Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 58

Remembering Jack Greenberg

Jack Greenberg, an influential civil-rights advocate and the last surviving lawyer who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court, died on Wednesday. He was 91.

From 1961 to 1984, Greenberg led the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, more commonly known as the LDF, as it fought in the courts to dismantle Jim Crow’s legal architecture during the Second Reconstruction. His predecessor, the legendary Thurgood Marshall, chose Greenberg as his successor after becoming a federal judge.

Under Greenberg’s tenure, the LDF became one of the most powerful legal organizations in America. Among its Supreme Court victories were landmark rulings on employment discrimination, school desegregation, anti-miscegenation laws, and voting rights. Greenberg also played a leading role in the first legal campaign against American capital punishment, culminating in its brief abolition in 1972.

“Few understand how powerfully Jack Greenberg shaped the practice of civil rights law and the breadth of his contributions to our modern conception of equal opportunity and justice,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the LDF’s current director-counsel, in a statement Wednesday.

James Jacob Greenberg was born on December 22, 1924, in New York City. His father Max was a public accountant; his mother Bertha was a homemaker. Born to a family of Jewish immigrants, Greenberg saw parallels between anti-Semitism’s horrors and pervasive racial oppression against black Americans in the mid-20th century.

Greenberg attended Columbia College and graduated in 1945, then briefly served as a Navy officer in the Pacific theater of World War II. Had the United States not dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he would have taken part in Operation Downfall, the planned Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands. Instead he returned to New York and received a law degree from Columbia Law School.

In 1949, the 25-year-old Greenberg joined the LDF’s cadre of young lawyers working alongside Thurgood Marshall to defeat American racial segregation in the courts. During that time Greenberg participated in some of the most pivotal Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, even serving as one of Marshall’s co-counsels in Brown v. Board of Education. He was the only white lawyer on the team.

When President John F. Kennedy offered Marshall a seat on Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961, Marshall selected Greenberg to be the organization’s second director-counsel. Choosing a white man stirred controversy among some of LDF’s black lawyers but did not bother the civil-rights legend.

“As to those who are fighting discrimination, we cannot afford to practice it,” Marshall told The New York Times.

Under Greenberg’s leadership, the organization continued to play a central role in the civil-rights movement. LDF lawyers defended Martin Luther King, Jr. while he was jailed in Birmingham in 1963 and brought the lawsuit that allowed for the Selma-to-Mongomery marches in 1965. At the Supreme Court, Greenberg personally argued for James Meredith’s integration into the University of Mississippi. In 1969, he represented the plaintiffs in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, in which the justices ordered Southern schools to desegregate immediately.

Virtually all of the LDF’s work focused on protecting the legal rights of African Americans, both individually and as a community. But an exception of sorts was American capital punishment, against which Greenberg’s LDF was the foremost opponent during the 1960s and 1970s. The campaign began in 1963 when Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote an unusual dissent that signaled a possible constitutional challenge to the death penalty. The other justices pressured him to strip out references to racism in an early draft, but Goldberg told his law clerk Alan Dershowitz to distribute their research on disparities himself. Among the organizations Dershowitz contacted was Greenberg’s LDF.

True to their origins, the LDF’s early death-penalty work focused on capital punishment’s virulent racial disparities, especially in cases of rape. But the organization soon shifted to a broader siege on its constitutionality and represented white defendants as part of that effort. Racism nonetheless remained a focus for Greenberg as the number of executions plummeted in the late 1960s.

“Were capital punishment to resume in this country,” he testified before Congress in 1972, “the result must fairly be seen as an expression of racial genocide.”

A few months later in Furman v. Georgia, one of five cases brought by the LDF, the Supreme Court struck down death-penalty statutes nationwide. Greenberg had drawn upon the racial-disparity statistics during oral arguments and urged the Court to abolish capital punishment for all crimes. But it did not. The de facto moratorium lasted four years before a more conservative Court upheld new capital statutes in Gregg v. Georgia.

Greenberg stepped down as the LDF’s director-counsel in 1984 and returned to Columbia Law School, first as a professor and later as dean. The organization, which helped bring down Jim Crow laws with only a handful of attorneys, had grown to nearly two dozen lawyers.

“Now, when there’s a very considerable effort to roll things back, we’re in a position to resist, to hold on to almost all our gains until the country starts going in the other direction,” Mr. Greenberg told the Times that year. “They can throw us back a few hundred yards, but we’re dug in too deep.”

