Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 65

The Suspension of U.S.-Russian Cooperation in Syria

NEWS BRIEF The U.S. State Department said Monday the U.S. was suspending bilateral talks with Russia over the situation in Aleppo, Syria.

Here’s more from its statement:

This is not a decision that was taken lightly. The United States spared no effort in negotiating and attempting to implement an arrangement with Russia aimed at reducing violence, providing unhindered humanitarian access, and degrading terrorist organizations operating in Syria, including Daesh and al Qaeda in Syria.

Unfortunately, Russia failed to live up to its own commitments - including its obligations under international humanitarian law and UNSCR 2254 - and was also either unwilling or unable to ensure Syrian regime adherence to the arrangements to which Moscow agreed.

Indeed, the statement said, Russia and Syria had intensified their attacks on rebel-held parts of Aleppo, were preventing aid from reaching civilians, and had targeted a humanitarian convoy last month, soon after the weeklong cease-fire—brought about following U.S.-Russian negotiations—broke down. The development comes just a week after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry threatened to cut off talks with Russia after it was accused of bombing the convoy.

Since the cease-fire ended September 19, things have drastically devolved. The U.S. had bombed Syrian government forces, which it called an accident, having mistaken them for Islamic State militants. The U.S. then accused Syrian and Russian forces of bombing the convoy, and last week it accused both countries of using bunker-buster bombs to blow up civilian shelters dug beneath the ground. Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said the bombings destroyed three out of four centers used by the White Helmets, a volunteer emergency-services groups that pulls injured citizens from bombed buildings.

Aleppo is the largest city in Syria, and the last significant stronghold of rebel forces. It has become the focus of intense fighting in the five-year civil war, because while President Bashar al-Assad’s forces control the city’s western portion, rebels still hold much of the city’s eastern side.

With the suspension in talks, the U.S. will withdraw personnel it had sent to create a joint U.S-Russia center, which would have coordinated military operations and intelligence, the State Department said in its statement.

Hurricane Matthew Moves North

NEWS BRIEF A major hurricane is churning over the Caribbean Sea this week, threatening to bring “life-threatening" weather conditions to Haiti, Cuba, and the Bahamas, according to forecasters.

Hurricane Matthew, a Category 4 hurricane, is expected to reach western Haiti and eastern Cuba Tuesday morning, and then swirl northward toward the Bahamas by Wednesday morning.

The hurricane will pass close to or directly over the western tip of Haiti and the eastern tip of Cuba, according to AccuWeather forecasters. It will then move north toward the Bahamas. Meteorologists say it’s too early to say where it would go next, and whether it will make landfall in the continental United States.

Matthew will bring heavy rains and strong winds that could lead to severe flooding, dangerous tides, and mudslides. AccuWeather meteorologists say “life-threatening conditions” are likely. Hurricane warnings are in effect for Haiti, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and several Cuban provinces.

“Fluctuations in strength, ranging from Category 4 to Category 2 status are likely as the hurricane is influenced by the mountainous islands and other atmospheric conditions,” Dan Kottlowski, an AccuWeather hurricane expert, said Monday.

Here’s a NASA animation showing Matthew growing in strength between Friday and Monday in the Caribbean. Matthew became a Category 5 hurricane Saturday night, then dropped back to 4 on Sunday. Its strongest recorded winds reached nearly 130 miles per hour.

The hurricane is expected to disrupt air and sea travel, and could knock out power in Haiti and Cuba.

Jamaica, Turks and Caicos, and Puerto Rico are expected to be hit with heavy rain as Matthew makes it way north. The hurricane could also generate rough tides and rip currents along the East Coast, from Florida to North Carolina, this weekend.

Friday Night Lights Democratized TV Drama

Football is a team sport in the deepest sense. The game may be most readily associated with its brutalities—hard helmet against soft flesh, foot against turf, the pounding and the scraping and the crunching—but it is also, in its way, delicate. Each play is a ballet in miniature, a work of intricate choreography that casts every player as a crucial member of the corps; the quarterback and his receivers may be the most visible to viewers, yes, but to win—to get that weird little ball over that fixed little line, as many times as it takes—everyone must run the route set out for them. In football, as in so many other things, it can be hard to tell where the “I” ends and the “we” begins.

