Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 962

Gabby Douglas Chooses Los Angeles Over Gymnastics

It's been a year since the 2012 Olympics, and while two gymnasts from the gold medal-winning Fierce Five have returned to competition, the biggest star has not: Gabby Douglas. This week, Douglas made a decision that makes it less likely we'll ever see her in competition again. Douglas informed her coach Liang Chow that she would be leaving his gym in West Des Moines, Iowa to train in Los Angeles. It's an indication she's less serious about continuing her training. Chow's wife, Liwen Zhuang, joked to The Des Moines Register, "I think maybe they like to be in a warm place after she became a celebrity or something."

This has made the gymternet cry. Though the 17-year-old gymnast has talked about training for the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Douglas only restarted training in May. After becoming famous, it's often hard for gymnasts to return to the grueling training schedule that made them successful, especially because they are usually teenagers and want to do the teenage things they finally have the freedom to do. L.A. will be more convenient for some of Douglas's TV appearances. 

In those appearances, Douglas looked to be in really good shape. She doesn't appear to face the same problem that Olympic teammate Kyla Ross faced: a growth spurt of three or four inches. Yet Ross and McKayla Maroney both competed at national championships this month, and are expected to on the team at world championships in September. (GIF of Maroney winning floor at nationals at left.) Both have stayed with their coaches.

Rumors that Douglas was leaving Chow's had been floating around. Her brother is going to school in Los Angeles, and the family is moving too. "We were not really sure for a long time, because we heard from other people first," Liwen told the Register. "Nothing was really confirmed. We didn’t really know for sure. We heard some rumors... It’s kind of awkward." Douglas will be training with UCLA assistant head coach Chris Waller, the Examiner reports. (UCLA has a strong gymnastics program.) Waller coached Mohini Bhardwaj when she made the 2004 Olympics, with which she won a silver medal in the team competition.

Douglas went to Chow's in 2010. He'd coached Shawn Johnson to win gold at the 2007 world championships and 2008 Olympics. Douglas had attended one of his clinics, where he taught her the Amanar vault in one afternoon. After training with Chow for less than a year, she made the world championships team in 2011. By early 2012, she beat Jordyn Wieber, who was expected to be the next Olympic champion, at the American Cup. After Douglas won the gold in the all-around at the Olympics, Martha Karolyi told The New York Times she couldn't remember "anybody this quickly rising from an average good gymnast to a fantastic one."

Could Douglas sustain what she learned from Chow at another gym? It's possible. But if Douglas wants to win again, she'll have to do better than that. Because after each Olympics, the rules change to make gymnastics harder. To beat the new, younger gymnasts, Douglas will have to learn even more tricks.

       

Technology Hopes to Save the Internet From Trolls

Rather than abandon online comments altogether, as one ABC affiliate did earlier this year, exhausted editors are putting their faith in the final frontier: Technology. Technology, they hope, will save them from trolls, those ubiquitous commenters who derail conversations in hateful directions. Trolls are a growing problem: In fact no less than three well-regarded editors and writers invoked the term to describe the current state of Internet discourse this month. "Comment Sections Are Wastelands Ruled by Trolls," declared Wired's Mat Honan today. "Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier," explained the Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington on Wednesday as she announced a new policy banning anonymous commenters altogether. (Some find this move misguided.) And in a post for the site earlier this month, The Atlantic's own Bob Cohn described comment sections as "cesspools of vitriol, magnets for haters and trolls and spammers."

Up until recently, media organizations relied on teams of moderators to weed out the most hateful of trolls — like the kind who make rape threats. That, however, takes more resources — read: eyeballs — than many companies can afford. (As of October 2012, The Huffington Post employed 30 full-time moderators.) Editors and media technologists are hoping that new platforms and algorithms will further discourage or disregard trollery. These higher-level commenting systems loosely fall into the following three categories:

The Enhanced Comment Section: Many commenting systems, like the ones that The Atlantic Wire and The Atlantic use, rely on algorithms to reward the best comments, based on favorites. In theory, the technology pushes the best comments to the top of the post and the trolls to the bottom. but that only works if the most-liked comment is actually the best comment. Plus, if a post gets linked on another, site, trolls can manipulate comments sections, pushing their trollery to the top. 

