Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 67

Luke Cage Is Truly a Hero for His Time

When Cheo Hodari Coker went to pitch his idea for a Luke Cage television series to Marvel, he brought with him two items: an action figure of the comic-book superhero and a photo of his grandfather. Coker envisioned Cage as a man much like the latter, a decorated U.S. soldier who flew with the Tuskegee Airmen. He told the studio’s head of TV that he wanted his version of the character to be an African American hero who does his job not just for the benefit of other black people, but for everyone.

Needless to say, Marvel liked the idea, and Luke Cage’s eagerly anticipated first season premieres Friday on Netflix. The show comes at a time when comic-book adaptations are everywhere, but very few feature black superheroes. Cage, played by Mike Colter, first made his Netflix debut in the series Jessica Jones as a supporting character and love interest for Jones. As the initial trailers for the show made it clear, Luke Cage was going to be ambitious both in terms of the issues it explored and the ways in which it would update its protagonist. Coker and his creative team looked to current events to ground Cage in reality from a specifically African American perspective.

“I saw an opportunity with this to tell a black story … that was sophisticated and forward-looking and at the same time had a sense of history,” Coker said. He wanted the show to fulfill his “comic-book geek sensibilities” while also digging into subjects such as police brutality, the gentrification of Harlem (where the show takes place), and even the privatization of prisons. One of the most powerful images from the show has been that of the bulletproof Cage in a hoodie beating up the bad guys under a hail of gunfire. The 1972 comic Luke Cage: Hero for Hire also told a distinctly black story—but it was shaped by very different cultural and social pressures that reveal how the original Cage and Coker’s hero are different avatars for their times.

In the 1970s, Cage’s costume wasn’t a hoodie but a metal headband, bracelets, and a chain-link belt—attire inspired by the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft are both most often credited as the first blaxploitation movies; both were also the rare films that featured African American directors and stars. Produced by studios looking to capitalize on black audiences, these movies tapped into a growing feeling of empowerment among many African Americans by presenting the first iconic big-screen black heroes. Characters in these films typically rebelled against the white establishment and were considered more or less antiheroes—especially significant following the turmoil of the 1960s and the civil-rights movement.

But blaxploitation movies did eventually face pushback from some in the African American community, including the Coalition Against blaxploitation, a movement formed by civil-rights groups including the NAACP and the National Urban League. One common complaint was that blaxploitation films painted black characters in a negative light: Movies were mostly set in inner-city environments and featured characters who were hardened criminals, sought casual sex, did or sold drugs, and used violence to achieve wealth and power.

“People would much rather talk about Charles Xavier and Magneto than they would about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.”

Marvel, seeking to diversify its superhero universe and its readership in the early ’70s, looked to Hollywood for lessons. Three white writers, Archie Goodwin, John Romita, Sr., and George Tuska, drew on blaxploitation tropes to create a new kind of black comic-book character. The resulting series, Luke Cage: Hero for Hire, begins with its title character being imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. While behind bars, he volunteers for a super-soldier-like experiment (one that bears similarities to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment) and escapes, relocating to Harlem and starting his own superhero business. With his newfound powers of super strength and bulletproof skin, Cage works to take down the criminal elements that plague his new home, fighting against mobsters such as Cottonmouth, a drug kingpin who has pointy snake-like fangs, and Black Mariah, whose gang used a stolen ambulance to steal dead bodies and the valuables that accompanied them.

Like its inspiration, the Luke Cage comics attracted controversy for playing into black stereotypes: The writers seemed to portray African Americans as caricatures, all the way from the pimp suits to Cage’s flashy costume to his “Hero for Hire” moniker, which implied that his noble actions came with a cost. As David Brothers wrote in a blog post for Marvel’s website, the original Cage “spoke with a funky type of jive, worked in the ghetto, and was a little edgier than a lot of other heroes … Cage is a hustler in the best possible sense of the word.”

As the popularity of blaxploitation started to wane, so did the original Luke Cage, which had been renamed Power Man in the mid ’70s. In an effort to save the series from cancelation, Marvel paired Cage with another crime-fighting hero, Danny Rand, for the Power Man and Iron Fist series. As the years went on and Cage evolved, there were more opportunities for black writers to build on the original comics. The writer David F. Walker and the artist Sanford Greene, for example, are currently producing a new version of Power Man and Iron Fist for Marvel. There’s a growing understanding in both the comic-book industry and in Hollywood about the importance of not only creating black stories, but also of giving more platforms to black storytellers.

