Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 76

The Best Female Characters Come From Books

Last year, I was working as a publicity associate at Simon & Schuster when Jessica Knoll’s debut thriller Luckiest Girl Alive was optioned for film. The novel, which would go on to sell over 450,000 copies, was still months from publication, but the option was a solid indicator that it would be the commercial success everyone at the publishing house was hoping for. While movie deals always bring some financial security to authors and perpetually-in-the-red book publishers, this one had the added benefit of being with Reese Witherspoon’s Pacific Standard, a production company with a record of turning would-be bestsellers into high-grossing, Oscar-nominated films—as it did with Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild and Gillian Flynn’s thriller Gone Girl. A Pacific Standard deal is the kind of thing that could extend the buying life and cultural relevance of a new book tenfold.

It’s no coincidence that most of Pacific Standard’s current projects are book adaptations. As Witherspoon told the Wall Street Journal in April, she founded the company in part so that she could bring her favorite novels and memoirs to life. These books, she said, featured complex women in ways the scripts that landed on her desk did not. Witherspoon’s comments, and her decision to turn to books as material for the majority of the films she produces, illuminate an interesting parallel between two industries for which “strong female lead” has become a heated topic of discussion. In the world of commercial publishing, books written by and about women receive few prestigious literary awards, and reviewers are mostly men. Meanwhile, the film industry has been widely criticized for its lack of substantial roles for women, both onscreen and behind the camera, as well as a huge gender wage gap.

But the publishing industry is 78 percent female and, accolades or no, recent books from commercial publishers have offered up a bevy of leading women who are complex, unconventional, wholly human, and even triumphantly “unlikeable,” as Koa Beck wrote for The Atlantic last year. Many of them are  getting a second life in film, and not just at the hands of Witherspoon. Rachel from Paula Hawkins’ thriller Girl On The Train, Ifemelu from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, and the two sisters from Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale will all soon grace the silver screen. Though from older works, Meg from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time and Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar are also getting the movie treatment over the next year. When they do, they’ll join a long tradition of nuanced female leads who’ve made the jump from literature to film, exemplified by works including Gone With the Wind, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Room, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Girl, Interrupted, Carrie, The Help, The Hours, Whale Rider, The Secret Life of Bees, and many others.

These new literary protagonists are bright spots in a Hollywood landscape where representation of women has been pretty bleak. Female leads, when they make it on-screen at all (less than 30 percent of the time), run a high risk of being over-sexualized, one-dimensional, and/or formulaic. This problem has roots in the gender breakdown of the industry: According to a 2016 study that examined over 100 movies released, in 2014 women made up 30 percent of screenwriters and just 3.4 percent of directors. Despite recent conversations around gender inequality, the response from Hollywood studios has been disappointingly uninventive: The all-female Ghostbusters and the forthcoming Oceans 11 are fine, but reimagining male characters as women doesn’t exactly represent radical change. And of the top-grossing movies of this year so far, only a small portion of them feature women in the starring role.

Big studio films do occasionally feature stereotype-defying female leads, as exemplified by Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. But independent cinema is generally better at tapping into underrepresented perspectives—for example, Mark Duplass’s hilarious and poignant Tangerine, the low-budget hit that follows two transgender women around L.A., or Trey Edward Schults’ acclaimed debut Krisha, whose eponymous lead is a gray-haired former addict trying to make good with her family. Even the indie world, though, is dominated by male writers and directors. As long as female filmmakers remain an anomaly, the variety of ways in which women are portrayed on screen will inevitably be limited.

Before the rise of the blockbuster, lead actresses consistently received more interesting parts.

Money is one place where the book and film industries most strikingly diverge. The process of actually writing a book—which, in fiction at least, typically happens before a publisher acquires it—is a solitary, low-budget affair. Even with the rise of the million-dollar book deal, the amount of money changing hands in publishing is paltry compared to the production of a feature film. In her 2002 book Women Who Run The Show, Mollie Gregory notes that while the phenomenal success in the 1970s of movies like Jaws, The Godfather, and Star Wars led to the big-budget “blockbuster,” it also made sexism more prominent in the industry. “Trusting women with budgets that big was not in the social context of the times,” she writes.

