Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 91

Britney Spears Finds Grace in the Hook-Up

Finally, someone pulled it off: the great generational anthem for Tinder’s and Grindr’s lonelyhearts.

“Say you feel alone, that your day was the baddest / Tellin’ me you can’t sleep because of your mattress,” Britney Spears coos at the start of “Do You Want to Come Over?” before asking the title question with an eager little hiccup. A beer can pops somewhere in the mix; a wobbly bass line creates a voracious groove; a herd of men scream, “WHATEVER YOU NEED, I’LL DO IT!” In the chorus, Spears declares that “nobody should be alone if they don’t have to be,” which reads a bit like a puzzling political slogan—“have to be” alone would mean what, medical quarantine? But the line also distills pop culture’s big commandment about sex to its animal essence: If you’re not screwing somebody, you’re nobody.

The relentless thrill of “Do You Want to Come Over?” is not the only time Britney Spears’s new album Glory makes you feel like you’re being hit on via thirsty text message. The record opens with “Invitation,” and the invitation is to a blindfolded petting session. In the single “Make Me,” what she’s making are orgasm noises. “Slumber Party” tries to coin a euphemism for one-night stands while invoking the teenage game of Seven Minutes in Heaven. “Change Your Mind (No Sea Cortes)” pleads for a guy to drop the chivalry already—“I'm desperate, so desperate.”

That Spears sings this way at age 34 and as the mother of two should not really come as a surprise. Sex is central to pop music in general, but for Spears, a very specific stance on sex has reigned from “...Baby One More Time” to “I’m a Slave 4 U” to “Hold It Against Me” to “Perfume.” She’s continually the wanter in a relationship but dreams of being the one wanted, which is to say she’s continually powerless, dreaming of power.

This persona is a performance of a gender trope and a fiction constructed by a songwriters in collaboration with Spears, of course. But it also has happened to fit the narratives of her public/personal life—mass-marketed ingenue to rebellious scalp shaver to a parent living under the legal control of her own parents—all too well.

Remarkably, Glory uses the loneliness-is-killing-me shtick for a clutch of fun pop songs that mostly don’t come across as examples of arrested development. Lusty as she may present herself, this is not the stomping dance-floor femme fatale that defined her heyday up through, yes, 2011’s Femme Fatale. Rather, her current version of whatever-and-chill emphasizes “chill,” all bubble baths and back rubs and whispering in French: romantic stuff without, necessarily, a long-term romance.

A pinker, fluffier sonic template reflects the lyrical shift, with a number of mid-tempo songs whose hook is just Spears oohing and whose flourishes—high disembodied vocal sounds; lackadaisical finger snaps; subtle reggae touches—follow trend with Selena Gomez and the various Lana del Rey knockoffs on the charts. Her voice often sounds like it’s not her own, but the choruses are stacked with enough hooks to make it not matter.

She’s figured out what she needs, and it’s a rejection of fairy tales about love.

Also peppered throughout are a few off-kilter and diverse jams that might represent what Spears was talking about when she said she wanted Glory to be “artsy fartsy.” She tries out frenetic neo-soul on “What You Need,” grinningly inauthentic blues-pop on “Liar,” and ambient electronica for “Coupure Électrique” (all in French, with flavors of trap music!). Least successful of the larks is a striptease monologue over imitation Timbaland beats on “Private Show”; most successful is “If I’m Dancing,” a gonzo, whirring pastiche of noises that recalls pop deconstructionists like M.I.A. and Grimes (as well as her own great and freaky 2011 tune “How I Roll”).

At one point in the album, Spears mutters “that was fun,” which about sums up the overall mentality. By reveling in nothing-to-prove sonic freedom while presenting a version of romantic longing specific to her life phase, she finally delivered a successful version of her long-promised “personal” album.

Thursday night on James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke,” Spears seemed loose and relaxed as she revealed a surprising personal belief that puts the whole of Glory into perspective. She told the talk-show host that while she wants three more kids, she has to find the right guy first—though really, “I might not ever go to men again … I may French kiss someone, but I’m not going to marry anyone, no. I don’t believe in marriage anymore.”

