Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 71

The Mass Shooting at a Washington Shopping Mall

Updated at 11:30 p.m. ET

NEWS BRIEF Five people were fatally shot at a shopping mall in Burlington, Washington. The killer left the scene, but state police said they arrested a suspect on Saturday night.

Gunman captured tonight by authorities, Details forthcoming, Press Conference tonight at 1800 Continental Pl. Time TBA

— Sgt. Mark Francis (@wspd7pio) 25 September 2016

The shooting happened in the cosmetics area of a Macy’s department store at the Cascade Mall. A state patrol sergeant, Mark Francis, told reporters that four women died at the scene, and later tweeted that a fifth victim, a man, had died from his injuries in a local hospital.

Eleven search teams scoured the mall, the sergeant said, some with dogs, going store by store.

A Washington State Patrol spokesman tweeted a photo of the suspect, who has yet to be identified.

Here is the shooter. We believe just one shooter. Notify authorities if you see him. Armed with rifle. pic.twitter.com/GXeWCPYnx5

— Sgt. Mark Francis (@wspd7pio) 24 September 2016

Friday night's shooting happened just less than a week after an earlier mass attack at an American shopping mall. Last Saturday, a 22-year-old man stabbed nine people at a St. Cloud, Minnesota, mall before being shot and killed by an off-duty police officer. ISIS media outlets claimed responsibility for the attack.

Law-enforcement officials have not linked the shooting in Washington to terrorism, and the FBI's Seattle office tweeted they had no information that additional attacks in the state are imminent.

At this time, #FBI has no information to suggest additional attacks planned in WA state. Assisting with intel review & manpower #SkagitDEM

— FBI Seattle (@FBISeattle) 24 September 2016

Two Glimpses Into Keith Scott's Death

Keith Scott had his hands at his side when a Charlotte, North Carolina, police officer fatally shot him four times, according to footage from a police dashboard camera.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department released Saturday clips of body-cam and dashboard footage taken during Scott’s shooting Tuesday after days of protests in downtown Charlotte over the killing.

The two clips offer an incomplete glimpse into the encounter. Footage from the body-cam of one of the officers runs a minute long. Scott himself is shown for only a fraction of a second in it. During the shooting itself, the lens is obscured by the officer’s neck. The audio is also missing from the first 25 seconds, including when the gunshots are fired.

The footage can be seen below; viewer discretion is recommended.

Footage from the dashboard camera, lasting about two minutes, captures the shooting itself at a distance of a few paces. In it, Scott is seen exiting his vehicle with his hands at his sides and slowly backing away from one of the officers. Suddenly, four shots ring out, and Scott crumples to the pavement.

You can watch the footage below; viewer discretion is recommended since it shows Scott’s death.

At a news conference Saturday, Chief Kerr Putney said the officers first approached Scott because they noticed he had marijuana in his truck. Putney also released photos of a gun recovered from the scene and a marijuana joint. The Charlotte Observer has more:

Officers were going to continue on their original mission until an officer spotted a weapon in the vehicle, Putney said.

“It was not lawful for him to possess a firearm,” Putney said. “There was a crime he committed and the gun exacerbated the situation.”

Officer Brentley Vinson, who fired four shots at Scott, was not wearing a body cam so his visual perspective was not part of the footage. Putney said that body cameras are being rolled out across the department and not all tactical officers have them yet.

It’s not clear from the footage whether Scott was holding a gun. Scott’s family has claimed he was holding a book instead. As my colleague Krishnadev Calamur noted last week, both the police and Scott’s family have different narratives about what happened in those fateful moments on September 20.

Scott’s death touched off a week of demonstrations in downtown Charlotte, pitting police in riot gear against angry citizens. During the protests on Wednesday, a civilian shot and killed 26-year-old Justin Carr. Police arrested a man in connection with Carr’s death on Friday.

Jeremy Corbyn Wins Again

NEWS BRIEF Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, has decisively won the leadership battle that had fractured the British left since the Brexit referendum in June.

The 67-year-old opposition leader sailed to victory with 61.8 percent of the vote from Labour members, party officials announced in Liverpool on Saturday. Owen Smith, a relative moderate and a former member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, received 38.2 percent of the vote.

Speaking after the results were announced, Corbyn made a bid for unity after a summer of heated clashes between himself and most of the party’s members of Parliament.

“We have much more in common than that which divides us,” he told party members. “Let’s wipe that slate clean from today and get on with the work we’ve got to do as a party together.”

Corbyn emerged from the contest with a broad mandate from all three tiers of Labour’s base. 59 percent of the votes cast by full party members backed him, as did 60.2 percent of those cast by members of the trade unions affiliated with Labour. Among the party’s registered supporters, the lowest tier of membership where Corbyn’s support is also strongest, he captured a commanding 69.9 percent of the votes.

