(Editor’s note: These questions from Atlantic readers—in bold—and replies from Ta-Nehisi were compiled from an.) As someone who’s largely a DC Comics reader, Black Panther is effectively my first real introduction to the character. What immediately jumped out at me was the dialogue. It feels a bit different from most comic books (in a good way!), and I look forward to seeing what happens in it down the road. Is there any other comic book you’d love to write?

Or do you think Black Panther might be it for you? I expect to be on Black Panther, or BP-related things, for a while. How would you like to see the Black Panther series (and world) grow and change? Any inclusion of other, missing characters? What would they be? Want it to get bigger.

Much, much bigger. When discussing writing Black Panther, you’ve talked about the need to disregard fan opinion on some level to work toward the goal of creating work that will hold up five or 10 years from now. As the stories you’re writing have progressed, has the fan reception of your work changed that outlook for you or confirmed it? Still believe it. I don’t want artists making work that they think I want to see.

I want them to pull from their heart, and if I love it, I love it. If I don’t, oh well. Where does feminism intersect with your work?

Does it at all? Right now, it’s most prominently in my comic books. I don’t want to blow the story, but basically one of the main threads is a revolution launched against the main character. The facts of sexual plunder, a society ignoring that plunder, and the fact of resistance to it, basically runs through every issue. And that is how it’s manifest in its least subtle ways.

I think in a lot of other ways, it’s much more subtle, but there. Snuck in an Audre Lorde citation in the last issue.

I don’t expect everyone to read comic books, so if folks aren’t seeing this, it’s cool. But it is there. Of the early stuff and the most obvious aspects of it. Any specific female writers that you’re engaging with right now? (I so vividly remember the days you were reading Southern Confederate female writers.) Who are the female voices that, I dunno, really speak to you and influence the work you’re doing on the comics?

Xtelevision For Jaguar For Mac Free

I know that Roxane Gay was tapped to work on the prequels. Yeah, I mean, because of the kind of work I’m doing write now it’s mostly in comics. Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Bitch Planet is a huge inspiration. Chelsea Cain’s Mockingbird was a book far from my own, but I adored it. Yona Harvey and I are cooking up some stuff.

And obviously Roxane, who is just a force of nature. Also, I think the new She-Hulk book looks really, really, really good. There’s actually been some criticism of the new She-Hulk book, in that a lot of women don’t particularly want every female Marvel character to be defined by trauma and violence. Especially as you’re dealing with violence against women in BP, do you have any thoughts on that?

I always answer this sort of question by the argument that there should be more characters. I think there are some options here, though—Moongirl, Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel, Silk, Gwenpool. There are female leads in several of the team books like Inhumans and X-Men. I think the current IvX series is basically led by two women. In this specific case though, I’m not sure what you do. I mean, her cousin really was killed.

They were close. That probably would be traumatic. Marvel brought in a woman to write the book and (I think) draw it also. I’m not sure what else they should have done here. I like the book.

I think it’s quiet and subtle. Beyond that, I’d say that superhero comics, themselves, are largely a response to trauma. Spider-Man is responding to the death of his Uncle Ben (among other deaths). The X-Men are responding to the trauma of discrimination and visions of genocide. Captain America is responding to the death of almost everyone he ever loved. Mockingbird was responding to rape in the recent series. Black Panther is responding to the trauma of the destruction of his kingdom.

What motivated this particular engagement with feminism in your comic books? Why there and not somewhere else? What prompted the collaboration with Roxane Gay? I don’t know. It was the next thing I was doing.

It’s not really a conscious thing, like that. Comic books have a long, fraught history with sexism. And so I felt, like, that was part of my inheritance as a comic-book writer. The debates are so much a part of the culture. And then there were some things about Black Panther, specifically, that made it the space to do it—the Dora Milajae’s position, the fact that most of the men around him were dead, the fact that in wars, rape is so often used as a weapon.

Who are your interlocutors with respect to feminism and womanism? Who are you in conversation with who will push back against the sexism in your own thinking and writing? I don’t know. The only people who usually have input on my writing are my wife and my editor. I’m not in conversation with anyone, except the people I report on and the people I work with.

