Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 52

Why Is The Great Indoors So Mad at Millennials?

Fish-out-of-water sitcoms, classic as they are, usually rely on an amount of give and take. The show’s lead is typically a rebel put into some new situation where he or she disrupts the established order of things, but there are always lessons to learn. By the end, the hero realizes something special about his or her new environment, even making a few friends along the way. It’s a dynamic that’s held true for shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Northern Exposure, Arrested Development, 3rd Rock From the Sun, and even this year’s Son of Zorn. Not so in CBS’s The Great Indoors, which premieres Thursday in the plum timeslot after The Big Bang Theory. Its protagonist gains no knowledge and develops no empathy, because he’s surrounded by the vilest creatures in human history—millennials.

The Great Indoors is a show that somehow feels venomous and toothless at the same time. It lobs insult after insult at its chosen target—the over-coddled, under-skilled, internet-obsessed twenty-somethings taking over offices today—but without any great insight, and in service of no larger point. CBS has always been a network that skews toward a slightly older audience, and with The Great Indoors it has matched subject and format perfectly. This is a hilariously staid, old-school, laugh-track sitcom about a man whose only purpose is to grit his teeth and gripe about young people. It’d be funny, if it weren’t so, well, unfunny—hokey stereotypes just don’t make for compelling comedy.

The sad irony is that the hero Jack Gordon is played by Joel McHale, who over the last six years played the similarly sarcastic Jeff Winger on the cult NBC sitcom Community. That show made fun of the fish-out-of-water concept and took every opportunity to subvert and comment on old sitcom tropes. Now, McHale is trapped in a role that’s barely one-dimensional. Jack Gordon is a Bear Grylls type, a magazine reporter famed for his outdoor exploits and round-the-world adventuring. But, times are changing, the print industry is collapsing (as everyone helpfully repeats throughout the pilot episode) and so he must return to the company office to work with a bunch of bloggers straight out of college. Heaven forfend.

McHale, a tanned, toned beanpole of a man, is oddly cast as a rugged outdoorsman. But he is very good at lobbing insults, and that’s what he does to the assembled “online-content generators” at his new workplace, sardonically mocking them for the simple fact of their existence. One of them clings to an emotional-comfort animal (“is that one of those special dogs that people can take anywhere?” Jack asks), another is prone to bursting into tears, all of them receive medals for completing menial tasks, and they gawk in horror when they realize Jack doesn’t have a Twitter or a Facebook account. “It’s like he doesn’t exist,” one of them gasps.

The Great Indoors seems unwilling to paint a cord-cutting generation as anything but a band of entitled fools.

Jack even mocks his coworkers’ diversity, as if the next generation is somehow rubbing it in everyone else’s faces by ... not being all white men. The team’s social media expert Emma (Christine Ko) is an Asian woman, and the writer Mason (Shaun Brown) is a black man who may be gay or may simply not conform to such binary labeling—Jack’s too afraid to figure it out. Aren’t millennials so annoying about things like who they decide to have sex with? To Jack, they certainly are, and his only solace comes from drinking whiskey with the magazine’s owner (played by Stephen Fry), and flirting with his daughter, who’s serving as Jack’s new editor.

As you might have concluded, none of Jack’s observations about the generation below him is particularly trenchant. Eventually, he wins the trust of the young cohort by bringing in a bear cub for them to play with, understanding that memes, cute animal videos, and anything else that seems like Buzzfeed brought to life is the only language they can speak. The classic fish-out-of-water model is ignored. Jack, it seems, has nothing to learn from these people—except “useless” information like how Instagram works, or what a live-stream is.

It’s most likely that The Great Indoors is a blip, destined to serve as a cultural artifact for a particular moment in history when simply being born in the ’80s or ’90s made someone worthy of mockery. The show’s ignorance feels totemic, though—there’s nothing wrong with poking fun at younger folk, of course, but it’s can’t be the premise of an entire television series, certainly not one with any hope of a future. “I got passed over for promotion again?” Emma complains at one point. “What do I have to do, it’s been eight weeks!” That line, and this show, feels perfectly emblematic of CBS’s flaws: The Great Indoors seems unwilling to paint a cord-cutting generation as anything but a band of entitled fools destined for their comeuppance. But as a typical millennial might respond: Y u mad tho?

Inferno: At Least Florence Looks Nice

First, there was The Da Vinci Code, the 2006 blockbuster based on the gazillion-selling novel by Dan Brown, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks in a mullet so bizarre and improbable that it seemed to have floated in from another dimension. Then, in 2009, we got Angels & Demons, a sequel based on an earlier Dan Brown novel, that again starred Hanks though not, alas, his mullet, which had evidently recommenced its interdimensional wanderings.

With Inferno, the Brown-adapted, Howard-directed franchise finds itself in a comfortable, if not terribly compelling, groove. Hanks is back as the world-famous symbologist Robert Langdon, and he once again finds himself up to his neck in a deadly global conspiracy engineered by people with a fondness for puzzles and antiquity. Last time, the setting was Rome; this time it’s Florence (ravishing), with late assists from Venice and Istanbul. Last time, the conspiracy involved the murder of papal candidates and an anti-matter bomb hidden in Vatican City; this time it’s a virus, Inferno, intended to wipe out half of humankind as a “cull” to prevent overpopulation. Last time, clues were to be found courtesy of Galileo and Bernini; this time, it’s Botticelli and Dante.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is the evident requirement that every Dan Brown movie provide Langdon with a female sidekick who is professionally accomplished—though not as accomplished as himself—a compliant helpmeet, and utterly disposable as soon as the film is over. Congratulations to Felicity Jones, who in this installment plays an emergency-room doctor, Sienna Brooks, with about as much enthusiasm as one could plausibly muster for the role.

Langdon finds himself in Brooks’s hands when he winds up in her Florence hospital with an apparent head wound. He has no memory of what’s taken place over the past 48 hours and he suffers from piercing headaches and nightmarish visions of flames and human deformity, a river of blood and a woman in a black veil.

Before long, Langdon and Brooks find themselves chased by no fewer than four separate pursuers: an assassin disguised as a cop (Ana Ularu); an enigmatic businessman (Irrfan Khan); and two agents who each claim to work for the World Health Organization (Omar Sy and Sidse Babett Knudsen). All are intent—and none more so than Langdon—on finding the Inferno virus, which was hidden away with a ticking timer by its creator, an overpopulation-obsessed billionaire (Ben Foster), shortly before he took a short walk off Giotto’s tall bell tower in the Piazza del Duomo. (Watch that first step … )

Along the way there are the customary amusements: a search for the stolen death mask of Dante Alighieri; another for the tomb of Enrico Dandolo, 41st doge of Venice; a secret passage hidden behind a map of Armenia in the Palazzo Vecchio (it’s real!); a brief lesson on the linguistic roots of the word “quarantine”; and a “Faraday pointer,” carved from human bone and planted within a thumbprint-locked “bio-tube,” that projects an image of Botticelli’s Map of Hell—subtly modified of course.

