Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 383

Why Obama Pushed for Gay Rights in Kenya

President Obama’s first visit to Kenya as U.S. president concluded on Sunday and, for all intents and purposes, the journey went well: Obama was greeted by adoring crowds throughout the country and was also able to meet with a number of his relatives.

But the trip did include one tense moment. Appearing at a press conference with his counterpart, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, on Saturday, Obama spoke out about the importance of gay rights in the country.

“As somebody who has family in Kenya and knows the history of how the country so often is held back because women and girls are not treated fairly, I think those same values apply when it comes to different sexual orientations,” he said. He then likened anti-gay discrimination as “the path whereby freedoms begin to erode and bad things happen.”

“Obama’s message resonated with many Kenyans, and will be debated and work its way through society.”

Kenyatta didn’t take the bait. “For Kenyans today, the issue of gay rights is really a non-issue,” he said. “We want to focus on other issues that really are day-to-day issues for our people.” Kenyans in attendance applauded his remarks.

Gay equality has a long way to go in Africa. Of the continent’s 54 countries, only one, South Africa, has legalized same-sex marriage. In many others, opposition to homosexuality is nearly universal. According to a 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center, 98 percent of the population of Nigeria, the continent’s largest economy, believe homosexuality should not be part of society. The percentages in Senegal and Ghana were scarcely lower. In Uganda, where public opposition reaches 96 percent, rights activists achieved a rare victory in 2014 with the overturning of a law mandating life in prison for many instances of gay sex. But months later, a similar piece of legislation was enacted in Gambia. Attitudes in the continent’s southern countries aren’t much more tolerant. When a Supreme Court decision legalized gay marriage in the United States last month, Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe remarked that he would take the opportunity to propose marriage to Obama himself.

In many ways, the situation for LGBT individuals in Kenya is less bleak. Gay and lesbian Kenyans have appeared on television and received respectful coverage in the national media, and gay-friendly clubs are known to exist in Nairobi, the capital. In April, Kenya’s high court legalized a gay rights organization for the first time. But homophobia remains rampant throughout the country, infecting even the top leadership. After April’s ruling William Ruto, Kenya’s deputy president, said in a speech that “we would not allow homosexuality in our nation, as it violates our religious and cultural beliefs.”

Despite Ruto’s frank bigotry—he has also referred to homosexuality as a “dirty act,” a comment that Obama said he “disagreed with”—Kenya’s reticence to accept gay rights exists for a variety of reasons. According to Howard French, a former New York Times correspondent in West Africa now at Columbia University, Obama’s call for tolerance—however well-intentioned—resonated with an welcome tradition of Western leaders lecturing Africans on ways they could improve.

“Africans have been subjected to the judgments of others: what’s right for them, what they’re ready for more than anything else,” French wrote on Twitter on Sunday, adding that “calling something cultural imperialism has nothing to do whether one is in agreement or not with a particular piece of advice.”

A BBC clip filmed on the eve of Obama's arrival presented Kenyans expressing a similar aversion to American meddling. Some of the individuals interviewed announced their support for gay rights—or at least a desire for the government to leave LGBT people alone. But others argued that Obama ought to respect the fact that other countries do not share the American point of view.

“If [Kenyan people] are not comfortable with the gay rights, then [Obama] shouldn’t push,” said a young woman in the clip. “He shouldn’t force it on Africans.”

There is also concern that American advocacy for gay rights may backfire on the continent. After Gambia and Uganda passed their laws criminalizing homosexuality, the U.S. imposed sanctions on the two countries. But according to the New York Times, the sanctions merely hardened public opposition to gay rights.

Do Obama’s comments in Kenya carry that risk? Likely not. And at the very least, they force a national conversation on a topic that the Kenyan government would rather not discuss at all.

“Obama’s message resonated with many Kenyans, and will be debated and work its way through society,” wrote French.

Ashley Monroe’s The Blade: Sharp and Sweet

While the world mourned the end of Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert’s marriage earlier this month, a handful of profiteers saw the bittersweet upside: the music that would surely follow. After all, if Lambert, country’s swaggering high priestess, and Shelton, its sleazy reprobate cousin, can’t be counted on to provide the definitive 21st-century odes to D-I-V-O-R-C-E, then Nashville really is in decline.

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In recent years, though, country’s jagged hurt of wounded hearts and reckless lovers has been superseded by something more celebratory—sure, there were the hollow drunk dials of Lee Ann Womack’s “Last Call” and Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now,” but even the sad-sack jilted groom of Dierks Bentley’s “Drunk on a Plane” ends up turning his lonely honeymoon into a raucous fiesta and getting a little extra attention from a comely flight attendant. The general sense of joie de Jose Cuervo was part of what made Ashley Monroe’s 2013 album Like a Rose so bracing: If bro-country was all about the party, Like a Rose confronted the aftermath. “Nothing hits,” she sings on one track, “Nothing hurts, like the morning after.”

Monroe is a storyteller who can tap into her fragile heart in a sweetly subversive way: Her imagery isn’t hearts and flowers so much as flowers and flickknives. “Give me weed instead of roses,” she compells a lover on Like a Rose, “bring me whiskey ‘stead of wine. Every puff, every shot, you’re lookin’ better all the time.” Her new album, The Blade, channels that edginess in theory, but also tempers it with an unmistakeable sense of contentment. “If April showers bring May flowers,” she sings on “Mayflowers,” “and a flower brings a smile / then I can’t complain.”