Saturday’s results underscore the extent to which Corbyn has remade the Labour Party in his own image. A veteran backbencher, Corbyn’s hard-left stances—and his willingness to express them in the House of Commons—often exasperated the Blair and Brown governments. His outspokenness also made him a hero of the grassroots British left, which joined Labour in record numbers during the 2015 leadership contest and propelled him to an upset victory.

But his leadership never sat comfortably with more moderate members of Labour, including many of its sitting MPs. Some opponents, like former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his allies, criticized him on ideological grounds. Others feared a leftward lurch would send the party back to the electoral wilderness of the Thatcher years, in which Labour lost four consecutive elections before its centrist turn under Blair.

Their frustrations reached a climax in June after the British electorate narrowly voted to leave the European Union. Corbyn, a longtime critic of the EU, publicly backed the Remain campaign but was accused by Labour MPs of halfheartedly campaigning for it. The Leave campaign eventually won higher-than-expected levels of support from traditional Labour strongholds.

Within two days of the results, Corbyn sacked Hilary Benn, his Shadow Foreign Secretary, after Benn began organizing a rebellion again Corbyn. The ouster triggered a cascade of resignations from the shadow cabinet and culminated in a vote of no confidence among party MPs. Corbyn lost, 172 to 40, but refused to resign, leading his rivals to seek a party-wide leadership ballot instead.

Corbyn’s next challenge may be even more formidable. Britain’s next general election isn’t scheduled until 2020, but Prime Minister Theresa May, a Conservative who took office after winning her party’s own leadership battle, could call one even earlier, perhaps to secure a popular mandate ahead of the Brexit negotiations expected to begin next year.

If she does, Labour could face an uphill battle to retake Downing Street. British opinion polls have given May and her Conservatives a large, consistent lead over Corbyn and Labour in a hypothetical election match-up.

Brangelina and Celebrity Memoirs: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Brangelina Is Dead; Long Live Angelina

Anne Helen Petersen | Buzzfeed

“Increasingly, Jolie’s vision of have-it-all-ness felt less disruptive, more desirable. She seemed to have softened. She wasn’t playing minxes anymore. She was into directing; she had a double mastectomy, and wielded what could have been spun as the end of her sexual potency into a narrative of cancer awareness. She had no publicist and rarely wore makeup, which combined to make her seem even more authentic, even less manipulative.”

Edward Albee Saw Life As a Cosmic Joke

Jesse Green | Vulture

“He often told me, because I refused to believe him, that he did not so much write his plays as transcribe them from his imagination; he said he would find himself ‘knocked up’ with an idea, which then, after a few months’ or years’ gestation, he would birth full-grown … The discovery of his gayness was thus tantamount to living openly as a homosexual; the idea made it so, and prevented any backtracking.”



Making Sense of Modern Pornography

Katrina Forrester | The New Yorker

“Whether you see porn as just another sector disrupted by the internet or as a still powerful engine of profit-driven exploitation depends on a thornier set of debates that shape how pornography is understood. To talk about porn purely in terms of costs and incentives is not, as Tarrant suggests, neutral. Even to stress the work involved is a political move.”

A New Literary Genre Critiques the Most Unbelievable Part of Life in China—Reality

Adrienne Matei | Quartz

“Like magic realism, the ultra-unreal reflects the experience of daily life in communities often dominated by centralized powers, wherein bizarre events become normalized. However, rather than introducing actual magic into its narratives, the ultra-unreal focuses on real-life events, not supernatural occurrences.”

What Becomes a Legend Most?

Nell Beram | The Awl

“But beyond the death of modesty and the publishing industry’s understandable campaign to sustain itself, there’s another force pushing for the celebrity memoir today: Celebrities tend to write (or ‘write’) when their careers are waning or at a low ebb — and note that we have an unprecedented number of celebrities now, what with reality television and Instagram and the rest of it.”

The Talk Show That Time Forgot

Rob Harvilla | The Ringer

“[Conan O’Brien’s] historical instincts are admirable, until you watch him religiously for a week or two, at which point you might conclude that distilling hour-long late-night talk shows down to the funniest 90 seconds and watching them on the internet the following morning is one of the best ideas millennials ever had. Conan just wasn’t made for these times, which is a scathing indictment of the times.”

How Comic Novelist Colson Whitehead Found His Way to the Grim Underground Railroad

Christian Lorentzen | Slate

“Whitehead hasn’t only put a check on his comic talent but also placed an almost impossible challenge to his ability to detect moral ambiguities: nothing ambiguous about the institution of slavery not quite two centuries since its abolition. Yet without resembling any of Whitehead’s previous books as a whole, it partakes of aspects of them all.”