In noted contrast to its precursors, Inferno even offers a few moments of moderate wit. At one point, when Langdon tries to pass off the much-younger Brooks to a colleague as his “niece,” he’s offered a rueful Florentine response: “Professor, you’re in Italy. You don’t need to say ‘niece.’” And despite having a small role, the Indian star Khan (Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi, and too many Hindi films to catalog) is an utter delight every time he opens his mouth as the mysterious and mercenary Harry “The Provost” Sims. As he wryly explains following a rather dramatic switching of sides: “There’s a great deal of situational ebb and flow in my line of work.”

If this all sounds to you like modestly diverting fun, well you’re probably not wrong (at least with the exception of a major narrative reversal that telegraphed itself almost from the start). If, on the other hand, it sounds to you like a terrific bore, you’re probably not wrong either. Inferno is better than The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons, but both of those films set the bar reprehensibly low.

Now, a spinoff focusing on Khan’s Mr. Sims—that might be something to get excited about.

Channel Zero Unleashes the Horrors of Childhood

The first time I can recall being legitimately frightened by a work of fiction was when I was three. The work in question was a book about two friends trying to identify a mysterious creature based on clues it leaves behind. With each new bit of evidence, the duo imagines a different incarnation of the beast: Does it have big ears? A gaping mouth? Long legs? The thought of a formless monster scared me to tears; my imagination inspired a fear that seemed bigger than myself.

That story, I learned later, was a Barney picture book called What Can It Be?. In retrospect, the illustrations are certainly nothing any reasonable adult would construe as inappropriate for a toddler. The “monster” at the end is a rabbit playing a tuba. This happens so often when grown-ups reflect on their childhoods: Things that seemed unfathomably disturbing are revealed in the cold light of maturity to be harmless, even silly. After all, when growing older means learning about all the big and serious dangers of the world, old ghosts lose their malice.

But in the new Syfy horror anthology show Channel Zero, which debuted earlier this month, those old terrors live on, as malicious as ever. The series, subtitled Candle Cove, follows a child psychologist named Mike Painter (Mark Schneider) who returns to his hometown of Iron Hill, Ohio, nearly 30 years after the murders of five kids, one of whom was his twin brother. He’s convinced their deaths were partly caused by a strange children’s television program called Candle Cove, which only aired during the two months the murders took place. But rather than exploring why kids find normal things abnormally terrifying, the series hinges on one question: What if your childhood phantoms are just as frightening as you remember? Despite being much quieter than most horror shows, Channel Zero manages to be deeply unsettling for the way it makes its grownup characters vulnerable to the monsters, both literal and abstract, from their youth.

Channel Zero was inspired by internet-based horror stories known as “creepypasta,” with this season being based on one of the most popular examples. The original story takes the form of a fictional web forum where adults are discussing an old, obscure kids show called Candle Cove, which was pirate-themed and featured weird puppets. But as the exchange progresses, the forum participants start realizing how sinister the show was, with its villain known as “the skin-taker” and one episode where all the characters just screamed. The twist at the very end of the story helps form the premise of the Syfy series, which mostly involves Mike Painter trying to figure out why Candle Cove has mysteriously begun airing again—and why it’s causing a whole new generation of children to start behaving bizarrely, even violently. Helping him to solve the case is his mother (Fiona Shaw) and his childhood crush, Jessica (Natalie Brown).

For those accustomed to the hectic, maximalist style of American Horror Story, Channel Zero might even seem boring. It’s a slow-burning but elegantly filmed watch where scenes and conversations and character personalities err on the side of understatement. This is perhaps intentional—the show, after all, features ridiculous-looking puppets, so the more dreamy pacing and visual style are a useful counterbalance. In a way, this approach suggests that Channel Zero takes children’s fear seriously, on its own terms, far more than most similar stories do. The show lets the random snippets from the fictional Candle Cove and Mike’s memories speak for themselves, trusting that older viewers will be able to viscerally empathize via their own experiences.

Channel Zero doesn’t shy away from the real violence kids often visit upon each other.

Over the first four episodes, a great deal of backstory is told through subtle flashbacks—some lasting for minutes, others for mere seconds. The result is a merging of past and present that brings Mike’s nightmares of Candle Cove to life, albeit in a fragmented manner. Mike’s old friends, now grown up, are also haunted by flashbacks to their youth, suggesting that Channel Zero seems intent on keeping the past close to the surface. In the first scene of the series, Mike appears on a talk show to discuss his job as a child psychiatrist. “Adulthood is just a mask,” he tells the host. “A sophisticated mask, for sure. But behind it, we’re still the kids we were.” The show has thus far taken care to treat adulthood as just that—a mask—and one that it constantly snatches away to show how age doesn’t lessen humans’ capacity to be wildly afraid.

For a show as concerned with the malevolent dimensions of childhood as this one, it’s no surprise that Channel Zero’s main monster is a silent, eyeless creature made entirely of baby teeth. The symbolism is fairly simple: The teeth are artifacts of youth and innocence, but they’re also kind of gross. While investigating some neighborhood thefts, the deputy sheriff, Amy Welch, balks at a mother who reports that the thief stole her child’s baby teeth from a memory box. Amy can’t understand why any parent would keep loose bits of their child’s bone matter, explaining, “Every time you smile, you’re showing off your skeleton.” In many little ways like these, the show imbues childhood with a sense of danger.

In an upcoming episode, Channel Zero amps up the danger even further, with one of its most gruesome scenes yet (fittingly, one involving masks). The scene is a direct consequence of the show’s adults constantly undermining children, despite the potential mind-controlling powers of the newly airing Candle Cove. (Curiously enough, the only grown-up who doesn’t underestimate them is a character who emerges as the likely villain and puppet-master.) But for all the show’s emphasis on spooky skeleton puppets and teeth monsters, Channel Zero doesn’t shy away from the real physical and psychological violence kids often visit upon each other: There are graphic scenes of bullying and cruel verbal exchanges that undercut the idea of childhood as a safe haven from the dangers of the real world.

Channel Zero’s more mundane approach to horror might keep it on the outskirts of popular attention, but the show is all the more compelling for its restraint. Without any jump scares or narrative gimmicks to write off, viewers might find the series actually dredging up some of their own creepy memories, and evoking a darker nostalgia than the kind typical of such throwback shows. Though its larger arc has relatively little to do with the source material that inspired it, Channel Zero: Candle Cove is faithful to creepypasta in the way that matters most: by recognizing that children can experience fear that’s as complex, terrifying, and real as anything felt by adults.

The Revolt of the Conservative Women

The 2016 presidential campaign kicked off in earnest with a clash between Megyn Kelly and Donald Trump over gender and conservatism at the first GOP debate, and now there’s another Kelly moment to bookend the race.

Newt Gingrich, a top Trump surrogate, was on Kelly’s Fox News show Tuesday night, jousting with her in a tense exchange stretching over nearly eight minutes. Things got off to a promising start when Gingrich declared that there were two “parallel universes”—one in which Trump is losing and one in which he is winning. (There is data, at least, to support the existence of the former universe.) After a skirmish over whether polls are accurate, Kelly suggested that Trump had been hurt by the video in which he boasts about sexually assaulting women and the nearly a dozen accusations lodged against him by women since. Gingrich was furious, embarking on a mansplaining riff in which he compared the press to Pravda and Izvestia for, in his view, overcovering the allegations.