The pushback is everywhere. People review my comic books. People review every article I write— The Atlantic even publishes them. A great deal of the critique of Between the World and Me was from a feminist perspective. Bell hooks pushed back, among others. Some of that has value. Some of it does not.

I try my best to separate the wheat from the chaff. Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Stelfreeze When I took on Black Panther last year, one Wakandan institution that really interested me was the Dora Milajae—the all-female troop of bodyguards to the King and potential wives. My misgivings about them and their portrayal. But you can’t just walk into a comic book and disregard everything you have misgivings about without really violating the soul of the book itself.

You can however look at those things from another perspective. What we really tried to do is depict the Dora Milajae—as much as possible—from their own perspective, and not from T’Challa’s. When writing and drawing them, we tried not to think so much about what T’Challa sees—or what the average male comic fan wants to see—but to imagine what the characters, themselves, would see. We really wanted them to have their own interior lives and motives, independent of T’Challa.

Costuming is so important in comics and while Brian hit early on with a cool Midnight Angel costume, we didn’t really think as much about the broader order of the Dora Milajae. But last week Brian sent in a fantastic cover sketch that forced us to start thinking harder about it. Basically the cover featured the Doras in their old school uniforms and we both wanted something that better reflected their own self-regard, their own form and function as warriors. I had no idea what this might look like. I sent some vague notes about “something that mirrors the Midnight Angels—but maybe lighter.” I wanted to be as if the Midnight Angels are wearing plate-mail, I imagine the Doras in some sort of chain-mail.

If the Midnight Angels were paladins, then the Doras were our rangers. The image above—which I think is just incredible—is Brian’s breathtaking response. There are all sorts of opportunities for weaponry and defense in these suits that we will be employing.

I have to say that w orking with both Brian and Black Panter’s colorist, Laura Martin, has just been incredible. It’s never been the case for me, as a storyteller, that I had two people who could take a notion I had in my head, run with it, remix it, clarify it, color it and then make it their own. It’s an amazing thing to be a part of. Black Panther #3 drops today and I thought I’d say something about the poetry that both opens and closes the book.

The poem we used is ’ “Rootsong.” I first encountered this piece during one of my many study sessions with the poet. This would have been somewhere around 1995 or 1996. Joel is a tremendous poet in his own right, but at that point (and perhaps even today) he was mentoring a whole crop of young writers—Terrence Hayes, Yona Harvey, Jelani Cobb—who happened to be in the DC area. Terms like “study session” and “mentor” make all of this sound more formal than it was. Usually it was a crew of us at a restaurant or a cafe discussing anything from sports to politics to poetry.

At one of these sessions, Joel whipped out a collection of Dumas’ work and turned to the poem “Rootsong.” What stunned me about the poem is how it used black myth to construct a narrative of the diaspora before and after colonialism and enslavement: Once when I was tree flesh came and worshiped at my roots. My ancestors slept in my outstretched limbs and listened to flesh praying and entreating on his knees. There is an Edenic, utopian quality to Dumas’ depiction of precolonial Africa. “Rootsong” always struck me as romance—not so different from the kind of romance than you’d see in Marvel’s Thor. Poetry is a natural cousin to comic books. Comic book writing, like poetry, requires a ruthless efficiency with words.

The art is the hero and if I may say so myself, the art in Black Panther #3—particularly in the pages using “Rootsong”—is heroic. Dumas was killed at the age of 34 by New York city transit cop. But his legacy endures through the strivings of the poet Eugene Redmond and the great Toni Morrison. It was Redmond who posthumously edited Dumas’ poems into a book. It was Morrison, then an editor at Random House, who ultimately published them. At the time: In 1968, a young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station.

A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear.

Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read. That Dumas wrote the words, that Morrison and Redmond made it possible to read those words, that I was exposed to those words during my tenure at the Mecca, and that those influenced my own words points to the deep and enduring power of tradition and lineage. Indeed as an atheist, tradition and lineage are the closes thing I have to any notion of afterlife. The work outlives us, and the work exerts power long after we are gone. I hope you feel that power in. I finished the first volume of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing earlier this week. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more compelling—or sadder—opening issue of a comic book.

