Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 74

Designated Survivor Realizes America's Worst Nightmare

The best and worst thing about ABC’s new political drama Designated Survivor is perhaps its macabre premise. In the show’s first hour, it imagines the decimation of Washington D.C.’s political class—the loss of the president, his entire Cabinet, all of Congress, the Supreme Court, and everyone else attending the State of the Union address—in a horrifying terrorist attack. But the series also relishes the prospect of the new president, the one member of the Cabinet asked to stay home in case of an emergency, who suddenly finds power thrust upon him. Why is the show so thrilled? Because that new president is Jack Bauer.

Okay—he’s not actually the gung-ho, perpetually haunted secret agent played by Kiefer Sutherland in the long-running hit 24. But Sutherland does stand out in the role of Tom Kirkman, Designated Survivor’s fictional Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who unexpectedly takes power in a time of national crisis, and the show’s creator David Guggenheim is clearly delighted about him as the star. Kirkman isn’t nearly as hard-edged as Sutherland’s most iconic role; indeed, he’s far more gun-shy about military intervention in the aftermath of the attack. But he does seem to tap into a fantasy of some Americans have: one of a take-charge free agent who can change the country by disobeying political norms. The problem is that Kirkman’s unexpected rise to power is just a little too grim to make that outcome worth fully celebrating.

Perhaps Designated Survivor will always be a grim show on some level. Its pilot episode sees the U.S. Capitol reduced to smoldering ashes, which leads to screaming matches between various generals who are trying to figure out what to do next while Kirkman (understandably) vomits in a bathroom stall. Still, there’s an optimistic streak present, a belief in the U.S. government as an institution that could weather such a catastrophe. After all, why else does the actual White House entertain the possibility of a cataclysm at the State of the Union by having someone stay home every year? Implicit in this protocol is a sense of faith: that anyone vested with the power of the presidency might be able to pick up the pieces.

Guggenheim, who wrote the movie thrillers Safe House and Stolen, constantly treads the line between secret-agent thriller and idealistic political drama, and that’s nowhere more apparent than in the casting of Sutherland. Jack Bauer was forever being drawn into tangled conspiratorial webs that went to the highest level of government, so who better than him to unravel the cause of this new attack? But the show tries to normalize Sutherland somewhat, dressing him in a fuzzy Cornell sweater and horn-rimmed glasses as he gets sworn into the highest office in the land.

It doesn’t quite work—Sutherland’s weary expressions can’t help but suggest he’s a man with a harrowing past, rather than a family-focused fellow with a dull life in academia (Kirkman’s given backstory). When he’s throwing up in the bathroom or trembling in the presence of irate military commanders, Sutherland struggles to sell Kirkman’s naïveté. But as the new POTUS rising to the occasion, chastising foreign ambassadors and finally standing up to one particularly trigger-happy general, Sutherland’s performance sings, showing off the grizzled leading-man charm he’s possessed for decades now.

There’s something clever about a network show combining the day-to-day politics of The West Wing with the paranoid conspiracies of Homeland.

The pilot’s best moments suggest a darker West Wing, or at least a better version of the one-season wonder Commander in Chief, which also posited an unusual scenario in which a political independent (played by Geena Davis) ascends to the White House. Designated Survivor could do well to focus on the nuts-and-bolts work that comes with restructuring the government. There’s clearly some interest in keeping things authentic—Kirkman’s new speechwriter upon becoming president is played by Kal Penn, who’s worked on and off in the Obama administration (he’s also credited as a consultant for the show).

But there’s also the political-thriller angle, a Tom Clancy-esque subplot driven by the FBI Agent Hannah Wells, played by the reliably steely Maggie Q. Hannah suspects that the terrorist attack, which goes unclaimed by organizations like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, might have even more sinister origins, and she begins a probe that will likely form the serialized spine of the series, should it become a hit. There’s no question that the political side of Designated Survivor is the more fascinating one, but there’s something clever about a network show combining the day-to-day concerns of The West Wing with the paranoid conspiracies of Homeland. At the very least, it makes the horror of the attack seem less like a cheap plot contrivance to get Kirkman in office; with Hannah on the case, surely deeper, nastier motivations will be revealed.

