Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 95

The Wedding Bombing in Turkey

NEWS BRIEF At least 50 people were killed Saturday night when a suicide bomber detonated explosives at a wedding celebration in southern Turkey.

The attack occurred in the city of Gaziantep as guests danced in the streets. At least 69 more were wounded, said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the BBC reported. The president blamed the Islamic State, which has been suspected of other bombings in Turkey, for the attack. He said the bomber was between 12 and 14 years old.

Reuters reported on the scene:

Celebrations were ending at the traditional henna night party, when guests have decorative paint applied to their hands and feet. Some families had already left when the bomb went off but women and children were among the dead, witnesses said.

Blood and burns marked the walls of the narrow lane where the blast hit. Women in white and checkered scarves cried, sitting crosslegged outside the morgue waiting for word on missing relatives.

The wedding celebration was for a member of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a pro-Kurdish political party in the country, according to Reuters.

Dozens in Turkey have been killed in similar attacks in the last year. Gaziantep is about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, from Turkey’s border with Syria, where Turkey has been bombing Islamic State targets since July 2015. Turkish forces are also fighting the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group that the Turkish government considers a terrorist organization, in the country’s southeast.

Why the Debate Over Nate Parker Is So Complex

At first, it seemed as though Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation couldn’t have come at a better time. In the wake of #OscarsSoWhite activism and the rapid expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement, a film about Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion that examined the history and power of black liberation seemed to be just the story America needed to see. When Fox Searchlight purchased the global rights to the movie at the Sundance Film Festival for $17.5 million—a new record for the event—Parker’s ascendancy seemed unstoppable. Excitement rose among black filmgoers for the film’s October release, while Parker seemed like a significant new presence in both the film and activism worlds. Unfortunately, the promise of both him and his movie appears now to be too good to be true.

Over the past few weeks, debate has swirled around the fact that Parker was accused of raping a female student in 1999 along with his writing partner on The Birth of a Nation, Jean Celestin, while all three were enrolled at Penn State. The victim also stated that both Parker and Celestin continually harassed her after she reported the crime. In 2001, Parker was acquitted on the grounds that he and the woman had had sexual relations before the alleged rape. Celestin was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to six months in prison, but he appealed, and the case was dismissed in 2005. This week, Variety reported that the woman involved killed herself in 2012, at the age of 30.

Within the black community, these revelations have provoked sharp debate and sour feelings. Parker’s movie concerns itself with black liberation, but the question of who gets to be the herald of this mobilization has long been a contested issue. In this sense, Parker’s personal life is inextricable from the message of The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner is a symbol of liberation through rebellion and Nate Parker has chosen himself to be the vessel through which to tell this story. But the revelations around his personal history illuminate the extent to which this liberation isn’t and hasn’t been equal for black men and women. Parker’s history of Nat Turner revolves around a particularly powerful presentation of black masculinity—one that reflects how the subject of liberation so often puts black women in a difficult bind.

While Parker was found innocent in a court of law, for many, the details surrounding the case are too disturbing to ignore. According to Sue Frietsche of the Women’s Law Project, an organization that sought to sue Penn State for its handling of the case in 2002, Parker and Celestin not only publicly identified the female student who accused them of rape, but also harassed and stalked her, without any serious repercussions from the university. According to a recent BuzzFeed report, the scandal divided the campus over issues of race and gender. Some believed the university didn’t do enough to protect the alleged victim. Some believed that Parker and Celestin were being protected because of their role in the school’s athletics program (both had wrestling scholarships, which they kept while they were suspended and awaiting trial). Others believed that Parker and Celestin were being treated unfairly in being accused of raping a white female student. It’s the last of these suspicions that is the most complex, and that continues to pit some black men and women against each other while discussion of Parker’s career and The Birth of a Nation continues.

One theory, as proffered recently by the radio presenter and TV personality Charlamagne Tha God, is that this unpicking of Parker’s history is nothing but a conspiracy to derail a star on the rise. His skepticism is fueled by history—for centuries in the U.S., black men have been lynched because of rape allegations made by white women. According to news reports collected by BuzzFeed, the jury at Parker and Celestin’s trial was entirely white with the exception of a single woman of color, leading many, such as Assata Richards, a graduate student and member of Penn State’s Black Caucus at the time, to believe that the system was unfairly stacked against them. Many black Penn State students expressed concern that Parker and Celestin didn’t have a shot at a fair trial.