This right here is all TNC-bait defined: Swamp Thing #20. Pencils: Denis Day. Colors: Tatjana Wood. In case this is hard to see, the words read as follows: Frame #1 “I had to come, Arcane.” “I had to be sure.” Frame #2 “Oh, I know I saw your ship falling and burning. I know I saw it.Drop like a wounded sun.exploding beyond the mountains. I know you that you couldn’t have survived.” “But I didn’t.hear the rattle in your windpipe.

I didn’t see.the glaze crawl over your eyes. I didn’t see the body, Arcane.” Frame #3 “.And I learned that if you don’t see the body.” “.then the rotten stuff.just keeps coming back.” For me, the best thing about writing comics is how it takes me back to everything I loved about writing poetry. The game of spacing and efficiency is so challenging and so important. Moore proves himself a master of both here—in three frames he gives you something of Swamp Thing’s compulsions and loneliness. There’s a progressive, forward energy in the first lines—“I had to come, Arcane”—that leaves us wondering what, specifically, could be so important that he had to come.

And then the answer slowly dribbles out an air-ship “falling and burning” dropping “like a wounded sun.exploding beyond the mountains,” the angsty feeling, native to the marvelous world of comics, of thinking an antagonist dead but not hearing “the rattle in their windpipe,” not seeing “the glaze crawl over their eyes,” of never seeing “the body.”. Swamp-Thing’s old foe Arcane is (for now) dead, and though the two were enemies, what we get in the comic is a sense that, somehow, the same forces that hunted Arcane are now hunting Swamp Thing. Those forces don’t just represent “evil” but a kind of modernism which threatens to sweep all the magic in the world away. Swamp Thing #21 (the second issue in Moore’s run) is considered the classic, because it offers a brilliant take on the character’s origins. But for me, it’s really Swamp Thing #20—with its high poetry—that sticks. I’m thinking about this volume a lot as I start sketching out the second season of Black Panther.

I really like how Moore is able to do both broad thematic work and character study with lines like, “Maybe the world.has run out of room for monsters.” Balancing those two things are tough, and if there’s one thing thing I’d like to do better with S2 of Black Panther it’s to figure out how to burrow deeper into T’Challa’s head while at the same time delving expanding and deepening the Wakanda around T’Challa. A few weeks back, in advance of Black Panther #1, I did with the great Evan Narcisse over at Kotaku. When Evan called, I was in the midst of fooling around with some mapping software in hopes of putting together a geographical vision of Wakanda, the setting for my story.

I’ve always liked maps. Maps were half the fun in any Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

When I was a kid I spent hours pouring over my parents’ atlas of the country. Nevertheless, the results from this outing were less than spectacular. I fiddled around with a few programs—Campaign Cartogapher, Fractal Mapper, and then finally Photoshop. Ideally I’d continue with Campaign Cartographer, but it, along with Fractal Mapper, are PC only and I do most of my work on a mac. That left me working in Photoshop (which I can no longer buy but have to license??) The map I made with Fractal Mapper is just risible. But here is a less risible version I made with Photoshop: Paintbrushes.

This isn’t much of a map. But it has the basics down in terms of where Wakanda exists in the world and what’s around it. In my imagination, Wakanda is a small country in East Africa, just off the Western Coast of Lake Victoria.

It is bordered by four other mythical countries in the Marvel canon—Mohanda to the North, Canaaan to the West, Azania to the Southwest, and Niganda to the Southeast. I can’t say too much, but Niganda exerts a subtle influence on events in Wakanda in both Season 1 and Season 2 (which I’ve started sketching out.). I imagine Wakanda as a country with strong natural barriers—impenetrable mountains to the North and West, dense forests, foreboding marshlands to the South, and the lake to the East. (When Prince Namor recently innudated Wakanda, he did so by causing the lake to rise.) There are passable points into Wakanda, but each of these are secured by a garrison which eventually bloomed into cities. One area that is less secure is the border between Niganda and Wakanda. Again, I don’t want to say too much there, but it has meaning. A few words on continuity and geography here: I stress the “In my imagination” portion of this description.

From what I can tell, canon and continuity are things comic book creators try to pay attention to, without becoming beholden to them. I have tried to root my Wakanda, and my Black Panther, in all that came before. But it’s really ultimately impossible to do this—there simply is too much information to read and remember. That said you do try to respect continuity and use it to you it to advance the story. This is my first serious go at mapping. Eventually we’ll have to get a map that is of enough quality to be reproduced in a comic book. This clearly isn’t it.

