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The Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham has been thinking and writing about Memphis’s policing crisis for several months now. This past weekend, he went back to survey the aftermath of released video footage of Tyre Nichols’s fatal beating by police officers. David is at work on a story about where police reform goes from here, and I called him today to talk a bit about what he saw and heard over the weekend, and how Memphis’s policing strategy led to tragedy.

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

The myth propelling America’s violent police culture The internet loves an extremophile. J. Kenji López-Alt thinks you’ll be fine with an induction stove.

Not Enough

Isabel Fattal: You were in Memphis over the weekend. What did you hear from residents of the city?

David A. Graham: The sense I got from people in Memphis is that they are glad the city moved so quickly to fire these officers, and they’re glad the district attorney moved so quickly to prosecute. But it’s not enough. They want to know more about the incident. It’s unclear why Tyre Nichols was pulled over. They want to see action against the other officer who tased Tyre Nichols and who has been relieved from duty but has not been fired. They want to know who else was involved. We’ve seen the SCORPION [Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods] unit that these officers were members of disbanded, but they want to see the broader organized-crime unit in the department disbanded. And they want this to not happen again. The city is saying the right things, but the trick is avoiding it in the future.

Isabel: You wrote last Friday that “one of the more remarkable things about the video is that it exists.” To what extent is police activity surveilled in Memphis?

David: Often, when we learn about these incidents, it’s because of bystander video. But in this case, as far as we know, no bystanders were involved. People didn’t come out of the houses around there. I went to the scene on Saturday, and it’s a quiet suburban street. But there is something called SkyCop, which is this surveillance system all over Memphis. It’s really eerie: There are these twinkling blue lights 15 or so feet off the ground, and there are surveillance cameras, which I think are hard to miss, whether you’re a civilian or a police officer. And these officers were wearing body cams.

We’ve seen cases where officers have tried to manipulate body cams. But there’s no effort to hide this. In the video, there’s nothing that suggests they thought they made a mistake, either morally or as a matter of police work.

Isabel: During your past reporting in Memphis, you heard from residents in places with high crime that the city is simultaneously under-policed and over-policed. Can you talk a bit about that?

David: When you’ve got a spike in violent crime—as you did in Memphis, and in a lot of other American cities in 2020—one of the solutions that a lot of departments turn to is hot-spot policing, where you put a lot of officers in an area where there’s crime. We know from experience in a lot of cities that hot-spot policing can drive down crime, but the question is how it does that.

One way you can do it is by sweeping a lot of people up—just arresting a lot of people, stopping people on pretext, and seeing what you can get them on. That may stop crime, but it also creates animosity between residents and the police department. It seeks out people for things that have nothing to do with public safety, and because of where a lot of this hot-spot policing is done, it leads to a lot of Black men being arrested.

So in Memphis, this SCORPION unit was created in 2021 to deal with violent crime and the sorts of public-safety issues that residents are complaining about. And what you see them doing instead, in this case, is terrorizing and killing a citizen who at the worst was driving unsafely, from what we know. So I think it’s a clear example of under-policing and over-policing. They’re not doing anything to stop violent crime, but they are abusing citizens.

Isabel: You wrote last week, “The problem with a troubled department like Memphis’s adopting a tool like hot-spot policing is that culture tends to triumph over tactics.” Why was hot-spot policing a mistake for Memphis?

David: If you have a police department that has a history of excessive force, like Memphis’s does, and you institute a new tactic like hot-spot policing but you don’t do anything to change the underlying culture of the department, then you’re going to get abuses in hot-spot policing.

In the aftermath of Nichols’s death, the mayor of Memphis said that an outside review will help determine whether this is a matter of training or a matter of culture. You can’t watch a video like that and think, Well, if only they had been trained better. No police officer is trained to savagely beat someone like that. It’s not that they needed to be told that. It’s that there’s a problem with the culture.

Isabel: How do you think Nichols’s death might affect the national conversation about police reform?

