Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 720
July 13, 2016
A guide to the Philadelphia DNC that media won’t show you, from extreme poverty to police misconduct
A man walks through a blighted neighborhood, July 11, 2013, in Philadelphia. (Credit: AP/Matt Rourke)
Just like their Republican counterparts in Cleveland, the delegates to the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia will be sequestered far away from the daily misery and despair that’s the experience of their host city’s extreme poor.
This growing cohort of folks are overwhelmingly people of color and include tens of thousands of children who find themselves living in neighborhoods in the “City of Brotherly Love” pock marked with 40,000 vacant lots and zombie homes.
Back in 2014, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that in addition to being “the poorest big city in America,” Philly had earned another dubious distinction of having “the highest rate of deep poverty _ people with incomes below half of the poverty line – of any of the nation’s 10 most populous cities.”
Reporter Alfred Lubrano observed that “Philadelphia’s deep-poverty rate is 12.2 percent, or nearly 185,000 people,” almost “twice the U.S. deep-poverty rate of 6.3 percent.”
As the elites of both parities prepare to enjoy the hospitality largesse of corporate America, it might be a good time to put Philadelphia’s misery index in a national context.
The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $2 a day. Since 1996, and the Clinton era push “to end welfare as we knew it,” the number of American families living in extreme poverty has spiked from 636,000 to 1.65 million by 2011 according to “The Rise of Extreme Poverty in the U.S.” (2015) by poverty researchers Kathryn Edin, and H. Luke Shaefer.
In that mix, say the researchers, are three million children nationally. In Philadelphia that translates to 60,000 kids.
Who wants to see that?
Evidently, not the people that run Philadelphia.
At first the city of Philadelphia rejected the permit application of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign to march on the convention that’s being held at the Wells Fargo Center. But thanks to a lawsuit brought by the Philadelphia office of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the group, which aligns itself with Dr. Martin Luther King’s poor people’s campaign, will get to march on the DNC’s opening day.
In their court filings, the ACLU’s lawyers noted that the group had successfully marched 16 years ago when the GOP held its convention in Philadelphia “in order to confront the nation’s political leaders with the necessity of taking action to address poverty” and that the “plight of the poor in Philadelphia has only worsened since 2000.”
Back in 2000 during the RNC, the Pennsylvania State Police resorted to a controversial undercover infiltration of protesters in Philadelphia resulting in the arrest of 70 people and the seizure of a warehouse where street puppets were being assembled.
The pre-9/11, over-the-top state police “puppet bust,” was an end run around a long-standing mayoral directive, limiting the use of such covert tactics in Philadelphia. In 1988 a federal judge ruled that an even larger undercover operation by local police surveilling protests around the celebration of the bicentennial of the Constitution were unconstitutional.
Cheri Honkala has lived in Philadelphia for 30 years and is the national organizer with the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, which is planning the march on the first day of the convention. “I have never seen anything as bad as it is now” when it comes to hardcore poverty in Philadelphia said Honkala.
Honkala ran as vice president on the 2012 Green Party ticket with presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein. But back in 2008 she was an enthusiastic supporter of candidate Barack Obama, taking to the streets with a bullhorn to press his case
But she soon became disillusioned. “In 2009 when we flew a bunch of women from around the country to Washington who were losing their homes to foreclosure to tell Congress their stories they got a bunch of empty promises,” recalls Honkala. “Every single one of them, including my sister, went on to lose their homes.”
“Here in Philadelphia we’ve thousands of empty homes and 27,000 homeless,” said Honkala. “If we wanted to end homelessness in this city we could. We don’t buy into the whole scarcity thing. It’s just straight up greed that keeps thing like they are.”
Honkala says that, increasingly, long-time residents are being forced out by gentrification driven “by the bankers, speculators, and developers” that are major political contributors to the local Democrats that run the city and the land use process. “The only positive thing is things have gotten so bad you can’t fool people anymore,” Honkala told Salon.
The Part of the Obama Legacy Nobody Talks About
When the Democrats picked Philadelphia to hold their convention they were selecting to celebrate in a state that is a kind of ground zero for the continued rise of wealth inequality nationally.
According to a study by Keystone Research, “during the economic expansions of the 1980s (1982- 1990) and 1990s (1991-2000), the bottom 99 percent of families in Pennsylvania captured between 64% and 65% of overall income growth in the commonwealth.”
But by the 21st century, Keystone reports income growth had become even more skewed. “The bottom 99 percent of families captured just over half of all income growth from 2001 to 2007.”
And it gets worse. “In the current economic expansion, which began in 2009, the bottom 99% of families have lost ground so far and the top 1 percent has been the only group to see its real incomes rise in Pennsylvania. As a result the top 1 percent of earners in Pennsylvania have captured more than 100% of overall income growth (124.4% to be precise).”
The Wealthy Rediscover Urban Life
Even as so many struggle in Philadelphia, the city’s declining crime rate is drawing affluent newcomers, according to Rolf Pendrall, director of Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute.
“Once upon a time people with wealth wouldn’t have stayed in the city. They were leaving the city,” said Pendrall. “That’s changed with the millennial surge, empty nesters and the city rebranding itself from its gritty blue collar image to one that revolves around arts and culture.”
In his study “World’s Apart; Inequality between America’s Most and Least Affluent Neighborhoods,” Pendrall looked at the demographic and income trends in over 200 of America’s commuting zones that had at least 250,000 people. Based on that survey Philadelphia’s scored second highest, only behind Dallas, on Pendrall’s wealth inequality index.
But it’s not only the spike in the income of the incoming high-end earners that creates the growing wealth gap, according to Pendrall. “In 166 other CZs (commuting zones) the largest of which included Boston, Los Angeles, Newark, and Philadelphia incomes fell in the bottom tracts but rose in top ones,” according to Pendrall’s study.
Pendrall thinks it’s possible for cities like Philadelphia to use planning to insure that a city encourage low income families to stick around and benefit from their community’s revitalization.
“Key to that however is rebuilding trust between the local government and the citizenry,” Pendrall told Salon. “This is an issue across the country.”
Trust between the African-American community and the Philadelphia power structure has always been in short supply. And the distrust transcends racial identity per se, because often local neighborhood residents are fighting a city hall led by African-American elected leadership.
