Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 441

What Can Michael Brown's Parents Achieve by Suing Ferguson?

First, a grand jury opted not to charge Darren Wilson in Michael Brown's death. Then the Justice Department, having voiced concerns about the shooting and its aftermath, decided there wasn't evidence to bring charges against the former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer—though it did find a long history of racial bias and racism in the police department and city government.

So what hope is there for the civil lawsuit for wrongful death that Brown's parents filed Thursday in St. Louis County?

There's one potential legal motivation and one larger motivation. The first is that because this is a civil suit, the burden on the plaintiffs is only to produce a preponderance of evidence backing their assertion, rather than to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. While the grand jury didn't vote to indict, it's become clear that there was some dissension among the jurors, and critics have complained about the manner in which prosecutors ran the grand-jury process. The threshold for bringing a federal civil-rights complaint is even higher. So while the track record might suggest an uphill battle for the plaintiffs, there is still some legal terrain for them to mine.

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Four Firings Won't Fix Ferguson

The second motivation, and perhaps the one that has the most interest for the general public, is one that Anthony Gray, a lawyer for Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden made at a press conference Thursday: No one has cross-examined Darren Wilson.

For Gray that matters because he believes there are inconsistencies in the testimony Wilson gave to the grand jury, and he complains that Wilson was able to carefully plan how he described the incident. For everyone else, that might provide one last chance to get details about Brown's death that aren't clear yet. Putting Wilson on the stand, under oath, with a more hostile questioner than the district attorney, might produce new information about what happened on August 9, 2014.

But the suit might also produce little of note. Brown's parents aren't seeking a huge payout—$75,000 plus attorney's fees. In addition to Wilson, the suit names the city and former Police Chief Thomas Jackson. The Los Angeles Times has the full document here.

A Quick Guide to the Questions About Clinton Cash

Après Schweizer, le déluge. At the start of the week, The New York Times revealed that Peter Schweizer, a Republican researcher, was close to publishing a book delving into the financial dealings of the Clinton Foundation. The book focuses on how donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation correlated with favorable decisions from the State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary. What's more, several news organizations had agreements with Schweizer to report on the findings in the book.

It's been clear for some time that the Clinton Foundation presented tricky and novel conflict-of-interest challenges for the candidate, and now the specific stories of those challenges are emerging. In fact, it can be tough to keep them straight. Here's a quick rundown.

1. The State Department, Uranium, and the Russian Government

This one is complicated, in part because many of the relationships are carefully kept at arm's length for legal and ethical reasons, but The New York Times lays it out in a lengthy story. In 2005, Canadian businessman Frank Giustra acquired uranium interests in Kazakhstan, on a trip with former President Bill Clinton. The following year, he gave more than $31 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2007, Giustra's UrAsia merged with Uranium One, a South African company, and acquired U.S. uranium concerns. In 2009, the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, reached a deal to take a 17 percent stake in Uranium One. In 2010, it increased that to a controlling 51 percent stake, and in 2013 acquired the rest of the company.

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Hillary's Campaign Is Built on a Shaky Foundation

Because the U.S. considers uranium a strategic asset, the acquisition had to be approved by a government commission. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, sat on the commission. As Rosatom gradually increased its stake, million of dollars flowed to the Clinton Foundation, including $2.35 million from the family foundation of Uranium One's chairman. Despite an agreement forged with the White House when Hillary Clinton became secretary, requiring the Clinton Foundation to disclose all of its donors, these donations were not disclosed. In total, people affiliated with Uranium One or its predecessor gave more than $8 million to the Clinton Foundation between 2008 and 2010. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton received $500,000 for a speech in Moscow, paid for by a bank boosting Uranium One stock.

The Times notes that it's impossible to prove any clear connection, and Hillary Clinton's campaign said that the donations had not affected her judgment, and noted that many other agencies also had to sign off on the deal.

2. The Tax Returns With the Missing Foreign Donations

For years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation reported tens of millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments on its tax forms. In 2010, that suddenly dropped to zero. Reuters reports:

Those entries were errors, according to the foundation: several foreign governments continued to give tens of millions of dollars toward the foundation's work on climate change and economic development through this three-year period. Those governments were identified on the foundation's annually updated donor list, along with broad indications of how much each had cumulatively given since they began donating.

After Reuters asked about the discrepancy, the foundation said it would refile five years' worth of returns. "No charity is required to disclose their donors," a spokesman said. "However, we voluntarily disclose our more than 300,000 donors and post our audited financial statements on our website along with the 990s for anyone to see." But of course, no other charity is run by a former president whose wife used to be secretary of state and who is running for president.

3. How Bill Clinton Benefited From Hillary Clinton's Cabinet Job

While the Times story focused on the policy implications of money coming into the Clinton Foundation, it also pointed to the other side of that coin—that Hillary Clinton's time at Foggy Bottom was lucrative for the Clinton family. ABC digs more deeply into that, and finds that Bill Clinton's speaking fees doubled or tripled once his wife become secretary of state:

Where he once had drawn $150,000 for a typical address in the years following his presidency, Clinton saw a succession of staggering paydays for speeches in 2010 and 2011, including $500,000 paid by a Russian investment bank and $750,000 to address a telecom conference in China.