That isn’t to say it’s all sunshine and Sweethearts. The title track, perhaps the most persuasive song, and the only one on the record that doesn’t give Monroe a writing credit, is a piano-led ballad suffused with the raw ache of a wounded heart:

I let your love in, I have the scar
I felt the razor against my heart
I thought we were both in all the way
But you caught it by the handle
And I caught it by the blade

The most country element on the song is Monroe’s voice, which trills girlishly even on more aggressive tracks. “Winning Streak,” for one, has keyboard riffs and riots reminiscent of Jerry Lee Lewis: “My mind is unadjusted / and my guitar strings are rusted,” she drawls, “had somebody that I trusted / Leave me broke and busted.” A chorus of male backing singers jut in and out, adding to the jaunty feel, and the stakes feel breezily low.

More compelling is “If Love Was Fair,” a plaintive, poppy track that gives into twang in the chorus amid a tangle of slide guitars. The first verse reminds of how effectively its singer sets a scene, and how winningly she presents dysfunction: If love didn’t hurt, she wouldn’t be “tangled up in someone’s arms I know I won’t see later … stuck between a rock and being stoned.”

Monroe’s imagery isn’t about hearts and flowers so much as flowers and flickknives.

There are a handful of songs that simply relish happiness—“From Time to Time” is a saccharine but gentle benediction to a lover, while “Mayflowers” heralds the arrival of spring over a backdrop of strings and Monroe’s Parton-esque vocals. The sound is so pleasant, so pensive, that it’s easy to get past the hackneyed metaphors and hazy scenes. But it’s infinitely more thrilling when she gives in to excess. “I buried your love alive,” she almost brags on a track of the same name. “Deep inside me, there’s a shallow grave / That haunts me every day.” The song is saturated with spilled whiskey and regret, but there’s an unmistakeable swagger to it. It’s part and parcel with “Dixie,” a mournful ode to the troubled state of southern living. “It was the mines that killed my daddy / It was the law that killed my man,” she recalls. “It was the Bible Belt that whipped me when I broke the fifth command.”

Monroe’s style is distinct from the ombré-outlaw schtick of the Pistol Annies, her on-hiatus group with Lambert and Angaleena Presley. But in similar ways, she challenges the country status quo and upends expectations about what female artists should and shouldn’t do. The women in the songs of Dierks Bentley and Luke Bryan and Sam Hunt are mostly interchangeable cyphers—lipsticked, Daisy Duke-wearing mannequins with legs the length of Tennessee and jeans faded in all the right places. The Blade is a reminder that reality is infinitely more complex, and more gratifying, even if there’s a sharp edge underneath all that sugar.

The Unbelievable I Am Cait

How extraordinary is Caitlyn Jenner’s story? Midway through the first episode of E!’s miniseries I Am Cait, her stepson-in-law Kanye West answers the question in the manner that only he can: “This is one of the strongest things that have happened in our existence as human beings that are so controlled by perception.”

Wearing sock-shoes in Jenner’s sunlit kitchen, West elaborates. “You couldn't have been up against more,” he says to Jenner. “Your daughter’s a supermodel, you’re a celebrity… but it was still like, ‘F*** everybody, this is who I am.’”

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This idea of fame as an obstacle doesn’t quite jibe with what Jenner herself says throughout Sunday’s I Am Cait premiere. Most trans people don’t have closets full of Tom Ford dresses or hilltop mansions in Malibu; many face disapproval from family members, threats of violence, and financial hurdles that make it hard to transition. Jenner acknowledges this fact repeatedly, taking time between scenes of her playing tennis or inspecting clothes to talk about less-advantaged transgender people. At the end of the hour, she visits with the family of a trans teenager who killed himself, shedding light in a way that’ll bolster some peoples’ contention that Jenner’s setting an example in how to use privilege for good.

But the biggest takeaway from the first I Am Cait installment is that fame interacts strangely with something as personal as a gender transition. Early on, Jenner and her stylists cheer as her Vanity Fair cover is revealed on TV; later, Jenner's mother, Esther, and Jenner’s daughter, Kylie, “meet” Caitlyn for the first time. That’s right: Immediate family members were introduced to the female-presenting Jenner after Diane Sawyer, Buzz Bissinger, and the rest of the world were, at least according to the chronology of the special. It’s especially strange when Kylie reveals she picked out turquoise hair extensions for Jenner based on Googling images of her.

Bissinger’s Vanity Fair profile of Jenner revealed that Jenner’s older children objected to her decision to document her new life using the same TV producers who made Keeping Up With the Kardashians, fearing the results would “devolve into maximum mayhem and minimal social awareness.” Thankfully, that nightmare has not come to pass. With its contemplative music and sociopolitical seriousness, the show has a different feel than the one that spawned it. But there is one fundamental, distracting similarity: In its editing and with its seemingly pre-rehearsed speeches for the camera, I Am Cait mimics typical reality TV by trying to force dramatic narratives onto day-to-day life. And while spotting the fakeness was part of the fun of the Kardashians, here it verges on counterproductive.

* * *

The most emotionally moving parts of the episode revolve around the 89-year-old Esther seeing her son as a daughter for the first time. When Esther arrives in Malibu, Jenner greets her by saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Esther looks up at her newly statuesque child and replies, sweetly, “I knew it would be.” Shortly after, Esther talks about how much she loves and supports Jenner, even as she continues to think of her as Bruce. “It’s a lot of getting used to,” she says, on the verge of tears. “But I will. I will.”

This all happens within the first 12 minutes of the episode. At no point does Esther say anything mean or disapproving. She just is going to need time before she can start referring to her child as “Caitlyn” with the same ease she once said “Bruce.” And yet for much of the rest of the episode the producers keep returning to Esther’s difficulties, as if her position—loving but still processing—is a point of conflict. (There is one interesting moment, when Esther brings up the Bible’s prohibition against crossdressing, and an LGBT-issues counselor says that Jenner’s not a man pretending to be a woman—Jenner’s a woman, period.) The storyline finally ends during a contrived-seeming conversation on a couch between Jenner and Esther. “I’m dragging you along with me,” Jenner says, and her mother just laughs faintly and says “okay.”