Before the rise of the blockbuster, the number of women working in Hollywood wasn’t any bigger than it is today, but lead actresses could consistently find interesting parts. During the 1940s and 1950s, a small, pioneering group of female screenwriters gave stars like Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, Ava Gardner, and Rita Hayworth characters who were whip-smart, tough, and irreverent. The scriptwriter Sonya Levien, for example, co-wrote the 1956 film Bhowani Junction, which stars Gardner as a fearless Anglo-Indian soldier who kills her attempted rapist. Virginia Van Upp, one of Hollywood’s first women writer-producers, is best known for making the noir Gilda, which stars Hayworth in her ultimate role as twisted femme fatale. There’s also Ida Lupino, in a category of her own as the first actor to write, produce, and direct her own films. Her female protagonists dealt with issues like out-of-wedlock pregnancy, bigamy, and rape.

Then, as now, it was also common for studios to adapt the bestselling literature of the time to the screen. “Hollywood moguls actually cared about art,” Maureen Dowd wrote in her 2015 New York Times piece about women in Hollywood, referring to the First Golden Age of American cinema. “They would take all the literary bestsellers, throw starlets into them, and make prestige movies.” Raymond Chandler’s whodunit The Big Sleep was co-written for screen by the “Queen of Space Opera” Leigh Brackett and starred Bacall. Francois Sagan’s disaffected teenager in Bonjour Tristesse, the novel that the French novelist wrote when she was 18, gave Jean Seborg her first role. In 1951, Hitchcock turned Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train into a mammoth hit. Lois Weber, the first American woman to direct a feature film, famously said that her “ideal picture entertainment” was a ‘‘well-assorted shelf of books come to life.’’

The advent of big box-office hits shifted dynamics, stacking the cards even more in the favor of male directors. But, as Gregory explains, the 1970s were also a time when “women in numbers began to reenter film,” and they eventually began climbing the ranks. By the 1980s, Hollywood had its first class of female film executives, including Marcia Nasatir, the first woman vice president of United Artist, and the Columbia Pictures vice president Rosilyn Heller, both of whom came to Hollywood by way of the New York publishing scene. New York was more conscious of the women’s liberation movement at the time than Los Angeles, Gregory writes, and more women had infiltrated the publishing at all levels.

This isn’t to lionize the literary world over Hollywood. Like many fields, publishing often treats men’s work as more serious or prestigious than women’s: Last year, the author Nicola Griffith found that the Pulitzer Prize, considered the highest honor in literary fiction, hadn’t been awarded to a book about women or girls in 15 years (2016 was no exception). And when it comes to racial or ethnic representation, the publishing industry falls painfully, embarrassingly short: 80 percent of industry staffers today are white. But for all the narrowness of the literary canon, many readers would be able to name several of their favorite women authors, while few moviegoers would be able to do the same for their favorite women directors. Many of the biggest female writers of the last 200 years have, incidentally, had their works adapted into films: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club; Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence; Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; several of Jane Austen’s novels.

The only secret to representing all the richness of the female experience is to do it more often and in different ways.

Today, women read more than men, making them an appealing demographic for publishers. (Curiously, the fact that women also make up the majority of moviegoers doesn’t appear to be enough of an incentive for Hollywood to cast more female leads, let alone nuanced ones). Recent popular memoirs and novels have broadened the representation of women’s sexuality in mainstream literature, with books like Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts, which chronicles her pregnancy at the same time as her partner’s gender transition. Other books explore coming-of-age and female friendship in refreshingly different ways: Emma Cline’s The Girls follows a teenager whose fascination with an older girl leads to her involvement with a Manson-like cult. Meanwhile Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others features two filmmakers as they deal with the effects of status and fame on longtime friendship. Then there’s Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy about the lifelong friendship between two women from a poor neighborhood in Naples.

The greatest works of literature and film humanize experiences beyond our own. Many contemporary page-to-screen female leads get saddled with the label of “the next Gone Girl,” like the antiheroine of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen, which was also optioned for film. But there’s a wide array of personalities making their way into theaters. Wild offered a grittier story of travel and transformation for women not sold on Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Last winter brought Todd Haynes’s Carol, a beautiful reimagining of The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, starring Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett as a younger and an older women in love. Highsmith published the 1952 novel under a pseudonym for fear of retribution, but the movie brought the book to prominence over half a century later. Disney’s upcoming biopic Queen of Katwe, directed by Mira Nair, is based on a book about the life of Phiona Mutesi, an poor Ugandan teenager who became a chess prodigy. The only secret to representing all the richness of the female experience is to do it more often, and in different ways—something that will only happen in Hollywood once women are afforded the same access to money, prestige, and fame as men. Until then, there are always books.