Pops and Luke Cage have a chat. Netflix

Coker, of course, is fully aware of his protagonist’s origins. Though he was already a comic-book nerd, having grown up reading the works of Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, and John Byrne in the ’80s, Coker re-read as many of the original Cage comics as he could. With Cage, he knew he had a responsibility, much in the same way his grandfather did to show people what a complex black hero could be. Attempts in the last 10 years to bring African American comic-book superheroes to the big screen have led to supporting roles at best: James “Rhodey” Rhodes’s War Machine appeared in the Iron Man films, Falcon was introduced as Captain America’s sidekick in the two most recent Captain America films, and Black Panther made an extended cameo in Captain America: Civil War. Of course, there’s also the Blade movie series from the 1990s, starring Wesley Snipes as Marvel’s vampire-hunting superhero, but Coker’s Luke Cage is the first with a  lead who gets to fully embrace his roots.

The show explores themes that are uncommon in mainstream entertainment, especially in the world of comic books. It delves into the subject of legacies and fatherhood as a way to address the incarceration of young black men, and the impact that American criminal-justice policies have had on black families. “Fatherhood is something that is personal to me because I didn’t grow up around my father,” Coker says, also acknowledging that the subject has universal appeal. The show features two characters in particular—Pops, a barber-shop owner who acts as a mentor to Cage, urging him to use his powers for good, and the main villain Cottonmouth, who’s raised by a violent mother figure in a crime family.

Fiction, including comic-book stories and television shows, allows people to think deeply about subjects they might want otherwise to avoid in real life, Coker says. “It’s much easier to talk about racism when you’re able to use mutants as a metaphor,” he explains. “People would much rather talk about Charles Xavier and Magneto than they would about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.” His new series makes a deliberate effort to address some of these complex subjects in a way that the original comics didn’t, with the benefit of more than 40 years’ worth of artistic and historical insight. Coker said he sees his interpretation of Cage as more urban western than traditional blaxploitation—more in the vein of Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film Unforgiven than the original Shaft. “The reason that people have been making westerns for a hundred years now,” he says, is because they’re “symbolic of the good and bad in all of us.”

Another Flogging for Wells Fargo

NEWS BRIEF Wells Fargo has agreed to paid more than $4 million in a settlement after federal investigators found the bank illegally repossessed 413 cars owned by American servicemembers over the last seven years.

The Justice Department announced the agreement Thursday, alleging Wells Fargo violated the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which gives certain legal protections to members of the military. The settlement comes after a yearlong investigation. According to investigators:

Wells Fargo had repossessed Army National Guardsman Dennis Singleton’s used car in Hendersonville, North Carolina, while he was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan to fight in Operation Enduring Freedom.  After Wells Fargo repossessed the car, it sold it at a public auction and then tried to collect a deficiency balance of over $10,000 from Singleton and his family.

Investigators found that Wells Fargo failed to obtain necessary court orders to repossess Singleton’s car, along with more than 400 others. A federal court must now approve the settlement, which also restores credit to the servicemembers affected.

Wells Fargo was fined additionally for the scheme, CNN reports:

The bank was fined $20 million more by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for breaking three provisions of the same law by denying members of the military certain banking protections, including capping their interest rates at 6%. Those violations began in 2006, the OCC said.

The bank is already under heavy scrutiny for its fraudulent practice of creating fake bank and credit-card accounts to collect fees. CEO John Stumpf was lambasted by members of the House Financial Services Committee earlier Thursday in his second visit to Capitol Hill in as many weeks. Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling said:

Mr. Stumpf, I have a mortgage with your bank. I wish I didn’t. I wish I was in the position to pay it off because you have broken my trust as you have broken the trust of millions.

Several lawmakers demanded Stumpf step down as CEO. One Democrat even suggested the need to break up the bank, saying it is too large to control.

A Resignation at Yosemite Amid Sexual Harassment Reports

NEWS BRIEF The superintendent of Yosemite National Park has stepped down amid reports of rampant sexual harassment and bullying of female employees.

Don Neubacher has led the California destination for the last six years, and was previously lauded for his efforts to protect and restore major sections of the park. This latest scandal, though, is likely to tarnish his legacy.

In a statement Thursday, Neubacher said:

I regret leaving at this time, but want to do what’s best for Yosemite National Park. It is an iconic area that is world renowned and deserves special attention.

The House Oversight Committee last week held a hearing to address recent allegations of sexual harassment at some of the country’s most popular national parks, including Yosemite. As ABC News reports:

At Yosemite, at least 18 employees have come forward with allegations of harassment or other misconduct so severe that a recent report labeled working conditions at the park “toxic.”

At Yellowstone, officials are investigating complaints of sexual exploitation, intimidation and retaliation.

The complaints follow a report by the Interior Department's inspector general that found male employees at the Grand Canyon preyed on female colleagues, demanded sex and retaliated against women who refused.

At the hearing, Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, said Yosemite’s hostile work environment was “a result of the behavior and conduct of the park’s superintendent,” Neubacher.

Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, said many of these persistent issues were presented to Congress 16 years ago and hostile working environment of national parks has yet to change.

