The Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy could have had a fascinating focus. We see glimpses of it in the first minute, on a grainy TV screen where Jay Leno (played by the comedian Adam Ray) is interviewing Pamela Anderson (Lily James). “Speaking of sex, and I have to ask,” Leno says, throwing his hands up and down in the faux-innocent shrug of someone just asking questions. “The tape.” The audience audibly inhales. Anderson, whom James imitates in uncanny fashion—the protruding tongue, the hands perched nervously on crossed legs, the slightly hunched posture—plays similarly dumb. “What tape, Jay?” she breathes. Leno casually twists the knife. “What’s that like?” he says. “What’s it like to have that kind of exposure?” The camera zooms in on Anderson’s pained face as she grapples with her response.

The choice to mediate our first glimpse of Anderson through multiple screens is, perhaps, telling; it has a distancing effect that keeps her at arm’s length. Pam & Tommy is an eight-part miniseries about how an intimate home movie—made by Anderson and her then-husband, the rock star Tommy Lee, on their honeymoon—became the first viral celebrity sex tape. With the Leno scene, the show suggests sensitivity for Anderson’s plight (the tape was stolen by an irate contractor and sold online without her consent). Then it abruptly changes course. The scene that follows, set one year earlier, shows a carpenter, Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), trying to focus on construction work in a Malibu mansion as Anderson and Lee (Sebastian Stan) go at it loudly upstairs. This is how the series really sees Anderson: Woman Victimized by the Culture, but also Woman Unabashedly Banging Her Heart Out.

Pam & Tommy, notably, hasn’t been sanctioned by Anderson, who has ignored all attempts by the series’ writers and stars to get in touch with her, and who is reportedly appalled by yet another distillation of her life and career down to the moment when she was most appallingly exploited. In response, the show’s lead director, Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya), has said that reclaiming Anderson’s narrative was part of the point of the series—that the people involved “absolutely respect [her] privacy” and wanted to use the series to change the “perspective of what happened.”

Erin Simkin / Hulu

Really? I don’t necessarily doubt the good intentions of the showrunners, Robert Siegel and D. V. DeVincentis, and their show—in moments—does succeed at communicating the ordeal Anderson endured and the many different forces that colluded in her suffering. But you’re not respecting her privacy when you re-create a sex tape that was stolen and viewed by hundreds of millions of people without her permission. You aren’t reclaiming her narrative on her behalf if she insists that she doesn’t want you to do so. The show’s creators would be better off just stating the truth: They wanted to tell Anderson’s story because it’s a good story, and its revelations have deeply informed the mess of celebrity and internet culture that we wallow in today. Even the fact that she resisted participating in the show is telling: What Anderson wants for herself has always mattered less than the desires she incites in others.

Critiquing Pam & Tommy as a single, unified work is hard because it’s such an awkward hybrid of genres and ideas. Based on a 2014 Rolling Stone story about Gauthier, the contractor with a grudge who accidentally introduced revenge porn to mainstream America, it’s equal parts caper, raunch comedy, romance (“the greatest love story ever sold” is the tagline), and cultural analysis. A scene in which Lee converses with his puppetized penis (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas) is ripped right from his memoir but feels derivative of Big Mouth. Meanwhile, an episode about a legal deposition Anderson gives while suing Penthouse—written by Sarah Gubbins (Shirley, Better Things) and directed by Hannah Fidell (A Teacher)—straightforwardly parses all the ways Anderson was ritualistically humiliated in the ’90s for daring people to look at her.

[Read: Where sex positivity falls short]

The first episode hardly features Anderson at all. It’s focused on the conflict between Gauthier—like so many Rogenite heroes, an endearing naif whose interests include marijuana and masturbation—and Lee, who’s hired him to manifest a project the rock star has envisioned as a “fucking futuristic, state-of-the-art love pad 2000.” Lee is an unexploded bomb. The puppeteer Frank Oz once said that Animal, the frenzied drummer he performed as on The Muppet Show, could be summed up in five words—drums, sleep, sex, food, and pain—and the same goes for Stan’s portrayal of Lee, with trunkfuls of pharmaceuticals thrown into the mix. The Mötley Crüe drummer is heavily tattooed, priapic, and … surprisingly sweet? To watch Pam & Tommy after living through the tabloid coverage of their relationship—the beach wedding, the hepatitis, the kids, the breakup, the domestic abuse, the jail sentence, the reunions—is to feel uncomfortably like you’re rooting for them, these crazy kids who take endless baths, are dying to have a family together, and don’t have sex until their wedding night (four days after their first date).