Indeed, there’s only one Glory song that hints at monogamy, “Better,” which is really more about the physical benefits of intimacy. After all she’s been through, she’s figured out what she needs, and it’s a rejection of pop culture’s favorite fairy tale about love. Suddenly, the desperate late-night hook-up seems to carry an element of grace—or maybe she’d call it glory.

Southside With You Is a Gentle Bit of Political Nostalgia

The main challenge Southside With You sets for itself isn’t a very difficult one. Richard Tanne’s gentle romantic drama charts a first date from its uneasy opening to its hopeful conclusion, with its protagonist Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter), as a skeptical young lawyer being wooed by subordinate at her firm. The film, at times, tries to cheekily inject some suspense into whether she’ll be won over. But given that her associate is a young Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers)—her future husband and President of the United States—the film inspires very little “will they, won’t they?” nail-biting.

So the real task for Southside With You may be justifying its own existence. In portraying Michelle’s cautiousness and Barack’s halting, but eventually successful charm offensive, the first-time writer-director Tanne revels in the qualities Obama would later use to captivate much of the country. But with President Obama still in office, there’s a sense that it may be too early to retell the story of his and Michelle’s first date—even if the election for his successor is still months away. But leave the oddity of Southside With You’s existence aside, and the film is still compelling for the way it celebrates a powerful partnership by unraveling its earliest moments.

Barack’s side of the first date is more widely known, since he recounted it in his memoir The Audacity of Hope. But the basics are: The pair met at the law firm where she worked and where he was a summer associate. They went to see Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which had just been released in theaters, and shared an ice cream cone afterward. But in Southside With You, Tanne wisely positions Michelle as the audience surrogate, slowly getting to know Barack as he tries to convince her he’s worth her time.

With the question of a happy ending out of the way, Tanne’s script invests itself more in Michelle’s psychology—including her tightly wound sense of propriety, rooted in her efforts to fit in at institutions (Princeton, high-powered law firms) where she’s one of few black women in attendance. Worried about how their relationship might look to others, Sumpter plays Michelle with her guard up, often deflecting Barack’s attempts to flirt with terse dialogue. Sumpter’s performance may be a little stilted at times, though it speaks to the character she’s playing. Michelle is saddled with heroic amounts of exposition, laying out her life story, and her hopes and fears, while learning more about Barack’s past. But Sumpter sells Michelle’s deeper emotions beautifully through her loving lionization of her family and upbringing, and her simmering resentment over her tenuous status at the firm.

If Southside With You is a love story, its job is to get audiences to fall for Obama: Tanne films his subject with all the subtlety of a campaign ad, bathing him in heavenly light or putting him in dramatic silhouette. Sawyers is not exactly a dead ringer for the president, but he’s close enough, and Tanne does the rest with his camera to make the physical resemblance nigh-uncanny. As a result, there’s a spookiness to Sawyers’ performance, which carefully treads the line between acting and mimicry.

The young Obama’s voice and diction are particularly dead-on when he’s in a political mode, especially in what comes closest to the film’s set piece: Barack talking at a community meeting at a local church in the South Side of Chicago. That meeting was the ostensible reason for his and Michelle’s date, a non-romantic excuse for them to intermingle outside of the office (he springs the Spike Lee movie, and the ice cream, on her later). It’s also the moment for Tanne to have the most fun with the odd premise of his film, forsehadowing Obama’s effortless ability to connect with a crowd, even though this time it’s just a dozen people sitting in church pews.

Fortunately, whenever Southside With You threatens to get too cute, it pulls back a little. When Michelle asks Barack if he’s thought about a career in politics, he replies “maybe,” with a shrug, taking another drag on his cigarette. For the most part, Tanne resists having his characters wink to the camera, relying instead on the power of Sawyers’ and Sumpter’s performances. In a tumultuous election year, Southside With You is a gentle, rose-tinted piece of political nostalgia—one that glances at the divisions in American society, but still casts a optimistic view toward whatever’s next.

Did Ryan Lochte Provide False Testimony in Rio?