Fictional presidents are an odd concept. They exist to indulge some sort of viewer fantasy, be it cartoonish villainy, unimpeachable moral certitude, or, in some cases, a powerful leader who can cut through bureaucratic nonsense and fix the nation’s problems. It would be misguided to draw any close parallels between Designated Survivor and the real world—the show is, after all, about the mass murder of American politicians. But if Designated Survivor can get audiences to stomach the utter bleakness of its core premise, it could be the kind of gripping political make-believe viewers are looking for.

Florida's Zika Image Problem

Florida’s Governor Rick Scott stood beside local business owners earlier this week and declared triumph in Wynwood. The small neighborhood north of Miami had been the first place in the continental United States where mosquito-borne Zika was spread, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had told people to stay away.

To the great relief of local businesses, Scott said on Monday that “everybody should be coming back here and enjoying themselves,” as he stood in front of the type of artsy building mural Wynwood is known for.

Federal officials have spent the summer spraying and fumigating to try to rid the area of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries Zika, since the virus first appeared there in July. This week, Wynwood met the CDC’s requirement for being declared Zika free: no new cases reported for 45 days. But the CDC took a much more cautious tone than Scott did. Director Tom Frieden said Monday while there have been great strides made in spraying and killing Zika-carrying mosquitoes, “we encourage people not to let down their guard.” “We could see additional cases,” he warned.

That is not what the Miami area wanted to hear.

After health officials found Zika in Wynwood, sales in the area slumped 50 percent . Business owners pressured Scott to do something about  the trendy arts neighborhood’s new stigma. They complained that maps with an giant box that labeled much of Wynwood a Zika “hot zone” were over the top. Locals griped that the media had overhyped the seriousness of Zika. Then in August, local transmission of Zika was reported in Miami Beach. Zika had spread to the white-sand beaches, restaurants, and clubs of one of southern Florida’s most popular tourist spots. In August, airfare prices to Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport fell 17 percent. The damage had been done. Half of Americans feared traveling to areas with Zika, which included Miami.

That’s why Scott’s announcement Monday had the jovial trappings of a ribbon-cutting, instead of the CDC’s more cautious—and realistic—message that warned pregnant women and their partners should still postpone nonessential travel to all Miami-Dade County. In fact, most of the CDC’s travel advisories for Florida remain unchanged, because although Zika left Wynwood, it hasn’t left the Miami area.

As Scott announced victory over Zika in Wynwood, 20 minutes to the east, in Miami Beach, a new case of Zika infection was reported. In that city, five different batches of mosquitoes with Zika were found, presumably in different places.  State health officials officials identified only one of those spots, the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, days after the garden closed for mosquito-related reasons, the Miami Herald reported. The Herald filed a lawsuit Friday demanding Miami-Dade County reveal where it found Zika-infected mosquitos, arguing that the public has the right to know, because “the precautions, decisions, and risk facing someone living or working next door to these specific locations are different than those facing someone who lives miles away—especially since this species of mosquito typically travels no more than 1,000 feet during its life cycle.”

But local business and city officials might list the same reasons as their desire to keep the information quiet. If Zika-infected mosquitos have been identified near a popular hotel, restaurant, or tourist attraction, the public would know the area within a 1,000-foot radius is a Zika zone—and they’d likely stay far away.

Florida officials have tried to balance informing the public, fighting Zika, and luring tourists. In Miami Beach, officials conducted an aggressive aerial pesticide campaign, despite some residents’ protests that the active chemical used in the spray has been banned in the European Union because of its questionable health concerns.  In Wynwood, when Zika fears threatened to hinder tourism around Memorial Day, the mayor of Miami announced the arts district would provide free two-hour parking.

How Did Disabilities Become a Partisan Issue?

On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton is giving a speech focused in part on Americans with disabilities, and the need to help all of them. It’s a rather warm-and-fuzzy topic for such an acrimonious campaign, but the story of how speaking up for the disabled came to represent a polarized issue is a microcosm of how even once-universally supported positions have become partisan fodder.

