Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 376

America’s Next Top Instagram Celebrity

If you were a contestant on America’s Next Top Model for the show’s first 16 seasons, your life looked something like this: The show’s host, former supermodel Tyra Banks, would be your idol, mentor, and new best friend. You’d live with your fellow contestants, typically 12 to 15 other women, in an open-plan house featuring almost no doors. Your week would revolve around a photo shoot, an extravagant affair with some sort of twist: bejeweled tarantulas, wind tunnels, no makeup. The judges—a photographer, a former supermodel, a diva—would scrutinize you, your photo, and your performance on the weekly challenge using some mysterious calculus. Then Tyra would announce, one by one, Bachelor-style, whether had it in you to move forward, or whether it was time for you to go home.

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But things have changed—there hasn’t been a “normal” cycle of ANTM since Cycle 16. Cycle 22, which premieres on August 5, features, for the third time in a row, women and men. Each season has a theme (“British Invasion,” “College”), so the competition isn’t just about who’s the best model, it’s about who best captures a certain type. While drama has always been been part of the show’s DNA, it’s been amped up exponentially. The judging structure has become transparent, with panelists putting up their scores like Olympic judges rating figure skaters. And to top it all off, in the past few seasons the show has invited its avid fans to help decide the champion using social media, by voting for their favorite shoots via Facebook likes.

In short, ANTM went from an industry competition to a branding pageant—from a more straightforward contest that promised the winner a modeling career to one that promised the winner a large Internet following. The prize still includes a modeling contract with an agency (for Cycle 22, it’s NEXT Model Management) and a spread in a fashion magazine (now Nylon, rather than Vogue Italia). But gone are the camp and self-awareness that once characterized the show—now, it’s a hashtag-heavy, emoji-laden battle of the brands. On the one hand, this departure mirrors a realistic shift that’s taken place in an industry that increasingly rewards familiar faces with built-in fanbases. On the other it detracts from the fun, insular fantasy world ANTM worked so hard to create.

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Even in its new incarnation, ANTM is huge today: It airs in over 150 countries and has spawned more than 40 international spinoffs, in countries from Australia to Cambodia. Upon the premiere of the show’s 20th cycle in 2013, the Glamour blogger Phoebe Robinson added ANTM to “cockroaches and Cher” as the things that would survive after the apocalypse. ANTM may have achieved immortality, but that doesn’t mean the show has aged well. The series held relatively stable at about 5 million viewers for seasons one through nine, but ratings have steadily tanked since. Cycle 20, in 2013, only had 1.7 million viewers.

ANTM’s ratings drop has coincided with other logistical changes for the reality-TV juggernaut. Beginning in Cycle 19, the show fired its regular judges and mentor figures—the photographer Nigel Barker, the photoshoot director Jay Manuel, and the runway coach J. Alexander—replacing them with PR experts and Twitter personalities. At the time, fans mourned the changing of the guard, lamenting that Tyra had driven the show off the rails. “When ratings dip despite your most valiant efforts to chase them, maybe it’s time to look under the weave for your show’s perfectly nice, apple pie roots,” Lucy Stehlik wrote on Hollywood.com in 2013.

The show had lost almost a million viewers between Cycles 17 and 18, prompting the overhaul. For Cycle 19, in fall 2012, ANTM gave itself its own makeover, or "Ty-over": To engage fans American Idol-style, viewers could rank their favorite photos on social media, and the fan vote would count for 25 percent of the model's score that week. But viewers were skeptical. Critics lambasted the shift, fans lamented the change on Reddit threads and discussion boards, and ratings continued to sink. The move may not have made many people happy, but when ANTM popped its bubble of cultivated exclusivity to let fans in, it made itself even more reflective of the modeling industry today.

Several of the most successful models working now, including Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevigne, have developed enormous followings via social media, which catapults them from fame to celebrity (it helps to have friends like Taylor Swift). Unlike in the past, ANTM’s contestants aren’t necessarily raw beginners anymore; since Tyra often finds people through their blogs or Facebook pages, cultivating a strong Internet presence will help an aspiring competitor get on the show. The two-time ANTM contestant Allison Harvard capitalized on her success as an online personality to launch an international modeling career. Chantelle Brown-Young, an ANTM alumna with the chronic skin condition vitiligo, had a devoted Internet following before she appeared in Cycle 21, and has used her publicity from the show to land international gigs.

Tyra-land is most compelling when it’s total fantasy. ANTM is about a model world, not models in the world.

Oddly enough, it’s the foreign Top Model spinoffs that are in the more direct business of producing working models, like Ksenia Kahtovitch and Alice Burdeu, not the beautytainment (but often still-successful) queens of ANTM. Slate’s Torie Bosch points out that the international versions “have retained what works best about ANTM—the in-house drama, the torturous makeovers, the ridiculous assignments—while skipping what’s worst about it: hokey judge antics, outlandish veneration of Tyra, and sob-story contestants.”

Even other American shows have a greater sense of the modeling world than the current incarnation of ANTM. Barker, a former male supermodel-turned-photographer, worked with ANTM for 18 cycles before leaving to become the host of The Face, a competition in which three supermodels mentor a team of aspiring models. “The Face is much more true-to-the-business,” Barker told DuJour in a 2013 interview. “Top Model is all about the craziness.”

​ANTM’s embrace of social media makes sense from the perspective of the real-world modeling industry. But the real world has never really been the point: Tyra-land is most compelling when it’s total fantasy. ANTM is about a model world, not models in the world. Everyone who arrives on ANTM is, more or less, a beginner; Tyra brags about plucking the girl from a shopping mall, or the boy from the ice cream truck. With the exception of a single week in Cycle One in an underwhelming Parisian flat, the contestants live in outrageously slick, tricked-out mansions and penthouses with hot tubs and catwalks snaking through their living rooms—hardly the likely quarters of an aspiring model. The art on the walls consists exclusively of enormous portraits of Tyra. Later in the show’s tenure, portraits of contestants from prior seasons would get to join Tyra’s on the walls. ANTM exists in its own world—the winner of ANTM isn’t America’s next most booked model, she’s ANTM’s next top model.

Everything has to be done by the rules, even if Tyra’s making up those rules on the spot. ANTM is a rigorous exercise in nonsense: Anything can happen in this world, as long as there’s a rule that’s making it happen. Models fly in wind tunnels, slump over windmills, dangle through warehouse ceilings like chandeliers, fight bulls, writhe in coffins, impersonate celebrity couples, wear snakes, wear human hair dresses, wear each other.

