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House Republicans are readying their subpoenas.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory. Take detransitioners seriously. Who’s afraid of a portrait of Muhammad?

Probable Probes

After a few (er, 14) initial stumbles, House Republicans have elected a speaker and handed out committee gavels, and are now poised to deliver on the one promise to voters that they have the unchallenged power to keep: pursuing aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden, his administration, and, yes, even his family.

The flurry of inquiries that Republicans, under the auspices of Congress’s oversight power, plan to launch in the coming days and weeks might well overwhelm the Biden administration, not to mention the public. None of the hearings are likely to command the attention of last year’s Democratic-led January 6 committee, but they have the potential to reveal new information about how the federal government has operated over the past two years and to create political headaches for the president as he prepares to run for reelection. The investigations also carry risks for Republicans, who could lose public support if they appear to be tilting too far at conspiracy theories or pursuing overly partisan—and personal—takedowns of Biden and his son Hunter.

Here’s a guide to the probes that are likely to make headlines in the months ahead.

The Southern Border

Multiple House committees are planning hearings on an issue that Republicans made, along with tackling inflation, a centerpiece of their national campaign. They’ve accused Biden of willfully neglecting the influx of migrants across the southern border, and although the attacks frequently devolve into immigrant-bashing, the moral and legal conundrum over how to handle asylum seekers is becoming a bigger political liability for the president. Big-city Democratic mayors such as Eric Adams of New York are complaining that they lack the funds to accommodate the migrants who wind up on their streets. A big question is whether the hearings will stay focused on policy or whether they’ll turn into an impeachment drive against Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of homeland security.

Hunter Biden

The personal and business dealings of the president’s surviving son have been a Republican obsession for years, and now the party has the power to hold hearings on what Representative Elise Stefanik of New York has called “the Biden crime family.” Hunter Biden is already under investigation by federal prosecutors in Delaware, and Republicans are intent on demonstrating both that he traded on access to his famous father overseas and that the president was aware of what his son was doing. The younger Biden may be in real legal jeopardy, but the GOP faces a tricky test in making the broader public care about Hunter Biden and keeping its probe focused on his alleged corruption rather than the more sordid personal activities of a troubled son.

The “Weaponization of the Federal Government”

To secure the House speakership, Kevin McCarthy agreed to conservative demands to create a select subcommittee modeled on a 1970s Senate panel that investigated abuses by the intelligence community. This one is focused on what Republicans call “the weaponization of the federal government,” and it’s likely to zero in on complaints from Donald Trump–aligned conservatives that the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies have unfairly targeted the former president and his supporters. Democrats see a more malicious motive: to undermine and thwart the many ongoing investigations involving Trump and GOP lawmakers, including the special counsel’s inquiry into Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Biden’s Own Classified Documents

Republicans had barely claimed their new House majority when news broke that classified documents had been found at a think tank in Washington, D.C., where Biden had kept an office, and Biden’s residence in Delaware—handing them a fresh line of inquiry against the president. GOP leaders quickly launched a congressional investigation, but they will be competing with the Justice Department, which appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to look into the matter.

U.S.-China Relations

Democrats may see the other planned investigations as partisan exercises aimed at tarnishing the president, but not this one. A House vote last week to create a select committee on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party” earned broad bipartisan support, including from all of the top Democratic leaders. The committee is expected to focus on how the U.S. should counter China’s growing economic and military strength, the threat of its possible invasion of Taiwan, and American concerns about its human-rights abuses. Stronger U.S. policy toward China has long been a bipartisan cause in Congress; former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who voted for the bill, is a hawk who angered the Chinese government with her high-profile visit to Taiwan last year. That consensus is likely to add legitimacy to the committee’s work, although some progressives are wary of its potential to generate anti-Asian rhetoric.

