Why Neil Gaiman talking at you for 5 hours from your screen is totally worth $90

Neil Gaiman is having another moment.

Next month the ultra-prolific author sees season 2 of the turbulent-behind-the-scenes, brilliant-on-the-screen series American Gods, now more closely based on his novel, premiere on Starz. A mere two months later, the screen version of Gaiman’s apocalyptic comedy book co-written with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, is unleashed on an unsuspecting world via Amazon Prime.

And while all this was in the works, the bearded bard of all things mythological casually became a writing professor for the whole plugged-in planet.

Gaiman’s course, titled “The Art of Storytelling,” is now available on the celebrity learning app MasterClass. I’m far from the only Facebook denizen to see the ad for this class dominate my news feed in recent weeks. Social media knows us nerds too damn well. (It probably also knows most of us have half-finished novels stuck in desk drawers.)

Probably the most devilishly clever thing about MasterClass is its pricing structure. You get a single course with a celeb for $90 (the growing roster currently includes Serena Williams, Martin Scorsese, Gordon Ramsay and Hans Zimmer), but $180 gets you a one-year all-access pass. Getting all the classes for the price of two is a marketing sleight-of-hand that can make you forget that one is pretty pricey.

Gaiman’s a great writer, but is his class worth it? That’s what I signed up to find out. I watched both Gaiman’s entire course and its closest analog from last year, Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood’s MasterClass, for comparison.

What you get for your money

Sure, $90 is pennies compared to, say, the cost of a college-level writing course. But the MasterClass sleight-of-hand also covers up the total length of its videos, which is nothing like the length of time you’d get in that college course.

Even after signing up, I had to do the math myself by totting up 17 class video runtimes. The answer: 4 hours, 48 minutes — or about 5/8ths of a season of American Gods. You’re paying a buck every 3 minutes 20 seconds. For the same price you could get 11 months’ subscription to Starz, or a dozen of Gaiman’s paperbacks.

Now the good news: As pricey as that is, Gaiman’s Masterclass is really good! The author speaks in the slow, measured tones of a practiced storyteller, but he’s always going somewhere worthwhile. He doesn’t ramble. Or if he does, it’s a gentle, quick ramble that leads you to a magical glade.

Like the best teachers, Gaiman is standing on the shoulders of giants

One of his themes is the importance of telling stories in as few words as necessary to be maximally effective — “don’t think you’re being paid by the word, imagine you’re paying by the word” — and he lives by that here. There is a higher ratio of memorable gems to noise than the average writing course. (I particularly liked his “character is dialogue.”)

You’d have to try hard not to be inspired.

Emotionally speaking, Gaiman’s aim is true; like the best teachers, he leaves a strong impression of genuinely wanting to help bring out the author in you. Also like the best teachers, Gaiman is standing on the shoulders of giants. He dispenses private pearls from great writers such as Roger Zelazny, who told a young Gaiman to write short stories as if they were the last chapter of a novel he’d never written.

Gaiman, who (laughably) calls himself “fundamentally lazy,” really liked that idea, and started knocking out top-notch short stories in a weekend.

Speaking of non-laziness, commenters on several videos suggested using the speed feature to get to the point faster — as with a podcast, you could jack this whole thing up to 2x, and be done in under 2.5 hours. But another classmate had nothing but praise for “a delightful unhurried stroll with someone I love through a sublime country that appears under our feet just in time for each next step.”

Those comments are one of two features that make each of the 17 short classes different to just watching Gaiman interviews on YouTube (of which there are quite a lot). There’s no weapons-grade trolling here, so there’s no need to waste energy tearing down trolls; just a lot of would-be writers sharing their own stumbling blocks and breakthroughs, offering encouragement to each other as you might expect in a real-world class.

This is an aspect that MasterClass, which has now been up and running for three years, can and should take further. Emails after I completed both the Gaiman and Margaret Atwood classes invited me to keep the conversation going by “connecting with your classmates” on a page called “The Hub.” Alas! Apart from 25 photo challenges from the Annie Leibovitz class, this hub was entirely bare.