The sales pitch for Friday Night Lights, the NBC drama that premiered 10 years ago today, is that it was about football but also totally not about football. The central sport, here, was simply a vehicle that allowed the show to explore ideas like community and competition and diversity and adversity and—if you’re laying the pitch on especially thick—the triumph of the human spirit.

The pitch was correct: Friday Night Lights is a show that is nominally about the Panthers of Dillon High School in Dillon, Texas, but that is really about all the people in the team’s orbit. It’s a serialized celebration of football’s ensemble act. Each player, here, whether central or supporting (and whether on the team, or simply around it) matters. FNL, when it premiered in 2006, rejected decades’ worth of sitcom-driven logic—the hermetic, hierarchical universe—in favor of a format that dared to suggest that every supporting character could also double as a star. The show took the everyone-has-a-story premise of the soap opera and turned it into high art.

FNL foreshadowed the “friendly panopticon” approach: Everyone, here, is seen. And everyone, here, is capable of seeing.

FNL’s pilot begins with Eric Taylor about to start his first season as the head coach of the Panthers. It’s early on the Monday before that first game (Monday being, a voice-overed morning-radio DJ reminds us, “four days until Friday night”); in the background, as the show’s roving camera provides a tour of the Odessa-esque town—chain-link fences, aluminum siding, power lines, sweeping skies—the DJ takes calls from Dillon residents who are passionately predicting the performance Coach Taylor will coax from his team on Friday. Viewers see Eric walking the immense football field, alone, acutely aware of the pressure he’s under.

But then the montage shifts, abruptly, to all the other people who are feeling the same pressures: There’s Tim Riggins, the Panthers’ running back, passed out on his couch; there’s Tyra Collette, his girlfriend, next to him; there’s Matt Saracen, QB2, doing the dishes; there’s Grandma Saracen, in her living-room rocking chair, watching QVC.

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Often a show’s pilot will, in retrospect, reveal its youth, differing in style and in tone from the episodes that came after it found its rhythm. Not so FNL, which from the outset seemed to know—down to its subtle soundtrack, down to its purposely shaky camera work—what it wanted to be. The pilot’s opening scene foreshadowed the kind of quiet impressionism that FNL would embrace, again and again, throughout its five excellent seasons. It also foreshadowed the approach that you might call the “friendly panopticon”: Everyone, here, is seen. And everyone, here, is capable of seeing.

Throughout the seasons, minor characters had a way of making themselves major. Joe, the stage-managing father of the phenom quarterback J.D. McCoy, began as an occasional pest when he first moved to Dillon, in season three; by season four, he’d shaken up Dillon football—and the Taylors’ (and everyone else’s) lives. Same with Vince’s dad in season five. And same with, basically, everybody else in Dillon and, later, East Dillon: Jess affects Vince affects Eric affects Tami affects Julie affects Matt affects Landry affects Tyra affects Lila affects Tim affects Jason … and on and on it goes.

It’s the ultimate cliché—connections, chain reactions, butterflies and their wings—yet in FNL’s telling, it never reads as trite. Instead, under the executive direction of Peter Berg, the characters who would seem to embody the most tired of high school stereotypes (the perky cheerleader, the swaggering jock, the nerd) reveal themselves, systematically and subtly and inevitably, to be so much more—and to find their more-ness specifically through their interactions with other characters. FNL took the physical premise of the small town, where people constantly ping against each other like pinballs, and transferred it to TV.

Friday Night Lights turned empathy into an aesthetic.

And then, just as importantly: It showed those people struggling and striving and doing what they had to to get by. In a television landscape that largely obscured notions of class and financial struggle, FNL grappled explicitly with money, and with the psychic strain that so often accompanies its absence. The Riggins brothers and their foraging of copper wire. Jason Street teaming up with them to flip a house in a down market. The Taylors giving up their dream home—another turn of events foreshadowed in the series’ pilot—once they realized how much stress the higher mortgage payments would add to their lives. Tyra and Julie working at Applebee’s; Matt and Smash working at the Alamo Freeze; Vince working at Ray’s BBQ. A crucial element of FNL’s expansive empathy was to recognize the ways that money can serve as its own kind of supporting character.