This thing we call liberation may not be equal across gender lines.

Throughout American history, the supposed hypermasculinity and sexual appetites of black men have been stereotyped and fearmongered as a threat to innocent white women. Awareness of this is presumably what compels black men to believe, and therefore protect, other black men at any cost. As Bill Cosby has been accused of rape by an ever-increasing number of women, many high-profile black actors including Eddie Griffin and Damon Wayans have discredited the victims, and dismissed their stories as malicious attempts to slander Cosby’s illustrious legacy. This kind of response often makes black women believe that they have to choose between their blackness or their womanhood when they’re partaking in these conversations.

In The Birth of a Nation, Cherry, Turner’s wife (played by Aja Naomi King), is brutally raped by a group of white men. The message is clear: subjugation of black female bodies has long been perpetuated through sexual violence. But this message becomes muddled when we consider the accusations of sexual violence against the film’s creator and how this thing we call liberation may not be equal across gender lines. How can we watch this scene knowing what we know now about Parker? Can we only discuss rape when the attacker is a white man, as if black men are exempt from benefitting from a patriarchal society? This conundrum is tremendously difficult for black women like myself, who want to make black men aware of our struggles but not feel as if we’re tearing them down.

Both the case of Nate Parker and the current commentary surrounding his life and work reveal how patriarchy is as much an intraracial issue as it is a problem outside of the black community. The push to protect Nate Parker is based on the fact that he’s trying to uplift black people through The Birth of a Nation, but what if that comes at the expense of black women? In Parker’s movie, Nat Turner’s masculinity is a key element of his revolutionary power—an inspirational quality. But for women that same quality, in light of Parker's history, is dangerous. Those prioritizing the significance of the movie over its creator’s history exemplify how often black women’s experiences are pushed aside, and to what extent discussions of black leadership and black liberation are filtered through a male lens, both in real life and on screen.

What will become of The Birth of a Nation has yet to be seen, but it’s fair to assume the backlash will be considerable. Before this week, Parker was set to tour college campuses and churches around the country to promote the movie, all of which is complicated now by the debate over his personal history. In October, filmgoers will have to decide for themselves whether the importance of the movie’s achievements in telling Nat Turner’s story supersedes the scandal surrounding its creator. But for black women, this decision is an impossibly complex one. There can be no true black liberation without acknowledgment of how black women’s issues are often pushed to the side to facilitate black men’s protection. Because this pattern persists, there needs to be a upheaval of another kind within our community—one that is not rebellion, but a shift in discourse, and in how we view each other’s unique struggles.

Joe Arpaio's Contempt of Court

NEWS BRIEF A federal judge in Arizona referred Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and three associates to federal prosecutors on Friday for allegedly ignoring a federal court’s orders to stop racially profiling Hispanics, compounding the controversial lawman’s legal woes.

In his formal order, U.S. District Judge Murray Snow assigned the U.S. Attorney’s office in Arizona to prosecute Arpaio, Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan, Captain Steve Bailey, and Arpaio’s former defense attorney Michele Iafrate for criminal contempt of court. The New York Times has more:

[Bailey and Iafate] were both accused of withholding information from a court-appointed monitor about the existence of 1,459 IDs seized in law enforcement operations.

Ultimately, though, Judge Snow laid the blame squarely on Sheriff Arpaio. “The court,” he wrote, “has reminded Sheriff Arpaio that he is the party to the lawsuit, not his subordinates, and thus the failure of his subordinates to carry out this court’s orders would amount to his own failure to do so.”

In his decision, Judge Snow removed several of Sheriff Arpaio’s powers, including his ability to oversee internal affairs investigations. The judge had already found that Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies had mishandled and manipulated such investigations, in part to obscure wrongdoing or neglect by deputies.

Snow’s order also accused Arpaio and his subordinates of lying under oath and withholding evidence from both the court and a federal monitor overseeing the sheriff’s office. The sheriff and Sheridan, Snow wrote, “have a history of obfuscation and subversion of this Court’s orders that is as old as this case and did not stop after they themselves became the subjects of civil contempt.”

Snow already found Arpaio in civil contempt of court in May for violating a series of orders from a 2011 racial-profiling lawsuit against the sheriff and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department.

The original complaint against Arpaio came from a Mexican tourist, legally in the U.S., named Jesus Ortega Melendres, who was pulled over by Arpaio’s deputies while a passenger in a car with a white driver, and detained for nine hours. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, he filed a complaint against the Sheriff’s Office in the U.S. District Court District of Arizona. Eventually, two Latino siblings also joined the complainant.