The Comment Blog: Wired's Honan points to Kinja — Gawker's new platform that allows commenters turn conversations into posts — and Branch, which moves conversations to a separate website. "Both of these systems treat discussions as independent acts instead of afterthoughts," writes Honan. In theory, since it it takes more effort to post on these platforms, the content will be of higher quality. So far, that hasn't turned out to be entirely true, as Slate's Will Oremus points out. Upon visiting Kinja for the first time he came across the following comment on an Elon Musk photo:

[image error]

The Pseudo Hidden Comment: The Atlantic Wire's neighbor, Quartz, has in-post annotations, which allows readers to leaves notes in the margins. The new blogging platform Medium also has "notes" in its margins. Although both of these systems move comments into the actual post, rather than below, they end-up hiding commentary more than traditional comments sections do. With Quartz, users have to click on the annotation to see the text; a Medium writer has to green-light a comment to make it visible to the public. That, however, means that it's harder to see criticism, especially on Medium. (The site acknowledges this, telling its writers. "Don’t only make positive notes public. By showing the commentary of people who don’t necessarily agree with you, you build credibility." It's unclear how often this actually happens.)

So far, no one of these set-ups have managed to magically send trolls back to the dark corners of the Internet where they belong. And it's not clear that outlawing anonymity does any good either. See: Facebook, which has a real name policy, and a whole lot of terrible. 

       

A Rift in the Highest Ranks of The New York Times

A just-published feature in New York magazine suggests that New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson and CEO Mark Thompson are often at loggerheads about the direction of the paper.

Earlier this week, The New Republic presented a generally optimistic picture of The New York Times, suggesting that executive editor Jill Abramson had solid control of her newsroom. But a New York magazine feature published late today (and running in print next week) suggests that Abramson has clashed repeatedly with new Times CEO Mark Thompson.

Here are the most compelling details, as reported by Joe Hagan.

[image error]Mark Thompson's Involvement in a BBC Scandal Led to an Inauspicious Times Start

Thompson was formerly the director general of the BBC, and many back in his native United Kingdom questioned his handling of the scandal over TV host Jimmy Savile's alleged abuse of young girls. Those same questions followed him to Midtown Manhattan. Hagan reports there was some initial "uneasiness" over Thompson's arrival and that, on one occasion, "Abramson was obliged to defend him, despite having assigned an aggressive investigative reporter to cover his travails at the BBC."

Thompson Has Exerted an Unusual Amount of Control Over the Newsroom

In most newspapers, business and editorial are like oil and water — and that was certainly the case at the paper of record. Then Thompson arrived.

Thompson began to appear frequently in the newsroom, and he made it clear he felt very comfortable there...The Times’ reporters and editors, eager to hold on to the protocols of a legacy media world, hold quasi-religious views about the sanctity of the newsroom against the influence of business concerns. The mere presence of a corporate suit among the journalists was like a belch in a cathedral nave.

Thompson, Not Abramson, Is Now Steering The Times

[image error]Thompson's predecessor, Janet Robinson (whose exit Hagan also reported on for New York) was not generally seen as wielding nearly as much influence in the newsroom. Thompson has his own vision for the paper, and he's not shy about letting it be known:

The role of “visionary” at the paper, traditionally held by the news chief, was now being ceded to Thompson. And in recent months, say several Times sources, Abramson has chafed at some of Thompson’s moves as he redirects company resources to projects of ambiguous design, including an aggressive video unit run by a former AOL/Huffington Post executive who sits among news editors but reports to the corporate side of the Times.

For example, Hagan says that Thompson envisions "a Times-sponsored cruise with editors and reporters to Europe," as well as branded conferences. To journalistic purists, this will surely seem like a dilution of standards. Some will even recall The Washington Post's disastrous venture into similar terrain, which might serve as a cautionary tale.

However, no such qualms appear to have deterred either the paper's owner or chief executive, who according to Hagan wrote in a joint memo that "that the newsroom would be working more closely with the business side."

