What Happened: November 24, 2021

Tablet’s afternoon news digest: Waukesha Tragedy; Ahmaud Arbery; Beijing Winter Olympics Scandal

November 24, 2021

The Big Story

Guest-edited by Sean Cooper

The death of an 8-year-old boy brings the total number of victims killed to six, after a driver of an SUV plowed through a Christmas parade on Sunday in Waukesha, Wisconsin. As of yesterday, six other children remain in critical condition, and at least 62 people suffered injuries. The alleged driver, Darrell Brooks Jr., has been charged with five counts of first-degree intentional homicide, and while no motive has been determined, the tragedy complicates the ongoing debate about how political campaigns calling for police reform impact practical law enforcement issues such as bail.

Brooks has a lengthy criminal history, including assault charges earlier this month stemming from an incident in which he allegedly ran over a former girlfriend with an SUV. In light of the parade massacre, Milwaukee prosecutors who set Brooks’ bail at $1,000 for that earlier incident have since expressed regret that the amount was “inappropriately low,” as Brooks soon posted bond. Yet the practice of setting low or no bail has become a key flank for progressive district attorneys rehauling prosecution practices across the nation, even as research continues to show that histories of domestic violence are strong indicators of future acts of greater violence. Last summer, Bloomberg reported that nearly 60% of the 749 mass shooting incidents it analyzed were either acts of domestic violence or perpetrated by gunmen with domestic violence records.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-mass-shootings-domestic-violence-connection/

Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads

The Rest

→ This afternoon in a packed courtroom in Georgia, a jury found three men guilty for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man who was shot dead after the three defendants, all of whom were white, claimed they’d been trying to detain Arbery because they believed he’d been involved in a nearby burglary. The convicted men now face sentences of life in prison as well as additional charges of federal hate crimes. The federal trial is set for February.

→The recent murder of a 32-year-old woman who was seven months pregnant and returning from her baby shower has pushed Philadelphia closer to the highest number of homicides in the city in 70 years. While the death toll is likely to reach 500 victims this weekend, the newly re-elected district attorney, Larry Krasner, points to the city’s policies on parole and cash bail as partly to blame for the city’s rampant violence. “Probation and parole officers [should] spend their time on people who present a bona fide danger,” Krasner said at a press conference yesterday in response to questions about the surge in gun violence and attacks on Philadelphia women. Since taking office, Krasner has stopped seeking bail for dozens of nonviolent offenses, including theft, criminal mischief, DUIs, and resisting arrest.

→A stock darling during the pandemic, stationary bike and treadmill maker Peloton is in hot water with a pension fund in Florida as it claims in a lawsuit against Peloton that company executives misled it to believe Peloton sales would continue to grow even after the pandemic. The Peloton stock dropped as much as 35% after the company disclosed this month that it overestimated its revenue projections by a billion dollars. The pension fund lawsuit alleges that Peloton previously advised the fund that the stock’s success was not related to closed gyms during the pandemic but rather because, according to one Peloton executive, customers expressed a natural human desire to integrate “fitness in my life in a consistent way.”

→With 10 weeks to go until Beijing hosts the Winter Olympics, new questions about the handling of sexual assault claims against a Chinese official by tennis star Peng Shuai pose additional problems for event organizers trying to disarm a brewing scandal. American tennis organization leaders and superstars Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka had all made public calls for updates on Shuai’s safety and whereabouts after her posts alleging she’d been raped by Zhang Gaoli, a retired member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee, were removed within minutes of appearing on China’s social media networks. The International Olympic Committee circulated a statement with screenshots from IOC president Thomas Bach’s subsequent video call with Shuai, but the pictures of Shuai smiling and the IOC’s claim that Shuai was safe at home and requesting privacy did not assuage critics who pointed out that IOC President Bach had a past working relationship with Zhang Gaoli, who was one of the leading Chinese officials tasked with shepherding China’s successful winning bid to bring the IOC’s winter event to Beijing. Following the IOC’s video call with Shuai, a spokesperson from the Women’s Tennis Association told ESPN that the IOC’s assurances “don’t alleviate or address the WTA’s concern about her well-being and ability to communicate without censorship or coercion.”

→Following the recent report that more than 100,000 Americans—a record high—had died in a one-year period from drug overdoses, a federal jury in Cleveland ruled this week that retail pharmacy chains CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens all bear responsibility for driving deaths during the ongoing opioid epidemic. Though previous suits have been settled against drug manufacturers and distributors, the case is the first to find pharmacy chains are likewise liable for exacerbating the drug overdose epidemic that has claimed more than half a million American lives since the early 2000s. While some critics of the pharmaceutical industry have welcomed the reckoning with those who made and sold the pills, there are fears that knee-jerk policy decisions about prescription pill practices in medical settings have forced drug users to seek out more dangerous illicit narcotics in the streets.

→After four terms under the rule of center-right chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany now has its first new leader in 16 years as Social Democrat candidate Olaf Scholz sealed the deal on a governing coalition yesterday. Scholz earned accolades for his cautious style of steering Germany’s economy as Merkel’s finance minister during the pandemic, though how skillful he’ll be in addressing the nation’s rising inflation and continued supply chain issues remains to be seen.

