Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 57

The Battle for the Soul of RuPaul's Drag Race

Toward the end of the RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 2 finale on Thursday night, the drag queen who goes by the name Katya Zamolodchikova explained why she deserved to win the show’s crown: “I’m the complex female character.”

It was a typically hilarious line for Drag Race, which over eight years has joyfully deconstructed the cliches of reality TV and gender performance while also highlighting the humanity beneath the costumes. Katya’s humanity showed through more than most, with a two-season arc about how she battled anxiety to try and inject more confidence into her persona of a crazed-but-brilliant, intermittently Russian oddball. Her performances could frequently stun; she became a Satan-worshipping socialite one week, a tracksuited Tilda Swinton another. Yet it was her quippy, self-deprecating camera confessionals that really propelled the 34-year-old into being the clear fan favorite by season’s end.

But RuPaul Charles crowned a simpler female character as All  Stars champion—the 31-year-old who performs as Alaska Thunderfuck 5000. Speaking in a hissing monotone evoking a cybernetic Paris Hilton, claiming to be an alien from the planet Glamtron, she’s purposefully one-dimensional, a nails-sharp parody of shallowness. When asked to invent and market a product, she came up with $100 rolls of body tape; her signature song is called “Your Makeup Is Terrible.” But Alaska can break character, too, with season highlights including a deranged Bette Davis, a filthy Mae West, and a life-sized, pissed-off doll. By the end, her win/loss ratio easily beat any other contestant’s, yet her determination to dominate was so intense that she had an ugly meltdown in the one week she lost a challenge.

Alaska’s victory, though, represented more than simply a job well done—it was coronation for the RuPaul’s Drag Race phenomenon itself. On stage in the finale, she advocated for herself by reciting catchphrases from previous seasons and calling herself the show’s No. 1 fan. She probably is. Alaska once was an underdog, having auditioned for every Drag Race season until finally getting cast  in the fifth installment—right after her then-boyfriend, the drag queen Sharon Needles, had been crowned winner in Season 4. She entered All Stars 2 as the odds-on favorite to win, having become a staple in the live-show and web-video ecosystem where the Drag Race cult congregates. Now, her destiny has been fulfilled—to mixed reaction in the fandom she rose from, a fandom that embodies the tensions inherent when self-expression becomes a competition.

The entire All Stars 2 season was a testament to the vibrancy of that fandom. In reuniting popular runners up from the show’s history, it invited viewers and contestants alike to laugh together at inside jokes calling back to previous seasons. The production side seemed less hidden this time around, with open references from the queens to the editing and publicity process. And a rule change that had the contestants, not the judges, choosing each week’s loser added social-media-baiting intrigue.

But the convivial, friendly-sleepover vibe of the whole affair was tested a few times: once when the fan-beloved Adore Delano quit after receiving harsh comments on her outfits, again when the ever-catty Phi Phi O’Hara took to social media after her elimination to say she’d been portrayed unfairly on the show, and once more when three of the final four contestants were the same clique that had made the final four years earlier. Drag Race presents itself as creating a family for misfits and outcasts, but it’s become such an institution that it’s creating insider/outsider dynamics of its own—and this season was, unmistakably, for the insiders.

In the finale, Alaska confessed to tamping down her personality so as to focus on winning.

The irony, though, in that crowning its ultimate fan as champion, the show has ruffled the fandom. The mood on the show’s dedicated Subreddit today is quite grim, writeups are noting the Alaska backlash, and when I checked Wikipedia this morning Katya’s entry had been edited to say she “was robbed” on All Stars. It’s a weird charge given how well Alaska performed, but the beauty of Drag Race is that the artform it concerns has no rules—it often feels as though the queens are competing to just be the most interesting person on screen. Alaska’s wasn’t that; in the finale, she even confessed to tamping down her personality so as to focus on winning. She also took dings to her likability by sending home well-performing rivals instead of underperforming friends—a gamble for her reputation that paid off with a $125,000 prize.

Today brings another example of her savviness, with Alaska capitalizing on her success by releasing a new album packed, primarily, with droll lyrics about Drag Race.  It should be a hit in the community, both because of and in spite of the fact that it’s reflecting what’s already there. It’ll be up to the more complex characters to bring something new in.