Money Has Been Directed Away from Traditional Journalism

With all the new projects Thompson has been concocting, he appears to have left Abramson with less cash to spend on writers and editors, as well as the expenses they accrue. Hagan paints a bleak picture of spendthrift Gray Lady:

Tales of ­austerity are rampant at the Times nowadays. The deputy editor of the op-ed page, Sewell Chan, recently posted on Facebook that he needed a place to stay while on business in Europe. A Portuguese online edition of the Times, which Sulzberger publicized with great fanfare on a trip to Brazil last fall, was considered too expensive and never launched.

Not Everyone Likes Abramson

This has been a running topic of conversation ever since Dylan Byers published a Politico piece that openly suggested that Abramson was disliked by many journalists. Hagan reprises many of these critiques, while also reporting that "she has become more sensitive to the jitters of the newsroom."

[image error]Videos Will Rule the Day

Thompson is heavily investing in video. Among the most popular thus far, according to Hagan, has been an instructional bit on roasting turkey for Thanksgiving.

All the news that fit to print, eh?

 

Photos: Abramson: REUTERS/Kena Betancur; REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly

       

Tori Spelling Is Back On Top

Today in show business news: Tori Spelling has a new show, Vampire Bill is going to be in The Sound of Music, and Ben Affleck's Batman takes its first victim.

Tori Spelling never really disappeared exactly, she's been doing reality shows and TV movies and all that stuff for years, but it's been a while since she was in the ol' scripted series game. But not for long! ABC Family has ordered a comedy pilot called Mystery Girls, produced by and starring the Beverly Hills 90210 actress. She'll play a former TV starlet (wink wink, nudge nudge) who starts solving crimes with her old costar. That sounds fun! I mean, I'd rather they were doing a series based on Mind Over Murder, but this is close enough, I guess. This is good news for Tori. So good, in fact, that she and her husband Dean recently went out and celebrated in a canoe. Great canoeing guys! [Deadline]

Speaking of comebacks, Timothy Dalton, the two-time James Bond, has been cast as one of the leads on the Showtime series Penny Dreadful. That's the one about all the literary horror characters, like Dorian Gray and Frankenstein and Dracula and all those jerks, hanging out in London together. Oh, so presumably then Dalton will be playing the Beast from Beautician and the Beast. Neat. I wonder if they'll have Fran Drescher cameo. Probably! It sounds like that kind of show. And, come on, at this point they're a package deal. You get Dalton, you get Drescher. And vice versa. They're like Woody and Mia. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Stephen Moyer, who plays vampire Bill "Zzzzzz" Compton on HBO's Peabody Award-winning series The Wire True Blood has been cast as, get this, Capt. Von Trapp in the Sound of Music movie that NBC is doing. Bill from True Blood is going to be in a network television version of Sound of Music in which Carrie Underwood plays Maria. Oh, yeah, that's happening too. What on god's green Earth, right? To be fair, Carrie has sung the music before, but... not that well. (She's no Nicole Scherzinger doing Evita, that's for dang sure.) This all just sounds very odd, doesn't it? The hills are alive with the sound of a strange TV movie. [Deadline]

The big Ben Affleck-as-Batman casting has its first casualty. Because of scheduling, Affleck is dropping out of directing a big screen adaptation of Stephen King's magnum opus, The Stand. Nuts. That would have been interesting, a completely new genre for Affleck, but alas, the bat cave came a'calling. So instead it looks as though Scott Cooper may get the job. He directed the quiet country music movie Crazy Heart and the upcoming small-town crime drama Out of the Furnace. So, OK, sure. Woulda been neat to have Affleck do it, though. Stupid Batman. [Vulture]

       

No More Magical Realism: Juan Gabriel Vásquez and the New Latin American Lit

There was a time not so long ago when Latin American literature, as it appeared on college syllabi, in critical discourse, and in writers' own spheres of influence, summoned up the whimsical and fantastical.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who famously aimed to set about "destroying the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic," may not have invented magical realism, but he introduced it to the English-speaking world with a 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Captivating readers of three dozen languages with tales of the utopic banana town Macondo, Marquez borrowed liberally from the musings of Jorge Luis Borges and pioneers Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Asturias. He set in motion a "Latin American Boom" that flourished well into the 1970s. He cast a surrealist influence on everyone from Salman Rushdie to Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved bore the echoes of Marquez's haunted relationship with ghosts and memories. 

