Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 939

Most Boston Residents Wouldn't Give Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the Death Penalty

According to a Boston Globe poll, the residents of Boston would not sentence Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for his crimes. Instead, a strong majority of Bostoninans believe Tsarnaev deserves life in prison, without parole, which is consistent with the region's overall stance against the death penalty. 

Even though Massachusetts doesn't have capital punishment, the federal charges facing Tsarnaev make the bomber eligible for death for his crimes, should U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder decide to pursue them. But despite his eligibility, only 33 percent of Boston residents would go for capital punishment against Tsarnaev, with 57 percent preferring life with no chance of release. That's in contrast to a national poll conducted in May, which found that most Americans overall would like to see Tsarnaev executed. 

While the Boston poll indicates a consistency in the city's stance on capital punishment — Massachusetts hasn't executed anyone since 1947 — that doesn't mean the state is entirely invulnerable to the emotional aftermath of gruesome acts of violence. The Globe explains that a previously notorious crime brought the state pretty close to reinstating capital punishment: 

In 1997... an attempt to reestablish capital punishment failed by a single vote in the emotional aftermath of the abduction and murder of Jeffrey Curley, a 10-year-old from Cambridge.

In other poll questions, a slight majority Boston residents, 53 percent, believe the federal government could do more to stop similar attacks, while 37 percent disagreed. But a plurality don't think that authorities had enough information to stop the Boston marathon bombings in particular: 43 to 36 percent. 

       

Fantasy Football Nerds Hurt an NFL Star's Feelings

Sticks and maybe break bones, but it's the words from fantasy football dorks that have cut Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice so deep that he's questioned his love for the game.

"I was a fan of fantasy football until today so many spiteful and hateful words I still love you all God Bless great win today," Rice tweeted on Sunday afternoon after leaving the game against Cleveland early due to an injury. Because of his injury and early departure, anyone who had Rice on their Fantasy Football teams scored less than handful of points their leagues, and Rice suffered the fury and wrath of those people.  Case in point: this shiny testament to American exceptionalism: 

Just wanna send out a big FUCK YOU to @RayRice27 for getting me 1.5 fantasy points this week. What the hell Ray?

— YourClassicAsshole (@graham_crackr88) September 15, 2013

Rice's sad showing hit close to home. He was on our colleague Connor Simpson's fantasy team. "Ray Rice is supposed to be the most reliable running back in the league. Yesterday, he left me standing with my pants down, drenched, in freezing cold temperatures," Simpson told me. 

While complaining about your favorite (or any) athlete on Twitter isn't a new phenomenon — some would argue that being able to heckle athletes to their digital face is one of Twitter's greatest achievements — an athlete like Rice actually complaining how a bunch of indoor kids hurt his feelings is somewhat of a first. 

For better (or worse) Rice's injury isn't expected to keep him out long. "The Ravens are hopeful that the injury isn't going to sideline Rice long and he's not scheduled for a magnetic resonance imaging exam," The Baltimore Sun reported. That means the team will be expecting him to play sooner rather than later — good news for fantasy football fans and for Rice. Assuming, of course, his body and his feelings have healed. 

The knife cuts both ways, of course. San Diego Chargers wide receiver Eddie Royal found himself on the receiving end of a shower of love and encouragement after his surprising three-touchdown performance soared him to the top of the waiver wire on Sunday. But at least Royal was wise enough to recognize the fleeting nature of Twitter stardom:

Appreciate all the love...even tho most was strictly fantasy football related! lol I'm just glad we got the W...great team win #BoltUp

— Eddie Royal (@EddieRoyalWR) September 15, 2013

       

The Mass Killing Incidents Since Obama Took Office, Mapped

The shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., on Monday marks the 20th time since Barack Obama took office that there has been a mass killing incident. Using data compiled by Mother Jones magazine, we created an animated map to show, month-by-month, what that toll looks like.