Some of the groups shelling out to hear the former president speak also had business before the State Department. Department ethics officials reviewed the speaking engagements, but apparently rarely, if ever, objected. As with the other cases, there's no clear proof of a quid pro quo, but it's also hard not to imagine that those paying Bill Clinton might have hoped it would give them extra access or sympathy with Hillary Clinton. ABC's scoop partly follows on Schweizer's book.

4. The Clintons' Intertwined Personal and Charitable Interests

In another story based in part on Schweizer's book, The Washington Post considered the close ties between the Clinton Foundation's charitable work and the Clinton family's income. Bill Clinton received at least $26 million in speaking fees from organizations that are also donors to the foundation, Rosalind Helderman reports. "The multiple avenues through which the Clintons and their causes have accepted financial support have provided a variety of ways for wealthy interests in the United States and abroad to build friendly relations with a potential future president," she notes.

Loretta Lynch, America's Next Attorney General

Updated April 23, 2015, 2:05 p.m.

Loretta Lynch won confirmation as attorney general on Thursday afternoon, as the Republican-controlled Senate gave its approval after a wait of 166 days. The final vote was 56-43, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in supporting her.

Lynch, 55, had been serving as the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn when Obama chose her in November to become the first African American woman to lead the Justice Department. Holder had announced his intention to resign last September after serving as attorney general for the entirety of Obama's presidency.

While most Republicans did not dispute Lynch's qualifications, they took issue with her support, during her confirmation hearing, for Obama's unilateral actions on immigration. But the delay in her confirmation—the third-longest for any attorney general nominee in history—actually had little to do with her: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made her wait until the Senate resolved an unrelated abortion dispute in an anti-trafficking bill, which passed on Wednesday. McConnell ended up voting in favor of her nomination on Thursday. Lynch is now the second Obama Cabinet nominee to be confirmed by the new Republican majority in the Senate, which overwhelmingly approved Ashton Carter to be defense secretary in February.

Updated April 21, 2015, 11:24 a.m.

Loretta Lynch will finally get a Senate vote this week on her nomination to be attorney general, five-and-a-half months after President Obama chose her to succeed Eric Holder.

The long-delayed vote will come after Senate leaders struck a deal on completely unrelated anti-trafficking legislation and as Republicans faced mounting pressure from within their own ranks to confirm her. While her eventual approval had been expected, Lynch had become entangled in the Senate's partisan wringer, with Mitch McConnell refusing to call a vote until Democrats relented on abortion language in the otherwise non-controversial trafficking bill.

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Loretta Lynch's Long Wait

On Tuesday, McConnell and Harry Reid, the minority leader, announced an agreement that, at first glance, appears to be a genuine compromise. The trafficking measure creates a fund for victims, and Democrats had protested when Republicans added language explicitly prohibiting any of the money from paying for abortions. They argued that this would amount to a significant expansion of the  Hyde Amendment, which for four decades has prevented taxpayer dollars from funding abortion. Under the compromise, the revenue for the fund will be split into criminal fees that can go to legal aid and law enforcement but not healthcare, while money appropriated by Congress—and subject to the Hyde restrictions—can pay for health and medical services. Like most compromises, it allows both sides to claim success. Republicans have prevented either pot of funds from paying for abortions, by preventing criminal fees from paying for any healthcare. Democrats have limited the application of the Hyde Amendment to taxpayer dollars, halting the effort to expand it to other sources of funding.

The real payoff for Democrats, however, is that Lynch will get a vote after waiting longer than any nominee for attorney general in the last 30 years. Obama had denounced the delay as "embarrassing" to the Senate, and even Republican onlookers in recent weeks wondered why the party was holding up a nominee whose qualifications were never in dispute. The delay was particularly curious given that it only extended the tenure of Holder, a frequent target of conservative criticism. Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, had lobbied for Lynch's confirmation; Jeb Bush said last week that Republicans should just go ahead and confirm her, despite his opposition to her support for Obama's immigration policy; and yesterday, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called for Lynch to have a vote.

The margin is expected to be close, but Lynch appears to have secured at least 51 votes, just enough to win confirmation without relying on Vice President Biden to cast a tie-breaking vote. (Republican opposition has centered not on her tenure as the chief federal prosecutor in Brooklyn but on her endorsement of the president's unilateral move to shield immigrants from deportation.) More broadly, the agreement is the latest sign that the logjam in Congress may finally be breaking after a slow start to the new Republican majority—at least to a limited extent. In the last several weeks, lawmakers have approved a significant change to Medicare policy and an extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program, and they have announced bipartisan agreements on trade and on Iran policy. Confirming a scandal-free attorney general shouldn't count for much, but given the recent dysfunction in Congress, it represents significant progress.

H Is for Hillary

The growing slate of 2016 presidential candidates had barely had a chance to announce their campaigns before a new contender entered the fray, only to prove immediately divisive. The guilty party? Hillary Clinton’s new logo, a blue and red “H” with a bold arrow as the crossbar.

Hillary Clinton Campaign / Twitter

Since anything to do with Hillary raises red (and blue) flags, critics assumed that the logo must be packed with symbolism. So, left-wingers were displeased that the arrow is red and points to the right, while right-wingers were annoyed that, when reversed, the arrow points left. Not since the Soviets ideologically censored art for geographical orientation—things facing West were forbidden—has the mere direction of anything been so disparaged. But that doesn’t mean Hillary’s logo should be given a free pass. The folks at FedEx, Tag Heuer, Amazon, and at least a dozen other corporations are justifiably upset because they have arrows in their logos, too—and how many arrows can the market bear? (Incidentally, the Nazi Stormtroopers' (SA) logo contained an “S” that turned into an arrow, but don't judge all arrows on a few rotten applications.)