Falling Water Is the Dull Endpoint of Conspiracy-Theory TV

The director J.J. Abrams gave name to one of the most influential storytelling conventions of our day in a 2007 TED Talk, in which he spoke of his fascination with the concept of the “mystery box”—so named for an unopened package Abrams was given in childhood whose contents remain unknown to this day. There’s nothing new to the concept of mystery in fiction, but Abrams is unique in positing mystery as the overriding imperative of entertainment.

The concept animated his TV show Lost, which hooked viewers with its question-making island, and Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which left viewers thirsty for its Force-wielding family tree to be diagrammed in future sequels, and most recently Abrams’s HBO drama Westworld, which has fascinated an impressively large viewership with concentric quandaries about the nature of its virtual and non-virtual reality. There’s also been a non-Abrams mystery-box boom as creators have moved to capitalize on the Internet-assisted fan frenzies that attends any clue-laden tale: True Detective, whose first season promised but never satisfyingly unveiled a grand conspiracy, Mr. Robot, designed to induce feverish speculation about what’s in its hero’s head, Sense8, the Wachowski’s Netflix original about interlinked brains and cross-continental murder schemes.

And now we have Falling Water, a bizarre new drama about supernatural lucid dreaming. USA has called it a “statement show,” which means it’s probably meant to bring the kind of cultish following that Mr. Robot did for the onetime formula-driven network. Promising a web of Jungian symbolism, Lynchian surrealism, and Abrams-y subterfuge, but nearly no compelling characters, little narrative cohesion, and blah cinematographic vision, it represents the preposterous pinnacle for the if-you-confuse-them-they-will-come trend.

The series opens on a not-entirely-inviting note with an extended shot of Lizzie Brocheré’s character Tess screaming in agony. She’s giving birth, but then the attending nurse tells her there’s no baby. This idea of a disappeared kid is mystery No. 1 for viewers and dream-obsession No. 1 for Tess, a trend-spotter who spends part of her waking hours asking doctors if they, one more time, would mind checking whether she’s ever given birth. Her storyline gives first entree into the larger mythos of the series when the billionaire Bill Boerg (Zak Orth) offers to help her find her maybe-imaginary child if she’ll take part in sleep experiments that prove people can walk in and out of one anothers’ dreams. Brocheré’s quiet, repressedly jittery performance is one of the few intrinsically memorable things about the show, and her character is an appealing superhero of sorts, perceptive and reserved.

If your show is going to unhinge itself from the traditional rules of entertainment, it’d better earn it.

The other two principals are David Ajala as Burton, a perceptive and reserved security expert at a Wall Street firm, and Will Yun Lee as Taka, a—yes—perceptive and reserved cop. Maybe it’s the lead trio’s shared personality traits that have somehow brought them into contact with their world’s weirder side, or maybe their similarity is just a result of the same tropeish writing that dictates most of the series’ scenes take place in austere rooms echoing with humorless dialogue. For now, it’s a meta-mystery: The three episodes I’ve seen have barely unraveled these characters significance beyond their confused interactions with what appears to be an interdimensional conspiracy involving a dead rock singer’s forgotten album, a Belgian ambassador, and a cult that wears green sneakers.

The story is told in dream logic, slipping between scenes in the waking world and the unconscious one with apparent disregard for classic storytelling norms about suspense or narrative cause-and-effect. In this age of flowering television creativity, perhaps USA expects the experimental technique to be applauded. But something’s obviously gone awry when you have an unintroduced character giving unprompted voiceovers throughout the pilot spelling out the concept of the show (dreams are real, connected, and the site of some sort of conflict upon which the fate of humanity may or may not depend).

Moreover, if your show is going to unhinge itself from the traditional rules of entertainment, it’d better transfix in some other ways: indelible characters, sharp writing, visuals you can’t forget—all elements that, when you think about it, great mystery-box works have in plenty. But instead of the wild flights of imagination you might expect from a show about dreams, viewers get ominous puddles, faceless people, and creepy children: cliches. The sole appeal upon which Falling Water relies is mystery, and I’ll admit that after watching I do want to learn the answers to the questions the plot has posed. But I don’t wish for the answers so much that I’ll sit through another hour.

A Not-Guilty Plea for the New York and New Jersey Bombing Suspect

NEWS BRIEF Ahmad Rahimi, the man accused of setting off bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey last month, pleaded not guilty on Thursday in a New Jersey Superior Court to charges that he tried to kill several police officers.