According to that data, 174 people have lost their lives since January 2009 in such incidents. The incidents must meet several criteria: four or more killed, it must have been a solitary shooter, the killings must have happened in a public place or series of places. Here's what the killings have looked like. (Note: not all months saw such killing, happily.)

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We've looked at Mother Jones' data before, using it to analyze the effect that the Senate's fairly weak gun control measures might have had if they'd been approved earlier this year. (Our assessment: not much.)

That map makes clear why the issue is so resonant with the president, who noted the spate of killings in his speech on Monday. No president has seen more incidents than Obama, as you can see at right, except President Clinton, whose two terms saw 23 killings to Obama's 20.

But, then, Obama has three more years to go. His administration has seen more killings on a per-month basis than any of the four proceeding.

       

The Brutal Beauty of '12 Years a Slave'

In one breathtaking scene in Steve McQueen's film 12 Years a Slave, our hero Solomon Northup, a free black man from the North who, in 1841, is kidnapped and sold into Southern slavery (and on whose autobiography the film is based), stands in a despondent stupor as his fellow plantation slaves sing a rousing spiritual. Overcome by the sheer hopelessness of his situation, Solomon, who is now a slave called Platt, eventually begins to sing along with them, tentatively then forcefully, his voice growing in strength and conviction as he sings about souls rising from the Earth. His face is pained but uplifted — he is both breaking, giving into the reality of his stolen life, and allowing himself to be delivered by the promise of kingdom come. Here in one brief scene is the remarkable contradiction of the human condition, grace poking up through even the most profound despair. That is the great strength of 12 Years a Slave, a film that humanizes a sprawling and often glossed-over historical atrocity through an individual's eyes, with admirable and necessary restraint.

There's not much editorializing in 12 Years a Slave; McQueen has never been terribly interested in broadcasting opinion. His two previous films, Hunger and Shame, had a calm, almost documentary style, watchful and observant, never indicating or overstating. Given this new film's subject matter, we certainly know that one side was grievously wrong, but still never feel the unwieldy, and frankly unnecessary, weight of McQueen's, or our, asserted moral authority. What Solomon experiences, and much of it is horrifying and excruciating to watch, simply happens. There's a terrifying ordinariness to the film's horror. That may actually be the one urgent point that McQueen is making, showing us how systemic and pervasive and everyday the culture of slavery was, how rooted and ingrained and thus seemingly invincible it was — for both slave and master. We meet only a handful of bad people in the film, but are never without a sense of the vast, broader-reaching injustices happening beyond these particular plantations. (We even feel it in the North, in flashbacks to Solomon's peaceful, prosperous life with his wife and children in Saratoga. Racial animus tingles around the edges of even that relative idyll.)

McQueen has made a film about one man (who is, in some ways, as much of an outsider to this world as we are) that awakens us to something much larger, something that feels distressingly familiar. Though its title suggests a temporary condition, the film forcefully, but subtly, nods toward a frightening permanency. By unflinchingly illustrating the foundational mechanics of America's worst crime, 12 Years a Slave says much about this country's legacy of racism up to the present day. The film's many plain and horrible truths shame us for not addressing these appalling facts every day, in myriad ways. The scariest thing about 12 Years a Slave is, perhaps, that it doesn't feel alien enough; it murmurs in tones we can still hear now, in stump speeches and legal defenses.

But again, McQueen avoids bonking us over the head with too much Larger Meaning. Mostly we are with Solomon, robustly and passionately played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, as he struggles to hold onto his humanity, his dignity, though subjected to cruelty after cruelty, debasement after debasement. Solomon is brought to several plantations, the first owned by an at least somewhat decent man (relatively speaking) played by Benedict Cumberbatch. But after coming to blows with the plantation's sniveling carpenter (weaselly Paul Dano), Solomon is beaten and strung up and then sent to a green hell, a cotton plantation owned by Edwin Epps, a booze-addled monster played with white-knuckle ferocity by a towering Michael Fassbender. Epps treats his slaves like toys, and takes particular interest in Solomon, because of his intellect and refined abilities, and a young woman named Patsey (newcomer Lupita Nyong'o, making a startling first impression), whom he rapes and abuses in drunken, possessive rages. It's here that Solomon's spirit truly begins to break, Ejiofor gradually hunching himself over, subtly and without any actorly affect, as his resolve weakens. His will to survive never quite disappears though, and he is eventually rescued from this nightmare after bending the ear of a sympathetic white man.