Wikimedia

As far as visual tropes go, the “H” owes its issues partly to its dubious alphabetic predecessors. Napoleon was one of the first autocrats to use a single initial, an “N”, as a monogram. Benito Mussolini’s “M” was monumentalized through sculpture and distributed to his followers on badges of allegiance. The single initial implies a noblesse oblige—or as Superman’s “S” implies, a kind of omniscient superpower. However, leaders in the United States of America are neither absolute rulers nor deities when referred to by initials: The shorthand names of FDR, JFK, and LBJ weren’t imposed from the top so much as they were democratically adopted by their constituents.

Then came “W”: George W. Bush had a problem with his dynastic last name and needed to distinguish father from son without resorting to lineage numerals (apart from the number of the presidency itself). As it happened, “W” evolved into a popular nickname, but I can't imagine Hillary wanting people calling her “H,” or even “HRC”, which sounds too much like a bank.

While a candidate, Barack Obama’s logo signaled a paradigm shift in the single-initial trope. The mnemonic “O” was consistent with the overall modernity of his entire branding style. Or maybe his image-makers realized Obama had a unique problem being the first foreign-sounding name on a major party’s ticket. Using the “O” was one way to avoid spelling out Barack Hussein Obama ad infinitum. Not to mention, the “O” is the comfort food of letters; it suggests openness, opportunity and [h]onesty. Its use during the 2008 and 2012 campaigns allowed for thematic versatility and inclusion, since various policy-centric symbolic graphic elements could fit neatly within the open letter.

Hillary’s “H” is not Obama’s “O." Her arrow is not as subtle, for instance,  as the arrow hidden in the negative space embedded in the FedEx logo. Rather, it's heavy-handed, which is perhaps the point. The “H” implies power. Just using the name "Hillary" is friendly, but much too informal for a presidential candidate. Hillary’s “H” bridges the gap with its heft.

Ted Cruz Campaign / Twitter Rand Paul Campaign / Twitter

So let’s look at this logo with perspective. It’s already getting more attention than the bland Ted Cruz and Rand Paul logos because “H-Arrow” is the mark of a real brand. A brand conveys a story, while a label simply identifies. If the “H-Arrow” lasts through the post-convention period, it may grow on people like the Verizon logo, which survives being fundamentally ugly because nobody cares as long as they get proper customer service. If Hillary’s policies live up to her promise, then the logo will follow suit. At this point, it’s too early to tell, given that the campaign will last another year and a half and being forth many other logos, signs, and slogans. The “H” may be just a placeholder, but if not, remember: Logos don’t win elections.  

Turning the Paige

For much of its third season, The Americans felt typically knotty and overloaded with plot, but its finale Wednesday night muted much of the background noise. Instead, the show zoomed in on its most enduring theme: the unique, but relatable, dynamics of the Jennings family. Recent episodes saw Philip and Elizabeth's daughter, Paige, discover the truth about them—that they're Soviet spies working undercover in the States, and that her birth and upbringing have served as helpful cover for their clandestine activities. The revelation was predictably shattering for Paige, but it felt like a necessary second act, forcing the question of whether the truth would further drive a wedge between the family, or help Paige begin to reconcile with her parents after multiple seasons of strife.

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The Americans Gets a Little Darker

For much of its running time, “March 8, 1983” felt like it was building toward the latter. While Paige’s horror upon learning the truth was certainly justified, it seemed possible that the revelation might prompt a degree of reconciliation. For so long, she'd suspected they had some kind of terrible secret, and here it was, but with its most gruesome details—the murders, sex crimes, and acts of coercion her parents regularly commit in the name of Mother Russia—omitted. Would the half-truth be better or worse than what she might have imagined?

In the finale, Paige accompanied her mother to Berlin for a covert but highly personal mission—to see Elizabeth’s ailing mother, spirited behind enemy lines as a political favor. The moment felt like the emotional crescendo Paige had longed for from her often detached mother, and it had that impact for the audience, at least. Keri Russell’s performance as Elizabeth was faultless, but definitely on the icy side. While Philip (Matthew Rhys) has always been more compassionate and less idealistic, perhaps secretly willing to defect to America to secure his children’s safety, Elizabeth has seemingly never wavered from the cause.

So it was powerful to see Elizabeth weep in her mother’s arms and murmur to her in Russian, but that much more so to realize that this genuinely moving moment hadn't work on Paige. Or, at least, hadn't worked in the right way. At the end of the episode, she told her youth pastor the truth about her parents, in her own moment of vulnerability. It was also a triumphant moment, even though it has alarming implications for next year (FX has renewed the show for a fourth season).

Throughout the year, Elizabeth and Philip have waged a mostly silent cold war of their own over the soul of their daughter. The KGB wants her groomed into a second-generation spy with her own American passport, and Elizabeth seems to agree; Philip wants her to enjoy all the freedoms and indulgences of her native country, free of the evil work he has to do. This season was particularly punishing in that regard, beginning with Philip folding a woman’s corpse into a suitcase by breaking many of her bones, and centering a major arc around his coercive romance with a teenage girl.