When the mission is to humanize a group of people, credibility counts.

The rest of the premiere is filled with other such redundancies—ideas aired, then re-aired, and then re-aired, either in hopes of amping up drama or filling out the hour. There are real, rarely-before-depicted challenges for Jenner to tackle: how to dress and style herself; how to recalibrate some old relationships; how to better serve the trans community. A filmmaker from the world of traditional documentary, rather than reality TV, might have found a way to make those conflicts not feel like a performance for the camera.

Of course, performance isn’t inherently bad—even documentaries are works of artifice. But when the mission is to humanize a group of people, credibility counts. Jenner, at one point, wonders whether some of her kids and stepkids haven’t yet visited her because they secretly disapprove of her transition. But the viewer may wonder right back at her whether their absence was planned, so that emotional meet-and-greets could later take place on camera.

Perhaps I’m looking at this the wrong way. Perhaps it’s heartening that even as the subject matter and Jenner’s appearance has changed, I Am Cait retains some essential Kardiashianness. As Esther observes at one point, Caitlyn still has Bruce’s soul. And for transgender acceptance to become total, it will require people to understand that someone’s gender expression might shift but their fundamental nature doesn’t. I Am Cait, in a few ways, supports that message.

A Good Month for Syria's Tyrant

Over the last two years, as the Islamic State took control over a large swath of Syria and Iraq, Turkey had refrained from engaging in the U.S.-led fight against the group. Until now. On Thursday, Ankara announced that the United States would be allowed to launch air attacks against ISIS from a Turkish base in the city of Incirlik. Then on Friday, Turkish F-16 plans struck ISIS targets within Syria, marking the first direct attack against the terrorist organization since its formation. According to Ahmet Davotoglu, the country’s prime minister, these attacks are part of a “broader strategy” and are likely to continue.

Turkey’s participation in the war is good news for the U.S., which had prodded Ankara to intensify its anti-ISIS efforts for months. But it’s also a boon for a man both countries so desperately want to see gone: Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

For all intents and purposes, Erdogan and Assad are now fighting on the same side.

Ousting Assad has been a goal of both Turkey and the U.S. since late 2011, when it became clear that the dictator would not step aside in the face of a popular uprising. Since then, both Washington and Ankara have supported—to varying degree—opposition groups within Syria. But after ISIS’ stunning capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, last June, the top American priority became defeating the group. Turkey, a NATO member, publicly went along with the plan. But the country contributed little to the effort.

The government of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has framed Turkey’s inaction against ISIS as one of strategy: Because Assad’s brutality caused the group to form in the first place, it made sense to eliminate the dictator first. But a more compelling explanation for Turkey’s reticence was its desire to root out Kurdish militant groups, against whom the Turkish state has battled for decades. The Erdogan regime, which has few qualms about attacking Kurdish militants in other countries, could not tolerate an independent Kurdish state within Syria. So it was of little surprise that when Syrian Kurds fought ISIS in a vicious battle in Kobani, the Erdogan regime did not come to its aid.

So what explains the about-face? On Monday, a suicide bomber tied to ISIS killed 34 people in the Turkish border town of Suruc, an incident met with global outrage. But the suicide attack was merely one of several factors that changed Erdogan’s political calculus. ISIS’ brutality in Iraq and Syria has caused nearly two million people to migrate to Turkey, straining the government’s capacity to provide them with food and shelter, and Erdogan had come under intense domestic criticism for refusing to attack the group.

Turkey’s offensive against ISIS doesn’t mean that the country no longer wishes to remove Assad from power. But the new strategy means that, for all intents and purposes, Erdogan and Assad are now fighting on the same side. This is a positive development for the once-isolated dictator, who is enjoying a rather good month: The U.S.-Iran deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief is a boon for Assad, whose regime is a major beneficiary of Tehran’s largesse.

None of this means that the Syrian government will soon regain control of the country. But there are signs the regime is feeling confident. On Saturday, Assad issued a decree granting amnesty to military deserters—who number in the thousands—willing to turn themselves in within the next two months. The likeliest scenario for Syria, though, remains the status quo: a government too weak to control the whole country, but not weak enough to have to negotiate. For the Syrian people, this means that there is no end in sight to a civil war that has claimed over 300,000 lives.

UnREAL and Gawkerism: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Gods and Bachelors: On Lifetime's UnREAL
Phillip Maciak | The Los Angeles Review of Books
“TV this mortifying can be alienating, but, if you give over to it, it can be absolutely gripping. It’s like watching a car crash; or maybe it’s like being in a car crash; or maybe it’s like causing a car crash. Regardless, you have to ask: who’s at the wheel?”

Nicki Minaj Is Right: The VMAs Have Historically Been Biased Against Black Artists
Aimee Cliff | The Fader
“The Video Of The Year nomination that Minaj is seeking is the same one every artist wants—it’s been the most prestigious award of the night since the VMAs launched in 1984—but it has a very white history.”

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Clueless and Capitalism: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Taylor Swift Is Not Your Friend
Dayna Evans | Gawker
“The reviews of the 1989 tour have been overwhelmingly positive in that cracked-smile way that makes it seem like every writer was forced to write with a gun to his or her head. They read like press releases at best and cult scripture at worse, and there is hardly a trace anywhere of any dissenting opinion, specifically anything that calls out Swift’s current co-opting of capital-f Feminism as a self-promotional tool.”

The Limits of Gawkerism
Jeet Heer | The New Republic
“The Condé Nast executive is seen as a legitimate subject for attack because of his wealth and class privilege. What the adherents to Gawkerism rarely consider is whether tabloid gossip is really the best tool for fighting a class war.”