Denial Is a Drama for the Misinformation Age

In 2000, one of the most high-profile libel cases in recent British history came to an end. David Irving, a writer and self-proclaimed historian, had sued the American academic Deborah Lipstadt for describing him as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial” in a 1996 book published by Penguin, which he claimed had ruined his reputation and adversely affected his career. The case seemed odd to many observers, not least because to make his case Irving only had to claim that Lipstadt’s statements were defamatory, not that they were false. “Under British law,” The Guardian wrote, “Prof Lipstadt and her co-defendant were not able to rely solely on truth as a defence.”

Denial, a new movie dramatizing the case, comes at an opportune time. A variety of recent factors including the polarization of the American public’s media habits, the rise of the internet, and the political ascendancy of one of the greatest fibbers of the 21st century have had the effect of making truth seem somehow more subjective, somehow squishier, than ever before. Meanwhile, as the Overton window stretches to breaking point, previously unthinkable ideas and policies have entered the political mainstream. Anti-semitism has reappeared both on the right and on the left. So how, Denial seems to ask, do you litigate anything when truth isn’t enough? How do you fight people intent on spreading misinformation who either won’t accept or don’t care that they’re wrong?

At first glance, the movie, written by the playwright and screenwriter David Hare (Plenty, The Hours) and based on Lipstadt’s book about the trial, seems to be a heroic narrative of one woman’s legal efforts to preserve her integrity and fight for the Holocaust victims and survivors whose experiences are being negated. But the reality of it is much more complex. Lipstadt, played by Rachel Weisz, is a fierce defender of the truth who’s eager to spar with David Irving (Timothy Spall) when he confronts her first in a lecture theater and then with his lawsuit. However, it soon becomes clear that engaging with him isn’t a winning strategy, simply because it’s what he wants: By putting Lipstadt on the stand to be questioned by Irving, or calling any one of the survivors eager to testify, her legal team will legitimize Irving’s claims.

It’s a fascinating moment of clarity in a film that often feels hurried—you tend to wish BBC Films, which co-produced Denial, had made it into a three-part miniseries instead, which would have allowed more space to examine the exhaustive effort that went into discrediting Irving, not to mention Irving himself. Spall, one of the finest character actors currently working, plays the disgraced historian as the worst kind of upper-class monster: He leers at his Caribbean nanny’s breasts, sneers down his nose at Lipstadt, and produces supposed historical facts with a pomposity that perhaps serves him well on the white-genocide lecture circuit, but less so in a court of law. Denial never quite unpicks why Irving is so intent on rewriting history, or how such a dogged and once-respected researcher could be so willfully blind to the evidence all around him.

At the movie’s start, Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University, has just published her 1996 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Giving a talk to promote her book, she’s ambushed in a well-planned protest by Irving and two associates, who film him interrupting her, and offering  $1,000 for anyone who can prove Hitler knew about or planned the Holocaust. Lipstadt refuses to talk to him, stating to the room full of students that she won’t debate Holocaust deniers. You can have opinions about the Holocaust, she says, but not about whether it happened or not: “That isn’t an opinion. That’s a fact.”

The question of why Irving would decide to sue Lipstadt and her publisher is one of the most intriguing unanswered questions of the film. Libel cases in Britain tend to benefit claimants, because any defamatory statements are assumed to be false unless the defendant can prove otherwise. But for Irving, the ploy is a risky one, simply because he’s opening up his work to such meticulous analysis. Lipstadt’s team, led by Anthony Julius (the terrific Andrew Scott), seems to sense that his overwhelming desire is for attention, not to mention the opportunity to put the validity of the Holocaust on trial. Thus, to Lipstadt’s deep frustration, they refuse to do so, focusing simply on the defamation charges. “You can stand up, look the devil in the eye ... that is very satisfying. And risk losing,” her barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) tells her. “Or stay seated, button your lip. Win. A real act of self-denial.”

If Denial has a message for 2016, it’s that the best way to deal with liars, hucksters, con men, and bigots is to refuse to acknowledge them.

It’s at moments like these that Hare’s script is at its most theatrical. The lesson Denial teaches subverts so many heroic narratives about squeaky wheels: Only by quieting down and playing the establishment game can Lipstadt win. The movie, directed by Mick Jackson (whose career includes projects as diverse as Temple Grandin and The Bodyguard), is mostly similarly restrained, although it indulges in cliched shots of Deborah out jogging, gazing mawkishly at a statue of the Celtic warrior princess Boudicea, pushing through the pain. Its finest and most moving moments are when Lipstadt and Rampton go to Auschwitz on a research mission, where the camera lingers on the piles of rubble that cover a destroyed gas chamber. A single animated flashback during the trial offers a jarring, visceral reminder of the atrocity Irving is trying to undermine.