The Quiet Feminism of Certain Women

In the first of Certain Women’s three barely connected tales, Laura (Laura Dern), an attorney, takes a disgruntled client, Fuller (Jared Harris), to a legal expert who assures him he doesn’t have a case. It’s the same opinion Laura had given him, but on hearing the news, Fuller quietly crumples in his chair, finally accepting what he’s spent months fighting to ignore. Laura, meanwhile, grimaces at a different realization: that Fuller needed to hear the news from a man to believe it. Kelly Reichardt’s newest film, an adaptation of three stories by Maile Meloy, dwells in those subtle moments, the unspoken tensions that build to unexpected, sometimes painful moments.

It’d be easy to dismiss Certain Women as a minor-key film, a tiny indie about nothing in particular, especially because of its triptych format. It moves almost gracelessly from one story to the next, the three tales linked by the spare landscapes of Montana but very little else. But like all of Reichardt’s work (her previous films include small, humane dramas like Wendy and Lucy and Night Moves), it lingers. Certain Women is a film where a missed opportunity to connect, or a brief, surprising flash of empathy, feels crucial enough to pore over days after seeing it. And it touches on stories about female protagonists that feel too often neglected even in the realm of indie cinema.

The first story has the clearest sense of plot. Laura contends with Fuller’s dissatisfaction over a workplace injury and tries to keep him from resorting to violence, as he makes vague threats. As things escalate, Laura has to remain a calming presence and an understanding mother figure to this increasingly demented man. Reichardt captures this burden of being a female professional in a male universe perfectly without ever pointing out the passive sexism. This isn’t a polemical film, but its naturalism is so consistent that Reichardt invites the audience to notice every detail. Dern is typically fabulous in the role, registering each microaggression and shrugging it off.

The intense drama of the first story recalls Reichardt’s Night Moves, a drama of environmental terrorism that was far more plot-driven than the rest of her oeuvre. But unlike that film, where her emphasis on low-key conversation struggled to contend with a very high-stakes plot about a bombing gone wrong, Laura’s story never escalates into truly shocking territory. Certain Women wisely keeping its focus on her relationship with Fuller and how it morphs from empathy, to pity, to fury as he decides to take matters into his own hands.

The second story is perhaps the slightest, and follows a marital conflict that plays out around a real-estate deal. Gina (Michelle Williams) and her husband, Ryan (James LeGros), are a couple weathering a rough patch while trying to build a new home; the audience is given some details about their difficulties, but minimal context. Reichardt invites the viewer to focus in on the tiniest dynamics, and it’s an undeniable struggle at times—Certain Women is not a long film, but if there’s a moment when Reichardt’s hyper-realism drags, it’s during this arc.

Certain Women is a movie of both hope and devastation.

Still, it feels inextricably linked to Laura’s tale, especially as the man Gina is negotiating with (Rene Auberjonois) focuses only on Ryan during their meetings, signaling an unconscious comfort with a more antiquated way of life. The Montana setting seems most crucial to this middle portion. Ryan and Gina are in a place so open and undeveloped that they can literally rebuild their lives from nothing. At the same time, the idea of change and progress in a more old-fashioned part of America takes on new weight. Reichardt’s camera lets the sparse, unforgiving quality of the landscape overwhelm the viewer here in a sharp shift from Laura’s story, which mostly takes place inside oppressively drab office buildings.

The final tale is easily the most powerful, featuring Kristen Stewart as the kind of muted, inscrutable ingénue that’s become her forte as an indie film star. Clad in a mustard-yellow sweater vest and attempting to teach education law at a night school to a bunch of disinterested teachers, Beth (Stewart) is both timid and striking. She’s the kind of self-effacing introvert whose inner life seems a fascinating mystery. At night school, she draws the attention of an even more introverted student, a Native American rancher named Jamie.