→The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a London-based charity, reported this week that its helpline had received an average of 26 calls a day about possible children being sexually abused, a record high and a 36% increase in reports from the year prior. With millions of children kept home from school during lockdowns over the past year in the U.K., the helpline director, Sam Thandi, said, “The risk of abuse has gone up since the start of the pandemic, with children more vulnerable and out of sight of the adults who can keep them safe.”

→A new Thomson Reuters investigation analyzed thousands of documents from prisons and jails across eight states and found that millions of hours of phone calls made by prisoners were being monitored by an artificial intelligence system made by Amazon. Ostensibly a tool to help prison officials collect evidence on the calls that discuss gang activity, the Amazon software system has been used to monitor a much wider spectrum of prisoner conversations, including mentions of the Spanish word for attorney and discussions of unhealthy conditions and poor management by detention facilities during the COVID-19 outbreak.

→Housekeeping note: The Scroll will be off for the Thanksgiving holiday for the rest of the week. A happy holiday to all that celebrate it. We’ll see you again on Monday.

The Back Pages

backpages Your Weekend Reads

→If there’s a silver lining to the present moment’s apathy for humor and satire in our journalism and letters, it’s that eventually this suffocating dourness will break away, and our inherent appetites for wit and irony will once again be satisfied. A look back over the long weekend at great works of reportage and criticism that examined previous cultural inflection points can at least help us bide our time while we await better, and funnier, days ahead.

In a piece for Life magazine in 1969, Albert Goldman explains how Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint was poised for a massive audience, on account of its drug-like potency of much-needed humor about sexual mores and its diagnostic ability to reveal what in American life was then “sick, black, and blue.”

Heralded last year by several stunning excerpts in the serious literary magazines, Portnoy comes to us glowing not merely as a succès d’estime but as a succès de scandale—the scandal fuming up from the book’s pungent language, a veritable attar of American obscenity; and from its preoccupations, foremost among which is the terrible sin of onanism.

Presently the object of a cult, which passes selections from the sacred writing from hand to hand at sophisticated dinner parties so that all may have the opportunity to read aloud, Portnoy today is still an underground password. But the complete work is being readied for distribution by an international ring of literary agents who are cutting, packaging and peddling it like a deck of pure heroin. Soon it will be injected into every vein of contemporary culture: as hardcover book, as soft-cover booklet, as book club offering, as foreign translation and as American. The TV rights remain as yet unsold, but even without them the book has already earned almost a million dollars prior to the first press run.

…

The book that is being blown up by all of this puffing is not so much volatile as it is intense, probing, incisive. A diagnostic novel by a comic Freud, it focuses its lens of a beautifully cut and brightly stained slice of contemporary American life—all sick, black, and blue.

→A decade later and Americans were unsure if it was time to try to restore some of its conservative ideas about itself as one common people or to continue to split up and fracture into a million pieces of contradictory desires and beliefs. In a 1979 profile of Robin Williams, screenwriter John Eskow dives deep into the sudden popularity of the frenetic comedian and actor, and what kind of payoff his volatile style gave to an audience.

Robin’s hunger for the “different” is never satiated; that’s why he still performs, unannounced and unpaid, at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Here, the audience is hip enough to give him free rein, and he can do what he does best: unlock his imagination, with its Hall of Many Zanies, and let the inhabitants scamper freely onstage.
“That helps me,” he admits. “Otherwise I think I’d implode with the energy.” Williams’ live act, with its multiplicity of voices and wild gymnastics, is a kind of dance on the edge of sanity. “Sometimes it gets a little scary. Like one night my wife, Valerie, said, ‘Ooooh, that was like a little breakdown there!’ It can be very intense. When you’re really out there, releasing the tension and generating energy, it’s like a sponge bath, a whole cleaning process. Not to the point of doing a primal scream, puking on the audience, and going, ‘Fuck you, I don’t know anything.’ It’s the struggle to turn frenzy into humor, and the audience, hopefully, gets off on that.”

→By the early 1980s, previous generations already had accrued the benefit of Lenny Bruce to break up the dark ice of mid-century social hypocrisies. Richard Pryor was doing what one man could to carry forward Bruce’s mantle, but as Robert Ward explores in this 1984 piece for GQ, a search for the next generation of comedic talents trying to break through is likewise a pursuit for how America will evolve beyond its own worst habits.

But the thing with Lenny was that he took stand-up comedy and created a new standard of excellence, a psychic dare. He said to every comic after him, “So you’re funny. Big deal … How safe will you play it? How much will you really say? How far will you travel on the edge? Is it enough to have a decent act? Maybe the point of the act is to destroy the act?”
But what of today’s new young comics? Comedy clubs are springing up all over America—Richmond, Virginia; Columbus, Ohio; Portland, Oregon—and every town has at least one guy who dreams of making it to The Tonight Show. … All over the republic people are paying to laugh, and there are a whole new crop of young comedians plying their wares at places such as L.A.’s Improvisation, run by Budd Friedman, or Mitzi Shore’s Comedy Store. In my trips out west I often catch a set or two, but this time I wanted to take a close look to see if there was anybody on the stage who was trying for something else … somebody who was as mercurial and wild as Lenny or Pryor.
Somebody who would not only make me laugh but make me shiver at the same time.

Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to [email protected].

Tablet’s afternoon newsletter edited by Jacob Siegel and Park MacDougald.

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