And so the actual threat to the show’s foundation is the breakdown of this nonsense world. As long as the show operates under its own rules, in its own reality, it thrives. There are signs that ANTM knows this. Cycle 22 will eliminate the social-media scoring system, so fans can be as judge-y as they like without having an actual impact on the show’s outcome. And that’s a good thing. The more the show reaches out to social media, and the more it tries to penetrate reality, the shakier it becomes. If the viewers are made to be part of the show, then they can’t project themselves into it: By making the fans part of the show, ANTM takes away the intoxicating fantasy that brought them there.

The Republican Road Block Ahead

We head into the first presidential debate in Cleveland with Donald Trump leading the field and confounding the confident predictions of a slew of pundits that his collapse was at hand—whether after the Mexican-rapists comment, the slam at John McCain as no hero, or other statements that offended elites but only seemed to attract more support from Republican hoi polloi. What explains the Trump bump? The answer is the emerging, even dominant force in the GOP—an angry, anti-establishment, anti-leadership populism that was triggered by the financial crisis and the 2008 bailout, cynically exploited in 2010 and 2012 by the “Young Guns” in the House and other GOP leaders in Congress to convert anger into turnout and elect Tea Party-oriented candidates. This force is now turning on those leaders, creating problems not just in the presidential race, but in a Congress whose leaders face the possibility of implosion ahead.

The angry populism has only grown with conservative rank and file incited to expect the repeal of Obamacare and an Obama capitulation on debt-ceiling showdowns and government shutdowns, ending repeatedly in disappointment. The sharp drop in Republican Party favorability shown in a recent Pew survey was driven by disenchantment among Republicans—an 18 percent decline in only six months.

Trump has become the lead channel for angry populists. But following behind is Ted Cruz, who rode the wave to his Senate election—beating, in a primary, a bedrock conservative who had the misfortune of being an office holder—and then to his role as a thorn in the side of his own party’s establishment. Cruz upped the ante last week with the unprecedented step of calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor as McConnell maneuvered to assuage most of his conference and the business community by securing a vote to salvage the Export-Import Bank. And, the same week, another angry populist, House Republican Mark Meadows, dropped a resolution to remove the Speaker. Two shots across the bows of the top-Republican leaders in Congress both Boehner and McConnell—conservative by any objective standard, but neither conservative or radical enough to satisfy the large and restless populist wing of the party.

The dysfunction of the majority in Congress was predictable (and predicted). After Republicans won the Senate and gained seats in the House in the 2014 midterms, a parade of leaders from Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to McConnell and his deputy John Cornyn said that Republicans were now going to have to share responsibility for governing—meaning no shutdowns, no more fandangos over the debt ceiling, and a positive agenda to send bills reflecting a conservative framework to the president for signature or veto. That included an alternative to Obamacare and action on pressing problems like infrastructure.

But those high expectations were going to come up against the underlying differences in outlook, rules, and electoral dynamics between the two chambers. The Senate worm turns from 2014 when a slew of vulnerable Democrats elected in 2008 were up, to 2016, with many more Republicans up than Democrats, including several elected in the great GOP sweep in 2010 from blue states. The result required McConnell to shape votes and issues to protect them, but with no comparable group among House Republicans. That fact alone meant that most bills that could capture majorities in the Senate would not be acceptable to Republicans in the House, and vice versa. In the House, there is the unusual challenge, especially for Boehner, of finding majorities with Republicans alone. That challenge was itself underscored at the beginning of the new Congress when, despite the excellent election results, 25 Republicans voted against Boehner for Speaker—the largest number of defectors in a century.

The first eight months of the 114th Congress were characterized far more by failure to launch than by policy accomplishments. And the dysfunctional interaction between the angry populist, radical wing of the GOP and its more pragmatic establishment leadership showed itself, especially as the dozen spending bills needed to fund most of government beginning October 1 began to emerge in the House.

The Interior bill came out of the Appropriations Committee on a sharply partisan basis, fracturing decades of tradition of bipartisan cooperation on the panel. This bill cut spending in popular areas sharply, but even more controversially added riders to curtail executive authority in areas like public lands and the environment—ensuring no Democratic votes for the bill on the House floor. But garnering a majority from Republicans alone means finding ways to capture the share of the conference who do not want to vote for any bill that involves government spending. In this case, the effort to capture that group meant offering Southern conservatives a vote on allowing Confederate flags on public property—the same week as the deeply emotional funeral services in Charleston, and a huge embarrassment for Republican House leaders. The bill was pulled and has not reemerged—nor have other appropriations bills as the clock ticks before the new fiscal year begins. And, of course, even if the bills make it through the House, they have to do the same in the Senate, and be reconciled, all by September 30. Now, there is the added complication, the growing, vociferous demand, to blow up funding for Planned Parenthood, with Cruz among others demanding a shutdown, if necessary, to accomplish that goal.

The leaders’ solution to avoid a shutdown is to punt—a continuing resolution for most or all of the spending bills, ostensibly for just a few weeks. But there is no reason to believe that the dilemma they face will ease in October or November. That leaves two alternatives. The first would be a grand bargain, like the one achieved in 2013 by Paul Ryan and Patty Murray, that would effectively ameliorate the sequester cuts for both defense and domestic programs, and probably continue significant funding, perhaps with some modifying language, for Planned Parenthood. The second option would be passing a continuing resolution for much or all of the fiscal year. But the former, by reducing the sequester, would be seen as a sellout by a swatch of Tea Party lawmakers. And the latter would mean spending continued at the previous year’s levels.

For Tea Party conservatives, the sequester cuts, draconian as they would be for domestic programs across the board, were not enough to begin with. A continuing resolution wipes those out, meaning total defeat on the cutting-spending front. All perpetrated by their own leaders! And, in the House, passing either a grand bargain or a continuing resolution almost certainly will happen with far more Democrats supporting it than Republicans, adding to the rage angry-populist members feel toward their Speaker.