With her parents out of the house all the time, Paige turned to religion for support. Her fervor was mostly directed toward helping others, and her church had a happy-clappy, lefty-activist vibe to it, but in the finale, Paige felt like an unwitting agent of Ronald Reagan, that mighty Christian icon of the era, who gave his famous “Evil Empire” speech in the finale, not coincidentally to the National Association of Evangelicals.

Paige is exerting her uniquely American, proudly selfish right to self-determination.

The speech marked a ramping-up of aggression toward the Soviet Union, as America’s rivals to the east seemed to be somewhat adrift following the death of President Leonid Brezhnev the previous year. Paige’s actions don’t exactly mirror Reagan’s cheerful proclamation of American superiority, but her family situation does take on grander metaphorical status here. If Elizabeth (and, more reluctantly, Philip) have always accepted their disturbing lives as being part of a great sacrifice for their country, Paige is exerting her uniquely American, proudly selfish right to self-determination, and she has plenty of good reason to. The biggest tragedy is that Elizabeth, whose own mother is basically a stranger to her, has no idea how roiled her daughter is by the Berlin trip, telling Philip it was “good for her.”

The biggest storylines on The Americans are always portrayed internally, even during moments of brutal violence. Philip and Elizabeth’s conflict over their children has played out via their sex lives and quiet visits with their KGB mentor Gabriel, who has softly but firmly pitted the couple against each other in an effort to eventually win Paige over to his side. The quiet nature of these twists is probably why the show has never been a ratings smash despite constant critical buzz—in a finale that could have gone so many action-packed ways, the biggest moments were Elizabeth’s lack of realization, and Paige’s quiet, tearful phone call.

But that doesn’t mean, as it finishes its most confident and well-executed season yet, that The Americans lacks dramatic flair. In the finale, Philip was tasked with framing an FBI agent for planting a bug in an office, to protect one of his crucial sources (Martha, a woman he falsely married to keep on the hook). To do so, he had to kill him and stage a suicide. After doing so and stringing up the poor man, Philip typed out a hasty suicide note on his computer: “I had no choice, I’m sorry.” That’s the central conflict of this series, boiled into one sad sentence: Philip has no choice, and nor does his wife, when it comes to the horrible things they do. The great unknown is whether that nightmare will be passed on to their children. By placing her parents in mortal danger, Paige’s choice to make that phone call suggests that it might not. That’s the kind of dark triumph only The Americans could engineer.

The Unbelievable Power of Amazon's Cloud

On Thursday, we’ll finally get a sense of the true scope one of the most important businesses for the Internet.

Amazon is due to announce the size of its Web Services product. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a set of cloud services often used by startups, big companies, and government agencies. You might know AWS better as “the servers that run Netflix and Instagram.”

AWS lets companies buy powerful computers cheaply and whenever they need them to handle traffic, to store video, to power a database. It’s not an understatement to say that AWS is the piece of infrastructure that has enabled the current tech boom. The only single technology which might come close to it is the smartphone.

Why?  The 2010s tech industry is built on quickly scaling a product to as many users as possible. It’s based, on other words, on fast growth. AWS and its competitors are what permit that fast growth. They have taken the normally considerable equipment costs—of servers, cables, hard drives, and power supplies—and abstracted them away. Entrepreneurs and coders can think about and purchase computing power on an as-needed basis, while the physical data centers they’re actually using sit far away in Virginia or Oregon.

Since its launch nine years ago, when it was the first such cloud service, AWS has come to dominate the market. But this is the first time Amazon will report AWS’s size. (Previously it reported AWS revenue and profit as part the rest of the company’s business in North America. In 2014, that segment claimed revenue of $5.4 billion.)

You can catch glimpses of the vastness of AWS, but it’s hard to get a sense of the true importance of the service. What’s enchanting about AWS is what’s enchanting about the cloud: It works in the background, silent, invisible, and powerful, never announcing itself—until Vine, Instagram, and Airbnb all go down at once.

So while we wait to learn just how much money AWS makes, here’s an incomplete (yet still mind-boggling) list of technological, social, economic, and cultural infrastructure powered by Amazon’s quiet goliath.

AWS provides the guts that lets Netflix stream billions of hours of movies and TV shows, so both the modern habit of unplanned binge-watching and the aversion to network TV shows is made possible by the service.

AWS is what kept Paper Mag’s servers from not breaking when it (and Kim Kardashian) broke the Internet.

When Healthcare.gov was being revamped, parts of the website were moved to AWS.

Spotify hosts its music on the company’s cloud storage service, S3. The ability to listen to any album, whenever, at work or home—AWS permits that.

Even the police body camera debate turns on AWS. Taser’s hosted service for body-cam footage and other kinds of digital evidence, Evidence.com, is actually a shell built on AWS.

And finally: Last year, the CIA moved much of its computing power to a custom AWS setup.

Though the information Amazon releases Thursday will offer a clearer picture of just how integral its cloud services are to the Internet as a whole, those same services will likely keep growing. As the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, Amazon says that it now adds computing power on a daily basis that’s equivalent to its entire capacity just 10 years ago.

Lady Sings the Blues

Though most readers are loath to admit it, narratives of American childhood innocence are mythologies. With American ethnic experiences this is especially true. From Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep to Junot Diaz’s Drown, the greatest literary writers quash the notion that any of us enter adulthood unscathed.  