“If Trump is a sexual predator, that is...” Kelly began.

Gingrich, perhaps having missed the “if,” blew up. Finally, Kelly had to demand that Gingrich stop speaking over her, on her own show. She pointed out that the allegations were a legitimate news story.

“You want to go back to the tapes on your show recently?” Gingrich sniped. “You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy, and that’s what I get from watching your show tonight.”

“You know what, Mr. Speaker, I’m not fascinated by sex, but I am fascinated by protection of women and understanding what we’re getting in the Oval Office,” Kelly replied.

It’s ironic to hear Newt Gingrich criticizing anyone as “fascinated with sex.” My colleague James Fallows has written on what he sees as Donald Trump’s tendency to project his own personality on others, and Gingrich seems to be adopting the tic. As speaker of the House, he found Bill Clinton’s personal sexual ethics important enough to merit the second successful presidential impeachment in American history. His personal life suggests a certain fascination with copulation as well: He left his first wife after beginning an affair with Marianne Gingrich who would become his second wife. He divorced her, too, after striking up an affair with Callista Bisek, who would become his third wife; according to Marianne Gingrich, he separated after she turned down his request for an open marriage.

The exchange is emblematic of a dynamic in the campaign dating to Trump’s dust-up with Kelly in August 2015. Repeatedly, conservative women have raised concerns about Trump’s language and treatment of women, and repeatedly, conservative men have not merely disagreed with them but have dismissed their concerns as evidence of bias or foolishness or identity politics.

Take the debate moment. Kelly’s question has been rather overshadowed by the aftermath, but it was about his treatment of women:

You’ve called women you don’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” … Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?

At the time, Trump downplayed his comments, pivoting to a critique of “political correctness.” But the next day, he fired back with a remark widely taken as a joke about menstruation. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her …. wherever.” It wasn’t enough to simply dismiss Kelly’s concerns; Trump had to deliver a sexist retort.

Kelly’s question proved prescient. Trump is now struggling with women voters, just as she had suggested he might. But his defenders have not learned any lessons. On Tuesday, Gingrich couldn’t simply argue that the focus on accusations of sexual assault against Trump was misguided; he had to accuse Kelly of an obsession with sex.

The pattern is especially galling to conservative women who spent years mounting good-faith defenses of the Republican Party against that “war on women” charge from Democrats. Now they find that the GOP is validating the Democratic narrative—and to boot, few Republican men seem to have their back.

Earlier this month, my colleague Conor Friedersdorf reported on the scathing jeremiad that Marybeth Glenn, a Republican woman, had posted on Twitter. Here’s a portion:

I fought on behalf of my principles while other women told me I hated my own sex. Not only charges of sexism, but I defended@marcorubio during Go8, I fought in my state to stop the@ScottWalker recall, etc… Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the @GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out? He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I – and other female conservatives – said you were & back down like cowards.

Get this straight: We don’t need you to stand up for us, YOU needed to stand up for us for YOU. For YOUR dignity. For YOUR reputation. Jeff Sessions says that he wouldn’t “characterize” Trump’s unauthorized groping of women as “assault.”

Are you kidding me?!

The tweetstorm’s viral spread was a testament to its resonance. Amanda Carpenter, a former speechwriter to Ted Cruz, picked up that argument in a Washington Post column this week. Calling out men who dismissed Trump’s comments on the Billy Bush video as simply “locker room,” she recommended that some GOP men have a conversation far more common among women than men:

Perhaps, they should talk to some rape survivors. They need to hear what those women heard when Trump bragged about grabbing a woman’s genitals, aggressively kissing women without consent, and getting away with it because he’s rich and famous. That wasn’t boyish banter. That was a confession of assault.

Carpenter continues, “If the GOP has truly convinced itself that openly engaging in sexual assault fantasies is something normal that men do among one another, I have a suggestion. Relocate the Republican National Committee headquarters into a men’s-only locker room. Eliminate all pretenses of wanting to let women in.”

This reaction is by no means universal. Mollie Hemingway writes at The Federalist that the press is in fact obsessed with sex, and is overlooking the substance of Trump’s campaign.

But voice’s like Kelly’s, and Carpenter’s, can’t be ignored. Kelly may be some people’s idea of a moderate (her colleague Sean Hannity’s, for example), but she’s no one’s idea of a liberal. She remains, for example, deeply skeptical of progressive claims about racism. Carpenter is even more solidly conservative. If even this strain of conservative feminism, which makes the minimal demand that conservatives recognize sexual assault as such and speak out against open misogyny, is too extreme for the GOP, what place can there be for women in the party?

Carpenter has a ready answer: “Now, I don’t purport to speak for all women, but I know I am not alone. I am one of the many women the Republican Party left behind this election. The GOP is about to learn a hard lesson when it comes to the women’s vote: defend us or lose us.”

Despite this, some conservatives are scoring Gingrich as the winner of the encounter. Trump himself took time out of a promotional visit to his new hotel in D.C. to mention the interview: “Congratulations Newt on last night, that was an amazing interview. You don’t play games, Newt.”

They’re whistling past a graveyard filled with the remains of old white men—and old white men may soon be all the Republican Party has left. Trump, Gingrich, and the rest of the GOP don’t have to take Kelly’s and Carpenter’s and Glenn’s word for it. Polls show that much of Trump’s deficit is a product of women opposing him. In a recent PRRI/The Atlantic poll, Trump trailed Clinton by 33 points among women. The details tell an even more vivid story. White women without college degrees, who voted by double-digit margins for each of the last three Republican candidates, are evenly split. Educated women who usually vote Republican are bailing on him too.

It is, of course, possible that all of these numbers are incorrect. But as of press time, polling from Gingrich’s parallel universe was not available.

Moonlight Is a Film of Uncommon Grace

Like all great films, Moonlight is both specific and sweeping. It’s a story about identity—an intelligent, challenging work that wants viewers to reflect on assumptions they might make about the characters. It’s also a focused and personal work, a mental odyssey about the youth, adolescence, and adulthood of Chiron, who is growing up gay and black in Miami. From start to finish, the director Barry Jenkins’s new film balances the scope of its ambitions: The story weaves random memories and crucial life experiences into a tapestry, one that tries to unlock the shielded heart of its protagonist.

In short, Moonlight demands to be seen, even though the film is about a man who desperately wants to keep the audience at arm’s length. Inspired by the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jenkins’s movie is a meditation on growing up, and the ways we all try to prevent ourselves from standing out or getting hurt. There’s insight to Moonlight that should pierce viewers to their core, even if Chiron’s life is very different from their own. This is not an “issue” film that’s mainly “about” race or sexuality; this is a humane movie, one that’s looking to prompt empathy and introspection most of all. On those terms alone, Moonlight is one of the year’s most gripping viewing experiences.

It’s been eight years since the release of Jenkins’s debut feature Medicine For Melancholy, itself a clever work about identity. That film followed a black couple wandering the streets of San Francisco after a one-night stand, pondering the gentrifying city and whether people of color could still find a place in it. Moonlight feels more personal for Jenkins, who was born and raised in Liberty City, Miami, the predominantly African American neighborhood in which the film is set. He’s stated that Chiron’s story is not his own, but the film has an incredible sense of place all the same. The movie begins with a casual conversation between two drug dealers on an abandoned block, then cuts to a young Chiron (Alex Hibbert), a boy taunted with the nickname “Little,” who’s hiding out from bullies in an empty, boarded-up apartment building.