The Camus Investigation

Ryu Spaeth | The New Republic

“This inversion of his sympathies, this upside-down world, would seem to belie the notion that the depiction of the Arabs in The Stranger reveals Camus’s true feelings toward Arabs—that they are incidental, less than human. In fact, Kaplan shows that Camus’s treatment of the Arabs was very deliberate.”

Goat Captures the Dark Psychology of Frat Bros

The first two minutes of the new drama Goat offer a nerve-wracking prologue. Shirtless fraternity brothers jump up and down in super-slow motion, screaming at the edge of a forest. Their mouths hang open while their fists pump, and the camera pans across the veins in their faces, capturing their rage. It’s a horrifying image, and the message seems obvious: These young men are like animals. But the sequence also poses a troubling question: What, exactly, made them that way?

It’s a question that Goat, released Friday, seeks to answer. The title of the director Andrew Neel’s latest movie refers to what the fictional Phi Sigma Mu fraternity brothers call pledges about to undergo an initiation period known as “hell week.” As the movie makes clear, the hazing is really torture—physical and psychological—and involves feces, duct tape, animal cages, (lots of) alcohol, and sexual humiliation. At the center of the film is Brad (Ben Schnetzer), a freshman who chooses to endure this brutality, if only to join his older brother Brett (Nick Jonas), and reclaim the manhood he feels he lost during an attack the month before.

When the movie premiered at Sundance this year, Neel described Goat as not exactly a screed against fraternity culture so much as a critique of modern masculinity. Indeed, the film illustrates the inability of its young male characters to express themselves outside of an all-important binary (“Are you a man, or are you a pussy?”), one that’s dangerously reinforced with sexual conquests and abuse, feats of strength, violence, and submission. That viewers witness all this uncensored behavior in Goat, based on Brad Land’s memoir of the same name, is a rare pop-cultural moment. For decades, Hollywood has portrayed fraternity culture and hazing as ripe subjects for light-hearted comedies. Goat stands out simply by virtue of being a dark drama and for challenging the supposed innocence of traditions that so often hurt the young men who take part in them.

Only recently have documentaries begun to explore the uglier side of fraternity life. Earlier this year, a BBC documentary series Frat Boys: Inside America’s Fraternities provided a window into the kind of data reported in 2013 by Bloomberg, which cited more than 60 fraternity-related deaths since 2005. The National Study of Student Hazing, released in 2014, found that 73 percent of students involved in a fraternity or sorority experience at least one kind of hazing. In 2015’s The Hunting Ground, which looked specifically at sexual assault on college campuses, one interviewee described frats as “unregulated bars” serving doctored drinks—a segue for the film’s report that enrolled fraternity men are three times more likely than other men to commit rape on a college campus.

But such documentaries can still come across to viewers as polemics, compared to the narratives Hollywood has peddled for years. Fictional movies about the fraternity experience have long operated within the safer comedy genre—Animal House, PCU, National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, Old School, Accepted, and Neighbors. They perpetuate stories about men with arrested development, raging against preppy standards and elitist institutions or fighting for their right not to be academically inclined. Even if some films, like Revenge of the Nerds, ultimately condemn frat culture, they still offer fairly lighthearted portrayals of the rituals involved: being doused with cold water and plastered with chicken feathers, surprise wakeup calls, and naming ceremonies. Those in charge of the mayhem often come across as caricaturist villains, and their victims rarely appear traumatized. These movies acknowledged that hazing happened, but often framed it as a form of social bonding, or else used it as a narrative device to draw the character’s palatable arc from outsider to brother.

In Brad’s mind, this formalized suffering is how he will reestablish his manhood after his attack.

Perhaps that’s why Goat feels so new. Unlike its predecessors, the movie cares less about plot and more about the personal demons of its main character, Brad. The movie begins the summer before Brad’s first year in college when two men kidnap Brad off the street at night and force him to drive into the middle of nowhere. They proceed to beat him mercilessly and leave him nearly unconscious. The post-traumatic stress Brad suffers after this experience establishes him as a particularly vulnerable character even before school begins.

Brad’s ultimate decision to pledge Phi Sigma Mu thus seems at once foolish and understandable. While Goat certainly paints the brothers in a negative light, it also prompts viewers to question why the freshmen pledges, including Brad’s roommate, are willing to undergo such awful treatment in the first place. Brad’s brother, Brett, at first an instigator, distances himself from the frat when things go too far: when pledges are forced to bob for sausages, chug hot sauce, slap each other, and drink themselves to incapacitation. In one of these scenes, Brad, even as he vomits, rejects his brother’s help. In Brad’s mind, this formalized suffering is how he will reestablish his manhood after his attack.