But some time after Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo, el supremo in 1974, the Boom generation simmered, its experimental tendencies faded, and readers wondered whether magical realism could adequately address a new generation of political strife and social realities.

"Even the genre's staunchest defenders agree that it has lost its magic," Newsweek proclaimed in 2002, by which point the surviving pioneers of the style had begun to distance themselves. "It's become kitschy, a commodity," the scholar Ilan Stavans told the magazine. 

Constrained by the fruits of its literary currency, critics wondered: what next? Newsweek pointed to a 1996 short story collection called "McOndo," which became a movement of its own. Others, to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, whose acclaimed, posthumous epic 2666 delves deep into a series of unsolved Mexican homicides and landed an international audience that had eluded most of his contemporaries.

The latest is a slew of Latin American neo-realists, writers who've fled Marquez's mystical landscapes and, like Bolaño, landed in the hard-boiled, decidedly unmagical realm of the crime novel. Jorge Volpi, writing recently for The Nation, identified a new crop of writers in Mexico and Colombia confronting drug violence by "giv[ing] a literary patina to the language of the narcos" and, in so doing, pioneering what Volpi has termed the narconovelas:

During the last ten years, narconovelas have flooded the bookstores, sparking interest among Mexican readers and foreign critics in a new strain of Latin American exoticism and displacing magic realism as the region’s characteristic genre. In these books, Mexico is portrayed as a violent, uncontrollable and fantastic world in contrast to the West, which consumes drugs without suffering or being scarred by the violence of the trade.

Volpi points to a long and varied list of writers—Sergio González Rodríguez, Mario González Suárez, Heriberto Yépez, and others — who've dared to question whether Latin America has much magic to offer.

And then there is the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez, whose astounding new novel based on the Colombian drug wars, The Sound of Things Falling, has landed him as arguably the finest of this new crop of Latin American writers. 

The reception for the book, which was released this month, began as a steady murmur. It has risen to a chorus of praise that eclipses Vásquez's previous works, The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana. According to Jynne Martin, a publicity director for Riverhead, The Sound of Things Falling is already in its third printing and has become an extended New York Times bestseller. Critics, meanwhile, have been heaping praise on the book. Some, noting the narrative's bracing realism, wonder if Vásquez has set a new tone for Latin-American literature, one that leaves magical realism and its cultural trappings neatly behind.

"In Vásquez, the writing is really nitty-gritty realism. There's nothing fantastical," Edmund White, whose raving New York Times review observes that the novelist "is nothing like Gabriel García Márquez," told The Atlantic Wire. "Vásquez is very caught up in his national history. He's not interested in having a kind of Disney version of it." White compared the novel to the work of the late Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti.

In a review for NPR, Marcela Valdes called it "the most engrossing Latin American novel I've read since Roberto Bolaño's 2666." In a phone conversation, she compared Vásquez's treatment of the drug trade—which he approaches indirectly, from a starkly emotional perspective—to Bolaño's depiction of serial homicides in Mexico. "It's no Breaking Bad," she said. "It's a much more rare look at how this drug has changed society."

Meanwhile, the novel has charmed the likes of Jonathan Franzen and E. L. Doctorow. Descriptions vary, but the question remains on the lips of the literary sphere: is Vásquez the future of Latin American literature?

From Macondo to Bogotá

The Sound of Things Falling is—yes—a crime novel. But to call it that is reductive, insufficient to capture how it approaches crime through a personal, familial, and generational lens. Like Marquez, Vásquez is obsessed with the ghosts of memory. But his ghosts aren't magical. They're psychological.

And they've haunted its author as much as his characters.

The novel begins, for instance, with a hippopotamus. It's a dead hippo, an escaped male "the color of black pearls," the same one whose posthumous photo appeared in a magazine in 2009 and threw Vásquez into the narrative that weaves his novel together.

Indeed, Things Falling is a story about the long reach of memory—what its narrator terms "the damaging exercise of remembering"—and the material signifiers that can launch one into the past: a cassette tape, a letter, a scar. Why not a hippo?