Rahimi was not at the hearing in person, because he is still in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds. Instead, he pleaded through a video connection. He was charged with five counts of attempted murder of a police officer, the alleged result of the shootout that injured Rahimi and brought a manhunt to a close. These do not include federal charges against Rahimi, in which he is accused of using weapons of mass destruction and bombing a public place, among other charges.

NJ.com has more details of the video hearing:

Rahimi appeared in Union County Superior Court just after 2 p.m. via Skype from his bed, with a bandage clearly visible around his neck. Rahimi spoke in a barely audible voice when responding to the county Superior Court Judge Regina Caulfield, who asked if he had received the charges against him.

"Yeah," Rahimi squeaked out after looking to his lawyer, the Union County Public Defender Peter Liguori, for approval to respond.

Rahimi also pleaded not guilty to two weapons charges through his lawyer Liguori, who stood beside Rahimi hospital bed. Liguori requested police reports supporting the charges

Officers found Rahimi September 19 sleeping outside a bar in Linden. It was the second day of a manhunt for the suspect who placed several bombs around New Jersey and New York, only some of which exploded. One bomb detonated September 17 along the route of a Marine Corps charity race in the New Jersey shore town of Seaside Park. A pressure-cooker bomb exploded in Manhattan injuring 31 people. A second pressure-cooker bomb failed to explode, as did several pipe bombs placed in a trash can near a light rail in New Jersey.

After officers realized they’d found the bombing suspect, a shootout ensued, and two officer were injured. Both were released from the hospital the next day.

Rahimi is a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, who attended high school in New Jersey. Federal agents are investigating whether he became radicalized over the course of several trips to his home country, as well as to Pakistan.

France's Solution to Drug Addiction

Home to one of the city’s largest train stations, the neighborhood surrounding Paris’ Gare du Nord in the 10th arrondissement serves as a major transit hub for tens of thousands of people each day. It’s also one of the easiest spots in the French capital to find drugs.

It’s within this neighborhood that the French government will debut Friday a facility where drug addicts can safely take drugs under medical supervision— the first of its kind in the country. The facility, known as the Supervised Drug Injection Site (SCMR), is part of a national effort to address the spread of infection and overdosing among drug addicts. The site is expected to serve as many as 200 drug addicts daily and will cost the state an estimated 1.2 million euros, or $1.3 million, per year.

Here’s what it looks like:

#ReductionDesRisques : La France ouvre enfin une #SalleDeConsommation à moindre risque à #Paris10. #SCMR pic.twitter.com/AqjtMC1KcW

— DrugConsumptionRooms (@INDCRs) October 11, 2016

Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris and a member of the country’s Socialist party, described the facility during a visit Tuesday as “necessary for the people who are in complete disarray, because they know they have a door they can enter.” She added: “They can come here, they can get counselling, they can get assistance, and get guided toward a life that will get them out of these addictions.”

The SCMR, known commonly in France as a salle de shoot or “shooting gallery,” seeks to give drug addicts a safe and supervised space for them to deal with their addiction. The center, run in coordination with the French government and Gaïa Paris, an organization that treats drug addiction, allows addicts to exchange hard drugs, such as heroin or crack, for safer substitutes, though it is unclear what those substitutes would be. In an effort to prevent the spread of viral infections, the center will also provide intravenous users with free access to sterile needles.

The initiative’s supporters believe the government can effectively take drug users off the streets and transfer them to rooms where they can take their injections safely—all while under the watchful eye of trained medical professionals.

These medical professionals, however, can only do so much. Visitors to the center will be provided with sterile injection kits and must administer the injections themselves. The center’s staff is permitted to intervene only in cases of overdose or if a visitor cannot find a vein, according to Le Monde. Under no circumstances can staff physically assist in the drug injection itself.

Marisol Touraine, the French health minister, said Tuesday the initiative “in no way trivializes drug use.” But opponents see the initiative as perpetuating, not combating, drug addiction. Philippe Goujon, a member of the French parliament representing the center-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, accused the initiative of paving the way for the decriminalization and even legalization of illegal drug use.

“The state is saying, ‘you can’t take drugs, but we’ll help you do it anyway,” Goujon told Le Figaro.

The Association of Parents Against Drugs, which opposed the facility’s establishment, told Agence France-Presse the group will launch a website to monitor drug use around the facility.