That man is played by Brad Pitt, who is also a producer on the film, a casting choice that marks probably the film's biggest misstep. Pitt's appearance, though brief, is distracting, taking us out of McQueen's meticulously crafted world and reminding us that these are all wealthy actors simply playing at history. Otherwise the film is entirely immersive, though McQueen has assembled a cast of other familiar and notable actors — Alfre Woodard and Sarah Paulson are particular standouts, Woodard as a slave at a neighboring plantation who has worked her way to being the lady of the house, and Paulson as Epps's equally cruel and spiteful wife. The photography, by the masterful cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, is austere when it needs to be, but is more often rich and aching, the Southern landscapes teeming with both dread and possibility. Hans Zimmer's lush score is at first eerie and foreboding, but by the movie's end has become something approaching a hymn. McQueen has put together a lovely and well-tailored film, but nothing is beautiful for beauty's sake. There is always a sense of economy to the filmmaking — this isn't Joe Wright's 12 Years a Slave. (Can you imagine!)

Speaking of other filmmakers, it's impossible to watch 12 Years a Slave, a hit at the Toronto Film Festival and Oscar front-runner that opens to the general public October 17, and not think about last year's similarly themed movie, Django Unchained. How disappointing it was that Quentin Tarantino simply set one of his fantastic yarns in a terrible time and place instead of actually saying something about the time and place. In that regard 12 Years a Slave feels corrective, McQueen giving us the thundering work of compassionate art that the subject matter deserves. Solomon Northup is himself unchained by the end of the picture, but his burden is still felt long after the credits have rolled and we've stumbled, shell-shocked and heartsick, back into the world.

       

Why Larry Summers Won't Lead the Fed

After an unusually divisive few months leading up to President Obama's Fed chair nomination, Larry Summers decided he didn't want to be considered for the job anymore. Summers was considered to be Obama's top pick for the post, but a lot of Democrats, not to mention women's groups, actively campaigned against him. What ultimately derailed Summers' candidacy was his record on deregulating the financial services industry, but the story that got all the attention was sexism.

On Sunday morning, Summers called Obama to remove his name from consideration. In the letter that followed, Summers wrote,

I have reluctantly concluded that any possible confirmation process for me would be acrimonious and would not serve the interests of the Federal Reserve, the Administration, or ultimately, the interests of the nation's ongoing economic recovery.

Four Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee were thought to oppose a Summers confirmation, meaning that a fair amount of Republican support would be needed to get him confirmed. Though Summers' withdrawal came as a surprise, it was probably the right thing to do — Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would have had to do a lot of campaigning to their own party to get the Senate in line. 

Sen. Jon Tester, one of the four Democrats on the banking committee to oppose Summers, has said in the past that Summers tends to favor large financial institutions over small community banks. Critics see Summers as too chummy with the banks and responsible for the deregulation during the Clinton years that led to the financial crisis. Sen. Jeff Merkley, another banking committee member who indicated he would vote against Summers, called a Summers candidacy "disconcerting." In July, a third of Democratic senators sent a letter to Obama urging him to pick Janet Yellen instead. The letter didn't mention Summers, but at the time, one of its signers, Sen. Tom Harkin, expressed his concern with the former treasury secretary: “He was one of the architects of getting rid of Glass-Steagall, of getting rid of other regulations.” It's a significant complaint, but one that usually gets mentioned second. The charge of sexism — against Obama and Summers — is the one that got all the attention in the Summers debate. 