Jamie is played by Lily Gladstone, an unknown in a cast of great actresses who gives the most dynamic performance of the film: a portrait of suppressed desire and emotion that gains weight over the closing minutes of the film. Reichardt spends much of Certain Women’s running time focusing on characters jaded by years of quiet misogyny and frustration; Jamie and Beth’s story feels more hopeful. This is a character for whom so many avenues of life feel unfairly closed off, so there’s a discreet joy in watching her suddenly try to open them up by quietly pursuing Beth, and equal anguish when things don’t proceed quite as she plans. As the film’s best tale, it sums up the worth of Reichardt’s work: Certain Women is unabashedly feminist, telling stories of both hope and devastation, ones which swerve between surprising optimism and depressing reality with the same deft power.

Bring On the Cuban Cigars

NEWS BRIEF U.S. tourists who visit Cuba will now be able to take 100 cigars and several bottles of rum home, because on Friday the Obama administration eliminated the decades-old restrictions placed on the goods.

The previous law limited travelers to $100 in rum and cigars—and because a single Cuban cigar can cost $100, it severely hobbled aficionados. This is now the sixth set of changes President Obama has made to the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, all aimed at freeing up trade between the two countries.

Statement by @POTUS on the Presidential Policy Directive on Cuba: https://t.co/0PmDm0ekWs pic.twitter.com/of4h8EWqiD

— WH National Security (@NSC44) October 14, 2016

Last year, more than 160,000 U.S. tourists visited Cuba, and that number is predicted to double this year. Obama has used presidential policy directives in place of a total repeal of the embargo because it’s unlikely such a task would be passed by the U.S. Congress, which remains in Republican hands. So instead, Obama has made these incremental changes in hopes they last beyond his final term this year.

In a statement Friday, Obama said: “This directive takes a comprehensive and whole-of-government approach to promote engagement with the Cuban government and people, and make our opening to Cuba irreversible.”

Cigar-making in Cuba is run entirely by the Communist government, so the policy change will likely have a big impact on the greater Cuban economy.

The changes made Friday will also allow cargo ships that visit Cuba to dock in U.S. ports directly after. Ships had previously been banned from visiting the U.S. for 180 days after docking in Cuba, which has hurt ports in the country.

Bring on the Cuban Cigars

NEWS BRIEF U.S. tourists who visit Cuba will now be able to take 100 cigars and several bottles of rum home, because on Friday the Obama administration eliminated the decades-old restrictions placed on the goods.

The previous law limited travelers to $100 in rum and cigars—and because a single Cuban cigar can cost $100, it severely hobbled aficionados. This is now the sixth set of changes President Obama has made to the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, all aimed at freeing up trade between the two countries.

Statement by @POTUS on the Presidential Policy Directive on Cuba: https://t.co/0PmDm0ekWs pic.twitter.com/of4h8EWqiD

— WH National Security (@NSC44) October 14, 2016

Last year, more than 160,000 U.S. tourists visited Cuba, and that number is predicted to double this year. Obama has used presidential policy directives in place of a total repeal of the embargo because it’s unlikely such a task would be passed by the U.S. Congress, which remains in Republican hands. So instead, Obama has made these incremental changes in hopes they last beyond his final term this year.

In a statement Friday, Obama said: “This directive takes a comprehensive and whole-of-government approach to promote engagement with the Cuban government and people, and make our opening to Cuba irreversible.”

Cigar-making in Cuba is run entirely by the Communist government, so the policy change will likely have a big impact on the greater Cuban economy.

The changes made Friday will also allow cargo ships that visit Cuba to dock in U.S. ports directly after. Ships had previously been banned from visiting the U.S. for 180 days after docking in Cuba, which has hurt ports in the country.

The UNESCO Controversy Over Holy Land Sites

NEWS BRIEF Israel suspended ties with UNESCO Friday after the UN’s cultural agency passed a resolution criticizing Israeli policy surrounding religious sites in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and using language Israel says denies Jewish ties to the region’s holy sites.

The draft decision, put forward by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, and Sudan, begins by asserting the religious significance of “the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls for the three monotheistic religions.” The contention, however, arises with the remainder of the document, and the wording it uses. When the draft gets to the Temple Mount—known in Arabic as Haram al-Sharif and in Hebrew as Har HaBayit— the document refers to the site only using its Islamic name, despite the fact the location is home to the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest site in Islam.

You can read the full document here.