Moonlight veers away from the gritty stereotypes its setting might suggest; in fact, this film deliberately rejects the visual markers viewers might anticipate in such a tale. Liberty City is bright and often colorful, even at its most dilapidated. When Chiron is rescued by Juan (Mahershala Ali), one of the drug dealers shown cruising around in a vintage Cadillac, the boy is taken to Juan’s suburban-ish home, and later to the beach, where Juan cradles him in the water to try and teach him how to swim. Juan quickly realizes that Chiron doesn’t need to be forced or coddled into opening up emotionally—he just needs space to be himself. At every juncture, Juan tries to dissuade the boy from accepting whatever lot he’s handed by his tormenters, or by his crack-addicted mother Paula (a frightening, and wonderful, Naomie Harris).

Moonlight is not an easy watch at times, partly because it delves deeply into its protagonist’s haunted psyche.

Ali’s incredible performance in Moonlight’s first third gives it its human core; Jenkins has no interest in upending, or affirming, the audience’s preconceived notions of how a drug dealer might behave. Juan is presented as an entire person because that’s exactly who he is—everyone in this movie is presented in the same three-dimensional fashion, even as they make decisions that break Chiron’s heart. More than anything, Juan tries to impress upon the boy that his outward appearance, and how the world sees him, isn’t everything. During his swimming lesson, Juan relays a memory of an old woman seeing him on the beach at night and saying, “In the moonlight, black boys look blue! You’re blue!”

In some of the film’s most important moments, Jenkins literally bathes his characters in that baleful, blue light, stripping them of whatever disguises they might unwittingly wear in the daytime. As a teenager (played by Ashton Sanders), Chiron is still awkward, still burdened by his mother, and perhaps only slightly more aware of his sexuality. When a nighttime flirtation with a friend turns sexual, Jenkins stages the action on a beach under the full moon, turning that intimate moment into something that feels at once exclusive to the couple and yet utterly universal.

There is tragedy at the heart of Moonlight, and the film is not an easy watch at times, partly because it delves so deeply into its protagonist’s haunted psyche. The movie’s final chapter, where viewers see the man who Chiron becomes (played by Trevante Rhodes), and his reunion with his childhood friend, feels like an utter surprise when it begins. But after 20 minutes with the characters, it’s clear why they ended up where they did. This cohesiveness is a remarkable achievement for a film that compresses a life story into three episodic segments, each running about 40 minutes. To say more would be to spoil a singular journey suffused with melancholy and hope, emotions that Jenkins communicates through the screen with uncommon grace. The result is a film that is one of the most essential of the year, and one whose depth rewards repeated viewings.

The Enduring Sadness of Back to Black

When Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black arrived in 2006, it was hailed for carving out a space in mainstream pop music for recreations of ’50s and ’60s soul. The past 10 years of Adele and Lana Del Rey, “Blurred Lines” and “Stay With Me,” Mark Ronson at the Super Bowl and Mark Ronson executive producing Lady Gaga’s latest album, testify to Winehouse’s influence—or at least testify to the fact that she presaged a shift in public tastes.

So it might be expected that a decade later, with the sound of Back to Black—the horns, the woodwinds, the wandering bass lines, the crackling analogue drum tones—once again familiar, the album might sound less vibrant than it once did. No, no, no. Back to Black remains a singular classic thanks less to the traditions it harkened back to than to Winehouse herself—her voice, yes, but also her crushingly honest point of view.

The model of modern radio conquerers, whether heading electronic-dance thumpathons or golden-oldies updates or trying to straddle both modes like Gaga’s been doing lately, seems to require a flair for being inspirational. Resilience and overcoming are pop keywords, and when addressing a breakup or a hater, indignation—how could you do this to me?—is the default. Even Winehouse’s descendent in soulful moping, Adele, laces her ballads with comforting amounts of dignity and hope. The space between her belting “We could have had it all” and Winehouse muttering, on “Tears Dry on Their Own,” “We coulda never had it all,” is the dark margin by which Winehouse was so much more fascinating than her imitators.

The uptempo hit that introduced her to the world, “Rehab,” wrung joy out of the most dangerous kind of refusal: not a middle-fingers-up claim of independence, but a giddy declaration of self-knowledge. She’s declining rehab not because she doesn’t drink but because she understands exactly why she drinks—nothing medical, just untreatable phases of heartbreak. “It's not just my pride /  It's just till these tears have dried,” she sings in the bridge as Ronson brings the band to the height of its ecstasy, a moment of liberating clarity that will color the rest of the album.

She believed in her own gravity, and she never, in song, considered escaping it.

Tears, as she sings later, dry on their own; there’s no hope for redemption in the love of another, no community of support except in the Ray Charles and Nas records she spends her solitude with. And it’s her fault. Over spindly guitars and a hip-hop groove for “You Know I’m No Good”—it could have been the album title—she spins a bracingly frank narrative about cheating on the man who expects to one day marry her. She thinks of him even as she strays, and he knows exactly what she’s up to—those rug burns aren’t from him. His indifference to her betrayal stings her, but she has no right to demand anything else.

The pathos here, the reason it’s all so compelling rather than ghastly, is the thick coating of empathy underlying her pain: She misbehaves knowing how it affects people, rather than out of obliviousness to how it affects people. “The guilt will kill you / If she don’t first” she says over the jazz-flecked reggae of “Just Friends,” where the story is that a man is cheating on someone else with her. For the deceptively pert “He Can Only Hold Her,” she sketches a relationship where the woman’s affections have started to dim, but the song’s sympathy largely lies with the guy.

Winehouse had a gift for clear but subtly complicated melodies, the kind that stick in the ear but also convey the cyclical love and shame she sang about, and she and her producers thought carefully about how to refurbish old musical tropes to fit her themes. The sickeningly beautiful “Wake Up Alone” is instructive in its use of the well-worn doo-wop template of guitar arpeggios and piano pulsing. Her voice flutters and dips as she describes her daytime distractions, but then she begins a descent as night falls; the arrangement drops out as she lands on the song’s title—she really is waking up alone.

Even more powerful is the title track, an all-time-great song, where the musical elements lock together to mimic the feeling of inevitability she’s singing about, a feeling that is at the heart of the album and sadly now at the heart of her public image. A breakup first sends her “back to Earth” and later “back to black,” but it’s the same thing. She believed in her own gravity, and she never, in song, considered escaping it. The world isn’t improved by reading the personal tragedy that unfolded after this album into its lyrics and composition, but there’s also no fighting it—the power that lies in hearing Back to Black is in the totality of its acceptance.

The Trials of Sheriff Joe

Joe Arpaio has reigned as Sheriff of Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, since 1993, when Latinos made up less than a fifth of the state’s population. In this time, he has forced prisoners to wear pink underwear, don striped black-and-white jumpsuits, work chain gangs, and serve time beneath the desert sun in Army-surplus tents. He calls it his “concentration camp.” Most famously, he has dispatched his deputies to largely Latino neighborhoods where officers arrest people with the goal of checking their immigration status, then queue them up for deportation. It is for continuing these immigration sweeps against a federal judge’s injunction that Arpaio was officially charged Tuesday with misdemeanor contempt of court.