As Jonathan Chait at New York points out, nominating and confirming a Fed chair usually isn't so "acrimonious": "Four years ago, Obama nominated Republican Ben Bernanke . . . with nary a peep of protest." The reason things got so heated over a possible Summers nomination is that he's a guy at a time when Obama faces criticism for failing to promote women in his administration.

The Fed chair nomination has become Obama's sexism test, and he has a well-liked woman he could pick — Yellen. Summers is 1) a man and 2) accused of being a sexist man. Commentators and women's groups have repeatedly brought up a questionable speech he made as president of Harvard University in 2005, in which he suggested that the lack of women in science and engineering could be due to natural differences between the sexes. A female MIT biologist present at the speech walked out, claiming if she hadn't, she "would've either blacked out or thrown up." Though Summers apologized, insisting he doesn't believe "that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science," people haven't forgotten the speech, and they won't. Amid debate over Summers' qualifications this August, NOW President Terry O'Neill called him a "sexist who isn't that good at his job."

Summers' record on deregulation got key Senate Banking Committee Dems to speak out against him, but it was Obama's record on nominating women that sealed his fate. Given Summers' history and Obama's, it was too easy to oppose a Summers candidacy, especially with Yellen available to take the post. We'll see whether Obama picks Yellen, a woman who economists and Democratic legislators alike think is the best pick for the job. 

       

The Zany Conspiracies Theories Behind 'Sleepy Hollow,' Fall TV's Craziest Show

The Fox series Sleepy Hollow, which premieres tonight, has Ichabod Crane chillin' with George Washington, fighting the Headless Horseman (who is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) in the modern day, dealing with the fact that his wife is a witch. And that's only the beginning. But it all makes sense to co-creator Roberto Orci.

"It is a historical fact that George Washington was indeed a Freemason," said Orci, who co-created the show with Alex Kurtzman and Phillip Iscove, in an interview last month. So, the show is "using idea that he was part of a secret society, which is a fact, to play with the idea that he is fighting two wars. One was political and one was biblical."

The show starts with Ichabod Crane, who fought in George Washington's army, waking up from a spell placed on him by his wife. He joins up with a Westchester County cop (that she's black female is doubly disconcerting for a man from the 18th Century) to solve a string of beheading murders that were caused by his legendary foe, who is back to bring about the end of the world.

With all this talk of Freemasons and the apocalypse, you should know that Orci, a prolific writer who has had a hand in the most recent Star Trek films, has a reputation as a conspiracy theorist. (He called conspiracy theorists "conspiracy realists.") Frequent collaborator Damon Lindelof once told StarTrek.com that "it's impossible to know Bob Orci and not get involved in those conversations."  His Twitter account—deleted last week following a nasty spat with Star Trek fans—used to be an outlet for his various wild ideas, including 9/11 trutherism and general discussion of conspiracies. So how do his predilections manifest itself in the overtly fantastical show? 

"The idea of the alternate history that’s not always talked about in textbooks to me is a very interesting thing," he said. "And that doesn’t mean, politically, the show is not about my bringing my conspiratorial views to it, it’s about trying to uncover, as much as we can, about what may have actually happened and also have fun with it and also, like you were saying, mix it with the Bible. Certainly I can’t deny that the idea that shattering a couple of historical myths and telling the truth is certainly an interest for me."  Those myths include, according to Orci, the Washington-secret society connection and the "idea that, though we are known to have very much victimized the Native Americans, there is much evidence that Native Americans very much informed Jefferson and Washington about how to run a democracy."