In 2011, Snow issued an injunction that prohibited deputies from targeting Latinos in traffic stops, and in 2013 he appointed a court monitor to see Arpaio complied.

Arpaio rose to national prominence for his aggressive opposition to illegal immigration in his jurisdiction, which includes metropolitan Phoenix. His zealous focus on rounding up undocumented immigrants drew heavy criticism from the ACLU and other civil-rights groups while simultaneously making Arpaio a hero among immigration hardliners on the American right.

"We are more concerned with the rights of illegal aliens and criminals than we are with protecting our own country,” he told the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July. The next day, he returned to Arizona for a hearing on the criminal contempt-of-court allegations against him.

If convicted of criminal contempt, Arpaio could face fines and a prison sentence. He is seeking a seventh term as sheriff of Maricopa County in November.

Michelangelo's David and Ryan Lochte: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

David’s Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring Down the World’s Most Perfect Statue

Sam Anderson | The New York Times Magazine

“Perfection, it turns out, is no way to try to live. It is a child’s idea, a cartoon — this desire not to be merely good, not to do merely well, but to be faultless, to transcend everything, including the limits of yourself. It is less heroic than neurotic, and it doesn’t take much analysis to get to its ugly side: a lust for control, pseudo-fascist purity, self-destruction. Perfection makes you flinch at yourself, flinch at the world, flinch at any contact between the two.”

What We Lose When POC Entertainers Crack Into the Mainstream

Navneet Alang | Buzzfeed

“To be a minority in 21st-century North America is not simply to exist in a comfortable mixture, but is instead to be engaged in a constant dance. To be seen by those like you is to be rendered inscrutable to those who are different. You are thus constantly immersed in a process of translation, at times going on at length to explain to others that you aren’t that different, but at other moments struggling to explain you aren’t quite the same either.”

Inside the Spellbinding Sound of Stranger Things

Noah Yoo | Pitchfork

“The presence of ’80s analog synths rising and falling in the background of conversation comes off as jarring at first, but after a few episodes, the score starts to carve out its own presence; you can start to anticipate when the music might cut in.”

Ryan Lochte: An Olympic Tale of Gold Medals and White Privilege

Marina Hyde | The Guardian

“I hardly presume to say that the antics of Lochte and his more junior swim team buddies is what white privilege looks like, being similarly blessed myself, but there doesn’t seem to be any possible other explanation. And for that reason, we just know Ryan is going to get away with it. To watch the outraged commentators attempting to lay a glove on him is to imagine them doggy-paddling in the wake of his best freestyle time.”

A Graphic Novelist Captures the Paradoxes of Living in the “New India”

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan | The New Yorker

“Banerjee’s work has often been described as autobiographical, but he told me that he considers himself a documentarian, one who records the ‘tonal’ as opposed to the ‘informational’ content of the world. He flouts the realist impulses that animate the work of many well-known graphic novelists in the West, and when he does recount ‘true’ stories, like that of the first dissection of a human cadaver in India, it is with the intention of complicating, not confirming, history.”

The Greatest Thing Metallica Ever Did Was Start to Suck

Drew Millard | Hazlitt

“All of this adds up to one thing, and one thing only: the conclusion, among millions of people, that Metallica went from a band that rocked ass to a band that sucked ass. This is not, strictly speaking, about the actual quality of Post-Good Metallica’s output. Instead, it has more to do with the perception that Metallica started sucking, which at this point is so widely believed that it has basically become true.”

Werner Herzog Dreams of Electric Sheep

Sven Birkerts | The New Republic

“Herzog ultimately wants to talk about scale and impact—the idea that you can’t create a global nervous system without producing massive changes in Being itself. He moves toward some of the deeper dimensions of this idea in the latter part of the film ... It all feels very progressive, a reasonable-seeming sidebar to the space epics and sci-fi novels we’ve absorbed into our unconscious.”

The Ambiguous Heroism of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther

Yo Zushi | The New Statesman

“In his first comic-book series, Coates trades in this sense of lived experience for a more mythic register: supernatural powers, masked avengers in figure-hugging bondage suits, the battle between good and evil … The moral compass of the series is fitted with several needles, each pointing in a different direction, and Coates gives generous attention to the perspectives of protagonist and antagonist alike.”