NEWS BRIEF The Ryan Lochte saga continues. On Thursday, Brazilian police asked prosecutors to file charges of providing false testimony against the U.S. Olympic swimmer, a crime that carries up to 18 months in prison.

Lochte told reporters that he and three teammates were robbed at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro by men dressed as police officers, but their account seems to be untrue—or at least not as simple as that. Officers in Brazil found security tape of the moment when Lochte and swimmers Gunnar Bentz, Jack Conger, and James Feigen stopped at a gas station, and instead of a robbery, they said the three swimmers vandalized a bathroom. When workers at the station confronted the group and asked them to pay for the damages, the swimmers became belligerent, and two security officers intervened and drew their weapons.

That’s how Brazilian authorities have framed it—but their version of the story was contested this week by an investigation by USA Today. The report told a more nuanced story, notably that footage officers claim shows the swimmers vandalizing the bathroom does not in fact show any vandalism. A witness in the article also said that because of the language barrier, the swimmers might have believed they were being robbed when officers, guns drawn, demanded they pay for damages.

The swimmers Bentz and Gunnar were pulled off their plane as they tried to return to the U.S., and Feigen paid more than $10,000 in fines. Lochte left Brazil and the games and returned to the U.S. shortly after the incident, and before a judge ordered his passport seized. He has since apologized (sort of) for what he called his “exaggerated” story.

His sponsors, including Speedo and Ralph Lauren, dropped the 12-time Olympic medalist. But now a new company says it wants to give Lochte second chance. The swimmer has signed a deal with Pine Bros., a cough-drop company. In a statement Thursday, the company’s CEO, Rider McDowell, said:

We all make mistakes, but they’re rarely given front-page scrutiny. He’s a great guy who has done incredible work with charities. I’m confident that Pine Bros. fans will support our decision to give Ryan a second chance.

Lochte tweeted:

Thanks to all the folks at pine bros. for your confidence in me. I look forward to making you proud.

— Ryan Lochte (@RyanLochte) August 25, 2016

It’s rumored that Lochte may appear on the TV show Dancing With the Stars, a program with a history of rehabbing the damaged reputations of fallen idols.  

Lochte could be charged in absentia, because it’s unlikely he’ll return to Rio, even if convicted. Police want Lochte to be deposed in the U.S., with a transcript going to the International Olympic Committee’s Ethics Commission. Lochte’s lawyer told the BBC on Friday he will not be responding to the charges, and that Lochte will not make a public statement to address them.

Oscar Pistorius's Six-Year Sentence Stands

NEWS BRIEF A South African court denied a bid by prosecutors Friday seeking more prison time for Oscar Pistorius. They had sought to extend the Olympic and Paralympic athlete’s six-year sentence for the 2013 murder of his girlfriend, the Associated Press reports.

“I am not persuaded that there are reasonable prospects of success for an appeal,” Judge Thokozile Masipa said Friday of the state’s bid to extend the 29-year-old’s sentence, which prosecutor Gerrie Nel called “shockingly light.”

Pistorius, a double-amputee sprinter commonly known as “blade runner,” was handed the sentence last month after he was convicted of shooting and killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in 2013. Pistorius claimed he shot Steenkamp through a locked bathroom door because he mistakenly believed her to be an intruder. He was initially sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter, in 2014. A South African appeals court overturned the manslaughter conviction one year later on the grounds the lower court had misinterpreted the law, and convicted him of murder.

Though Pistorius faced a minimum of 15 years in prison for his murder conviction, the judge said she issued six because of “compelling personal circumstances,” including his disability, his status as a first-time offender, and his expressions of remorse.

The Stanford Rape Case Judge Steps Aside

NEWS BRIEF Santa Clara County Judge Aaron Persky is voluntarily giving up his docket of criminal cases in the aftermath of his lenient sentence for a college student convicted of sexual assault.

The judge will instead be transferred to the civil division starting on September 6, where his caseload will focus on lawsuits instead of criminal trials.

Persky received intense criticism for sentencing Brock Turner, a former Stanford student convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault in March, to six months in jail and probation in early June, citing the “severe impact” it would have on him. Prosecutors had asked for a two-year sentence.