But the concept that originally brought Orci and Kurtzman to Sleepy Hollow was a desire to work on a "man out of time" idea. Iscove floated the idea of a modern day Sleepy Hollow. Orci explained to us that the biblical, supernatural, and historical elements got mashed together as he and his co-writers tried to find a way to expand Washington Irving's original short story, which is, y'know, pretty short. The disparate elements of the show came together via a sort of stream of consciousness. "So when we were studying and looking at the story of, okay, this man getting chased by the horseman, so we thought well what if this horseman is one of four horsemen, one of four horsemen of the apocalypse," he said. "It’s funny when we started running that by our friends and family, none of them were sure if that was part of the original Washington Irving short story." That worked with the Revolutionary War based on their thinking that, well, that the devil wouldn't want democracy. (Seriously.)

It all makes for a particularly wild show, the enjoyability level of which is predicated on whether or not you choose to buy into it. And, of course, how you feel about witches.

       

National Book Awards YA Longlist Goes Indie

After shuffling up its usual nominating process, the National Book Foundation has announced the very first long-list of finalists for the National Book Awards, the Associated Press reports.

[image error]Today's reveal is the Young People's Literature category, a list that notably includes Kate DiCamillo and David Levithan. DiCamillo was nominated on the strength of Flora & Ulysses, her new superhero story, though if you've set foot in a sixth grade English class in the past 13 years, you're likely to recognize her from her novel Because of Winn-Dixie, which spawned a movie adaptation in 2005. (DiCamillo also garnered a Newberry with 2004's The Tale of Despereaux.) Levithan, the Scholastic staffer who co-authored Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist in 2006 before Michael Cera swooped in for the screen, was nominated for Two Boys Kissing, the latest of his many LGBT-themed novels for young adults.

The other YA novelists to get a nod are Kathi Appelt, Lisa Graff, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Cynthia Kadohata, Tom McNeal, Meg Rosoff, Anne Ursu, and Gene Luen Yang, whose nominated books can be found next to their names on the NBF website. If those names don't ring a bell, you're probably not alone—as the AP reports, publishers have been rather, err, displeased at the foundation's penchant for lesser-known titles:

Publishers, some of whom sit on the book foundation’s board and contribute thousands of dollars for tables at the ceremony, have worried in recent years that judges—especially fiction judges—have been overlooking such high-profile books as Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” in favor of more obscure releases. Anxious for the National Book Awards to match, or least approach, the commercial power of Britain’s Man Booker Prize, the board added long-lists and expanded the pool of judges

The new nominating process is meant to spur "increased attention and sales." Few, though, are likely to dispute the honorary awards that will be handed to Maya Angelou and E.L. Doctorow, as we reported earlier this month. Poetry, nonfiction, and fiction nominees are coming later this week.

       

All Three 'Big Brother' Finalists Have Been Fired From Their Jobs for Being Racist

The 'Big Brother' finale is Wednesday night. All three of the finalists are going to need the $500,000 prize, because they've all been fired for racist things they've done on the show. GinaMarie Zimmerman was fired from her job as a pageant coordinator in July for using the n-word, among other things. Spencer Clawson was fired from his job as a train conductor in July for praising Hitler and making jokes about child pornography.

Now, with just three days left in the house, Andy Herren, one of the least objectionable houseguests this summer, was fired from his job as a public speaking teacher, seemingly for supporting all the racism in the house, including a statement Zimmerman made calling the evicted contestants "robotic biracials." The three have been in an alliance they named "the Exterminators." Heavy on the "terminator" part, it seems.

All three (and head racist in charge Aaryn Gries who was booted from her modeling agency for a string of racist remarks which she later denied saying even though they were on tape and broadcast to the entire world over the Internet) have been kept away from news from the outside world since joining the show, so there's going to be some pretty rude awakenings after the game concludes. No matter who takes the prize, they're all losers.

       

Michael Hayden's Latest NSA Defense: Terrorists Love Gmail

While current NSA chief Keith Alexander may be the individual most closely associated with the controversial data collection programs made public by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, it's his predecessor, retired general Michael Hayden, who offered the latest defense of those programs on Sunday. "Gmail is the preferred Internet service provider of terrorists worldwide," Hayden said, as a defense of the PRISM program, which delivers vast amounts of information from several communications companies, including Google, into the hands of U.S. intelligence. 