It doesn’t help that Brad is inundated with emasculating language—the kind that implies that being compared to a woman is the worst possible insult: “Don’t be a pussy.” “Take a shot, this is some man shit.” “You are my bitches.” “Did your balls drop yet?” The taunts and repeated vulgarities only strengthen the pressurized bubble Brad has entered. Refusing to participate or play along would mean popping that bubble, toppling a system he thinks he needs in order to redeem himself, to be the man that his peers—and by extension society—expect him to be.

“Pledges have to go through hell, otherwise what’s the point?”

From the opening scene, Neel is looking to make viewers uncomfortable, rather than couching anything in the dismissive logic of “boys will be boys.” The director is keen to show audiences a paddleboard hanging on the wall of the house, a relic of decades past and a reminder that the frat initiations of old have evolved into distortions of what they used to be. In one “hell week” ritual, the brothers march their pledges through the woods with blindfolds and line them up. One leader shoves his crotch into a pledge’s face, grasping a banana to simulate oral sex while smearing the mushed fruit all over his target. Then the pledge master herds the freshmen into a small cabin with a full keg of beer inside. Mud is poured onto their bodies, which incites wrestling and writhing. Once the upperclassmen finish their spectating, they give an ultimatum: Pledges have three hours to finish the keg, otherwise, they’ll be forced to have sex with a live goat, stolen from a nearby farm.

Neel shows it all—the frantic drinking, the vomiting, more frantic drinking—until the pledges achieve their goal. They celebrate with bare-chested screams, only realizing the hollowness of their accomplishments once their hangovers kick in and their 22-year-old superiors find even more humiliating games to play. Here, manhood isn’t something learned or contemplated, but simply given (for sexual conquests, for feats of strength, for holding down liquor), and, just as easily, taken away by those in charge. “Pledges have to go through hell, otherwise what’s the point?” the frat’s pledge master says in an empty defense of his actions.

Which is to say that tough-guy mindsets are difficult to change. As Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, writes in his book Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, masculinity isn’t innate or “hard-wired” but something that is “coerced and policed relentlessly by other guys.” But who determines what masculinity is once the coercion ends, when brothers graduate or frats break up (or are shut down)? That existential question once provided the basis for comedies like Old School, where middle-aged men seem unable to move on from the halcyon days of consequence-free college brotherhood.

Now, however, it lays the foundation—in a much more challenging and perhaps enlightening way—for a movie like Goat, in which Brad continuously confronts his psychological and physical pain he’s endured, even as he tries to rationalize it away. As James Hamblin wrote in The Atlantic in June, “toxic masculinity,” the kind that frats like Phi Sigma Mu help perpetuate, “sets expectations that prime us for disappointment.” By the end, Goat and its protagonist seem aware of this reality. Brad has consumed ungodly amounts of alcohol, been beaten, and tormented to exhaustion. He’s gone through hell to erase his insecurities and indecision, and emerged right where he started.

Bridget Jones’s Baby Is a New Kind of Momcom

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that, “in every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts.” When Bridget Jones’s Diary was first published in 1996, there was a lot to criticize, from a feminist perspective: Bridget was obsessed with men and with her weight; the character was too unflaggingly “likable” to convey psychological depth or undergo much change. And yet … the charm of the novels and the movie adaptations that followed was that they said things that many women had thought or felt, but not articulated.

Were our thighs fat? Were we being charming? Or were we just drunk? Would we meet our true love someday? What if we lost five pounds? Would he still want to have sex if he saw us in control-top underwear? Bridget Jones made fun of the imperatives delivered by women’s magazines, while acknowledging the reality of the anxieties and desires they created. The effect was paradoxical: The books reinforced gender stereotypes while simultaneously encouraging readers to laugh at their absurdity.  

This month, Bridget returned to cinemas in Bridget Jones’s Baby. The latest, and apparently last outing for the perennial “singleton” shifts its focus from men who break Bridget’s heart to men who get Bridget pregnant. Shortly after her 43rd birthday, Bridget has a one-night stand with Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey), an American tech billionaire she meets at a music festival. A week later, she sleeps with her old flame, the barrister Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). When she finds out she’s pregnant, she has no way of figuring out which one is the father. Terrified of needles and of the risk of miscarriage—the script repeatedly emphasizes that given her “geriatric” age, this is her one shot at motherhood—Bridget refuses to have the amniocentesis she would need for a genetic test.

The choice of subject matter is on trend.