"It was 2009 and I opened up this magazine and I found the photo of a dead hippo, with which the novel begins," Vásquez explained when reached at his home in Bogotá. "That image did something very strange for me. For Colombians of my generation, one of the strongest images we have is the photograph of [billionaire drug lord] Pablo Escobar shot dead on the rooftops of Medellín. That hippo, in a very strange way, resembled Escobar."

And so it was a hippo—a slain one, helpless and enormous—that drove Vásquez to investigate the long, violent legacy of the Colombia of his adolescence, the drug lords and the murders and the bombings and the political intimidation. Not a magical creature, but a real animal like the ones famously held in Escobar's zoo. Carried out by members of Colonel Hugo Martinez's Search Bloc at the end of 1993, Escobar's death signified the conclusion of that era—a grisly decade that left lasting scars on the generation that came of age during it.

"I started remembering what it was like to live with this constant fear," Vásquez said. "I started thinking about those years in a very personal way, [and] I started remembering those years as I had never remembered them before. I realized that the novel was about the emotional or moral side of something we already knew quite well in its public side."

[image error]The gripping, noirish story of Antonio, a young law professor who contends with the psychological trauma of a bullet that was meant for another, the novel's plot is too rich, too carefully woven and cleverly paced, to reveal in any great depth. It's about the drug trade, but its characters aren't really users. It's about the 1970s and '80s, but it's mostly narrated in the '90s. It's consumed by the miracle of flight, but remains grimly aware of its dangers. Mostly, it questions what it means to grow up in a landscape ravaged by terrorism. Its characters trade stories about where they were at the time of different attacks, about avoiding public places and living "with the possibility that people close to us might be killed."

"If you listen to an explosion, people from my generation know if it's a bomb or if it's something else," the writer recalled. "We got used to walking around with a coin in our pockets so in case of a bombing we could go to the nearest pay phone and call home."

It's a story likely to resonate with Vásquez's readers whether or not they are from Colombia. Having left Bogotá in 1996, the writer discussed working on the novel in Spain only several years after the Madrid train bombings of 2004. Then, after 17 years in Europe, he returned to Bogotá, driven by the urge to live again in the country he has written obsessively about—and the hope that his twin daughters might experience Colombian life.

"The interesting thing is how universal these emotions are," he said. "There are people who have gone through times of terrorism, whether it's the IRA in Ireland or the Shining Path in Peru or 9/11 attacks in New York. So everybody knows at this time and place in history, the Western world in the 21st century, what it's like to live with fear, with this kind of anxiety, this kind of unpredictable violence. And I think that has in a way shaped the reception of the book."

Like those before him, Vásquez has written a story of Latin America for the rest of the world to savor, but his is coated in fear and terror rather than mysticism. 

Tragedy, Not Magic

"I don't think magical realism is a major reference for writers in Latin America anymore," Marcela Valdesm, the NPR critic, told me. "I think people continue to use it as a frame of reference because we still haven't seen a novel in the United States that has had the same impact as Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude."

But she cautioned against generalizing all Latin-American literature together. "There's just too much variety with what's going on, and the region is so enormous." 

Vásquez, though, noted the spiked interest in the region's literary output. "It does feel like something is happening," he said. "After what we call the Latin American 'boom generation'—involving Márquez and Carlos Fuentes and all those people who made us discover the people who came before—I don't think American readers have been so attentive to what's going on in Latin American literature as [they are to] what is going on today."

He admitted that his novels diverge sharply from the flourishes that have dominated the Latin-American tradition for so long. Indeed, he has publicly proclaimed this agenda, as Edmund White quotes in his review:

In my novel there is a disproportionate reality, but that which is disproportionate in it is the violence and cruelty of our history and of our politics. Let me be clear about this. . . . I can say that reading One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . in my adolescence may have contributed much to my literary calling, but I believe that magic realism is the least interesting part of this novel. I suggest reading ‘One Hundred Years’ as a distorted version of Colombian history.

But his is not a conscious rebellion. It's the only way he knows how to write about his country.

"My work is a reaction to the idea of magical realism as the only way to discover Latin America," he explained to the Wire. "It's something that still many readers believe. And this is obviously something I strongly oppose. I don't feel Latin America is a magical continent. I feel Latin American history is, if anything, tragedy."