Remember, all of this will play out in October just as the presidential nominating process is really heating up. As it unfolds, expect the slew of angry-populist presidential candidates, some of them sitting senators, including Trump, Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and others, to push Congress to toughen up, stare Obama and his Democrats down, and push for confrontation. They will do the same, most likely, with the debt ceiling, which has to be raised by November or December, putting additional pressure on McConnell, Boehner et al. And they will join the chorus, raising bloody hell as the primaries and caucuses begin about the perfidy of their own establishment leaders, getting even more distance from a Washington where Congress is run by Republicans.

Two intersecting roads explain a lot about today’s American politics. One, of course, is Pennsylvania Avenue, running from the Capitol to the White House. The other is the long and winding road to a party’s presidential nomination. The last week or so has demonstrated that the intersections can lead to collisions. Brace yourselves for more to come.

Why the Iran Deal’s Critics Will Probably Lose

The latest set of indicators:

1. Logic. Graham Allison, who originally made his academic reputation with Essence of Decision, his study of the negotiations that averted a U.S.-Soviet nuclear catastrophe in 1962, has another installment in his series of Atlantic essays on the details and implications of the nuclear agreement with Iran. This one is called “9 Reasons to Support the Iran Deal,” and it begins by reestablishing a crucial point about the deal’s critics.

None of them, from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “historic mistake” Netanyahu to U.S. Senator Lindsey “it’s a declaration of war on Israel” Graham, has yet risen to the challenge of offering a better real-world alternative. Better is something that would make Iran less likely to develop a nuclear weapon. Real-world is something that the Russians, Chinese, and other nations on “our” side would agree to demand from the Iranians, and that the Iranians would accept too. As the saying goes, this is the worst possible deal, except for all the alternatives.

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2. A vote for. Representative Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and “a moderate’s moderate,” tells The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that he thinks the deal is in the best interests of both the United States and Israel, so he will support it. “At the end of the day, I could not find an alternative that would turn out in a better way than the deal,” he told Goldberg, making the essential real-world point. “The risks associated with rejection of the deal are quite a bit higher than the risks associated with going forward.”

[More votes for. Significantly, on Tuesday Democratic Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia, Bill Nelson of Florida, and Barbara Boxer of California signed on. On the WaPo’s site, Greg Sargent explains why these are bellwether declarations.]

3. A potential vote against. I take this headline from Politico as a good sign for the deal’s prospects in Congress:

How can a powerful Democrat’s opposition be a good sign? Because it suggests that Schumer has already calculated that the administration can do without his vote.

For rococo parliamentary reasons, the crucial voting showdown is still several legislative rounds into the future. First the Congress would have to pass a measure condemning the deal, which Republican majorities in both the House and Senate will certainly do. Then President Obama would have to veto the measure, which he will certainly do. Then the Congress would have to override the veto, which requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers—and this is what the Democrats, even in their diminished numbers, should still be able to block with some votes to spare.

Schumer doesn’t put it this way, but obviously he is hoping that one of those spare votes will be his. His life will be easier in many ways—in minimizing hassle during his upcoming reelection run in New York, and thus maximizing his efforts to help other Democratic candidates so that he has a chance of becoming Senate majority rather than minority leader—if he doesn’t have to spend time explaining away a vote for the deal to his conservative and AIPAC-aligned constituents. If the deal goes through despite Schumer’s opposition, people who support the deal won’t care, and those who oppose it can blame evil Barack rather than valiant Chuck.

Any “Schumer-no” signal now may indicate his confidence that enough other people are going to vote “yes” for the deal to go through.

But what if it came down to a single vote, so that Chuck Schumer himself would determine whether a Democratic president’s most important diplomatic effort succeeded or failed? Call me a cockeyed idealist, but in those circumstances I just can’t believe he would join Senators Cotton, Cruz, Inhofe, et al. in voting “no.” Thus any “Schumer-no” signal now may indicate his confidence that enough other people are going to vote “yes.”

4. Reality. The UN Security Council has already approved the deal, and by a 15-0 unanimous vote—hardly its norm on controversial issues. So has the European Union. Sample report, from Reuters: “‘It is a balanced deal that means Iran won’t get an atomic bomb,’ said French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. ‘It is a major political deal.’” The Russians and Chinese are moving ahead as if the deal is done, because from the world’s perspective it is.

The remaining forceful public opposition is from the unified GOP plus some Democrats, and the Netanyahu administration plus other Israeli figures. Even if they prevail, they cannot stop the deal and make five other countries reinstitute sanctions. Although you’d hardly know it from the U.S. debate, the opponents’ writ does not run to China, Russia, Europe, or Iran. All that a congressional “rejection” can do is ensure that the safeguards negotiated in the bill never take effect. As Graham Allison put it:

If the U.S. Congress rejects this agreement and proposes sending Secretary of State John Kerry back to the negotiating table, Kerry will most likely find no one else there. Partners who have negotiated and compromised over 20 months to achieve this accord will conclude that the U.S. government is incapable of making agreements. The international coalition will splinter and the sanctions regime will collapse, with Russia and China leading the way, but with France and Germany not far behind.

* * *

Netanyahu makes his case. Here is a late-update dose of reality. I have just now watched all of Netanyahu’s address on Tuesday to a webcast audience of 10,000 people, organized by the Jewish Federations of North America. By all means consider the case he makes.

The themes in Netanyahu’s opening presentation will be familiar to anyone following this topic. To wit: The deal doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb but “paves the path”; it will fuel and fund Iran’s international destructiveness; it will provoke a nuclear arms race in the region (which now has only one nuclear power); and it ignores Iran’s anti-Semitic commitment to Israel’s destruction, which obliges Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister to consider this an existential threat. Also, “Iran can have its yellowcake and eat it too.”

To me the most interesting part of the presentation starts around time 14:30, when audience members ask Netanyahu: OK, so what’s your better idea? Judge for yourself, but I think his responses are so weak as to undercut everything else he says.

What’s his better idea? Well, first Netanyahu says that the U.S. should have been tougher from the start. But another questioner asks, in essence: That was then. What’s a better alternative now?

Against all evidence, Netanyahu’s better idea is that the United States should reject the deal—and then, on its own, significantly tighten sanctions on Iran. After the 15-0 Security Council vote, and the EU approval, and the Russian and Chinese preparations to resume business with Iran, the wisest course for the United States (according to Netanyahu) is to forget the previous negotiations and really crack down. Until now, Iran hasn’t given ground because it hasn’t felt enough pressure. But a new round of sanctions, really strong ones, will put the squeeze on Iran—and “after some initial erosion, the rest of the world will come around.” If you think I’m being unfair to the argument, check it out starting around time 15:20.