Arpaio has embraced controversy, and has repeatedly won re-election. After six terms in office, it seemed only age would defeat the 84 year old. But this election year appears different—not only because Arpaio faces a misdemeanor and up to six months in jail, but because polls give his Democratic rival, Paul Penzone, a comfortable lead. Arpaio’s last election was called his toughest yet, but this one may be his last.

This very real specter of Arpaio serving time is the culmination of a long battle in which the sheriff has offered himself as savior of law and order, waging war against Latino migrant hordes knocking on the Southern border wall, and as a lawman rallying against a conniving liberal federal government. “If anybody out there believes that this decision is anything but pure politics and politically motivated,” Arpaio’s campaign manager, Chad Willems, said of the federal charges, “they are living on a different planet."

It is indeed a different planet Arpaio has created. In 2007 he set up a hotline where residents could report people they believed to be in the country illegally. Latinos in Maricopa are four to nine times more likely to be pulled over by deputies than non-Latinos, their homes can be searched without a warrant, they can be detained without cause, and can be sent to jail for 13 days for failing to use a turn signal.

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) concluded its three-year investigation into the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and one federal investigator called it the “most egregious” case of “racial profiling in the United States.” Arpaio preferred to call them “crime-suppression operations,” but his immigration sweeps were thinly veiled excuses to act as Border Patrol, stopping anyone with brown skin. One especially besieged town was Guadalupe, a Phoenix suburb of 5,500 people, where businesses post signs in Spanish. Today, 72 percent of the town’s citizens are of Latino origin. Arpaio turned it into his own U.S.-Mexico border war after Guadalupe’s then mayor, Rebecca Jimenez, defied him as he spoke to TV reporters during an immigration sweep and said she didn’t want his deputies back in her town the next day.

“You said you didn't want us back here tomorrow. Is that what you said?" Arpaio asked.

"Well,” he said, “we will be back here tomorrow. Full force!"

And they were.

Arpaio continued his sweeps in Guadalupe, and across the county, even after the federal government took away his legal ability to do so in 2010, and even after a federal judge’s issued an injunction in 2012 that forbade him from doing so. This is what landed him in court. It began in 2007 when Arpaio’s deputies pulled over a car in which Manuel Ortega Melendres, a Mexican citizen in the country on a valid visa, was a passenger. Deputies said they stopped the car for speeding, but they never issued a citation. Even though Ortega had proper identification, deputies arrested him and sent him to county jail so an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official could look over his papers. He was eventually let go. Then in 2008 deputies stopped a brother and sister, both U.S. citizens, checked their IDs, released them. But other deputies stopped them further down the road and held them at gunpoint. These became two cases in a class-action suit against the sheriff’s department brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, cases that eventually gained the attention of federal investigators.

By 2011 Arizona U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow ordered Arpaio to stop detaining people solely based on the belief they were in the country illegally. Arpaio continued to do so. In 2012—also an election year—Arpaio appeared in court at a six-day bench trial where he testified his department does not “arrest people because of the color of their skin.” Arpaio won that year’s election, and by 2013 the judge ruled his department had indeed arrested people based on the color of their skin. From now on the sheriff’s department was supposed to comply with the federal court’s remedies to fix racial profiling. Arpaio never did (three years out he still hasn’t). And he didn’t try to hide his defiance either. In a video shot in 2013, Arpaio’s chief deputy tells his agents the racial-profiling order is “ludicrous” and “crap.” Arpaio tells the deputies, “We don’t racially profile, I don’t care what everybody says.”

It’s that attitude, coupled with his self-proclaimed “America’s Toughest Sheriff” monicker and his tough words on illegal immigration, that made him a darling of national and local GOP candidates seeking to burnish their anti-immigration credentials.

In March 2014 Arpaio sent an email to his followers asking financial support to defend himself against Obama, the DOJ, and Democrats, whom he accused of waging a smear campaign, and sussing up the“rampant UNFOUNDED charges of racism and racial profiling." This, along with his comments in the 2013 video on racial profiling, earned Arpaio a reprimand from Judge Snow, but it’s what happened next that changed the story from defiance to conspiracy.

In May 2014, a deputy on Arpaio’s immigration-sweep team who’d been arrested on drug charges hung himself on his pool table, leaving behind a video-taped suicide note in which he threatened to expose the sheriff’s office. Deputies department wide, including those on the immigration-sweep team, had made thousands of audio and video recordings of traffic stops and never turned them over to plaintiffs in the Melendres case. When investigators searched the dead deputy’s home, they found some of these recordings and, along with drugs and illegal weapons, hundreds of stolen IDs, Mexican passports, licenses, Social Security cards, all believed to have been confiscated during traffic stops and deliberately hidden. Judge Snow asked Arpaio to turn over the tapes, as well as those from recorded interactions with deputies across the department, and to gather them quietly to avoid tempting deputies to destroy or lose evidence. Instead, Arpaio’s office sent out a mass email alerting supervisors.

The civil contempt of court hearing began in April 2015. Arpaio had repeatedly ignored the injunction to stop his immigration sweeps, he resisted department reforms, and now the court learned he failed to turn over thousands of recorded traffic-stop interactions. Arpaio admitted guilt before the hearing began, hoping to avoid a trial, and possibly to avoid talking about a private investigator the sheriff’s office hired for $250,000 to based entirely on a tip he received through Facebook—an alleged plot to oust him involving Snow, his wife, and the U.S. Justice Department.

It wasn’t until May 2016 that the civil case would be resolved, when Snow found Arpaio guilty of contempt. But in the interim, Arpaio’s staff threw him a party for being the longest-serving sheriff in Maricopa’s history; he failed to turn over 50 hard drives related to the conspiracy investigation; and U.S. Marshals seized evidence from the sheriff’s office.

To the news that Snow intended to seek criminal charges against him, Arpaio said: “It is clear that the corrupt Obama Justice Department is trying to influence my re-election as Sheriff of Maricopa County.”

Despite already admitting guilt to nearly the same charges in the civil trial, Arpaio vowed to “fight this case tooth and nail because I know these charges are rubbish.”

So is this the last ride of Sheriff Joe?

Arizona is now one-third Latino, and the red state Arpaio entered office in is now hued purple. There is some evidence Arizona Republicans are realizing they won’t be able to win without these voters: In 2011 voters recalled state Senate President Russell Pearce, the author of SB 1070, Arizona’s tough immigration law, and the state’s most anti-immigration politician. Then in the 2012 primary election, Pearce was beaten by a moderate conservative candidate. Arpaio has never done well among Latinos, but even his former base seems to have grown tired of his antics; this racial-profiling case alone is expected to cost taxpayers in Maricopa $72 million, and that’s a drop in the bucket of the many, many lawsuits Arpaio has been—and is still—entangled in. The recent poll of Maricopa residents who voted in three of the last four elections found Arpaio is losing among men, independents, and voters ages 50-64. The only group Arpaio is carrying is the elderly.

