Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 37

Westworld and the False Promise of Storytelling

This post contains spoilers for the season finale of  Westworld .

In 2013, a widely cited study published in Science suggested that reading literature increases a person ability to understand other peoples’ emotions. In 2016, another study seemed to debunk it, finding the original study’s results irreplicable and its resulting media coverage way too broad. “Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers,” went The Atlantic’s headline from last week about the reversal.

It might seem laughable in the first place for anyone to think literature bestows superpowers. But that’s actually one of the more abiding beliefs of popular culture, and the question of whether stories improve the soul and mind—and better humanity more broadly—remains eternally in dispute. It’s a question that HBO’s Westworld has riffed on for 10 episodes, with the popular drama’s finale last night suggesting a cynical take on the social value of storytelling.

The final episode, “The Bicameral Mind,” was a lurid one, involving severed limbs and sexual humiliation and a bloody ambush by the “hosts” of the show’s immersive cowboy theme park against their human masters. But just before the climactic revolt, Robert Ford, the venerable park architect played by Anthony Hopkins, laid out his original idealistic vision for the place. “I’ve always loved a good story,” he began. “I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth.”

The admission—that his goal has been to improve the world through storytelling—was strangely jarring, one of the more subtle twists in a show otherwise packed with unsubtle ones. Westworld has all along defied certain conventional notions of “a good story”: It scrambled beginnings, middles, and ends; it hid character motivations so that every action doubled as a mystery; and it mocked the moralizing plot archetypes of the Western—a foundational genre of American entertainment—as hokey and square. The results were sometimes tedious or confusing, wringing drama less from cause-and-effect plots than from the filmmakers withholding information. But a sizable audience remained hooked by the suspense of disorientation, by the handsome cinematic execution, and by interest in the show’s apparent ambition to rewrite the rules of popular fiction.

But in the first season’s finale, the ideal of “a good story,” with all of its absolving power, returned—both within the show’s universe and in the overall form of the show itself. The show’s complicated threading of flashbacks and flash-forwards ultimately has revealed a recognizable, even familiar, design: a linear narrative beginning 35 years in the past and concluding in the finale’s violent end. That narrative can be interpreted as a Biblical tale involving original sin (the advent and enslavement of conscious AI), the fall (the first-ever host, Dolores, being ordered to kill her creator and fellow robots), redemption (Dr. Ford’s on-stage sacrifice), and now apocalypse. Or you can slot it alongside other sci-fi allegories about subjugation and man’s hubris, like Jurassic Park or Planet of the Apes.

Or you can see it as a story about stories—and about whether they are, in the end, transformative at all. Ford’s final monologue spelled it out: Once upon a time he believed that good stories “ennoble” the people who experience them, but over the years he realized he was wrong. “For my pains, I got this, a prison of our own sins,” he said. “You can’t change, or don’t want to change, because you’re only human after all.” Presumably “you” are the park’s customers, engaged in ever-escalating loops of carnage as epitomized by the decades-long transformation of the naive young visitor William (Jimmy Simpson) into the hardened villain known until the finale as simply the Man in Black (Ed Harris).

Aren’t the awakened hosts doomed to the same amorality as Westworld’s human visitors?

But the hosts, at least, could be changed by story. In the park’s very early years, his partner Arnold discovered their machines could eventually achieve consciousness when given access to their memories. Dolores (Evan Rachel Woods) then made a halting journey through a mental maze, stringing together images and moments from her past into a coherent narrative that revealed the nature of her existence—and brought her into self-awareness. The implication: Through the assemblage of narrative, a person becomes a person. In other words, stories do have the power of improvement.

Maybe only to a point, though. What comes after consciousness? Aren’t the awakened hosts doomed to the same amorality that Westworld has enabled in its visitors? Or have their experience of being raped and tortured by the park’s visitors—and treated as livestock by the park’s creators—made them more empathetic? This looks to be the existential mystery of the next season. Perhaps the hosts will be as horrible as humans. Perhaps they’ll be worse; perhaps they’ll be more enlightened.

Or perhaps the issue is moot, determined not by the moral judgements of a newly conscious race but by human hardwiring. Such is the suggestion of the dramatic escape attempt by the Westworld head madame Maeve (Thandie Newton). Amid spectacularly violent scenes of her and her allies battling out of the Westworld compound, the finale revealed that someone had programmed her to try and break out. Even when faced with that knowledge, she insists she’s still acting out of her own free will. But doubt has been planted both about the story she’s been telling herself and the story the show has been telling about the robot awakening. Similarly, when Dolores and her host army guns down the Delos board gala, are they doing so out of a real desire for revenge? Out of newfound political consciousness? Or simply in reaction to some coding directive?

By raising such questions, Westworld evokes that enduring philosophical dilemma: whether (or not) everyone, at base, is simply acting out stories written by another author, biological or divine. Faced with the possibility that free will is a myth, one’s own ability to tell stories—about oneself, or about others—can feel like empowerment; after all, there’s a reason Robert Ford can be described as “playing god.” Yet he’s realized he’s a god of limited influence: His project to “help us become the people we dreamed of being” didn’t work, at least not the way he’d hoped.

Is his failure meant to be a larger, meta-level indictment of certain kinds of storytelling? Creators, critics, and viewers often justify the violence and sex and exploitation of any given entertainment—like, say, Westworld—using the same rationale of edification that Ford does, proposing that essential truths are contained in scenes that might otherwise be seen as appealing to the viewer’s worst instincts. Within Westworld, Ford came to profess that, no, actually the worst instincts were all there were. If he’s right, Westworld is telling a very dark story about itself and its viewers.

The Feedback Loop of Saturday Night Live and Donald Trump

Saturday Night Live has been on television for nearly 42 years, and in that time, it has mocked seven presidents, with an eighth, Donald Trump, now firmly in its sights. The show’s satire is essentially part of the political scenery; at best, a president might knowingly reference it as a sign of self-awareness. Chevy Chase, in his portrayal of Gerald Ford, mocked the president as clumsy and accident-prone. President Ford did not respond by publicly demonstrating his grace and poise, obeying the old maxim about not protesting too much.

Playing Trump on last weekend’s show, Alec Baldwin mocked the president-elect’s impulse control in a sketch that saw him retweeting random high-school students during a national security briefing. The real Trump was not pleased. “Just tried watching Saturday Night Live - unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad,” he tweeted at 12:13 a.m., about halfway through the episode. The irony couldn’t have been more plain: In response to a sketch mocking his propensity for impulsive tweeting, the president-elect ... impulsively tweeted about it. Satire in the age of Trump has already been difficult for Saturday Night Live, but it seems increasingly caught in a feedback loop: Any ridiculous heightening of his behavior is doomed to instant irrelevance by Trump’s reaction to it.