David: Each of these situations does have its own unique factors and local context. But the national horror that we have seen reflects not only just how visceral this video is but also the fact that we are familiar with this.

It’s always hard for me to know when one of these stories will become a national story. I think this one did partly because the video is so visceral, but also because people are primed for this. They’ve seen so many of these cases. And I think every time we have one of them, it’s a reminder that there was a moment after George Floyd’s death when people were unified on this and there were some changes, but there’s still a lot of work to do to make sure that people are experiencing just policing around the country.

Related:

Memphis’s policing strategy was bound to result in tragedy. Inhumanity in Memphis

Today’s News

The seven states that comprise the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin failed to reach an agreement on water-conservation plans for the second time in six months. Representative George Santos of New York told House Republicans that he will temporarily step down from his congressional-committee positions amid ongoing scrutiny of his campaign finances and biographical fabrications. President Joe Biden announced his plan to end COVID-19 national-emergency and public-health-emergency declarations on May 11.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: For the first time in half a century, the rich are buying more free time, Derek Thompson writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Daniele Castellano

The Existential Wonder of Space

By Marina Koren

Of all the moons in the solar system, Saturn’s largest satellite might be the most extraordinary. Titan is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere, and liquid methane rains gently from its sky, tugged downward by a fraction of the gravity we feel on Earth. The methane forms rivers, lakes, and small seas on Titan’s surface. Beneath the frigid ground, composed of ice as hard as rock, is even more liquid, a whole ocean of plain old H2O.

The wildest part about Titan—the best part, perhaps—is that something could be living there. NASA is currently working on a mission, called Dragonfly, that would travel to the faraway moon and search for potential signs of alien life, past and present. A helicopter will fly around and study the local chemistry, checking whether conditions may be right for microbes to arise. Hypothetical Titanian life-forms could resemble the earthly varieties we’re familiar with or be something else entirely, feeding on methane compounds the way we rely on oxygen.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Salman Rushdie, April 2021 (Benedict Evans / August)

Read. Victory City, the latest novel from Salman Rushdie—and “a triumph,” according to the writer Judith Shulevitz.

Listen. Gloria, the radically inoffensive new album by the pop singer Sam Smith.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

For a more detailed analysis of the Memphis Police Department’s troubled history, David recommends this recent New York Times opinion essay by the Memphis-based journalist Emily Yellin. “One reason I wanted to focus on Memphis when I started writing about it was that it’s really similar to a lot of cities but also has its own distinctive characteristics,” David told me. Yellin’s article helps situate this recent tragedy within the city’s particular history.

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

Oscar nominations will be announced next week. I called our culture writer Shirley Li for her tips on the movies and the buzz you should know about.

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

The George Santos saga isn’t (just) funny. How Joe Biden wins again How ChatGPT will destabilize white-collar work

Top Guns

Isabel Fattal: Are there any big themes that have emerged from this awards season, or any lessons about the state of Hollywood today?

Shirley Li: If there’s one way to summarize this awards season, it would be that it’s been a year of comebacks. When you look at the leading contenders in the performance categories, we have a lot of actors who are returning to the awards conversation after a long career of not being involved in such conversations. The names that come to mind include Brendan Fraser, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan. All of those are actors who got shuffled out of Hollywood for one reason or another, but have been given these opportunities to return to acting or to finally sink their teeth into meaty roles, and are now deservedly getting their flowers.

I’d also say it’s been a year of comebacks when it comes to major sequels. Films like Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water being a part of the awards conversation signifies that there’s room for sequels to succeed beyond the box office, and that superhero films aren’t the only ones bringing audiences back to theaters, which have been struggling since the pandemic. Top Gun and Avatar made strong cases for seeing movies on the biggest screens possible.

Isabel: What is the importance, if any, of movie awards now?