When You Squint, Everything Shines

Katie Baker | The Ringer

“The Olympic movement has long been plagued by inherent tensions: between the theoretical purity of competition and the tarnished reality; between a host country’s photogenic beauty and the ugliness that lies just outside the frame; between the athletes’ authentic charm and the manufactured veneer of the spectacle they create.”

Immigrant Runners Are Winning More Than Olympic Medals

On Saturday night, the British distance runner Mo Farah will try and become the first athlete to sweep the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races at consecutive Olympics since Finland’s Lasse Viren won both in 1972 and 1976. Farah has already found a heart-stopping way to pay homage to the Finn, albeit accidentally. Viren famously fell mid-race during the 10,000-meter in 1972 but managed to get up and still win. Forty-four years later, in the middle of last Saturday’s 10,000 in Rio, Farah got tangled up with the American runner Galen Rupp, his friend and sometime training partner, and went crashing onto the track. It briefly looked as though Farah’s race was over. But he sprang up, rejoined the pack, and won in the same way he’s dominated the biggest international races for a half-decade: by separating himself from runners still in the mix and entering the final lap with a blistering closing kick.

Farah is tangled up with forces off the track too. He’s an immigrant who came to England from Somalia in order to escape conflict there at the age of eight. Time and again in recent years, the 33-year-old Farah, a devout Muslim, has prayed on the track and draped himself in the British flag after crossing the line for wins on the biggest stage, including at London’s 2012 games and then biennial World Championships in Russia and China in 2013 and 2015.

Still, Farah has faced claims that he’s not truly a British athlete throughout his career. In an ugly incident last year after Farah set the European record in the half-marathon, the man he took it from, Spain’s Fabian Roncero, dismissed the feat, reportedly claiming that an athlete “born in Somalia is Somali forever.” And this year’s Olympics are unfolding at a very different and even more fraught political moment than Farah’s earlier wins, arriving just weeks after anti-immigrant sentiment helped elicit Britain’s exit from the European Union. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump has made condemning immigrants a pillar of his campaign to capture the GOP nomination and the White House.

The games can be read as something of a physical rejoinder to Trump. “The performance of immigrants and children of immigrants in the Olympics really contradicts Trump in two ways,” Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado political scientist with an upcoming book on sports, told me in an email. “One is that America is already great (look at the medal count!) and the second is that immigration is a big factor in what makes America great in sports (and business, and culture).”

While Trump has vilified immigrants, distance running is thriving thanks to them. This weekend will be a moment to especially savor a pair of 41-year-old U.S. runners who should have no business still competing at the highest level. One of the men facing Farah in the 5,000-meter final on Saturday is the American distance great Bernard Lagat, a Kenyan native who became a U.S. citizen 12 years ago and set the American record at the distance in 2011. The field will also include Hassan Mead, a Somali-born American. Sunday’s marathon features American Meb Keflezighi, who came to the U.S. from Eritrea when he was 12 years old.

The U.S. success of foreign-born athletes is hardly unique to running. Nearly 50 athletes on the U.S. Olympic team weren’t born in the country they now compete for. Still, questions of distance runners’ nationality are especially fraught because it’s not a team sport where the influence of any one athlete is arguably smaller, and because East Africans have utterly dominated distance running for decades.

There are certainly debates to be had about nationality rules in sports, which can be gamed to acquire athletes even though the Olympic charter requires that individuals wait three years before competing for a new country. The Temple University law professor Peter Spiro, who is nonetheless against nationality rules, noted in a 2012 New York Times column that “the Gulf states have acquired African distance runners with promises of stipends for life. In preparation for the 2000 games, Qatar pretty much bought the entire Bulgarian weightlifting team.”

“Given the choice between Trumpism and the excellence of these athletes, I side with the athletes every time.”

Lagat created a controversy when he competed for Kenya in 2004 at the Olympics without revealing that he had technically become an American citizen a few months earlier. Farah, for his part, is not an overtly political athlete, and his own reaction to Brexit was measured. He told The Sun this month: “If I’d have voted, I would have voted to be in the EU, but hopefully it will be better—whatever is best for the country, I guess ... We’ve just got to do the right thing now and make it work.”

But the link between Farah and Brexit has been inescapable. This week, Twitter has lit up with people casting Farah’s 10,000-meter win as something beyond a track race, elevating it to a blow against the pro-Brexit forces. At the same time, as the The Huffington Post reported, some Brexit supporters have managed to draw the opposite conclusion, casting Great Britain’s overall medal haul thus far as proof of the country’s fitness to go it alone outside the European Union.