That was just one more way that FNL anticipated the current era of literary television. The narrative assumptions that made the show so exceptional—and that cemented its place in the canon—are increasingly common today, 10 years later, encoded in shows like Orange Is the New Black, and You’re the Worst, and Jane the Virgin, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. While FNL wasn’t the first series to apply the structure of the soap-opera to televised literature—it was one of a trend-setting group that included The Wire and The Sopranos and, slightly later, Breaking Bad and Mad Men—it was uniquely systematic in its insistence that each character get their due. The show would take care to give special moments to the running back Smash Williams’s mom. And to Buddy Garrity, the smarmy car dealer and football booster. It would offer long-term character arcs to the paralyzed Jason Street, and to the pheromone in bootcut jeans that is Tim Riggins, and to the husband-and-wife duo who may be the best couple ever presented on television: Tami and Eric Taylor.

There are minor characters and major ones in all this, certainly—it would be narrative anarchy without that—but FNL, much more than most shows that preceded it, took for granted the dignity of each character in its universe. It rejected sitcomic snobbery in favor of a broader embrace of its wide array of characters. It turned empathy into an aesthetic.

The show anticipated the current moment—one that celebrates the power of the individual experience.

FNL’s October 2006 premiere date meant that it first aired half a year after Twitter launched and just a month after Facebook expanded its service beyond colleges and universities. On the surface, the show— adapted from both the 1990 Buzz Bissinger book and the 2004 film of the same name—acknowledged basically none of that cultural context: It paid extremely little attention to digital technology (save, perhaps, for several scenes in season three that find Landry sending needy text-messages to Tyra’s flip phone). In another way, though, FNL anticipated the digital age better than most other shows of its time. If there’s a prevailing ethic to the current cultural moment, it is one that comes to us by way of social media’s new affordances: We are newly recognizing—and grappling with—the power of the individual voice, and the worth of the individual experience. Everyone has a story to tell. And everyone, too, deserves to tell that story.

Which brings us back to football, the sport that is also a mindset—and, extended ever so slightly, a political declaration. In one of the final scenes of Friday Night Lights’s pilot, in the first of the many dramatic games the show would portray, the Panthers are down 21 to 24. Jason Street has just been hurt; no one, at that point, knows how severe his injury is. All they know is that they want the Panthers to win, for Jason and for the whole community. The center snaps the ball; Matt Saracen, the untested quarterback, stumbles with it; he recovers; he runs. The show’s camera slows. It pans to the coaches, and the cheerleaders, and the crowd. Matt eludes a tackle. And another one. The clock runs out. He plants his feet. He throws.

And then the pilot of Friday Night Lights serves up the image the show will return to, again and again, over its five remarkable seasons: a football hurtling through the air, against a wide and darkened sky, above the crowds and over the lights, arcing and spinning and hoping—assuming—that someone will be there to catch it.

Is Hungary's Referendum Result a Victory or a Defeat for the Prime Minister?

NEWS BRIEF The vote by Hungarians to reject an EU plan for a bloc-wide migrant quota is being labeled both as an overwhelming victory for Prime Minister Viktor Orban as well as a humiliating defeat for him. So which is it?

The EU plan to redistribute 160,000 asylum-seekers across the bloc would have resulted in 1,294 people being resettled in Hungary. But Orban strongly opposed the plan, challenged it in court, and called for a referendum. With nearly all the ballots counted in Sunday’s vote, 98 percent of voters supported Orban’s call to reject the EU plan. But turnout was 43 percent—well short of the 50 percent needed for the results to become legally binding. Orban was undeterred, however. He said he would amend Hungary’s constitution to make the decision binding. He said that though a “valid [referendum] is always better than an invalid [referendum],” the result would give him enough support to tell the EU Hungary “should not be forced to accept … people we don’t want to live with.”