You Can’t Fight City Hall Because They Can Bomb Your House
Post-Dallas, but pre-Democratic Convention, it is instructive to remember that it was in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985 that the city’s police force dropped a bomb from a state police helicopter onto the home that was the base for MOVE, an armed, radical, anti-authoritarian mostly African-American group committed to going back to nature.
The aerial bombardment set off a fire that killed six adults and five children and swept through the densely populated row house neighborhood destroying more than 60 homes and leaving 250 people homeless.
This incident has been widely reported as the only example of local law enforcement dropping a bomb on an American residential neighborhood.
Several years earlier, MOVE followers had exchanged gunfire with police that left one police officer dead. Several of MOVE’s supporters were tried and convicted for their participation in the gun battle.
In the subsequent years before the fire, MOVE members were unrelenting in their campaign to have their comrades released, who they believed had been unjustly convicted.
To be sure, there were major tensions between the MOVE adherents and their immediate neighbors, who appealed to City Hall to intervene. Little could the complaining neighbors contemplate what would follow.
The day of the bombing, the police arrived with search warrants for illegal weapons and explosives. Before the bombing, MOVE members refused law enforcement’s commands and a multi-hour siege ensued in which gunshots were exchanged. Police fired 10,000 rounds, and used water cannons and tear gas.
The mayor at the time was Wilson Goode, the first African-American to lead Philadelphia. After the conflagration, which made national headlines, Goode convened the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission.
The Commission took extensive testimony and held public hearings. The members of the police bomb squad, who were involved with the bomb’s preparation and the aerial bombardment, refused to testify, invoking their fifth amendment rights.
According to the Temple University archival synopsis of the proceedings, the “commission deliberated for several months before issuing its report,” which “was a sweeping denunciation of the actions of the city government, typified by the finding that ‘Dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable.’ ”
But in Philadelphia the saga of betrayal and community mistrust doesn’t end there. It goes on for decades.
In the aftermath of the fiery destruction of an entire residential neighborhood, the city shifted into heavy damage control, quickly rebuilding the homes it’s police department had leveled. But in short order the new houses began to fall apart requiring chronic repairs which never seemed to hold.
Residents filed suit and litigation went on for years. By 2010 CBS News reported the City had blown through $43 million and “had two block of boarded up eyesores to show for its efforts.”
By 2000, then-Mayor John Street was offering buyouts of $125,000 per household with an additional $25,000 for moving expenses. Roughly half the homeowners took him up on the offer for their homes, which at that point were worth just $75,000.
Two dozen homeowners pressed on with their claims in federal court and were awarded $13 million dollars, which broke down to about a half -million per plaintiff. By the time the award made it through the appeals process the residents who took the award ended up getting $190,000 for their homes.
Where are we 31 years after the bombing?
According to Sergeant Eric Gripp, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Police Department, the city has made significant strides in reducing police-involved shootings and in the reduction of both violent and property crime.
“In 2007 we had 62 police-involved shootings and last year we got that down to 23,” Gripp told Salon. “In 2007 we had 391 homicides and in 2014 we got as low as 248 but last year in 2015 we lost some ground with 280 murders” Gripp says in the 90s the annual homicide body count was closer to 500.
Back in 2013, after a spike in police-involved shootings, former Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey asked for help from the Department of Justice which runs an office that provides technical advice and works with local departments to develop a roadmap to improve police performance.
Gripp says one of the reforms that came out of that process is the awarding of so called Medals of Tactical De-escalation for officers that resolve potentially fatal confrontations by de-escalating. Since late last year 40 of these awards have been handed out.
These are often cases where officers “would have been acquitted of charges if they fired their weapon to defend themselves but in the moment they figure out another way,” Gripp told Salon.
Gripp says so far year to date shootings are up so far this year but that overall the city’s crime numbers remain historically low.
Stop and Frisk Still A Major Issue Says ACLU
While New York City’s very aggressive stop-and-frisk strategy during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure made national headlines, the reliance on the tactic has also been a hot point of contention in Philadelphia.
“When we initially filed we were seeing 250,000 stop and frisks annually where the police were often stopping people for no lawful reason and it was skewed so the racial bias was clear,” Mary Catherine Roper, the ACLU’s deputy legal director told Salon.
“Now, remember we are talking about a city population of just one and a half million” compared to New York’s over eight million said Roper. “That means that here in Philadelphia we were seeing a much higher stop and frisk rate than was the case in New York City. And we are not even talking about the quarter of a million vehicle stops we see here.”
Back in June of 2011 the ACLU and the city entered into a consent decree. “Up until this point I would give them a C-minus in terms of improving the way they are handling stop and frisk,” said Roper.
Yet Roper says in the last mayoral election the issue of stop and frisk was a defining issue. “Now we have a new mayor and new police commissioner appointed from within and they have instituted a whole lot of new protocols and we are anxiously awaiting the latest data to see if it has resulted in any improvements.”
July 12, 2016
“Mr. Robot” in moral free-fall: Groundbreaking season 1 sets up intriguing stakes for next act
Rami Malek and Christian Slater as "Mr. Robot" (Credit: USA/Peter Kramer)
The opening season of “Mr. Robot” was a rare example of prestige television that was not just edgy but also genuinely radical: It made a critique of capitalism during the Internet age into a gripping storyline — on USA, no less, former home of action romps like “Burn Notice.” Blending Philip K. Dick with Naomi Klein, “Fight Club” with Thomas Piketty, “V is for Vendetta” with the speeches of Bernie Sanders, Edward Snowden with “The Matrix,” the show built an argument about the hollowness of 21th century reality and how financial elites manipulate us to make it seem otherwise. And “Mr. Robot” did it with stylish shooting, consistently strong acting (especially from break-out star Rami Malek, the self-proclaimed vigilante hacker Elliott), and eerie, evocative music.
This was a lot for a 10-episode series to capture – some of it felt breathless — and it would be easy to imagine the second season struggling to keep up the momentum. But the first half of season two’s opening episode — the only part that USA has made available to Salon, which also “leaked” across social media over the weekend — is every bit as taut and brilliant as the first season. The cutting isn’t quite as quick as in the early episodes of season one — this season may be driven more by despair than anxiety, and the storytelling takes its time here. But the quality level is just as impressive.