Shirley: If done right—and this is hard to do—awards-show speeches can be a great opportunity to tell a story that’s not just, “I love my agents; I love my managers.” I think about [Everything Everywhere All at Once actor] Ke Huy Quan’s speech at the Golden Globes, where he talks about that feeling of self-doubt, of wondering whether his work as a child actor is all he had to offer, not just in his career but in his life. If more winners think about the story they can tell, that’s a way to reach people beyond the room, to be accessible to the general public.

Isabel: What are the two or three movies you need to watch if you want to keep up with the awards chatter?

Shirley: The first is Everything Everywhere All at Once. I think that film has a lot of momentum when it comes to this awards season, but on a broader scale, it’s such a fascinating example of how wild this medium can be. It’s almost impossible to classify when it comes to a genre. It comes from a pair of directors who have a really unique creative vision; they’re the ones who made the farting-corpse movie with Daniel Radcliffe. When you watch it, you don’t think of it as an Oscar contender, but it’s proof that a genre movie can make it really far.

The second movie is the more traditional contender in the mix: The Fabelmans, the Steven Spielberg–directed film that is plumbing his own childhood. It’s in some ways about why he became a director, but at the same time, it’s about how he wrestled with his parents’ divorce.

The third movie I recommend watching, which is now available on HBO Max, is The Banshees of Inisherin. It’s the film that reunites the writer-director Martin McDonagh with Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell. It’s this more intimate number about friendship and toxic masculinity and being a part of a small community. When it comes to awards season, I think it’s somewhere in between the other two films I recommended. It’s made by a previous Oscar winner, while at the same time being unconventional in its own way.

Isabel: I have a question about another awards contender, Tár. It has become something of a meme to pretend that Lydia Tár, the main character, is a real person. Why do you think this is?

Shirley: I was just talking about this with a friend who was asking the same thing, because on the surface, Lydia Tár is a real person is not a funny joke.

Even as a meme format, it doesn’t really make sense.

I think what set it off was Cate Blanchett’s performance. It’s so convincing. Lydia Tár is this EGOT-winning conductor. But as you watch the film, you kind of realize that “Lydia Tár” is a costume that this woman is wearing. And as the film goes on, it becomes both a horror and a comedy, and it goes into camp territory. It’s all grounded in this performance that is so sharp and that makes you almost believe that Lydia Tár is a real person. But to be honest, maybe the meme just comes from how funny “Lydia Tár” sounds.

Isabel: Have you had any arguments with fellow movie people about the awards contenders?

Shirley: One recent debate I had with a critic was over whether Babylon is any good and deserving of all this awards attention, or if it’s just so audaciously stupid that it tricks you into not being able to fully hate it.

Babylon didn’t do very well at the box office, so I doubt a lot of folks have seen it. It’s a film starring an A-list cast, including Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, that’s about Hollywood’s transition from making silent pictures to making talkies. This is like catnip for awards committees—a big, maximalist Hollywood movie from Damien Chazelle, the director of La La Land, about Hollywood itself. But it’s also lewd and vulgar and three hours long. It spans decades. It is self-indulgent. It follows way too many characters. It opens with a scene in which an elephant poops onto the camera. Maybe that last bit’s all you need to know.

Isabel: Is there a movie or performance that you think is being overlooked?

Shirley: So many, but I’ll try to stick to just a few. The first one is Women Talking, the film directed and adapted by Sarah Polley from the 2018 novel of the same name. It’s a really tough sell, because the story is based on a series of real-life rapes that happened in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. It’s about one long conversation the women in this community have where they try to imagine what they can do next. But it’s more engaging than you might think. I worry that it’s coming so late in this awards season that people have just not been interested in seeing it or have not been able to see it.

Another contender that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about is Aftersun, from the writer and director Charlotte Wells, which is a film about a father-daughter relationship and how we struggle to understand our parents. I think the performances in that are outstanding, and Wells is an immensely talented filmmaker, but I’m afraid the categories are too crowded at this point for them to make it in.