An Explosion in Manhattan

Emergency services responded to reports of an explosion in New York City on Saturday night. The cause is unknown.

The blast reportedly occurred at around 8:30 p.m. on West 23rd Street and 6th Avenue in downtown Manhattan. 25 people have been transported to local hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, according to the FDNY.

25 injuries to civilians confirmed at 133 W 23 St #Chelsea. None appear to be life-threatening at this time

— FDNY (@FDNY) September 18, 2016

Multiple witnesses claimed on social media they heard a loud noise or boom in the Chelsea neighborhood.

Good God. Heard the boom from a friend's apartment in Chelsea, shook building, sounded like thunder. Praying for everyone's safety. #NYC

— Mary Kissel (@marykissel) September 18, 2016

Major explosion right around the corner from my apartment in #NYC just happened.#safe #chelsea #explosion #rightnow pic.twitter.com/yr2Tfnqp4U

— Aiden Leslie (@aidenleslie) September 18, 2016

This article will be updated.

An Accident at the Paralympics

NEWS BRIEF An Iranian cyclist died Saturday during a Paralympics road race in Rio de Janeiro, the International Paralympic Committee said.

Bahman Golbarnezhad, who was competing in the men’s C4-5 road race, crashed in a mountainous part of the track west of downtown Rio.

IPC President Philip Craven offered condolences to his family and teammates for the “truly heart-breaking news.”  The committee also provided more details:

Golbarnezhad, 48, was involved in a crash at around 10:40am on the first section of the Grumari loop, a mountainous stretch of the course. The athlete received treatment at the scene and was in the process of being taken to the athlete hospital when he suffered a cardiac arrest. The ambulance then diverted to the nearby Unimed Rio Hospital in Barra where he passed away soon after arrival.

Dutch cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten also crashed during Rio’s Olympic road race events in August, suffering minor injuries. But according to the BBC, Golbarnezhad’s accident occurred on a different part of the road, and the site where van Vleuten crashed was not part of the Paralympic course.

Golbarnezhad’s death comes one day before the Paralympic Games’s closing ceremony. More than 4,300 athletes from 161 nations competed in the two-week-long series of competitions.

Typecasting and Punk Rock Origins: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Typecast as a Terrorist

Riz Ahmed | The Guardian

“America uses its stories to export a myth of itself, just like the U.K. The reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies. Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth it exports is of a racial melting-pot, everyone solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.”

Hollywood, Separate and Unequal

Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott | The New York Times

“The movies with black protagonists that tend to win awards — to be legitimized, in other words, as mainstream, serious and prestigious — are more often than not about exceptional figures, many of them drawn from the annals of American history. Athletes. Musicians. Leaders. People whose remarkable accomplishments both ease the consciences of white viewers and mask the collective struggles and communal experiences that sustained the heroes in their work.”

What Does It Mean to Experience an Album for the First Time as a Film?

Judy Berman | Pitchfork

“These films attach images and sometimes dialogue to sounds and lyrics in the same way that big-screen adaptations of books attach actors to characters that readers previously had to imagine for themselves. And they’re becoming more successful at it over time—in part because we’re starting to appreciate visual albums as a discrete art form, and in part because they’re just getting better.”

All Novels Aren’t Political Statements. But They’re Not Apolitical, Either.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy | The New Republic

“By suggesting that a white guy can’t write a story about a Nigerian woman, Abdel-Magied isn’t just condemning offensive representation but any representation—and she’s doing it based solely on the identities of the writer and character. To see the flaw here, consider the TV version of this question: Do we want white show creators to put only white characters onscreen?”

The Outback Special

Liam Lowery | The Eater

“My last meal with my mom before she started drifting in and out of consciousness ended with me taking away her empty styrofoam container to toss in the garbage. I shook it, surprised to feel it was empty. ‘I wasn’t that hungry,’ she joked. That she felt well enough to eat a piece of medium-rare beef was a good sign: We were going to have dozens more Outback Specials together as a family, maybe even at an Outback restaurant.”

Where Punk Rock Begins

Amanda Petrusich | The New Yorker

“Punk, maybe more than any other genre, is contingent upon the body. Ideologically, it requires the actualization—the making real—of some otherwise unreachable pain. Other punk performers had incorporated a kind of aestheticized violence (and self-violence, especially) into their acts before, and punk fans often turned to decorative mutilation as catharsis, but I can’t recall many other artists whose physical sacrifice has felt quite as generative or as essential or as giving as Iggy Pop’s.”