How Ant-Man Highlights the Sad State of Marvel’s Female Characters
Matt Singer | ScreenCrush
“Throughout the entire movie, Hope keeps pushing Hank to let her join the fight. He refuses; he lost his wife, he won’t lose his daughter. And while Hope spends the film hoping for an opportunity to prove her value, the audience does the same, hoping that Marvel will finally give its fans the super-powered superheroine they’ve been waiting for.”

How Taye Diggs Is Transforming the Role of Hedwig
James Hannaham | The New York Times Magazine
“Hold up, though—is this not madness? Black America's most eligible bachelor is about to play a glammed-out Teutonic genderqueer mash-up of Nico and Axl Rose?”

The Bravery of E. L. Doctorow
George Saunders | The New Yorker
“Doctorow was an incredibly brave writer. He articulated our American darkness as well as any writer ever has—our hubris, our greed, our stupidity around race and class—but this awareness of darkness vibrated alongside a deep optimism, a fascination with the beauty and genius of the American experiment.”

An Expert’s Must-See Guide to the Half-a-Million Amazing Historical Videos AP Just Put Online
Caitlin Dewey | The Washington Post
“It’s the biggest dump of historical news the site has ever seen. It’s also a huge and exciting step in an industry-wide push to digitize and democratize information that’s typically been locked up in archives and museums.”

White People Have a Race—But Everyone Flips Out When We Talk About It
Jenée Desmond-Harris | Vox
“That idea—that white people have an identity worth thinking about, and a natural stake in tackling racism—is taking hold.”

How an Unlikely Hollywood Juggernaut Came to Rule Netflix
Jason Tanz | Wired
“Beyond their prodigious output, Mark and his brother, Jay, 42, are celebrated for creating an entirely new model of DIY filmmaking, one tailor-made for the Netflix era of digital distribution. Twenty years ago every young director dreamed of becoming the next Quentin Tarantino. Today they all want to be a Duplass brother.”

Mr. Robot, Ms. Robot

There’s a conversation in the second episode of USA’s hacker drama Mr. Robot between the protagonist, a programmer named Elliot, and the show’s titular character. They’re in an abandoned arcade, the HQ of an Anonymous-esque hacker collective called F Society, and one of its members, Darlene, has just stormed off in a huff. Earlier she cursed at Elliot, broke into his apartment to take a shower, and ranted to him on the subway about her ex. “What’s her deal?” Elliot asks Mr. Robot, F Society’s mysterious leader (Christian Slater). “She’s a complicated woman,” he replies. “Most malware coders are, am I right?”

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Dramas about hackers are notorious for taking liberties to make the mundane, time-consuming work of hacking, well, sexier. But since it debuted in June, Mr. Robot has earned praise for its creator Sam Esmail’s devotion to accuracy: Even now, at the midseason point of the show, much coverage of the show still centers on how deft and realistic its handling of technology is. But one underappreciated aspect of the show is how Mr. Robot treats its female characters, as well as how it critiques the kind of traditional masculinity often valorized in antihero dramas. In doing so, it offers a smart realignment of the gender politics you might expect from a series about big corporations, cybersecurity, and hacking—arenas that have been historically unfriendly to women. And it’s all coming from a breakout show, not on HBO, but on a basic cable network from a first-time showrunner.

The men of Mr. Robot harbor deep-seated pathologies, perhaps none more so than its main character, played by the terrific Rami Malek. Elliot is a morphine-addicted, anxiety-ridden programmer who works for a cybersecurity company named Allsafe by day and hacks into bad guys’ computers at night. When F Society taps him to bring down “Evil Corp,” an Enron/Apple/Google-type conglomerate, it sets off a chain of events that threaten his coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. Elliot—who provides the show’s voiceovers—is the textbook definition of an unreliable narrator. He talks to possibly imaginary people, questions his own sanity, grapples with paranoia and hallucinations, and is often either high or going through withdrawal.

Which is to say, viewers are more likely to pity Elliot than they are to idealize or emulate him. Unlike most TV antiheroes, he’s neither a tortured ball of testosterone (True Detective, Mad Men), nor an emasculated nobody seeking to become a somebody (Breaking Bad). He’s an outsider who snarks to himself about people who drink Starbucks lattes and post selfies on Instagram, not because he thinks he’s better than they are, but because he feels disconnected from them. In his attempts to act like a normal guy, he’s adopted a well-meaning but patronizing attitude toward the women in his life, including his childhood friend and AllSafe coworker Angela, his drug dealer/girlfriend Shayla, and his psychiatrist Krista. He goes out of his way to fix, protect, or help them by hacking into their social-media accounts or those of their boyfriends, like a bedroom superhero testing out his powers for good.

But Elliot’s creepy intrusiveness helps Mr. Robot puncture a flawed masculine value: A man’s need to defend a woman isn’t always heroic; it can be self-serving, presumptuous, and disrespectful. The show doesn’t just rely on the audience to intuit his white-knight complex either—both Shayla and Angela openly challenge it. “Even if I’m losing, let me lose, okay?”Angela tells Elliot, after he tries to stand up for her in a meeting with AllSafe’s sexist CTO.  

On the less-sympathetic end of the spectrum is the AllSafe executive, Tyrell Wellick, a Scandanavian ubermensch whose Patrick Bateman-esque egoism has yet to find its limits. He’s the ultimate embodiment of the show’s vision of corporate psychopathy: amoral, unflappable, manipulative, vain, inhuman. For therapy, he pays homeless men to let him beat them up. He’s the kind of guy who prepares for big meetings by practicing speeches in front of a mirror and slapping himself when he screws up. But like Elliot, he’s far from a sympathetic or admirable in the way that handsome, powerful men on TV typically are, no matter their flaws. Instead, the ill-channeled aggression, the self-destructiveness, the blind ambition, the neuroses, and the devotion to physical fitness all render Tyrell a caricature of male perfection.