“Everyone will be invited to report incidents in the vicinity of the shooting gallery, and we know that there will be incidents,” Serge Lebigot, the organization’s president, said.

Medically supervised drug injection centers are hardly new in Europe, with the first appearing three decades ago in Bern, Switzerland. Since then, similar facilities have opened across the continent, including in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. A report released in May by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that while data surrounding the facilities’ effectiveness is limited, available evidence suggests they have “an overall positive impact” on the communities where they exist.

Here’s more from the report:

In summary, the benefits of providing supervised drug consumption facilities may include improvements in safe, hygienic drug use, especially among regular clients, increased access to health and social services, and reduced public drug use and associated nuisance. There is no evidence to suggest that the availability of safer injecting facilities increases drug use or frequency of injecting. These services facilitate rather than delay treatment entry and do not result in higher rates of local drug-related crime.

Despite the facility’s potential effectiveness, the French public remains divided over whether the center should be in their backyard. A September poll by Ifop, a French polling agency, found that 55 percent of those surveyed opposed the concept of shooting galleries, while 45 percent supported it.

How Ken Bone Became a Brand

Here is how Ken Bone, newly minted celebrity, introduces himself on the Twitter feed he established on Sunday: “Somewhat reluctant, undecided, cuddly internet political faceman!”

The “undecided” part is, it seems, still true. So, definitely, is “cuddly,” and “political faceman”—not to mention the earnest enthusiasm of that crowning exclamation point. “Reluctant,” though? That might be a little less true than it was on Sunday. Bone now has, by virtue of his status as the civilian victor in Sunday’s presidential debate and his subsequent transformation into a human meme, more than 200,000 followers on Twitter. This afternoon, he sent out the following message to them:

Everyone wants to know if I've decided... and I have. uberSELECT helps you ride in style like me https://t.co/HyOS8z9SRd

— Ken Bone (@kenbone18) October 13, 2016

The tweet links, as you’d expect, to some bona fide (and also Bone-ified) marketing literature for uberSelect.

Why should you choose uberSELECT?

The safe, affordable rides you know and love — with an added touch of luxury
Top rated driver partners
All at a cost that won’t break the bank!

All of this was more than enough to win over the formerly undecided Ken Bone, who this morning took the first-ever uberSELECT ride in St. Louis!

Yes. Again, just what you’d expect. Not about the tweet, necessarily, but about the cycle that it represents. In the space of a few days, Ken Bone has gone from a man, to a meme, to a celebrity, to a … brand. Or, more specifically, a #brand. Which is to say that he has ridden the roller coaster of microcelebrity to its inevitably commercialized conclusion, stopping along the way for lots of pictures that will commemorate the experience later on.

In the space of a few days, Ken Bone has gone from a man, to a meme, to a celebrity, to a … brand.

So, first, there were all those tweets. And the guy who wrote a song about him. And the twitterer who wrote a poem about him. Bone made the requisite appearance on Jimmy Kimmel. Stephen Colbert wrote a ballad in his honor. He was interviewed by The New York Times (in an article announcing in its headline that “Ken Bone Is Closer to Deciding”). Time magazine did a deep-dive analysis of the celebrities Bone follows on Twitter.

And then, Kenneth Bone—lovable hero, relatable Everyman, splitter of suit pants—reached that pinnacle of pop-cultural relevance: There is now a Sexy Ken Bone Halloween costume.

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Of course there is. And of course Ken is capitalizing on it all! The meme-industrial complex is premised on the idea that attention is currency, and that celebrity and advertising are almost inextricably linked to each other. The lines between the communal and the commercial were vanishingly thin even before the internet came along; the web has eroded them one meme at a time. That’s as true in politics as it is in everything else: Joe the Plumber wrote a book. Tito the Builder formed TitoPac.

And, now, Ken the Bone is selling things on Twitter. Because of course he is. Because why wouldn’t he? And, indeed, why shouldn’t he? Ken is marketing Uber; he is also, though, marketing himself. Here is the tweet Bone pinned to his feed, ensuring that it’s the first thing his followers will see on his page:

America, prepare to enter the #bonezone. My official shirt is available for 1 week. Get it at https://t.co/WKSP0H9p9i pic.twitter.com/ts7K0K5WUv

— Ken Bone (@kenbone18) October 13, 2016

The #bonezone, like so many other things in a country that runs on capitalism, is fickle. It can also be, though, surprisingly friendly. After Bone explained to CNN that he wore his now-iconic red sweater to Sunday’s debate because he had split the pants on the suit he’d planned on wearing, Jerry Gergich-style … fans established a GoFundMe campaign on his behalf. To raise money to, yes, buy Ken a new suit.