But that may not be easy. Orban had made the issue the centerpiece of his campaign against the EU. He has presented the newcomers as a threat to his country’s European identity, prompting accusations he was xenoophobic. Last year, he said not only would he like “Europe preserved for the Europeans ...[but] we want to preserve a Hungarian Hungary.” The government spent millions on a campaign urging citizens to vote no to the question “Do you want the European Union to be able to mandate the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens into Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly?” In the end, it wasn’t enough. Despite his public optimism after the vote, the shortfall means Orban can’t force the EU to rethink its plan.

#HungaryReferendum: In domestic politics, #Orbán will try to spin that he won this – but it doesn’t send a strong message to Brussels.

— András Bíró-Nagy (@bironagyandras) October 3, 2016

Ferenc Gyurcsany, the leader of the opposition Democratic Coalition, said the low turnout showed “the people do not support the government. And this is good.”

The turnout should ease the pressure on Germany and other EU countries that—in the face of their own domestic opposition to the asylum-seekers—had pushed for an EU-wide distribution plan in order to ease the overcrowding in migrant-holding centers in Greece and Italy.

But the overwhelming nature of the results among those who did vote means the opposition toward the asylum-seekers, those European leaders who are welcoming of them, and toward the EU itself are unlikely to diminish anytime soon. Those sentiments are prevalent among many of the Central and Eastern European members of the EU, and are also gaining ground in places like Germany, home since 2015 to the largest number of asylum-seekers in Europe.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, perhaps the migrants’ greatest champion in Europe, has felt the brunt of the anger of German voters, losing ground in local elections this summer to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). In an interview published Sunday, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said the EU should scrap its plan, telling Welt am Sonntag the plan is “totally unrealistic.” And Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who has also challenged the EU’s quota system, has said his country won’t accept a “single Muslim migrant.”

Hungary’s referendum may not have been conclusive, but it ensures the issue of asylum-seekers in Europe will remain controversial until at least next year when national elections are being held in Germany and France, and possibly in 2018, as well, when Hungarians vote in parliamentary elections.    

Colombia's Rejection of the FARC Peace Deal

NEWS BRIEF Colombians have rejected a deal to end more than 50 years of war between the government and guerrilla forces in a national referendum that was largely expected to support the peace agreement.

About 50.2 percent of Colombians voted Sunday against the agreement, which was signed last week by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Timoleon Jimenez, the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, after nearly four years of fraught negotiations. About 49.8 percent voted in favor—a difference of less than 63,000 votes out of 13 million, according to the BBC.

The government has not officially called the results of the referendum, but 99 percent of the ballots had been counted Sunday night. National approval was required to ratify the deal.

The outcome casts uncertainty on the fate of the conflict between Colombian government and the Marxist rebel group has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced thousands since 1964. Under the peace deal, FARC rebels had agreed to abandon their posts and give up their weapons to United Nations workers at special disarmament zones throughout the country. They would then be allowed to form a political party that would be recognized by the government and take 10 seats in the country’s 268-member Congress. About 7,500 FARC rebels were expected to enter civilian life if the deal was approved.

Wire services photos from the country showed some Colombians who voted for the peace deal were in tears after the ballots were counted Sunday.

Britain, Mark Your Calendars

NEWS BRIEF One hundred days after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May has set a deadline for the country to begin its formal withdrawal from the 28-member bloc.

May told the BBC Sunday the process, known as Brexit, will start by the end of March 2017 when her government invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, kicking off two years of negotiations for the terms and conditions of Britain’s departure from the EU. Britain will then be out by spring 2019.

May also said she would seek to repeal the 1972 European Communities Act, the act of Parliament that allowed the United Kingdom to join the EU’s predecessor, which was known as the European Economic Community. This move would enshrine EU law into British law, and allow Parliament to determine which legislation to keep or remove. May said the repeal would go into effect after Brexit is completed.