Elliott, once a lowly tech whose efforts fed the evil of E Corp, no longer toils for the one percent’s one percent. He’s helped collapse the nation’s financial markets, and has discovered that the anarchist ring-leader played by Christian Slater is both his father and a figment of his imagination. Elliott is trying to get his head back on by eating most of his meals with the same “Seinfeld”-obsessed friend, opening up to a therapist who is rightly wary of him, attending a regular church group, watching basketball, and living with his mother, where he doesn’t have access to a computer. The backstory of his childhood injury — being pushed out of the window by his father — is filled in through a flashback.
And that, since the episode doesn’t air until Wednesday, is all I’ll say about the plot for now.
What I will say: Despite what we’ve learned about Slater’s character, he still shows up to confuse Elliott about what is and isn’t happening. (Given how unreliable a narrator Elliott is, I’m hesitant to believe anything here for sure.) And Elliott’s sister Darlene, who now leads the rebels of Fsociety, is asserting herself in a way that could certainly lead in a dangerous direction.
Malek continues to play Elliott with a combination of neurotic intensity and hangdog absence – he’s both too much and out of it at the same time. In the opening episode, he’s a bit passive, as if waiting for the pieces to fall back to earth.
The episode doesn’t give us a lot of new information about E Corp, Whiterose, Tyrell Wellick, the Dark Army, Angela, or a number of the other players from season one. It’s deliberately rolling everything out.
Part of what makes “Mr. Robot” so skillful is its tone. It’s paranoid, tense, sleek, and polished. And it never pushes: The acting in particular is consistently understated.
The show also has a nuanced take on technology. There’s a “smart house” about halfway through, and it’s quite lovely to the eye and ear. But when it inevitably begins to go haywire, we see what happens when we depend too much on inanimate objects to do our thinking for us. The sequence is like the whole show in microcosm.
There are a lot of plot points left hanging by the end of what the show’s credits call “Part One.” Morally, we’re in free fall: How virtuous is Elliott? Did the hack that trashed E Corp make the world a better place, or did it hurt millions of regular people who now can’t use their credit cards or pay their mortgages? How much can we believe our eyes and ears on this show? But these 40 minutes demonstrate confident photography, intelligent writing, masterful acting, and a season to very much look forward to.
The growing gender divide over “Ghostbusters”: Why movies starring women get slimed by male critics
Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada," Kate McKinnon in "Ghostbusters," Rebel Wilson in "Pitch Perfect"
After months of fanboys arguing over a movie no one has even seen, critics finally got a peek at Paul Feig’s “Ghostbusters” reboot, in which comedians Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig, and Melissa McCarthy suit up to fight the supernatural. And much to the relief of everyone who has spent months preparing themselves for the worst, the consensus is mainly positive: The film currently holds a 77 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
There is, however, a growing gender divide over the film’s reception. As of the time of writing, the film’s scores from female reviewers are considerably higher, with 84 percent of women giving the movie a thumbs up. Time’s Stephanie Zacharek comments, “The movie glows with vitality, thanks largely to the performers, who revel in one another’s company.” Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis writes that it’s “cheerfully silly” and Kate Muir of U.K.’s The Times says it’s a “rollickingly funny delight.”
On the flip side, 77 percent of the critics who gave the film a thumbs down are male.
Roger Ebert’s one-time sidekick, Richard Roeper, called it a “horror from start to finish,” while David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter referred to “Ghostbusters” as a “bust.” That disparity has hampered the film’s reception: Currently, there’s a 10 percentage point difference between male and female opinion on the movie. If reviewing were left up to male critics alone, “Ghostbusters” would have a 74 percent approval rating.
What gives? As Meryl Streep pointed out in a 2015 speech, this discrepancy is likely due to the fact that in a way, these critics are watching two different movies.
“Women are so used to that active empathizing with the active protagonist of a male-driven plot,” Meryl Streep said during a 2015 panel. “That’s what we’ve done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it’s all fellas. But they’ve never had to do the other thing. And the hardest thing for me, as an actor, is to have a story that men in the audience feel like they know what I feel like. That’s a really hard thing. It’s very hard thing for them to put themselves in the shoes of female protagonist.”
Because men are commonly treated as the default in movies—the everyman who stands in for the audience—they rarely are forced to empathize with others’ perspectives. If cinema does not reflect men’s experiences, it can, thus, be difficult for male audience members to see themselves in the picture in the way women are forced to. That affects not only the way that men interact with movies but also how they review them.
Currently, men make up an estimated 76 percent of registered film critics on Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates reviews from across the country. They are most likely to review science-fiction films and genres dominated by men—and least likely to voice their two cents on a movie with a woman protagonist. According to the San Diego State University study “Thumbs Down 2016: Top Film Critics and Gender,” female critics write 34 percent of the reviews when a movie stars a woman in the lead role.
If all things were equal, men and women would then approve and disapprove of movies at roughly equal rates. Thus, 76 percent of positive and negative reviews should be expected to come from men.
That, however, is rarely the case. A survey of Meryl Streep’s films showed that men were disproportionately likely to give them a negative review, no matter the quality of the film.
In the cases surveyed, men accounted for the vast majority of unfavorable notices, even as female critics remained roughly in line with the Tomatometer (if slightly more favorable than the average). When “The Devil Wears Prada” debuted in 2006, 80 percent of female critics liked it, while 82 percent of bad reviews came from men. Overall, David Frankel’s fashion industry satire, starring Streep as an Anna Wintour-inspired ice queen, scored a 75 percent.
The case was even worse for other Streep vehicles like “Ricki and the Flash” (67 percent overall), “August: Osage County” (64 percent), and “The Hours” (81 percent). Eighty-five percent of those who disliked Jonathan Demme’s “Ricki and the Flash,” in which Meryl appears as an aging rocker trying to mend fences with her estranged daughter, were male. That number was even higher for “August: Osage County” (86 percent) and highest for “The Hours” (an overwhelming 97 percent).
These gender gaps were static across the board: On average, men were overrepresented in negative reviews by a six percentage-point margin—with 82.1 percent of “rotten” ratings coming from male critics. These films include “Suffragette” (78 percent of negative reviews came from men), “Julie and Julia” (80 percent), “It’s Complicated” (76 percent), “Hope Springs” (78 percent), “Mamma Mia” (80 percent), and “The Iron Lady” (79 percent). The latter was the only film to receive harsher reviews from female critics, in which Streep played Margaret Thatcher. Just 43 percent of female critics liked it.