It is a truth frequently acknowledged that the romantic comedy has passed its prime. In 2008, The New York Times’s A. O. Scott described the genre as cynical and exhausted. In 2013, in The Atlantic, Christopher Orr observed that modern rom-coms weren’t just bad, but they were also no longer making money. Later that year, Variety reported that Nancy Meyers couldn’t convince Sony to fund her new project. When the director of What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, and It’s Complicated can’t get a rom-com greenlit, it’s clear an era has ended.

But as studios attempted to rework the romantic comedy, a new genre emerged. Call it the Comedy of Unplanned Pregnancy. The Oops, I had a baby! movie. The momcom. Classic romcoms, and the screwball comedies that came before them, presented love as a battle of the sexes that was also a battle of wits. Men and women sparred verbally until they negotiated a kind of marriage contract they both could agree upon. The audience, meanwhile, got to participate vicariously in this public debate about how a relationship should be. In contemporary momcoms, though, love can only happen by chance. An independent career woman accidentally gets pregnant, which leads to the formation of a couple that would never have formed otherwise.

Momcoms both reflect and reinforce a rather depressing view of gender roles and relations. In them, women are too neurotic and career-obsessed to sustain romantic relationships, while men are too emotionally immature, professionally inept, or both. They don’t work through their differences through dialogue so much as get forced together by a gestational twist of fate. In some ways, Bridget Jones’s Baby epitomizes the momcom. In others, it shows how desperately women want to escape the double bind that the momcom places them in—of being forced to become both nurturers and providers, individuals who don’t need men for practical or emotional purposes but are still ultimately defined by their roles as wives and mothers.

* * *

The contemporary momcom does have precedents. In 1944’s Miracle at Morgan’s Creek, a patriotic small town girl gets blackout drunk and “marries” a soldier who is departing the next day; the audience never sees him clearly, and she never sees him again. When it emerges that this one-night “marriage” has left her pregnant, the geeky boy next door who’s always loved her steps up. She gives birth to sextuplets, and they live happily ever after. In the 1987 Diane Keaton vehicle Baby Boom, a yuppie woman inherits a baby from a distant relative; after growing to love the child, she realizes that she hates her Wall Street career and moves to Vermont to pursue a passion project making artisanal baby food. In Look Who’s Talking (1989), a single mom played by Kirstie Alley gets together with the taxi driver (John Travolta) who happened to take her to the delivery room and was mistaken for the father.

There are plenty of others: 1993’s Made in America, 1994’s Junior, 1995’s Nine Months (1995). In each of these films, an accidental pregnancy or an accident involving pregnancy leads to the creation of a new couple. But the millennial momcom has produced a new set of gender stereotypes, more specific to the age of the unapologetic power woman—of Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton.  

One of the first prominent Oops, I had a baby plots featured in the fourth season of Sex and the City. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), a high-powered corporate lawyer, reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Steve (David Eisenberg), a sweet bartender who broke up with her because he felt humiliated by how much she out-earned him. When Steve is diagnosed with testicular cancer, Miranda steps in to help him sort out his health insurance; after he has a testicle removed, she sleeps with him out of pity. Having recently been diagnosed with a “lazy ovary,” she assumes that she cannot become pregnant. When she does, she plans to have an abortion. But at the clinic, she realizes that she can’t go through with it. Miranda has the child, assures Steve that she will take care of it on her own, and a year or so after doing just that, realizes she still loves him. They marry and buy a brownstone in Brooklyn.

Miranda set a precedent that accidental pregnancy could domesticate the alpha woman. But it was Judd Apatow who turned this template into the archetype of mancession-era romance. In 2007, Knocked Up told a story similar to Miranda’s in a more misogynistic tone: Alison (Katherine Heigl) is a go-getting newscaster who gets pregnant after a drunken one-night stand with a schlub played by Seth Rogen. For reasons that are never explained, Alison’s apparently secular and ambitious character doesn’t consider abortion. As she endures the goofy physical humiliations of pregnancy, she is humanized. She loosens up; he grows up. Audiences (and critics) loved it. That same year, Juno put an indie twist on the formula. The title character, a cynical high-school student played by Ellen Page, gets pregnant after she has sex with her best friend (Michael Cera). Like Miranda in Sex and the City, Juno goes to an abortion clinic, but gets cold feet. While she and Cera are too young to think about marriage, they do start dating after she gives their child up for adoption.

In momcoms, to be a career woman and to be a mother is not an either/or, but a both/and.