Fifty-two percent of British voters decided in a national referendum in June to leave the bloc after 43 years. Prime Minister David Cameron, who urged citizens to vote to remain in the EU, resigned a day after the results. Brexit sparked fears of immediate and long-term damage to Britain’s economy, but the last several months have looked better than predicted. From CNN Money:

Government borrowing declined in August, inflation held steady and consumer spending increased by 10% -- its biggest jump in more than a decade. Factory data have been positive and activity in the services sector, which accounts for nearly 80% of the economy, rose 0.4% from June to July.

“The sky hasn't fallen on either side of the Channel, contrary to concerns that the U.K. would soon fall into recession,” Jean-Michel Six, chief economist for Europe at S&P, told CNN this week.

Westworld Is a Grand Saga of Gunslingers and Robots

Every episode of Westworld begins with some variation on the same image: it’s Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), an innocent maiden of the prairie, the idealized image of a woman in need of rescuing from a thousand Westerns past. Sometimes, she’s in her remote cottage, biding her time with her father and waiting to be swept up in an adventure. Other times, she’s slumped in a metal chair in an underground lab, being prodded with questions and responding in a subdued monotone. Dolores is a robot, dubbed a “host,” one of thousands who populate a colossal theme park in which high rollers can act out their movie-star fantasies. Her existence is based on reflecting back a kind of stylized realism at them, to make them feel like real heroes or villains.

Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s new show, a remake of Michael Crichton’s 1973 sci-fi thriller, digs into the question of Dolores’s existence from both sides. It’s trying to grapple with the casual violence on display, reckoning with the thrill audiences seem to get watching cowboys blow each other to bits and rescue (or attack) the women around them.  But it’s also asking the classic science-fiction question about consciousness and morality: At what point does Dolores become real, someone you can’t just poke at in a metal chair? Is it from the very moment of her creation, or is it at the beginning of the show’s pilot episode—when she starts to remember the horrors people keep visiting on her?

Westworld begins like many a prestige HBO drama. It’s slow and somewhat ponderous, throwing dozens of open-ended questions into the air and setting several mysterious plots in motion. Nor does it lack the baser hallmarks of the genre—violence, nudity, and snarled lines about heaven and hell or God and judgment, which sound far more profound than they actually are. But Nolan and Joy are taking cover behind Westworld’s self-knowing critique of the whole thing. Any gory shootout will quickly cut to a sterile control room, where technicians tut at how formulaic it all is. Men in HAZMAT suits quickly clear any room of blood and gore; cowboys and prostitutes alike are scrubbed down, rebooted, and sent back into Westworld to entertain a new wave of paying customers.

Still, the meta-textual cleverness of the whole affair takes a little while to settle into, partly because the early storylines feel so routine. But therein lies the rub. Along with Dolores, there’s Teddy (James Marsden), a heroic-seeming gunslinger looking for adventure. There’s Maeve (Thandie Newton), a hard-bitten madam running her saloon with an iron fist. And there’s a mysterious cowboy (Ed Harris), clad in black and seemingly impervious to bullets, blazing through the whole affair in search of something deeper, like an experienced player trying to find the secret ending of a video game. The show lets on that some of these characters are “hosts,” artificial actors, but with others, it holds back, delighting in the difficulty of trying to tell the difference. It’s only when the hosts get recalled to the lab they were born in that you can tell for sure—but at that point, there are much deeper moral questions being asked.

Dolores experiences a strange side effect from what the park’s creator Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) calls a “reverie,” programmed gestures she makes that are tied to specific memories, designed to make her appear more lifelike. This has somehow begun to conjure her whole nightmarish history—memories of death, of her father’s brutalization, of a lifelong desire to escape—in confusing fragments, a virus that is spreading amongst many of the park’s artificial actors. Nolan and Joy seek to dramatize the very concept of consciousness and self-awareness; there’s pathos every time Dolores twitches to “life” in the hands of her creators, and Wood (who is terrific) adds a new layer of confusion to her performance.

Westworld is a slow start, and a slightly frustrating one; after four episodes, it feels like it’s just begun to probe deeper into its own high concept. The sequences inside the control room are fascinating, but the dialogue is often circular, swerving away from simple exposition into loftier ethical discussions. Hopkins’s Ford (curiously named after a strange figure in Western lore, the man who shot Jesse James) seems lost in the clouds, trapped somewhere between high-minded innovation and creepy malevolence. The show is clearly building to some larger twist with both him and Harris’s mysterious hero, but in the early episodes, both clearly enjoy sinking their teeth into their archetypal roles.