Some Maricopa voters have shown they’re willing to vote repeatedly for a man accused of racial profiling, but a potential convict? Maybe not.

The Old-Fashioned, Modern Marriage of Ina and Jeffrey

There are some couples in pop culture who are more than simply couples. Barack and Michelle. Rita and Tom. Ellen and Portia. Jay and Bey. They could always break up—romance is romantic in part because it is so fundamentally fragile—but the more urgent point is that nooooooooooonono they can’t break up, because their enduring togetherness suggests not just that contemporary coupledom can work, but also that a chaotic world can be made sensible, and the cruelties of entropy can be resisted through that most unpredictable and yet stabilizing of things: love.

Ina and Jeffrey—Garten, officially, but they have also, at this point, transcended their shared surname—make up one of those couples. They are, in fact, according to one assessment, “the most cherished celebrity couple in the world.” The Gartens met in the ‘60s, when he was a student at Dartmouth and she caught his eye as she was visiting her older brother there; they married when she was 20 and he was 22. And nearly five decades later, now that Ina is a culinary celebrity and Jeffrey is an occasional guest star on her popular Food Network show, they seem more in love than ever.

She talks about him all the time, on Barefoot Contessa, invoking him even when he isn’t there. And for his part, when he does show up, he seems affable and impish and convinced that the crème brûlée that has been placed before him in the episode’s crescendo is, like the woman who’s torched it on his behalf, a sweet and glinty miracle. The pair’s defining coupledom seems somehow to have transcended the concerns that plague so many other duos who’ve joined the institution of marriage; it manages to be at once regressive and uniquely modern.

The book, like its author, occupies a Jeffreycentric universe; it’s cashmere turtlenecks all the way down.

And now there is Cooking for Jeffrey, the long-awaited tenth book in the Barefoot Contessa brand-canon. The new manual, out today from Clarkson Potter, is a beautifully produced cookbook: hefty and glossy and fit to be gifted by people who use “gift” as a verb. But Cooking for Jeffrey’s cookbookishness—its recipes, its lists of Contessa-recommended pantry items, its vaguely voyeuristic photographs of scattered radishes—is supplemented by bookishness of a more literary strain. Arranged among the recipes are brief interstitial essays in which the author discusses her entertaining philosophy; expounds on philosophy more generally (“it doesn't really matter what the occasion is … it’s the connections that we have with the people we love that nourish our souls”); reveals the formative moments in her culinary career; and in general makes implied arguments about feminism and Marxism and the merits of softly lit domesticity.  

Mostly, though, the author makes arguments about Jeffrey. “Cooking is more gratifying and, frankly, more fun when I’m cooking for people I love—whether for two friends or a party of twelve,”  Garten notes, in one of those mini-essays. “And for more than forty years my most constant and appreciative audience has been my sweet husband, Jeffrey.” Jeffrey, with this, has been promoted from cameo-maker; in the book that bears his name, he is the star and the first mover. (Even the book’s dedication, its text set against the golden backdrop of Garten’s Vanilla Cream Cheese Pound Cake, reads: “For Jeffrey, who makes everything possible.”) Here, Garten’s most common catchphrase—“How easy is that?”—has been subsumed into her other one: “Jeffrey’s gonna love it!”

Related Story

Martha Stewart, Queen of All Internet

Jeffrey himself never appears in the text, playing either himself or an extra-adorable version thereof; he is merely discussed with cheerful reverence, spectral both in his omnipresence and his absence. Jeffrey, here, exists simply as a bundle of desires waiting to be fulfilled. In Garten’s introduction to her recipe for Sautéed Shredded Brussels Sprouts, she notes that “Jeffrey loves Brussels sprouts; not those mushy overbuild things our mothers used to make but rather satiated or roasted Brussels sprouts that are flavorful and crispy.” Filet Mignon With Mustard & Mushrooms, similarly, is included in the book because, Garten explains, “When Jeffrey and I eat out in Paris, I love to order a classic fillet of beef with mustard sauce.” The bread pudding is included because it “is based on the Thanksgiving stuffing that I’ve been making for Jeffrey for decades.”

We learn, too, via asides in the text, that “Jeffrey adores zucchini with garlic and parmesan” and that “Jeffrey adores lamb,” so “I like to find new ways to cook it,” and that “Jeffrey loves when I make traditional Jewish dishes” and that, relatedly, “one of the first things I made for Jeffrey after we were married was Challah.” We also learn some of Jeffrey’s favorite samplings from previous Barefoot Contessa books: He is particularly partial to Perfect Roast Chicken, from the original Barefoot Contessa Cookbook; and to Scallops Provençal (Barefoot in Paris); and to Steakhouse Steaks With Roquefort Chive Butter (How Easy Is That?).

Watching him on Barefoot Contessa, you would have very little idea that Jeffrey is also the dean emeritus of the Yale School of Management.

The author inhabits, with all this, a Jeffreycentric universe; it’s cashmere turtlenecks all the way. “We don’t have any children,” Jeffrey explained this spring to Johns Hopkins Magazine. “I’m her family. And she is all about family cooking.” Indeed. At one point in Cooking for Jeffrey, Garten discusses her love of mastering a recipe, the sense of satisfaction she has felt when solving that little culinary puzzle. And then she adds: “Just as important to me, though, was that Jeffrey loved everything I cooked. His enthusiasm truly fueled the fire. I was making a home for us, which made me happy, and taking care of the love of my life.”

You could read Cooking for Jeffrey, in all that, as a kind of slow-roasted rebuke to the general arguments set forth in All the Single Ladies and Spinster and Lean In and Unfinished Business and The End of Men: The ultimate recipe the book shares, perhaps, is for a voluntary regression to the divided domesticities of bygone eras and a celebration of feminine servitude. You could cringe, a bit, when Garten tells interviewers, of her husband, “I love to cook for him. He doesn’t have to do anything and that’s my pleasure.” You could cringe as well when Jeffrey explains of that instant attraction to Ina: “She looked like she would take care of me.” You could look, overall, at the show and the books and the general Jeffreycentrism that permeates the Contessa empire and argue that, far from smashing the patriarchy, Garten has instead chosen to serve it some perfectly seasoned smashed potatoes.

But Garten’s feminism is more complicated than that—and it is complicated, in large part, by the presence and the person of Jeffrey. The male Garten may be the direct recipient of his wife’s labors, emotional and otherwise; he may well be, as she has suggested so many times before, the central force in her life. But fame is a tricky currency. And when it comes to Garten’s celebrity—if you set aside any Marxist readings of this self-styled American contessa—what becomes clear is that Jeffrey, Quintessential Husband, is, as a celebrity, playing the role of the wife.

He is the person in the pairing who is defined, in the public mind, by his domestic self. He is the one who is judged according to his looks. He is the one who is regularly referred to as “adorable.” He is the one who gets called “man candy” in Buzzfeed listicles and whose persona gets lovingly satirized on 30 Rock, when Matt Damon—as Liz’s boyfriend, Carol—collapses into tears as he is forced to admit, “I’m not Jeffrey Garten! I’m not as strong as that guy!”