Farah actually produced another heart-stopping moment in Wednesday’s preliminary round of the 5,000-meter when he nearly fell again. He stumbled on the last lap—that is, when it’s likely too late to recover—after making contact with Mead. But Farah stayed on his feet to easily qualify for Saturday’s upcoming final. “I’ve got such a long stride ... I always get tripped up or tangled up with someone,” he explained afterward. (Mead fell and finished out of the running for a finals spot, but was later given entry by track’s governing body due to the collision).

Farah, assuming he can stay upright, is the favorite in the 5,000-meter on Saturday night, although there are several dangerous runners in the field. Lagat, meanwhile, doesn’t quite have the top gears he used to but can’t be counted out. Keflezighi, who took the silver marathon medal in Athens way, way back in 2004, could be a contender in a tactical marathon race. He’s known for finding ways to win big races against marathoners with much faster personal bests, claiming victories in New York in 2009 and Boston in 2014.

“The success of these athletes should be read as a stinging rebuke of the sophomoric stereotypes and dime-store xenophobia that all too often clog up political discourse around immigration,” Jules Boykoff, a Pacific University professor who explores the intersection of sports and politics, told me an email. “Given the choice between knee-jerk Trumpism and the elegant excellence of these athletes,” he added, “I side with the athletes every time.”

What If Trump Got Hacked Too?

The story seemed so neatly self-contained: Someone hacked the Democratic National Convention. Those hackers were connected to the Russian government, according to U.S. intelligence and outside experts alike. And then someone leaked a tranche of DNC emails just as the Democrats were gathering for their convention in Philadelphia—an optimally damaging time. It didn’t take Holmesian deduction why some people concluded that Russian agents were trying to influence the election by hurting Hillary Clinton. A spree of comments from Donald Trump praising Vladimir Putin, waving off the annexation of Crimea, and semi-jokingly calling for Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails only made it all look fishier.

But what if Trump’s campaign was hacked, too? Reuters reports Friday:

Hackers targeted the computer systems of presidential candidate Donald Trump and Republican Party organizations as well as Democratic Party networks, sources familiar with investigations into the attacks said. At least one Trump staff member’s email account was infected with malware in 2015 and sent malicious emails to colleagues, according to one insider for the Republican candidate's campaign and an outside security expert. It was unclear whether or not the hackers actually gained access to campaign computers.

Sources told Reuters that the attack on Trump campaign and RNC computers resembled the one against the Democrats, and the Republicans have even hired the same security firm, CrowdStrike, to investigate.

So far, Reuters is the only outlet with the story, but if it’s right, it would put the entire existing narrative in question. On the one hand, Russian hacking targeted at the RNC and Trump team would reinforce the worrying idea that a foreign government is trying to meddle in the American election. But it would make the motives a little more obscure. It’s not altogether surprising that someone would want to snoop on both parties.

In an interview with Slate in July, Glenn Greenwald took issue with journalists speculating on ties between Trump and Putin:

The history of linking your political opponents to Russia is a really dangerous and ugly one in the U.S. That’s basically how, for a decade, the right demonized the left, but also liberals. This is the rhetoric that has been resurrected in order to demonize Trump, and I do find it disturbing because, what has he said about Russia? The platform change that he wanted said that he didn’t think the U.S. should be funding factions in the Ukraine in order to defend themselves against Russia because he didn’t think we had a vital interest in Russia’s neighborhood. Let’s leave that to them. You can argue with that and say it’s an irresponsible thing to do. But that’s been a standard liberal view for decades.

That’s a somewhat incomplete gloss on the situation: The change in the Republican platform to which Greenwald alludes was hardly the only incident, and Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. might recognize the Crimean takeover is hardly a “standard liberal view” except perhaps in the pages of The Nation. Nonetheless, evidence of hacking on both parties might give the press pause, and grant some credence to Greenwald’s suggestion that the press was too quick to validate the idea of a Russian hit on the Democratic Party.

All that said, bipartisan hacking doesn’t preclude Kremlin sympathy for the Republican Party; after all, the U.S. government spies even on its allies, as Angela Merkel can attest. Trump’s perplexingly positive view of Putin is no less strange if Russian agents aren’t out to help him; in fact, it’s stranger. As for the hacks, the full story may also be richer, stranger, and more worrisome than it initially appeared.