You can say that Iran is a jihad state bent on Israel’s destruction or that it will crack once financial costs go up. You cannot say both.

Is he kidding? Not at all. “It’s a no-brainer!” the prime minister explains. Since the U.S. economy is “40 times bigger than Iran’s,” it follows that the Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese, and others will soon see where their self-interest lies. They will realize that this deal was an illusion, they’ll call back their business missions to Iran, and they’ll slap sanctions back on too. Then, once Iran’s leaders recognize what they’re up against, they will stop bluffing and stonewalling. Instead they will accept the “good” deal that America should have been insisting on all along.

Maybe you find this analysis convincing. I do not. At all.

First, I challenge the prime minister to find any sane observer in China or Russia, or even England, Germany, or France, who thinks those countries would respond in the way he suggests. And second, I suggest that he consider the deep incoherence in his views of Iran. On the one hand, its leaders are so fanatically consumed with anti-Israeli hatred that they will countenance the destruction of tens of millions of their own people in a retaliatory nuclear strike from Israel, as long as they have the chance to kill as many Jews as possible. That’s why Iran is an existential threat. On the other, those same leaders are such canny cost-benefit pragmatists that they’ll fold and give up their vain nuclear plans, once they understand how much money the sanctions are costing them.

You can say one thing or the other—that Iran is a jihad state bent on Israel’s destruction (and America’s, as the prime minister points out), or that it will crack as soon as the financial cost goes up. You cannot say both, not with any respect for your audience.

But to be fair, I challenge you not to be charmed by the part from time 20:00 to 20:15.

* * *

This deal is going to take effect. Then a whole new set of challenges unfolds.

UnREAL Turned The Bachelor Into Literature

“We killed somebody, didn’t we?” Rachel, a producer on the Bacheloresque show Everlasting, asks Quinn, the show’s executive producer, in the final episode of UnREAL’s first season.

Quinn is taken aback. “Yeah,” she replies, after a pause. She pauses one more time. “Let’s not do that again.”

If you haven’t been watching Lifetime’s dark satire of dating shows and reality TV and pretty much the entire romance industrial complex, I won’t say who was killed, or who the killer “we” may have been. The “we” in question is unclear anyway. And that, actually, is part of what makes UnREAL so well worth watching. The show, by turns sassy and sardonic, revels in its own ambiguity. It takes the tired tropes of the reality show—which are also the tired tropes of the soap opera, which are also the tired tropes of the melodrama—and freshens them.

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In the show’s first season, someone, yes, gets killed. Someone, yes—actually, many someones—gets cheated on. There’s lying and behind-the-back-ing and power struggling and lawsuits and horseback riding and bulimia and British aristocracy and sex in trailers. There’s manipulation and vulnerability and a deep belief in romantic love and an even deeper mistrust of it.

UnREAL is a fiction about a fiction about reality; as such, it would have been easy for its writers to focus on the ironies embedded in that format. The stuff of The Bachelor (and The Bachelorette and Married at First Sight and My Fair Brady and Dating Naked and all the other shows in their vein) is, after all, eminently mockable. The “Rose Ceremonies”! The “Fantasy Suites”! The candles! The talking-head interviews with contestants! The cryings-in-the-backseat-of-limos! The drama both intensely human and ridiculously manufactured! “Let’s give them something that they want,” Quinn tells her crew in UnREAL’s pilot episode, going on to list as elements of that “something” ponies and princesses and romance and love, and going on after that to remind everyone that “it’s all a bunch of crap anyways.”

But UnREAL doesn’t just mock the conventions of treacly dating shows. It meets those shows on their own terms, focusing, in particular, on one element they all share: They are, maybe more than anything else, mysteries. Highly stylized and ritualized mysteries, yes, but mysteries nonetheless. Who will the Bachelor(ette) pick at the end of the show? What surprises will transpire when strangers find themselves, suddenly, married to each other? UnREAL takes the uncertainties at the center of the marriage plot—will they? won’t they?—and infuses them into its own production. There are not only ambiguous outcomes, but also ambiguous relationships and ambiguous power dynamics and ambiguous character motivations. You’re never quite sure who’s on whose side, or what the line is between honesty and manipulation. The characters themselves are never quite sure, either.

At the center of it all is Rachel, the woman who first appears in UnREAL wearing a “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt, and who professes to be participating in the morally questionable behavior that is apparently required of a good Everlasting producer only under duress. Who, despite the talent she has for that role, insists that she would rather be producing “a show about women who have careers and actually talk about them” and/or “saving AIDS babies.”

What does she really want, though? Is she a hero or an anti-hero? “You know how I always used to say that the show is bad for you, and how it brings out the ugliness in you?” Jeremy, her on-and-off love interest, asks her in the season’s final episode. “I was wrong, Rach,” he says. “It’s you that’s ugly.”

Is she? Is everyone else, too—all these writers and producers and executives and shooters and actors-in-the-guise-of-actual people, all these participants in a charade that, week by week, both celebrates and cheapens romantic love?

The show doesn’t say. It does, instead, what the best literature does: It leaves itself open to interpretation and argument. It asks its audience to think, and analyze, and come to their own conclusions. It makes a point of its own ambiguity.

UnREAL does what the best literature does: It leaves itself open to interpretation and argument.

In one of the final scenes in last night’s season finale, Rachel—having been betrayed (or maybe protected?) by Quinn—collapses in a chaise next to her mentor. They’ve just been joking (but maybe not joking?) about the fact that they probably shouldn’t murder someone for the sake of the show. Rachel stares (and maybe glares?) at Quinn. There’s a long and pregnant pause. (Maybe even a literal one, Rachel having slept with at least two guys on set and UnREAL being, on top of everything else, a soap opera.) Rachel’s stare is intense. The silence is awkward. The whole thing starts to become just slightly painful to watch.

“I love you,” Rachel says, finally. “You know that, right?”

Quinn is taken aback. “I love you, too,” she replies. She pauses again.

“Weirdo.”

It’s a strange moment, and a compellingly confusing one. Was that a gesture of forgiveness from Rachel? Was it a confession of friendship and sisterhood? Was it a simple acknowledgment that Rachel and Quinn have become, on top of everything else, accomplices?