"It's the tragedy of recent Latin American history," he said, "that I'm trying to tell in my novel."

       

The National Zoo's Giant Panda Gave Birth to a Cub

Update: Well, that was fast, Mei Xiang gave birth Friday evening, about two hours after going into labor. 

WE HAVE A CUB!! Born at 5:32 p.m. this evening. More details to follow. http://t.co/R88TEAQKzv #cubwatch

— National Zoo (@NationalZoo) August 23, 2013

According to the National Zoo, Mei Xiang immediately picked up the cub and began to cradle and care for it. The team monitoring the birth only got a quick glimpse of the cub, but they heard it vocalize right after it was born. 

This is the third cub for Mei Xiang. Her first, in 2005, survived. But her second cub died six days after its birth in September, 2012. 

Thanks to the National Zoo, you can watch the panda birth for yourself here: 

Original post: Mei Xiang, the National Zoo's 15-year-old female giant panda, appears to have gone into labor. Her water broke earlier today, and the zoo thinks she might give birth later this evening — though the process could take up to 10 hours. And yes, there is a Panda Cam, where you can wait for the panda birth in high def: 

Watch the panda cams now! Mei's water broke a short time ago and she's having contractions. She may give birth in a few hours #cubwatch

— National Zoo (@NationalZoo) August 23, 2013

[image error]

Armed with a comfort toy, Mei Xiang, who has had five false pregnancies and lost a newborn cub last September, might not even give birth after the whole process finishes, according to the Washington Post:

It is difficult to determine if a giant panda is pregnant because the animal goes through the same physiological stages whether it is bearing a cub or not.

The conclusive evidence, which could be coming soon, is either the arrival of a cub or the close of the period with no cub.

Researchers have trouble breeding pandas in captivity (maybe it's because we do things like stream videos of them online when they give birth!). Zoo officials have tried numerous approaches, including giving pandas porn, and researchers have had a bit more success in recent years. But still, giant panda births in captivity are extremely rare. According to the Post, Mei Xiang's had five false pregnancies before, but researchers are pretty optimistic about her pregnancy this time: 

“The best indicator of somebody who’s going to give us a healthy panda is one who most recently had one,” zoo director Dennis Kelly said in an interview Aug. 20. “We’re cautiously optimistic that Mei Xiang will deliver a healthy cub, or two. We’re prepared for twins.”

 

       

Off to See the Wizard: 'Oz' Adaptations are Everywhere

Forget vampires, dragons, or, yes, even mermaids: the trendiest fantasy property right now might just be The Wizard of Oz. 

Hot on the heels of Disney's spring moneymaker Oz the Great and Powerful comes news that there are at least three television projects in development based on L. Frank Baum's classic series. Deadline's Nellie Andreeva reports today that NBC has bought an "Oz-themed" drama called Emerald City written by Matthew Arnold and described as Game of Thrones-esque. Earlier this month we learned that CBS is developing Dorothy, which Andreeva describes as "a medical soap based in New York City inspired by the characters and themes from The Wizard of Oz." Syfy, meanwhile, is working on a miniseries called Warriors of Oz, which involves a warrior from Earth in the present who gets sent to a dystopian Oz and must fight the Wizard aongside the warriors named "Heartless, Brainless, and Coward." There may even be yet another project in the works from some of the people behind Heroes, Andreeva explains. 

That Oz would become a hot property makes some sense. For one thing, Oz the Great and Powerful, despite the fact that it starred James Franco, has, to date, made over $200 million domestically. We're also nearing the 75th anniversary of the Judy Garland movie, which was originally released in August 1939. (Warner Bros. plans to re-release the film in 3D in September, a dreadful sounding proposition.) In fact, Baum's books provide plenty of material from which various adaptations can and have been drawn. Still, it's hard to see a network television future littered with iterations of Oz because, though Hollywood writers and producers keep trying to perpetuate spin-offs, the Victor Fleming film version remains the most indelible. Remember the pilot Tim Burton conceived in 2000 called Lost in Oz? Or the other Lost in Oz pilot from 2002? Yeah, we didn't either. 