Mr. Robot show’s female characters aren’t angsty antiheroes, but like their male counterparts, they’re by turns aggressive, impulsive, myopic, idealistic, and naive. That is, they’re human. But they do sometimes fall victim, to varying degrees, to the men in their lives. Angela faces sexism at work, and is tethered to an insufferable, cheating boyfriend. Shayla lives under the thumb of her sexually violent drug supplier. The show implies that Darlene’s demanding personality may be a byproduct of belonging to the mostly male hacking community. And no wonder: In the pilot, Elliot stares at her in disbelief when she tells him that she wrote the malware program that attacked his company’s data centers.

Mr. Robot’s treatment of its female characters feels like an extension of its broader portrayal of those typically marginalized on TV.

Men dominate the hacker subculture, even though women comprise 28.5 percent of all computer programmers. But of the six members who make up the tiny F Society, two are women, one of whom, Trenton, is a Muslim who wears the hijab. This matters, not as a way to police representation on TV, but to show that Mr. Robot’s departure from strict accuracy in some areas makes it a more forward-thinking show that others could learn from, even if it’s not exactly radical. Through Darlene and Trenton, the series nods at real-life examples of female hacker groups, including one led by a Jordanian beauty queen that’s taking on ISIS.

The drama’s treatment of its female characters feels like an extension of its broader portrayal of those typically marginalized on TV. Mr. Robot and Darlene are the only white members of F Society. Trenton is shown praying early one morning. Malek, like the show’s creator, is Egyptian American. Mr. Robot also depicts an array of non-heteronormative relationships: There’s a sexual espionage thread involving two male characters; Elliot’s gay boss discusses the anxieties of formally coming out; during a hacking attempt, one target is a woman preparing to have a baby with her wife. The show isn’t without its messier moments: There was also a drugged pseudo-lesbian kiss whose merit is up for debate and a rape-revenge subplot. But considering Mr. Robot as a whole, Hollywood and its audiences should welcome this kind of seemingly effortless diversity, one that strikes an enviable balance of natural and deliberate.

The season’s only halfway over, and a lot could still go wrong by the time before the August 26 finale (viewers might never get as much backstory for Darlene, Trenton, Angela, or Shayla as they do for Tyrell or Elliot). But the fact is also that, five episodes in, Mr. Robot has proven itself to be more than a realistic hacker show or a cinematically adventurous Fincherian tone poem.

As the writer Brit Bennet has pointed out on Twitter, “We constantly debate how stories represent or erase types of people, but I wish we'd shift focus to whether stories empathize or imagine ... I just think representation is easy. Imagining yourself in the body of another is the hard work of writing and the hard work of being human.” For better or worse, Mr. Robot has a lot to say about getting inside the minds of others. Some characters seek to use that ability to exploit and destroy those around them. But starting with its thoughtful reframing of traditional gender politics, and moving onto its treatment of others typically excluded in Hollywood, the series has already taken promising steps from representation (which on its own can have tremendous consequences) toward even more meaningful empathy.

Are Americans More Pessimistic About Race—or More Realistic?

You don’t need a pollster to tell you that race relations are not especially good at the moment in the United States—all you need is a quick survey of headlines. But a new CBS/New York Times poll confirms it.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans believe race relations are bad, versus 37 percent who disagree. (Among whites, 56 percent think relations are bad; among blacks, it’s 68 percent.) Four in 10 Americans, among both black and white respondents, believe things are getting worse. The last time polls showed results this bad was immediately after the Rodney King riots in 1992.

Polling is an important barometer for what’s going on in the nation, but it’s a second-order tool. A poll measures whether people feel race relations are getting worse, not whether race relations are actually getting worse. It’s possible that what this poll actually shows is less a material change in race relations, than greater awareness among white Americans of racial divisions that were previously invisible to them. This poll offers some strong evidence for this theory.

From the many instances of killings of and violence against black Americans by police, to the Charleston massacre, to the increasing awareness of disparate treatment of blacks by the criminal-justice system, the news is suddenly full of evidence of racial divisions, which are being covered nearly constantly and with new sophistication. One of the most interesting graphs the Times included is this one, showing the changing number of blacks and whites who think race relations are good:

Do you think race relations in the U.S. are good or bad?

The New York Times

The portion of black Americans who think race relations are good has reverted to where it was in July 2008 (28 now versus 29 then), after a number of years of increased optimism. Compare that to the trend in the white population. There’s been a nearly 20-percent drop in the number of whites who think race relations are good.

Black Americans didn’t need the media to tell them that policing was unequal in their communities, that disproportionate numbers of blacks were behind bars, or that economic outcomes for whites and blacks were widely divergent. They knew it in 2008, and they know it today. White Americans were, until the recent spike in media coverage, largely shielded from these realities. As the pollster Robert Jones has noted, most white people have only other white people in their closest social circle.

Most of the change here isn’t in the actual substance of race relations—though, to be sure, debates over issues like the Confederate battle flag do inflame tensions in the short run. Most of the change is in how much more white Americans see those tensions every day.

The poll offers even more evidence that this is about a dawning consciousness. For example, as they have in every CBS and CBS/NYT poll since the 1990s, a strong majority of people of both races believe that race relations are good in their own communities. The number of people who think there’s been racial progress since the 1960s has remained mostly constant.

The Times frames this poll as an “age of Obama” question, using the now rather cliché point that many people thought the president’s election would herald a new age of racial harmony; as the poll shows, it has not come. Trying to disaggregate Obama’s impact on perceptions of race relations in the poll from other factors is tough. Half of whites disapprove of how he’s handling race, versus 40 percent who approve, while nearly three-quarters of blacks approve. A quarter of whites think the Obama administration favors blacks over whites; only 2 percent of blacks agree. An African American woman in Georgia told the Times she expected this: “I’m not surprised it’s gotten worse under President Obama, because he’s black, and so he already had that strike against him once he got into office.”