The success of Knocked Up and Juno inspired more variations: Baby Mama (2008) (which features Sigourney Weaver, who played the unexpecting mother to end all mothers in Alien, as a surrogacy-agency director), Labor Pains (2009), The Backup Plan (2010), The Switch (2011), Friends with Kids (2011). Subversions of the formula followed, from the campy Gayby (2012) to the wonderful Obvious Child (2014). Even in China, when the director Xue Xiaolu set out to remake Sleepless in Seattle, she made the protagonist pregnant. In 2013’s Beijing yushang Xiyatu (or Beijing Meets Seattle), the star Tang Wei shows up in America, pregnant by her married boyfriend, and ends up falling for the Chinese taxi driver who picks her up from the airport.

To borrow Heigl’s famous criticism of Knocked Up, many momcoms can feel “kinda sexist.” The women are joyless shrews; their out-of-control bodies become the butts of raunchy jokes. When Rogen’s character sees Heigl’s the morning after having sex with her, all he can say is, “You’re prettier than me.” By the end, his friend who walks in on her in labor is disgusted. “Get out!” Heigl growls, as if this were The Exorcist. The friend shudders, “I wish I hadn’t seen that.” The message is: Women are ridiculous, women are monsters, and pregnancy can put the prettiest back in her place. It was no accident that Heigl’s career collapsed after the “kinda sexist” comment. It was as if she hadn’t learned her character’s lesson; she dared to remain the uppity kind of woman Alison was at the beginning, rather than the chill woman she becomes.

These movies also take abortion off the table. They have to: The romance of the alpha woman and the man-child isn’t plausible without the baby ex machina. Kelly Oliver, a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt and author of Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films, coined the term “momcom.” Oliver argues that films that fit this formula coopt the language of reproductive rights and distort it. “Films in the mom genres redeploy the language of choice in service of family values, reinforcing the old-fashioned idea that no matter how successful a woman is, her true desire is to have a baby,” Oliver says. In Bridget Jones’s Baby, the “big decision” is not whether or not to have a baby, but who Bridget should choose to be the father. “Once again,” Oliver says, “the language of pro-choice is displaced onto another choice, this one more acceptable, namely the standard Hollywood love triangle.”

It’s worth adding that the momcom doesn’t push women back into the “traditional” role of stay-at-home mother. In these films, to be a career woman and to be a mother is not an either/or, but a both/and. In addition to the raunchy misogyny of Knocked Up, the genre sustains more subtle forms of sexism. The new feminine ideal is the woman who “has it all,” and by “has it all,” I mean does everything. The ideal expressed by the momcom exploits women, while claiming to empower them.

* * *

Some critics have hypothesized that the decline of the romcom started when it became socially acceptable for anyone to fall in love with anyone. In a new millennium without disapproving parents or class hierarchies, there were no more obstacles for characters to overcome. But American marriage is the most class-stratified it has been since the 1930s, and American communities are rapidly resegregating.

The appeal of Bridget Jones’s Baby lies in how it inverts the demand to be superwoman.

The momcom depicts a world where some rules have changed. Premarital sex, for instance, is permissible. But others persist. The casts of these films are middle-class and up and blindingly white. (If Bridget Jones were a poor woman of color who had unprotected sex with two men within one ovulation window, then got pregnant, one imagines that Hollywood would give her story different treatment.) The momcom may look liberated, but it normalizes new patterns of labor and leisure, work and consumption that are supposed to recreate the world in a white, middle-class image. It says women should be willing to both provide for and nurture their babies—and often their boyfriends. Indeed, it suggests that they should like doing so.

Bridget Jones’s Baby conforms to many momcom stereotypes. But its appeal lies in how it inverts the demand to be superwoman. A steely OB/GYN, played by Emma Thompson keeps telling Bridget that she can be a single mom (“I did it”). But Bridget has both of her prospective partners constantly at her side. For 90 minutes, two rich, handsome men fall over themselves to help her. Firth is actually upset when Dempsey beats him to taking Bridget to the hospital after she eats too many anchovies and BBQ Pringles and gets a case of “wind.” The film even hints that both might stick around indefinitely. Bridget’s Lamaze coach thinks that the two men are a couple and Bridget is their surrogate; Dempsey plays along, calling Firth “teacup.” For as long as the men tolerate each other, viewers can imagine that alternatives to the “traditional” nuclear family might be possible—that women have not only gained the right to raise children alone, if they want to, but might also be able to live in more extensive networks of care.

The climax of Bridget Jones Baby takes a sharp turn back toward anti-feminism. When Bridget goes into labor, her race to the hospital is interrupted by a “women’s rights” march, led by a group of Russian punk rockers modeled on Pussy Riot. With their car blocked, Firth and Dempsey’s characters must carry Bridget, howling, through the fray. What the marchers want is never specified; feminism has become an occasion for slapstick, a literal obstacle to be overcome. When Bridget’s mother shows up, too late for the delivery, because she also got stuck in traffic caused by the march, she blurts out with exasperation: “Women’s rights! Don’t we have enough rights already?” Then, sure enough, a DNA test briskly determines that the “real” father of Bridget’s baby is the man she was hoping to end up with, and a wedding reaffirms the institutions of marriage and paternity.