The show’s original attempts at portraying Trump the presidential candidate were abortive. Taran Killam was unmemorable in the role, and Darrell Hammond’s take was that of a knowing circus clown, a provocateur throwing self-aware winks to the audience as he mowed down his Republican opposition. Baldwin’s work has been crucial to a revitalization of Saturday Night Live’s political relevance; his Trump is more straightforwardly combative, a man deeply confused about the power that has been thrust upon him.

“There is a reason, actually, that Donald tweets so much,” his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway (played by Kate McKinnon) says in the sketch. “He does it to distract the media from all his business conflicts and all the very scary people in his cabinet.” Not so, says Baldwin’s Trump. “That’s not why I do it. I do it because my brain is bad.” As SNL prepares for a Trump administration, it’s still playing out the debate over whether the president-elect is trying to throw Americans off the scent of bigger stories with his angry tweetstorms.

The self-awareness that was on display in Hammond’s performance as Trump has shifted over to McKinnon’s portrayal of Conway, who has become the audience surrogate for these sketches. It’s an odd if interesting choice; Conway, the most prominent mouthpiece of the Trump campaign, doesn’t seem like the obvious choice with whom to break the fourth wall. But McKinnon is still best known for her work as Hillary Clinton, and the sense of long-suffering she deployed there somehow filters through to her performance as Conway, whose face is stuck in a permanent grimace.

Baldwin’s Trump has no such humanity, obsessing only over his personal image and uninterested in getting any work done (he tells Conway that he’s going to “build that swamp,” since it’ll be faster than “building a wall” and “draining the swamp”). When he summons his personal adviser Stephen Bannon into the room, a Grim Reaper figure arrives in a black cloak, bellowing, “SORRY I’M LATE.” Perhaps this is what President-elect Trump is referring to when he says the show is “totally biased,” something he’s claimed in previous tweets. But Trump appears confused about the role of satire, geared as it is, at its best, toward challenging those in power. In loudly (and repeatedly) dismissing his own parody, Trump is defying yet another unspoken rule of politics. And as with so many other unspoken rules he’s broken, he’s seemingly suffering little consequence.

SNL’s challenge will be breaking the feedback loop (though the show’s ability to do so is as much up to Trump as it is to the program’s writers). Every president has had his own persona on the show—Ford was clumsy, George H.W. Bush a patronizing scold, Bill Clinton a boisterous cartoon. Now, the show is tasked with delivering a heightened portrayal of a man who, in real life, detests Saturday Night Live and wants the world to know it. In the past, SNL has tried to dispel tension by inviting targets of mockery onto the show, so that they can be in on the joke—Sarah Palin dropped by during the 2008 campaign, and Hillary Clinton played a world-weary bartender in 2016, parodying her own standoffish persona.

Trump has, of course, already appeared on SNL multiple times, and his 2015 hosting effort was widely criticized as helping to “normalize” a candidate who had called Mexican immigrants rapists and proposed banning Muslims from entering the country. As a host, he was an affable, largely forgettable presence, uninterested in poking fun at himself in any significant way and making SNL look toothless. His return to the show seems unlikely, though Trump has defied expectation before.

Next week, the show could mock Trump’s public hatred of SNL, in effect holding a mirror up to a mirror. But that approach would quickly grow unsustainable—SNL itself can’t always be part of the story in an SNL sketch. Still, ignoring Trump’s behavior could also be a misstep; his apparently thin-skinned tweets and the ease with which the show has baited him may point to how he’ll conduct himself as president. After the episode, Baldwin took to Twitter to try and reason with the President-elect, joking that he’d stop his impersonation if Trump released his tax returns. The gag wasn’t so much Baldwin’s acknowledgement that Trump’s tax returns remain secret, but rather the idea that Baldwin could very well strike a deal with the social-media-friendly politician online. Reality is melding with performance, and the world of politics and satire now feel one and the same.

What Caused the Deadly Oakland Warehouse Fire?

Rescue workers say 36 people were killed in Oakland, California, in a fire that torched an artist-collective warehouse known locally as the “Ghost Ship.” It may take weeks to identify everyone killed, because the flames have charred some bodies so badly they’ll have to be identified through dental records. The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office has also opened a criminal investigation into what caused the fire. So far, it’s thought to have been an accident—the result of too many people in a place with rampant building-code violations. But already some of the artistic community’s frustration seems aimed at both the warehouse’s artistic leader as well as the Bay Area’s unaffordable rent.  

The fire started Friday during a late-night rave being held at the warehouse, home to a couple dozen artists. The blaze grew so quickly that flames and smoke trapped many of the people inside, and forced some to leap out of the second-floor windows. Since firefighters extinguished the flames early Saturday morning, rescue workers have methodically removed bits of ash and debris, putting them in dump trucks to be taken to an offsite location, where they can be sorted and checked in case they contain human remains. It is one of the worst U.S. fires in recent memory, bringing to mind the 2003 blaze in West Warwick, Rhode Island, that killed 100 people at a nightclub called the Station.

The warehouse in Oakland was the subject of many complaints. Last month city officials said they were alerted to illegal construction, but inspectors couldn’t gain access to the site. If they had, they would have seen pianos, couches, beds, wood and fabric partitions closing off artist workspaces, and a staircase made of pallets created by the two dozen people who shared the 10,000-square-foot site.

San Francisco and the greater Bay Area have the some of the highest rents in the country, with the average one-bedroom apartment in Oakland renting for $2,000 per month. That has forced some cities in the area to try and reconcile the rising property costs with the desire to keep a vibrant artistic community. In the meantime, some local artists have created live-and-work spaces inside lofts and warehouses, where a community can share the rent, often at the cost of cramped quarters. “These are people on the fringes of our economy who are just kind of getting by doing what they love and they do get overcrowded in these spaces that are not designed to be residential,” Diego Aguilar-Canabal, who had visited parties at the warehouse, told CNN.

About 40 or 50 people were inside the warehouse when it caught fire at 11:30 p.m. Friday. Smoke quickly filled the building, trapping some people on the second floor. The lights had cut out, one survivor, who identified himself as Chris, told the East Bay Times, and people become jammed on the winding pallet staircase. “When you’re in a burning building, you’re being surrounded by a completely hostile environment,” Chris told the Times. “It was kind of a free-for-all.”

After Chris reached the exit, he said he ran to his car to grab a flashlight. By the time he returned, the smoke made it impossible for him to go back inside. Firefighters arrived within three minutes, but it took four hours to extinguish the flames. As rescue workers dug through the ashes, they found more bodies, and what started as 10 dead, rose to 33 by Sunday, and 36 on Monday. Few people were taken to the hospital with injuries, said Ray Kelly, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office spokesman, because “people either made it out or didn’t make it out.” In order to help identify those trapped and burned inside, investigators have asked some family members to collect DNA samples from combs and toothbrushes.

The building in Oakland was leased by a man named Derick Ion Almena, who informally ran the collective, and who often hosted parties there to subsidize rent. Almena lived there with his wife and their three children, but that night, because of the music, they’d rented a hotel room. Almena was criticized by members of the community who said they’d warned him previously about the risk of fire.