Or was it, as the vaguely menacing tone of the whole thing might suggest, a threat?

We don’t know. We won’t know—for a while, and maybe ever. All we can do is think and theorize and, of course, tune in next season.

Halt and Catch Fire: A Show on the Edge of Greatness

There’s a lot to find impressive in the resurgent second season of AMC’s drama Halt and Catch Fire, but foremost is the show’s confidence. It’s a rare prestige drama that would dare dabble in blatant clichés, but Sunday’s season finale included a big one—the lead character Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) biting her lower lip, sitting on a plane headed to California, and hoping that her love interest and fellow programmer Tom (Mark O’Brien) would take the seat next to her. Halt and Catch Fire is, at its core, a portrait of the volatile computer industry in the 1980s, as well as a dazzling examination of that world’s gender dynamics. But after a rocky and forgettable first year, the show cleverly chose to harness the power of soapy melodrama—stolen kisses, illicit affairs, dark secrets—making it not only one of the smartest shows on air, but also one of the most watchable.

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Whether Halt and Catch Fire will return after this critically hailed second season remains a toss-up. Its ratings are underwhelming, and it got a slow start with audiences last year with a first season that tried to do too much, too quickly. It followed an ideas man, Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), and an engineer, Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), as they created a revolutionary personal computer (based on the story of Texas PC company Compaq) in the early ’80s. Along the way, Joe recruited, fell for, and broke up with the rebellious programmer Cameron. The story trudged along in early episodes and then tried to cram in the rest of the plot toward the end: Joe and company tasted success with their prototype PC before having to throw their innovations out the window to fit into an IBM-dominated market. Season two wisely hit the soft reboot button and focused on Cameron starting an online video-game company in 1985 with Gordon’s wife Donna (Kerry Bishé), while Joe and Gordon receded to the background to pick up the pieces of their own failures.

The new setting and shift in protagonists turned out to be exactly what the show needed: It executed the fastest turnaround (in terms of critical acclaim) since Parks & Recreation’s much-mocked first season led into its wildly praised second in 2009. Halt and Catch Fire arrived on AMC last year, facing its network’s strong track record and the high expectations that came with Breaking Bad wrapping up its run and Mad Men preparing up to do the same. When those shows launched, AMC found itself in the top tier of cable TV, but with them gone, it only had ratings monster The Walking Dead available as a viable lead-in for a new series. Each of AMC’s big new dramas arrives under the shadow of the network’s departed behemoths—a burden for Halt and Catch Fire, which needed time to find its characters’ voices amid the complex story that creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers were trying to tell.

The second season focused on Mutiny, the online game company Cameron runs out of a ramshackle house in Austin, Texas, with a bunch of grody young coders and Donna, a mother-of-two struggling to balance her passion for the job with her crumbling marriage. By focusing the season arc on a tech startup run by two women, Halt plumbed largely unexplored dramatic territory for TV, following Donna and Cameron’s efforts to avoid being pigeonholed in a male-dominated industry (that, in time, would only become even more male). What’s more, the show didn’t patronize Cameron’s struggle to define her company as more than an act of rebellion, or Donna’s resistance to becoming den mother to Mutiny’s nerdy employees. The duo’s arguments and managerial clashes were resolved without the grunting testosterone of the first season.

In focusing the season arc on a tech startup run by two women, Halt plumbed largely unexplored dramatic territory for TV.

Meanwhile, Joe and Gordon—both of whom fit the antihero mold that defined TV’s cultural revolution post-Sopranos—faced much more dire prospects. After the relative financial success, but intellectual and moral failure, of their PC project in the first season, the men scrambled to find a new foothold in the booming tech industry as their love interests surpassed them. But even so, the creators Cantwell and Rogers never jeered at their characters’ failures—the show simply moved on, as though its two self-destructive male protagonists’ luck had run out. Viewers never got to see Tony Soprano, or Don Draper, or Walter White stop being the de facto leads of their own shows, but as season two of Halt and Catch Fire progressed, it became clear that was exactly what was playing out.

Halt and Catch Fire didn’t settle for subverting the dramas that came before it, nor did it expect easy applause for making its female characters the stars. It also embraced what many successful TV dramas had for decades before and since the rise of the concept of “prestige”—the delight of stolen kisses, overheard insults, and shocking betrayals. Cameron’s budding romance with the arrogant coder Tom, whom she falls for while recovering from her big breakup with Joe, was gripping enough to merit the Friends­-style “Does he get on the plane?!” cliffhanger in the season finale. Gordon’s fracturing marriage to Donna played out the same way viewers had seen a hundred times before, but with rare humanity for their ups-and-downs. When Donna made the decision to abort a pregnancy midway through the season, still a rare twist for an American TV show, it felt like neither a plot chip to be cashed in later, nor like an impetuous act of revenge against Gordon.

In Halt’s second season, Cantwell and Rogers found their way into the show by upping the personal drama without letting go of the larger story of an industry they wanted to tell. By focusing on its ensemble’s personal lives, the writers justified a year-long arc exploring the nascent stages of the Internet, and Donna’s discovery that Mutiny users longed for a community to interact in (practically inventing the online chatroom). By stripping down the main plot to focus just on Mutiny and ramping up the soapier elements, the show tapped into the kind of edge-of-your-seat personal drama that AMC has been longing for since the departures of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Ratings be damned, Halt and Catch Fire has a chance to be one TV’s next great milestones in drama—if its network will just give it a chance to continue to evolve. The talent is there and the product is golden, so like any burgeoning start-up, all Halt needs is a little more investment.  

The Best Week of Summer in D.C.

Most professional sports are way better to watch on TV than in person. You don’t have to spend hours getting to and from the (crowded and overpriced) venue. You can do something else when nothing’s happening on the field, You can hit Pause on the TiVo. You can simply get a better view of the action on your home screen than from all except the very most expensive seats.

I recognize that the simple fun of spending a warm evening at a baseball stadium is an exception. But its pleasures are only vaguely related to what players are doing on the field.

Here’s another exception, which is all about the players’ performance: the early-round action in a pro tennis tournament, in circumstances that let you get right next to the athletes as they are walloping the ball back and forth. That’s why the sports-fan part of my consciousness spends 51 weeks of the year looking forward to the first week of August, when the pro tennis tour makes its stop in reliably sweltering Washington D.C.