“Suffragette” (73 percent Tomatometer):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 82 percent
“The Devil Wears Prada” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 82 percent
Female critics who liked it: 80 percent
“Julie and Julia” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 80 percent
Female critics who liked it: 85 percent
“It’s Complicated” (57 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 76 percent
Female critics who liked it: 60 percent
“Hope Springs” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 79 percent
“Ricki and the Flash” (65 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 85 percent
Female critics who liked it: 76 percent
“The Hours” (81 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 97 percent
Female critics who liked it: 97 percent
“Mamma Mia” (54 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 80 percent
Female critics who liked it: 60 percent
“August: Osage County” (64 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 86 percent
Female critics who liked it: 68 percent
“The Iron Lady” (51 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 79 percent
Female critics who liked it: 43 percent
Streep isn’t the only one to get continually dinged by male critics. Looking at female-driven vehicles released over the last decade, it’s rare to find one that received equal appraisals from both men and women. Female critics were overwhelmingly positive about “Pitch Perfect,” the 2012 sleeper hit starring Anna Kendrick as a reluctant member of a ragtag female a cappella group. Ninety-three percent of women reviewers liked it, but their male colleagues were less enthusiastic: 94 percent of thumbs-down scores came from men.
Since 2000, the biggest gender discrepancy in film reviews was over Paul Feig’s “Spy,” which received a perfect 100 percent score from female critics. That means every single reviewer who didn’t like the Melissa McCarthy action-comedy was a man. Other female-centric comedies showed lower ratios of male disapproval (with “Bridesmaids” and “Mean Girls” faring better with male critics than women).
“Pitch Perfect” (80 percent Tomatometer):
Negative reviews that came from men: 93 percent
Female critics who liked it: 94 percent
“Pitch Perfect 2″ (66 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 75 percent
Female critics who liked it: 66 percent
“Mean Girls” (83 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 75 percent
Female critics who liked it: 82 percent
“Bridesmaids” (90 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 88 percent
“Spy” (94 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 100 percent
Female critics who liked it: 100 percent
“Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” (77 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 77 percent
Female critics who liked it: 83 percent
“In Her Shoes” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 76 percent
“The Intern” (61 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 81 percent
Female critics who liked it: 70 percent
A May study from FiveThirtyEight noted a similar gender bias when it comes to reviewing female-driven television shows. Men tend to rate programs like “Sex and the City,” “Switched at Birth,” and “My Mad Fat Diary,” which center the lives and experiences of women, well below average—which has a way of tanking user reviews. Although the median score for television shows is 7.3, “Sex and the City,” which won seven Emmys and eight Golden Globes in its extraordinarily successful six-year run, boasts just a 7.0. On average, men give the show a 5.8 rating, and they account for 41 percent of IMDb voters.
As the website points out, this is par for the course. While women rarely take their time to review male-marketed programs like “Sportscenter” or the Discovery Channel’s “Wheeler Dealers,” very few shows are predominantly reviewed by women. More men chimed in on “United States of Tara,” “Broad City,” “Murphy Brown,” and “Orange Is the New Black,” and they rated each lower than female viewers did.
The problem is, thus, not just that men do not like female-driven movies and television shows as much as women do but that they have a disproportionate say in how such entertainment is received. According to the San Diego study, women account for just 20 percent of film reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. That means their opinions hold a lot of weight.
With little opportunity to counterbalance ingrained bias against female-driven films, the large volume of male voices will continue dragging down the overall scores of films that star women. In the eight films cited directly above, male critics brought down the Tomatometer by an average of 5.25 percentage points. Streep fared even worse: Her scores would have averaged six points higher if men’s reviews weren’t factored in. Her average Tomatometer over those 10 films is a 67. It would have been a 73.
The female “Ghostbusters” might be busy fighting the undead, but their biggest foe won’t be so easy to vanquish.
Sulu, “Star Trek” and queer sci-fi: LGBT diversity has been there all along—now it’s gone mainstream
George Takei, John Cho (Credit: AP/Victoria Will, Paramount Pictures)
When John Cho outed his character in the forthcoming “Star Trek Beyond” to The Herald Sun’s James Wigney on Friday, it was assumed by the film’s cast and crew that beloved LGBTQ icon George Takei, who first inhabited the role of “Hikaru Sulu,” would embrace the character’s new direction.
Instead, Takei told The Hollywood Reporter that while he was “delighted that there’s a gay character,” he considered the queering of Sulu to be “unfortunate” and “a twisting of Gene [Roddenberry’s] creation, to which he put in so much thought.”
Simon Pegg — who plays Scotty in the film he also co-wrote with Justin Lin and Doug Jung — published a polite reply in The Guardian, in which he argued that what is truly “unfortunate” is that “the screen version of the most inclusive, tolerant universe in science fiction hasn’t featured an LGBT character until now.”
Moreover, he added, “[w]e could have introduced a new gay character but he or she would have been primarily defined by their sexuality, seen as the ‘gay character,’ rather than simply for who they are and isn’t that tokenism?” The answer to that question would seem to be, unequivocally, “Yes” — and to engage in such tokenism would be a betrayal of the more complex relationship to human sexuality long cultivated by the best science fiction.
The history of the future has almost always been more queer than the society science fiction purports to represent. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel “The Left Hand of Darkness” (1969), the inhabitants of Gethen are neither male nor female, but potentially both — they only acquire sexual characteristics during their “kemmer,” a process of mutual negotiation with their chosen partner. As an anthropologist sent to investigate humanity’s ambisexual descendants notes, while the social changes of gender fluidity seem small on the surface, in reality they are “incalculable.”
The “burden” of child-bearing and -rearing is shared between the partners; children never become attached to a mother or a father, so the Oedipal complex is non-existence; and perhaps most significantly, because social relations aren’t divided into strong/weak, active/passive, protective/protected, dominant/submissive pairings from the moment of birth, “the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed,” on Gethen.
Salon spoke to Adam Roberts, author of Palgrave’s “History of Science Fiction” and an award-winning science fiction writer himself, about both Pegg’s decision to have Sulu join the LGBTQ community and what the responses to it, including Takei’s own, says about the future of queerness.