Clinton’s speech Wednesday is part of a push for positive stories by her campaign, as a way of countering a string of negative stories as well as her high unfavorables. Her campaign previewed the speech in Orlando, saying the Democratic nominee would “​​make the case for building an inclusive economy that welcomes people with disabilities, values their work, rewards them fairly, and treats them with respect.” She’s also touting her own plans to help people with disabilities, including banning subminimum wages and working with businesses to encourage and incentivize hiring of people with disabilities.

At a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, last week, Clinton was introduced by Martha Soltani, whose daughter Sara was born deaf but was aided by the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which Clinton helped push into law in the 1990s.

You’d think none of that would be all that controversial. Disabilities strike across age groups, racial barriers, and partisan lines. In this election, even this is a polarized issue—though the roots of that split actually date back to before Donald Trump was a major political figure.

Disability politics used to be bipartisan. The Americans with Disabilities Act was primarily authored by Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat. It passed the Senate and House overwhelmingly—91-6 and 377–28, respectively, and was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. When he signed the law, Bush said:

Now I sign legislation which takes a sledgehammer to another wall, one which has for too many generations separated Americans with disabilities from the freedom they could glimpse, but not grasp. Once again, we rejoice as this barrier falls for claiming together we will not accept, we will not excuse, we will not tolerate discrimination in America…. To those Members of the House of Representatives with us here today, Democrats and Republicans as well, I salute you. And on your behalf, as well as the behalf of this entire country, I now lift my pen to sign this Americans with Disabilities Act and say: Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.

Eighteen years later, Bush’s son George W. Bush signed some expansions of the ADA into law.

Since then, however, things have sputtered. In 2012, the Senate failed to ratify a United Nations treaty called the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. Democrats supported the treaty, but Republicans were split. On the pro side were George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, the former Senate GOP leader and presidential candidate who was injured during World War II. On the con side were a bloc who warned on extremely dubious grounds that the treaty would allow the UN to meddle in U.S. courts. In the end, the treaty failed, despite Dole himself appearing on the Senate floor to lobby. It needed two-thirds of votes to pass, but was only able to garner 61.

The Trump campaign has only exacerbated any such splits. The most egregious moment came when he mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski. Trump falsely claimed he’d seen Muslims celebrating 9/11 in the streets in New Jersey, and pointed to reporting Kovaleski, who was then a reporter for The Washington Post. When Kovaleski, who has a congenital condition affecting his joints, contradicted Trump, Trump mocked him, doing a physical impression of Kovaleski:

Trump denied that he was mocking Kovaleski, despite the evidence. He also argued that his legally required compliance with the ADA proved his support for the disabled, although as Gideon Resnick pointed out, Trump has been sued repeatedly for violating the ADA. He also appeared to mock conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, who is paralyzed from the waist down, saying, “I get called by a guy that can't buy a pair of pants, I get called names? Gimme a break.”

As Irin Carmon reported, disability advocates were displeased by Trump’s decision to name his campaign book Crippled America. In a 2011 book, meanwhile, he wrote, “Then there's the disability racket. Did you know that one out of every 20 people in America now claims disability? That adds up to $170 billion a year in disability checks. Between 2005 and 2009, it is estimated that $25 billion were eaten up in fraudulent Social Security Disability Insurance filings. On and on, scam after scam it goes; as always, taxpayers are the ones getting stiffed.” (The idea that disability insurance is being overused is one sometimes voiced by analysts across the ideological spectrum.)

All of this makes Trump an alluring target for the Clinton campaign. An August Bloomberg poll, for instance, found Trump’s mockery of Kovaleski to be the single most disliked moment of his campaign. In June, PrioritiesUSA, a super PAC supporting Clinton, launched a brutal ad spotlighting the comments:

That was not uncontroversial on its own. As David M. Perry wrote in The Atlantic, “It’s exciting to see disability issues play a role in the campaign, and gratifying to see a politician take heat for humor that offended many people. The ad, however, also plays into stereotypes about disability, revealing tensions between disability-rights activists and mainstream politicians.”

But Clinton’s focus on disability issues isn’t just a matter of electoral jockeying. It’s also in line with the direction of progressive politics as a whole. The Democratic Party has increasingly embraced the language and agenda of social justice. As my colleague Clare Foran noted back in March, Clinton herself has adopted the language of intersectionality, the idea that forms of discrimination, marginalization, and inequality should not be considered singly but as a complex, with different forms compounding one another.