The case reached national prominence after a stomach-churning letter by Turner’s victim, which she had read aloud in court prior to sentencing, went viral. In it, she detailed the trauma she experienced and her struggle to recover from the assault.

The Mercury News has more:

Persky and Judge Vincent J. Chiarello, who lives near the Palo Alto courthouse, will switch places, with Chiarello moving up to Palo Alto. The switch was not engineered by Presiding Judge Rise Pichon, who said she had no plans to transfer him out of Palo Alto, despite the public outcry.

In a brief written statement, Pichon said, "While I firmly believe in Judge Persky's ability to serve in his current assignment, he has requested to be assigned to the civil division, in which he previously served. Judge Perky believes the change will aid the public and the court by reducing the distractions that threaten to interfere with his ability to effectively discharge the duties of his current criminal assignment."

The new assignment will not be permanent. Judicial assignments rotate every year and must be approved by the presiding judge.

Persky’s ruling in the Turner case continued to haunt him in other trials. In one dramatic incident, at least 10 prospective jurors refused to serve on a case assigned to him. Local prosecutors also successfully asked him to step aside in other sexual-assault cases.

The disqualifications continued even after the national spotlight faded: According to the Mercury News, Persky most recently removed himself from a sex-related criminal case on August 19.

Thursday’s reassignment likely won’t be the end of the fallout for Persky. A coalition of local legal figures and national women’s organizations is pushing for the judge’s recall on the November 2017 ballot.

Clinton's Indictment of a Trump Campaign Built on 'Prejudice and Paranoia'

Hillary Clinton aimed a fierce barrage at Donald Trump on Thursday, accusing him of fomenting racism, bigotry, and paranoia with his presidential campaign.

It was a kitchen-sink attack, a bracing inventory of Trump’s connections—some direct, others more tenuous—to conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, white supremacists like David Duke, and the “alt-right” conservatism of Breitbart. The speech served as a domestic-policy counterpart to the similarly critical broadside she aimed at Trump’s foreign policy in June. As Julia Ioffe pointed out, it was also an update to the idea of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Clinton coined 18 years ago.

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“Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He is taking hate groups mainstream, and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party,” Clinton said at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada. (A video ad released Thursday covers much of the same ground.) She said Trump’s rhetoric was “like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for president of the United States from one of our two major parties.”

Over more than a half-hour of sustained attack, Clinton added little new material to the record. Instead, she methodically plotted Trump’s known ties, in what appeared to be an effort to energize her own voters and, in particular, to give pause to Republicans who have grudgingly opted to make their peace with a candidate they don’t love. As she had in June, Clinton again labeled Trump “temperamentally unfit to be president of the United States.”

Though the speech had been billed as an exploration of Trump’s ties to the “alt-right”—a political niche catering to white nationalists, xenophobes, and others—she only touched on the topic toward the end of the speech. By the time she reached that point, Clinton had already assailed Trump for retweeting a white-supremacist Twitter account and for posting a meme taken from a white-supremacist website. She had mentioned his fabricated account of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey and his baseless accusation that the father of Senator Ted Cruz was implicated in the Kennedy assassination. She had criticized him for appearing on Alex Jones’ show and praising the host, and for failing to promptly disavow David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and current congressional candidate. (Although Trump later did so, Duke remains enamored of Trump, she noted.) And she had criticized his latest immigration plan as both unworkable and un-American.

“The last thing we need in the situation room is a loose cannon who can’t tell the difference, or doesn’t care to, between fact and fiction,” Clinton said.

Finally turning to the alt-right, she read off a series of headlines from Breitbart, whose CEO Steve Bannon recently became CEO of Trump’s campaign: “Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage,” “‘Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?’,” “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield.” She also criticized Trump for campaigning Wednesday night with Nigel Farage, the former head of the U.K. Independence Party and a leader of the campaign supporting Britain’s departure from the European Union.

Clinton implored her audience not to take seriously Trump’s recent moves toward softening his tone on immigration and speaking to black voters.

