Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 854

Telling Darrell Issa to Stop His Leak-Fueled Crusade Will Only Make Him Madder

AP

The relationship between the Obama administration and Darrell Issa has never been good, but now it's devolved into accusations of dangerous leaks and criminal obstruction.

The Health and Human Services Department finally told Issa, the subpoena-happy chairman of the House Oversight Committee, that it was tired of him leaking sensitive documents to the press. HHS said it wouldn't turn over physical copies of documents related to Healthcare.gov's security measures because Issa has a habit of leaking things, according to Politico. But when the Obama administration told its security contractor not to respond to a subpoena, Issa saw it as an obstruction of justice. And it all sort of escalated from there, with a (Democratic) member of Issa's committee calling the group a "virtual revolving door of leaks and misinformation." The House oversight committee just announced that the contractor will comply with a subpoena for security files. 

Who started it?

The Obama administration points out that the House oversight committee has leaked documents related to the "Fast and Furious" investigation and TSA security documents, according to Politico. And, on a more personal note, Issa was responsible for leaking the story that only six people signed up on Healthcare.gov on Day 1. That wasn't misinformation, but it was motivated by Issa's opposition to the law. He's subpoenaed Todd Park, the White House's chief technology officer, and other contractors. 

Why did HHS snap only now?

Because this time it's really important that the documents don't leak. MITRE is the contractor hired by the government to assess Healthcare.gov's security risks. Issa and his committee have access to physical, redacted copies of the security test documents, and they were able to view the full documents but not keep them. But Issa wants the full, complete documents in his hands. So he subpoenaed MITRE. HHS told the company to just ignore Issa, which Issa didn't take well. MITRE recommended that Issa just subpoena HHS for the docs. 

How mad was Issa?

Real mad. He wrote a letter to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that was a pretty saucy. He wrote that they were breaking the law by obstructing his investigation, aka not doing exactly what Issa wanted. This bit especially sticks out:

The Department's hostility towards questions from Congress and the media about the implementation of ObamaCare is well known. The Department's most recent effort to stonewall, however, has morphed from mere obstinacy into criminal obstruction of a congressional investigation. 

Well, maybe HHS should just do what he wants?

On the one hand, yes. Issa argues that it sets a poor precedent for federal officials to ignore oversight requests for documents. That's true. And while Health and Human Services hasn't been hostile towards information requests, they have not been very forthcoming and transparent when it doesn't suit them. But then, if Issa has seen the documents, why does he need physical copies?  According to Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, Issa has every intention of leaking the documents to the press "in a way that misrepresents them," as quoted in The Hill. He sent a letter to Issa on Friday with his concerns:

Since you became Chairman of the Committee in 2011, you and your staff have engaged in a reckless pattern of leaking sensitive information and documents to promote political narratives that turn out to be inaccurate after further investigation.

Cummings said Issa had turned the committee into a "virtual revolving door of leaks and misinformation," which is maybe a nicer way of saying a house of lies. 

So what happens next?

MITRE talked to its lawyers and found that it “has no alternative but to comply with the terms of a Congressional subpoena absent some form of judicial intervention,” according to The Hill. Issa, in a statement, said that “MITRE’s decision is a rejection of efforts by the White House to obstruct oversight," though it sort of just seems like he bullied them. The question now is whether Health and Human Services was trying to hide more embarrassing glitches, or trying to keep the papers out of the hands of hackers. Given Issa's track record, we'll find out soon enough. 

       

The Day in Reboots: Perry's 'Odd Couple' and Helms' 'Naked Gun'

CBS

One day, two maybe ill-advised reboots: It was reported this morning that Ed Helms would be stepping into Leslie Nielsen's shoes in a new Naked Gun movie, and this afternoon news broke that Matthew Perry was going to be developing a new version of The Odd Couple for CBS as a vehicle for himself. 

The Helms news, first reported by Variety, was not met with much enthusiasm. Writer Maura Johnston tweeted "this is why we can't have nice things." Matt Singer at The Dissolve wrote: "I would never remake The Naked Gun under any circumstances (all three movies, along with the six Police Squad! episodes, still hold up great), but if you held a (naked) gun to my head and forced me to, I’m not sure I would cast Helms as Drebin." 