This shift is not without a reaction. The Trump campaign has seized on “political correctness” as a great ill afflicting America. White, straight, male voters who lean toward Trump, and who are those least affected by discrimination, might be inclined to dismiss discussions of intersectionality as simply more political correctness. The two moves in concert produce a feedback loop: Progressives become more and more concerned about the dismissal of intersectional concerns, while that growing concern only convinces conservatives that the attention being paid to matters of race, disability, class, or gender are disproportionate and a result of political correctness.

In other words, the 2016 presidential campaign may have produced a sharpened and accelerated partisans split on disability accommodation, transforming them from a universal concern to a wedge issue, but November 8 is unlikely to mark the end of the trend or any renewed unity.

The Protests After Police Shoot Another Black Man

NEWS BRIEF Several hundred protesters gathered outside a Charlotte apartment complex Tuesday night, hours after police shot and killed a man authorities say was armed.

Demonstrators were outraged by the death of Keith Lamont Scott, the 43-year-old black man who was shot. They marched and chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” near the scene of the shooting. Several dozen riot police officers responded to the protests, eventually firing tear gas into the crowd. Police say 12 officers were injured in skirmishes with protesters. A local CBS reporter was at the scene:

Here's what it's like inside the crowd at @CMPD Ofr involved fatal shooting @WBTV_News pic.twitter.com/2DqkZXsUNY

— Coleen Harry WBTV (@ColeenHarryWBTV) September 21, 2016

At around 4 p.m. Tuesday, police arrived at The Village at College Downs apartment complex, located around a mile away from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte campus. They were in search of a man who had an outstanding warrant. Then, as The Charlotte Observer explains:

They saw a man with a gun leave a vehicle. Police said they approached the man after he got back into the vehicle. The man got out again armed with a firearm “and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers, who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject,” police said in a statement. “The officers immediately requested Medic and began performing CPR.”

Scott was not the person officers were searching for to arrest on the outstanding warrants, CMPD Chief Kerr Putney told reporters at the scene.

Scott was brought to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

After the shooting, a woman who claimed to be Scott’s daughter posted a video on Facebook, where she claimed Scott was unarmed when he was shot. She also said Scott is disabled. The video has since been removed from Facebook.

The officer who shot him, Brentley Vinson, is also black. Vinson has been placed on administrative leave, which follows the police department’s protocol.

This comes just a day after Tulsa police released footage of an officer fatally shooting an unarmed black man who had his hands up. Around 200 protesters gathered outside the Tulsa police headquarters Tuesday afternoon demanding that the officer who killed Terence Crutcher be fired.

When an NBA Star's Rape Accuser Is No Longer Anonymous

NEWS BRIEF The woman accusing NBA star Derrick Rose of rape must be named in court, a Los Angeles federal judge ruled Tuesday.

Up until now, the woman has been known as “Jane Doe” to protect her anonymity. She is suing the New York Knicks point guard and two of his friends for allegedly gang raping her in 2013. She has claimed she was intoxicated and did not consent to sex with the three men. Rose claims she consented.

Waukeen McCoy, a lawyer for Doe, told Deadspin that the judge “wants everybody to have a fair trial, and he didn’t want any inferences drawn [by the jury] from her name not being used.”

Rose’s lawyers have been pushing to make her name public for the last year. They argued in a recent motion that “because Jane Doe and her lawyers are openly pandering to the media on a nationwide blitz tour, Ms. Doe should be precluded from using a pseudonym.” Previously, his lawyers argued that because her social media accounts were “sexual in nature,” she shouldn’t remain anonymous.

When Doe spoke recently with Think Progress, she emphasized how important anonymity was for rape victims. She explains:

I think people stay silent because they don’t want to have to deal with everyone finding out, like, hey, this happened to you, now I’m a victim, now I have to walk around with a “damaged” label, being broken and this and that. You don’t want that. Who can deal with that on top of everything that happened?

The trial is set to start on October 4.

Who's Responsible for the Aleppo Aid Convoy Attack?

NEWS BRIEF Russian warplanes bombed the aid convoy that was heading to Aleppo, U.S. officials are now claiming.