       

Bob Filner Resigns in Settlement with San Diego

Update 6:45 p.m.: On Friday, Bob Filner offered his resignation as mayor of San Diego as part of a negotiated deal between the politician's legal team and the city. The city accepted his resignation effective August 30, 2013. Speaking before the council, Filner offered a "deep apology" for his part in the scandal, before moving on to an apology to his supporters, who cheered in the meeting room in response. He also apologized to his former fiancee. 

Then, Filner addressed the allegations against him — eighteen accusations of sexual harassment from — by comparing them to "the hysteria of a lynch mob." He said: "In a lynch mob mentality, rumors become allegations, allegations become facts, facts become evidence of sexual harassment." 

Before the closed vote by the council to accept Filner's resignation, 40 city residents, speaking for a minute each, participated in a public comment period. The comments were a mix of support for the mayor and praises for his impending resignation. Filner was the first progressive mayor of San Diego in decades, and several Filner supporters seemed to believe that the accusations against him were part of a conspiracy by his political opponents to remove him from office. In a recent poll, however, 81 percent of city voters wanted the mayor to resign. 

That means that 35-year-old Council President Todd Gloria will temporarily take over as the city's mayor starting in September. But his tenure as an interim mayor won't be anything like that of an elected mayor in the city. His powers will be limited by the city charter. He can't veto bills, but he will have limited supervising powers over the mayor's staff and city affairs. The City Council has to call a special election, to be held within 90 days, to replace the mayor. 

According to U-T San Diego, the recall campaign against the mayor pledged to continue collecting signatures until organizers are sure that Filner absolutely can't return to office. 

Original post: San Diego Mayor Bob Filner signed a resignation letter on Friday, ahead of the City Council's consideration of a mediated deal between the troubled mayor's lawyers in the city. That deal, according to multiple reports, would let the mayor offer his resignation in exchange for a resolution to mounting legal troubles stemming from a series of sexual harassment allegations. A deal would also end the drawn-out public spectacle of a recall effort already mounted in the city. 

According to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the news of Filner's signed letter, the negotiated deal between the city and Filner's lawyers includes a settlement for any future potential legal fees and damages. That should address any financial fallout for the city from a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Irene McCormack Jackson (the mayor's former communications director) against Filner. But Filner's lawyers have already insinuated that they were ready and willing to argue that the city itself bears some responsibility for Filner's actions: apparently, the mayor never received the sexual harassment training required of all city employees. 

The City Council meets at 1 p.m., Pacific Standard Time, to consider the deal. Should the proposal gain city approval, Filner is then expected to resign. Eighteen women, including three former employees, have accused the mayor of sexual harassment. Filner, 70, became the mayor of San Diego at the beginning of 2013, after two decades in Congress. 

       

Obama Called the Woman Who Prevented a School Shooting

President Obama called Antoinette Tuff on Thursday to thank her for preventing a massacre at a Dekalb County, Georgia school this week. Tuff, a bookkeeper at the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy Elementary School, talked to gunman Brandon Hill for over an hour in the school's officies, all while Hill carried — and loaded — the AK-47 he intended to use to kill children at the school. After a brief standoff between Hill and the police on the scene, she eventually convinced him not to go through with his plans. 

On Thursday evening, the White House released a short statement through the pool noting that "This afternoon, the President called Antoinette Tuff to thank her for the courage she displayed while talking to a gunman who entered the school where she works earlier this week."

Tuff was on Anderson Cooper 360 Thursday evening, where she described her call with the president, which looks like it happened while Tuff was getting ready to go on CNN. "Awesome. Oh God it was awesome," she said of hearing Obama's voice on the other line, adding, "It was the best voice I could ever hear." Obama, according to Tuff, called her a hero told her that he hoped to meet her one day in person, adding that his entire family was proud of her too.

While reports of Tuff's courage emerged soon after the averted shooting, it was the 911 call, released earlier today, pretty much solidifies just how much of a hero she is:  

"It's gonna be all right, sweetie," Tuff says to the gunman after he decides to surrender, "I just want you to know that I love you, though, OK? And I'm proud of you. That's a good thing. You've just given up. Don't worry about it."  