The tournament that began yesterday at the Rock Creek Park tennis complex has had a series of names through its

That is all. Back to “policy” in the next dispatch.

9 Reasons to Support the Iran Deal

Having carefully reviewed the lengthy and complex agreement negotiated by the United States and its international partners with Iran, I have reached the following conclusion: If I were a member of Congress, I would vote yes on the deal. Here are nine reasons why.

1) No one has identified a better feasible alternative. Before negotiations halted its nuclear advance, Iran had marched relentlessly down the field from 10 years away from a bomb to two months from that goal line. In response, the United States and its partners imposed a series of sanctions that have had a significant impact on Iran’s economy, driving it to negotiate. That strategy worked, and resulted in a deal. In the absence of this agreement, the most likely outcome would be that the parties resume doing what they were doing before the freeze began: Iran installing more centrifuges, accumulating a larger stockpile of bomb-usable material, shrinking the time required to build a bomb; the U.S. resuming an effort to impose more severe sanctions on Iran. Alternatively, Israel or the United States could conduct military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, setting back the Iranian program by two years, or perhaps even three. But that option risks wider war in the Middle East, an Iran even more determined to acquire a bomb, and the collapse of consensus among American allies.

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An Iran-Deal Skeptic Becomes a Supporter

2) At this point, a “better deal” is an illusion. One can always imagine a better deal. But if the U.S. Congress rejects this agreement and proposes sending Secretary of State John Kerry back to the negotiating table, Kerry will most likely find no one else there. Partners who have negotiated and compromised over 20 months to achieve this accord will conclude that the U.S. government is incapable of making agreements. The international coalition will splinter and the sanctions regime will collapse, with Russia and China leading the way, but with France and Germany not far behind. The United States will have demonstrated that D.C. is in fact an acronym for Dysfunctional Capital. In comparison, Iran will appear to be the adult in this paring.

3) This agreement achieves America’s minimal essential objectives. In an earlier article for The Atlantic, I urged policymakers considering this agreement to “remember Nietzsche.” He famously observed that “the most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do.” In this case, the overriding objective of the United States has been to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. This agreement achieves that objective by stopping Iran verifiably and interruptibly short of a bomb. In fact, by eliminating two-thirds of Iran’s current centrifuges and 98 percent of its enriched-uranium stockpile, the agreement pushes Iran back at least a year from a bomb. If from that point Iran should seek to develop a nuclear weapon, the United States and its international partners will have ample time to discover the violation, consider their options, and act to stop it.

Opponents of this deal have misled some members of Congress with false claims and exaggerations about several technical details, including an International Atomic Energy Agency “secret deal” with Iran. Members of Congress interested in the facts should ask for a classified briefing from the American and Israeli intelligence communities. Both have concluded that this agreement puts Iran’s known nuclear program “in a box” for at least 10 to 15 years.

Whose weapons, military exercises, and covert activities does this agreement not constrain? The answer is: the U.S., Israel, and their allies.

4) But what about secret facilities? The brute fact about unknown facilities is that we cannot know what we don’t know. No agreement can provide 100-percent confidence that Iran will not cheat at a secret facility. Indeed, no one can have 100-percent confidence today that Iran has not already built a nuclear bomb at a secret facility. What has prevented the Iranians from doing this so far has been Tehran’s judgment that such an undertaking would be discovered and that the United States would act decisively to deny them success. The keys to sustaining effective deterrence are (1) rigorous efforts by the intelligence agencies of the United States and its allies, and (2) a credible military capability to act if Iran dashes toward a bomb.

Since the agreement imposes the most intrusive verification and inspection regime ever negotiated, it will significantly add to the ability of intelligence officials to discover any prohibited activity and enhance the legitimacy of U.S. or other countries’ military actions to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons should it violate its commitments. Nonetheless, as experts and so-called experts debate a 24-day delay for direct inspections of suspicious activity, or insufficient answers about Iran’s earlier nuclear pursuits, no one should miss the larger truth: 99 percent of the work to assure that any Iranian cheating is discovered will be done by U.S. intelligence agencies and those of allies. That was true before the agreement and will remain so after—even though the new inspections regime will provide some helpful information and observations that would otherwise be unavailable.

5) But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserts that this agreement “paves Iran’s path to a bomb.” Fortunately, this is not true; indeed, the opposite is closer to the mark. For a decade, Iran has been driving down a paved path to a bomb that allowed it to reach its current position: just two months away from that goal line. The agreement will push Iran back at least a year from this line, thus giving the United States and its allies more options to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

6) But at the end of 15 years, won’t Iran be free to resume its march toward a bomb? Yes, in the sense that the key physical constraints on Iran’s enrichment program will expire. But at that point, the United States and its partners will also be free to do whatever they choose. Everything the United States, Israel, and their allies can do today, they could do tomorrow or when the deal concludes. If, for example, the Iranians attempted to produce highly enriched uranium on the way to a bomb, the U.S. could stop them today—and, as U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz told Congress, it could do so tomorrow.

Iran’s nuclear program is just two months away from one bomb’s worth of material. These are brute facts that no agreement can erase.

7) Most observers have failed to ask: Whose weapons, military exercises, and covert activities does this agreement not constrain? The answer is: those of the United States, Israel, and their allies. The clearest bottom line on this question comes from the individual who knows more about military options for blocking nuclear programs than anyone else on the planet. General Amos Yadlin is now the chief of Israel’s leading national-security think tank. Until 2010, he was the head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, most recently serving under Netanyahu. In that role, he oversaw Israel’s bombing of Syria’s nuclear facility, an appropriate sequel to a mission he flew as a young pilot in 1981 that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. As Yadlin wrote recently, when the agreement expires, military action against Iran will be no more difficult—and indeed is likely to be easier—than it would be today, since there will be fewer Iranian targets and more will be known about them. In Yadlin’s words: “Military action against the Iranian nuclear program in 2025 would in all probability not be much more complicated or difficult than in 2015. … [T]he Iranian program will be reduced compared to what it is today, intelligence about it will be better, and it will be less immune than it is at present.”

8) But won’t Iran be free to continue all of its other nefarious activities that threaten the interests of the United States and its allies, including supporting terrorism, providing arms to Hezbollah and Hamas, and threatening Israel and U.S. allies in the Gulf? Yes, it will. But the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia will also be free to do everything that they are doing today—and more. Indeed, with the issue of Iran’s nuclear program set aside, they will have an opportunity to enlarge and enhance the collective effort to meet the challenges posed by Iran on other fronts.