Related:

Hollywood can’t survive without movie theaters. The speeches that saved the Golden Globes

Today’s News

CIA Director Bill Burns reportedly briefed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week on the agency’s expectations for Russia’s military plans in the coming months. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced that it will cut about 12,000 jobs. Anti-abortion activists held the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. This is the first march since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Dispatches

Books Briefing: Kate Cray asks: How do you adapt a book into a TV show? Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains what the tech and media layoffs are really telling us about the economy.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty

What Happens When AI Has Read Everything?

Ross Andersen

Artificial intelligence has in recent years proved itself to be a quick study, although it is being educated in a manner that would shame the most brutal headmaster. Locked into airtight Borgesian libraries for months with no bathroom breaks or sleep, AIs are told not to emerge until they’ve finished a self-paced speed course in human culture. On the syllabus: a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced.

When AIs surface from these epic study sessions, they possess astonishing new abilities. People with the most linguistically supple minds—hyperpolyglots—can reliably flip back and forth between a dozen languages; AIs can now translate between more than 100 in real time. They can churn out pastiche in a range of literary styles and write passable rhyming poetry. DeepMind’s Ithaca AI can glance at Greek letters etched into marble and guess the text that was chiseled off by vandals thousands of years ago.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

BayView Entertainment

Read. Try one of these seven books about how homes shape our life, or one of these eight self-help books that actually help.

And pick up our staff writer John Hendrickson’s new book, Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter.

Watch. On TV, HBO Max’s The Last of Us adds something unexpected to the zombie genre.

In theaters, Skinamarink is a delightful nightmare.

Need something new? Try one of these 26 brilliant movies that critics were wrong about.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ll leave you with a few more suggestions from Shirley for under-the-radar movies you should watch, even though you might not be hearing their names next week:

“The Woman King is a crowd-pleasing, great action film, and Viola Davis’s performance is a departure from what she’s done before.” “There’s a South Korean film called Decision to Leave that I wrote about. It’s a fantastic erotic thriller that I’m afraid will only be recognized in international categories, even though the direction is so sumptuous. I could not take my eyes off the screen. Every frame has new clues to the story.” “Lastly, there’s a tiny movie called Emily the Criminal that I think is mostly getting indie-awards attention. It stars Aubrey Plaza, and it’s such a sharp little movie about credit-card fraud, of all things, but that’s what makes it great and insightful about wealth and income inequality.”

— Isabel

A defeated New Mexico GOP candidate allegedly hired others to shoot at the homes of Democratic officials, in a case that is intensifying concerns about political violence in America.

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

The longest study on human happiness found the key to a good life. What winning did to the anti-abortion movement Trying to stop long COVID before it even starts

Negative Polarization

On Monday, police in New Mexico arrested Solomon Peña, a Republican who, after losing a race for state representative last fall, allegedly paid four men to participate in at least two shootings at the homes of Democratic state officials in Albuquerque. Peña has blamed his loss on election fraud, and police believe the attacks were politically motivated.

I called the Atlantic staff writer David Graham, who reported last summer on the killing of a retired judge in Wisconsin, to discuss the political violence that appears to be on the rise in America.

Isabel Fattal: In your article about the assassination of the retired judge, you wrote that, based on the limited research that exists, the U.S. is showing warning signs of a rise in political violence. What are those signs?

David Graham: There are a few. One is we just have a really polarized country, and in particular, we have what political scientists call “negative polarization” or “affective polarization,” where people are driven almost more by their dislike of the other party than they are by any kind of shared value among their own party. And you see attitudes of a kind of dehumanization—seeing the other side as less than human, as a threat to democracy. All of these things encourage folks to take up violence; they make them believe that violence might be justified.

So you have these risk factors. And then we see lots of political violence, even though it’s not always on the level of assassination. The most obvious case is January 6. We have seen some attempted assassinations. We had a shooting at the practice for a congressional baseball game in 2017, in which Republican Representative Steve Scalise and others were injured, and we had the Trump-supporting pipe bomber in 2018. We had a guy who tried to attack an FBI office in Cincinnati and was then killed.