Tuff also met Kendra McCray, the 911 dispatcher who talked with her for close to a half an hour as she talked Hill down, on Cooper's show. At the end of the call, Tuff told her, "I'm going to tell you something, baby: I've never been so scared in all the days in my life." McCray's reply? "You did great." On Cooper's show, McCray said "I've never had a call where the caller was so calm and confident...you made my job a whole lot easier." 

Tuff, who sympathized with Hill, who told her that he had mental health issues and hadn't been able get his medication before attempting the school shooting, has set up a fund to benefit underprivileged kids: 

#AntoinetteTuff has set up a fundraising effort for underprivileged kids. The link to donate is http://t.co/iPww75MYWM

— Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper) August 23, 2013

Tuff, who credited God with her courage, told Cooper she doesn't consider herself a hero. 

       

New Mexico's Gay Rights Fight Wins Two Victories in a Week

The state-by-state push for same-sex marriage rights focused in on New Mexico this week after New Mexico's supreme court ruled that for-profit businesses can't discriminate against wedding and commitment ceremonies for same-sex couples. The ruling comes just one day after a New Mexico county began issuing marriage licences to same-sex couples, arguing that the state's law doesn't actually say anything about prohibiting gay marriage anyway. 

New Mexico's marriage laws are uniquely ambiguous, making the state something of a weird case study for the gay marriage battle in the U.S.: the state has no laws on the books specifically addressing the issue of same-sex marriage, nor does it have a provision allowing or banning civil unions or similar legal statuses. Instead, the state tentatively recognizes same-sex marriages from other states while functioning as if state law prohibits gay marriage. Two attempts to get related measures on the state's November 2014 ballot — one to legalize same-sex marriages, and the other to ban them — failed to make it out of the state's legislature. The city of Santa Fe, meanwhile, decided this year that the state's laws already legalize same-sex marriage. Plus, a series of lawsuits have challenged the state's interpretation of its current laws as an effective ban on gay marriage prompting New Mexico's Attorney General Gary King to announce that he wouldn't defend the state against them. King believes the state's equal protection laws render those bans unconstitutional. 

Thursday's court decision centers around the New Mexico-based Elane Photography, which refused to photograph the commitment ceremony of a same-sex couple in the state. Because the company's main business comes from weddings, it's considered a public accommodation under state law — which the company doesn't contest. When the couple contacted the company once more (this time hiding the fact that they were inquiring about a same-sex ceremony), Elane Photography was eager for their business. That was enough for the couple to file a discrimination complaint under the New Mexico Human Rights Act. That law prohibits businesses who provide services to the public from discriminating against protected groups of people. 

The company argued that because they'd photograph a gay person, but not anything depicting or promoting the idea of a same-sex weddings, the law didn't apply. Here's Justice Edward L. Chavez's opinion: 

If a restaurant offers a full menu to male customers, it may not refuse to serve entrees to women, even if it will serve them appetizers. The NMHRA does not permit businesses to offer a “limited menu” of goods or services to customers on the basis of a status that fits within oneof the protected categories. ... it does not help Elane Photography to argue that it would haveturned away heterosexual polygamous weddings or heterosexual persons pretending to have a same-sex wedding. Those situations are not at issue here, and, if anything, these arguments support a finding that Elane Photography intended to discriminate against Willock based on her same-sex sexual orientation.

In a concurring opinion, justice Richard C. Bosson added the following: 

In the smaller, more focused world of the marketplace, of commerce, of public accommodation, the Huguenins have to channel their conduct, not their beliefs, so as to leave space for other Americans who believe something different. That compromise is part of the glue that holds us together as a nation, the tolerance that lubricates the varied moving parts of us as a people. That sense of respect we owe others, whether or not we believe as they do, illuminates this country, setting it apart from the discord that afflicts much of the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Doña Ana County clerk Lynn Ellins issued marriage licences to same-sex couples for the second day on Thursday, after he decided that the state's laws provided no actual prohibition against it. The "state's marriage statutes are gender neutral and do not expressly prohibit Dona Ana County from issuing marriage licenses to same-gender couples," he explained. On Wednesday, the clerk issued about 40 licenses, with even more handed out on Thursday. Ellins is the first clerk to do so since 2004. But those licenses, issued in Sandoval County, were later invalidated. But King indicated that he had no plans to challenge those licences any time soon, cautioning they could still be invalidated by a future court decision.