Related:

Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy. The impeachment of Joe Biden (from October 2022)

Today’s News

A helicopter with senior Ukrainian officials onboard crashed in a Kyiv suburb, killing more than dozen people, including Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs. The cause of the crash is still unknown. Microsoft is planning to lay off about 10,000 employees as part of a broader effort to cut costs. New research shows that areas of Greenland are hotter than they have been at any point in the past 1,000 years.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explores whether diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts actually exacerbate intolerance.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Tommaso Ottomano

This Is the Band That’s Supposedly Saving Rock and Roll?

By Spencer Kornhaber

Early December, a tchotchke shop in Brooklyn—an employee advises me about which novelty socks to pair with which comical greeting card for a friend. Then her voice, previously curious and chatty, gains a sudden seriousness. She tells me about a concert she went to the night before. The band was Italian, it was saving rock and roll, and it’d play in the city again, that night. I suddenly understood the difference between a salesperson and an evangelist. The woman gave me an order: You must go see Måneskin.

I didn’t go, but I did know who Måneskin was. I first became aware of the group while attending a watch party for the 2021 Eurovision Song Competition. No one at the party could understand why a bar band in burgundy leather, playing what sounded like a Rage Against the Machine song edited for a Chevy ad, ran away with the top prize. Eurovision is known for Abba-style spectacle, silly and bright. Måneskin is all about scowling, and guitars that sound like carburetors. But clearly, the band had sparked passion somewhere—the kind of passion that, it turns out, converts listeners into proselytizers.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Let’s shake on it. When good pain turns into bad pain

Culture Break

A still from Hawa (Amazon Studios)

Read. “The Bug,” a new poem by Daniella Toosie-Watson.

“What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug. To leave it alone / when it already planned on dying.”

Watch. Hawa, streaming on Amazon Prime, accurately captures teen grief.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, James Kirchick’s book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which came out last year. The title, with its focus on a single American city, actually undersells the book’s scope. More than a case study or chronology of a civil-rights movement, Secret City is a fascinating history of the past century of American politics. It reveals, or reminds, the reader of the supporting and often central role that the scandal of homosexuality—as it was too long understood—played in so many of the nation’s pivotal moments, including the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate. I had no idea, for example, that Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan were all subject at one time or another to rumors that they were gay. Kirchick documents how gay life evolved from subculture to simply culture in Washington over the course of a few decades, and how the nation’s capital was both behind and ahead of the curve in the slow but profound shift in acceptance of gay men and women in public service.

— Russell

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

In many West African cultures, griots are the keepers of memory, their oral traditions simultaneously positioning them as fabulists, historians, genealogists, entertainers, and messengers. To serve as a voice for a people is a heavy burden—colonization has dispossessed many Indigenous communities of the cultural artifacts that hold their history, and the triangular slave trade decimated the landscapes and kingdoms of various ethnic groups. But griots remind people that we truly die only when we are forgotten, not when we are separated from our earthly bodies or environments.

Hawa, the second feature film from the director Maïmouna Doucouré, serves as an apt, fantastical canvas to explore this dynamic between legacy and memory. Streaming on Amazon Prime, the coming-of-age story follows its titular character (played by Sania Halifa), a young Malian girl in Paris who is struggling to accept the impending death of her griotte grandmother. Maminata, compellingly rendered by Oumou Sangaré, the legendary Wassoulou musician, is not only Hawa’s last remaining relative, but also her anchor to Malian culture. She teaches Hawa the Bambara language and tries to impress upon her the importance of griots’ musical stylings and magical storytelling conventions.

Maminata’s terminal illness means that, in addition to finding a new home for herself, Hawa will also have to protect the memories her grandmother has entrusted her with. But instead of reconciling the trauma of seeing Maminata through her final days, Hawa avoids her pain and latches on to the idea that she will be adopted by Michelle Obama—who is on a four-day book tour in Paris—if she can just find a way to meet her. The ensuing journey sets the stage for Hawa to eventually acknowledge her grief and confront her fear of failing to carry on Maminata’s teachings.