The airstrike killed 20 people Monday, including the head of the Syrian Red Crescent, and destroyed 18 of the 31 trucks that were delivering medicine, water, and food to help 250,000 stranded civilians. The bombing came just after a weeklong ceasefire agreement, brokered by Russia and the U.S., came to an abrupt end.

Russia, for its part, claims that footage from its military drones shows the attack was carried out by Syrian rebels firing a mortar from a pickup truck. U.S. officials, however, told CNN that only a Russian warplane could have struck the convoy.

Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser, also told CNN that it was clearly an airstrike that destroyed the aid convoy. Only Syria or Russia could have carried out that strike, he says. Rhodes, though, didn’t say which forces struck.

Still, he argues that Russia did not hold up its end of the ceasefire agreement, saying:

We hold the Russian government responsible for airstrikes in this airspace given their commitment under the cessation of hostilities was to ground air operations where humanitarian assistance was flowing…

We have not seen good faith. This was an outrageous action. It raises serious questions about whether or not this agreement moves forward.

The United Nations announced earlier on Tuesday that it was suspending aid to Syria in light of the airstrike, saying it was a security precaution.

There's Nothing Left in the Tank in the Southeast

DURHAM, N.C.—The ’70s are back in the Southeast.

No, it’s not a Republican candidate for president promising law and order. It’s not the latest bellbottom revival. It’s not even the North Carolina-centered movement of Grateful Dead-inspired musicians.

Instead, drivers across the region are lining up at gas stations, hoping to fill up their cars. A gas shortage began September 9, when a mining inspector noticed a gasoline odor in Shelby County, Alabama. Colonial Pipeline discovered that there was a leak in a line that runs from Houston up to New Jersey. More than 300,000 gallons leaked from the line. Somewhat miraculously, the spill seems to have avoided the worst ecological damage, because much of the gas ended up in a retaining pond.

But while the pipeline is being repaired, there are gas shortages in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. In Tennessee, Governor Bill Haslam declared a state of emergency on Friday. The governors of Georgia and North Carolina loosened rules on truckers’ hours to try to make it easier to move gasoline in. The major effect hasn’t been so much on prices, though those are up. In Tennessee, per-gallon prices were going up around 5 cents to 15 cents, though in some cases as much as 30 cents. Prices jumped 31 cents on average in Atlanta. In North Carolina, prices also surged, but the state’s anti-gouging law is holding down the increase, as it did in Georgia. What’s striking is that even with the spikes, many prices are still below $2.50—the magical, and at the time unthinkable, number below which Newt Gingrich promised to bring prices, when he was running for president in 2012.

The more visible effect has been on availability: As if it were 1973, many gas stations simply don’t have gas to pump, at any price.

“People are freaking out,” a gas-station employee in Asheville, North Carolina, told the Citizen-Times.

Brett Kern, the Tennessee Titans’ punter, told an NPR reporter he nearly ran out of gas before finding a story with supply. “I was 0 for 6 on Saturday, 0 for 3 yesterday, and then I called about four stations this morning,” he said. “This was the first one that had it.”

On a drive Tuesday morning between Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, your correspondent found that most prices were still between $2.10 and $2.25 per gallon, but several stations had no gas. One BP station changed its sign to read “0.00,” not a statement of free gas but an acknowledgement that a motorist couldn’t pay for it. Several miles up the road, a small traffic jam surrounded a rare service station that offered fill-ups.

To try to address the shortage, Colonial on Monday began running gasoline through a second, parallel pipe that usually carries diesel and other products. Gasoline was also being moved on tanker ships toward New York. Colonial said Tuesday it had finished repairs and hoped to have the pipeline back on line on Wednesday thanks to a temporary bypass. After that, it will take a few days for the shortage to end, but the lines for gas should be gone again. Now, if only we could get Ted Nugent to go back to the ’70s, too.

The Wells Fargo CEO's Mea Culpa

Updated at 2:22 p.m. ET

NEWS BRIEF Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, under fire for the practice by some of his employees to create millions of fake bank and credit-card accounts to collect fees and hit sales targets, told the Senate Banking Committee he accepts “full responsibility for all unethical sales practices.”

But those remarks did little to placate lawmakers from both parties who pointedly criticized the bank and its practices. Here’s Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, who told Stumpf he should resign.  