Nostalgic attachment to The Odd Couple may not be quite as strong perhaps since it's a) older and b) already been through a number of various incarnations. Deadline's Nellie Andreeva reported that Perry will co-write the pilot with Danny Jacobson, and that Perry will play Oscar Madison, a.k.a. the messy one.

The more recent history of Neil Simon adaptations is not too promising. Michael Schneider recalled: "'Odd Couple' remakes are like 'Fawlty Towers' remakes. TV keeps trying them." Schneider specifically referenced The New Odd Couple, which was a short lived series in the 1980s. Vulture's Margaret Lyons also had practical concerns with a reboot: "Hope the new Odd Couple is about an actual couple, because otherwise…just get a different roommate? You're a 45-year-old man."

Perhaps the biggest question in the Odd Couple reboot, however, is whether Perry will ever have another hit show. 

 

       

Memo to Artists: Don't Threaten Writers Who Didn't Put Your Album on Their End-of-Year Lists

Max.blodgett via Wikimedia Commons.

End-of-year list season is well underway, which means it's a good time to browse some slideshows, see how critics' judgments match up with your own tastes, and seek out the albums that passed you by. Or, if you're an artist, call up the media outlets that didn't feature your album and verbally threaten their writers.

Or, actually: wait. Don't do that. That's a terrible plan.

Too late. DC-based rapper Wale called up Complex's offices earlier this week, reports Complex, to express his disappointment that The Gifted, his pretty-good album from 2013, wasn't pretty-good enough to make Complex's Top 50. Writer Insanul Ahmed took the call:

Wale claimed that staff members at Complex had a personal bias against him, then started shouting and making threats.

“At this point, you know it’s got to be personal," he said. "You telling me it’s not personal. It's like a bold face lie. To be omitted from every type of list that y’all do or be at the bottom of it or every type of way that y’all can omit me, ya will.”

But then he went further:

When I tried to explain how our lists are formulated, Wale cut me off: "I swear to God I’ll come to that office and start knocking n****s the fuck out," he screamed. I tried to talk to him calmly. "Alright," he said. "I'll see y'all tomorrow. Get the security ready."

That's all caught on recording. Wale never showed. Later attempts to invite Wale over—presumably without the knocking-people-unconscious part—were declined.

So, a friendly memo to recording artists: critics haven't hatched a conspiracy against you come year-end season. In most instances, in fact, the way year-end lists are formulated at music publications is remarkably boring. Individual writers submit their own lists. Editors tally the results. And—voilà—a master list is born. 

There's no Big Agenda at play. Of course, groupthink plays a role. Of course, more writers heard Yeezus than Wale's record, so not all candidates get an equal foot in the door. And, of course, critics are fickle, inconsistent beasts. Hence the phenomenon that a publication will occasionally give an album a mediocre review, then crown it on a year-end list. Alas: the review was one writer's opinion, the list a tabulation of many. Occasionally, several music sites, for that reason, will make public the individual writers' lists.

Oh, and another thing: if you do feel compelled to threaten those who didn't love your record, don't threaten a journalist. They've got recording devices and active Twitter presences and all sorts of ways to call your bluff. There is such a thing as bad press.

       

Here Comes Freedom! John McCain Visits Ukraine

AP

Sen. John McCain will visit the Ukraine in the wake of a violent government crackdown on protesters in the capital of Kiev. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers told The Daily Beast that the senator will spend the weekend in the country, meeting with government officials and opposition leaders. "If Ukraine's government thinks that brute force and the politics of fear can see it through the current crisis," McCain wrote earlier this week, "it is woefully mistaken." It is likely that he will have even more strong words for the government in person. This is good news, because John McCain has a lot of experience visiting countries in the midst of a crisis.

John McCain in Syria, allegedly posing with two
men who were involved in a group who kidnapped
11 Shia Muslims. Credit: AP

In August, for instance, John McCain and Lindsey Graham flew to Cairo to solve the Egypt crisis, because, in McCain's words, they "have credibility with everybody there." In the wake of the Egyptian military's coup against president Mohammed Morsi, the pair of Senate hawks had some strong words for the interim military government. And now, everything in Egypt is fine. 

That was far from the first time McCain dropped into a country in crisis and fixed things. In May, John McCain secretly crossed the border into Syria in order to meet with armed opposition groups fighting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. 