Toni Morrison’s eleven novels are filled with characters whose jacked-up childhoods hobble them like Oedipus on Mount Cithaeron: Pecola Breedlove and Milkman Dead; Denver and Seneca; Frank Money and Golden Gray. Though her fiction is strewn with broken black bodies, Morrison has always been more interested in the characters that manage to disengage from their psychological and physical damages in order to embrace the extant African-American experience as the human experience.

In Jazz (1992), for instance, when Golden Gray tracks down his black father, he complains, “I don’t want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man.” But his father, Henry Lestory, understands blackness as the very seat of humanness and freedom, rather than an impediment to either. Addressing his erstwhile son face to face, Lestroy explains simply: “Be what you want—white or black. Choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black, meaning draw your manhood up—quicklike, and don’t bring me no whiteboy sass.”

Knopf

In Lestory’s blackness, in the kind of womanhood or manhood ready to face down blue devils and reckless lovers, pedophilic fathers and murderous mothers, Morrison locates the kind of sensibility that frees many of her characters from the chokehold their histories have on them. In her new novel, God Help the Child, the characters Bride and Booker must learn how to draw up their respective womanhood and manhood in order to fulfill the promise of their affair.

The lessons, as will come as no surprise to readers of Morrison, do not lack for stark drama. As soon as Lula Ann Bridewell, Morrison’s protagonist, leaves her mother’s house, she clips her name simply to Bride. When readers first meet her, she's an executive in a successful cosmetics company living in an unnamed Southern California locale in the American present. Her blue-black skin, accentuated by a chic, all-white wardrobe, is the measure of her remarkable beauty. However, during her childhood, as readers learn in the opening chapter, “Sweetness”—named after its narrator, Bride’s light-skinned mother—Sweetness sees that dark skin as the very mark of Ham’s damnation. She withholds love and kindness from her daughter, imagining that she’s training the girl for her reception in the world outside their home.  

As a third-grader, seeing a chance to win her mother’s love, Bride colludes with her classmates to accuse their teacher, a white woman named Sofia Huxley, of sexually molesting them. Bride’s testimony inspires Sweetness to display, if only once, affection for her daughter publicly.

When the novel opens, 15 years after her courtroom performance, Bride’s relationship with her lover, Booker Starbern, has just run aground. Bride decides to approach her former teacher, who has recently been released on parole, to make recompense for her imprisonment, but Huxley greets Bride with a vicious, disfiguring beatdown. Bride calls on her friend and colleague, Brooklyn, to cover her workload and help her convalesce at home. But during her recovery, Bride notices that her body has begun regressing toward some prepubescent stage: her pubic hair suddenly disappears, her ear lobe piercings close, and she stops menstruating.  Later, her breasts will vanish, leaving only the nipples, as if she’s had “a botched mastectomy.”

Bride suspects that Booker’s leaving has instigated her body’s “melting away.” As she heals from her run-in with Huxley, Bride decides to track down Booker to find out why he’s exited their relationship. Though readers find out the roots of his departure late in the novel, they learn his valediction up front: “You not the woman I want,” he tells her.

Rather than craft big novels, Morrison has distilled her fictions to their atomic elements.

God Help the Child is a tragicomic jazz opera played out in four parts. Part I reads like a choral prelude: There are nine sections, each driven by an individual voice, as if Sweetness, Bride, Brooklyn, and Sofia were trading improvised solos. Part II contains four sections: two told by an omniscient third person narrator and one each for Sofia and Rain. Part III is devoted entirely to Booker’s backstory, told by the anonymous third-person narrator. And Part IV is made up of three sections: Brooklyn returns for a solo; the anonymous third person narrates Booker’s reunion with Bride; and Sweetness closes the show with a final flourish.

Since Love (2003), Morrison has been working in what one might call her late style. Rather than craft big novels like Tar Baby or Paradise, she’s distilled her fictions to their atomic elements. Morrison has chiseled and sculpted powerful narrative voices to drive these shorter, compressed works, each one paced for speed. In God Help the Child, that means the individual voices, like Brooklyn’s, Rain’s, and Sofia’s, don’t do the work of establishing character, whether theirs or others. Those voices are present to add dissonant timbre to Bride’s narration and Morrison’s themes. Like Bride, for instance, all three ancillary characters carry burdensome childhood baggage and have charged relationships with their mothers.

God Help the Child twins Bride’s devolution with Booker’s life-stunting rage. Booker’s narrative is the novel’s most accomplished section. Few writers, regardless of gender, can address the vagaries of black masculinity as sensitively, insightfully, and elegantly as Morrison.

Few writers can address the vagaries of black masculinity as sensitively and insightfully.

Unbeknownst to Bride (she doesn’t ask, he doesn’t tell), Booker is a Walter Benjamin-loving graduate student and street musician. Angrily mourning his older brother’s murder, Booker fashions his childhood angst into an adult quest for truth through history and jazz. Taking up the trumpet as an eight-year-old, shortly after Adam’s funeral, Booker uses jazz to “oil and straighten his tangled feelings.” After learning that a child molester, “the nicest man in the world,” killed Adam and other local boys, Booker envisions that true justice calls for the man to “carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as a public shame and damnation.” But it’s Booker who ends up carrying Adam’s killing like a cumbersome load. Though meeting Bride seems to unshackle him from death, “the bliss of edible sex, free-style music, challenging books and the company of an easy undemanding Bride” isn’t enough to keep their “fairy-tale” relationship from crumbling when unspoken childhood traumas rise up between them. And then Booker runs away.