But I’m learning. And that was the whole reason to take this gig to begin with. Shout-out to for. Time for to cop that sketch-tablet, I guess. I’m hesitant to make a general declaration about all writer-artists teams. From what I can tell the process differs from team to team. In my case the best way I can explain our process is this: I am the screenwriter and Brian is the director.

To get some sense of how this might work, I figured it’d might help to compare a page from the script and a page illustrated by Brian. Here is my direction from the script: Here is what Brian actually did: The basic gist of the scene is here.

But it’s much better dramatized. The usage of the spear, for instance, to bring T’Challa’s men back to attention is a big and important addition. The constant question with comic script writing is “How does it look?” I always offer an answer to that question because I think it’s easier to brainstorm from something bad, then from nothing at all. Still, sometimes the answer just isn’t very good.

It takes a great artist not just to realize that T’Challa “waving and telling his forces to fall back” is insufficient, but to actually come up with something better. There will be more notes later this week on Issue #1 of Black Panther, on working with Brian, and comics in general. (Brian Stelfreeze) Above we have a sketch of T’Challa courtesy of Brian Stelfreeze. Obviously, I can’t really take much credit for this sketch. Brian has this great ability, not just to interpret script direction, but to actually add on and make something new and beautiful.

With that said I’d like to talk some about T’Challa’s major challenge in this first season of Black Panther. (Here’s hoping there will be more.) When I accepted the task of writing the new Black Panther comic, I was faced with an obvious question—Who is this guy? There was the obvious and the known—T’Challa is the ruler of the mythical African nation of Wakanda. But to write, I needed to develop a grounded theory of T’Challa’s great loves, small annoyances and everything in between. The grounding came from past depictions of T’Challa by writers like Don McGregor, Christopher Priest, Reginald Hudlin and Jonathan Hickman.

I also had to create some sort of working theory about Wakanda, and to the extent to which I came to one it is this: Wakanda is a contradiction. It is the most advanced nation on Earth, existing under one of the most primitive forms of governance on Earth. In the present telling, Wakanda’s technological superiority goes back centuries. Presumably it’s population is extremely well educated, and yet that population willingly accedes to rule by blood.

T’Challa descends from an unbroken line of kings, all who’ve taken up the mantle of the Black Panther. But if you’ve ever studied monarchy, it becomes immediately apparent that the aptitude, or even the desire, to govern isn’t genetic. Leaving aside the problems of reconciling absolute monarchy with ultra-modernism, there are the actual events in Wakanda which have happened under previous writers. In recent years Wakandans have endured a coup courtesy of the villainous Achebe, another courtesy Dr. Doom, the murder of two of T’Challa top lieutenants, a cataclysmic flood courtesy of Prince Namor, the subsequent dissolution of a royal marriage, and finally decimation and conquest at the hands of Thanos’ Black Order. Wakanda had always prided itself on having never been conquered. This is no longer true.

What, then, is the country if it is as vulnerable as all others? And what happens to a state when its absolute monarch can no longer fulfill the base requirement of any government—securing the safety of their people?

(Brian Stelfreeze, Laura Martin.). Alex Ross It’s obviously not the case, but T’Challa—the Black Panther and mythical ruler of Wakanda—has always struck as the product of the black nationalist dream, a walking revocation of white supremacist myth. T’Challa isn’t just a superhero in the physical sense, he is one of the smartest people in the world, ruling the most advanced civilization on the planet. Wakanda’s status as ever-independent seems to eerily parallel Ethiopia’s history as well as its place in the broader black imagination. Maybe it’s only me, but I can’t read Jason Aaron’s superb “” and not think of.

Comic book creators, like all story-tellers, get great mileage out of myth and history. But given the society we live in, some people’s myths are privileged over others.

Some of that is changing, no doubt. In the more recent incarnations of T’Challa you can see Christopher Priest invoking the language of the Hausa or Reginald Hudlin employing the legacy of colonialism. These were shrewd artistic decisions, rooted in the fact that anyone writing Black Panther enjoys an immediate, if paradoxical, advantage: the black diaspora is terra incognita for much of the world. What does the broader world really know of Adowa? Of Nanny and Cudjoe? Of the Maji-Maji rebellion?