The warehouse, which had no running water, plumbing, or sprinkler system, and has been described as a labyrinth of flammable materials, had numerous “habitability” complaints lodged against it; the city was investigating those claims. Almena was also criticized for an insensitive Facebook post he made after the fire. In it, he said:  “Confirmed. Everything I worked so hard for is gone. Blessed that my children and Micah were at a hotel safe and sound... it’s as if I have awoken from a dream filled with opulence and hope... to be standing now in poverty of self worth.” There was no mention of the victims.

Much of the community is now focused on grieving, and locals started a memorial at a nearby intersection. Kaiser Permanente, which is based in Oakland, said it would donate $50,000 to help those affected by the fire, with matching amounts pledged by the Oakland Athletics, the Golden State Warriors, and the Oakland Raiders, the city’s pro sports teams. Meanwhile, firefighters were sifting Monday through the remains of the warehouse, and the fire battalion chief said the death toll would almost certainly rise.

The 'Comet Pizza' Gunman Provides a Glimpse of a Frightening Future

After weeks of debate about the theoretical and abstract dangers of fake news, there’s finally a concrete incident to discuss. On Sunday, a North Carolina man walked into Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in an affluent corner of Northwest D.C. wielding an assault rifle, which he fired at least once.

The man, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, told police he intended to “self-investigate” a bogus story alleging that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilia ring out of the restaurant. The story, dubbed, deplorably, “Pizzagate” has spread around certain fake news circles, culminating in Welch’s expedition to Comet on Sunday.

So much of the discussion about “fake news” has involved vague questions about, for example, whether Russian-backed propaganda could have been a factor in Donald Trump’s victory. A big Washington Post report suggested that Russia had played a role in spreading lots of fake news; Adrian Chen, among others, convincingly argued that one major basis for that report was extremely fraught. There’s a broader question of the extent to which a foreign power could influence the election, and the extent to which that would really be anything new. Jack Shafer suggests not.

But the Comet incident offers a disconcerting example of what looks like a concrete result of fake news leading to violence. BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman last month offered an excellent forensic tracing of how the story came about. A white-supremacist Twitter account falsely claimed on October 30 that emails showed a pedophilia ring centered around Clinton. It jumped from there to message boards, and then to bogus news sites. Eventually, the Patient Zero Twitter account passed along the bogus posts as affirmation of his tip, even though the story originated with him anyway. The connection to Comet came because the restaurant’s owner popped up in emails with Clinton campaign chair John Podesta discussing a fundraiser. Those emails were hacked and then leaked during the election by an unknown actor, though U.S. intelligence officials have said they believe Russia is behind the hacks.

The “Pizzagate” story goes beyond some of the other bogus claims made during this election. “Random D.C. pizza parlor is the home of an international pedophilia ring run by the former first lady and Democratic nominee for president” wouldn’t pass muster at The Onion, to say nothing of less reputable, less entertaining satire sites. Yet Welch is not alone. The New York Times reported in November that one other person had already shown up to investigate, presumably without a high-powered firearm. There were death threats and hundreds of social-media posts.

The gullibility involved in the case is disheartening, and the recourse to weapons is scary. But the more frightening problem is that there’s no promising solution to the causes that produced the showdown in Chevy Chase on Sunday. Most suggestions for fighting back boil down, as Shafer notes, to some form of censorship, which is an unacceptable path.

Nor is the traditional press in a position to make much difference. There’s a long list of overlapping theories, some valid and some not, for the weakened position of the traditional press, but whatever the truth, it’s not structurally prepared to fight this sort of thing. The barriers to entry for media outlets, including the bogus ones that spread the Pizzagate story, are extremely low, while traditional outlets can no longer maintain any sort of oligopoly on distributing news, so that the emergence of fake news stories is unstoppable. The press can debunk them, of course, and in fact it has done an admirable job—as Silverman’s piece and another in the Times did. But this makes little difference. The audiences that are receptive to those debunkers are the ones who would have missed the original fake story anyway, and the ones who believe the fake story are inclined to dismiss mainstream reports out of hand, so the debunkers won’t influence them either.

It would be helpful if responsible citizens would do all they could do to stifle stories like this. But that hasn’t always been the case. Retired General Michael Flynn, a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who Trump has named as his national security adviser, helped spread one of the early stories about a pedophilia ring that Silverman identified:

U decide - NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc...MUST READ! https://t.co/O0bVJT3QDr

— General Flynn (@GenFlynn) November 3, 2016

One major proponent of the Pizzagate story has, unsurprisingly, been InfoWars, Alex Jones’s clearinghouse for wild-eyed conspiracy theories. Trump has courted Jones, appearing on Jones’s radio show and praising him.

Meanwhile, Flynn’s son, who is a top adviser to his father, fueled the Pizzagate story Sunday night with a tweet:

Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many "coincidences" tied to it. https://t.co/8HA9y30Yfp

— Michael G Flynn

Adam Pendleton on Art's Turbulent Moment

Although Adam Pendleton’s new exhibition, “Midnight in America,” was finalized long before the results of the U.S. presidential election in November, the timing of its opening at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich, Switzerland, coincided neatly with intense global curiosity about what the next chapter of American history might look like. For Pendleton, whose work uses language and abstraction to explore history, race, and art itself, the show was a direct response to ideas that had been swirling around in popular discourse regarding the election. Its title is a play on the famous television commercial for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1984, referenced by Hillary Clinton earlier this year. Donald Trump she said, has “taken the Republican Party a long way, from ‘Morning in America’ to ‘Midnight in America.’ He wants us to fear the future and fear each other.”

Despite the sense of darkness the title evokes, Pendleton insists that the exhibition isn’t trying to equate midnight with metaphorical darkness, but rather is emphasizing that history is moving in a different direction, one that allows “a different sense of possibility.” His show includes six new paintings, called “Untitled (A Victim of American Democracy),” spray painted and silk screened in superimposed layers of black paint. Two larger wall works, resembling pages from a notebook, incorporate writing by W.E.B. DuBois and Amiri Baraka. Pendleton’s artistic manifesto, which he calls “Black Dada,” refers in part to Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus,” which is featured in the show.

Pendleton hails from Richmond, Virginia, and works in a studio in Brooklyn, New York. He’s one of the youngest artists represented by Pace Gallery, and his work has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. He spoke with me by phone. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sophie Gilbert: Can you tell me a little about “Midnight in America”, and where the idea for the show came from?

Adam Pendleton: The language I use in the paintings that anchor the show was pulled from a speech that Malcolm X gave in 1964 called “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Not exact phrases or quotes, but pulling from something he was saying in the speech about how he, and African Americans, were victims of American democracy. I often use language in my works. And the historical context was that someone who was being systematically oppressed in American society actually had a deeper belief in the American democratic project, and was arguing that it could in fact be a more open and just place.