Father and Son: Kid Cudi and the Growing Pains of Kanye West’s Children

Sean Fennessy | The Ringer

“Cudi went inward, and Kanye went out, becoming a bigger celebrity, a bigger artist, a bigger voice. Cudi found his people — young and amenable to his radical vulnerability. Kanye found Kim Kardashian. Cudi became a father. Kanye did too.”

How a Museum Captures African American History

One of the most difficult lessons to learn about racism today is one of the first to be gleaned at the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens to the world on September 24. On the lowest concourse, deep in the museum’s basement levels, exhibits about slavery explain that the trans-Atlantic slave trade wasn’t motivated by racism.

Racism came after. This isn’t new information, but it isn’t conventional wisdom in America today. “Enslaved Africans, European indentured servants, and Native Americans worked alongside one another as they cultivated tobacco,” reads an exhibit on life in the Chesapeake region. Planters grew fearful of the interracial friendships, marriages, and alliances—and rebellions—that characterized life in the colonies. “Africans were ultimately defined as ‘enslaved for life,’ and the concept of whiteness began to develop.”

The design of the museum, from the bottom up, which is the direction in which it’s intended to be seen by visitors, reflects that history. The lowest-level galleries on the slave trade and the Middle Passage are tight and narrow. They eventually open up to an expansive concourse that sets the stage for the fight for freedom that extends to today. Exhibits in this majestic hall range from a statue of Thomas Jefferson framed by bricks bearing the names of slaves who built Monticello to a house built in a freedmen’s settlement in Montgomery County, Maryland.

The Smithsonian’s new museum—the last to be built on the National Mall—follows the African-American experience through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era. The museum proceeds chronologically, escalating from African and pre-colonial history (in the third and lowest basement level) to contemporary art (on the fourth floor). It’s a massive undertaking, sometimes breathtaking. And the architecture of the museum both builds and hinders its narrative.

Douglas Remley / Smithsonian

Some 60 percent of the building is below grade; the historical galleries all fall along three underground mezzanine levels. To create exhibition space so far below ground, Davis Brody Bond—the same architecture firm responsible for the largely subterranean National September 11 Memorial and Museum—had to build a concrete container in which the museum sits, a bucket with walls rising 75 feet high that frame the entire historical experience.

“The largest challenge was water,” Anderson says. “Everything west and south of the Washington Monument was infill. It was all swampland. When you dig down 12 feet, you hit the water table. We had to build essentially an inside-out bathtub in order to keep the water out of the building.”

More From Our Partners




The Man Who Wants to Build a Village Out of Plastic Bottles
In Houston, an Underground Cistern Is a New Temple for Art
One Photographer’s View of New York, Before and After  9/11

Visitors pass from the narrow hall on slavery into this major space, following a ramp that shepherds them past several iconic exhibits: the pointed Monticello statues, a slave cabin, the Jones-Hall-Sims House, a segregation-era railcar, and a prison tower from the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary (nicknamed Angola) among them. This fairly linear course then deposits viewers at a Reconstruction gallery, on the second mezzanine level, with information-heavy exhibits that characterize most of the rest of the museum.

“We thought the added volume made sense,” says Phil Freelon, one of the principal architects responsible for the building’s design, discussing how the area of the history galleries doubled during the museum buildout. “As you move through history, you’re able to see different aspects of the exhibits from varying perspectives. Which adds another layer of understanding to the overall sweep of history.”

One of the great strengths of the National Museum of African American History and Culture is its heavy emphasis on place. There are rich maps scattered throughout the museum that showcase the many migrations that have defined black history: from the domestic slave trade (after the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807) to the Great Migration during the early- and mid-20th century to subsequent returns to the South. These maps explain how the African American experience shifted within the states, and how states and the nation changed inalterably as a result.

Where the museum may lose viewers, however, is in its sweeping chronology, which is lost over too many side-by-side displays. Many of the exhibits (designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates) serve as portals, with a chunk of text paired with images, or often a video screen, alongside some essential artifacts. Unfortunately, atomic exhibits about the constituent people, places, and moments from Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era don’t add up to clear and comprehensive categories.

Problems are few in number, but the museum’s biggest ones start with the entry procession. It isn’t immediately clear that viewers ought to take one of two elevators down to the lowest concourse to begin. And it isn’t exactly clear how the escalators connect from one level to the next—though these passages ofter some of the best vistas within the building and through its exterior filigree, which looks as delicate as lace when seen from the inside.