View note

The document criticized actions taken by Israel, which it refers to as the “occupying Power,” around the holy sites, including restriction of UNESCO experts’ access to sites and actions by Israeli forces against Muslim worshipers. Israel has occupied the West Bank since the war of 1967 and annexed East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as their future capital, that same year. This move, however, has not been recognized under international law. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital.

Twenty-four countries voted in favor of the UNESCO draft resolution, with 26 abstaining. Six countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Lithuania, and Estonia, voted against it.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, condemned UNESCO’s passage of the resolution as a “delusional decision that states that the Jewish People have no connection to the Temple Mount or the Western Wall. ”

What's next? A UNESCO decision denying the connection between peanut butter and jelly? Batman and Robin? Rock and roll?

— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) October 13, 2016

The Palestinian Authority praised the resolution, but condemned Israel for shifting “the focus from Israel's illegal and colonial actions in occupied East Jerusalem to issues irrelevant to the content and objectives of the resolutions, which aims to put an end to Israel's dangerous and illegal actions against holy sites in Jerusalem and Palestinian rights, including the right to worship.”

Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s director-general, reaffirmed UNESCO’s commitment to fostering tolerance and respect for Jerusalem’s history in a statement Friday, though she did not mention the controversy around the resolution directly.

“To deny, conceal or erase any of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim traditions undermines the integrity of the site, and runs counter to the reasons that justified its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage list,” Bokova said. She added: “The recognition, use of and respect for these names is paramount. The Al Aqsa Mosque / Al-Haram al-Sharif, the sacred shrine of Muslims, is also the Har HaBayit—or Temple Mount—whose Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism, a few steps away from the Saint Sepulcher and the Mount of Olives revered by Christians.”

This latest incident illustrates just how loaded language remains in both Israeli and Palestinian narrative—from the more serious contention over whether the West Bank should be referred to as part of Palestine or as Judea and Samaria, to the seemingly innocuous debate over how to properly pronounce hummus.

Is Mascots Too Mean?

Is there any more efficient way to insult someone, nowadays, than to accuse them of lacking “self-awareness”? The accusation is paradoxical, sure—it has very little to do with the self, and nearly everything to do with everyone else—but that’s what makes it, in the end, such a good burn. There’s no good comeback: You can’t defend yourself, really, because the real allegation rests in the gaze of others.

Christopher Guest, as a filmmaker, might understand those dynamics better than anyone. His works find their comedy in the interplay between the individual ego and the collective, and they insist that vanity’s absurdities can be located in characters of all kinds, be they dog owners or be-mulleted rock gods or patchouli-clouded folk musicians or [Corky St. Clair voice] the players of The Theater. The mockumentary form that Guest helped to pioneer—a form whose constituent “mock” involves both falsity and farce—works most effectively when it explores the divide between a person and a culture, between people’s sense of themselves and other people’s estimation of them, between “self-awareness” and its laughable absence. The form has become ubiquitous, nowadays—maybe even clichéd—because it is so singularly good at puncturing the people who are inflated with their own hot air.

Which is also to say that Christopher Guest is a master, in today’s terms, of the fine art of imposed privilege-checking. And that would seem to make him a fitting filmmaker for the present moment, a gimlet-eyed soothsayer for a time whose assorted sooths so often involve the examination of identities both individual and collective. That would also seem to make Mascots, Guest’s first directorial effort since 2006’s For Your Consideration, a fitting lens for the world of 2016. What is a mascot, after all, if not an identity in physical form? But while the movie, which premieres Friday on Netflix, may be often quite funny—mascottery is inherently comical—it is also, just as often … uncomfortable. Not because its characters are awkward, but because they are, in the end, not awkward enough. Mascots takes the grotesquely oversized fists of its title characters and uses them, again and again, to punch down.

What is a mascot, after all, if not an identity in physical form?

Mascots is so familiar in its form(ula) as to read almost as a sequel—Best in Show II, basically, only with show in question populated by turtles and octopi and merrily obese hedgehogs instead of petulant Weimaraners. The film adopts the frame of, yes, a mockumentary: It’s another elaborate joke at the expense of people who have the audacity to care deeply about something the film deems to be silly. As before, every character involved is working, in some way, toward a single Climactic Event—in this case, the 8th World Mascot Association Championships in Anaheim, California. Also known, as the event organizer, Langston Aubrey (Michael Hitchcock), explains to Mascots’s invisible filmmaker, as “the Fluffy awards—or as we like to call them, the Fluffies.”