It was a nice gesture. But it was also, it turns out, an unnecessary one.

Desierto Is a Horror Movie for the Age of Trump

The premise of Desierto is simple, and blunt. A truck full of Mexican migrants, attempting to cross the U.S. border illegally, is attacked in the desert by a lone gunman. For the next 90 minutes, the truck’s occupants are hunted by this demented figure toting a sniper rifle, a horror-movie villain who mumbles to his dog about keeping his country safe. If the metaphor seems obvious, well, it’s supposed to be—the Mexican director Jonas Cuarón has manifested a villain out of recent anti-immigrant sentiment, and is terrorizing viewers with it.

Desierto is not a good movie, but it’s an interesting pop-cultural footnote, especially given its release in the final weeks leading up to a U.S. presidential election in which Donald Trump seized the Republican nomination partly on the back of his extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s a horror movie first and foremost, although not a particularly original one. Cuarón’s father, Alfonso (who produced the film), is a master stylist who excels at layering deeper meaning into his work, and while any comparison between the two might feel unfair, it’s also inevitable. Desierto’s message is always clear, and while Cuarón extracts some genuinely visceral shocks from this take on The Most Dangerous Game, the film is more of an angry, well-intentioned idea than a significant piece of art.

Gael García Bernal, who collaborated with Alfonso Cuarón on Y Tu Mamá También, plays Moises, the primary target of Sam (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a rather obviously named avatar of American isolationism and racism. Sam is armed with a rifle and accompanied by an evil dog that’s trained to tear a person’s throat out in an instant. After the briefest of setups, the pair begin their mission, dispatching most of the workers crossing the border with Moises with ruthless efficiency. Because Cuarón wants the whole experience to be brutish above all else, viewers don’t learn anything about the people being attacked, or even their names, as if to express how inhuman Sam believes them to be.

Whatever larger impact Desierto could have had is dulled by the story’s simplicity. Sam is supposed to represent some larger pervasive movement within America, but he’s too comically evil for the metaphor to work; there’s a banality to the prejudice of anti-immigrant sentiment that the film doesn’t want to engage with. The violence is bloody, but it erupts so quickly and continues so incessantly that there’s rarely a sense of real tension. Viewers immediately know what this 90-minute allegory is leading to—a final showdown between Sam and Moises, a battle of pure good and evil. As a result, Desierto quickly sags once audiences have wrapped their mind around Sam’s mission.

Desierto wears its single-mindedness as a badge of pride.

Perhaps that’s Cuarón’s larger point—that viewers can reconcile themselves to this awful violence, especially when it’s presented in a genre format via an action thriller playing out in the landscape of a wide-open desert. But the film’s battle lines are drawn so quickly, and its point made so unsubtly, that it’s hard to go much deeper. Yes, the rhetoric of politicians like Trump, who tar Mexican immigrants as monstrous rapists and murderers, is worth investigating, and Cuarón’s obvious anger over it is both palpable and understandable.

But because of its one-note message, this film isn’t likely to change anyone’s mind about anything. Desierto succeeds in portraying the savagery of racism, but in the end, it’s completely cold. Cuarón co-wrote Gravity, the similarly stripped-down, though far less metaphorical, thriller that his father directed, but that movie succeeded by embracing its humanity. The way Sandra Bullock’s character’s sad life story unfolded as she did battle with the harshness of outer space was undeniably trite.  And yet it served as a necessary emotional anchor amid the film’s CGI chaos.

Meanwhile, Desierto wears its single-mindedness as a badge of pride. It’ll be best remembered as an entry in the stack of political films of 2016 that seemed all the sharper thanks to the rise of Trump. From Zootopia, Disney’s ballad of inclusiveness and empathy, to Denial, which wrestled with the ethics of giving blatantly racist views their day in court, there’s been a surprisingly wide range of works with extra weight in a deeply polarized year. Desierto is the nastiest of them all, but it’s also the shallowest.

Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize Isn't About Music

The Swedish Academy’s official bibliography for Bob Dylan, recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, begins with the category “Works in English.” The first listed entry is the Bob Dylan Song Book, a 1965 collection of sheet music and lyrics, and the last is If Not For You, a little-noticed 2016 children’s book that that illustrated the lyrics of a 1970 Dylan song. His self-repudiated 1971 prose collection Tarantula and 2004 memoir Chronicles, Volume One are in there, too.

So “works,” in this context, means books. They’re listed before the albums that provided the lyrics that make up many of those Dylan books—the albums whose music, in the Nobel Committee’s word, gave Dylan “the status of an icon.”

Handwringing about “what is literature?” seems inevitable after the announcement that a rock star has taken the global writing community’s biggest award. But no great existential crisis is needed. The Nobel Committee could have decided that with this prize it wanted to expand the definition of “literature” to include recorded music, a hugely influential and relatively young art form that doesn’t have an award of Nobel-like prestige dedicated to it. But it seems to have declined to do so. Dylan is winning 8 million kronor ($932,786) for his words as they are written and not sung—affording him a wild degree of praise for something that is not the main achievement of his career.

After this morning’s announcement, an interviewer put to the Nobel Permanent Secretary Sara Danius the notion that because Dylan isn’t known for novels or traditional poetry, the committee has “widened the horizon” of the literature prize. Darius pushed back:

Well, it may look that way. But really, we haven’t, in a way. If you look back, far back, 2,500 years or so ago, you discover Homer and Sappho. And they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, they were meant to be performed, often together with instruments. It’s the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho and we enjoy it. And same thing with Bob Dylan. He can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the grand English poetic tradition.

“He can be read and should be read.” With those words, Darius is advocating for people to turn off their speakers and pick up a copy of Bob Dylan’s Lyrics tomes, complete collections of his words that have come out in various editions since 1985. She also mentioned that people may want to listen to Blonde on Blonde as an entrypoint. But listening is not what this award is about.

There’s little that’s inherently controversial about praising words originally meant for vocal delivery. Playwrights have won the Nobel Prize for Literature before. But in an era when songwriting and song performance and song recording are tied together, when many musicians’ literary voices are first received via their literal voices, lyrics alone should inevitably have a hard time competing with “pure” poetry or prose. They’re trying to accomplish different things. Bob Dylan is not exempt from this idea, even though he’s spawned an industry of college English-department analysis. Here’s Michiko Kakutani 31 years ago in a generally positive New York Times review of Dylan’s Lyrics 1962-1985:

Simply reading a song, we miss the ways in which the words interact with the music—how, say, the sardonic lyrics to many of the songs on ''Highway 61 Revisited'' counterpoint the upbeat, even exuberant tracks - and we are deprived, as well, of the point of view supplied by Mr. Dylan's raw, insistent inflections and distinctive phrasings. Numbers like ''Lay, Lady, Lay,'' ''Blowin' in the Wind'' and even ''Like a Rolling Stone'' feel considerably more trite as prose poems than as songs, and many of Mr. Dylan's weaker efforts —''New Pony,'' say, or ''Emotionally Yours''—simply collapse into pretentious posturing when separated from their propulsive tracks, which at least helped to endow them with a modicum of conviction on the records.

The Nobel Committee would seem to disagree with Kakutani. Or rather, perhaps, it’s asserting that even with the inherent limitations of written lyrics, Dylan’s still rate as so good as to deserve recognition. And that is, make no mistake, huge recognition. Today’s award says that a byproduct of Dylan’s main job is as good or better than the life’s work of Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, Adonis, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or so many other authors theoretically in contention. His worthiness for that honor cannot be determined by doing what his fans most enjoy doing, hearing a Bob Dylan song.

Trump Faces a Slew of New Allegations of Sexual Assault

Updated on October 12 at 11:06 p.m.

Early in the second presidential debate, moderator Anderson Cooper confronted Donald Trump about a video in which the Republican presidential nominee boasted that stars like himself could do what they wanted with women. “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,” Trump said in the 2005 clip.

“You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?” Cooper asked. Trump insisted that wasn’t the case. Cooper asked three times whether Trump denied that he had ever done such a thing. Finally, Trump replied, “No, I have not,” and quickly changed the subject.

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Trump Brags About Groping Women

But in the aftermath of that report, five women have come forward to say that Trump sexually assaulted them, including a People magazine reporter who published a first-person account of an alleged assault.

In a story published early Wednesday evening, The New York Times reported the stories of two women who say that Trump assaulted them, one in the 1970s and one in 2005.