Of Legba and Oshun? Of High John The Conqueror?

T’Challa’s writers have always enjoyed access to a rich and under-utilized pool of allusion and invocation. I would not have always considered this an advantage. When I first started writing, I was anxious that I would be pigeon-holed into the “race-beat.” Eventually I realized that the “race beat” was actually the “humanity beat,” and that questions about “racism” are really questions about the exercise of power.

Perhaps more importantly I realized that “race” was an essential thread of American society, and questions about race were questions about the very nature of the Western world. I wasn’t pigeon-holed, I’d fallen into a gold-mine. America is the most powerful country in the world. You simply can’t understand how it got that way without understanding “race.” And beneath that political conversation about “race,” swirling around it, sometimes directly related, and sometimes tangentially related, are the incredible myths and world-views of black people and the black diaspora at large.To the extent that this society has not been able to engage with those myths, with that world-view, it has not only lied to itself, but it has also robbed itself of some beautiful art. Racism isn’t just morally wrong, it makes for poor story-telling. Incidentally, so does didacticism. T’Challa won’t be yelling, “Hands Up!

Don’t Shoot!” There will be no policy papers on the slave trade, nor any overly-earnest, sepia-tinged “Black History Month” style of story-telling. The culture and politics can’t be on top; they have to baked in. So yeah, you might see some Walter Rodney in the royal library, or a sample from Robert Hayden. Or you might get a variant cover that pulls from our present moment.

But there’s no need to over do it. The facts are in: T’Challa is black. This is not a declaration.

It’s an opportunity. The release is now: “Ta-Nehisi, Brian, colorist Laura Martin, letterer Joe Sabino, assistant editor Chris Robinson, and I have been working on this series for months already, so we’re happy to have a launch date as we’re all anxious to start getting this book out in front of people,” series editor told.

“We may be biased, but we think it's something pretty special!” Elsewhere in comics: Ladies and gentlemen one of the great critics, and great magazine stylists, of our time. — Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates). Black Panther concept art (Brian Stelfreeze) A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to be contracted to work on Marvel’s. I didn’t want to say too much before I got started, but now, with a few scripts in, having gotten comfortable with my editors, and having been blown away by (early sketches of which you see here), I’m feeling a little better.

With that in mind, my hope is, from time to time, to update you guys on the process of making the thing. I guess I should start by saying I’ve never done this before. I expect that there will be stumbles and screw-ups on my part.

My nightmare basically involves this turning into some sort of stunt or vanity project. I did not take this on to look pretty, or add a line to my CV. I took it on for the same reason I take on new stories—to grow intellectually and artistically. In this case it’s another genre—fictional, serial story-telling—one a good distance away from journalism, memoir, and essays. Still I find myself falling back on old principles.

I’m a writer. I value it even more when saddled with the relatively high probability of failure. In that regard, my basic approach has been as follows. 1.) Read a ton of back issues and try to think about what I find interesting (Ramonda) and what I find less interessting (M’Baku.) 2.) Get a detailed outline done of all the issues I was contracted to write. 3.) Write those scripts early in order to give Brian, and my editors, a chance to tell me what I am doing wrong. 4.) Revise the outline regularly, as events (and finished scripts) dictate a need to change. That has been the plan.

Having a plan doesn’t guarantee success. But not having a plan probably guarantees failure. The Panther in action (Brian Stelfreeze) One thing I did not count on was the extent to which the art would shape the story. Brian’s thoughts on T’Challa, and his supporting cast, have been invaluable. You can see the fruits of collaboration in the image above. After talking back and forth we came up with some new ideas for how T’Challa’s famed Vibranium-weave suit might work—in this case, absorbing kinetic energy and allowing him to fire that energy back out in short energy bursts. “Energy bursts” almost gets it wrong—think “” not “.” All the old powers are there—enhanced senses, agility, peak-human strength, etc.