Isabel: What was your reaction to this New Mexico case?

David: It’s interesting to compare it with the Wisconsin case. One thing that’s good about this is no one was killed or seriously injured, which is a major difference. But in other ways, as part of the trend, I think it’s almost a bit more concerning.

The Wisconsin case, from what we know, is somebody who had a personal vendetta against this judge because of a case where the judge ruled against him. People are always going to have that sort of disagreement, and what we don’t want is a situation where political violence is normalized so they think violence is a good way to deal with that.

But in Albuquerque, we have somebody who was specifically complaining about elections being stolen; who described himself as the “MAGA King”, according to postings online; and who seemed to be really motivated by the sorts of things we hear people talking about in regular discourse about “stolen” elections. So you can see how it connects to things we hear every day and then takes on this really dangerous form. In that sense, I think the outcome is less grave—but we need to be more worried.

Isabel: Solomon Peña, the alleged perpetrator in New Mexico, didn’t act alone—he involved other people in the shootings. What does that say more broadly about political violence right now?

David: I think the organization is alarming. On January 6, we could see some coordination among groups, but it’s unclear how coordinated it was. And you wonder, if these people had had their act together more, what might have happened? Could Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi have been harmed?

The same thing applies here. This guy was allegedly able to get some people to go shoot at these folks’ houses for him. It seems, from what we know now, that they’re kind of small-time criminals, so it’s not like this was a mass political movement. But it’s worrying that someone was able to enlist people. You wonder how big it gets when it goes beyond a single actor.

Isabel: What relevance, if any, do you think the recent convictions in the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have to this trend?

David: I think it’s a little ambiguous. It’s obviously important that people who commit crimes like this are caught and prosecuted and punished for it. The discourse around the Whitmer case is weird, because on the one hand, you have folks getting some pretty stiff sentences, and on the other hand, you have a critique—and this is not just on the right, you hear this from folks on the more civil-libertarian left too—saying, Is this a real plot, or is this something the FBI cooked up? Because we’ve seen cases where the FBI takes people who are prone to violence and helps get them going. You have an argument among some people that this plot was really deep-state puppeteering.

So in that case, although you have a deterrent effect, you also may end up with people distrusting the government more and being angrier about things.

Isabel: There’s obviously no easy answer to this, but what can be done to stem this violence?

David: The short answer is it’s really complicated. One thing we do know is that leaders make a difference, and when leaders are condoning or even encouraging violence, that is likely to produce more violence. When leaders say it’s unacceptable, even in the service of their cause, that will tamp it down. That’s not all of the answer, but it’s one simple answer that we do have.

Related:

A chilling assassination in Wisconsin The New Lost Cause

Today’s News

The United States hit its debt ceiling, and the Treasury Department announced that it has begun using “extraordinary measures” to prevent the federal government from breaching the limit. Prosecutors are planning to charge Alec Baldwin and one crew member with involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 accidental shooting on the set of the film Rust. The Agriculture Department announced that it is tightening its oversight on which products can be labeled “organic.”

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson suggests that journalists should stop trying to ask “smart questions.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Jan Buchczik

Nothing Drains You Like Mixed Emotions

By Arthur Brooks

“Ōdī et amō,” the Roman poet Catullus wrote of his lover Lesbia about 2,000 years ago. “I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.”

Maybe you can relate. If you’ve ever had mixed feelings about someone you love, you know the intense discomfort that results. If your feelings were purely positive, of course, the relationship would be bliss. Even purely negative feelings would be better, because the course of action would be clear: Say goodbye. But mixed feelings leave you confused about the right thing to do.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

David recently wrote about a very different example of how political polarization plays out: the debate over gas stoves, which, he argues, exemplifies the silliest tendencies of American politics. But you can also read the article for the simple pleasure of his wordplay. It’s a sharp analysis with many great air-, cooking-, and heat-related puns nestled in it.

— Isabel