Their downfall, though, is inevitable. After Lee fires Gauthier and waves a shotgun in his face, Gauthier, an “amateur theologian,” decides that karma is taking too long and cooks up a revenge plot. He cases the Malibu home for several weeks, breaks in one night, and steals a safe, which contains cash and jewelry, numerous guns, and an unmarked video tape. That tape, he discovers, contains an explicit home movie filmed on a yacht during Anderson and Lee’s honeymoon. He shows the tape to a porn director he knows, Milton “Uncle Miltie” Ingley (Nick Offerman, in fine sober-unhinged form), who immediately appraises its value. “This is so private,” Ingley says. “It’s like we’re seeing something we’re not supposed to be seeing … which is kind of what makes it so fucking hot.”

The pair’s efforts to monetize the tape allow the show to make broader points: The series positions the Anderson-Lee video as not just a debauched tabloid frenzy, but a moment that actually changed the world—a fracturing of established mores in American life (about privacy, sex, celebrity, commerce) at the hands of the internet. Here was a new, unregulated marketplace without any standards or legal precedents. The porn industry at the time required signed releases to sell videos of adults engaging in sexual intercourse; the internet meant that Gauthier could sell the tape he’d stolen without restriction. But it meant that anyone else could too. What had been a business was now suddenly a free-for-all for anyone with an explicit video and an agenda. (Siegel, Pam & Tommy’s co-showrunner, seems intrigued by historical turning points in American capitalism—he wrote the script for The Founder, the story of how Ray Kroc ruthlessly turned McDonald’s into an incomparable business empire.)

Naturally, this shift was bad news for women. The way Pam & Tommy tells the story doesn’t so much reclaim her narrative as manipulate it to draw bigger conclusions. The major beats of her life story are there: her “discovery” at a football game, her first audition for Playboy, her elevation to icon status via a prime-time beach soap and a strategically tailored red bathing suit. James looks so similar to Anderson in some scenes that the lines between truth and fiction seem to wobble a little. And the English actress captures what may be the heart of Anderson: She describes herself, in one early scene, as just “a good Christian girl from small-town Canada,” and she’s resolutely sweet and courteous to almost every person she meets. But in Pam & Tommy, Anderson comes to represent more than herself—she’s an avatar for every woman who’s ever been slut-shamed or abused, or who’s ever suffered a loss too poignant to bear. She’s a foil for men like Gauthier to have their own moments of revelation. “Oh man, I feel terrible for women,” he tells his ex-wife (Taylor Schilling), a character patently created for these kinds of discussions. “They gotta deal with us.”

For Anderson, maybe the fact that she’s less a person in the show than a collection of tropes and stories animated into a whole is some consolation. But I doubt it. The more we rely on these narratives of ’90s revisionism to confront the flaws in our own past thinking, the more responsibility we have to wonder who’s being served in the process. Is it right to take a painful invasion of privacy that was turned into mass entertainment and turn it into mass entertainment again, even if the motivations have changed? Have they changed? I enjoyed this show. It made me think about Anderson differently—as someone who’s survived extraordinary victimization and typecasting and who’s managed to redefine how she’s perceived. (Whether steadfast defender of Julian Assange trumps Baywatch babe depends on your worldview, I guess.) But the series, which so often feels like it’s trying to atone for our old mistakes, seems intent on pointing out ethical transgressions while looking right past the notable void at its own core.

Doing the bare minimum to stand up for human rights isn’t an Olympic sport in the Winter Games, which kick off in Beijing tomorrow, but let’s suppose it was. Gold medals would undoubtedly be awarded to the United States, Britain, Canada, and the handful of other countries whose high-level officials have chosen to shun the Games in protest of China’s persecution of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, saying that the use of mass detention and forced labor amounts to genocide. Silver would go to countries such as Austria, Sweden, and the Netherlands, whose government officials attributed their absence from the Games not to human-rights concerns, but to the pandemic. Bronze would go to the likes of France and the Czech Republic, whose leaders dismissed diplomatic boycotts of the Games as “insignificant” and a “misuse of the Olympic idea.”