But this idea (and others) really came out of Brian’s thoughts—not just on the suit—but on the properties of Vibranium itself. Writing, for me, is a lonely exercise. I pitch an idea to my editors and then I disappear for awhile. There are a few regular check-ins, but generally the next thing they see from me is a draft. Black Panther has been different. There’s a lot more collaboration and conversation. Barely three days go by in which I don’t talk to Brian or my editor, Wilson Moss.

I’ll have more to say about that process as the days go on. For now, enjoy some of Brian’s (awesome) concept art. I’ve seen some of his penciled pages already.

They’re glorious. I’m trying to keep up. Updated at 4:22 p.m. The Trump administration is resuming its efforts to deport certain protected Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades—many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War. This is the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions, and one that’s sure to raise eyebrows—the White House had hesitantly backed off the plan in August before reversing course. In essence, the administration has now decided that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam are subject to standard immigration law—meaning they are all eligible for deportation.

An Angry Little Town Soon after the snows of 1977 began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, received a strange questionnaire in the mail. “Try to recall the number of times you became annoyed and/or angry during the past week,” the survey instructed. “Describe the most angry of these experiences.” One woman knew her answer: Recently, her husband had bought a new car.

Then he had driven it to his mistress’s house so she could admire the purchase. When the wife found out, she was livid. Her rage felt like an eruption she couldn’t control. To hear more feature stories, or The survey was interested in the particulars of respondents’ anger. In its 14 pages, it sought an almost voyeuristic level of detail. It asked the woman to describe the stages of her fury, which words she had shouted, whether punches had been thrown. “In becoming angry, did you wish to get back at, or gain revenge?” the survey inquired.

Afterward, did you feel “triumphant, confident and dominant” or “ashamed, embarrassed and guilty”? There were also questions for people like her husband, who had been on the receiving end: “Did the other person’s anger come as a surprise to you, or did you expect that it would occur?”. Donald Trump can’t stop telling on himself. Just two years into his presidency, the New York real-estate mogul turned politician faces at least two separate criminal investigations, while half a dozen former advisers, including his former campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, national-security adviser, foreign-policy adviser, and personal attorney have all pleaded guilty to or been convicted of serious crimes. That’s even more remarkable when you consider that the American legal system makes white-collar crimes difficult to prove, by making guilt conditional on a defendant’s state of mind, a notoriously high standard. Nevertheless, Trump has done his best to ensure that we all know what he’s thinking, even as his legal peril grows. Last Friday, the U.S.

Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York claimed in a filing that Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, had been directed during the campaign to pay hush money to women who claimed to have had affairs with the president. Those payments, according to the filing, were laundered through shell corporations and reimbursed by the president’s private company. Effectively, the president’s own Justice Department accused him of ordering his personal attorney to commit a felony.

When Americans look abroad these days, they see Donald Trumps everywhere: In Brazil, whose new president, Jair Bolsonaro, endorses torture, threatens to pull out of the Paris climate-change agreement, and suggests that his country was better off under military rule. In the Philippines, where of thousands of alleged drug dealers and threatened to impose martial law nationwide. In Hungary, where, enriched his cronies, and stoked fear and hatred of refugees. In Poland, whose Law and Justice Party has undermined the independence of the supreme court. Even in Italy, bash the European Union, and pal around with Steve Bannon. NEW YORK — With his teary-eyed and grim-faced family arrayed behind him, Michael Cohen laid claim to his freedom in a federal courtroom here on Wednesday morning.

Not from incarceration, of course—Donald Trump’s former longtime lawyer, fixer, and foot soldier knew he was soon headed to prison after he pleaded guilty to what a federal judge called “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct.” No, the 52-year-old Cohen was declaring his formal, surely irrevocable liberty from the clutches of the president of the United States. “Today,” he told Judge William H. Pauley III in a deep, steady voice, “is the day I am getting my freedom back.” “I have been living,” Cohen continued, “in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I admired.”. It’s a situation familiar to many women: You’re in a contentious meeting with male colleagues. Your turn to talk comes around, and just as you get going, someone else begins talking loudly. Then another person.