But about half of respondents, a clear plurality of both whites and blacks, thought that Obama’s presidency had had no effect on race relations. That makes a great deal of sense. The highly publicized cases of race tension have been largely outside of Obama’s control, and until recently he has tended to take an extremely muted approach to racial issues. It seems plausible, and maybe likely, that Michael Brown is a bigger factor here than Barack Obama.

This theory—that what’s driving these bleak impressions about race relations is whites awakening to realities that were always extant but had been invisible to them—suggests that the results may actually be cause for optimism. Actively grappling with racial tensions is crucial to solving them; ignoring them may obscure the wounds, but it won’t heal them. Although more bleakly realistic perceptions of race relations may not lead to improvement, they are a prerequisite to bridging the divide and producing a more positive view of relations between blacks and whites.

Ted Cruz's Cry for Attention

As the 2016 Republican presidential campaign heats up, Ted Cruz must be feeling a little left out.

Donald Trump has sucked up most of the oxygen in the GOP primary in recent weeks, railing against immigrants, rising in the polls, giving the party establishment a bout of collective agita, and relegating Cruz—a man who almost single-handedly engineered a shutdown of the federal government—to also-ran status. Indeed, it’s been desperate times for much of the non-Trump Republican field, and several contenders have resorted to desperate measures. Last week, Rand Paul (7th place in the last two polls) took an actual chainsaw to the tax code, and this week Lindsey Graham (tied for last) took a meat cleaver—and many other objects—to his own cell phone.

On Friday morning, the Texas Tea Party star made his own bid to force his way back into the national conversation by doing something almost unheard-of in the stodgy Senate chamber: He stood up and called a fellow senator a liar. And not just any senator, but the leader of his own party, Mitch McConnell.

“I cannot believe he would tell a flat-out lie,” Cruz declared of McConnell near the end of a damning floor speech about the expired Export-Import Bank. “What we just saw today was an absolute demonstration that, not only what he told every Republican senator, but what he told the press over and over and over again was a simple lie.”

“We now know that when the majority leader looks us in the eye and makes a commitment, he is willing to say things he knows are false.”

The issue that Cruz is so angry about—the Ex-Im Bank—is not one that’s likely to move a lot of Republican votes. The bank helps U.S. businesses find markets overseas, but conservatives have targeted it as a prime example of corporate welfare and “crony capitalism.” Congress allowed the bank’s charter to expire at the end of June, but shortly before Cruz spoke, McConnell announced plans to allow supporters of the bank to attach an amendment reviving it to a three-year highway bill the Senate is going to pass next week. The majority leader had said publicly for weeks that the Ex-Im amendment vote would likely happen, but Cruz claimed that he had promised the opposite to Republicans in a private meeting earlier this summer.

“We now know that when the majority leader looks us in the eye and makes a commitment, he is willing to say things he knows are false,” Cruz said. To appease conservatives, McConnell said the Senate would also hold a vote on a full repeal of Obamacare—an offer that Cruz treated as an insult. “It will be an exercise in meaningless political theater,” he said.  “An empty show vote—that’s a good way of distracting from whats really going on.”

Accusing another senator of lying on the Senate floor is not just rare—it runs counter to the Senate’s rules:

No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.

Cruz’s rant against his party leader was all the more notable because he has repeatedly refused to denounce Donald Trump’s critique of immigrants, or his later attack on John McCain, because, Cruz told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press: “I’m not interested in Republican-on-Republican violence.” That principled stand appears to have given way to Cruz’s desire for the votes that Trump is now hogging.

For his part, McConnell ignored Cruz’s diatribe and pointedly did not respond to it when he spoke on the Senate floor later in the day. (In truth, he was probably more offended at Cruz’s other accusation—that he was running the chamber in the same way as his Democratic predecessor and nemesis, Harry Reid, despite his promises of change.) McConnell surely saw Cruz’s outburst for what it was: A desperate attention-grab by a candidate sitting at 4 percent in the last two presidential polls, whose bad-boy status as the GOP’s ultimate conservative outsider has been eclipsed by the antics of The Donald.

An Ambiguous Victory for Gay Rights in Europe

L’amore vince. Sort of. This week, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled in the case of Oliari and Others v. Italy that Italy is obligated to legally recognize and protect same-sex unions. The judgment is an exciting development for LGBT activists in Europe, where more than a dozen nations have legalized gay marriage—representing roughly two-thirds of the countries that have done so worldwide. But the significance of this latest ruling isn’t entirely clear, mainly because of the unique nature of the court itself.

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage in June, there was no real confusion regarding the court’s authority or the scope of its jurisdiction (enforcement of the ruling has been another matter entirely). But the situation is murkier with the ECtHR, an international court independent of any sovereign entity and with jurisdiction over 47 member states and 800 million people.

The court was established in 1959 in order to enforce compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights. Based in Strasbourg, France, the court accepts cases from both individuals and states. It only takes on a case after all possible legal recourse has been exhausted in national courts, and rulings are binding on the state against which the case has been brought. Enforcement of rulings is handled by the Committee of Ministers, comprised of the foreign ministers of the 47 member states.

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Oliari and Others v. Italy wasn’t the ECtHR’s first foray into matters of sexual orientation. In fact, the court has been something of a judicial vanguard in the field. Whereas the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized homosexual activity in 2003 with Lawrence v. Texas, the ECtHR came to the same conclusion back in 1981 with Dudgeon v. the United Kingdom. In 2013, the court ruled that states that offered heterosexual couples legal recognition of unions beyond marriage were obligated to offer the same options to homosexual couples. The court has also been a pioneer on transgender rights, requiring the French government in 1992 to respect and recognize a citizen’s changed gender; in May, the court ruled that transgender people are protected against discrimination on the grounds of gender identity.