Jessica Leeds told the paper that watching the debate made her want to punch Trump. She said that she was seated next to him during a flight three decades ago, when he began touching her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt. “He was like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere. It was an assault.”

Rachel Crooks introduced herself to Trump at an office in 2002; her company did business with his. She shook his hand, but then he didn’t let go, and then, she said, forcibly kissed her on the mouth. “It was so inappropriate,” she said. “I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”

In the video, Trump told Billy Bush, “You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait.”

Long-ago allegations are, of course, usually impossible to prove. But both women have told friends their stories over the years, and the friends confirmed those accounts to the Times. Meanwhile, their stories seem to have opened up floodgates for other women to air their stories.

Mindy McGillivray told The Palm Beach Post that Trump had groped her while she was assisting a photographer friend at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in January 2003. (A Trump spokeswoman denied the story.) A Miss USA contestant from Washington state reportedly posted on Facebook that Trump had groped her.

And Natasha Stoynoff, a former People reporter, wrote for that magazine about an assault that she says occurred while she was writing a story on the first anniversary of Trump’s wedding to Melania Knauss in 2005. Stoynoff, who had been covering Trump for some time, says that Trump wanted to show her a room at Mar-a-Lago:

We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat. Now, I’m a tall, strapping girl who grew up wrestling two giant brothers. I even once sparred with Mike Tyson. It takes a lot to push me. But Trump is much bigger—a looming figure—and he was fast, taking me by surprise, and throwing me off balance. I was stunned. And I was grateful when Trump’s longtime butler burst into the room a minute later, as I tried to unpin myself.

Stoynoff said that a few moments later, Trump told her, “You know we’re going to have an affair, don’t you?” Stoynoff said she told a colleague about the incident, but blamed herself, did not act, and asked to leave the Trump beat. A Trump spokesperson denied that story, too.

Trump has insisted that his language in the video was nothing more than “locker-room” conversation. But Leeds and Crooks are not the first women to lodge such accusations. Jill Harth, who worked with Trump on pageants in the 1990s, has said that Trump tried to grope her on various occasions, and sexually assaulted her in his daughter Ivanka’s bedroom. “I was admiring the decoration, and next thing I know he’s pushing me against a wall and has his hands all over me,” Harth told Nicholas Kristof, the Times columnist. “He was trying to kiss me. I was freaking out.” On another occasion, she says she vomited as a defense mechanism.

Contacted by the Times about the two allegations it published, Trump blew up:

“None of this ever took place,” said Mr. Trump, who began shouting at The Times reporter who was questioning him. He said that The Times was making up the allegations to hurt him and that he would sue the news organization if it reported them.

“You are a disgusting human being,” he told the reporter as she questioned him about the women’s claims.

Asked whether he had ever done any of the kissing or groping that he had described on the recording, Mr. Trump was once again insistent: “I don’t do it. I don’t do it. It was locker room talk.”

After the video was released, dozens of Republican officeholders disavowed Trump, either calling on him to withdraw from the presidential ticket, rescinding their endorsements, or both. Trump has remained defiant, however, insisting he will stay in the race and feuding with the GOP and Speaker Paul Ryan, its highest elected official. His standing in the polls was already tumbling, and the first polls to emerge since the video was released show even greater collapse.

The Resignation of Wells Fargo's CEO

NEWS BRIEF John Stumpf, the embattled CEO of Wells Fargo, is stepping down from his position immediately following a phony bank and credit-card account scandal that’s rocked one of the largest banks in the U.S.

Several members of Congress have demanded Stumpf’s resignation for the last month. While Stumpf forfeited $41 million in stock awards, he remained in charge of a company that for years set unrealistically high sales expectations, which regulators say created a culture that led to this scandal. Now, he’s forfeiting his position, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Stumpf will be replaced by President and Chief Operating Officer Timothy J. Sloan,who was widely expected to succeed Mr. Stumpf when he retired in the future.

In a statement, Sloan said that his “immediate and highest priority is to restore trust in Wells Fargo.”

It’s unclear if Stumpf will receive any sort of severance package. When Carrie Tolstedt, the head of the Wells Fargo division where the phony account scheme took place, left the company earlier this month, she did not collect the $124 million she would normally have received in severance.