Within seconds, your colleagues are talking among themselves, and you’re trying to find a place to jump back into the conversation you were leading just moments before. Today it happened, during a heated exchange over funding for the border wall and a looming government shutdown. This particular conversation included President Donald Trump and the Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the latter of whom Trump in a short discussion. President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison on Wednesday, just days after directly implicating Trump in a felony stemming from hush-money payments to two women made just weeks before the 2016 election. The sentencing marked the culmination of a months-long saga that began in April with a dramatic FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office and ended with Trump’s most loyal lieutenant and fixer—who once said he would take a bullet for his boss—turning against the president and implicating him directly in criminal misconduct. In Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, Cohen apologized to his family and to “the people of the United States.” “Today is the day that I am getting my freedom back,” he said in a prepared statement.

“I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I deeply admired.” He said that his “blind loyalty” to Trump led him “to take a path of darkness instead of light.”. Every day, as Americans dry their hands, soak up their spills, and wipe their counters, they are—whether they know it or not—contributing to their country’s dominance. In an era of waning American exceptionalism, inhabitants can at least pride themselves on an underratedly important, probably shameful distinction: They reside in the paper-towel capital of the world. This status is unquestioned. According to data shared with me by the market-research firm Euromonitor International, global spending on paper towels for use at home (but not in office or public bathrooms) added up to about $12 billion in 2017, and Americans accounted for about $5.7 billion of that total. In other words, the U.S.

Spends nearly as much on paper towels as every other country in the world combined. In White Right: Meeting With the Enemy, the filmmaker Deeyah Khan, a Muslim woman of color, recounts a television interview that she gave during the summer of 2016. “The fact of the matter is that the U.K. Is never going to be white again,” she told the BBC. “Similarly, our parents who have left Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and other Muslim countries, for them to think that they can reestablish those countries and the lives that they had there over here—it’s not gonna happen.

We’re together going to have to find out, what does it mean to build a society that includes all of us?” A deluge of hate mail quickly followed. Rather than silence her, the threats provoked her to go out and meet “the kind of people who sent me this abuse to get behind the hatred and the extremist ideology to find out what they are really like as human beings.”. Yesterday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee. The topic was Google’s control of information, thanks to its eponymous search engine, its power over online advertising and commerce, and its Android operating system, which runs most of the world’s smartphones. Pichai had an invitation to testify about on Russian meddling in U.S. Elections before September’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where both Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had appeared, and where senators shot barbs at the empty chair Google would have occupied during that hearing.

The House appearance offered the company and its CEO an opportunity to appear engaged with American policy. Updated at 4:22 p.m. The Trump administration is resuming its efforts to deport certain protected Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades—many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War. This is the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions, and one that’s sure to raise eyebrows—the White House had hesitantly backed off the plan in August before reversing course. In essence, the administration has now decided that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam are subject to standard immigration law—meaning they are all eligible for deportation. An Angry Little Town Soon after the snows of 1977 began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, received a strange questionnaire in the mail. “Try to recall the number of times you became annoyed and/or angry during the past week,” the survey instructed.

“Describe the most angry of these experiences.” One woman knew her answer: Recently, her husband had bought a new car. Then he had driven it to his mistress’s house so she could admire the purchase.

When the wife found out, she was livid. Her rage felt like an eruption she couldn’t control. To hear more feature stories, or The survey was interested in the particulars of respondents’ anger. In its 14 pages, it sought an almost voyeuristic level of detail. It asked the woman to describe the stages of her fury, which words she had shouted, whether punches had been thrown. “In becoming angry, did you wish to get back at, or gain revenge?” the survey inquired. Afterward, did you feel “triumphant, confident and dominant” or “ashamed, embarrassed and guilty”?

There were also questions for people like her husband, who had been on the receiving end: “Did the other person’s anger come as a surprise to you, or did you expect that it would occur?”. Donald Trump can’t stop telling on himself. Just two years into his presidency, the New York real-estate mogul turned politician faces at least two separate criminal investigations, while half a dozen former advisers, including his former campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, national-security adviser, foreign-policy adviser, and personal attorney have all pleaded guilty to or been convicted of serious crimes. That’s even more remarkable when you consider that the American legal system makes white-collar crimes difficult to prove, by making guilt conditional on a defendant’s state of mind, a notoriously high standard. Nevertheless, Trump has done his best to ensure that we all know what he’s thinking, even as his legal peril grows. Last Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York claimed in a filing that Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, had been directed during the campaign to pay hush money to women who claimed to have had affairs with the president.