Many of the faces here are familiar from Guests’s previous films. There’s Cindi Babineaux (Parker Posey), an interpretive dance aficionado whose Fluffies character is a kind of post-apocalyptic armadillo. There are Mike and Mindy Murray (Zach Woods and Sarah Baker), a husband-and-wife team who tolerate each other only in the name of their act. There’s the foul-mouthed Canadian Tommy “Zook” Zucarello (Chris O’Dowd), who says things like “a lot of people say I’m the bad boy of mascottery” with a straight face and a snarl. There’s Gabby Monkhouse (Jane Lynch, magisterial as always), a domineering former mascot and current Fluffies judge. There are also Jennifer Coolidge and Bob Balaban and Ed Begley, Jr. and Fred Willard and John Michael Higgins, playing an assortment of characters with cartoonishly Guestian names like Upton French and Jolene Lumpkin. And there’s, yes, Guest himself—appearing again as his Best in Show character, Corky St. Clair, and suggesting a kind of Guest Cinematic Universe.

So, short of the sadly absent Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, Mascots features basically all the people you’d want—and expect—to show up at Guest’s latest gathering. And, as always, the gathering takes the form of a competition that unites the characters in purpose, bringing unexpected challenges and anticipated victories.

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The competition also unfolds, however, in a way that pretty much guarantees that everyone involved—even the winners—will be presented as losers. Another hallmark of a Guest film is the sadness that simmers just below the surface of characters’ stated enthusiasms. And here, again, the humans behind the mascots fit that mold: They aren’t merely vapid or clueless or arrogant without deserving to be, in the manner of David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel; they are also, simply … sad. In every sense.

Broken dreams permeate the proceedings. Cindi Babineaux brags of a previous mascot competition, “I got honorable mention—that’s like first place, but it’s a weird first place.” Her half-sister, Laci (Susan Yeagley), confesses that “I had a dream in my heart”—of becoming a professional cheerleader—before an injury killed it. The film’s first scene features Mike Murray asking his doctor, after they discuss treatment for an injury Mike incurred in the line of mascotting, “Do you prescribe anti-depressants?” Later, Mike will declare, in one of the film’s patented talking-head-style interviews, “They say that those who can’t do, teach; and those who can’t teach, teach gym; and those who can’t teach gym teach drivers’ ed.” Mike pauses. “But the joke’s on them, because I teach gym and drivers’ ed.”

And then there’s Phil Mayhew (Christopher Moynihan), who tells the camera that “in my pretend life, I am a real estate appraiser. But in my real life, I am Jack the Plumber, official mascot for the Beaumont College football team.” And who makes clear that the job “is truly a dream come true for me.”

Phil goes on to explain that

For me, it is that sound! The sound of that crowd. You can’t really hear it from inside the head. But you can hear that there is a sound. And for me, the sound of that sound—that is the greatest sound in the world.

Guest, who tends to prefer improvisation to strict line-reading—he has compared himself to a jazz musician—has also perfected the art of the slow-building punchline, with characters’ monologues weaving and winding until (as with one Mascots character) suddenly they’re telling the camera about what it’s like to have a micropenis. It can be a hypnotic approach; the punchlines in Mascots, though, often build to admissions that are better at evoking pity than laughter. Cindi Babineaux begins an early monologue by bragging that “I can hip-hop, and I can pop,” and ends it with a realization that the Fluffies could be her last brush with mascottery: “This could be my last hurrah,” she says, as a flash of panic crosses her face. “Um, my swan song.”

Similarly, Phil Mayhew tries to make small talk on the field with a couple of the football players he represents as Jack the Plumber. After the awkward chit-chat, they look at each other quizzically: “Who was that guy?” one asks. As Phil retreats from the sidelines, having been snubbed by the athletes he considers it “a dream come true” to represent … he dramatically trips and falls.

It’s a physical version of Guest’s long-winded punchlines—a punctuation and a puncturing in one fell swoop—but it’s also an extremely unnecessary one. It layers a moment of physical humiliation onto the social one Phil has just experienced. It fails to recognize the core challenge that will be at play when  a mockumentary mocks too hard: the fact that, as Molly Ivins put it, “when satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel—it’s vulgar.”