“The idea that some of the Enterprise crew would be LGBT is so uncontentious, so obvious,” Roberts said, “that I have some sympathy with Simon Pegg’s bafflement at the fuss — he ‘respectfully disagrees’ with George Takei’s disapproval. Takei says it’s ‘really unfortunate’ that Sulu is gay since he wasn’t gay in Roddenberry’s original conception of the character. Of course he wasn’t anything very much, in Roddenberry’s original conception of the character, which is part of the reason why Pegg, Lin and Jung felt able to out him in ‘Star Trek Beyond.'”
For Roberts, the more interesting phenomena at work here is the inability of science fiction “to separate out fictional characters and real life persons. The root reason why Sulu is gay in ‘Star Trek Beyond’ is that George Takei is so prominent, and widely loved, a campaigner for gay rights. There’s a functional blurring of Takei and Sulu here — as if Laurence Olivier were to announce to the press, ‘It’s really unfortunate that Maxine Peake had elected to play Hamlet as a woman; that’s not true to Shakespeare’s original conception of the character.’”
The science fiction community need not be so wedded to “original conceptions” of fictional characters, Roberts says, and instead embrace diversity not because of any larger social agenda, but simply because it exists. “It seems to me that the best way to handle LGBTQ characters is to represent them not as basically the same as straight characters, but certainly as human — as capable of greatness or pettiness, as interesting and varied and so on. LGBTQ characters do not deviate from a norm, and therefore aren’t ‘deviants’; the norm is a convention, not a brute fact of nature.”
Even in “The Left Hand of Darkness,” in which the narrative was driven by an increasing awareness and acceptance of difference — as the novel closes, the narrator states that “I saw then, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man” — the Gethenians live on an isolated planet, the remnants of what some in the novel consider a failed experiment in directed evolution begun millions of years earlier. They are deviants, and they are outside the norm, even if the novel seeks to persuade the reader to share the narrator’s more inclusive definition of humanity.
Which is, of course, the most significant issue — how to represent historically underrepresented communities, especially when doing so within the confines of a franchise that, however progressive it was when originally produced, was still originally produced in America during the 1960s. Should members of the LGBTQ community be treated as deviations from the “norm” who require acceptance, or simply as people whose sexuality or gender identification is a fundamental, if incidental, fact of who they are?
Roberts clearly argues that it should be the latter, whereas Takei believes that the character of Sulu will be fundamentally altered — an “unfortunate” revision of his original conception — if he happens to homosexual in the new film. In this respect, Takei is out of step with how science fiction has evolved since Roddenberry first envisioned life aboard the Starship Enterprise, at least inasmuch as straightness is no longer considered the default among characters whose sexuality isn’t a central feature of the narrative.
Consider, for example, the case of Poe Dameron in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” As played by Oscar Isaac, he’s swashbuckling without being hyper-masculine and charming without imposing himself on female characters — which in 2016 and, absent an obvious love-interest, is coded as “gay,” or at the very least invites that interpretation. So, too, does John “Finn” Boyega joining Isaac on “Ellen” and declaring that, like his co-star, he “was playing romance” in the cockpit scene. Even though the pair were joking, the fact that neither the film nor Degeneres’ audience would be surprised if they weren’t signals a significant shift in how genre audiences approach LGBTQ issues.
In science fiction, that shift began with Le Guin, but reached its heights in the works of the late Octavia Butler, whose own sexual identity remains something of a mystery to this day. Gender fluidity existed casually, not simply across the human race, but in “Lilith’s Brood,” across species. The subject as it once stood is perhaps best expressed by a character named Amber in her “Patternist” series, who replied to the question of whether she preferred men or women thus:
“I’ll tell you,” she said softly. “But you won’t like it.”
He looked away from her. “I asked for the truth. Whether I like it or not, I have to know….”
“When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women,” she said. “And when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men.”
“You mean you haven’t made up your mind yet.”
“I mean exactly what I said. I told you you wouldn’t like it. Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other.”
The crux of this controversy, then, is that Takei represents those who still want to ask, whereas the question doesn’t even occur to Pegg, Roberts, or the majority of the audiences in 2016.
Police brutality in NYC: Cop investigated in shooting of unarmed dad Delrawn Small
Surveillance footage showing Delrawn Small moments after being shot
The issue of police brutality has been revived in recent days, as videos of the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have shaken the country.
More than 300 people were arrested over the weekend in protests against police brutality throughout the U.S.
Tens of thousands held demonstrations and blocked roads, demanding political action.
One recent case, however, has gotten much less attention: The killing of Delrawn Small, a 37-year-old father of three, in New York City.
In a road rage incident on the early morning of July 4, off-duty police officer Wayne Isaacs shot and killed Small, who was unarmed, in Brooklyn.
Authorities justified the attack by claiming Small had punched Isaacs in the face. But surveillance footage later released showed that the police had lied about the incident.
The video, which was obtained by The New York Post, clearly show Small was shot and killed within just one second after walking up to Isaacs’ car.
The footage can be seen below, courtesy of Democracy Now.
Small was apparently angered when Isaacs had cut him off. The video shows that Small got out of his car and walked toward Issacs, whom he did not know was a police officer.
The second Small reached the car, Isaacs fired two shots through his window, hitting him. Small immediately stumbled to the ground. Isaacs got out of his car, tucked the gun into his waistband, and walked toward Small. He looked at the dying man before getting back in his car.
Zaquanna Albert, Small’s girlfriend, witnessed the attack from the car, along with their 4-month-old child.
On Monday, the NYPD announced that it had stripped Isaacs of his gun. He has been placed on modified duty and will, for now, be restricted to desk work, the New York Daily News reported.
New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating.
Victor Dempsey, Small’s brother, said at a news conference that the video shows he was “point-blank murdered.”
“It’s time for us to get justice on it,” Dempsey added. “Everything they told us from the very beginning is a lie.”
A 2014 lawsuit accused oIsaacs of a false arrest in which the suspect was “punched, kicked and struck several times in the head and body,” the Daily News reported.
The plaintiff said one of the police falsely arresting him called him a “ni–er.” The case was settled for $20,000.
Small’s family says the shooting was a clear case of excessive force.
Democracy Now interviewed Roger Wareham, the attorney representing Small’s family.
“The video is very instructive in terms it shows that the cop had no urgency around what was happening,” Wareham said.