Jeffrey, in that sense, is, in public, the masculine answer to the Feminine Mystique. He is beloved in large part because he is widely seen to be beneath: Though Ina serves him—food, love, loyalty—he is also, according to the dynamics of fame, serving her. Barefoot Contessa may be an instructional cooking show, and one of the first Food Network programs to realize that a lifestyle is something that can be bought as well as lived; it is also, in its way, a rom-com. The food, in it, feeds the relationships; and Ina’s relationship with Jeffrey is the show’s narrative through line. (“Ina and Jeffrey: A Love Story” is an authorless essay featured on the Food Network’s site.) Jeffrey is, in his very modern way, princely: He shows up for her. He loves her. He giggles when she talks. He thinks everything she does is miraculous. In interviews, he talks about TSA agents recognizing him in security lines and chiding him: “My wife wants me to be just like you!”

Jeffrey, in public, is the masculine answer to the Feminine Mystique.

Which is also to say that, watching his brief, beatific appearances on the Barefoot Contessa, you would have very little idea that Jeffrey Garten is also the dean emeritus of the Yale School of Management, or that he is a regular contributor to the national newspapers of record, or that he is, himself, the author of several books (in this case, about the global economy). That is in part because, in the Contessa cosmos, these things—“profession,” “labor,” “the world”—have very little place; the home, instead, cheery and white and color-popped with peonies and/or hydrangeas, is a refuge from the messiness of life as most people experience it. It is also, however, because the romance the show is selling is in some sense myopic: In Contessaland, salt crunches and heated oil shimmers and marriage is predicated not just on mutual respect, but on mutual obsession. That is the fairy tale being sold—and, perhaps, lived.

Last month, in the publicity tour running up to Cooking for Jeffrey, Garten answered Vanity Fair’s Proust questionnaire; seven (7!) of her responses to the quiz’s 21 questions contained a reference to her husband. “What is your greatest regret?” the questionnaire asked. “Not marrying Jeffrey sooner,” she replied. “What or who is the greatest love of your life?” it queried. “That’s easy—Jeffrey,” came the reply. And then, finally: “How would you like to die?”

“I don’t care,” Garten answered, “as long as Jeffrey and I go together and we end up in a big suite with a view of the ocean.”

And, with that, Ina Garten answered not just Proust’s question, but many of the other ones that have buzzed around the Barefoot Contessa as she has built an empire based on the soft pleasures of home-making. With it, she surveyed it all—Gloria Steinem and Martha Stewart and Karl Marx and basic cable and chocolate babka and first-wave feminism and second-wave feminism and choice feminism and the literary industrial complex and Hollywood and Paris and warm evenings and fresh flowers and Lamb Stew With Spring Vegetables—and came up with a response that would both fail to answer the questions and answer all of them at once: “Yes, but I love him.”

This World Series Isn’t Just About Making History

Soon, one group of baseball fans will be happier than it’s been in a long while. The Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians are this year’s participants in the World Series, and each is long overdue to lift the Commissioner’s Trophy. The Cubs last won the Series in 1908, the year Ernest Shackleton made his first voyage to the Antarctic and Henry Ford built the first Model T, and the team hasn’t even appeared in one since 1945. Cleveland’s drought is short only by comparison—they beat the Boston Braves for the title in 1948.

The coverage of the 2016 World Series—beginning Tuesday evening in Cleveland—will doubtless emphasize history, and for the unbiased observer, it’ll be great fun. After all, baseball has the most extensive and well-cataloged past of the major American sports, and the meeting of these two teams provides an excuse to pore through it. During games, announcers will surely allude to curses, and cameras will cut to long-suffering octogenarian fans.

But the appeal isn’t purely retrospective. The Cubs and Indians have made it to this point by way of youth and ingenuity, and by bucking the sort of habitual strategizing that often dictates everything from roster-building to in-game tactics. Opposites in many ways—Chicago has been a juggernaut all year while Cleveland is an injury-diminished version of a team that had to battle just to make the postseason—both share a disregard for conventional wisdom. Their performances over the earlier playoff rounds have astonished, thanks to Chicago’s lineup of inexperienced prodigies to Cleveland’s new-age system of relief pitching. And over the next week or so, both teams will be hoping that their new thinking can end old losing streaks.

Chicago’s brand of advancement, which has involved investing in young talent, is best represented by its 23-year-old second baseman, Javier Baez. Over the last few weeks, Baez has played like a highlight reel, flashing a shutter-quick glove and hitting the ball all over the park. He can fit almost anywhere on the diamond, reflecting one of the Cubs’ preferred bits of ingenuity: collecting players who don’t have to stick at one position. But during the postseason Baez has stayed mostly at second and, from that spot, added to his growing legend on a nightly basis.

The Cubs still rely chiefly on MVP candidates Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo and ace Jon Lester, but Baez stands in for the team’s philosophy. Dreamed up by the team president Theo Epstein and implemented on the field by the manager Joe Maddon, the Cubs’ strategy in recent years has been to bet on youth. Where other teams might balk at inexperience, Chicago has stockpiled mid-20s wunderkinds and hoped that prodigious talent would outweigh the occasional error. When Maddon talks about Baez, he turns naturally to the virtues of his team as a whole: “When he goes out there he’s not afraid of making a mistake, and that’s a big thing. When you get players that are en masse not concerned about making mistakes, really good stuff can happen.”

If the Cubs’ plans have worked out mostly as intended, some unwelcome surprises have forced Cleveland to innovate. Founded on a strong rotation of pitchers, the Indians lost two of their top three starters in the weeks before the postseason (one of them, Danny Salazar, will return for the World Series). Another pitcher, Trevor Bauer, slashed his pinkie finger open while repairing a drone prior to the American League Championship Series; he had to exit his next start during the first inning when the stitched finger started dripping blood on the mound. What he’ll be able to provide against Chicago is something of an unknown.

The upcoming games will feature individual matchups that merge baseball with science fiction.

Terry Francona, the Cleveland manager, responded to the lousy luck by rethinking long-held maxims of bullpen use. Managers tend to hold to tradition regarding their relief pitchers, bringing on their best arms only in strictly prescribed circumstances. But Francona has adopted a flexible approach more in line with what the statistical community has long recommended, turning to his top relievers whenever the need is greatest. “I’ve had a difficult time coming up with the right adjective for it,” Cleveland’s president, Chris Antonetti, said of Francona’s managing, “but ‘masterful’ seems to be the word that’s most appropriate.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in Francona’s use of Andrew Miller, a giant left-handed reliever with a blazing and accurate fastball and disappearing slider. On any other team, Miller would almost certainly be a closer, a specialist locked in to protecting leads in the ninth inning. In Cleveland, Francona deploys him whenever there’s trouble, and he almost always gets the team out of it. The Indians needed a total effort to advance to the Series, from the star 22-year-old shortstop Francisco Lindor to the 36-year-old bunter extraordinaire Coco Crisp. But it was the all-purpose Miller who was named series MVP—a designation made possible by his manager’s experimentation as much as by his own performance.