After the rushed conclusion, Bridget’s mother’s line stuck with me. “Don’t we have enough rights already?” The exhaustion that the line expresses seems real: It left me wondering whether there wasn’t something a bit utopian about Bridget Jones Baby. The formulaic ending lies sprung, ready to define the heroine by marriage and motherhood. But a desire for love that could be more flexible—and a division of reproductive labor that would be more equitable—hovers above it.

The Deadly Capsizing of a Migrant Boat

NEWS BRIEF More than 160 people drowned off the Egyptian coast this week after a boat carrying as many as 600 migrants capsized on the way to Europe.

Authorities are still expecting to recover dozens more bodies in the coming days, many floating several miles from the site because of strong currents. The overcrowded ship sank early Wednesday morning just 7 miles from the port city of Rosetta, along the Nile Delta, as it was heading to Italy. Local fishermen and members of the coast guard have had to use fishing nets to recover the rapidly decaying bodies.

Ali Abdel-Sattar, the head of a local Egyptian council, told the Associated Press that many people were stored in the bottom of the boat. He adds:

Those are the ones who drowned first, most probably stuck, and their bodies might not be retrieved anytime soon, those we found are the ones liberated from the boat. I believe many are stuck and now laying in the bottom of the sea.

Most of the boat’s passengers were Egyptian. The boat also included Eritreans, Somalis, and Sudanese. It is unclear how many people were on the boat. The United Nations estimates there were 450 people aboard, while the Egyptian state news agency puts that figure closer to 600.

Four crew members were arrested Thursday on charges of human trafficking and manslaughter. More than 3,500 people have died this year attempting to sail across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, according to the International Organization for Migration. In all of last year, 3,675 people died crossing the Mediterranean.

Why Obama Vetoed the 9/11 Lawsuit Bill

NEWS BRIEF President Obama has vetoed a bill that would have opened the door for the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia.

The move was expected. Both houses of Congress passed the bill by wide margins, but Obama has said for months he would veto it, and White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest reiterated the threat last week. In a three-page statement explaining his decision, Obama said he has “deep sympathy for the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), who have suffered grievously. I also have a deep appreciation of these families’ desire to pursue justice and am strongly committed to assisting them in their efforts.”

But he went on to argue that the bill, known as the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act or JASTA, was misguided. Under current U.S. law, citizens generally cannot sue foreign governments. The bill at hand would have allowed lawsuits if a foreign government were found to have played a role in a terrorist attack. Obama administration officials have repeatedly argued that the bill would open up American government personnel and service members to lawsuits overseas. The president wrote:

JASTA threatens to reduce the effectiveness of our response to indications that a foreign government has taken steps outside our borders to provide support for terrorism, by taking such matters out of the hands of national security and foreign policy professionals and placing them in the hands of private litigants and courts… Second, JASTA would upset longstanding international principles regarding sovereign immunity, putting in place rules that, if applied globally, could have serious implications for U.S. national interests.

The veto may not spell the end of JASTA, though. If every member of Congress who supported the bill voted to override, Obama could see a veto overridden for the first time in his tenure. In particular, the veto sets up a conflict between Obama and New York’s Chuck Schumer, who is both the presumptive Democratic leader in the Senate and a strong backer of JASTA. “This is a disappointing decision that will be swiftly and soundly overturned in Congress,” Schumer said in a statement Friday. “I believe both parties will come together next week to make JASTA the law of the land.” Hillary Clinton has also backed JASTA.

It’s unclear how soon an override vote might come. The White House has promised to lobby against it.

What President Trump's Supreme Court Would Look Like

How many Supreme Court nominees does Donald Trump need?

Twenty-one, apparently. Trump’s campaign released a list of 10 more potential nominees to the nation’s highest court on Friday—only five months after he floated a list of 11 jurists from which he pledged to appoint. With only nine seats on the Court, Trump now has enough possible candidates to fill each seat at least twice.

Listing one’s picks for the Supreme Court before an election is an unprecedented move for American presidential candidates. While each administration typically keeps a shortlist of potential nominees should a vacancy arise, those names are kept close to their chest. But Trump’s unusual disclosure is driven more by political necessity than transparency.