Best wishes to @SenJohnMcCain in Syria today. If he doesn't make it back calling dibs on his office.

— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) May 27, 2013

Rebel leaders in the country asked McCain to help convince the White House to provide lethal aid, a no fly zone, and strikes against Hezbollah and the Syrian regime in order to aid their efforts. Success No. 2. 

In April of 2011, McCain visited the Benghazi stronghold of the Libyan rebels, shortly after the U.S. joined NATO military action against the regime of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi, who died in October of that year, was not a stranger to McCain. 

Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his "ranch" in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) August 15, 2009

After his 2011 visit, McCain called for increased military action against the Qaddafi regime. Perfect three out of three. 

In all fairness, however, international diplomacy isn't exactly the easiest thing to do in the world. McCain's international problem solving visits, then, might just be a good indication that a country is mired in a deeply complicated crisis, often into which McCain believes the U.S. should intervene, rather than the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

       

America's Wealth Is Staggeringly Concentrated in the Northeast Corridor

At the county level, America is a tremendously unequal place. The median household income in the poorest county (Wilcox County, Alabama) was $22,126 in 2012. In Falls Church, Virginia, where highly educated defense contractors and federal government workers cluster, the median income last year was $121,250, more than five times higher.

What's most startling, though, in new local income and poverty data released this week by the Census Bureau, is the way these opposing poles of poverty and wealth in America concentrate geographically. The Census map below shows median household income data from 2012 for every county in the country:

[image error]
2012 Median household income by county.

[image error]

There are more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. Of the 75 with the highest incomes, 44 are located in the Northeast, including Maryland and Virginia. The corridor of metropolitan statistical areas that runs from Washington, D.C., through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston includes 37 of these top-earning counties (where the median family takes home at least $75,000 a year). Zoom in to the region, and it shows a kind of wealth belt unmatched even on the West Coast.

Poverty is similarly concentrated in the American South. Seventy-nine percent of the poorest counties in the country (where the median family makes less than $35,437) are located in the South:

[image error]
2012 Poverty rate of the total population by county.

This latest Census release also slices data by school district, revealing the below picture of poverty rates by district among school-aged children 5 to 17. In dark blue, these are the school districts with some the steepest challenges educating low-income children on scarce resources:

[image error]
2012 school-aged poverty rate by school district.

How People Outside of Kiev Feel About the Ukraine Protests How Do Criminals Get Illegal Guns? 2 Very Different Ideas for Preventing Subway Deaths

Relative to 2007, 33 percent of all U.S. counties saw statistically significant increases in poverty by 2012 (across all age groups), deepening the challenges in places that had been struggling even before the recession. Over this same time period, however, one part of the country in particular saw an actual increase in median incomes, and it wasn't the traditionally wealthy Northeast corridor.

It was the Upper Great Plains. Statistically significant increases in median income, from 2007-2012, are shown in green:

Change in median household income, 2007-2012, by county.

As a result of the energy boom in the Dakotas, households in about half of the counties there were better off in 2012 than they were in 2007, a distinction most of the rest of the country doesn't share.

All maps, based on U.S. Census Bureau Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, are courtesy of the Census Bureau.
       

The Best Movie Trailers of 2013

Honestly, what would we do without trailers? Besides have to show up on time to the movies more often. These are the vehicles through which we funnel our enthusiasm for the vast possibilities of movies unseen. They so often fall short—both the movies and the trailers. At their most frustrating, trailers can give too much away or set a bland or misleading tone. At their best? At their best, a trailer can be far better at conveying the message of the movie than the movie itself is. 

What follows is a list of the best, most effective, most stirring, and most creative movie trailers of 2013. 

Best Overall Depiction of a Film's Finished Product

The truth-in-advertising people were probably very happy with the trailer for Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's Frances Ha, since the clip was a perfect distillation of that film's goofy charm and appeal. That the David Bowie song that scores the bulk of it actually appears in the film doesn't hurt either. 

Best Music (Song)

The use of Sleigh Bells' "Crown on the Ground" in the first teaser for Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring turned out to be a fine preview for the opening scene of the film itself. In both, it serves as a siren alarm for the teen delinquents as they strut around L.A. in a haze of larceny and selfies. Coppola's movies have always been smart about their music choices, and this trailer took that tendency and ran with it. 