“You see him, he gets out the car. He’s very casual. He walks over. He looks down… He doesn’t even bend over to touch him to see if he’s alive, and strolls back to his car.”
Small’s attorney stressed that, had Isaacs been a civilian, he would have been arrested for shooting an unarmed civilian, whether or not he had a license for a gun.
There’s “always has been a double standard in terms of how the police are treated when they are involved in the shooting of civilians,” Wareham said.
Incidents like this send “a message to the police department that they are apart from the same rules that affect everybody else in society.”
He pointed out that, when there is not footage of these police attacks, there is virtually no attention to them. “It’s almost as if, if there is no video, there is no crime committed.”
Police have been accused of cracking down on civilians who film these shootings.
Ramsey Orta, who filmed an NYPD cop putting unarmed black father Eric Garner in a chokehold and killing him, says he has been constantly harassed by police, and now faces four years in prison on drugs and weapons charges. Orta is the only one connected to the Garner killing who has gone to jail.
Chris LeDay, the Georgia man who first posted a video of the police shooting of Alton Sterling, also says he was detained by police the next day on false charges that he believes were a form of retaliation.
Early media reports on the shooting of Small uncritically repeated the police’s version of the incident, before video exposed it to be false.
Wareham noted that the surveillance footage shows “the cold-blooded nature of what happened, and that the cop’s attitude was, ‘This was nothing more than if I had stepped on an ant.'”
Obama pays tribute to officers shot in racial attack: “Dallas, I’m here to say we must reject such despair”
President Barack Obama attends a memorial service at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, July 12, 2016, in Dallas. (Credit: Eric Gay, AP)
DALLAS (AP) — At a memorial for slain police officers, President Barack Obama declared Tuesday that a week of deeply troubling violence has appeared to expose “the deepest fault lines of our democracy.” But he insisted the nation is not as divided as it seems and called on Americans to search for common ground in support of racial equity and justice.
Obama acknowledged Americans are unsettled by another mass shooting on their streets and are seeking answers to the violence that has sparked protests in cities and highlighted the nation’s persistent racial divide.
Five Dallas officers were killed last Thursday while standing guard as hundreds of people protested the police killings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota earlier in the week.
“It’s hard not to think sometimes that the center might not hold, that things might get worse,” Obama said. “We must reject such despair.”
He joined politicians, police officers and families of the fallen in the wake of the shocking slaying by a black man who said he wanted revenge for the killings of blacks by police.
“The soul of our city was pierced,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said, as he welcomed Obama to a memorial service. The group had assembled because to combat “a common disease” of violence and honor those who fight it, “our men and women in blue, our peacemakers in blue.”
Rawlings spoke steps from five empty chairs and five portraits of the dead officers.
A call for national and solidarity was reinforced by several speakers at the interfaith service, including former President George W. Bush, a Dallas resident, who attended with his wife, Laura.
“At times it feels like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together,” Bush said. “Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions. And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose.”
Bush called on Americans to reject the unity of grief and fear.
“We want the unity of hope, affection and higher purpose,” he said.
Obama has denounced the shooting as a “vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement” by a “demented” individual. And he has argued that, despite the heated public outcry of the past week, the country is not as divided as it may seem.
Obama’s choice of traveling companions underscored the theme. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California joined Obama him on Air Force One for the flight to Dallas. Republican Sen. John Cornyn, attended and spoke at the service but did not travel with the president.
He described the attack as deeply personal.
“Being a Texan doesn’t describe where you’re from it, describe who your family is,” the senator said.
The White House said president worked late into the night writing his speech and consulting scripture for inspiration.
Just a few weeks ago, Obama spent hours in Orlando, Florida, consoling the loved ones of 49 people who were killed in a shooting rampage at a nightclub.
The Dallas attack ended with the gunman, Micah Johnson, 25, blown up by a bomb delivered by a police robot. The black Army veteran portrayed his attack on the officers as payback for the fatal police shootings of black men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban Minneapolis.
Portions of both shootings were videotaped and broadcast nationwide, leading to fresh outrage, protests and scores of arrests. The killings also put the country on edge, heightened racial tensions and pushed the issue of the use of deadly force against black males by white police to the forefront.
Obama sought to begin bridging those issues with his tribute to the fallen five, who included a former Army Ranger, a Navy veteran and a newlywed starting a second family.
Some police officials blame the president for the rise in racial tension, saying he is insufficiently supportive of law enforcement. In comments since the Dallas shooting, Obama has urged the public to recognize and respect that police officers have a tough job.
Meanwhile, he has been criticized by others for going to Dallas before visiting Louisiana or Minnesota.
As Obama landed in Dallas, spokesman Josh Earnest said the president had telephone the families of Alton Sterling, the man shot by police in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile, the Minnesota motorist shot by an officer, to offer his and the first lady’s condolences.
The president, joined by his wife, Michelle, and Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, were also meeting privately in Dallas with families of the slain officers. At least nine other officers and two civilians were injured in the attack.
Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap
“Sadness, anger, frustration”: The tremors of Philando Castile’s death continue in the Twin Cities
A memorial at the site of the police shooting of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, July 7, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Eric Miller)
On the afternoon of July 6, Duchess Harris, chair of the American Studies department at St. Paul’s Macalester College and co-author of the book “Black Lives Matter,” brought a group of undergrads to see the exhibit “RACE: Are We So Different?” at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
Invited by new St. Paul Chief of Police Todd Axtell, Harris saw this as a positive sign of a “commitment to conscientious community engagement.” Harris would wake up the next morning to find out that Philando Castile was killed by a police officer in Falcon Heights, a St. Paul suburb.
“When I woke up my heart was heavy with how challenging police brutality is,” Harris said.
Miski Noor — an organizer with the Minneapolis chapter of Black Lives Matter and a communication strategist with the national Black Lives Matter network — had a similar reaction.
“It’s the same cycle of feelings that you go through,” Noor said. “Shock, and then not shock, because every 21 hours a black man is killed by police or a vigilante in the United States. I feel sick to my stomach — sadness, anger, frustration. And after all of that, getting determined to continue the fight for liberation for black people and our collective liberation.”
Castile, 32, a food supervisor at a St. Paul Montessori school, was killed by police officer Jeronimo Yanez after a routine traffic stop. Yanez was accompanied by his partner, Joseph Kauser.