9) So if the agreement does all of the above, why do so many people feel so uneasy about it? Beyond poisonous partisanship, the primary reason for discomfort with the current deal is that it surfaces ugly realities that most Americans who have not been following the Iranian nuclear story have never internalized. During the Bush administration, Iran mastered the technologies and know-how for manufacturing centrifuges and enriching uranium, thus overcoming the only high hurdle to building a bomb. This know-how is ingrained in the heads of thousands of Iranian scientists and engineers. Before 2003, Iran developed plans and tested explosives for a nuclear weapon. Over the past decade, Iran’s nuclear program advanced to the point at which it stands today: just two months away from one bomb’s worth of nuclear material. These are brute facts that no agreement, airstrike, or alternative anyone has proposed can erase.

In other words, it is impossible to “solve” the Iranian problem through this agreement or any feasible alternative. Iran’s nuclear ambitions will long remain a cardinal challenge for the United States and its allies—a challenge that will demand constant vigilance and a demonstrable readiness to do whatever is required to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The current agreement puts the United States in the best position to meet this challenge.

A New Planned Parenthood Video and More Outrage

Planned Parenthood’s handling of fetal tissue for research is the subject of a fresh video released Tuesday by an anti-abortion group.

In the latest video, the fifth released by Irvine, California-based Center for Medical Progress, an official from Planned Parenthood discusses the procurement and cost of intact fetuses. The video, we should warn you, is graphic.

Planned Parenthood calls the videos a “smear campaign.” It says the footage is highly edited, misleading, and takes discussions out of context.

The Center for Medical Progress has faced two court orders that block the release of future videos, but those orders are limited to footage recorded at meetings of the National Abortion Federation and those dealing with a tissue procurement company. Fox News adds: “Tuesday’s release, purely reliant on video taken inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, would not seem to violate either order.”

The videos have been met with outrage from conservatives and those who oppose abortion rights, who have called on lawmakers to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. A procedural vote on a measure to ban such funds for the organization failed in the Senate on Monday.

But the threat of defunding could be costly for the organization. As Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News reported this week:

According to the group’s most recent annual report, 41 percent of the $1.3 billion received by the national group and its affiliates came from government sources. Under a series of different laws including the Hyde amendment, none of the federal funds can be used for abortions, which accounted for 3 percent of services Planned Parenthood provides.

Yet even though abortion is a small part of what Planned Parenthood does, the group’s enormous size makes it the nation’s largest single provider of the procedure.

And, Rovner noted, the effort to defund Planned Parenthood isn’t new, either—even if there has been a “fairly broad bipartisan consensus in favor of using tissue from aborted fetuses in research for many years.”

Still, despite hashtag activism  from supporters of abortion rights, the outrage spawned by the videos are likely to keep Planned Parenthood’s funding in the spotlight for the time being.

Two Stories That Are Shaping the Abortion Debate

Abortion is back at the fore of U.S. politics due to an activist group’s attempt to discredit Planned Parenthood, one of the most polarizing organizations in the country. Supporters laud its substantial efforts to provide healthcare for women and children. For critics, nothing that the organization does excuses its role in performing millions of abortions––a procedure that they regard as literal murder––and its monstrous character is only confirmed, in their view, by covertly recorded video footage of staffers cavalierly discussing what to do with fetal body parts.

If nothing else, that recently released footage has galvanized Americans who oppose abortion, media outlets that share their views, and politicians who seek their votes. “Defunding Planned Parenthood is now a centerpiece of the Republican agenda going into the summer congressional recess,” The Washington Post reports, “and some hard-liners have said they are willing to force a government shutdown in October if federal support to the group is not curtailed.”

Like many in the mainstream media, the newspaper focused on whether Planned Parenthood broke the law. “Anti-abortion activists have suggested that the videos constitute evidence that Planned Parenthood has violated the federal ban on selling fetal tissue for profit, as well as other federal abortion restrictions,” it notes. “While Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards has apologized for the tone of remarks heard in one video, the organization has strongly denied any wrongdoing.”

For many, there’s also a hope that these videos will change public opinion.

Abortion opponents see one of the same qualities that they seized on in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortion provider who, in the words of a grand jury, “illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy, and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors." In that controversy, abortion-rights supporters correctly noted that Dr. Gosnell’s clinic was atypical; that he was accused of perpetrating murders, not legal abortions; and that if abortion were illegal, there might be more clinics like his, not fewer. But the case exposed the public to descriptions of “fetal demise”—more graphic than any that are typically encountered. And some observers noticed that late-term abortions performed legally at the clinic seemed no less brutal than illegal infanticides, even if tiny arms and legs were dismembered and spinal chords severed inside the womb or birth canal rather than outside it.

“I think we’ve forgotten what abortion really is,” activist Lila Rose told Bill O’Reilly at the time. Abortion opponents who believe it to be murder hoped that the case would jolt some of their fellow Americans toward the same conclusion–– and they see similar potential in the Planned Parenthood videos, even granting the significant differences between the two controversies. So long as the organization’s supporters and opponents are arguing over whether it behaved legally or illegally when providing the livers of aborted fetuses to medical researchers, some number of persuadable people who haven’t thought deeply about the subject will realize that doctors are sometimes killing something with a liver, and perhaps start to think of the unborn as possessing livers rather than just clumps of cells.

If that triggers a visceral reaction against abortion, Ross Douthat argues, it would be justified. “Real knowledge isn’t purely theoretical; it’s the fruit of experience, recognition, imagination, life itself,” he writes. “And the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn’t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood. It’s a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience—the reasoning that notes that it’s precisely a fetus’s humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one’s own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just ‘products of conception’ or tissue for the knife.”

For their part, abortion-rights activists also draw on visceral reactions in forming and arguing for their moral judgments. In their view, prohibiting abortion would be gruesome: a guarantor of horrific outcomes for women that would play out in millions of horrific scenes. They urge the public to think of the coat-hanger; the filthy underground clinics where desperate teenage girls will be abused; the 15-year-old rape victim whose skin will crawl at the physical sensation of her rapist’s baby growing inside her; the mother of three who dies painfully in pregnancy because she could not persuade anyone to terminate the pregnancy that threatened her health.