“When satire is aimed at the powerless,” Molly Ivins wrote, “it is not only cruel—it’s vulgar.”

That problem—things getting, well, a little too mockward—isn’t unique to Mascots: Guest has long engaged in a kind of comedy that verges, in the Ivins sense, on vulgarity. Jonathan Rosenbaum called Waiting for Guffman, when it came out, as “amusing if you feel a pressing need to feel superior to somebody.” Variety’s Daniel Kimmel noted, accurately, that in the same film, “Guest’s target... is small-town provincials.” Guest’s films, starting with This Is Spinal Tap—which Rob Reiner directed, but which Guest co-wrote and starred in—have been, over the decades, punching ever downward: They poke fun at the people who, in a world populated by so many things that richly deserve to be laughed at, never fully merit the mockery.

And the mockumentary frame, for all its obvious comedic affordances, means that the people at the butt of the joke never get to answer back. The unseen filmmaker is the one who holds all the power. He’s accusing them of lacking self-awareness; they have no way to reply.

Which isn’t to say that Mascots lacks humor. It’s often pretty funny! Some of the jokes falls flat (the championships are being aired on the Gluten-Free Channel, which “runs in over two cities nationwide”), but some of them are worthy of full-on lols (Zook Zucarello used to be a member of a cult based on the teachings of Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven; Gabby Monkhouse uses the Fluffies as an excuse to hawk her book—which is titled  A Moosing Grace: A mascot’s journey to God … and success in real estate). For the most part, though, the laughs often end up missing the point. They sometimes seem cheap. They are not, themselves, terribly self-aware.

And that makes Mascots read, for all its slick Netflixiness, as vaguely regressive. The film seems to long for a time of monoculture, an age in which some unseen and unarticulated power could decide that a given subculture is silly, and spend 90 minutes of our time proving that point. The film may be set in 2016, or a loose approximation thereof; it may include the obligatorily timely jokes about racist mascots and classist smarm (“I want to work with disadvantaged children,” one character says, “that are really pretty disadvantaged”). Those are the only ways, though, that Mascots, ten years after Guest’s last movie, suggests progress. You’d think that a film like this would want to understand the people inside the costumes; for the most part, though, it prefers to do the far easier thing: to laugh at them.

What the Nigerian First Lady Said About Her Husband's Presidency

NEWS BRIEF Nigeria’s first lady criticized her husband’s work as president in an interview Friday with the BBC, even questioning whether she would vote for him if he sought re-election in 2019. Not much later, while on a trip to Germany, President Muhammadu Buhari told reporters, “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room.”

He made the comments while standing beside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, as the Associated Press reported, glared, and laughed.

The first lady, Aisha Buhari, told the BBC her husband doesn’t know many of the top officials he has appointed, and that the government has been hijacked by a “few people” who are behind all the appointments. This is her husband’s first year as an elected president (he was Nigeria’s military dictator in the 1980s), and she campaigned alongside him. But since he won the election in 2015, Aisha Buhari has been pushed out of the public eye, mostly left to organize town-hall meetings with women’s groups.

Her comments support already widespread claims of nepotism amid rising frustration that the government is corrupt.

Here’s more from the BBC’s interview with her:

Asked to name those who had hijacked the government, she refused, saying: "You will know them if you watch television."

On whether the president was in charge, she said: "That is left for the people to decide."

She added that the president had not told her if he’d contest the 2019 election.

“He is yet to tell me but I have decided as his wife, that if things continue like this up to 2019, I will not go out and campaign again and ask any woman to vote like I did before,” she told the BBC. “I will never do it again.”

Buhari ran on a promise to root out corruption, but critics say nothing has changed. There is also growing tension amid a recession, largely because of low oil prices, as well as lawlessness in the northeast of the country, where the Islamic militant group, Boko Haram controls much of the region. Buhari has been credited for putting the militant group on the back foot.  

A Year of Mourning in Thailand

NEWS BRIEF Thailand entered a yearlong mourning period Friday as thousands of people wearing black took to the streets of Bangkok to observe the royal funeral procession of their beloved King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died Thursday at age 88.