This year’s World Series will certainly end in one big surprise for a fan base that’s waited either 108 or 68 years for it, but it will just as certainly be made up of numerous surprises along the way. Whereas some championship-level teams overwhelm with lockstep professionalism—think of the inexorable Yankees of the Derek Jeter years—this season’s entrants in the Fall Classic succeed by shocking. It is as if, convention having failed to get the job done for so long, they’ve opted to head full-on in the other direction.

The upcoming games will feature an embarrassment of young talent, two of the sport’s leading managers trying to outthink one another from the dugouts, and individual matchups that merge baseball with science fiction. Miller might throw an unhittable pitch to Baez; Baez might not only hit it but send it clear out of the park. After the Series is over, there will be plenty of time for contextualizing, for looking back at the long decades of lousy fortunes that led one team to its redemptory moment. Until then, though, the show will be on the field, and it’ll be something to see.

Obama on Kimmel: Trump Isn't Funny Anymore

The Choice, Frontline’s quadrennial documentary about the two final candidates who have become the major-party presidential nominees, made a remarkable argument this cycle around. Donald Trump’s candidacy, the documentary suggested, may have arisen as a result of some jokes made by President Obama. During the height of Trump’s birther phase in 2011, Obama gave a speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, laying into Trump with joke after joke.

“It just kept going and going,” recalled Trump’s now-campaign staffer, Omarosa Manigault, “and he just kept hammering him. And I thought, ‘Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I don’t know if he’ll be able to finish.’” Trump’s fellow adviser, Roger Stone, agreed: “I think that is the night that he resolves to run for president. I think that he is kind of motivated by it. ‘Maybe I’ll just run. Maybe I’ll show them all.’”

Related Story

Why Stephen Colbert Isn't Connecting

President Obama made what will likely be his final appearance, as president, on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday evening, and in many ways the event was a fitting coda to the events of the Nerd Prom of 2011. It was inevitable that the comedian and the politician would discuss Trump, and Trump indeed was a spectral presence throughout the proceedings. But not just there: He was everywhere, and not just as a joke, but as a warning. Obama, with his uninvited guest, brought a note of the ominous to the otherwise cozy late-night couch, suggesting that the era of 2011—the time when Trump could exist simply as a punchline—is over.

Things started cheerily enough, with the president’s appearance on Kimmel’s semi-regular series, “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets.” It was Obama’s second time participating in that—dramatically reading the criticisms people had tweeted at his expense—and an extremely funny one. Some of the tweets the president read:

— Barack Obama is the Sharknado of presidents. Loud, stupid and over-hyped. #sharknado4

— Obama couldn’t negotiate getting a whopper without pickles.

— I just found out my daughter shares a birthday with Obama. PUKE!

— My mom bought a new conditioner and it sucks. It isn’t even conditioning my hair. I blame Obama.

Obama concluded his reading, however, with a specially selected mean tweet: “President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!”

Obama paused. The tweet was from @realdonaldtrump.

He paused again, getting the timing perfectly.

“Well, @realdonaldtrump, at least I will go down as a president,” Obama said. Then he dropped the mic smartphone.

During Kimmel’s interview segment, though, things stayed on the topic of Trump but took a much more serious turn. The two engaged in typical small talk—about the mozzarella sticks backstage that Obama snacked on, about the Cubs’ participation in the World Series, about Bill Murray’s recent meeting at the White House—but quickly moved on to politics. Obama and Kimmel discussed Hillary Clinton: In response to Kimmel’s question about why so many people seem to distrust her, the president explained that “a lot of this just has to do with the fact that she has been in the trenches, in the arena, for 30 years.” They talked about Obama’s post-presidency life, and the family’s plan to stay in Washington. “I’m like the old guy in the bar where you went to high school,” Obama joked—“just kind of hanging around.”

But then: Trump. Trumpety-Trump Trump. “When you watch Trump in the debate,” Kimmel asked, “do you ever laugh?”

“Most of the time,” Obama replied.

They talked about the Access Hollywood video. “I think that’s one of those things where, if your best friend who worked in the office somewhere had that video, it’d be a problem for him,” Obama said. “And he’s not running for president.”

Things built, then, to another Trump question. “Do you ever wish you were running against Donald Trump?” Kimmel asked. “Do you ever wish you were in there?”

“You know, I think Hillary’s doing just fine,” the president responded.  

After a moment, though, he added:

We joke about Donald Trump, but I do think that part of the reason you’ve seen Michelle so passionate in this election, part of the reason that we get involved as much as we have, is not just because we think Hillary is going to be a great president, but it’s also because there is something qualitatively different about the way Trump has operated in the political sphere.

And this is where the President Obama of 2016 had his moment of reckoning with the President Obama of 2011. The appropriate response to Trump, he suggested, is no longer to laugh him off. It’s no longer to do what a late-night show used to be all about: to mock the candidates in an equal-opportunity way. We are beyond that now. Late-night comedy is also, in some sense, beyond that. “Look, I ran against John McCain,” the president said. “I ran against Mitt Romney. Obviously, I thought that I could do a better job. But they’re both honorable men, and if they had won, then I wouldn’t worry about the general course of this country.”

The president paused, now timing his non-joke perfectly. He continued:

I think Republicans and Democrats have some fierce disagreements, and that’s how democracy works—we’re a big, diverse country, and sometimes it’s going to be contentious and noisy. But what we haven’t seen before is somebody questioning the integrity of elections and the will of the people. What we haven’t seen before is a politics based on putting down, in very explicit terms, Muslim Americans, who are patriots, or describing women not in terms of their intellect or character, but on a 1 to 10 score.

It was a speech, essentially, delivered from a plush, late-night couch. It was purposely un-funny. It was an iteration of his wife’s phrase, which has recently been adopted as a kind of rallying cry: “When they go low, we go high.”

Kimmel, the consummate late-night host, tried to lighten the mood, looking for some hi-larity in all the heights. As the president continued his speech—“regardless of what your policy preferences are,” Obama said, “there is a certain responsibility and expectation in terms of how you behave, how you present yourself—”

Kimmel interrupted him.

“I’ve heard this speech before, believe me,” Kimmel said.

“Yeah. It doesn’t mean that you’re perfect,” the president replied.

“No, I didn’t mean from you. I meant by guidance counsellors, to me.”

The president gave him a courtesy laugh. And then he continued with his speech.

“Yeah. Well, that’s the—the point is that I said when I was running in 2008, I’m not a perfect man, and I wouldn’t be a perfect president.” He added:

But I’d make the effort to, as best I could, be honest to the American people, to make sure that I was protective of the institutions, that there were certain norms and standards and values and customs that make it work. And if you are going to say anything and do anything, even when it undermines everything that’s been built by previous generations, that’s a problem. And that’s why I take this election very seriously.

“Seriously” is not a word that has traditionally fit in well with the antics of late-night comedy. And yet here we are. Trump has been anti-establishment not just when it comes to politics, but also when it comes to the broader sphere of entertainment: Comedians have been unsure, exactly, how to treat him. The president was in that sense making a political argument that was also about comedy: He was saying, essentially, that the time for simple jokes about Trump—the kind he made in 2011, the kind so many people have been making since Trump became a political candidate—has ended. This election hasn’t been about policy differences so much as it has been about divisions in basic decency; the comedy that helps people make sense of that election, for better or for worse, now needs to reflect that.