Atlanta Is One of the Most Versatile Shows on TV

Some TV shows get viewers to tune in each week with shocking cliffhangers or teasers; others consistently draw fans back by subtler, but no less intriguing, means. Atlanta’s first season on FX has been largely plotless, dependent more on mood than major twists, but part of its allure is the way it seamlessly slips into new genres from episode to episode. This willingness to experiment has helped the series become the most surprising, versatile half-hour currently on television.

Donald Glover’s show is about rap music, race, celebrity culture, the city of his birth, and how those things all intersect. But it can also be a moody relationship drama, a madcap sitcom, a social commentary on gentrification, or, most recently, a surreal sketch comedy. The show’s seventh episode, “B.A.N.,” took place entirely within a fictional program called Montague, a roundtable chat show seemingly modeled on PBS mainstays like Charlie Rose or Tavis Smiley, in which one of Atlanta’s lead characters, Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), was challenged by hosts over the sexist and transphobic content of his lyrics.

The episode never strayed from its format, even cutting to brilliant parody commercials for real brands like Dodge or Arizona Iced Tea. “B.A.N.” joined an impressive recent run of episodes that have analyzed questions of identity from wildly different angles—sometimes with quiet pensiveness, other times (like this week) with hilarious bluster. Atlanta doesn’t always try to be laugh-out-loud funny, but at the very least it never fails to be inventive.

The pilot episode gave the impression that Atlanta might follow a prescribed plot course, charting Earn’s (Glover) efforts to make Paper Boi a star. The series wisely dispensed with that narrative immediately, instead using Paper Boi’s rising fame to burrow into much thornier issues. On the show-within-a-show Montague, a simpering host batted questions at Paper Boi and a trans activist named Dr. Debra Holt about the outrage inspired by some of his lyrics mocking Caitlyn Jenner. “There’s no extra layer,” he protested when challenged on the deeper meaning of his words. “I don’t think about what I’m rapping half the time. I’m just trying to get paid.”

Throughout the roundtable discussion, Paper Boi and Dr. Holt argued over the idea that art has to speak to larger issues, and over the concept that prejudice is something learned rather than ingrained. “You’re whining about chickens coming home to roost,” Dr. Holt said to Paper Boi’s complaint that rap’s language is being increasingly policed. “No. Rap is chickens coming home to roost,” he countered, demanding understanding for the simple fact that he works within an art form that often pushes against the boundaries of acceptability. “I should be able to say something that’s weird without people hating on me,” he later added. “I never said anything about taking away anyone's rights.”

It was a profoundly interesting discussion in which neither character was allowed to be right or wrong. It was also extremely, extremely funny, as Paper Boi’s initial exasperation over being put on trial for all rap music’s content evolved into empathy for Dr. Holt, his supposed opponent, and vice versa. Montague then shifted to a segment about a supposedly “trans-racial” black boy named Antoine who “identified” as a 35-year-old white man. In shifting from a legitimate topic to a ridiculous one, the show subverted the gentle, comfortable window dressing the media puts on the evolving and sensitive topic of identity in America—and the frequent inability to distinguish real issues from invented ones. Montague himself (Alano Miller) seemed like an obvious parody of CNN’s Don Lemon, a news anchor often criticized for his absurd TV stunts supposedly investigating racism.

In the age of Netflix, television, even in the half-hour comedy genre, has become overly dependent on the power of the serialized narrative. Great shows like Bojack Horseman and You’re the Worst build much of their comic force from the overarching stories they’re telling; the delight of Atlanta, meanwhile, is its utter changeability. Last week’s episode “Value” threw its focus entirely on the show’s only female regular, Van (Zazie Beetz), as she navigated an awkward night with an old friend and the repercussions of the morning after, becoming a moody meditation on the difficulty of maintaining female friendship in a class- and image-conscious society.

The week prior, “Nobody Beats the Biebs” was a wild investigation of celebrity in which Paper Boi clashed with an obnoxious Justin Bieber—except Bieber was played by a black actor, Austin Crute. The show never acknowledged the bizarre theatrical device, but it didn’t need to; every reaction you as a viewer had to an African American Bieber (who was otherwise guilty of the same bad-boy antics as the real singer) forced you to analyze if his race affected your opinion of him. As Vice’s Pilot Viruet said of the episode, the series is great at talking about race without ever actually talking about race; it’s neither polemical nor apathetic. Still, Atlanta’s biggest achievement is how it layers slice-of-life insights with weird sketches and departures from reality, while also telling a different story every week. With just three episodes left this season, “B.A.N.” is the latest evidence of how beautifully Atlanta can strike that balance.