So when I was thinking about how to contextualize these paintings, which are actually rather abstract when you see them, I wanted the title of the exhibition to prompt an interaction with the works on view. “Midnight in America” seems appropriate as it plays on Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” and I think with the tone and the dynamic of the recent election it seemed as though we were headed toward a darker place. This isn’t a binary that I’m setting up between light and dark, where light is good and dark is bad. It’s rather that we’re opening up to a different realm, a different sense of possibility.

Installation view, Midnight in America, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, 2016

Gilbert: What does it mean to you to have the show open now, in the context of recent events?

Pendleton: It’s funny, because I think the title of the exhibition suggests something that would be subdued in some ways. But strangely enough, now that I’ve finished installing the exhibition, there’s a kind of exuberance that’s on display that exist in the individual works but also in between the objects themselves. I think that it articulates that arriving at one place or political situation or dynamic that isn’t desirable just means there’s somewhere else to go. It can shift attention in a critical and meaningful way and I think it’s time for us as citizens—and perhaps for me as an artist—to ask critical questions about the cultural and social space that we share with each other.

Gilbert: You’re someone who juxtaposes history with a perception of the future in your works, so how do you begin to respond to events like those of the past month?

Pendleton: I’m very much involved in examining the past, and the present in relationship with the past, and how that helps to articulate a future dynamic. In the past several years, current events have played a role in my works, between the Black Lives Matter movement and perhaps the recent election, but in a strange way I’m more grappling with and deconstructing both the language and the potential of this phrase, “Black Lives Matter.” It can be read in so many different ways and it registers in increasingly complex ways within the work, often through abstraction. Abstraction is really another word for freedom. You’re sort of untethered from obvious obligations, creating something that is unspecified and undefined.

Gilbert: Do you see your work as having a particular message or is it more about encouraging a particular kind of interrogation?

Pendleton: It’s much more about encouraging an interrogation, and a thoughtfulness to slow things down. You read a news article and you forget about it the next day, but we’ve been looking at the same paintings and sculptures and even films for decade after decade, and reading the same books. So there’s this kind of base where things slow down when we look at them outside of the immediacy of current events. This tells us something about ourselves either in a theoretical or in an aesthetic sense, by speaking to a more complicated idea of who we are as human beings.

Gilbert: You used the word “exuberance” earlier. Some people have expressed recently that difficult times in history are times when art can really thrive. Do you have a sense of that in your own work?

Pendleton: I’ve been using this phrase “Black Dada” to articulate my body of work in general. When Dada came about it had a direct relationship to World War I and how artists responded to that moment. I think there are many different ingredients that are utilized to make something of some kind of cultural worth, so I’m not going to make a direct connection. The exuberance I speak to is the fact that I respond to things visually. And I often refer to what I do as visual note-taking. So in saying there’s an exuberance in the work itself, it’s not necessarily me responding to socio-political dynamics that may cause or create the exuberance. It’s really me investing deeply in my project as an artist and asking myself perpetually, what does Black Dada look like? And each project, exhibition, or publication, offers an opportunity to better articulate that.

It’s nice to go, and it’s nice to come back. I think that articulates perpetually what it’s like to be an American.

Gilbert: What do you have on the horizon?

Pendleton: After this show here in Zurich I’m opening the third leg of my traveling museum exhibition “Becoming Imperceptible,” which will be followed by my first solo show in a European institution at the KW Institute in Berlin.



Gilbert: Do you find that responses to your work are different around the world to how it’s received in the U.S.?

Pendleton: Yes and no. Largely, no. I think my project is broad enough that there’s something to take away from it no matter where it’s showing.

Installation view, Midnight in America, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, 2016

Gilbert: Do you have an idea of what role you in particular and artists in general can play over the next four years?

Pendleton: I hope that artists realize that there are stakes involved in everything they do. No gesture lacks weight even when you want it to. It matters. Personally, as an artist, I always attempt to be as rigorous as I can, but I hope that I take even more seriously what I find to be a responsibility as an artist, as someone to look at something to think about it—to acknowledge it exists.

Gilbert: What was it like being in Switzerland during the election?

Pendleton: I said to someone that it’s nice to go, and it’s nice to come back. And I think that articulates perpetually what it’s like to be an American. Because it’s not uninteresting how things unfold and how there’s this perpetually regressive tendency in America to go backward. Like, “Oh, let’s revisit that 1973 decision of the Supreme Court.” I like thinking about it.

Gilbert: Who do you think are some of the American artists doing the most interesting, relevant work right now?

Pendleton: It’s wide-ranging. Someone like Robert Ryman oddly enough is as interesting to me as William Pope.L. These are both interesting conceptual projects with formal dimensions that have a kind of rigor in relationship to art history that not all artistic projects have. And then I can think of someone like Joan Jonas, and people who shift our attention, and change how we think about our project of living.

Gilbert: What do you hope people take away from “Midnight in America”?

Pendleton: I hope they realize that there’s perpetually a direct relationship between political and social movements and art-historical movements as they relate to conceptualism and abstraction—that they really feed into each other. I like to say that I’m a conceptual artist. Conceptual art came about during the civil-rights movement, and that’s a dynamic I always like to think about and examine in my work.

Why TV Needs ‘Weak’ Female Characters

In the first episode of the HBO series Enlightened, the show’s heroine, Amy Jellicoe, learns that she’s been fired. She does not take the news well. Within minutes, she goes from pitiable victim, sobbing abjectly in a bathroom stall, to mascara-streaked fury. “Go back to your sad, fucking, little desk,” she sneers at her assistant before tracking her ex-lover and presumed betrayer to the office lobby. “I will destroy you—I will bury you—I will kill you, motherfucker!” she screams at him through the elevator doors that she somehow, in a feat of desperation, manages to pry open.

Though the scene aired five years ago, it’s still a pretty radical few minutes of television, and not just because of the ferocity of Laura Dern’s performance. What feels most striking is the series’ willingness to dramatize an extended scene of female distress for something other than a moralizing end. In this sense, Enlightened anticipates the Amazon series, Fleabag, which evinces a similar empathy toward a female character in the grip of powerfully negative emotions: anger, sadness, grief, self-doubt, shame. It’s probably no accident the two shows have almost identical promotional stills—close-ups of their protagonist’s makeup-smudged faces, staring directly to camera. Like a number of other female-centric, female-created tragicomedies to have emerged on TV in recent years—Transparent, Girls, Catastrophe, Insecure—the series also share a commitment to more compassionate portrayals of dysfunctional heroines, by suspending judgment even (or especially) when they’re at their worst.