If Denial has a message for political spectators in 2016, it’s that the best way to deal with liars, hucksters, con men, and bigots is to refuse to acknowledge them—to cast them off into a corner and let them conspiracy-theorize their way into hysteria. It’s both a pipe dream (never has it been easier to broadcast your own particular brand of craziness to an infinite audience) and perhaps the best hope for moving toward a slightly more rational and civil public square. To look the devils in the eye, to legitimize the damage that men like Irving have long sought to impose on the world, is to imbue them with credence and gravity they have done nothing to deserve.

A White House Tribute at Last

In 1936, 18 African American athletes left the Berlin Olympics with 14 medals, a quarter of the total medals won by the U.S. team that summer. They returned to a segregated United States, where the American public mostly celebrated their victories—but their president didn't.

“Hitler didn’t snub me; it was our president who snubbed me,” said Jesse Owens, the 23-year-old track star who won four gold medals, of Franklin Roosevelt. “The president didn’t even send a telegram.”

Eighty years later, the athletes—16 men and two women—received their overdue recognition by a U.S. president Thursday when their relatives visited the White House for an event honoring the U.S. team at this year's Rio games.  

“It wasn’t just Jesse. It was other African American athletes in the middle of Nazi Germany under the gaze of Adolf Hitler that put a lie to notions of racial superiority—whooped ’em—and taught them a thing or two about democracy and taught them a thing or two about the American character,” President Obama said Thursday.

The other athletes were Dave Albritton, John Brooks, James Clark, Cornelius Johnson, Willis Johnson, Howell King, James LuValle, Ralph Metcalfe, Art Oliver, Tidye Pickett, Fritz Pollard Jr., Mack Robinson, Louise Stokes, John Terry, Archie Williams, Jack Wilson, and John Woodruff. Eighteen relatives attended the White House event and shook the president’s hand, according to the AP.

Obama also praised Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who were in attendance, for their silent protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. The athletes, who won gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter run, each raised a glove-covered fist on the winner’s podium while the national anthem played, an act that resulted in their expulsion from the games. Obama said Thursday the controversial move “woke folks up and created greater opportunity for those that followed.”

After the 1936 games, Owens gained national attention. The lives of the other athletes, largely forgotten to history, were the focus of Olympic Pride, American Prejudice, a documentary by Deborah Riley Draper released in July. “They were Olympic athletes when they were on the medal stand,” Draper told NPR in an interview last month. “When they came back home to a segregated America, they came back to being Negroes.”

John Woodruff, who won gold in the 800-meter run, recalled this experience in a 1996 interview published on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website. “It was very definitely a special feeling in winning the gold medal and being a black man. We destroyed his [Hitler’s] master race theory, whenever we start winning those gold medals,” Woodruff said. “So I was very proud of that achievement and I was very happy, for myself as an individual, for my race, and for my country.”

But when he returned to the U.S., Woodruff was reminded of his own country's lack of acceptance of blacks:

After the Olympics, we had a track meet to run at Annapolis, at the Naval Academy. Now here I am, an Olympic champion, and they told the coach that I couldn't run. I couldn't come. So I had to stay home, because of discrimination. That let me know just what the situation was. Things hadn't changed. Things hadn't changed.

Owens later received White House recognition in 1976, when Gerald Ford presented the athlete with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award given to a civilian. Owens died in 1980. His granddaughter Marlene Dorch, who was among the relatives at the White House Thursday, told the AP Obama’s recognition would make Owen “so happy.”

In his praise for this year’s Olympians, Obama began with gymnast Simone Biles, shot putter Michelle Carter, and swimmer Simone Manuel, all of whom are black.

“Imagine what it means for a young girl or a young boy who sees somebody who looks like them doing something and being the best at what they do,” he said. “There's no kid in American who can't look at our Olympic team and see themselves somewhere.”

American Honey Is a New Indie Classic

Star (Sasha Lane), the effervescent, snarling, teenaged heroine of American Honey, is aptly named. A total unknown discovered while partying on spring break, Lane gives a brilliant performance that grounds this cinematic odyssey worth every minute of its nearly three-hour running time. A bold, often abrasive statement about life on the fringes of society in the parts of the country still ravaged by recession, American Honey could have been patronizing or reductive. Instead, thanks to Lane’s natural magnetism and the director Andrea Arnold’s remarkable empathy for her subjects, it’s required viewing.

Arnold is a British director who excels at uncompromising storytelling. Her protagonist Star has something in common with Mia, the isolated, impoverished teenager in her 2009 film Fish Tank, and even with the aloof, angry Heathcliff of her 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But one of Arnold’s biggest achievements with American Honey is how effortlessly she leapfrogs across the pond; her emphasis on naturalism and quirky detail, rather than overly knotty plotting, gives American Honey the slice-of-life feeling it sorely needs to work. As Star is swept up by a crew of drifters and runaways, tearing around America’s South and Midwest in a white van trying to sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door, the ultimate success or failure of her new venture seems beside the point. Arnold dunks the viewer’s head into the gnarly, frightening soup of Star’s life, but still manages to inspire nothing short of exhilaration.