Zika in Miami Beach

NEWS BRIEF Local cases of Zika infection have been found in Miami Beach, Florida Governor Rick Scott said Friday, which means the virus has spread beyond the small neighborhood that health officials had hoped to contain it to, and has infected one of South Florida’s largest tourist areas.

The spread of Zika by local mosquitos had been confined to one spot just north of downtown Miami, a one-square mile area in the Wynwood neighborhood. But health officials on Friday said at least five people were infected by Zika in Miami Beach, in the heart of the city’s restaurant and nightclub scene. Of the five infected, three were tourists, and two live locally. Almost immediately after Scott and health officials released the news, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its traveling warning.

The new updates said pregnant women and their partners should not go to the two affected areas, which now include a 1.5-square mile area on the island city of Miami Beach, which spans from Eighth Street in the south to 28th Street in the north. The CDC also cautioned pregnant women from any unnecessary travel to all of Miami-Dade County.

During his announcement Friday at the Florida Department of Health office, some reporters asked Scott why the news wasn’t revealed sooner, because the Miami Herald reported local officials learned of the virus’ transmission as early as Thursday morning.

The Herald reported that:

… as late as Thursday evening, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine denied that Zika was in his city, the heart of Miami-Dade's tourism industry.

“There is no epidemic, no outbreak of Zika in Miami Beach,” he said, shortly after arriving from a trip to New York late Thursday.

…

But the discussions on Thursday morning between the county health department and Miami Beach officials, along with an email from City Manager Jimmy Morales, indicate that Zika is spreading in Miami Beach and already may have met CDC guidelines for confirmed transmission of the disease.

In response, Scott said he wanted to assure everyone that any local transmission would be announced immediately to the media and public.

This makes 35 confirmed cases of locally transmitted Zika cases in Florida. Nearly 600 people have contracted the virus across the state, though most of those are from travel outside the country. Zika is transferred through mosquitoes, mainly the Aedes aegypti, though the virus can also be sexually transmitted. Pregnant women are most vulnerable to Zika, because it has been linked with birth defects in infants, like microcephaly, which inhibits full brain formation.

Zika In Miami Beach

NEWS BRIEF Local cases of Zika infection have been found in Miami Beach, Florida Governor Rick Scott said Friday, which means the virus has spread beyond the small neighborhood that health officials had hoped to contain it to, and has infected one of South Florida’s largest tourist areas.

The spread of Zika by local mosquitos had been confined to one spot just north of downtown Miami, a one-square mile area in the Wynwood neighborhood. But health officials on Friday said at least five people were infected by Zika in Miami Beach, in the heart of the city’s restaurant and nightclub scene. Of the five infected, three were tourists, and two live locally. Almost immediately after Scott and health officials released the news, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its traveling warning.

The new updates said pregnant women and their partners should not go to the two affected areas, which now include a 1.5-square mile area on the island city of Miami Beach, which spans from Eighth Street in the south to 28th Street in the north. The CDC also cautioned pregnant women from any unnecessary travel to all of Miami-Dade County.

During his announcement Friday at the Florida Department of Health office, some reporters asked Scott why the news wasn’t revealed sooner, because the Miami Herald reported local officials learned of the virus’ transmission as early as Thursday morning.

The Herald reported that:

… as late as Thursday evening, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine denied that Zika was in his city, the heart of Miami-Dade's tourism industry.

“There is no epidemic, no outbreak of Zika in Miami Beach,” he said, shortly after arriving from a trip to New York late Thursday.

…

But the discussions on Thursday morning between the county health department and Miami Beach officials, along with an email from City Manager Jimmy Morales, indicate that Zika is spreading in Miami Beach and already may have met CDC guidelines for confirmed transmission of the disease.

In response, Scott said he wanted to assure everyone that any local transmission would be announced immediately to the media and public.

This makes 35 confirmed cases of locally transmitted Zika cases in Florida. Nearly 600 people have contracted the virus across the state, though most of those are from travel outside the country. Zika is transferred through mosquitoes, mainly the Aedes aegypti, though the virus can also be sexually transmitted. Pregnant women are most vulnerable to Zika, because it has been linked with birth defects in infants, like microcephaly, which inhibits full brain formation.

France's Burqini Debate in 10 Quotes

The coastal city of Nice added itself Friday to the growing list of French municipalities banning the Burqini from their beaches, Le Monde reports. The swimwear favored by some Muslim women (you can find a brief history of it here) has already been banned in several places throughout the country. And as the ban continues to spread, so too has the debate over whether it belongs in French society.

