered with open palms and shrugged shoulders. Before it becomes deeply unsettling, the romance between the two main characters is briefly poignant and—as much as a love affair between a newly minted pimp and his adolescent prostitute can be—fairly realistic.

Slaboshpytskiy doesn't know sign language; he relied on the local deaf community for casting and on interpreters for the direction. He has said he was inspired by a deaf boarding school near his childhood home in Ukraine and by his many years as a crime reporter there. The plot draws on “real-life accounts of so-called ‘deaf mafias’ that operate within the Ukrainian deaf community,” as Slaboshpytskiy told the Daily Beast:

The Tribe is based on a number of stories that the people in the deaf community told me. The deaf mafia is like any alternative system of society, they have unofficial taxes, they have unofficial trials, unofficial bosses in the city.

It may be rooted in reality, but the plot veers into far-fetched terrain at points. Slaboshpytskiy appears to be condemning the wanton kleptocracy that had seized Ukraine in the absence of good government services. “They have a boss in every city which controls the life of the community. I wanted to tell [that] story, on the youngest and lowest levels … so I put it inside a school,” he told Rolling Stone. That much comes through loud and clear, despite the silence. Still, it's hard to believe that any school, even one trapped in whatever post-Soviet hellscape this is supposed to represent, would look the other way as its wood-shop teacher sold two upperclassmen into sex slavery.

Slaboshpytskiy did his reporting in the nineties—a decade in which the Soviet Union fell apart and proceeded to function about as lawfully as his fictional school does. But is it really still that bad?

The Tribe reminds me of another movie in the depressing post-Soviet genre, Lilya 4 Ever, which was set in an unnamed Baltic nation in the early aughts. Based on the true story of a Lithuanian prostitute, the movie’s protagonist is an impoverished teen who is abandoned by her family and sex-trafficked across borders. But just a few years after that film was released, former backwaters like Estonia and Latvia transformed into the “Baltic Tigers.” These days, Lilya would be more likely to get a job at Skype than to become a sex slave. It’s not clear whether Slaboshpytskiy is trying to say that Ukraine hasn't progressed similarly.

When Leviathan, yet another movie about the sinister side of Slavs, came out last year, residents of the far-northern Russian city on which it was based decried the harsh treatment, saying they were portrayed as “drunkards living in our own dump.” But film critics—and even some politicians—defended the film, suggesting that directors only expose the dark realities of their homelands because they love them. Maybe that was Slaboshpytskiy’s aim, as well.

Then again, Americans don't expect Hollywood to reflect our social ills realistically. Perhaps it's a sign of progress in former-USSR cinema if films like The Tribe can serve as works of art, rather than journalism.