 

Best Music (Score)

It took them three tries, but Warner Bros. finally delivered the stirring trailer that a hero like Superman really deserves. Zack Snyder's film did not end up impressing the critics, but by harnessing the grandeur of Hans Zimmer's score, it certainly seemed like it might live up to expectations. 

Best Multi-Trailer Campaign

All too often, a brilliant teaser—brief and punchy and evocative without being explainy—can give way to a humdrum trailer, if only due to the inflated expectations. Good for the people who cut the trailers for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty for following up their rather poetic teaser with a longer trailer that doesn't lose any of the first clip's impact. Doubling down on the Of Monsters and Men track with José González's (sadly Oscar-ineligible) "Step Out" really pays off.

 

Most Sadly Unconvincing

How could a trailer front loaded with Emma Thompson dressed in a Sunday church hat and speaking in a hilarious southern accent have done anything but convince audiences to flock to their local multiplexes by the dozens? The teaser for Beautiful Creatures is an intoxicating blend of gothic atmosphere, top-notch actors (Viola Davis! Jeremy Irons!), doomed lovers (our favorites Alice Englert and Alden Ehrenreich), Emmy Rossum as diva'd out as you please, and a whole lotta Florence + the Machine. At the very least, this should have earned Creatures—the best possible version of the supernatural teen romance genre that Twilight foisted upon us—a bigger box-office haul than The Mortal Instruments. Alas.

Best TV Spot

Pretty much any preview footage of Gravity was going to look fantastic, and the full-length theatrical trailers got everybody whipped into a frenzy -- especially those who got to see them in 3D. What this subsequent TV spot, released mere weeks before the film opened, accomplished was marrying the harrowing outer space footage with the score from Danny Boyle's Sunshine, one of the better pieces of movie music (and trailer fodder) available.

Worst TV Spot

Who wouldn't want to watch a movie about slavery, set to a driving rock soundtrack and punctuated by macho action beats? After all, Django Unchained did so well! This 12 Years a Slave spot is not only entirely unrepresentative of the film it advertises, it also takes the audience at home for idiots who need action spectacle in order to think about slavery for two hours.

Worst Trailer

I flirted with giving this (dis)honor to World War Z, since that trailer ended up criminally underselling a movie that turned out to be pretty good. But, no, the worst trailer of the year was the clip for Jobs, which mangled Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's "Can't Hold Us" so as to better underline that "return of the Mac" line (GET IT, DO YOU, WE REALLY HOPE YOU GET IT). The tone of the trailer suggests something in between a smirking Ashton Kutcher vanity project and a smirking Ashton Kutcher vanity project wherein Steve Jobs gets laid a lot. No one saw this movie, and thank God, so maybe we should be thanking this terrible trailer?

       

Why Alcoholic Air Hockey Isn't Replacing Beer Pong Anytime Soon

presque_isle via Reddit

Alcohol-favoring bros are abuzz this morning with the newest import from Canada, "Alco-hockey." The Imgur photo appeared on Reddit Friday morning as "the Canadian variation of beer pong," and blew up from there. Fawning writers quickly billed it as a "better beer pong" (SB Nation) and a "total game changer" (Business Insider), championing the union of two great wonders of the world: cheap beer and air hockey.

That unabashed excitement for a drinking game upgrade was the initial assessment I made as well. But upon closer review, alco-hockey falls decidedly short of "next best thing in drinking games" status. In fact, it looks like a waste of a good air hockey table. Alco-hockey fails the basic test of drinking games: It requires too much concentration, it's anti-social, and it just won't work logistically. Here's five reasons why alco-hockey won't ever catch on:

Note the ball-less team's casual stance (AP Photo).

1. Needs more brainless – Beer pong is a simple game for simple minds. You and a partner take a ping pong ball. You toss it into an arrangement of cups. If it goes in, they drink. If you miss, the other team scrambles to get the ball. Then it's their turn to shoot. Easy peasy. This is not a criticism; beer pong's greatest asset is its pure simplicity and ease of access. You shoot, and then you wait, and then shoot again. You don't have to be particularly coordinated (read: sober) to be able to play adequately.