The roughest part of American Honey is its opening. Star’s miserable life in Texas, dumpster-diving with her younger siblings and being sexually abused by her drunken stepfather, is a concentrated dose of unhappy (albeit plausible) stereotypes. But during a trip to a K-Mart, with Rihanna’s “We Found Love” blaring over the speakers, Star glimpses the unforgettably ridiculous sight of Shia LaBeouf, sporting a ponytail and crisp dress pants, gyrating on a checkout counter. In another film, the heroine would flee for the exit, but American Honey’s camera repeatedly sears the most bizarre sights onto the brain, turning trash into wonder.

LaBeouf plays Jake, the leader of a “mag crew” of misfits rolling from town to town with little in mind beyond having fun and making a few quick bucks. The once-wayward star invests Jake with the kind of freaky, charismatic volatility you can’t take your eyes off. A squirrelly, fun-loving hothead, Jake fuels his crew with the kind of renegade energy needed to keep up such a pointless gig. He’s paired with Krystal (Riley Keough), a laconic, frightening den mother who exists to balance out his mania. Star, who’s clearly in search of some sort of authority figure to push back against, gloms onto them immediately.

This is a film with an intense understanding of the environment it’s exploring.

The rest of the film, which runs for 163 minutes, is essentially without plot; Arnold tries to get the viewer in Star’s immediate headspace rather than asking questions about her uncertain future. She and the mag crew bounce around to contemporary tunes, largely hip-hop and country, in their van as it streaks across America’s flailing industrial towns, snaking up from Texas to South Dakota. Star clashes with Krystal and falls for Jake, getting drawn into a romantic maelstrom that feels as foolish as it does inevitable. Meanwhile, her efforts to sell magazines lead to encounters that feel like precarious mini-adventures perpetually on the verge of turning dangerous.

Arnold and her cinematographer Robbie Ryan photograph this unfolding chaos serenely: American Honey is Spring Breakers shot through with Terrence Malick, wringing poeticism from the sight of two gummy bears stuck to a car window as scenes of dilapidation roll by. Arnold’s female gaze feels present and crucial in moments both terrifying (Star goes on a “date” with an oil-field worker who pays $1,000 for the privilege) and erotic (a romantic confrontation at a blasted, windswept farm). The film’s sex scenes, when they arrive, are arresting flurries of passion, and each one has an effect on the group’s power dynamics. Arnold wants Star’s decision-making to be aimless, but not without consequence. This is a film with an intense understanding of the environment it’s exploring; No impulsive decision goes unanswered, even if the answers are sometimes as frustrating as Star’s constantly roiling emotions.

Rather than offering a hectoring treatise on poverty in the U.S., American Honey withholds judgment at every moment. Jake has a predatory quality, and Krystal an undeniably cruel streak, but neither is fully monstrous. Star’s inherent goodness surfaces at times, but seems nonexistent at others, and the people she meets are similarly hard to read at face value. Arnold researched the film for years by traveling around the country with “Mag Crews,” and populated the film with non-professional actors she met along the way, including Lane. That deep investment in granular authenticity shines, inviting the viewer to simply get swept up in the journey, rather than sweat the details of what it means. American Honey is a long journey well worth taking, a singularly magical experience that’ll echo in the brains of its viewers for months no matter what they think of it.

After Cosby, California Changes Its Rape Laws

NEWS BRIEF California has eliminated its statute of limitations for rape and other sexual-assault charges—in a major change to its criminal code.

The measure, proposed by State Senator Connie Leyva, a Democrat from Chino, eliminated the state’s 10-year window on prosecuting a broad set of sex-related crimes. Governor Jerry Brown signed the measure into law Wednesday alongside dozens of other bills.

“[Brown’s] signature of SB 813 tells every rape and sexual assault victim in California that they matter and that, regardless of when they are ready to come forward, they will always have an opportunity to seek justice in a court of law,” Leyva said in a statement. “Rapists should never be able to evade legal consequences simply because an arbitrary time limit has expired.”

SB 813, along with similar bills proposed in other states, emerged after more than 50 women accused comedian Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting them over a four-decade period. Cosby has repeatedly denied any criminal wrongdoing.

Because most of the allegations only became public decades after Cosby’s alleged crimes, state laws prevented criminal charges against him in most jurisdictions. The Hollywood Reporter has more:

Cosby has repeatedly denied the sexual abuse allegations made by dozens of women nationwide. He is facing just one criminal case stemming from sex abuse. A trial is set to begin in June in Pennsylvania.

[…]

In June, Colorado doubled the amount of time sexual assault victims have to seek charges, from 10 to 20 years, a decision also prompted by the Cosby allegations. Nevada extended its time limit from four to 20 years last year after testimony by one of Cosby's accusers.