Jeffrey Wright, Shannon Woodward, and the great Sidse Babett Knudsen (Borgen) round out the cast of conflicted technicians, each doing wonderful work. But in the four episodes provided to critics, the park is the main source of action, much of it confusingly horrifying, a patchwork of imagery that’s slowly being knitted into grander philosophical directions. Still, Westworld is thrillingly threading a tight needle: It’s resolutely aware of its formula while simultaneously trying to puzzle out the dark impulses behind it. If that’s the future of the HBO drama, it’s an exciting one.

How Brock Turner Changed California's Rape Laws

NEWS BRIEF California expanded its definition of rape and added new mandatory-minimum sentences for sexual assaults on Friday, five months after a judge’s lenient sentence for former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner sparked national outrage.

State legislators approved the two measures, Assembly Bills 701 and 2888, as part of a broader effort to reform how California’s criminal code handles sex-related crimes.

AB 701 eliminates probation as an option for offenders whose victims are intoxicated or unconscious, while AB 2888 expands the state’s definition of rape beyond the use or threat of physical force. The Los Angeles Times has more:

Currently under the law, those convicted of rape using additional physical force must serve prison time. But offenders, like Turner, convicted of sexually assaulting someone who is unconscious or incapable of giving consent because of intoxication, can receive a lesser sentence based on a judge’s discretion.

Rape has previously been defined as “an act of sexual intercourse" under certain conditions of force, duress or lack of consent. Other types of sexual assault, like penetration by a foreign object, were categorized as separate offenses.

In a statement announcing he had signed them into law, Governor Jerry Brown said he opposed adding new mandatory-minimum sentences in general. In this case, however, Brown justified his support for AB 701 by noting it would bring “a measure of parity to sentencing for criminal acts that are substantially similar.”

A Santa Clara jury found Turner guilty on three counts of sexual assault in March for attacking an unconscious 23-year-old woman after a party on Stanford’s campus in 2015. Turner faced a maximum of 14 years in prison; prosecutors recommended six years.

In June, Santa Clara Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky instead sentenced Turner to six months in prison, plus three years of probation. The case rose to national prominence after BuzzFeed published the victim’s courtroom statement, in which she describes the emotional toll of the assault in haunting, extensive detail. A campaign now is underway to recall Persky; Turner was released three months early in August.

The changes come two days after Brown signed a bill into law that nixed California’s statute of limitations for sex-related crimes. State legislators drafted the measure after more than 50 women came forward with rape allegations against comedian Bill Cosby in 2015. Many of the allegations were decades old, including some in California. Cosby has denied any criminal wrongdoing.

How Banning Books Marginalizes Children

Every year since 1982, an event known as Banned Books Week has brought attention to literary works frequently challenged by parents, schools, and libraries. The books in question sometimes feature scenes of violence or offensive language; sometimes they’re opposed for religious reasons (as in the case of both Harry Potter and the Bible). But one unfortunate outcome is that 52 percent of the books challenged or banned in the last 10 years feature so-called “diverse content”—that is, they explore issues such as race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental illness, and disability. As a result, the organizers of Banned Books Week, which started Sunday, chose the theme “Celebrating Diversity” for 2016.

Since the inception of the American children’s literature industry in the 1820s, publishers have had to grapple with the question of who their primary audience should be. Do kids’ books cater to parents and adult cultural gatekeepers, or to young readers themselves? But as books that address issues of diversity face a growing number of challenges, the related question of which children both the industry and educators should serve has become more prominent recently. Who benefits when Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of Part-Time Indian, which deals with racism, poverty, and disability, is banned for language and “anti-Christian content”? Who’s hurt when Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings’s picture book I Am Jazz, about a transgender girl, is banned? The history of children’s book publishing in America offers insight into the ways in which traditional attitudes about “appropriate” stories often end up marginalizing the lives and experiences of many young readers, rather than protecting them.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, debates over the target audience of the American children’s-literature industry largely centered around the question of how much adults should trust children to choose what they read. Before the Civil War, the prevailing answer was “very little.” Accordingly, kids’ books and magazines addressed the instructional concerns of adults without worrying much about readers’ interests. New entertainment options, from dime novels to nickelodeons, led to a greater effort to retaining children’s attention by amusing them. Yet even as publishers focused more on engagement, they carefully avoided subjects that riled the parents who bought the books.