France, which is officially a secular country, bans public displays of conspicuous signs of religion, including the wearing of headscarves, kippas, and large crosses. Whether the Burqini qualifies as a religious sign is a matter for debate—a debate that comes as France has failed to stop several high-profile terrorist attacks carried out by Islamist militants since early 2015. These 10 quotes from those opposed to the Burqini, as well as those who believe the government should not interfere in mandating what people can wear, offer an insight into the conversation on the issue in France.

“There is the idea that, by nature, women are harlots, impure, that they should be completely covered. It is not compatible with the values of France and the Republic. Faced with these provocations, the Republic must defend itself. Today, Muslims in France are taken hostage by these groups, these associations, these individuals who advocate for wearing the Burqini and would have you believe that the Republic and Islam are incompatible.”

—Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister, to La Provence

“[#burkini] an unnecessary controversy which maintains the confusion on the real issues of our struggles. Intolerance must not change camps.”

—Samia Ghali, a French senator and Muslim, on Twitter

[#burkini] polémique inutile qui entretient les confusions sur les vrais enjeux de nos combats. L'intolérance ne doit pas changer de camps.

— Samia GHALI (@SamiaGhali) August 4, 2016

“I voted to ban the burqa in public places. There is no reason why it should be tolerated on the beach. It’s a matter of consistency.”

—Daniel Fasquelle, deputy mayor of Le Touquet, to La Voix du Nord

“[The Burkini] was created by Western Muslim women who wanted to conciliate their faith and desire to dress modestly with recreational activities. What is more French than sitting on a beach in the sand? Here we are telling Muslims that no matter what you do even we don’t want you here.”

—Rim-Sarah Aloune, a French-Muslim researcher at the University of Toulouse, to the Associated Press

“Support the Mayor of #Sisco and his anti-#burkini order. Firmness against Islamist provocation is the best way to avoid violence.”

—Marion Le Pen, a National Front lawmaker, on Twitter

Soutien au maire de #Sisco et son arrêté anti-#burkini. La fermeté face aux provocations islamistes est le meilleur moyen d'éviter violences

— Marion Le Pen (@Marion_M_Le_Pen) August 15, 2016

“[The Burqini ban is] a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of several fundamental freedoms: freedom of opinion, religion, dress, to come and go. … Today, it is the beaches. Tomorrow it will be  the streets.”

—Patrice Spinosi, a lawyer with the League of Human Rights (Ligue des droits de l’Homme), at a public hearing Friday

“Those who mock the #burkini ‘debate’ pretend not to see the provocation behind this simple bathing garment...#blindness”

—Sonia Mabrouk, a French-Tunisian journalist, on Twitter

Celles et ceux qui moquent le "débat" #burkini font semblant de ne voir dans cette provocation qu'un simple vêtement de bain..#aveuglement

— Mabrouk Sonia (@SoMabrouk) August 17, 2016

“[The Burqini ban] will accentuate tension within French society. We are teaching the French public to associate a woman in [a] Burqini with the terrorist who assassinates.”

—Leyla Dakhli, a French-Tunisian professor of Arab history, to the Associated Press

“The preservation of our social pact and our Nation requires the Government to take all measures to fight against radical communitarian practices.”

—Christian Estrosi, the President of the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, in a letter to Valls

#burkini : j'ai écrit à @manuelvalls pr demander que l'Etat prenne ses responsabilités pr lutter c/ communautarisme pic.twitter.com/TUMWEHX4W7

— Christian Estrosi (@cestrosi) August 17, 2016

“It touches on fundamental freedoms. I do not see the disturbance in public order from a woman who goes swimming dressed. … This government is too busy chasing innocent Muslim women to fight against terrorism.”

—Marwan Muhammad, director of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, to iTELE

Kubo and the Two Strings Is a Gorgeous Stop-Motion Adventure

“If you must blink, do it now.” The words that open the animation studio Laika’s new film, Kubo and the Two Strings, feel like a prelude to an elaborate trick. And in a way, they are: When the 11-year-old titular protagonist urges the audience to pay close attention to his story, he might as well be preparing them for the 90 minutes of spellbinding visual magic to follow. Like when a giant wave rises out of the ocean above a baby Kubo and his mother, or when a pair of witches with masks for faces descend like ravens from the sky, or when a thousand autumn leaves assemble themselves into a full-sized ship. Kubo is designed to make its audience never want to blink.