“I know that some people still want to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. They hope that he will eventually reinvent himself, that there’s a kinder, gentler more responsible Donald Trump waiting in the wings,” she said. But no such Trump exists, Clinton insisted. “The policies that he as proposed would put prejudice into practice. Don’t be distracted by his recent attempts to muddy the waters.”

Her argument that Trump hasn’t really changed was aided by the recent addition of Bannon to the campaign, since Breitbart has emerged, under Bannon’s stewardship, as one of the marquee outlets for the alt-right, and a major point for alt-right ideas to enter the mainstream—sometimes via the Trump campaign.

“It really does take a lot of nerve to ask people he’s mistreated and ignored for decades, ‘What do you have to lose?’ Because the answer is everything.”

In reaching out to black voters, Trump has argued that African American communities are uniformly poor, dangerous, and hopeless, and suggested they should give him a chance. But Clinton noted that Trump had been accused of racial discrimination as far back as the 1970s.

“It really does take a lot of nerve to ask people he’s mistreated and ignored for decades, ‘What do you have to lose?’” she said. “Because the answer is everything.”

The speech was a remarkably harsh attack for a candidate who is leading Trump by sizable margins both nationwide and in key swing states, having already expanded the possible range of victories into traditionally Republican states. But if Trump’s odds in November already look long, she sought to knock him entirely out of contention on Thursday. The careful indictment was designed to make Trump supporters uncomfortable, forcing them to reckon with some of the less savory remarks their candidate has made, and to encourage Republicans who are on the fence to forsake Trump and back her.

Clinton harkened back to moments when prominent Republicans have publicly rejected bigotry. Discussing Trump’s attack against federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, she quoted Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Trump endorser who labeled the jab “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” She praised President George W. Bush for his inclusive rhetoric about Muslims immediately after 9/11, and lauded Senator Bob Dole for banishing racists during his 1996 run against her husband. (In an ironic turn, Dole is a Trump backer this year.) “This is not conservatism as we have known it, this is not Republicanism,” she said. Reprising a campaign ad, she warned of the effect of hearing Trump on children.

Yet Clinton’s speech was also well-calibrated to bait Trump and his supporters, right down to her quotation of a Mexican proverb. She got some immediate gratification when David Duke defended the alt-right—and by extension Trump—in a rebuttal to BuzzFeed.

The best-case scenario for the Clinton campaign is to prod Trump himself into responding. She has characterized him as easily baited to anger, and when he has lashed out in the past, his outbursts have often been damaging to his campaign. Although he’s attempting a milder tone this week, he also said, “If people hit me, I will certainly hit back. That will never change.” Clinton has served the ball right into his court to prove it.

The NHL's First Female Coach

NEWS BRIEF Professional hockey has its first female coach.

The Arizona Coyotes on Wednesday hired Dawn Braid as the team’s skating coach. This is the first time a team in the NHL has hired a woman as a full-time coach. Previously, Braid serves as a consultant for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Anaheim Ducks, Buffalo Sabres, and Calgary Flames.

Braid, who for seven years served as the director of skating development at the Athletes Training Centre in Ontario, in a statement:

The fact that they respect what I do enough to name me as a full-time coach, or to name me as the first female coach in the NHL, I take a ton of pride in that. I’ve worked very hard for this opportunity. It’s been going on for years and I just look forward to going even further with it.

The NHL isn’t the first professional sports league to add a full-time female coach. In 2014, the San Antonio Spurs basketball team brought on former WNBA star Becky Hammon as an assistant coach. Earlier this year, the Buffalo Bills football team hired Kathryn Smith as a special team quality-control coach. Both women became the first full-time female coaches in their respective leagues.

The NHL season starts in October.

Is the French Ban on the Burqini Legal?

NEWS BRIEF The burqini ban, which has spread across 26 French towns, was presented Thursday before the State Council, France’s highest administrative court, Agence-France Presse reports.

France’s Human Rights League (LDH) and the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) appealed a lower court decision Monday in Nice that upheld the proscription of the swimwear on beaches in Villeneuve-Loubet, one of the first towns to institute the ban.