In the end, Bride tracks Booker down in a California logging village, after each has spent time alone confronting their individual failures. Morrison has always enjoyed pitting lovers against each other in her novels—think of Hagar trying to kill Milkman in Song of Solomon. Here, however, witnessing the lovers separate, fight, and reconnect lacks danger or dark humor; it seems too easy and unearned. This might explain some of problems coded into Morrison’s late style: With so many speedy narrative turns, the author risks missing some requisite details.  

Morrison’s greatness—the beauty of her prose, her formal and imaginative risk-taking, her intellectual prowess—is founded on fiction about human devilishness and weakness, bodies crippled and in crisis, and the impact of our histories on our emotional faculties. If not at maximum strength, her powers are proudly on display in God Help the Child.  At its best, this new novel demonstrates that the author is, as she suggested recently in a New York Times Magazine profile, fully capable of writing novels forever.

It’s worth keeping Jazz in mind while parsing this novel; it’s hard to read it without recalling the title of one of Billie Holiday’s signature songs, “God Bless the Child.” That's probably no accident: God Help the Child celebrates characters who achieve selfhood in spite of childhood suffering. But the novel also says, “You don’t know what love is/ Until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues.” And so, like Lady Day, Morrison makes art from the cadences of human heartbreak.

Hillary Clinton's Hard Choice on Free Trade

Harry Reid is mad at the Obama White House, which is pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “The answer is not only no but hell no,” the Senate minority leader said. Elizabeth Warren is equally incensed: "No more secret deals. No more special deals for multi-national corporations. Are you ready to fight? Are you ready to fight any more deals that say we're going to help the rich get richer and leave everyone else behind?"

President Obama, the deal's biggest proponent, is mad at Warren. “I love Elizabeth. We’re allies on a whole host of issues. But she’s wrong on this.” (Warren sniped back in a blog post.)

Martin O'Malley, who opposes the deal, is mad at Hillary Clinton, who has hedged on the TPP recently. "Americans deserve to know where leaders stand," he tweeted.

Jeb Bush, who backs the deal, is also upset at Clinton. "It is time to move forward as even recent Democratic presidents have recognized—and Sec. Clinton shouldn’t stand in the way for political gain," he wrote on Medium.

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A GOP Deal to Give Obama More Trade Power

The politics of trade are weird.

Obama's biggest hurdle in getting the trade deal approved was always his own party, as my colleague Russell Berman pointed out last week, when negotiators reached a deal to fast-track the TPP. What's changed is that the TPP has collided with the presidential race—in ways that are risky for Hillary Clinton. The problem for Clinton is that she has historically backed free-trade deals, and as secretary of state called the TPP "the gold standard in trade agreements." Yet her campaign's big push over the last week or two has been to prove her liberal bona fides. Many progressives still don't like NAFTA, a product of Bill Clinton's administration (actually, many Americans don't like NAFTA), and while Hillary Clinton still looks like a prohibitive favorite in the Democratic primary, rivals like O'Malley and Senator Bernie Sanders oppose it, as do the labor unions that are a major part of the Democratic coalition.

Clinton's approach so far has been to stay vague. "She will be watching closely to see what is being done to crack down on currency manipulation, improve labor rights, protect the environment and health, promote transparency and open new opportunities for our small businesses to export overseas," her campaign said Friday. On Tuesday in New Hampshire, the candidate herself added, “Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security. We have to do our part in making sure we have the capabilities and the skills to be competitive.”

Those don't sound like full-throated endorsements, as O'Malley implied. He followed up that tweet with an email to supporters with the subject line "Hard choice?" (Clinton's memoir, released last June, was Hard Choices.)

Then there was this awkward exchange in a press gaggle with White House spokesman Eric Schultz on Wednesday:

... Do you consider Hillary Clinton an ally on this trade stuff?

Evan, I'm going to side with you on this. I believe that the labor, environmental and human rights concerns that many Democrats have voiced, the President takes to heart. And he would not sign a deal unless those protections are in place.

If you look at the TPA agreement that was introduced in a bipartisan way in the Senate, we believe that’s the most progressive in history and that’s why the President is encouraged by it.

So Secretary Clinton and President Obama are on the same page with trade?

Well, look, I believe that if you look at the points that are being raised in terms of human rights, environmental protections, labor protections, that those are important priorities of this President.  So I haven’t seen anything to suggest any distance.

Here's the thing: Clinton has largely adopted the central liberal critique. Warren, at least in theory, isn't opposed to all free-trade deals‚ but she warns that the TPP could be a bad deal and that the contents of the deal need to be public so that all Americans can read them and make up their minds. That's where O'Malley is too. (In a video in that email, O'Malley said, "I'm for trade, and I'm for good trade deals. But I'm against bad trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.") Now Clinton has joined them, sort of, in saying that the deal requires environmental and labor protections, while not quite calling for total transparency.

Will that half-a-loaf approach satisfy constituencies like the AFL-CIO, though? The group's president, Richard Trumka, blasted the deal at a hearing Tuesday. "The livelihoods of workers are at stake here," he said. "We need a different deal." Remaining vague has political upsides, and it avoids the political circus that would come with an outright break from the president. But it won't help her to convince progressives she's one of them. Unlike same-sex marriage, for example, free trade isn't usually a top-tier issue, but it's fairly easy for Clinton to stand behind marriage equality in 2015, when the issue is largely settled for many people. Taking a stance on the TPP is playing with live ammunition.