In the Oliari case, three Italian gay couples complained that they were unable to enter into any legally recognized or protected unions despite being in stable, committed relationships. The court found that Italy’s refusal to offer any legal framework for the recognition or protection of these unions violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which holds, “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home, and his correspondence.” Although the article is geared toward preventing state interference in the lives of individuals, the court found that “it may also impose on a State certain positive obligations to ensure effective respect for the rights protected by Article 8”—namely, legal recognition and protection of same-sex unions.

Some members of the ECtHR will likely ignore the ruling entirely. That includes Russia, whose government has pursued virulently anti-gay policies.

Critically, the judgment does not call for marriage equality, as in the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in the United States. It does not explicitly oblige any state other than Italy to recognize same-sex unions. It does, however, place indirect pressure on other European countries to do so, according to Dinah Shelton, a law professor at George Washington University. “Because the court is issuing an interpretation of a right within the Convention to which [the states] are bound,” Shelton said, “they’re on notice that if they were similarly sued the result would likewise be the same.” With this in mind, Shelton explained, states that belong to the ECtHR may pass legislation to comply with the ruling so as to preempt future lawsuits.

Still, some members of the ECtHR will likely ignore the ruling entirely. That includes Russia, whose government has pursued virulently anti-gay policies. Russia and the court already have a complicated relationship: Russia had the highest number of pending cases before the ECtHR in 2013, accounts for a plurality of cases requiring special attention from the Committee of Ministers, and takes the longest time on average—9.7 years in 2014—to fully comply with court rulings. The relationship isn’t entirely dysfunctional, though. Russia paid out nearly €2 billion in financial compensation in 2014 as a result of court rulings, and the judicial body’s decisions have influenced Russian jurisprudence even at the level of the Russian Supreme Court.

The reality is that if the ECtHR were, in the future, to order Russia to recognize same-sex unions, it would have no surefire way of enforcing that judgment. The Committee of Ministers cannot apply sanctions or similar penalties to ensure compliance; it can only apply continuous diplomatic pressure on a given member. Diplomatic pressure can be successful—the Committee of Ministers was able to pressure Turkey into complying with a case related to its 1974 invasion of Cyprus by linking the case to Turkey’s possible admission to the European Union. But pressure can only go so far, and short of expelling a state from the court, there is little the ECtHR can do to require a nation to adopt measures that are anathema to it. Thus, it would be difficult to force Russia, Ukraine, or other serial non-compliers to follow the court’s lead. (Italy also has a poor reputation for compliance, but that’s due more to its dysfunctional judiciary than to ideological opposition to the court’s rulings, according to Shelton.)

If nothing else, though, the court sent a message this week to its 47 members, 23 of which do not officially acknowledge same-sex partnerships: The legal recognition of gay unions is a human right, not a privilege.

From Whitewater to Benghazi: A Clinton Scandal Primer

What did the secretary send, and when was it classified?

That question might not quite be Howard Baker, but that’s the latest bone of contention over Hillary Clinton’s email records while she presided at the State Department. The New York Times was the first to report that two inspectors general have requested an investigation into the mishandling of classified material in connection with Clinton’s email account.

If that sounds a bit convoluted, that’s because it is. The initial Times report suggested that Clinton herself would be the target of the investigation—which could be a major issue in the midst of Clinton’s White House bid. But an updated version of the story, as well as reports from The Wall Street Journal and Associated Press, suggests a murkier situation. When Clinton’s use of a private email account was revealed, she was widely criticized. The State Department is now in the process of releasing her emails during her time as secretary—though the emails being released are only the ones that she chose to turn over to the department, exercising what her camp says is legal discretion. Other emails were reportedly destroyed.

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The inspectors general charge that classified information has been revealed as part of those document dumps. But is that Clinton’s fault? It’s not clear. In some cases, information that was not classified when she sent it was retroactively classified and consequently redacted. In other cases, information that was classified was apparently incorrectly released. The Times reports, “It is not clear if any of the information in the emails was marked as classified by the State Department when Mrs. Clinton sent or received them,” but the AP adds that “the referral doesn't suggest wrongdoing by Clinton herself.” (My colleague Conor Friedersdorf explores the problems with current classification standards, and the unevenness with which they are applied and used to prosecute leakers.)

The email controversy is quickly turning into a classic Clinton scandal. Her use of a private email account became known during the course of an investigation into the 2012 deaths of U.S. personnel in Benghazi, Libya. Thus far, the investigations have found no wrongdoing on Benghazi, but the private-email use and now the classified-info referral have become stories unto themselves. This is something of a pattern with the Clinton family, which has been in the public spotlight since Bill Clinton’s first run for office, in 1974: Something that appears potentially scandalous on its face turns out to be innocuous, but an investigation into reveals other questionable behavior. The classic case is Whitewater, a failed real-estate investment Bill and Hillary Clinton made in 1978. While no inquiry ever produced evidence of wrongdoing, investigations ultimately led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice.

With Hillary Clinton favored to win the Democratic nomination for president, every Clinton scandal—from Whitewater to Clinton’s State Department emails—will be under the microscope. (No other American politicians—even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush—has fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.) Keeping track of each controversy, where it came from, and how serious it is, is no small task, so here’s a primer. We’ll update it as new information emerges.

Clinton’s State Department Emails Secretary of State Hillary Clinton checks her phone on board a plane from Malta to Tripoli, Libya. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? Setting aside the question of the Clintons’ private email server, what’s in the emails that Clinton did turn over to State? While some of the emails related to Benghazi have been released, there are plenty of others covered by public-records laws that haven’t.