Douglas Remley / Smithsonian

From design to execution, the largest changes to the museum happened inside the museum’s central hall. The dipping, timber-lined ceiling initially envisioned for the atrium fell off along the way. (The architects say that the space is now more suitable for performance and static art.) Still, one of the museum’s most important metaphors was maintained in the form of its grand vistas: Floor-to-ceiling windows comprise the four walls of the building’s entrance level, opening the museum to the world outside. Portals throughout the the upper floors emphasize the effect.

“What you’re getting is the journey from the very soil—the very depths, the crypts, the chamber—right through to getting a panoptic lens, a panoptic reading of this important juncture of the National Mall and the Washington Monument,” says David Adjaye, the primary architect of the museum. “When you’re going into the upper galleries, you’re getting these windows that are framing the context and bringing [the Mall] into the content of the story.”

The community and culture galleries make up the third and fourth floors of the museum. (The Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts, on the museum’s second level, was not yet finished at the time of the preview.) The exhibits in the community section range widely. There’s a display on the legacy of Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress and the first black woman to run for president. There’s an exhibit on Mae Reeves, a legendary Philadelphia milliner. And there’s one on Ben Carson. This corner of the museum gives an impressionistic overview of community (a rather broad theme to begin with). While these exhibits are, again, very atomic—only loosely interconnected—they offer by and large the most satisfying insights into the lives and achievements of everyday black Americans.

There is no directionality to these floors, no wrong way to do them. Doing them right will take hours, maybe even days. The culture galleries include snippets of film, television, spoken word, and theater that may add up to hours of programming time. (This, in addition to reams of wall text.) With so much media on display—the number of screens seems to rise as a factor of the floor level—the fine art galleries on the fourth floor offer a welcome reprieve to information overload. (The art galleries are stacked, too, with a smart selection of paintings from across American history. In fact, this corner of the museum arrives as one of the finest art collections in the District.)

Douglas Remley / Smithsonian

The museum’s most impressive visual remains its iconic “corona,” which the architects say they drew from a West African caryatid design of Yoruban origin—a column with a base, a figure, and a capital or crown.   

“Our general approach to the design of cultural facilities is to try to imbue the architecture with meaning,” Freelon says. “So that it’s contributing to the stories and the vision and mission of the institution. We did that sort of research to say, ‘What would be an appropriate expression, formally, for the building?’ We looked at a lot of different ideas and settled on the corona notion as a strong and powerful idea.”

There are many smaller moments of design excellence, however, that give the museum its grounding. One thoughtful gallery on the lowest level is a simple sidebar, a triangular cutaway space off the main corridor, that surveys the São José Paquete de Africa. The vessel was a slave ship bound from Mozambique to Brazil that wrecked, killing most of the 500 slaves it held as human cargo. Several ballast bars, which balanced the light weight of their bodies, are on display in this dark and intentionally haunting space. That the shape of this gallery reflects the trapezoidal edges of the museum’s exterior is no accident.

There are enough moments like these throughout the National Museum of African American History and Culture to make it a building that demands criss-crossing, back-and-forth viewing. It isn’t simple to say what the museum offers in the form of answers about progress or freedom or justice. It may be fair to say that it has none. Or that the museum is “making a way out of no way,” to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. (as this museum does).

According to Adjaye, the windows and cut-outs are key to ensuring that building is not static, but dynamic and responsive to the history around it.

“The idea is to laminate the experience of the outside world with the inside world, so you’re not disconnected from it,” Adjaye says. “It is not a narrative or a fantasy that is hermetically sealed. It’s a real history, that is relating to things that are around you and in you. And that is a very new idea.”

This article appears courtesy of CityLab .

The Killing of ISIS's Information Minister

NEWS BRIEF The Islamic State’s minister of information and one of its most senior leaders was killed in a coalition airstrike near Raqqa, the group’s de-facto capital, the Pentagon announced Friday.

Wa’il Adil Hasan Salman al-Fayad, known as “Dr. Wa’il,” oversaw the production of ISIS’s propaganda videos, which frequently featured footage of militants torturing and executing prisoners. He was also known to be part of the Shura Council, ISIS’s leadership body and religious authority.  

The news comes weeks after Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the ISIS spokesman, was killed in coalition airstrikes in Aleppo, the Syrian city. The Pentagon said the two men were close associates.