The lower court’s ruling said the ban was “necessary, appropriate, and proportionate” to preventing public disorder, arguing the swimsuit favored by some Muslim women could be interpreted as a provocation. Patrice Spinosi, the LDH lawyer, called the move “a serious and manifestly illegal infringement” of individual’s fundamental freedoms.

The high court’s ruling, which is expected to be announced Friday, will set a legal precedent for towns to observe across the country.

The high court’s decision comes amid a nationwide debate over whether the conservative swimwear has a place in France’s secular society—a debate which intensified Tuesday after photos surfaced of four policemen fining a woman for not wearing “an outfit respecting good morals and secularism” while she lounged on the shores of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.

The views of French lawmakers reflect the vocal debate on the burqini. Prime Minister Manuel Valls backed the ban adopted by mayors across the country last week on the grounds the swimsuit “is not compatible with the values of France and the Republic.” But not all lawmakers in Valls’s Socialist party agree. Najat Belkacem, the minister of education, condemned the ban for prompting “racist speech.”

Les arrêtés anti-burkini libèrent la parole raciste, il y a là une dérive politique grave. #E1Matinhttps://t.co/lmSYNjkWta

— Najat Belkacem (@najatvb) August 25, 2016

“The anti-burqini arrests free racist speech, this constitutes a serious political drift,” Belkacem tweeted.  

A study conducted by Ifop for Le Figaro found the debate to be less stark among the French public. Of the 1,001 people surveyed, 64 percent opposed allowing burqinis on French beaches, with 6 percent supporting and 30 percent saying they were indifferent.

Religious dress has long been a source of contention in France, whose secular laws prohibit displays of religion in certain settings. In 2010, the country became the first in Europe to ban the burqa, a full-faced veil favored by some Muslim women, in public. In 2004, religious symbols—including headscarves, yarmulkes, and large crosses—were banned from public schools.

Aheda Zanetti, the founder of the Burqini brand from which full-body swimsuits of that style get their name, addressed the controversy surrounding her swimsuit design Wednesday in The Guardian. She wrote:

When I invented the burkini in early 2004, it was to give women freedom, not to take it away. … I wanted to find something that would adapt to the Australian lifestyle and western clothing but at the same time fulfill the needs of a Muslim girl.

The State Council’s decision is expected to be announced Friday.

What Happens to Mr. Robot Without Mr. Robot?

This post contains spoilers for the most recent episode of Mr. Robot .

If someone had told me early last season that Mr. Robot could survive a single episode without Rami Malek as the brilliant, unraveling hacker Elliot Alderson, I would have rattled off several reasons why I thought that person was wrong. But Rami is the show’s anchor! He’s a perfect Elliot! He lends a crucial humanity to the show’s crushing neuroses and cynicism! But over the rest of the season, Mr. Robot wisely deepened the other characters lodged in Elliot’s orbit (especially Angela). Even the most diehard Malek fans would have to admit that Wednesday’s episode, “eps2.6_succ3ss0r.p12,” made the powerful case that Mr. Robot can be genuinely fascinating, moving, and tense without its titular dual personality.

Coming just after last week’s revelation that Elliot has been (as many had suspected) not at his mother’s house but in prison all season, the latest episode offered a much-needed return to some of the more straightforward cyber-thriller qualities that so perfectly complemented the show’s headier themes in season one. (Finally, a break from wondering what is or isn’t “real.”) The episode also finally unleashed the rest of the Mr. Robot cast, which has been less prominent this season as Elliot’s mental crisis overshadowed fsociety’s troubles in the wake of the disastrous E Corp hack (a.k.a. 5/9). The result was a fairly tight narrative that saw fsociety leak an FBI conference call confirming an illegal surveillance operation; Mobley and Trenton’s paranoia mounting; Dom’s investigation flailing; and Angela’s disillusionment growing. Oh yeah, and Darlene killing Susan Jacobs, the “Madame Executioner” E Corp general counsel, who comes home unexpectedly to find the hacker group squatting there. And possibly Cisco, her Dark Army-affiliated boyfriend.