.@SenWarren #WellsFargo CEO: "You should resign. You should give back the money that you took..." pic.twitter.com/aPZViWGJIN

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 20, 2016

Those comments were echoed by Sherrod Brown, the ranking member on the panel.  “I was stunned when I learned about the breadth and duration of this fraud,” he said.

Stumpf told lawmakers that “there was no orchestrated effort, or scheme as some have called it, by the company.

“Wrongful sales practices goes entirely against our values, ethics, and culture, and runs counter to our business strategy of helping our customers succeed financially and deepening our relationship with those customers.”    

As we reported last week, federal regulators fined Wells Fargo $185 million—the largest fine since the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was founded in 2011—for the practice in which some employees engaged in deceptive practices to hit sales targets. The bank, which admitted no wrongdoing under the deal, also fired 5,300 employees who were involved in the fraudulent practice, but Carrie Tolstedt, who headed the unit that created the fake accounts, will likely walk away with a $125 million golden parachute. That payment, which was part of her contract and agreed to prior to the settlement with CFPB, has been heavily criticized by financial-watchdog groups—and, in theory, the bank can take some of that money back.

Senators on the banking panel asked Strumpf what he and other top Wells Fargo executives knew about the practice. Senator David Vitter, the Republican from Louisiana, pressed Stumpf on how customer fraud could persist for as long as it did without top executives knowing about it.

“Why isn’t this crystal clear proof that an entity as big as Wells is not only too big to fail,” Vitter said, “but it’s too big to manage and too big to regulate?”

Other lawmakers asked whether the bank intended to “claw back” some of the money being paid to Tolstedt.

Also appearing before the Senate panel on Tuesday were Richard Cordray, the CFPB’s director; Tom Curry, the comptroller of the currency; and James Clark, the chief deputy of the Office of the Los Angeles City Attorney.

Spotify Is Trying to Become the Music Platform of Modern Dating

Spotify and Tinder are giving the modern mating dance a soundtrack. Starting today, users of the popular dating app can spotlight one song—their “Tinder Anthem”—to make playable on their profile via the popular music-streaming app, and they can also get a glimpse of how their listening habits match up with potential new suitors’ listening habits, so long as both parties have Spotify.

Presumably this initiative is meant to give people more things to discover they have in common—Slayer fans can meet Slayer fans. Or to give people new ways to signal important things about their personality or identity—Zayniacs can tell their dates about their crush. Or, most temptingly, to allow folks to better signal exactly why they’re on Tinder: You can pick a song depending on whether you’re looking for an eternal flame, to hold someone’s hand, or simply to do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.

But in addition to whatever the Spotify/Tinder partnership may eventually reveal about love songs’ relationship to real-life love, it also offers a reminder that the most important and under-recognized factors in music’s ongoing “Streaming Wars” may simply be personal networks, critical mass, and interface.

Music-industry headlines this year have been dominated by Apple Music and Tidal’s epic exclusive-content slug out, with superstar after superstar giving their latest works to one proprietary platform over another. Splashy releases from Beyoncé, Kanye West, and Rihanna offered Tidal some buzz; Apple Music struck back with Drake, Frank Ocean, and Chance the Rapper, among others. The thinking behind exclusives is that they drive more people to sign up, and indeed, these services have built user bases since launching in 2015. As of July, Tidal said it had 4.2 million paying subscribers, and this month, Tim Cook announced Apple Music had 17 million.

Last week, though, Spotify hit a far bigger number: 40 million paying subscribers, as touted with a smiley face by the service’s founder, Daniel Ek, on Twitter. That figure represents 10 million new customers in six months, which observers say makes Spotify the fastest-growing service of a moment when all major streaming services are booming. It’s accomplished these gains while staying out of the exclusives battle. In fact, its library’s onetime appearance of comprehensiveness has been eroded by the likes of Taylor Swift and Jay Z pulling their content to let rival services have exclusive rights.

So how has Spotify not only survived but thrived with such new competition? Instead of exclusives, it’s instead tried to capitalize on its first-mover advantage (the service has been around since 2008, and in the U.S. since 2011). Whether fine-tuning its smart playlists, emphasizing social-media integration (something the other apps conspicuously lag behind on), or trying out secondary features like interactive workout mixes, the focus has been not on splashiness but on simple utility: a music app you can live with, one that all your friends seem to be on.