“The removal of ISIL’s senior leaders degrades its ability to retain territory, and its ability to plan, finance, and direct attacks inside and outside of the region,” Peter Cook, a Pentagon spokesman, said. “We will continue to work with our coalition partners to build momentum in the campaign to deal ISIL a lasting defeat.”

It remains unclear how al-Fayad’s death will affect the organization overall. As Rukmini Callimachi, the reporter covering ISIS and terrorism for The New York Times, said, the killing of al-Adnani last month was not fatal to the organization.

18. As important as he is, I would caution ppl not to see this as a blow ISIS can't recover from. Organization is built to survive deaths

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) August 30, 2016

Still, ISIS has suffered numerous losses in leadership—as many as 120 people this year, according to some estimates—and it is getting squeezed from the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq.

Has Anything Changed With Arizona's Immigration Law?

NEWS BRIEF Arizona’s attorney general put new limits on a law that made the state a leader in tough-on-immigration legislation, which was criticized by immigrant-rights advocates.

Senate Bill 1070, which passed in 2010, has been tangled in a lawsuit brought by several immigrant-advocacy groups who say it created an environment of fear among the state’s large Latino population by allowing racial profiling. To Arizona’s conservatives, SB 1070 allowed local law enforcement to make the kinds of immigration checks that in their view the federal government seemed unwilling to do. The law served as a precursor to others like it introduced in dozens of states around the country. The most controversial section of the law, and the one Attorney General Mark Brnovich limited, was called the “show-me-your-papers” portion.

That section allowed Arizona officers to question a person’s immigration status during any interaction. If the person could not produce ID proving legal presence in the U.S., he or she could be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported. What Brnovich has done is to clarify this section to officers with a nonbinding opinion filed Thursday in Arizona’s Supreme Court. The opinion says officers should not make an arrest “based on race, color, or national origin” in an effort to check the person’s immigration status.

Most advocates called the decision a win. The Phoenix New Times quoted American Civil Liberties Union attorney Cecillia Wang as saying:

The supporters and proponents of SB 1070 clearly envisioned a state in which police officers and sheriff's deputies could go after people they suspected of being undocumented immigrants.

But because it’s a nonbinding opinion, it means law-enforcement departments can choose to ignore it. The opinion also reflects decisions already made by U.S. courts. One is from a separate lawsuit brought by the Obama administration, which went to the Supreme Court. The other was by an Arizona U.S. District Court that found Joe Arpaio, the top sheriff of the state’s most populous county, engaged in racial profiling; he was ordered to stop his immigration sweeps that used the law as justification to round people up for deportation. The sheriff has waged a long legal battle, and ignored the court’s order to stop pulling people over solely based on the perception of their immigration status. Arpaio now faces criminal contempt charges.

Essentially, the intent of the law remains unchanged. For that reason, while immigrant-rights groups saw the opinion as a victory, so too did one of the law’s Republican sponsors.

State Senator John Kavanagh told The New York Times Thursday’s agreement represented “a clear rejection of the notion that the law is racist.”

But not all immigration advocates declared it a victory. Activist Sal Reza told the Times the law still allows any officer to interrogate someone for their immigration status as long as it’s during a lawful stop, Reza said, “and we know what a lawful stop means here in Arizona.”

Mykki Blanco's Super-Sad Queer Rap Love Story

During an interlude on his new album Mykki, the rapper Mykki Blanco takes a break from fractured party jams and delirious diss tracks to read a bit from his journal. “How my heart aches,” he says, his voice echoing against a backdrop of other vocals, distorted and low. “… I want to be in love. I want to know intimacy, this desire burns in me so deeply. Deeper than my desire to act, or to entertain, or to become prosperous or famous or successful. It’s a burning deep in my core just to be loved. A monogamous love. A really sweet special love. Will this burning desire within me ever cease? It isn’t even sexual. It’s love.”

Monogamous love: outré! Or at least, some might expect it to be outré for a new icon of musical experimentation and queerness and gender defiance and fashion and downtown cool. One of the hip-hop tropes that Blanco’s music toys with is the spectacle of sexual conquest; one of the implications of the LGBT liberation movement is a loosening of longstanding hetero norms about happiness requiring One True Love.

But for his debut album after years of releasing buzzed-about mixtapes, Blanco makes clear that he’s not looking to revolutionize romance itself. He just wants to partake, which is a political act only in that it emphasizes his full personhood and lays claim to a path that’s still often denied by society for people like him. Yearning works well with his music, deepening the playfulness, commentary, and confrontation that have built him a following.