Alco-hockey, meanwhile, requires constant concentration and deft hand-eye movements. Air hockey itself is already difficult enough with just one goal to defend; six goals is downright impossible. It would be like playing beer pong from a foot away, as almost every shot would go in. A good drinking game mixes good-time chugging with something approaching a real challenge. Alco-hockey seems like it would result in a constant barrage of drinking. And when you're sipping PBR, Natty Light, or (heaven-forbid) Genny Light, constantly drinking doesn't sound quite so appealing.

2. No partners – How would you fit two players on an air hockey table? There isn't enough space for each to have their own swinging mallet, and the fear of smashed hands makes this game best played mono a mono. So for binge-drinking introverts, this game's for you. At a packed house party, it's hard to imagine it would work.

3. Wet pucks don't move – Where alco-hockey really falls apart is the logistics. After falling in the beer-filled cups, the puck will be too wet to slide along the table's surface. A towel would fix that, or a dirty pant leg, but wiping down the puck every turn sounds like the least fun, most annoying activity ever. And a sticky table is equally bad.

4. It's not "pong" at all. As Time's Eric Dodds noted on Twitter, not every drinking game is another version of beer pong. It's simple, really: No ping pong ball, no "pong" in the name. Is Quarters an upgraded version of beer pong? What about Kings? Of course not. They aren't upgrades of beer pong, they are just different drinking games. Alco-hockey might be another drinking game, but it certainly is not an upgrade on beer pong.

(AP Photo)

5. Air hockey itself is more fun. – You can turn any normal game into a drinking contest without changing the basic rules. But cutting out cup-sized holes in the air hockey table, the game changes at a very fundamental level, and not for the better. Look at how great of a time German politician Volker Bouffier is having with regular air hockey!

Air hockey is fun. Drinking (in reasonable amounts) is fun. There is a simpler, much better way to get drunk combining these two that doesn't require handyman skills. Just drink from a beer off to the side after each goal on a regulation table, people. You'll need to use the table as a bed at 2 A.M. anyway. Better that it doesn't have holes drilled into it, damaging the structural integrity.

       

Emma Thompson Is Your Oscar Season BFF

AP

Last Oscar season, it was all about Jennifer Lawrence being adorable and frank and awesome. Well, it's a new dawn and a new day, and Emma Thompson is going to be this year's awards-season best friend. 

Thompson has been fabulous for a long time, but as she campaigns for Saving Mr. Banks, she just seems to be going all out. Take, for instance, her all-singing, all-dancing appearance on Jimmy Fallon last night. First, she broke it down when she entered. 

Then she, led the entire studio audience in a "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" singalong. 

Singing has been part of Thompson's charm offensive since she began promoting the movie. The tale of the making of Mary Poppins, in which Thompson plays the character's creator P.L. Travers, does, after all, offer up a perfect opportunity. You have to be hard-hearted to not love a Sherman brothers tune and all the better if Thompson is the one who is singing it. Writing for Vulture, Kyle Buchanan described Thompson's pipes at a Saving Mr. Banks event in November: 

 Emma Thompson, in particular, was a standout: Her rendition of "A Spoonful of Sugar" was so on point and Broadway-perfect that she could easily handle a Julie Andrew biopic next, assuming she wants to run the table when it comes to Mary Poppins creatives. 

She even got Sean Penn singing along. 

But lest you think Thompson is all sweetness and songs, part of the reason she makes for such great imaginary best friend material is that she also has a wonderfully bawdy sense of humor and a no bullshit attitude towards Hollywood's treatment of women. She revealed in a talk with Variety how there was a period when she was being offered roles for women far older than she was. During The Hollywood Reporter's actress roundtable—usually fairly buttoned-up affairs—Thompson discussed roles she would not do: 

Well, apart from the muff shot and things like that -- but let's not go there (laughter) -- there was a patch of time when I was in my 30s and just started [being offered] a whole string of roles that basically involved saying to a man, "Please don't go and do that brave thing. Don't! No, no, no, no, no!" That's a trope, the stock woman who says, "Don't do the brave thing." I said no to all of them. I'm so proud.

She later discussed tongue kissing Meryl Streep.  