At a glance, it might seem as though no such considerations are needed. “Peak TV,” after all, has yielded a surfeit of deeply flawed female characters, to the extent that critics have begun to hypothesize an entire subgenre of shows featuring “unlikeable women.” Yet in most cases, these flaws are at least partly redeemed—generally by the heroines’ professional acumen and career success­­—or subject to punishment (see: Cersei Lannister’s long walk of shame in Game of Thrones). By contrast, dark comedies like Transparent, Fleabag, and Girls take a refreshingly amoral approach, and are thus distinguished less by the quality or quantity of their characters’ shortcomings, than by their refusal to adjudicate them. “Competence,” for instance, has often operated as a get-out-of-jail free card for female characters; it’s a quality, as Willa Paskin has observed, that most regularly preempts debates about their “likeability.” So when shows like Catastrophe offer an unapologetic presentation of their heroines’ failings, it feels like a provocation: a way of challenging audiences to confront their own biases against historically less sanctioned forms of female behavior.

Put another way, what distinguishes this run of TV tragicomedies isn’t their heroines’ unlikeability, but rather, their vulnerability, that is, the frankness with which they disclose feelings and experiences women have long been encouraged to suppress. It is no coincidence that so many of the programs mentioned make deliberate (and much-derided) use of nudity. Like the shots of unmade-up faces that fill Transparent’s third season premiere, the images of Hannah Horvarth sans culottes are a sign not of the shows’ prurience, but of their politics: their insistence on giving women the license, and space, to be exposed. In contrast to the “strong female characters” that have dominated popular culture in recent decades—and that, as Carina Chocano argued in The New York Times, are often distinguished by their lack of gendered behavior—these comparably “weak” characters undermine the conflation of complexity with an implicitly masculine code of values. Too often, to be “strong,” in Chocano’s phrase, is to be “tough, cold, terse, taciturn, and prone to not saying goodbye when they hang up the phone.” Instead, these shows take the bold step of assigning to their lead characters some of the most disparaged of “female” traits.

In public life, as in popular culture, women are given little latitude to slip.

On the one hand, contemporary media’s deprecations of female “weakness” are understandable. Ever since the writer Mary Wollstonecraft weaponized the term in her 1792 treatise “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”—which eviscerates the forced imposition of “weakness” on female subjects—both the language and concept of vulnerability remains almost a feminist taboo. For postfeminist audiences, even a hint of frailty in female characters can be an uncomfortable reminder of the pre-second-wave world.

Yet worlds populated only with aspirational characters pose hazards of their own. As the literary scholar Lennard Davis has argued of the novel, such narratives can offer “false or surrogate examples of change that might satisfy any external need or desire for change.” In other words, fictions that focus disproportionately on women’s triumphs might suggest to readers (or viewers) that no impediments remain to their broader attainment. In this sense, it might not be paranoid to suggest that pop culture’s fetishization of female strength is at least partly a compensation for, or distraction from, its real-life curtailment. “Strong female characters,” in this light, are truly the least Hollywood can do.

In this way, the cultural value of these socially and emotionally vulnerable characters becomes increasingly clear. When popular media sends the message that women are to be valued inasmuch as they are “strong,” it tacitly endorses their derision, if—or when—they are not. What feels significant about the appearance of Fleabag, Enlightened, Transparent, Girls, Insecure, Better Things, and Catastrophe, with their flailing and failing characters, is the possibility that they might collectively help to normalize a broader and more naturalistic range of female bodies and behaviors. In their willingness to focus on weakness, these shows have a paradoxically empowering effect: affirming the idea that women’s humanity is not jeopardized by any momentary lapse. In particular, they accomplish something that feels more like a feat than it should—they uncouple female error from moral judgment. Fleabag’s protagonist, by the finale, has copped to some startling sins, and yet the episode’s mantra (“people make mistakes”) signals the sort of equanimity with which viewers are invited to accept this news. No matter how deplorable her actions, the point is for audiences to feel with the character, not about her.

“If you’re making a ‘feminist’ story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho.”

In so doing, these series position themselves less in a specific televisual tradition, than in the genealogy of feminist filmmaking dating at least back to the 1970s. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, A Woman Under the Influence, and An Unmarried Woman, for instance, are striking in part because of the degree of naturalism with which they document their heroines’ imperfections. Roughly contemporaneous films by female directors go even further. Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle, Barbara Loden’s Wanda, and Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, among others, all make it a point to focus on characters in desperate or disenfranchised states. Unlike some of the melodramatic “women’s films” that preceded them, however, they do so for the sake of critiquing social expectations of women, rather than the women themselves. This tactical use of disempowered heroines has more recent cinematic inheritors, as well—perhaps most notably, Kelly Reichardt, a poet of the down-and-nearly-out, whose 2016 film, Certain Women, focuses on characters who in her words, “don’t have a net, who if you sneezed on them, their world would fall apart.”

By contrast, much contemporary film and TV inclines toward the uncritical celebration of female toughness. In a 2013 interview, for instance, the actress Natalie Portman decried the “fallacy in Hollywood” that “if you’re making a ‘feminist’ story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho.” The critic Sarah Blackwood has argued in The Hairpin that literary culture has witnessed a similar devaluation of conventionally “female” traits. Thus, for instance, she notes of the Twilight series that Bella’s preference for sentimental experience condemns her among many young (female) readers, who idolize The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen for her archery chops.

A handful of shows, of course, is hardly a panacea. That nearly all the characters mentioned above are white, and at least middle class, suggests that the opportunity to be less-than-tough is still a privilege only certain female demographics can enjoy. There’s also the fact that so many of these women remain confined to the 30-minute “comedy”: the format and genre that, compared to the hour-long drama, still enjoys comparatively less prestige.

Yet there is something encouraging about the fact that so many of these female-driven and -scripted series are gaining acclaim, even with their non-aspirational ethos. Viewers of Girls, for instance, may argue about whether they’re a Jessa or a Marnie, but in contrast to the Sex and the City cast, these characters invite comparison because of their flaws, not despite them. In the years since Carrie Bradshaw made her debut, television comedy, at least, seems to have grown more comfortable presenting less palatable—and less marketable—depictions of the female experience. These characters may spend screen-time seeking each other’s approval. But they don’t need yours.

Pedro Almodóvar and Donald Glover: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

The Evolution of Pedro Almodóvar

D.T. Max | The New Yorker

“He appreciates the fact that American film critics championed his work from the start, but one aspect of their support confused him: Many defined him as a gay director. It was a useful label for him—the gay press helped to make him well known in the States—but an ironic one for an artist whose films had done so much to suggest that sexuality was not so easily defined.”

Storytelling vs. Oversharing in the Age of Snapchat

Clare Sestanovich | Literary Hub

“If the obsessively curated self-mythologizing turns everybody into an author of a sort, a creator of first-person avatars, what are the stakes for the literary world? What does all this authorship mean for those creating confessional characters in the old-fashioned form of the novel? Or at any rate, how might it shape the way we read them?”

Capital, Diplomacy, and Carnations

Teju Cole | The New York Times Magazine

“Photojournalists give us images that work by themselves, or seem to. A photograph in a work by [Taryn] Simon is different: It verifies, or purports to verify, the claim made in its caption, rather than the other way around. The photograph is reduced to the status of evidence: It is there to testify to something that is not a photograph, something that predated its making.”