Today’s news would seem to bolster that appeal. Tinder is the most popular dating app for millennials; Spotify being on it should just add to its self-perpetuating feeling of widening ubiquity. Though it may not have Beyoncé’s latest album, for many it still feels irreplaceable.

Seth Meyers Proves He's the Anti-Fallon

When Jimmy Fallon talked to Donald Trump on The Tonight Show last week, he ruffled the presidential candidate’s hair. Seth Meyers, the host of Fallon’s former show Late Night, had a slightly different message for the Republican presidential candidate last night. “Obama was born in the United States, period?” he asked mockingly, repeating Trump’s recent specious assertion that he was no longer a believer in the “birther” movement. “Fuck you, exclamation point!”

Sadly, Meyers couldn’t say this to Trump’s face—in fact, until last week, the late-night host had jokingly banned the candidate from appearing on the show as a response to Trump’s ban of The Washington Post from his press events. He recently lifted that ban after Trump did the same, but joked to The Huffington Post that Late Night was “pretty booked up” on guests from now through November. But even if he were invited, it’s hard to imagine Trump appearing on Meyers’s show, which has become an appreciable counterbalance to the much more light-hearted antics of his hair-ruffling network partner.

“You don’t get to peddle racist rhetoric for five years and decide when it’s over!” Meyers yelled at the camera during “A Closer Look,” his frequent and popular segment that he uses to deconstruct recent news events. “We decide when it’s over! It’s certainly not over after a 30-second statement in the middle of a hotel commercial.” The 10-minute segment, which deserves to be watched in full, is reminiscent of the best years of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. Stewart could methodically, but humorously, take apart a piece of political hypocrisy, or a fundamental lie being spread by cable-news media. With “A Closer Look,” Meyers has assumed Stewart’s outraged sense of good conscience, and unlike the similarly skilled late-night takedown artists Samantha Bee and John Oliver (who host weekly shows), he can react to the news immediately.

There’s something pointed about Meyers airing this particularly vitriolic segment just days after Trump appeared on Fallon’s show and was asked no substantive questions. But Meyers has taken aim at Trump all year with “A Closer Look,” and the candidate’s ridiculous press conference—where he half-heartedly admitted President Obama was born in the U.S. but lied in saying Hillary Clinton’s campaign had started the rumor—came only a day after his appearance on Fallon. As Meyers told The Atlantic in an interview earlier this year, it’s hard for a late-night show not to weigh in on Trump every day. “The biggest challenge has been trying to resist this fear that we’re piling on. Because we are talking about it so much,” he said. “[But] look, Donald Trump’s on the cover of The New York Times every day, so it makes sense that he can be in our monologue every night.”

Meyers isn’t the only one going after Trump’s history of spreading the birther conspiracy theory. Stephen Colbert aired a similarly tough segment on The Late Show the same night, almost exactly a year after he interviewed Trump on his show and, in a particularly awkward segment, gave him the opportunity to apologize to anyone he might have offended with his campaign. “Uh … no. No apologies,” Trump said. Colbert, too, is better when he’s in straight-to-the-camera monologue mode, but he at least tried to question Trump on real issues like immigration last year, though he got stonewalled. Meanwhile, Samantha Bee laid into Trump’s press conference and The Tonight Show interview on her show Full Frontal on Monday night, at one point referencing Jimmy Fallon’s house band. “Aww, Trump can be a total sweetheart with someone who has no reason to be terrified of him,” Bee said. “I notice there were no cutaway shots to The Roots. I wonder why.”

Fallon’s kid-gloves approach (which he applies to every guest on his show) prompted a huge blowback on social media in the following days. He responded as only he could: with a helpless aw-shucks attitude. On Monday, as his fellow late-night hosts ripped into Trump, Fallon aired a taped interview with Hillary Clinton in which he gave her a bag of things Trump “left behind” after his appearance. Included among them: Pink Floyd’s LP The Wall, a picture of Vladimir Putin in a heart-shaped frame, and a mesh bag that Clinton inspected. “Softballs,” she said, laughing as she looked inside. “That was my gift to him!” Fallon protested.