Doucouré’s depiction of how people honor familial histories is bracing, filled with melancholy but imbued with tenderness. Scenes where Maminata brings Hawa along to weddings and performs in full regalia, singing stories about the host family’s ancestors and blessing their legacies, give a glimpse of the esteemed role and function of a griot at their best. They also highlight Maminata’s fading charm: She forgets newlyweds’ names during celebrations and repeatedly loses her command of lyrics, each error resonating like a foghorn in a quiet room. Those moments are delicate and earnest, making up for the fact that following Hawa’s harebrained plan to meet the American former first lady requires the audience’s significant suspension of disbelief.

[Read: Grief is evidence of love]

On her adventures to encounter Obama, the brusque teen infiltrates a concert venue, slips into a children’s hospital, runs through a private airport hangar, and dodges elaborate security checkpoints on her scooter. Hawa navigates the film’s various settings with a sense of audacity that is not generally afforded to a young Black girl. But because her appearance—albinism, a soft golden afro, coke-bottle-thick glasses—lends her a sense of invisibility, Hawa is emboldened as she barrels her way toward Obama. The sharply written script, buoyed by its surrealist bent, facilitates the plot well enough that the impracticalities aren’t too distracting.

Obama as the source of Hawa’s fixation is a clever directorial choice—she serves both as a global avatar for Black women and as a blank canvas for young girls to project their hopes and dreams onto. She is never shown on-screen outside of recycled press footage, which is used sparingly and to great effect. To frame Hawa’s ultimate “interaction” with the former first lady, Doucouré employs a blurry lens, indicating the point of view of a glasses-free Hawa (her spectacles were ruined mid-pursuit), and homing in on the notion that Obama exists in many young girls’ heads as more of a concept than a fully realized individual. She’s the perfect plot device to show how Hawa is processing the imminent loss of her parental figure: In a revealing scene, Hawa unironically tells a security guard that Obama is her mom, a nod to her search for a new, yet familiar, elder to cling to.

Along her journey, Hawa encounters the singer-songwriter Yseult and the astronaut Thomas Pesquet, playing mildly satirized versions of themselves. The French celebrities tell Hawa about their own relationships with grief and explain how it has shaped their evolution as adults. Pesquet became an astronaut so that he could find his grandmother in the skies, and Yseult, who lost her grasp of Cameroonian Eton after her brother died, associates her connection to the language with the anguish left in place of her most intimate relationship. Performing her song “Corps” as Hawa watches from the sidelines, Yseult sings in French, “I have lost my mind / Where is the way home?” and later considers honoring her brother’s memory through reengaging her indigenous language. Hawa is captivated as Yseult’s dancers animate the emotional chaos that has taken hold of her young life, every movement layered with intention as if it has a direct link to Hawa’s inner turmoil.   

Throughout the film, Hawa is loath to commit to the work of memory; it requires that she confront a very present pain that she would rather avoid, though her emotions occasionally crash through her hardened shell like a tidal wave. But by the time she finally meets Obama, after her grandmother has died, Hawa is able to embrace her sorrow as part of a beautiful history, one that is hers to share and protect. Instead of advocating for Obama to adopt her, Hawa hands her one of Maminata’s seashells as a keepsake, and pleads for her to listen to the story of her grandmother so that her beloved elder will not be forgotten.

Doucouré’s potent exploration of a Hawa’s full emotional landscape is marked with pathos and whimsy, offering a more nuanced alternative to the director’s 2020 debut, Cuties, another slightly absurdist coming-of-age story situated in adolescent girlhood. Where Cuties at times took for granted its audience’s cultural fluency, Hawa is imbued with a more holistic care that makes the film hard to misunderstand. The film isn’t perfect: What ends up happening to Hawa, for instance, is a bit too tidy. But Hawa succeeds in its stirring portrayal, beautifully rooted in West African tradition, of a girl finding comfort in remembrance when the world is shifting under her feet.