In researching my book Commercializing Childhood, I discovered that children’s stories and magazines during the 19th century rarely discussed slavery. When the popular children’s magazine The Juvenile Miscellany ran anti-slavery stories in the early 1830s, its largely New England-based audience abandoned it, and the magazine collapsed within 18 months. The outcome had a chilling effect on other publications. The subject of slavery had a brief revival during the war (when it served to highlight the evils of Southern society), but afterward the topic remained unpopular within the industry. Indeed, the recent #SlaveryWithASmile controversy over two books’ depiction of slaves’ lives indicates that publishers today still haven’t figured out how to address the subject for younger children in a way that’s both historically accurate and acceptable to parents.

When librarians and teachers reject works that may be “emotionally inappropriate” for children (a common reason), they’re adhering to the traditional and mostly prevailing view that children’s literature should avoid controversial topics. It’s understandable that adults want to minimize children’s anxiety, and schools are often under intense social and financial pressure to maintain established standards. But it ‘s also important to recognize that this tradition was established in the 19th century to serve the needs of the white, wealthy Protestant producers and consumers who have dominated the field of American children’s literature for much of the past 200 years.

The distinction between books that have inspired calls for censorship (including series like Nancy Drew and The Hunger Games) versus the works that more often have actually been kept out of children’s hands (Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, the novels of Judy Blume) reveals the insidious effects of this tradition. Whereas violence or elements of fantasy rarely leads to widespread censorship, concerns about race or sexuality are more likely to restrict circulation. It’s an especially troubling tendency, considering the structural biases within the publishing industry that have made it harder for minority authors to get children’s books published. In effect, this pattern means the industry serves those who benefit from the status quo, which is why most scholars see children’s literature as a conservative force in American society.

There is an alternative tradition of using children’s literature specifically to introduce more diverse perspectives to young readers that dates back to The Juvenile Miscellany, which encouraged empathy for American Indian and slave characters. This practice mostly remained economically and culturally marginalized until the 1960s, when books like Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day and Don Freeman’s Corduroy began to naturalize the experiences of children of color. Around the same time, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen challenged cultural taboos about addressing children's normal stages of psychological and emotional development.

Perhaps no recent book has illuminated the benefits of such an approach for young readers as much as R.J. Palacio’s 2012 bestseller Wonder. This novel narrates the school year of 10-year-old Augie, a boy with a severe facial deformity, from his own perspective as well as those of the people that surround him. By encouraging children to imagine themselves in the place of Augie and his classmates, Wonder transports them beyond their own experiences and instills the feelings of empathy and humility that are an essential part of the reason why we tell stories.       

Keeping books about certain types of children out of libraries perpetuates a vision of a sheltered American childhood that has rarely existed.

Despite Wonder’s commercial success, a recent survey of 574 librarians by the School Library Journal suggests a trend toward a more conservative approach to producing and curating children’s books. Content labels, restricted access areas, and self-censorship have all been on the rise since 2008, and in 2014, a group of children's book authors started the We Need Diverse Books campaign to highlight the lack of diversity in children's publishing.

Quiet decisions by libraries not to carry titles such as Kate Messner’s The Seventh Wish, whose protagonist has an older sibling grappling with addiction, or Alex Gino’s George, which is about the life of a transgender fourth-grader, reflect a resurgent fear and misinterpretation of difference. As Messner wrote on her blog after being disinvited from a planned school talk, “When we say ‘This book is inappropriate,’ we’re telling those children ‘your situation … your family … your life is inappropriate.” More broadly, keeping books about certain types of children or experiences out of libraries or putting them on separate shelves perpetuates a troubling vision of a sheltered American childhood that in fact has rarely existed.