After a hazy, downbeat album opener, the single “Loner” announces the larger mission. A quavering electronic arrangement gains momentum, and Blanco’s voice seem to come in and out of focus as he confesses to being bummed out by hooking up in the smartphone age. There’s the pure emo of lines like “I'm fucked up / I know that / I need help / I'm so sad,” but also the specificity of, “You’re guarded / I'm faded / I'm standing wasted on Snapchat I'm naked.” The music is propulsive but more melodic than usual for Blanco; “I’m alone / so alone,” may become your next workout mantra.

The image he projects throughout is of someone who’s lived of a few lifetimes’ worth of good times but still can’t find the one thing he wants. The jarringly pretty orchestral pomp of “High School Never Ends” has Blanco narrating feeling isolated amid an “in” crowd: “Everybody got wet hair cuz they just came from the pool / They kissing, but I’m missing out / yo homey it’s cool.” “The Plug Won’t” talks about companionship as being better than any drug, and it comes across like a painful realization: Blanco cries he’s “mystified” that he needs love.

Most gloriously, the sensuous rattle of “My Nene” spends most of its runtime with Blanco bragging about how hot his beau is (“I’m using words that could be applied affectionately to a man or a woman, and I’m doing it on purpose” he explained to The Fader). But then Blanco throws a jealous tantrum:

Why the fuck is you liking pics?

Text me back, what the fuck is this?

Missed call, who the fuck is Chris?

Why you keep doing me like this?

All of this is genuinely moving stuff, perhaps heightened by the fact that it’s threaded in with the kind of bouncy, unpredictable music that’s characterized Blanco’s previous work. Producers Woodkid and Jeremiah Meece layer in glittery hooks and exciting rhythm changes, but the main attraction is Blanco’s shtick: haughty and clever, spitting fantastical brags and bedazzling hip-hop’s toolkit. Over a glassy-eyed rave backing on “Hideaway,” he fantasizes about being what he called a “queer boss-type figure” (“Mijo go bring me a muffin,” he sneers); on the femme pep rally “For the Cunts,” Blanco screams “faggots!” and giggles as if he’d just huffed helium.

The album happens to join a boom moment for queer musicians releasing music that goes beyond the announcement of sexuality and into the particulars of love. Many of the descriptions of yearning on Frank Ocean’s Blond(e) take on specific meaning in a gay context, whether it’s the very particular kind of bad date sung about on “Good Guy” or Ocean contemplating an alternate life with “two kids and a swimming pool” on “Seigfried.” The punk band Against Me!’s new album Shape Shift With Me is a collection of raging heartbreak stories from Laura Jane Grace, whose previous album directly addressed her transition to female. Her latest songs reveal part of the trans experience in a less obvious way: “You have a second puberty when you’re on hormones,” she told EW. “… It’s strange having those emotions or feeling that way with a little more wisdom than you had when you were a teenager.”

Similarly, Blanco is as out and proud as can be—as queer, as gender non-conforming, as HIV-positive—but he doesn’t explicitly tie his romantic quest to that fact. As it is for everyone, his identity is more than a sum of signifiers and his desires are complex parts of a complex life. The music—weird, profane, inspiring, and vivid—reflects that.

Fleabag Is the Filthy Antiheroine TV Deserves

In a flashback scene in the first episode of Fleabag, the title character (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and her best friend Boo (Jenny Rainsford) improvise a drunken song about their lives. “Another lunch break, another abortion, another piece of cake, another cigarette,” the pair intone. “And we’re happy, so happy, to be modern womennnnnn.”

If Fleabag, a six-part BBC3 series newly released on Amazon, were just another raunchy, provocative comedy about a sexually active woman luxuriating in her personal and professional failures, it would still be one of the more distinctive entries in the genre, just because Waller-Bridge is so ingeniously filthy. (“It’s surprisingly bony,” she says of one encounter in the café she owns. “Like having sex with a protractor.”) But what really sets the show apart is that it’s essentially a tragedy. Fleabag, it emerges in the first episode, is bereaved; she’s also consumed with self-loathing, uniquely self-destructive, and deeply lonely. In a scene immediately following the flashback to the modern-women song, she bursts into her father’s house at 2 a.m. “I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist,” she blurts out.

“Well, er ...” he replies. “You get all that from your mother.”