It’s unsurprising, considering Laika is the studio behind Coraline and the Oscar-nominated The Box Trolls, and the warm, hand-crafted aesthetic comes through in even the most polished and otherwise modern-looking scenes. Then there’s the story itself, which follows a one-eyed boy named Kubo (voiced by Game of Thrones’s Art Parkinson), who lives with his mother in a cave in ancient Japan and possesses a magical two-string shamisen that lets him fly and bring origami figures to life. A bizarre, supernatural family drama unfolds slowly but violently over the course of the film, which at times leans more on spectacle than a tight plot or deep characters. In what’s been an awful summer-movie season so far, Kubo would be worth seeing solely for the beautiful stop-motion animation, but it’s also hard not to be won over by the movie’s heartfelt messages about compassion and defining one’s own path.

The plot itself is an odd blend of complex and storybook-simple. It turns out Kubo had one of his eyes stolen as a baby by his grandfather the Moon King (Ralph Fiennes), who also killed Kubo’s warrior father, Hanzo. The boy and his traumatized mother can’t go out at night, or they’ll be discovered by his evil twin aunts (both voiced by Rooney Mara), but the family’s backstory is otherwise kept obscure. Little bits are revealed only after Kubo finds himself transported far away from his little village and meets a stern, maternal talking Monkey (Charlize Theron) and a large, goofy humanoid Beetle (Matthew McConaughey). The trio then embarks on a classic quest: to find the three pieces of his late father’s mythical, superpowered warrior’s armor (Harry Potter fans, just think of the Deathly Hallows).

The exact stakes of Kubo’s adventure, and the general direction of the plot, aren’t always clear, but it’s easy to get distracted by the rich world the director Travis Knight and his team have built. Kubo is at turns lush and dreamlike, and cold and frightening; the animation perfectly captures the extremes through which children tend to view the world. When Kubo huddles with his mother in their womb-like cave, telling stories and eating a modest dinner, the film conjures a seductive vision of safety and love and home. But it doesn’t shy away from the mortal dangers Kubo faces on his quest, like when the boy, Monkey, and Beetle are caught in a vicious storm, while simultaneously battling underwater monsters and Kubo’s witch-like aunts.

Kubo offers visceral thrills and visual splendor, but it also champions the importance of kindness.

After the gorgeous visuals, the second thing that stands out most about Kubo is its deep preoccupation with the power of storytelling—of writing your own story, of choosing your own ending. In an early scene, Kubo uses his shamisen in the village square to tell the story of his father, Hanzo, to a crowd of rapt onlookers. The scene goes on, the film implies, for hours, until the sun is about to set, but Kubo’s audience won’t leave until they hear the very end—much like the moviegoers sitting in the theater. At times the self-consciousness feels excessive, but it’s also nice to see this kind of thoughtfulness in a children’s film (Zootopia and Inside Out were even more high-concept endeavors). And it helps justify the relative lack of setup: The audience learns more about Kubo’s family history just as he does, from putting together clues, from memories suddenly come to light, from the tales passed down to him.

A less obvious flaw of the film can be found offscreen. Even before Kubo’s release, fans and critics observed that, though the movie was clearly set in ancient Japan and featured Japanese characters, traditions, and imagery, its voice cast is largely white (as is the director, Knight). Fortunately, Kubo makes no mistakes that could be construed as majorly offensive (there are just little cultural things that stand out—like Monkey scowling at Kubo for loudly slurping his soup, when such a thing would be considered good manners in Japan.) But viewers also shouldn’t expect a film that’s fully invested in the cultural specificities of the country or people it depict. There’s often more reluctance to bring up issues of whitewashing in a film as beautiful and thoughtful as this one (meanwhile, this was not the case with The Forest and Aloha). Still, it’s hard not to feel somewhat disappointed that the most prominent Japanese voice actors (George Takei and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa) have minor roles.

But it’s likely that even viewers who think whitewashing is a problem in Hollywood won’t think the issue is enough to truly detract from Kubo’s significant virtues. The film has some genuinely surprising twists, too many laugh-out-loud moments to count, a few scenes that feel like they belong in a brilliant horror film, and—most importantly—many profound moments of familial affection. Kubo offers visceral thrills and visual splendor, but it also champions the importance of kindness, forgiveness, and embracing humanity’s many imperfections. Whenever Kubo stumbles or slows down, audiences can always just sit back and feel the only thing that such ambitious animation can inspire: wonder.