Majority-Muslim countries, which have largely chosen to ignore the Uyghurs’ plight, wouldn’t make the podium at all.

Silence from majority-Muslim countries’ governments on China’s treatment of the Uyghurs is not new. For years, countries that purport to be defenders of the world’s Muslims—among them Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey—have largely skirted the issue of China’s treatment of its Muslim population in the northwest region of Xinjiang, where the government is believed to have corralled at least 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in concentration camps (or, as Beijing prefers to call them, “reeducation camps”). Some of these countries have even aided the Chinese government’s efforts by deporting Uyghurs living within their borders back to China, where they are all but certain to face persecution.

[Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps]

The return of the Olympics to China, which is counting on these Games to bolster its global image and validate its authoritarian system, accentuates the silence of governments in the Muslim world. Although these countries are certainly not the only ones that have excused or even abetted China’s human-rights abuses, they have essentially given the Muslim world’s tacit blessing for China to continue its mass atrocities.

The Muslim world isn’t homogenous, of course. It spans dozens of countries on multiple continents and includes a wide array of cultures, languages, and interests. But even with all of their diversity, majority-Muslim countries do occasionally find opportunities to speak with one voice. When it comes to issues such as Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, and even caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in Europe, you’d be hard-pressed to find Muslim leaders unwilling to speak out. But on the crisis in Xinjiang, and on China’s human-rights abuses more broadly, the response from these countries has been more erratic. Although Turkey and Malaysia have at times offered tepid criticism of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, a much bigger group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, have gone out of their way to endorse China’s policies in Xinjiang. Indeed, all four countries’ leaders are among the international dignitaries slated to attend tomorrow’s opening ceremony of the Winter Games.

Muslim leaders’ words may be varied, but their actions are more unified. In the months leading up to the 2022 Winter Games, none of the world’s majority-Muslim countries has answered calls by activists and religious leaders to boycott the Games. “From an Islamic standpoint, supporting an oppressor directly or by extension is not allowed,” Imam Abdullah Mu’mini, the chief of staff of the Iraq-based Global Imams Council, told me in an email. “Since we consider what is happening to Uyghur Muslims as oppression, we have taken this very stance.”

That Muslim leaders have willfully chosen to ignore the plight of China’s Muslims is a testament to Beijing’s growing influence. China is one of the most important trading partners of many Muslim-majority countries and, crucially for Gulf states, the primary buyer of Middle Eastern oil. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has invested billions of dollars in infrastructure projects across the Muslim world. In doing so, the Chinese government has not only secured its influence; it has also purchased leverage.

In perhaps no country is that leverage more acutely felt than in Indonesia. Despite being the world’s largest majority-Muslim country, Indonesia is among the most muted when it comes to the persecution of the Uyghurs. Pro-Uyghur activists attribute Indonesia’s stance to Chinese investment in the country and Beijing’s concerted diplomatic effort to promote its version of events in Xinjiang. “Indonesia is one of the biggest recipients of [Belt and Road] money, so that is a huge incentive for Indonesia to keep quiet,” Emil, a Jakarta-based activist with the Indonesia Save Uyghur campaign, told me. (He asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of retaliation.) He noted that while public support for the Uyghurs has forced the Indonesian government to tread carefully on the subject, that hasn’t stopped it from working with Beijing to further China’s aims and its own. In 2020, the Indonesian government, at Beijing’s request, reportedly deported three Uyghurs who had been convicted of terrorism back to China, in what Uyghur activists called a clear violation of non-refoulement, the international-law principle that forbids countries from returning refugees to places where they are likely to face persecution or torture.

“Indonesia is totally complicit in the persecution of Uyghurs in that sense,” Emil said. “There are no Uyghurs who are safe here.”