Why Aren’t There More Famous Black Sci-Fi Authors?

Bryan Washington | The Awl

“American literary fiction, already an ‘other’ within the business of fiction itself, consistently and predictably demonizes the minority entities within it. If their narratives aren’t written in a supposedly ‘exotic vernacular,’ reporting live from el barrio, or delivered with the express — but never too tempestuous — intention of conveying ‘digestible’ outrage, minority authors often have a hard time getting a foot in the door; so to pen a piece set on another planet? In another galaxy? Navigating that market is, to put it lightly, a long-shot at best.”

You Have to Take Donald Glover Seriously Now

Micah Peter | The Ringer

“Music is an art form, but it’s also a means to the end. The end is freedom—creative freedom, financial freedom, the freedom to do nothing. Glover, currently the most exciting young polymath working in pop culture, had a point back then. And don’t be fooled: He also had a plan.”

How Podcasts Are Reinventing Music Journalism

Caroline Crampton | The New Statesman

“It turns out that musicians really like to talk about the work that goes into their music, and podcasts provide them with the perfect place to do so. It has long been the case that niche subjects with dedicated audiences have found a natural home in podcasts, but now it seems that the medium can also provide an alternative for areas that are well covered by traditional media, too.”

L.A. Finally Gets Its Love Letter With Issa Rae’s Insecure

Hannah Giorgis | Buzzfeed Reader

“While Atlanta peppers primarily Southern music into the background of its male leads’ lives and Master of None’s Father John Misty references alone are peak Williamsburg, Insecure employs its soundtrack to more profound effect: The music serves to further shape the show’s unmistakably L.A. mood. Rolling views of the ocean and Hollywood Hills, frank dialogue about and depictions of rapidly gentrifying black neighborhoods like Baldwin Hills, and notably West Coast funk influences are woven throughout the series. The cumulative effect is as soothing and laid-back as (black) L.A. itself.”

The Weeknd Builds an Even Higher Pop Palace

Doreen St. Félix | MTV News

“The way is littered with hanging chandeliers, white lines, sunken luxury roadsters—all the relics marking the blasé subclass of the nouveau riche. The Weeknd has selected himself as their bard. The people of Starboy are transitory women and their permanent male adversaries, the standard demographic of The Weeknd’s glossy underworld.”

Italy's Referendum: Not 'Italexit,' but Still Critical

Italians vote Sunday in a referendum that is being called the most significant vote in Europe this year—bigger even that Brexit, the vote in which the U.K. chose over the summer to leave the European Union.

The referendum Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has staked his political future on concerns proposed constitutional changes that would weaken the Senate, strengthen the central government in Rome, and, consequently, make decision-making in the EU’s third-largest economy more efficient. The proposal would also amend the country’s complicated electoral system for the Chamber of Deputies and result in Rome gaining more power over the regions. Renzi says the changes are needed to streamline Italy’s government, but his critics—including members of his own center-left party—say the referendum is an attempted power grab by the government.

Renzi’s proposed changes were approved by both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate earlier this year. But they failed to gather the two-thirds majority required in each chamber, prompting him to seek a referendum on the matter. Indeed, he was so confident the proposal would pass, he pledged to quit if voters rejected his proposed changes. But it’s been a year of shocks for the political establishment in Europe (and indeed the U.S.): Following the success of the Brexit campaign, which defeated the better-funded “Remain” side, Italians appear poised to hand Renzi a defeat. Brexit comparisons abound. But Matteo Garavoglia, a nonresident Italy Program Fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that they’re overblown.  

“As it is often the case with a referendum, people do not vote on the question itself,” Garavoglia said. “For most people it is, as very often the case, a vote for or against the government.” He added the similarity between the two situations ends with the populist tone of the campaign in Italy, with “crass slogans that have nothing to do whatsoever with the substance of the proposed referendum on the constitutional reform.”

Indeed, Italy’s relationship with the EU is not in question. Italy was after all one of the founding members of the bloc, and most Italians still view membership favorably. “No Italian would seriously argue leaving the European Union,” Garavoglia said. “It would be absolutely suicidal for Italy.”

Still the political developments in Europe this year have obscured the widespread economic problems across the eurozone, many of whose 18 members have not recovered fully from the global recession of 2008. The EU’s formula for the most imperiled nations—Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Greece—was austerity, a prescription that stung the most vulnerable citizens in those countries. In the political backlash that resulted, far-left and far-right populist movements made gains, the establishment lost favor, and the political parties that seemed secure across Europe since the end of World War II were severely weakened. Amid this, the economic vulnerabilities remain. Italy, for instance, is struggling with massive public debt—130 percent of GDP—and a fragile banking sector where about 20 percent of loans are seen as troubled—problems that Renzi says he will be able to tackle if Italians vote “yes” in the referendum. If they vote “no,” it could unleash a period of political uncertainty and, consequently, economic uncertainty.

“If Italy were to enter a phase of uncertainty, with shaky governments, with a new government, and be attacked on the financial markets, this would be a huge problem,” Garavoglia said. “Not just for Italy, of course, but for the rest of Europe. Italy is just too big to fail.”

In the event of a “no” vote, Garavoglia says, Italy could expect to see a speculative attack on Italy in the bond market. But it’s the political repercussions that could be bigger. Several scenarios have been outlined: The president would ask Renzi to form a new government; or the president would appoint a respected technocrat as a caretaker prime minister to shepherd the electoral law and pass the budget for 2017. This could lead to instability and a general election that could propel the populist Five Star movement, which is riding high in the polls, to power.  

If Renzi triumphs, and his constitutional changes are put into place, it would remake modern Italy, handing the central government more power, at the expense of the regions and the legislature. The repercussions would be felt far beyond Renzi’s tenure in Italian politics.

“The fundamental question that should be asked is this: Is Italy a sufficiently mature and sophisticated democracy to handle a concentration of power in the hands of the executive?” Garavoglia told me. “Are the democratic institutions strong enough to handle this or is it better not to touch things? This is a country that had Mussolini and fascism, and, more recently, 20 years of Silvio Berlusconi.”

So, Why Can't You Call Taiwan?

It’s hardly remembered now, having been overshadowed a few months later on September 11, but the George W. Bush administration’s first foreign-policy crisis came in the South China Sea. On April 1, 2001, a U.S. Navy surveillance plane collided with a Chinese jet near Hainan Island. The pilot of the Chinese jet was killed, and the American plane was forced to land and its crew was held hostage for 11 days, until a diplomatic agreement was worked out. Sino-American relations remained tense for some time.

Unlike Bush, Donald Trump didn’t need to wait to be inaugurated to set off a crisis in the relationship. He managed that on Friday, with a phone call to the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen. It’s a sharp breach with protocol, but it’s also just the sort that underscores how weird and incomprehensible some important protocols are.