Despite his role inspiring California’s legislation, the changes won’t affect Cosby himself. The new law goes into effect on January 1, 2017, and does not apply retroactively.

The U.S.-Russia Spat Over a Syrian Cease-Fire

NEWS BRIEF Russia dismissed Thursday a U.S. warning that talks between the two nations over Syria would cease if the bombardment by Russian and Syrian forces on Aleppo persisted, and vowed to continue to support the Syrian government’s latest campaign to reclaim the rebel-held areas of the city.  

The rejection marks a significant setback in relations between American and Russian leaders over the Syrian civil war; earlier this month, the two countries negotiated a week-long cease-fire between troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and rebel forces. The agreement collapsed following charges of violations by both sides.

Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, proposed Thursday a “48-hour pause” in fighting to allow humanitarian aid to reach the besieged city, but rejected a longer cease-fire on the grounds it would “ensure that terrorist groups can carry out activities to rearm, rest and regroup,” according to Interfax.

John Kerry, the American secretary of state, expressed doubt over whether a diplomatic solution could be reached in the foreseeable future.

“We’re on the verge of suspending the discussion,” Kerry said Thursday at the Washington Ideas Forum, presented by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute. “It’s irrational in the context of the kind of bombing taking place to be sitting there and trying to take things seriously.”

The U.S. threat to dissolve talks with Moscow, issued Wednesday by the State Department, follows intensified air strikes in rebel-held eastern Aleppo that left two of the area’s largest hospitals out of service—a significant blow to the besieged part of the city where an estimated 250,000 people and 30 doctors remain. The strikes are part of the Syrian government’s latest offensive to one of the last major rebel strongholds in the country, which, if successful, will mark a significant turning point in the country’s five-year civil war.

Though Russia reaffirmed its interest to continue talks with the U.S., there remains little motivation for the Assad regime to relent on its campaign to regain full control of Aleppo, which has been divided between government and rebel control since 2012. The Syrian government has managed to retake much of the territory it lost since the civil war first began and, as my colleague Krishnadev Calamur noted,“Assad is now more firmly entrenched as Syria’s president than at any time since the civil war began in 2011, and he has little incentive to stop the fighting.”

Lewis and Clarke Get Their Day in Court

After a five-year legal voyage, Lewis and Clarke have arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The justices said Thursday they would hear their case and seven others in the upcoming term, which starts next week. The eight-justice Court has largely avoided taking on any blockbuster cases since the death of Antonin Scalia in February. But some of the disputes it’s agreed to hear could have far-reaching outcomes.

Lewis v. Clarke, which will likely become famous for its name alone, may also have major implications for Native American tribes. The dispute began in 2011 when William Clarke, a limousine driver who works for the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority, crashed into Brian and Michelle Lewis’s car in Norwalk, Connecticut. He was transporting patrons from the Mohegan Sun Casino at the time.

The Lewises initially filed a personal-injury lawsuit against both Clarke and the Mohegan tribe itself. Typically, this would be a lost cause. Native American tribes, like the states, the federal government, and foreign powers, are protected in U.S. courts by sovereign immunity. Generally speaking, this legal doctrine shields tribes and governments—as well as their employees when carrying out official business—from lawsuits unless those governments waive the immunity for themselves.

In an attempt to circumvent this, the Lewises dropped their claims against the tribe and amended their lawsuit to target Clarke in his individual capacity. Clarke invoked sovereign immunity to dismiss the lawsuit anyways. The trial court refused, but the Connecticut Supreme Court sided with him, ruling that he was shielded because he was acting as a tribal employee when the crash occurred.

Allowing that decision to stand “will leave many persons who have been injured by tribal employees without any remedy at all,” the Lewises told the justices in their petition. Clarke disagrees. In his reply to their petition, he argued the Lewises should have sued him in the Mohegan tribe’s Gaming Disputes Court, which hears claims against tribal employees, instead of trying to undermine tribal sovereign immunity in state courts.

At risk, Clarke warns, is a central pillar of the Mohegan tribe’s right to self-government. “If sanctioned, it will result in a stampede away from the Mohegan tribal courts,” Clarke told the justices in his reply. “A functioning court system is a critical aspect of sovereignty; reducing the efficacy of the Mohegan court system undermines the Tribe’s sovereignty.”

Another case accepted by the Court on Thursday could also indirectly affect a high-profile Native American issue. Lee v. Tam revolves around the Slants, a rock group based in Portland, Oregon, and their efforts to copyright their own name. The Slants’ members, who are all Asian Americans, say the name is intended to reclaim and undermine a deeply offensive ethnic slur.