Waller-Bridge, a classically trained British actress, based Fleabag on a one-woman show she wrote and performed in 2013 at the Edinburgh Fringe. The show is constructed around repeated asides to the audience that sketch in salient details about Fleabag’s life: Her business is failing; her sister is high-powered, successful, gorgeous, and “probably anorexic”; her father responded to her mother’s death by buying both his daughters tickets to feminist lectures and moving in with their godmother, who’s not evil, Fleabag notes, “just a cunt.”

There isn’t much plot to speak of, although the show repeatedly refers to the character whom Fleabag is grieving, and a traumatic event she hints at but won’t begin to process. Instead, episodes meander through uncomfortable interactions with family members, random conversations with strangers, and excruciating sexual encounters. “I’m not obsessed with sex,” Fleabag tells viewers, “I just can’t stop thinking about it. The performance of it. The drama … Not so much the feeling of it.”

If this sounds unconscionably grim, it’s elevated by Waller-Bridge’s magnetic presence in every scene: Onscreen, she’s part movie-star mesmerizing, part-demented schoolgirl planning a terror attack. Fleabag’s jokes are so dark, and yet so cheery in their offensiveness that they’re impossible not to snicker at. “We’re going to die here,” her sister, Claire (Sian Clifford), says as the pair arrive at a country manor for a weekend retreat. “We’re going to be raped and die.”

“Every cloud,” Fleabag replies, genially.

If the series has a recurring theme, it’s a subtle but forensic examination of the paradox of modern womanhood. Fleabag is glib on the subject of why she’s so drawn to sexual experiences that are so fundamentally unsatisfying; you get the sense she’d rather slash her own throat than indulge in even semi-serious self-analysis. But the show itself is sneakily insightful. When Fleabag and Claire participate in their women’s retreat, which mostly involves silently scrubbing floors and plucking weeds from the manor’s vast gardens, Fleabag runs away and happens upon a men’s group staying at the same house. While the women are silently and stoically engaging in mindfulness (“No matter, what happens, a word must not be heard,” the schoolmarmish organizer informs them), the men are encouraged to spew hateful invective at sex dolls dressed up in women’s professional attire. “You shouldn’t be here … for your own safety!” a terrified male assistant tells her.

It’s moments like these that make Fleabag’s acute self-loathing a little more understandable. Waller-Bridge’s awkwardness, her moments of rampant egoism followed by crushing bleakness, make Fleabag one of the most distinctive female characters in recent memory. Never has being a modern woman seemed so painfully funny, so brutal, and so hopeless, all at once.

Colombia's Role in a Rebel Crackdown

NEWS BRIEF The Colombian government is scheduled in 10 days to sign a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Marxist rebel group it has fought for 50 years. Part of the peace process will include FARC rebels laying down their weapons and creating a political party. But this is deja vu, three decades removed. Colombia and FARC have been in this position before, and that time it did not go well for the FARC.

In the 1980s, FARC forces left the jungle for the political pulpit. They created the Union Patriotica (UP) political party and had tremendous success in the 1986 elections. Then they were massacred in the thousands. Right-wing paramilitary groups assassinated UP leaders, even their president, Jaime Pardo. In all about 5,000 died. This has been a major sticking point for FARC in the current peace talks. On Thursday, at an event full of the victims’ family members, Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, acknowledged the government’s role in those killings for the first time.

As Reuters reported, Santos said:

That tragedy should never have happened, and we must recognize that the government didn't take sufficient measures to impede and prevent the assassinations, attacks and other violations even though there was evidence the persecution was taking place.  

I make the solemn commitment before you today to take all the necessary measures and to give all the guarantees to make sure that never again in Colombia will a political organization have to face what the UP suffered.

The Colombian peace accords of the 1980s were a much shakier prospect than today. Throughout those talks, FARC continued to kidnap the family members of wealthy elite and landowners. The government, meanwhile, carried out military strikes against FARC, often helping armed paramilitary groups like the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), and Death to Kidnappers. FARC membership peaked in 1999 at about 18,000. Since then some of its ranks have devolved into a quasi-criminal organization, alongside their former persecutors, the AUC and Death to Kidnappers, to traffic drugs.

There are about 7,000 remaining FARC members today who are set to be reincorporated into society after the peace accord is signed September 26. The deal will then be voted on by the Colombian public in October. Trust and peaceful negotiations have done the most to resolve the conflict with FARC. Much of that trust in the coming days will rely on Colombia’s ability to keep rebel soldiers safe in the disarmament, lest history repeat itself.