This was as close to a Darlene episode as the show has come so far. This season has framed her as the episode’s eponymous “successor” to her brother, but it’s unclear so far how different or effective her reign has been. Her panic attacks—only referenced but never shown on screen—seem like a more minor barrier to consistent leadership than Elliot’s dissociative personality disorder. But Darlene also has the undesirable task of dealing with the aftermath of a hack Elliot orchestrated, without Elliot’s help, while being targeted by dangerous forces.

A pressure-cooker situation was almost inevitable, and Mr. Robot deployed Darlene’s bottled-up rage quickly and powerfully: Midway through the episode, Darlene told a bleeding Susan that, as a four-year-old, she watched the lawyer laugh on TV after E Corp was found not responsible for the deaths of employees, including her father. Miscalculating the conversation as a kind of parley, Susan asked what Darlene wants to do next. So Darlene pressed a stun gun to the woman’s chest and watched silently as Susan fell unconscious into the indoor swimming pool.

Darlene’s own internal darkness was alluded to in the sitcom sequence (where she suffered abuse from her mother), but Elliot’s trauma regularly supersedes his sister’s. No surprise then, that Mr. Robot took Elliot’s absence as an opportunity to give consequence to Darlene’s pain and to reinvigorate the show’s ever-compelling question of morality. Elliot is often shielded from the immediate repercussions of his actions—Mr. Robot stepped in to protect him during the vicious beating, he lost time after allegedly killing Tyrell, he’s in jail for some minor offense while the rest of fsociety tries not to drown. Darlene isn’t so lucky. After she killed Susan, she didn’t just conveniently “lose time.” She had to dispose of the body in what turned out to be a horrifyingly intimate process, at the exact animal shelter that had been the scene of an exciting liberation in season one, no less. Of course, all the dogs fsociety freed are back in their cages again. (Metaphor!)

Everyone on this show is trapped in their own cage. Elliot is in a literal one, but also in one of the mind. Darlene is in many ways trapped by her past and her destructive, but understandable convictions about justice. Mobley and Trenton, too, appear to have no way out of their current predicaments, with the FBI and Dark Army both closing in. Dom is stuck chasing down dead-end leads as part of an embattled bureau. And Angela is ensconced in a strange prison of her own making: Season two has seen the complicated pathology planted by Terry Colby taking further root, as Angela goes about her life, skittering between guilt, self-loathing, and zen-like denial.

So what better place for all those complicated feelings to collide than at a New York karaoke bar on the Fourth of July? And what better song to capture that dissonance than … Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”? “All for freedom and for pleasure / Nothing ever lasts forever,” Angela sang, in a gorgeously sad scene that jumped between a closeup of her on stage and fsociety hacking Susan’s accounts. Elliot has been broken for a long time, but “Successor” was the first Mr. Robot episode that truly showed everyone else around him is, too.

Yemen's Crisis

NEWS BRIEF At least 9,000 people, including nearly 4,000 civilians, have been killed in fighting in Yemen in the past 18 months. Now, the United Nations wants some accountability.

The conflict between the Sunni government of Yemen and the Houthi rebels has gone unchecked, says Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN human rights chief. Since a Saudi-led coalition of nine countries ramped up airstrikes in March 2015 against the Shiite rebels, who control the capital, Sanaa, 3,800 civilians have been killed, a new report from the UN Human Rights Council says.

Zeid is now calling for an independent, international investigation into the conflict. He adds:

Civilians in Yemen have suffered unbearably over the years from the effects of a number of simultaneous and overlapping armed conflicts. And they continue to suffer, absent any form of accountability and justice, while those responsible for the violations and abuses against them enjoy impunity. Such a manifestly, protractedly unjust situation must no longer be tolerated by the international community.

The UN Human Rights Council last year voted to defer a humanitarian investigation of the conflict to the Yemeni government. That clearly has not worked, Zeid says. Left in the wake of this conflict are 7.6 million people suffering from malnutrition and an additional 3 million people displaced, according to the UN report.

While UN peace talks were suspended earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Saudi King Salman on Thursday to express concern over the civilian casualties and try to bring an end to the Yemeni civil war.