Television For Jaguar For Mac

Those payments, according to the filing, were laundered through shell corporations and reimbursed by the president’s private company. Effectively, the president’s own Justice Department accused him of ordering his personal attorney to commit a felony. When Americans look abroad these days, they see Donald Trumps everywhere: In Brazil, whose new president, Jair Bolsonaro, endorses torture, threatens to pull out of the Paris climate-change agreement, and suggests that his country was better off under military rule. In the Philippines, where of thousands of alleged drug dealers and threatened to impose martial law nationwide. In Hungary, where, enriched his cronies, and stoked fear and hatred of refugees. In Poland, whose Law and Justice Party has undermined the independence of the supreme court. Even in Italy, bash the European Union, and pal around with Steve Bannon.

NEW YORK — With his teary-eyed and grim-faced family arrayed behind him, Michael Cohen laid claim to his freedom in a federal courtroom here on Wednesday morning. Not from incarceration, of course—Donald Trump’s former longtime lawyer, fixer, and foot soldier knew he was soon headed to prison after he pleaded guilty to what a federal judge called “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct.” No, the 52-year-old Cohen was declaring his formal, surely irrevocable liberty from the clutches of the president of the United States. “Today,” he told Judge William H. Pauley III in a deep, steady voice, “is the day I am getting my freedom back.” “I have been living,” Cohen continued, “in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I admired.”.

It’s a situation familiar to many women: You’re in a contentious meeting with male colleagues. Your turn to talk comes around, and just as you get going, someone else begins talking loudly. Then another person. Within seconds, your colleagues are talking among themselves, and you’re trying to find a place to jump back into the conversation you were leading just moments before.

Today it happened, during a heated exchange over funding for the border wall and a looming government shutdown. This particular conversation included President Donald Trump and the Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the latter of whom Trump in a short discussion.

President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison on Wednesday, just days after directly implicating Trump in a felony stemming from hush-money payments to two women made just weeks before the 2016 election. The sentencing marked the culmination of a months-long saga that began in April with a dramatic FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office and ended with Trump’s most loyal lieutenant and fixer—who once said he would take a bullet for his boss—turning against the president and implicating him directly in criminal misconduct. In Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, Cohen apologized to his family and to “the people of the United States.” “Today is the day that I am getting my freedom back,” he said in a prepared statement. “I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I deeply admired.” He said that his “blind loyalty” to Trump led him “to take a path of darkness instead of light.”. Every day, as Americans dry their hands, soak up their spills, and wipe their counters, they are—whether they know it or not—contributing to their country’s dominance. In an era of waning American exceptionalism, inhabitants can at least pride themselves on an underratedly important, probably shameful distinction: They reside in the paper-towel capital of the world.

This status is unquestioned. According to data shared with me by the market-research firm Euromonitor International, global spending on paper towels for use at home (but not in office or public bathrooms) added up to about $12 billion in 2017, and Americans accounted for about $5.7 billion of that total. In other words, the U.S.

Spends nearly as much on paper towels as every other country in the world combined. In White Right: Meeting With the Enemy, the filmmaker Deeyah Khan, a Muslim woman of color, recounts a television interview that she gave during the summer of 2016. “The fact of the matter is that the U.K. Is never going to be white again,” she told the BBC. “Similarly, our parents who have left Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and other Muslim countries, for them to think that they can reestablish those countries and the lives that they had there over here—it’s not gonna happen. We’re together going to have to find out, what does it mean to build a society that includes all of us?” A deluge of hate mail quickly followed.

Rather than silence her, the threats provoked her to go out and meet “the kind of people who sent me this abuse to get behind the hatred and the extremist ideology to find out what they are really like as human beings.”. Yesterday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee. The topic was Google’s control of information, thanks to its eponymous search engine, its power over online advertising and commerce, and its Android operating system, which runs most of the world’s smartphones. Pichai had an invitation to testify about on Russian meddling in U.S.

Elections before September’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where both Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had appeared, and where senators shot barbs at the empty chair Google would have occupied during that hearing. The House appearance offered the company and its CEO an opportunity to appear engaged with American policy.