Here’s what the crowd looked like:

Farewell to beloved king pic.twitter.com/TXfRYsMB5c

— veena T. (@veen_NT) October 14, 2016

The funeral procession, in which the monarch’s body was transported from the capital’s Siriraj Hospital to the Grand Palace, comes as the country begins a yearlong mourning period, during which time civil servants are expected to wear black. For the next 30 days, state agency flags will be flown at half-staff and citizens are expected to refrain from taking part in public festivities.

Since Bhumibol’s death, Thai television stations and international channels were replaced with black-and-white broadcasts featuring footage of the king throughout his nearly 70-year reign. Thai newspapers followed suit by publishing without color. Here’s the English-language newspaper The Nation’s front page Friday:

The Nation newspaper. pic.twitter.com/qP0F6xOk1L

— Oliver Holmes (@olireports) October 14, 2016

Bhumibol’s death brings an end to a nearly seven-decade rule—one which makes him the longest serving monarch in Thai history. As my colleague Krishnadev Calamur noted, “Bhumibol ascended to the throne shortly after World War II. His reign spanned 12 American president—from Harry S. Truman to Barack Obama. He outlived the Cold War and saw his country transformed from a mostly agrarian society in the 1940s into a rising Asian economy.”

Prayut Chan-ocha, the Thai prime minister, announced Thursday that Maha Vajiralongkorn, the Thai crown prince and Bhumibol’s only son, would assume the king’s role, though he did not specify when. While it remains unclear how popular Vajiralongkorn, who is set to become the ruling Chakri Dynasty’s 10th monarch, will be compared to his father, he will likely be shielded from public scrutiny, as the country’s lèse-majesté laws strictly prohibit insulting the royal family—a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

The Justice Department's New Police Shooting Database

NEWS BRIEF The Justice Department will start collecting data on police-involved shootings.

In light of recent fatal shootings and a series of protests, the Justice Department next year will embark on what The New York Times says is “the most ambitious” project to track the use of deadly force by police officers nationwide. Activists have long complained about the gap in federal data.

More from The Times:

Under the plan, the Justice Department will gather more data on the use of force by federal agents and help local departments report information on a wider range of police encounters.

But a number of the reporting steps will rely on local police officials to voluntarily submit data, and some civil rights advocates said the Justice Department had not made clear how it would impose financial penalties set by Congress to encourage the reporting of police shootings.

Because of the gap in data, journalists and activists have had to rely on news organizations—most notably from The Washington Post—to get accurate numbers. FBI Director James Comey called this gap “embarrassing.” According to The Post, there were 991 fatal shootings by police last year. This year, there have been 754.

In a statement Thursday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said:

Accurate and comprehensive data on the use of force by law enforcement is essential to an informed and productive discussion about community-police relations. The initiatives we are announcing today are vital efforts toward increasing transparency and building trust between law enforcement and the communities we serve.

The pilot program will start early next year and will track 178,000 federal law enforcement agents. The Justice Department will also spend $750,000 to encourage local police departments to collect data.

The Extension of the Colombian Ceasefire

NEWS BRIEF In an effort to save a peace agreement recently rejected by voters, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos extended a ceasefire with the country’s largest rebel movement for an additional two months.

Santos, speaking Thursday with students who have organized demonstrations across Colombia in support of peace, announced the ceasefire with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, will continue until December 31. He said he hopes a new peace accord will be in place by the end of the year, adding:

Let it be clear: this isn’t an ultimatum or deadline. Time is conspiring against peace and life.

There is still a challenging path ahead. The country’s opposition leader, former President Alvaro Uribe, has demanded significant changes to any peace accord, including harsher punishment for rebels who have committed war crimes in the past. The current accord would allow those rebels to avoid jail time. Uribe’s father was killed by rebels.

Colombian voters narrowly rejected the accord that would have ended a 52-year war with FARC by a 50.2-to-49.8 margin. The stunning upset was a blow to Santos, who just last week was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

For now, around 5,800 FARC soldiers, who for the last half-century have been fighting in the jungle, will continue laying down their arms as the country’s leaders negotiate a long-awaited peace.