Trump’s call was first reported by the Financial Times, but the Trump campaign soon confirmed it and issued a readout of the conversation:

President-elect Trump spoke with President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, who offered her congratulations. During the discussion, they noted the close economic, political, and security ties exists between Taiwan and the United States. President-elect Trump also congratulated President Tsai on becoming President of Taiwan earlier this year.

Why would Trump not speak with Tsai? Here’s where the strangeness starts. The U.S. maintains a strong “unofficial” relationship with Taiwan, including providing it with “defensive” weapons, while also refusing to recognize its independence and pressuring Taiwanese leaders not to upset a fragile but functional status quo. It’s the sort of fiction that is obvious to all involved, but on which diplomacy is built: All parties agree to believe in the fiction for the sake of getting along.

The roots of this particular fiction date to 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China was routed by Mao Zedong and the Communists, and Chiang fled to Taiwan. The U.S., in Cold War mode, continued to recognize the ROC in Taiwan as China’s rightful government, and so did the United Nations. But in 1971, the UN changed course, recognizing the People’s Republic of China—or as it was often called then, Red China—as the legitimate government. In 1979, the United States followed suit. Crucially, the communiqué proclaiming that recognition noted, “The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.”

Officially, this has also been the policy of Taiwan for almost a quarter century. Under the 1992 Consensus, another artful diplomatic fiction, both Taipei and Beijing agreed that there was only one China and agreed to disagree on which was legitimate, as well as maintaining two separate systems. During the Bush years, the U.S. said it would defend Taiwan in an attack, but Bush also pushed back on Taiwanese moves toward independence.

Despite recognizing the PRC, the U.S. has kept close ties with Taiwan since 1979. The State Department notes that “Taiwan is the United States’ ninth largest trading partner, and the United States is Taiwan’s second largest trading partner.” More importantly, the U.S. has sold some $46 billion in arms to Taiwan since 1990, which are intended as defensive. Last December, the Obama administration sold $1.8 billion in anti-tank missiles, warships, and other materiel to Taipei. Of course, the “defensive” purpose to all of this is against China, the most plausible aggressor against Taiwan. Naturally, the arms sales have consistently annoyed the Chinese. (Recently, China has been on a campaign of land-grabbing and saber-rattling across the South China Sea, trying to assert greater control and influence.)

“The Chinese leadership will see this as a highly provocative action, of historic proportions.”

Though the triangle between the U.S., China, and Taiwan sometimes flares up, the general goal of all three has been to maintain the fragile status quo. By speaking to President Tsai, and praising U.S. relations with Taiwan, Trump threatens to upset that delicate balance. Reaction to the call was immediate and, for the most part, aghast.

“The Chinese leadership will see this as a highly provocative action, of historic proportions,” Evan Medeiros, former Asia director at the White House National Security Council, told the FT. “Regardless if it was deliberate or accidental, this phone call will fundamentally change China’s perceptions of Trump’s strategic intentions for the negative. With this kind of move, Trump is setting a foundation of enduring mistrust and strategic competition for U.S.-China relations.”

Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary, noted that he wasn’t even allowed to refer to a Taiwanese government. My colleague James Fallows, not generally a man given to overreaction or caps-lock, was blunter: “WHAT THE HELL????” he tweeted.

As is typically the case with Trump, it’s hard to tell whether this blithe overturning of protocol is intentional or simply a result of not knowing, or caring, better.

There are various reasons Trump might be intentionally poking China. Trump spoke harshly about China throughout his presidential campaign, accusing Beijing of currency manipulation, land-grabbing, and taking advantage of the United States. He also showed a willingness, if not an eagerness, to slaughter nearly every sacred cow of American foreign policy.

Some Trump confidants have suggested existing policy on Taiwan should become one of them. John Bolton, who served as Bush’s ambassador to the UN, has been advising Trump, and Bolton has been a very public advocate of the U.S. cozying up to Taiwan in order to show strength against China.

Even if the provocation is intentional, that doesn’t mean Trump has acted wisely. “I would guess that President-elect Trump does not really comprehend how sensitive Beijing is about this issue,” Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Hill.

Some observers suggested that the call fits with the pattern of Trump intertwining his business and political interests, pointing out that he’s currently seeking to open luxury hotels in Taiwan.

But it’s also possible that Trump just stumbled into the matter, Being There-style. It’s not clear who initiated the phone call or why Trump decided to participate. Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, assailed Trump for not taking it seriously. “Foreign policy consistency is a means, not an end. It’s not sacred. Thus, it’s Trump’s right to shift policy, alliances, strategy,” Murphy said in a pair of tweets. “What has happened in the last 48 hours is not a shift. These are major pivots in foreign policy w/out any plan. That’s how wars start.”

It’s also hard to know how big a deal Trump’s call is. China did not immediately comment. A White House official told The New York Times that the administration was only informed of the call after the fact, and said the fallout could be significant. There were other questions. Wouldn’t Beijing see that what Trump did was a blunder, but not a major shift in policy? Isn’t the Chinese government sophisticated enough not to take Trump at face value?

Trump’s previous conversations might provide hints on whether foreign governments will take Trump seriously. As Uri Friedman wrote today, Trump’s conversation with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has already had repercussions. The Pakistani government put out a readout that read suspiciously like a near-verbatim transcript of Trump’s words, capturing the tone the president-elect uses. His promise to “play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems” might sound to an American who just observed the election as so much Trumpian space-filling, but it made headlines in Pakistan, where some interpreted it as a nod to Pakistan’s conflict with India in Kashmir. Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, told the Times it appeared Pakistani officials had taken Trump’s words too seriously.

China is perhaps a more sophisticated foreign-policy player than Pakistan; it’s certainly a more important one. But as Fallows points out, a China that sees Trump as buffoon probably isn’t good for American interests either.

For the time being, the most important thing to watch is probably for Beijing’s announcement. That will be the first clue as to whether Trump’s phone call will set in motion a huge realignment of American policy and relationships with China and Taiwan—or if it will be another Hainan Island incident, barely remembered 15 years on.

Kafka in the Bull City

DURHAM, N.C.—There’s not a lot of love lost between the North Carolina State Board of Elections and its subordinate board in Durham County these days.

Exasperation was written on the faces of the members of the county board Friday morning after they met to consider an NCSBE order that they recount more than 94,000 votes by Monday evening. The three members of the board huddled in a closed meeting, trying to figure out how to comply with the order. When one member, Democrat Dawn Baxton, emerged briefly from the room, reporters asked how much longer things would take. Baxton suggested the Second Coming might come sooner. When she emerged again, 20 minutes later, Baxton asked whether the press had been praying in her absence.

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It’s not the reporters who need prayer: Divine intervention might be the only thing that could allow Durham County to meet a state-imposed deadline for the recount. The vaguely Kafkaesque story is a crisp illustration of the friction when state government and local government collide, and how that friction sometimes scrambles partisan lines.

The trouble started on election day, when Durham counted those roughly 94,000 votes late in the night, due to software delays. When they were added to the statewide total, they changed a decent lead for Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, into a very narrow lead for his challenger, Democrat Roy Cooper.