When founder Simon Tam attempted to trademark the band’s name in 2011, the Patent and Trademark Office denied the request, citing a clause in federal trademark law that prohibits the office from registering trademarks that “may disparage … persons, living or dead.” Tam sued on First Amendment grounds, arguing the disparagement clause violated his right to free speech. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals agreed and struck it down.

If the Supreme Court upholds that decision, the largest beneficiary could be the Washington Redskins football team. In 2014, the PTO cancelled six of their trademarks, some of which dated back to the 1960s, for disparaging Native Americans. The team sued on First Amendment grounds, but a federal district court sided with the PTO and upheld the disparagement clause. Their appeal is currently pending before the Fourth Circuit.

The other six cases address a wide variety of legal questions. McClane v. EEOC focuses on the level of deference by federal courts when reviewing Equal Employment Opportunity Commission subpoenas. In Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, the Court will consider the scope of a federal law that reimburses school districts for educating children with disabilities. Nelson v. Colorado weighs how a Colorado statute reimburses defendants who are proven innocent. Expressions Hair Designs v. Schneiderman challenges New York’s credit-card surcharge fee under the First Amendment. Goodyear Tire v. Haegar will resolve a circuit split over attorney-misconduct fees and sanctions. And Lynch v. Dimayo will determine if the definition of “crime of violence” is unconstitutionally vague in a federal deportation statute.

Overall, the year ahead will be relatively quieter than in years past for the short-handed Court. The eight justices have already agreed to hear high-profile cases on the Fair Housing Act, state funding of religious organizations, and death sentences for defendants with mental illnesses in the upcoming term. But neither hot-button political battles nor blockbuster constitutional debates can be found on its docket this term—a clear sign of the even split between its conservative and liberal wings.

How Pop Culture Tells Women to Shut Up

In the early days of the United States, colonists imported from England a set of regulations that were ostensibly meant to maintain the public peace. They were called, collectively, “common scold” laws, and they targeted women—it was almost always women—who had a habit of quarreling, too loudly, with their neighbors.

A woman who found herself on the wrong side of a scold law might be made to wear, as punishment, a scold’s bridle—an iron mask that fit over the head and depressed the tongue, to prevent her from further speech; more commonly, though, she would be dunked, ceremonially, into cold water (the better “to cool her immoderate heat”). She would be, as one 18th-century summary stipulated,

sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking stool, which in the Saxon language signifies the scolding stool; though now it is frequently corrupted into ducking stool, because the residue of the judgment is, that, when she is so placed therein, she shall be plunged in the water for her punishment.

It’s easy to shake our heads, today, at this relic of monstrous legalism. How awful things were back then! People were so barbaric! It’s less easy to do that, though, when you consider how common the “common scold” mentality still is, even in our current age of relative enlightenment and egalitarianism. The Puritanical discomfort with the “troublesome woman” manifests, in miasmic form, in American culture’s continued policing of women’s voices, figurative and literal: in every panicked discussion of vocal fry and up-speak, in every dismissal of Hillary Clinton’s feminine timbre as “scolding” and “shrill.” It stays with us, too, in the policing of women’s bodies, and clothing choices, and sexual practices. It’s with us every time a woman’s behavior is dismissed as “slutty,” every time her emotions are dismissed as “crazy,” every time a guy suggests that she would be so much more pleasing if she smiled. It is with us every time the man who might become the next president of the United States refers to a woman as a “pig,” or a “dog,” or, when specificity fails, a “disgusting animal.” And every time his comments are met with feverish applause.

Hillary, punished for her ambition, is part of an old story. Everything was lovely, after all, until Eve got hungry.

The “common scold” of the 17th century is present, in other words, every time a woman of the 21st is punished for asserting herself in the public sphere: every time she—whether running for president or simply running her life—is dismissed for being too brash, and too ambitious, and too inconvenient, and above all too loud. As the journalist Sady Doyle argues in her fantastic debut book, Trainwreck: “A woman must be perfect, or not be anything at all, to encounter fame without being shamed or scarred.”

Doyle’s nominal focus is, as the book’s title suggests, the “trainwreck”: the woman who has a public meltdown or a similar (and similarly public) fall from grace. Think Britney Spears. Or Whitney Houston. Or Miley Cyrus. Or Amy Winehouse, or Monica Lewinsky, or Princess Diana, or Judy Garland, or Billie Holiday, or Marilyn Monroe, or Sylvia Plath. Their falls vary, in their distance and their demeanor; what they share, though, is that they function as “photo negatives of acceptable femininity.” These celebrities’ downfalls announce all the things—overly sexual, overly emotional, underly apologetic—that the culture of the contemporary moment does not want its women to be. They serve as warnings, essentially, of the dangers of feminine assertion. Hillary, repeatedly punished for her ambition? That’s just one more chapter in an extremely old story. Everything was lovely, after all, until Eve got hungry.