So many Americans have conflicted opinions about abortion policy, or do their utmost to look away from the abortion debate entirely, precisely because when they listen to an abortion opponent describing the consequences of its ongoing legality and then an abortion rights proponent describing the consequences of making it illegal, they desperately desire to avoid being complicit in either of those terrible realities. Told that legal abortion is unspeakably brutal to unborn humans and that lack of access to legal abortion is unspeakably brutal to women, they feel both are correct. Thus the appeal of Bill Clinton’s famous attempt to triangulate on the issue: The notion that the best way forward is to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.”

That approach squares with the moral intuitions of many Americans, even as others in the conflicted middle of the issue would prefer a formulation that distinguishes between abortions carried out at 8 weeks and those carried out at 8 months. For them, “safe, legal, and rare” sounds like a good compromise when they imagine a “clump of cells” being aborted very early in a pregnancy and much less desirable––even intolerable––when they imagine a baby that would be perfectly viable outside the womb being dismembered at 33 weeks inside the birth canal.

For either sort in the conflicted middle, this summer has brought some happy news. “Over the past six years, Colorado has conducted one of the largest experiments with long-acting birth control,” the New York Times reported. “If teenagers and poor women were offered free intrauterine devices and implants that prevent pregnancy for years, state officials asked, would those women choose them? They did in a big way, and the results were startling. The birthrate among teenagers across the state plunged by 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, while their rate of abortions fell by 42 percent, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.”

The program saved taxpayers an estimated $80 million in Medicaid costs and will cut costs elsewhere too. But when the private money that paid for the program dried up, some pro-life legislators in the state opposed continuing to fund it using public money. Why would legislators who regard abortion as murder oppose a program that caused a 42 percent reduction in women seeking the procedure? “Most of the time an IUD prevents sperm from meeting an egg, and therefore prevents pregnancy,” NPR explains. “But if the egg and sperm do meet, the IUD keeps that embryo from planting itself in the uterus. In those cases, an IUD would prevent a fertilized egg from developing into a person.” Some regard those rare cases as abortions.

Opponents of state funding for IUDs cite other concerns as well. "We believe that offering contraceptives to teens, especially long-acting reversible contraceptives, while it may prevent pregnancy, does not help them understand the risks that come with sexual activities," Colorado Family Action stated in USA Today. "We should not remove parents from the equation—equipping teens for safe sex without their parent's involvement bypasses this critical parental right and responsibility. Parents need to be the primary educator when it comes to sexual education and the primary decision about healthcare choices for their children. Lastly, Colorado taxpayers should not be paying for the 'Cadillac' of birth control for minor children."

My position on abortion is very much in the conflicted middle. Does human life begin at conception? When a heartbeat can be detected? At some threshold of brain development? At birth? I don’t know for sure. After much reflection, I’ve concluded that I should usually write about other issues where I’ve found more clarity.

But precisely because I’m at least somewhat persuaded by Douthat’s argument that it’s rational to pay some attention to our visceral reactions, because “real knowledge isn’t purely theoretical; it’s the fruit of experience, recognition, imagination, life itself,” I find myself feeling, with more confidence than I typically do on this subject, that it’s a huge mistake to group IUDS in the same moral category as abortions. That reducing clinic abortions by 42 percent is a morally superior outcome even if IUDs used to achieve that stop some fertilized eggs from implanting. It isn’t just that those cases are rare (though I find that relevant) but that––to return to an earlier formulation––an egg just after it is fertilized seems better characterized as “a clump of cells” than “a living thing with a liver.”

There are pro-lifers who feel very deeply that deliberately ending a life at eight minutes is the moral equivalent of doing so at eight months; and while I bear them no ill will and cannot definitely prove that they are wrong, I hope that they fail to prevent the public funding of IUDs in more states. Rigorous studies declare that they are medically safe. If no terrible, non-medical unintended consequences can be anticipated from their wider use––and that ought to be probed as cautiously as has their medical safety––they strike me as the happiest of all advances in the realm of reproduction: a technology that advances women’s autonomy even as it decreases abortions and saves taxpayers money. The retort, “life begins at conception and I cannot be complicit in subsidizing a device that ends such lives” is, I think, coherent. But it is seemingly at odds with the visceral case against Planned Parenthood.

If we should be influenced at all by our reactions to graphic descriptions of late-term abortions or the livers of aborted fetuses, we should also be influenced by the fact of feeling very little on hearing that a newly fertilized egg did not implant. And I suspect that one day in the future, when very effective birth control is in widespread use, we’ll look back with confusion on a time when the greatest opposition to contraception that would nearly halve the number of abortions in the U.S. was opposed by the same coalition that most strongly believes abortion to be murder.

Lion Item: Cecil's Death Is Great for Rage, and Turns Out He's Also Great for Raising Cash

Cecil the lion’s death last month has resulted in donations of more than $780,000 to the team at Oxford University that was studying him.

Researchers at Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit said Tuesday the money would help them study lions not only in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, where Cecil lived, but also in adjoining countries.

Cecil was lured out of Hwange and shot with a bow and arrow by Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer who had paid $50,000 to hunt him. But the lion didn’t die immediately, and his hunters tracked him down and killed him some 40 hours later. Cecil was then skinned and beheaded.

Killing lions isn’t illegal, and, as we noted Monday, 11 African countries, including Zimbabwe and South Africa, issue permits for their hunting. Indeed, some hunters argue trophy hunting actually helps conservation, by providing tens of thousands of dollars per permit to countries that otherwise lack the resources to protect wildlife.

But news of the death of Cecil, a local favorite, quickly prompted outrage worldwide, especially on social media. Palmer, who has said he relied on his local guides to ensure the hunt was legal, closed his dental practice amid death threats. His current whereabouts are unknown. Zimbabwe wants him extradited, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it is investigating how Cecil was killed. The outrage over the lion's death has also pressured airlines, including Delta and American, to announce they will stop transporting hunting trophies.

David McDonald, the head of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, said Tuesday the global response to Cecil’s story “transcends the tragic fate of one lion, and sends a signal that people care about conservation and want it to be reflected in how humanity lives alongside Nature in the 21st Century.”

The $780,000 in donations was aided by a $100,000 matching pledge from American philanthropists Tom and Daphne Kaplan.