When? 2009-2013

How serious is it? Who knows? The fact that Clinton sorted her own emails would seem to offer some inoculation. But a federal judge’s ruling that the State Department must release new batches of cleared emails every 30 days means there will be a monthly cycle of reporters digging into the cache—bad news for a candidate who’d rather put it behind her. Plus there have already been some strange revelations, like the fact that former Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal was advising her on Libya and a wide range of matters, and may have been the source of initial, misleading ideas that the Benghazi attacks were spontaneous mob violence. Two inspectors general have also requested a criminal investigation into whether classified material was improperly released as part of the publication of Clinton’s emails.

Benghazi A man celebrates as the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi burns on September 11, 2012. (Esam Al-Fetori / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? On September 11, 2012, attackers overran a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Since then, Republicans have charged that Hillary Clinton failed to adequately protect U.S. installations or that she attempted to spin the attacks as spontaneous when she knew that they were planned terrorist operations.

When? September 11, 2012-present

How serious is it? Benghazi has gradually turned into a classic “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” scenario. Only the fringes argue, at this point, that Clinton deliberately withheld aid. A House committee continues to investigate the killings and aftermath. But it was through the Benghazi investigations that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server became public—a controversy that remains potent.

The Clintons’ Private Email Server Jim Young / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What? During the course of the Benghazi investigation, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt learned that Clinton had used a personal email account while secretary of state. It turned out she had also been using a private server, located at a house in New York. The result was that Clinton and her staff decided which emails to turn over to the State Department as public records and which to withhold; they say they then destroyed the ones they had designated as personal.

When? 2009-2013, during Clinton’s term as secretary.

Who? Hillary Clinton; Bill Clinton; top aides including Huma Abedin

How serious is it? The rules governing use of personal emails are murky, and Clinton aides insist that she followed all rules. There’s no evidence at this point that proves otherwise. The greater political problem for Clinton is that it raises questions about how she selected the emails she turned over and what was in the ones that she deleted. Are those emails truly deleted? Could the server have been hacked? Some of the emails she received on her personal account are marked sensitive. Plus there’s a entirely different set of questions about Clinton’s State Department emails.

Sidney Blumenthal Blumenthal takes a lunch break while being deposed in private session of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? A former journalist, Blumenthal was a top aide in the second term of the Bill Clinton administration and helped on messaging during the bad old days. He served as an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and when she took over the State Department, she sought to hire Blumenthal. Obama aides, apparently still smarting over his role in attacks on candidate Obama, refused the request, so Clinton just sought out his counsel informally. At the same time, Blumenthal was drawing a check from the Clinton Foundation.

When? 2009-2013

How serious is it? Some of the damage is already done. Blumenthal was apparently the source of the idea that the Benghazi attacks were spontaneous, a notion that proved incorrect and provided a political bludgeon against Clinton and Obama. He also advised the secretary on a wide range of other issues, from Northern Ireland to China. But emails released so far show even Clinton’s top foreign-policy guru, Jake Sullivan, rejecting Blumenthal’s analysis, raising questions about her judgment in trusting him.

The Speeches Keith Bedford / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What? Since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, both Clintons have made millions of dollars for giving speeches.

When? 2001-present

Who? Hillary Clinton; Bill Clinton; Chelsea Clinton

How serious is it? This might be the most potent of all the current Clinton scandals. For the couple, who left the White House up to their ears in legal debt, lucrative speeches—mostly by the former president—proved to be an effective way of rebuilding wealth. They have also been an effective magnet for prying questions. Where did Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton speak? How did they decide how much to charge? What did they say? How did they decide which speeches would be given on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, with fees going to the charity, and which would be treated as personal income? Are there cases of conflicts of interest or quid pro quos—for example, speaking gigs for Bill Clinton on behalf of clients who had business before the State Department?

The Clinton Foundation A brooch for sale at the Clinton Museum Store in Little Rock, Arkansas (Lucy Nicholson / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What? Bill Clinton’s foundation was actually established in 1997, but after leaving the White House it became his primary vehicle for … well, everything. With projects ranging from public health to elephant-poaching protection and small-business assistance to child development, the foundation is a huge global player with several prominent offshoots. In 2013, following Hillary Clinton’s departure as secretary of State, it was renamed the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

When? 1997-present

Who? Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; Chelsea Clinton, etc.

How serious is it? If the Clinton Foundation’s strength is President Clinton’s endless intellectual omnivorousness, its weakness is the distractibility and lack of interest in detail that sometimes come with it. On a philanthropic level, the foundation gets decent ratings from outside review groups, though critics charge that it’s too diffuse to do much good, that the money has not always achieved what it was intended to, and that in some cases the money doesn’t seem to have achieved its intended purpose. The foundation made errors in its tax returns it has to correct. Overall, however, the essential questions about the Clinton Foundation come down to two, related issues. The first is the seemingly unavoidable conflicts of interest: How did the Clintons’ charitable work intersect with their for-profit speeches? How did their speeches intersect with Hillary Clinton’s work at the State Department? Were there quid-pro-quos involving U.S. policy? The second, connected question is about disclosure. When Clinton became secretary, she agreed that the foundation would make certain disclosures, which it’s now clear it didn’t always do. And the looming questions about Clinton’s State Department emails make it harder to answer those questions.

The Bad Old Days Supporter Dick Furinash holds up cardboard cut-outs of Bill and Hillary Clinton. (Jim Young / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

What is it? Since the Clintons have a long history of controversies, there are any number of past scandals that continue to float around, especially in conservative media: Whitewater. Troopergate. Paula Jones. Monica Lewinsky. Vince Foster.

When? 1975-2001

Who? Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; a brigade of supporting characters

How serious is it? Not terribly. Some are wholly spurious (Foster). Others (Lewinsky, Whitewater) have been so exhaustively investigated that it’s hard to imagine them doing much further damage to Hillary Clinton’s standing. In fact, the Lewinsky scandal famously boosted her public approval ratings. But that doesn’t mean you won’t hear plenty about them.