Clinton still enjoys overwhelming support in the polls, and the fight over the TPP seems unlikely to change that. But it highlights the difficulties she faces as she attempts to win over her party's progressive wing, without alienating other constituencies. It is proving a difficult deal for Clinton to negotiate, as she attempts to fast-track her bid for the Democratic nomination.

Why Do People Hate Lilly Pulitzer?

In January, the clothing-and-lifestyle brand Lilly Pulitzer announced that it would collaborate with Target, releasing a collection of 250 pieces of apparel, accessories, beauty products, and home decor by way of the discount chain. This weekend, the results of that collaboration were put up for sale in Target stores and on its website. Both of these events would seem to be innocuous: yet another instance of the discount retailer’s collaboration with a high-end fashion brand, of luxury goods made accessible to the masses, of fashion (relatively) democratized. A win-win! Actually, a win-win-win!

There was something different, however, about this particular launch. #LillyforTarget ended up, remarkably … offending people. Lots of people.

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The collaboration angered, first of all, fans of Lilly Pulitzer, whose clothes have doubled as a “preppy uniform” for decades. It angered Target customers who tried, and failed, to grab $40-ish “Lillys” during a sale that was meant to span several weeks and instead spanned mere hours. It angered Target executives, who were disappointed in the performance of the chain’s website during the sale and indignant that the products they’d intended for their customers were being resold on eBay for more than twice the original cost.

Most interestingly, though, #LillyforTarget provoked the vitriol of fashion critics and business-minded brand-watchers. “I have never seen a woman wearing Lilly Pulitzer who would not have looked better in a ratty flannel bathrobe,” the business writer Megan McArdle confessed. The fashion critic Robin Givhan noted that “the classic Lilly Pulitzer dress comes in shrill shades of yellow and pink that are vaguely infantilizing. They are clothes that can be shrunk down and worn by 7-year-old girls without changing a single design element—if there were actual design elements to change. But there are not.” (As she summed it up: “Lilly Pulitzer is not fashion. It is clothes.“)

The subjects of all this consternation, it’s worth remembering, are sundresses. So why would clothing—cotton shifts that swirl with pastel-perky pineapples, shorts studded with insouciant little sea stars—provoke such anger? What is it about "Lillies" that encourage such devotion among their fans and such consternation among their detractors? How did palm-leaf patterned jumpsuits get so divisive?

Here are some guesses.

First, in part, it’s the aesthetics of Pulitzer’s clothes. Which are, with their festively flora-fauna-ed prints, the rough sartorial equivalents of the people who are omg super-excited to tell you about the juice cleanse they’re on. They are perky, insistently so. They are self-absorbed, aggressively so. Your retinas aren’t currently up for seeing some bubble-gum-pink toucans, their bills interlocked in an explosion of avian paisley? Lilly Pulitzer does not care. Lilly Pulitzer does not even think to ask.

The broader criticism, though, is the performance of identity that the Pulitzer brand represents. “Lilly” is not about luxury; it is about privilege. There is an important distinction between the two, Givhan notes. The brand, she writes, “suggests an advantage of birth. The clothes stir up scrapbook notions of ancient family trees, summer compounds, boarding school uniforms, and large, granite buildings inscribed with some great-great-grandfather’s name. Lilly Pulitzer represents something that money cannot buy.”

Which is another way of saying that Pulitzer’s clothes evoke not just wealth, but class. They speak to a status that is conferred rather than earned, and that cannot—with apologies to hard work and good luck and all the other vehicles of the American dream—be fully democratized. The garments are evidence in that sense not (just) of conspicuous consumption, but rather of privilege as it plays out as an economic system. They nod to, and then politely ignore, Thomas Piketty. Those whimsy-dripping pineapples, those insouciant peacocks, the designs that are often described as “eye-popping”—they are evidence not just of “resortwear” gone mainstream, but also of the ease of living enjoyed by those who can use the term “resortwear” unironically. These are clothes that are worn by people for whom life is, in relative terms, a permanent vacation.

These are clothes worn by people for whom life is, in relative terms, a permanent vacation.

A common phrase you’ll hear associated with Pulitzer is “uniform”—as in, as Givhan put it, “part of a preppy uniform that announces itself from fifty paces,” or, as the Boston Globe put it, “a uniform of the well-heeled WASP.” Which is ironic, of course: Uniforms are about the constriction of freedoms, and preppiness and WASPiness are, in general, about the freedom that comes with privilege. And clothing, furthermore—“fashion,” in haughtier moments—is most optimistically about the freedoms of self-expression and self-reinvention. It recognizes very little distinction between faking it and making it. If you have the money and the inclination, you can stock your closet—and swath your body—with Alice + Olivia and Thakoon and Marc Jacobs and Marchesa, or with very convincing knockoffs. You can balance them out, as the fashion magazines have taught you to do, with items from H&M and Zara and Forever 21. We live in an economy of sartorial abundance; one outcome of that is that “style” is something we have come to associate with freedom.

But Pulitzer's clothes are, again, "uniforms"—which are, on the whole, designed to free their wearers from the burdens of free thinking. And this is perhaps the main source of the ire about Pulitzer's clothes: The garments suggest a kind of willful conscription, celebrating when happens when wealth and status are accompanied by an insistent rejection of creativity. It was, and to some extent still is, popular to deride women for being "basic," which is to say for loving pumpkin-spice lattes, Ugg boots, Gucci handbags, and other predictable outcomes of commercialized femininity. "Basic" is a terrible epithet in many ways, but it is also, as far as "Lillys" are concerned, an instructive one: Pulitzer's clothes are, in this sense, the worst kind of basic. They promise class and community and the relief of conformity. They are marketed to people of privilege. Worst of all, though, they suggest that the best thing one can do with one's privilege is to use it to go on vacation.