According to the Washington Post, Hayden, who ran the CIA until 2009 after stepping down as NSA director in 2005, also posited that the American-ness of the internet also gives the U.S. special privileges over scanning its content for intelligence: 

Hayden suggested that the Internet's origins in the United States partially justifies the NSA's conduct..."We built it here, and it was quintessentially American," he said, adding that partially due to that, much of traffic goes through American servers where the government "takes a picture of it for intelligence purposes."

That's unlikely to be a popular argument among the "friendly" nations who found out recently about the NSA's reach. Take Brazil, for example: they're so mad about the NSA's collection of their country's communications that the country's government has commissioned a satellite of its very own to bypass American, or American-friendly infrastructures. 

Hayden was also involved in the defense of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. He was the NSA chief when the former president authorized the program shortly after September 11, 2001. In 2006, Hayden argued that programs like the warrantless wiretapping initiative would have stopped 9/11, had the authorization been in place beforehand. More recently, Hayden defended the recently revealed XKEYSCORE intelligence program, which allows analysts to sift through vast troves of browsing histories for millions of people. Hayden is also responsible for assessing Snowden's personality as a “combustible combination of naivety and narcissism." 

       

Cecily Strong Will Join Seth Meyers at the SNL Weekend Update Desk

Now we know which cast member SNL godfather Lorne Michaels has chosen to take over Weekend Update upon Seth Meyers's fast-approaching departure: it's Cecily Strong, which probably isn't a huge surprise.  By most accounts, even by Meyers himself, Strong had a particularly amazing debut season at SNL, including the creation of one popular Weekend Update guest: "The Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started a Conversation With at a Party." 

In an interview with the New York Times, Michaels explained that Strong, "from the first show, was right there...She exploded.” His plan, it seems, is to have Strong share the desk with Meyers until at least February, when Meyers (who is also head writer for the show) will take over hosting duties on NBC's "Late Night." But his exact departure date from SNL's fake news desk apparently isn't set in stone. Since Michaels also produces "Late Night," it looks like he's trying to figure out a way to have the "anchor" drop in once a week for the rest of the season: 

“Seth is a unique case,” Mr. Michaels said, noting that the new late-night show would not have a Friday edition, letting Mr. Meyers potentially drop in and work that day and Saturday on “Update.”

But whether Michaels gets to keep Meyers on double duty or not is still an open question. Whenever he does depart, however, Strong will be there to man the desk alone.

Meanwhile, it looks like the cast for the next season is all picked and ready to go, too, even though the show has yet to make an official announcement. By all accounts, the newbies are Brooks Wheelan (picked last week, according to the Times), Beck Bennett, Kyle Mooney. John Milhiser,  and Noël Wells. Longtime SNL writer Michael Patrick O’Brien will also move into the cast. They, along with the remaining cast, will have a lot of work to do after last season's mass veteran exodus. Here's what Michaels told the Times about how he picks new cast members, based on a kind of legendary audition process: 

“You can’t be famous before you’re famous,” he said. “It’s one thing to be on a stage in Chicago or L.A.; it’s another thing to be standing in 8H,” he said of the show’s studio. “It’s like standing in Yankee Stadium. They can all play baseball, but this is something different. And the weight of all that was just more palpable to me this summer, more than ever before...Mr. Michaels said that he does “absolutely think about who I am replacing,” but, he added, “One thing you can’t do is look for another Kristen Wiig.” Even so, last season was a success in terms of new female talent, with Ms. Strong joined by another breakout performer, Kate McKinnon.

Michaels is also making some interesting choices for guest hosts this season, as the show looks to keep its strong-again reputation even as Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Jason Sudeikis depart. Tina Fey will guest host the season opener, while, uh, Miley Cyrus will both host and perform in early October.