After publishing The Seventh Wish, Messner received several messages from librarians and parents concerned about the topics her book dealt with. One elementary-school librarian explained why she wouldn’t share Messner’s book with her students. “For now,” the librarian said, “I just need the 10 and 11-year-olds biggest worry to be about friendships, summer camps, and maybe their first pimple or two.” Messner responded by emphasizing a broader obligation that parents, teachers, writers, and publishers all share. “We don’t serve only our children,” Messner said. “We serve children in the real world.”

That message of tolerance, compassion, and affirmation aligns with the values of Banned Books Week, as well as with the ideals of children’s literary classics ranging from Little Women and Tom Sawyer to The Diary of Anne Frank and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. This shared sensibility is grounded in respect for young readers, which doesn’t mean providing them with unfettered access to everything on the library shelves. Instead, it means that librarians, teachers, and parents curate children’s choices with the goals of inspiring rather than obscuring new ideas. Such an approach allows kids to learn how to navigate imaginary worlds filled with differences, with the faith that they will apply those lessons to their own lives.

Danny Brown and Seven Samurai: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

There’s Only One Danny Brown, and He Just Made Another Hip-Hop Masterpiece

Dan Hyman | Esquire

“His latest [album] is his darkest and most psych-rock effort yet. Atrocity Exhibition is a punishing, warped dissection of an ascendant rapper confronting his demons. It depicts a guy at a personal crossroads, unsure whether the wild-and-wacky party-time self-caricature he’d created of himself, and the live shows he hosted with the manic energy of hardcore DIY gatherings, was in fact the real him.”

My Son, the Prince of Fashion

Michael Chabon | GQ

“For Abe it never seemed to be a challenge at all, and if it was a burden, it was also a gift: From the moment he became himself, what made Abe different—from his siblings, from classmates, from most of the children who have ever lived—was the degree of comfort he felt with being different. Everybody wants to stand out from the crowd, but so few of us have the knack, and fewer still the stomach for bearing up under the crush of conformity.”

How Beige Took Over American Homes

Kate Wagner | Atlas Obscura

“Our houses were painted beige because beige enabled the prospective buyers we (even unintentionally) were designing for to picture their own lives in our houses. Beige is a blank slate—a canvas upon which anyone’s personality can be painted over. The irony is that beige became the painting itself, because of the media-driven trend towards overwhelming interior neutrality, spurred by the idea that it added concrete value to our asset-houses.”

How Should an Advice Column Be?

Megan Marzin | The Point

“While novelists, or memoirists, or poets might merely hope a reader takes something from their writing beyond a literal understanding of the words, advice artists go one step further. Just as they use reader questions as prompts for their writing, readers are explicitly invited to use the answers as prompts for living, ways to get unstuck from old, unhelpful truths and latch on to the truths we need.”

Social Media Got You Down? Be More Like Beyoncé

Jenna Wortham | The New York Times Magazine

“Most people treat social media like the stage for their own reality show, but Beyoncé treats her public persona more like a Barbie—she offers up images and little more, allowing people to project their own ideas, fantasies and narratives about her life onto it.”

Why Hollywood Keeps Coming Back to Seven Samurai

Peter Suderman | Vox

“It’s primal and elegant, a story so simple that it works almost at the level of myth. And like many myths, it’s a story that can be told and retold in almost any setting ... That combination of durability and flexibility is a big part of why Kurosawa’s beloved and widely imitated film has remained so influential for so long. And it is a reminder, as Hollywood plots have grown both flimsier and more complex, of the virtues of a simple, straightforward story told well.”

What Obama Has Meant for Food

Rebecca Flint Marx | The New Yorker

“Ever since Obama made the mistake of uttering the word ‘arugula’ back in 2007, critics of the President have seized upon his foodie tendencies as the surest mark of his élitism. But, during his final months in office, it’s worth noting that Obama cannot be accused of being only an insufferable foodie: He and Michelle have also done more than any other First Couple to confront the problems that plague the American food system.”