Which brings us back to Target—which, through its collaboration with Pulitzer, promised to extend this fraught notion of privilege to its customers (or its "guests," as the chain prefers to call them). It was, of course, a false promise. And this was apparent to all the people who criticized the partnership. Pulitzer's clothes, beyond the perky and the pastel, revel in their paradox: The whole point of the "Lilly" brand is that what it is selling cannot, in fact, be bought.

Why Did It Take a Sex Scandal to Topple the DEA Chief?

In April 2012, Daniel Chong was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration officers on suspicion of being involved in an ecstasy ring. While Chong readily admitted to smoking pot, agents determined he wasn't involved in ecstasy trafficking. They told him he'd be released. Instead, the agents forgot about him, leaving him for four and a half days in a cell without food or water or a toilet, after which he had to be rushed to a hospital. Multiple agents saw him or heard his cries, but they all thought it was someone else's problem.

In May 2012, in a drug sting coordinated by the DEA, four people were shot dead in a boat in Honduras. Honduran authorities said they were drug traffickers, but witnesses said the victims—including two women and a 14-year-old child—were innocent. Fifty-eight members of Congress wrote to request more information and received an answer from DEA that Mattathias Schwartz's reporting in the New Yorker suggests was, charitably, misleading.

In June 2013, the Arizona Republic reported that a DEA informant who had received almost $4 million but was fired amid accusations of serial perjury was back working the DEA on undercover cases.

In August 2013, Reuters revealed that the DEA was funneling information from massive surveillance, wiretaps, and undercover agents to local police to help make arrests. In some cases, the DEA was coaching police to hide the source of the information not only from defense lawyers, but also from prosecutors and judges. A Harvard Law professor and former federal judge said she found such practices even more disturbing than the NSA surveillance program. "It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Nancy Gertner told Reuters. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations." This month, USA Today reported that "for more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking."

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In January 2015, a Justice Department inspector general's report criticized the use of "cold consent encounters"—basically, stops by DEA agents without probable cause—in which cash was seized. The report noted that such stops are often associated with racial profiling. The report also noted that the cash seizures, similar to the asset forfeitures that have been widely criticized, raise serious concerns, and that many seizures had been challenged, with DEA having to return money.

That same month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the DEA was tracking cars traveling all over the U.S., with the effect that almost anyone driving in a populated area was probably swept up in the dragnet.

In March 2015, the Justice Department said that Carl Force, the lead undercover DEA officer investigating Silk Road, the online drug market, had extorted bitcoins from the exchange's founder, who called himself Dread Pirate Roberts. "Using a series of private, fictitious accounts, Force allegedly told Roberts he would bury evidence related to the case if Roberts paid him $250,000," The Washington Post reported. "In another instance, Roberts allegedly paid Force $100,000 in bitcoins after Force, using one of his anonymous accounts, offered up information related to the federal investigation."

This is a more or less arbitrarily chosen list of offenses over the last three years. There are plenty of other disturbing statistics—for example, the Justice Department's inspector general expressed concerns about weapons losses at the DEA in 2002, but when it checked in again in 2008, the rate of loss had more than doubled.

Meanwhile, there seems to be more consensus than ever that the War on Drugs has failed. Despite the $1 trillion price tag, then-drug czar Gil Kerklikowske said in 2010, "In the grand scheme, it has not been successful. Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified." Two-thirds of Americans want the government to focus more on treatment and less on prosecution for drug use, and 84 percent agree with Kerlikowske that the U.S. is losing the War on Drugs. Critics also blame the drug war for years of violence and thousands of deaths in Mexico.

Against this backdrop, it might seem logical that DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart is stepping down. She's been at the agency for 35 years, and her tenure since taking over in 2007 has been marked by a series of abuses, failures and missteps. In fact, the proximate cause for Leonhart's exit is the eminently more headline-ready case of DEA agents having sex parties with prostitutes.

That's not to say that the story isn't disturbing:

The report described accusations from foreign police officers that D.E.A. agents had attended “loud” parties with prostitutes over several years, paid for by local drug cartels. The parties reportedly took place in locations leased by the government where agents’ laptops and other electronic devices were present. The foreign officers also said they had watched over the agents’ weapons and other property during the parties.

The punishment doled out by the DEA? Suspensions of seven to 10 days.

Lawmakers lashed out at Leonhart during a hearing last week. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest declined repeated invitations from reporters to express confidence in her leadership of DEA. (She has clashed with the Obama administration over marijuana, which the president's team said was less harmful than other drugs and was willing to treat more leniently.)

Now, one could view Leonhart's forced resignation as a sign of progress—there's plenty of evidence to suggest that her leadership of the agency wasn't working, and the sex parties were simply a turning point. But the contour of the story gives the nagging impression that despite years of issues, the salacious, sexy headline is what pushed Leonhart out, whereas the systemic failures over the last decade received even less sanction than those agents' seven-to-10-day suspensions. It's not that the outrage in this case is misplaced—it's that it's a day late and a trillion dollars short.