Castile is the second black man killed by a Twin Cities police officer in the past seven months.
Jamar Clark, 24, was shot by police on Nov. 15, 2015, after being detained by police outside a party in Minneapolis. On March 30, an investigation concluded that no charges would be filed against Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze, the officers in the shooting.
Duchess Harris praised Minnesota politicians for their swift reaction to Castile’s death: “Although Minnesota can have its difficulties, I am extremely proud that my Congresswoman Betty McCollum, Gov. Mark Dayton, Lt. Governor Tina Smith, U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, and Rep. Keith Ellison sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch urging the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct a full and thorough investigation into the death of Philando Castile.”
Dayton has gone as far to say that Castile would still be alive if he and his passengers were white.
While politicians have called on the Department of Justice to investigate, the DOJ has deferred the case to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, offering help if needed.
Retired black St. Paul police officer Sgt. Melvin Carter, Jr., who served as a member of the SWAT team, a detective, and an internal affairs investigator during his 28-year career, said the shooting was “an overreaction to what was never a threat in the first place.”
Racism in policing is a national epidemic, said Carter, while conceding that “St. Paul does a better job than other folks.”
“Police work in itself is a hostile environment. It’s racist, sexist, violent. It’s inherent from the hand-me-down culture. White privilege is laced in the fiber of law enforcement,” Carter said. “We’re at a place where we have to decide where we go from here. This last event [with Castile] was so obvious — we need reform.”
Noor agreed that race relations in the United States are at a crossroads.
“A lot is going to have to change,” Noor said. “We’ve been pushing for change for a long time. And folks are actually going to have to look to community members and talk about community-based initiatives because obviously policing as-is is not working.”
Noor said that there is a different kind of racism that pervades the Midwest.
“We have ‘Minnesota Nice'; we have ‘Midwest Nice,'” Noor said. “People think that things are better in the north or in the Midwest because people are more liberal and progressive. But racism takes a different form, and it’s harder to name, and it’s harder to see. But it shows up in the casual attitudes when folks all day can post about the Twins game or the State Fair, but not even say anything when [black] men have been killed by police.
Harris, Carter and Noor all agreed that changes to policing must come from within the community.
“We need peace officers, instead of law enforcement agents,” Carter said. “Go back to community policing, where we originally came from. Get back to the true meaning of policing: hiring from the community, building relationships with the people who live in communities.”
“They say examinations of credit scores, family history, and where a person lives are subjective and often negatively impact black men,” Harris said. “Should you be denied entry to the police academy for bad credit? I think we should blame the wealth gap and not the person that has fallen in the gap.”
Noor said the people who are most affected by policing should have a say on how police decisions are made.
“It’s not only about changes and reforming the police, we actually want the police abolished,” Noor said. “We actually want a different system that is created by community, and created by the folks who are most marginalized and most harmed by police. People who are survivors of police violence, police rape. Folks that have been incarcerated, black trans women who have been targeted by the police, sex workers. Those folks should be making decisions about what our system should basically look like.”
“This is not a way we can continue to live,” Noor said. “It’s in our best interest to get out of a white supremacist, capitalistic patriarchy, which is what we’re living in.”
Donald Trump running mate roundtable: Salon writers on whom Trump will — and should — choose as his VP
Chris Christie, Mike Pence, Mary Fallin (Credit: AP/Mel Evans/Alex Brandon/Sue Ogrocki)
With Donald Trump expected to announce his vice presidential running mate this week in advance of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, political prognostication season is in full swing.
Trump told the Washington Post on Monday that he had narrowed his search to five potential running mates and would choose “someone that would be really good” in the next few days. Speculation has centered on several candidates the Trump campaign is reportedly vetting, including Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
According to overseas betting markets, Pence is an overwhelming favorite to earn the GOP’s vice presidential nomination. Irish bookmaker Paddy Power places Pence’s odds at 4-6, meaning bettors wagering on Pence must be willing to risk more than they stand to win if he is chosen. Pence is followed by Gingrich and Christie, both at 5-1. (Gamblers looking for a nepotistic longshot might like the odds of Trump’s daughter Ivanka at 66-1.)
As Trump prepares to announce his running mate, we asked Salon political writers to weigh in on both whom the presumptive Republican nominee will pick and whom he should pick:
Amanda Marcotte
Donald Trump will pick: His daughter, Ivanka, because he’s not legally allowed to marry her and having her as his running mate is the next best option. He hasn’t shown any interest in curtailing his baser instincts before, so why start now?
Donald Trump should pick: Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, as a shield against accusations both of sexism and of insufficient fealty to the religious right.
Sean Illing
Donald Trump will pick: Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, because he’s the least terrible candidate in a pool of terrible B-list candidates.
Donald Trump should pick: Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, because he’s the least terrible candidate in a pool of terrible B-list candidates.
Daniel Denvir
Donald Trump will pick: Every single option contains a bundle of contradictions and problems, speculating upon the inner workings of Donald Trump’s gut makes me queasy. That said, while Michael Flynn might scratch his clash of civilizations itch and Chris Christie, perpetually re-damaged by Bridgegate, is channelling the George Wallace-style cop-friendly war on crime thing…I’m guessing he’ll go with Newt. Because Newt is an insider, which Trump knows he needs, and a firebrand, which Trump likes.
Donald Trump should pick: Mike Pence, I suppose. He’s certainly a right-wing guy but he’s what passes for mainstream establishment Republican these days. Trump needs to win over establishment-aligned and white-collar Republicans who might sit November out or even vote Clinton, though I think the effort will ultimately prove futile no matter who he picks
Chauncey DeVega
Donald Trump will pick: Mike Pence. He is a known quantity, albeit a not very interesting or particularly exciting one, and will show that Trump is “serious” about being a “responsible leader.”
Donald Trump should pick: Pence. Trump’s options are limited as few Republicans with aspirations for holding national office in the future will want to associate with his toxic political brand.
Heather Digby Parton
Donald Trump will pick: Newt Gingrich, because Newt has a nasty streak that Trump respects and he has made it very clear that he will not hesitate to use it.
Donald Trump should pick: Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, because they share an affinity for white supremacy but Sessions looks and sounds like a standard Republican so he might be able to reassure some wobbly members of the base that Trump will have an experienced adult by his side.