Meanwhile, in an interview in Parade she was asked why her films deal with love. (Never forget her Love Actually scene.) She said: "Partly because it’s one of the major areas in which women are allowed to take part. It’s not as if I’ve got the same kind of choices as Brad Pitt in filmmaking. But also because love is the only thing that matters. Not just romantic love…there’s affection, Eros, family love…it’s exactly what we’re designed to do." That's gracious, but also some real talk about the state of things for women in cinema. Then, in the same interview, she quipped about the perm she wore to play Travers: "It was a nightmare! People would bleat in the streets as I went by. I didn’t have sex for six months!" 

We end up seeing a lot of the actors and actresses who get nominated for the Oscars. It's a long season with a lot of publicity opportunities. It's the rare actress who can make it out of such a campaign with their sparkling likeability intact. Jennifer Lawrence rode that all the way to an Oscar last year. As this year's most charming (potential) Oscar nominee, maybe Ms. Thompson has a shot at avoiding the backlash.

       

Shooting Reported at a High School in Colorado

9 News Denver/Twitter

Littleton Public Schools in Colorado went into lockdown after a shooting at Arapahoe High School in town of Centennial, south of Denver. The school is part of the Littleton public school system and is also about eight miles from Columbine High School, the site of a 1999 school shooting that left twelve people dead and injured 23 others. Centennial, like Littleton and Aurora, the site of the deadly movie theater shooting in 2012), are suburbs of Denver.

At a press briefing following the shooting, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said that the suspected gunman was found dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was a student at the school. Officials aren't identifying the gunman at this time. The shooter had expressed a desire to "confront" a particular teacher at the school, who was evacuated safely. Two students were found injured following the shooting. One victim had a "minor" wound that might not have been a gunshot wound. A second student was hospitalized in serious condition. 

PHOTO: Students being evacuated from Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado pic.twitter.com/IHHoKBGYF0

— NBC Nightly News (@nbcnightlynews) December 13, 2013

#BREAKING pic from Arapahoe HS. Students running, evacuating school @CBSDenver pic.twitter.com/rnUsJXPqqr

— Heather Burke (@HeatherCBS4) December 13, 2013

#Breaking live update now on 9NEWS. Active shooter situation at #ArapahoeHighSchool pic.twitter.com/N7E0MOty2A

— 9NEWS Denver (@9NEWS) December 13, 2013

Students tell me 2 students were shot about 30 minutes ago. Shooter also shot, they say pic.twitter.com/NrK0nZzBzH

— Ryan Parker (@ryanparkerdp) December 13, 2013

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the deadly Newtown elementary school shooting. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy tweeted the following as he headed home for the grim anniversary of the massacre in his home state. 

Breathing...stopped. #aprapahoe

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 13, 2013

Arapahoe High School is being evacuated as officials continue to search the building. 

       

Surprise! There Is a New Beyoncé Album Out Right Now, This Very Second

Beyoncé, a very good musical performer, has released a new set of songs. (APPLE)

Beyoncé has a new album, and she launched it tonight just now, this very second. Surprise! Not really sure what else to write here. Watch the video she made announcing the self-titled album, and then we'll regroup. Okay? Okay.

Beyoncé's new album appeared on iTunes shortly after midnight on the East Coast. It is called BEYONCÉ, in all caps, because that is presumably how everyone will be tweeting about it. It is a visual album, meaning that each of the new tracks also features an accompanying video. That means 14 new Beyoncé videos. Wow, 14 new chances for Kanye to interrupt an awards show.

The album features guest spots from Drake, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, and her husband Jay Z. The last track, "Blue," features a guest performance by Blue Ivy.

There's some slight bummer news tucked in here: the album is exclusive to iTunes. Those of you who have transitioned to listening to music in [spirit fingers] The Cloud, on services like Spotify and Rdio, are out of luck for now.

oh my god it's oh my god so real

— Choire (@Choire) December 13, 2013

just bought an album for the first time in years, years, this is fascinating

— Shani O. Hilton (@shani_o) December 13, 2013

The Golden Globes are adding these Bey videos to the nominations tomorrow, right?

— Caitlin Kelly (@atotalmonet) December 13, 2013

I will never in my life experience more Houston pride than hearing Bey start this album with a Third Ward shout out

— Jia Tolentino (@jiatolentino) December 13, 2013

RT if you are weeping for new bey

— Emma Carmichael (@emmacargo) December 13, 2013

Remember this night. Remember it so that in fifty years, you'll know how to answer when your grandchildren ask, "Where were you when the new Beyoncé album dropped?"