One of Trump’s strengths during the primary campaign was his ideological plasticity, allowing him to outmaneuver his opponents on immigration and trade. But that same flexibility also stoked fear among conservatives who now fear losing their four-decade majority on the Court following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. Trump’s past support for abortion rights and gun-control measure only added to their anxiety about maintaining a conservative bench.

Like his previous list, Trump’s latest prospects come from an assortment of backgrounds. Four of the ten names offered serve on state supreme courts: Edward Mansfield of Iowa, Keith Blackwell of Georgia, and Charles Canady of Florida, as well as Robert Young, currently Michigan’s chief justice.

Another four of them are federal judges with lifetime appointments. Neil Gorsuch and Timothy Tymkovich sit on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, while Amul Thapar and Federico Moreno serve on federal district courts in Kentucky and Florida, respectively. Additionally, Margaret Ryan began a 15-year term on the Armed Forces Court of Appeals in 2006.

On the campaign trail, Trump frequently invokes his desire to appoint conservative judges in Scalia’s image. The prospects’ records seem to largely follow that mold. Tymkovich wrote the Tenth Circuit’s opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which allowed religious exemptions from the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate for certain for-profit corporations. Canady, a former congressman, introduced the first version of the federal ban of “partial-birth” abortions in 1995. Thapar struck down parts of Kentucky’s rules against political participation by judges and judicial candidates earlier this year.

But the most notable name on the list is Utah Senator Mike Lee, a staunch conservative with a civil-libertarian streak. As both a former clerk for Justice Samuel Alito and a former federal prosecutor, Lee’s name is occasionally mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee for hypothetical Republican presidents. His brother Thomas, a judge on Utah’s supreme court, was also on Trump’s list in May.

Lee, who has declined to endorse Trump so far, is also at odds with the Republican nominee on multiple issues, including religious freedom and fidelity to the Constitution. (On Friday, he spurned the idea of accepting Trump’s nomination and said he “already has the job he wants.”)

“We can go through the fact that he’s made statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant,” Lee said in a June interview. “We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church, people who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838. And statements like that make them nervous.”

During the primaries, Lee also backed his close friend Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whom Trump habitually denigrated on the campaign trail. If Lee's inclusion was intended as an olive branch for Ted Cruz, it seemed to work: On Friday afternoon, Cruz finally endorsed Donald Trump, citing it as one of six reasons for his decision.

“For some time, I have been seeking greater specificity on this issue, and today the Trump campaign provided that, releasing a very strong list of potential Supreme Court nominees — including Sen. Mike Lee, who would make an extraordinary justice — and making an explicit commitment to nominate only from that list,” Cruz said in a statement on Facebook. “This commitment matters, and it provides a serious reason for voters to choose to support Trump.”

Anthony Weiner's Latest Sexting Scandal

NEWS BRIEF Investigators with the FBI, and police in New York and in North Carolina, are looking into allegations that former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner exchanged sexually explicit photos and texts with a 15-year-old girl.

Jill Westmoreland, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, announced the investigation late Thursday. Unnamed sources in the FBI told the Associated Press the bureau’s task force that investigates the sexual exploitation of children was looking into claims first reported by the Daily Mail. The American website of the British tabloid reported Wednesday that for months Weiner and the girl had sexual text conversations that led to a video chat in which Weiner asked the girl to undress and touch herself.

This is the latest scandal in which Weiner, a once high-profile Democratic politician, has become embroiled. Revelations last month that the former congressman had yet again sent sexually explicit messages to another woman resulted in his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, separating from him.

The teenage girl and her father spoke with the Daily Mail, and she said she had reached out to Weiner through Twitter in January. She then shared dozens of photos that show Weiner’s face, explicit texts, as well as messages in which they talk about Abedin, his son with Abedin, and Weiner’s previous sexting scandals. The girl said Weiner knew she was underage, and that she talked about being a high-school sophomore, earning her learner’s permit to drive a car, and being a virgin.

Wiener has not denied he spoke with the girl. He told the AP:

... he had "likely been the subject of a hoax," and he provided an email written by the girl in which she recants her story. He also apologized, noting he had "repeatedly demonstrated terrible judgment about the people I have communicated with online and the things I have sent."

Weiner resigned as a New York Congressman in 2011 after he first denied, then admitted to, sending lewd photos to women he met on Facebook and Twitter. His political career seemed ruined, but in 2013 he ran for mayor of New York, asking that people give him a second chance. His campaign did not go well. That year Weiner found himself in another sexting scandal after it was learned he’d continued to send explicit photos and texts to several women while he used the pseudonym “Carlos Danger.”

In the text conversations the Daily Mail published, Weiner and the girl reference that nickname. As part of the investigation, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has issued a subpoena for Weiner’s phone.