Sophia Tesfaye
Donald Trump will pick: Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. Trump has repeatedly indicated he knows his weakness is the “political” and he has said he wants a running mate with Congressional experience. Pence comes with both federal and state experience, as a Republican leader in the House and the executive of a red/leaning purple state with an appeal to Ted Cruz voters. Granted, none of this helps him outside of the traditional GOP base.
Donald Trump should pick: Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin. While the Trump campaign apparently believes selecting a running mate who isn’t a white man is “pandering,” the conservative governor brings Congressional and executive experience like Pence along with the added appeal to a group Trump desperately needs to win the election – married white women.
Gary Legum
Donald Trump will pick: Newt Gingrich. Trump can’t help acting the bully. In his mind, there will be no better way to get under Hillary Clinton’s skin than to run with one of her husband’s major tormentors from the 90s. All other considerations about Newt – the ethics problems that drove him out of Congress, his ego that will chafe at being the number-two guy and occasionally grab the spotlight away from Trump – will be secondary to that.
Donald Trump should pick: Mike Pence. He’s got genuine far-right credentials that appeal to the base. His colorlessness contrasted with Trump’s mania and off-the-cuff style can add a sense of quiet competence to the ticket.
Andrew O’Hehir
Donald Trump will pick: If this is a serious question, then the needle is probably wavering between Mike Pence and Newt Gingrich, and likelier to come down on Pence. He’s a hardcore conservative from a purplish state who will reassure the “values voters” along with the Republican establishment, and he isn’t perceived as a lunatic. (Although, by the standards of any earlier point in political history, he basically is a lunatic.) That said, if Trump follows his own instincts instead of outside advice, he’ll go with Gingrich, creating a class-5 hurricane of fatuous windbaggery on one ticket.
Donald Trump should pick: Rand Paul, who isn’t on the list. No, I’m serious: Paul ran a dreadful presidential campaign and is kind of dumb, but his libertarian jazz-dance routine, where he doesn’t care about gays or weed and is against overseas wars and NSA spying, could create real positioning problems for Hillary Clinton, and open the way for Trump to outflank her to the left on certain issues.
Pooch’s police pose: Willow the “fugitive K9″ wins cutest mugshot award
(Credit: Tarpon Springs Police Department Facebook page)
The Tarpon Springs (Florida) Police Department deserves credit for the cutest criminal booking.
Officers in the Tampa suburb on Monday found Willow, a “fugitive K9″ who’d “wandered away from home,” according to a post on the department’s Facebook page.
“Willow refused to tell officers where she lived so she was taken to the PD where she was booked and photographed,” the post explains. “She was very cooperative with officers and probably one of the most friendly prisoners we’ve ever had in custody.”
Willow’s owners were eventually located and “bonded her out,” but not before she got the full perp treatment, complete with mugshot and finger (paw) print.
Find the department’s full post at Tarpon Springs Police Department’s Facebook page.
(h/t NY Daily News)
Can Audible sell podcasts? New short-form Channels shows sound familiar to public radio ears
Jon Ronson, Ashley C. Ford (Credit: Penguin/Barney Poole/Audible)
One of the best things about 21st century culture has been the explosion of intelligent talk on public radio and a surge of intelligent, witty podcasts just about everywhere. There is now so much available from MTV News, WBUR, NPR, American Public Media, RadioLab, and endless others that is funny, poignant, outrageous, well-reported, and everything else. The vast majority of it is entirely free. So how do you get people to pay for content?
That’s the challenge that Audible is tackling as it launches Channels, a new subscription service that comes free with the Audible audiobook app and costs $4.95 for others. The main event here will be original programming, though Channels also offers commercial-free versions of other podcasts and access to TED Talks, narrated stories from The New Republic and other magazines, Dan Savage, and a lot more.
Audible, which is owned by Amazon but whose service operates largely independently, has been doing podcasts and the like for a very long time. What it seems to be offering here is shows that would interest the audiobook crowd. There is a show on books and authors (“Authorized,” hosted by writer Ashley C. Ford), one on presidents (“Presidents Are People, Too!,” with historian Alexis Coe and former “Daily Show” head writer Elliott Kalan), and a popular-science show (“Breasts Unbound,” hosted by journalist Florence Williams.) If you like any of these shows, Amazon won’t have to work very hard to recommend books that will match your taste.
The one show that’s a bit less predictable is “Mortal City,” a look at the eccentricities of New York. Host Kathleen Horan calls it a show that will “introduce you to something I can’t believe exists.” The opening episode chronicles Rocky Robinson, who runs an emergency medical service for people in Bedford-Stuyvesant who’d otherwise be dangerously overlooked. Robinson tells his story well, if not entirely credibly. He says he was a cab driver, club DJ, pimp, and thief earlier in life, all of which are plausible; he also says he invented hip hop, which is a bit harder to swallow. In any case, he’s fascinating to listen to.
The quality of these shows is strong, for the most part. Let me break them out for a moment.
The presidents show is full of fascinating information, like the way Theodore Roosevelt’s drive came at least in part from his trying to fight his family’s history of depression, and he had a complicated relationship to feminism. But this episode, at least, leans toward the goofy, both with Kalan’s delivery and excursions like visiting a Queens taxidermist because of Roosevelt’s passion for hunting and mounting animals.
Ford’s interview with Janet Mock, the transgender author of the memoir “Redefining Realness,” is intelligent and lively. Ford has a gift for rapport and the result is a smart conversation about race, gender, family, and literary passion.
The first installment of the breasts show visits the Texas housewife who became the first woman to get silicone gel implants, as she’s reunited with the doctor who did the surgery. (Both were born in the early 1930s.) The show is snappy and well-told.
There’s also what seems to be a Malcolm Gladwell-ish show hosted by Jon Ronson called “The Butterfly Effect,” and another about “the afterlife of violence places” called “Damned Spot,” for which I’ve only heard teasers. (I’ve got high hopes for both, though the latter is necessarily morbid.)
But the one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was how these resembled other shows I’ve heard on the radio or on existing, free podcasts. The style is also similar – unobtrusive music, joking hosts, oddball turns to the storytelling.
Audible will be dropping shows every week or two, and the people in charge have good, smart taste. Nothing here is pandering or cynical. But it will take at least a few weeks to get a full sense of how much noise its new service will be able to make.