Since then, Cooper’s lead has remained consistent, and has even grown a bit, standing at a little more than 10,000 votes. State Republicans have gone through a series of steps to try to prevent Cooper from being certified as the race’s winner. In counties around the state, Republicans filed protests and challenges, alleging ineligible voters and irregularities in counting. Nearly all of those were thrown out, and those decisions were not appealed. But the situation in Durham County has remained unresolved. (It’s not the only outstanding issue—there is also a pair of protests in Bladen County, while a conservative think-tank has filed a suit to try to keep the votes of some same-day registrants out of the tally.)

Tom Stark, a Republican lawyer here, argued that late tabulation of the votes raised questions and was grounds for a hand recount of the county’s votes. The McCrory campaign, in turn, announced that it would withdraw a request for a full state recount if Durham County recounted its votes. (That offer may have been a bluff: Candidates can only automatically demand a recount if the margin of the race is less than 10,000 votes, and McCrory is no longer inside that range.)

“The order that we received from the state board was an order that, it seems to me, was designed to cause us to fail.”

Under state law, every county board of elections has a 2-1 majority for the governor’s party and the state board has a 3-2 edge, meaning Republicans control the process from top to bottom. (This was also a controversy before the election. After a federal court threw out a voting law and demanded restoration of early-voting days, which are disproportionately used by Democratic voters and especially African Americans, some county boards found other ways to limit hours—a move urged by the executive director of the state GOP.)

Durham County considered Stark’s challenge last month, decided it was without merit, and rejected it unanimously. But Stark appealed to the state board, which held a three-hour meeting Wednesday to consider it. In short, Democrats argued that the fact that Durham County calculated the votes late didn’t amount to an “irregularity” in any formal or legal sense, and that therefore there wasn’t any grounds for granting the recount. Republicans, including Stark, conceded that they had no evidence of malfeasance, but said that a recount couldn’t hurt and would only help to instill faith in the cleanliness of elections. (There’s a cynical irony to this argument, which is that Republicans in the state have spent the last three years arguing, also without evidence, that elections are tainted by widespread fraud.)

The board voted along party lines, 3-2, to order that Durham conduct a recount, but decided that could be done via machine rather than by hand, a time-saving measure. That still left unresolved how long the recount might take—and with that, when the outcome of the governor’s race might finally be decided. On Thursday, Durham County Board Chair Bill Brian, a Republican, told The News and Observer he was guessing the recount would be resolved by the end of next week.

But later that day, Durham received the formal order for the recount from the state board. The NCSBE demanded that Durham County produce a plan to recount the votes by Friday at noon, and to have the count finished by 7 p.m. on Monday. Thursday night, the Durham County board announced an emergency meeting for first thing Friday morning.

Brian is a dry-humored, burly, white-bearded man with a knack for expressive faces—imagine a sardonic Santa. Friday, he was expressing annoyance, complaining about what he called an “unreasonable” order from the state board. When the board emerged from a closed session, Brian announced that it was requesting an extension of the deadline for the recount to 7 p.m. on Wednesday, and asking for an emergency state board hearing to grant it.

Brian then explained the litany of complications attending the state board’s order. In order to count the ballots, the county is supposed to have teams of two supervising each voting machine used to recount votes, and each team is ideally comprised of one Democrat and one Republican. The board was finalizing a plan to use 26 machines, so that means they needed 52 people—52 people who would work long shifts the entire weekend for the princely sum of $13 per hour. Even if they were able to find full crews, given an estimated 13 seconds per ballot, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests it would take around 13 hours to count all of the ballots.

So far, so good. But Durham County first has to get employees of the company that makes the voting machines to certify them. Brian had also read in local media that he was supposed to appear at a state board meeting on Saturday, though he’d received no notice. As a result, the board expected that they could start counting no sooner than Sunday morning. Even then, 13 hours would put the board comfortably ahead of 7 p.m. Monday, right?

Well, no. Because the NCSBE had ordered Durham County to count not just the governor’s race but every race, employees would then have to tally write-in votes for every seat, down to soil-and-water commissioner separately. Brian estimated that would take another 36 hours.

“Somebody always has a great idea, oh, we’ll just bring in new machines,” Brian said. But he rejected that, too: For every new machine, the board would have to find a new pair of workers—one Democrat, one Republican—background-check them, and pay them. (Brian semi-sarcastically invited the members of the state board to come chip in, pointing out that would guarantee at least three Republicans and two Democrats.) Even if there were plenty of applicants, it did not appear that the board of elections could plug in all 26 machines at its building without overloading the building’s circuits; electricians scurried around the room during the conversation trying to test the system. The board couldn’t just move the machines to another county building, though, because then they’d have to come up with a security plan for moving the ballots and locking them up overnight. That, of course, would require more money.

The board was guessing the whole process, which almost no one expects to change the result of the contest, would run $35,000 to $40,000. It was a rare point of certainty. “Right now, the money is coming out of the pockets of the people of Durham County,” Brian said. “At the end of the day, that’s the one thing we do know.”

Brian doesn’t seem like the type to lose his temper, but there was no question about his frustration. Baxton sat to Brian’s right, scowling. Margaret Cox Griffin, the third member, sat to the left, expressionless. Marie Inserra, a lawyer for the county, sat quietly for 25 minutes, before unleashing a furious outburst at the state for failing to upgrade software when it had a chance.

“The order that we received from the state board was an order that, it seems to me, was designed to cause us to fail,” Brian said. “Everybody knows this [process]. It’s no different for the state than it is for us or any other county.”

Although as Brian drily noted last week, “Everything is politically motivated in an election,” the tussle between Durham County and the state board doesn’t really break along party lines. Despite the partisan structure of the county board, its members have an incentive to appear to the local community untainted by political consideration. They’d considered the Stark complaint, found it wanting, and rejected it. Yet the state board, which seemed untroubled by the plain party-line vote, had come in and overruled them. That wasn’t just a pride-bruising reversal; it made Durham County look bad by suggesting there might be foul play. Even worse, the brunt of that decision was landing on the county board and its employees, who were getting ready to work all weekend to conduct a recount they didn’t they could finish to achieve a result that likely wouldn’t matter. Brian even took a mild swipe at the state GOP, which had asked for a hand recount. Brian said that would create a logistical nightmare—and then mused that perhaps that was the point.

Brian wouldn’t say point-blank that meeting the NCSBE deadline was impossible but everything else he said telegraphed it. “I’d rather not go on record saying that. I don’t know how we can get it done. No one yet has presented a plan that can get it done by 7 p.m. on Monday.”

Nonetheless, he said he expected the state board to reject Durham County’s request. And what would happen then if Durham County failed to meet the deadline?

“We have no idea,” Brian said. “Maybe I'll go to jail!” It was hard to know for certain, but it appeared that Brian might prefer incarceration to his current plight.