The same is true across much of the Muslim world. Since 2017, nearly 700 Uyghurs have been detained in other countries, many of them majority-Muslim, according to a 2021 report published by two Washington, D.C.–based groups, the Uyghur Human Rights Project and the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs. Many of those detained, including Uyghurs living in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, have been deported.

“Muslim-majority countries are not only silent on Xinjiang; I would argue that they are actively complicit,” Bradley Jardine, the research director of the Oxus Society, which has been tracking China’s repression of the Uyghurs around the world, told me. Even havens such as Turkey, which is home to one of the world’s largest Uyghur diaspora communities, no longer seem all that secure. Although Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was one of the first to liken the Chinese government’s policies toward the Uyghurs to “genocide” (in response to 2009 communal riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang), his government has since taken a more conciliatory approach toward China. A yet-to-be-ratified extradition treaty between Beijing and Ankara could put the country’s 50,000 Uyghurs at risk of repatriation back to China. Some have already been deported.

[Read: ‘I never thought China could ever be this dark’]

Another reason the persecution of the Uyghurs in and beyond China hasn’t sparked mass protests in majority-Muslim countries is that with the exception of Turkey, which shares a similar language and culture, most majority-Muslim populations don’t have many ties to the Uyghurs beyond their shared faith. People who live in more repressive countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt may also sense that they cannot freely challenge their government’s relationship with China. “A lot of these countries have their own issues; they have their own human-rights problems too,” Peter Irwin, a senior program officer at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, told me. Moreover, the public in majority-Muslim countries, many of which are arid, tends to have little interest in the Winter Games. Those facts suggest that “you’re not going to get much from [these] governments, if anything, on the Olympics,” Irwin added.

This status quo might be sustainable in more repressive countries, whose leaders needn’t worry about public opinion, but activists in more democratic countries are counting on public pressure to force a policy shift. “The Olympics offers an opportunity for Muslims to bring the Uyghur cause to the spotlight,” said Emil from Indonesia Save Uyghur, which is planning protests in Jakarta during the Games. Idris Ayas, an Istanbul-based activist with the Score4Rights Campaign, told me that the group is encouraging Olympic athletes to show their solidarity with the Uyghurs and other targets of persecution in China by giving a crescent-shaped salute to signify “hope for change.” The idea, Ayas said, was inspired by John Carlos and Tommie Smith, the Olympians who famously raised their fists in the Black Power salute during the 1968 Olympic Games. A representative of China’s Olympic organizing committee has warned that athletes who partake in such protests will face “certain punishment.” The committee did not respond to a request for comment.

Although the activists I spoke with welcomed the United States’ and other countries’ diplomatic boycotts of the Games (which “is the absolute least you can do,” Irwin said), they see such demonstrations as incomplete without the buy-in of majority-Muslim countries, whose collective voice could have a substantial impact. “If Saudi Arabia were to criticize China, that would be very powerful, considering its position of influence within the Muslim world; the same for Pakistan,” Jardine, of the Oxus Society, said. There is no clear incentive for these countries to take a stand, nor is there an international movement advocating for majority-Muslim countries to use their collective voice. But without them, any Western-led effort to apply pressure on China is unlikely to have the desired effect.

Watch the winning moment as Team GB's mixed doubles curling pair Jen Dodds and Bruce Mouat beat fellow medal hopes Canada at the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

As air travel collapsed in the early days of the pandemic, many passenger planes got a makeover, with airlines stripping out seats and converting empty cabins into cargo holds. At first, these so-called “cabin freighters” airlifted ventilators, masks, and other crucial medical supplies to hard-hit hospitals. Eventually, as factory shutdowns and port closures tangled the world’s supply chains, the planes transported everything from mayonnaise to dog food.

Air Canada was one of the first airlines in the world to yank the seats out of part of its passenger fleet in April 2020, three months after the first confirmed Canadian covid case. The seatless configurations served the company well as chaos in the container ship industry drove up the price of air cargo.

But now, Air Canada is betting on the start of a new phase of the pandemic. To prepare, it’s reinstalling seats in the 11 planes it converted to seatless cabin freighters and will return them to passenger service by May.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

Team GB's curling mixed doubles pair gain another notable victory against fellow medal hopes Canada at the Winter Olympics in Beijing.