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So while the trainwreck, as Doyle frames it, is fundamentally about breakdown, it is also about something simpler and much more, well, broad: a woman whose desires chafe against her times. Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and arguably the founder of modern feminism, was in her own age considered a trainwreck: She had several sexual partners and, as a result, a child out of wedlock. So, too, was Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre’s author had her own version of Rochester, but one who treated her terribly—and she was devastated by the breakup.

Doyle’s team of trainwrecks includes many other women whose names have been silenced, largely, by history. Theroigne de Mericourt, who tried to write women’s rights into the cause of the French revolution (and who was, for that, finally locked away in a mental institution). Harriet Jacobs, a former slave who was forced to write pseudonymously—and whose stories of what she experienced in captivity were so gruesome that readers assumed her work to be fiction. Louise Augustine Gleizes, a teenager who, in late-19th-century France, was diagnosed with “hysteria” by the then-renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Gleizes, too, was incarcerated as a lunatic—an extremely effective means of literally shutting women up—and put on display for the Parisian masses, neatly anticipating Britney Spears’s dutifully TMZ-ed breakdown. After Charcot’s death, though, Gleizes left the sanitarium. Suddenly quite sane, she went on to befriend Marie Curie, and to assist the doctor in the lab work that would go on to win a Nobel Prize.

History, to be sure, is full of people of both genders who are forgotten and flawed and frightening to their contemporaries. The problem, though, is that our romanticized sense of passion and purpose tends, still, to rely on a gaping double standard. David Foster Wallace, Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh—they all struggled with challenges that, were they embodied by women, very likely would have gotten them written off as sanitarium-worthy. Imagine what we’d think of Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything’s puppy-eyed and also vaguely stalker-y hero, had he been a woman. Or recall all those “Rihanna Deserved It” t-shirts. Or Harold Bloom wondering whether Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” is best described as a “tantrum.” Or an actual U.S. senator asking Anita Hill, in the course of her testimony against Clarence Thomas and without a hint of irony, “Are you a scorned woman?” Or all the lawyers who still rely on some version of the “nuts and sluts” defense in their trial work—and who keep doing so, of course, because the defense proves extremely effective.

Back in the ’90s, Hillary and Monica had one thing in common: Both of them were blamed for Bill’s cheating.

Beyoncé, Taylor, Rihanna, Angelina, Shonda—these women are, for the most part, deeply in control of their own stories and images.

“Patriarchy,” for all its blunt ubiquity as a term, still retains an element of magic: At once everywhere and nowhere, it describes not just a pervasive cultural infrastructure, but also something that many people simply do not—will not—believe in. It’s a myth of the angry feminists. A hobby-horse of the social justice warriors. A scapegoat. A lie. It deserves either widened eyes or rolled ones—and which one will depend entirely on one’s perspective. Trainwreck will very likely join the feminist canon, but that is, in part, a pity: Its preachings, ideally, would have an audience far larger than the choir. The book may be framed as an exploration of the dramatic downfalls of lady celebrities; it is in scope, though, about all the ways American culture punishes women for the soft crime of self-assertion. It doubles as a kind of legalistic indictment. It is a book-length proof of patriarchy.

The book’s primary weakness, in that sense, is also the best reason it offers for hope. Doyle pulls many of her examples from the American culture of the early 2000s: Paris’s sex tape, Tara’s nip slip, Whitney’s drug-addled demise, Britney’s head-shaving episode. (As the AP—yep, the Associated Press—informed its reporters in 2008, “Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal.”) And yet the female celebrities who are ascendant today are dominant precisely because they have studiously avoided, for the most part, the Spearsian style of public downfall. Beyoncé, Taylor, Rihanna, Angelina, Shonda—these women are, for the most part, deeply in control of their own stories and images. There may be tiny cracks in the veneer—the Met Ball elevator, Kimye, Chris Brown—and yet, overall, they serve less as icons of fallen femininity than of what may well be the new regime: one in which women set their own agendas. Britney, Doyle’s iconic embodiment of trainwreck, recently performed at the Video Music Awards that were dominated by Beyoncé and Rihanna; the paragon of early-aughts celebrity seemed out of step, out of touch, and just, in every sense, out of it. She is no longer the role model of record.

And, as we settle into the 21st century, it’s refreshingly difficult to imagine one of our current role models following the path that Spears has. The expectations of perfection on those women’s shoulders may carry their own weighty challenges; they also, however, suggest a culture in which women are celebrated for speaking, rather than punished for it. The trainwreck, Doyle writes, is suggestive of “the many ways the world convinces women to steal speech from themselves.” But there is nothing silent about Beyoncé. Kim will find a way to have the last word. And while Hillary has known every modern manifestation of the scold’s bridle, she is also, now, the Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States. Trainwreck is a rich analysis that will, ideally, soon prove to be out of date in a world in which “patriarchy” is disbelieved not on the grounds that it has never existed, but on the grounds that it has lost its power.

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