The other thing you don’t get from a regular Gaiman video is the course book — a beautifully laid-out 94-page PDF with more in-depth discussion of the topics in each chapter, plus pointers to useful online resources and suggestions for questions to ask about your own novel. (This gave me XML errors the first time I tried to download it, but seems to be working fine now.)

It may be a little misleading to call this a ‘class’ — it’s more a really long, somewhat interactive TED talk.

There’s no actual coursework, however, and it’s not like Gaiman is going to be giving out grades at the end of the semester. It may be a little misleading, in fact, to call this a “class” — it’s more like a really long, somewhat interactive, more intimate TED talk broken down into manageable chunks you can download for offline viewing, with supporting material. (The PDF is also chunk-ified.)

But at the same time, that may be all the aspiring writer needs to get going. For all their pearls of wisdom, the advice that both Gaiman and Atwood give boils down to basically the same thing: You learn writing by writing, and especially by finishing.

You make lots of mistakes, you double back on yourself, you try the same story multiple times from multiple perspectives until you’re sure, as a reader, that it works. Atwood, who like Gaiman drafts her first drafts by hand, puts it most succinctly: “the wastepaper basket is your friend.”

Face to face

Gaiman is a better speaker than Atwood, who has a somewhat flat monotone. Atwood has better facial expressions; the cheeky, twinkling grin after she says something witty is almost worth the price of admission alone. But ultimately, both are more compelling after five hours than any introvert with a pen has a right to be.

That is a testament to the most fundamental part of the MasterClass formula, the thing that will probably ensure the company’s success going forward. These videos are tremendously good at fostering intimacy and immediacy (especially via the full-HD Apple TV app). The famous teacher talks directly to camera. MasterClass cuts to a side angle just often enough that the staring doesn’t get uncomfortable, but still it tickles something in our lizard brains.

It’s the archetypal meeting with the Great Elder, the aspirational guru. We sit up and pay attention.

The videos are shot in beautiful book-lined rooms that make you feel you’re in the author’s home, even though they’re probably in a studio (MasterClass wouldn’t tell us one way or the other). They are not, apparently, scripted. (Explaining point-of-view decisions, Atwood breaks out into a wonderfully bonkers sketch using a couple of boxes and a stapler.)

They both seem to be dripping with story ideas. (Making a point about expectations, Gaiman notes that P.G. Wodehouse never had Bertie Wooster kill his butler Jeeves — and for a second, you can see him pause to consider whether that would make as great a subversive short tale as it sounds.)

And they’re visual enough that you can’t just close your eyes and listen. Gaiman goes through scripts and key changes on an early Sandman comic. Atwood shows us the first draft of Handmaid’s Tale. Gaiman pulls his notebook out of his pocket, with some difficulty, just to show he’s always carrying one. Atwood sketches her initial idea for the Handmaid costume on an iPad. Every extract they read is somewhat animated, with highlights pulled out.

Is all of that worth $90 per author? Your mileage may vary, of course, but by this point you’ve probably either dismissed it out of hand or are having a quiet argument with your wallet. My advice: Try one, and skip your next 18 coffeeshop lattes. This experience will deliver more of a writing jolt.

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Ariana Grande surprises the TNT Boys and aww their faces

Are you ready to see the cutest thing you’ll see all day? Well, I’m not entirely certain that anything can properly prepare you for the levels of cuteness you’re about to behold.

Ariana Grande surprised boyband TNT Boys while they were performing on The Late Late Show with James Corden.

As the three boys sang “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Ari watched backstage and eventually joined them on stage to sing along with them. And, my goodness, look at their faces when they realise who’s joined them on stage!

Aaahhh!

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US teen who faced off with Native American sues Washington Post

A US high school student from Kentucky has sued the Washington Post for defamation, claiming the newspaper falsely accused him of racist acts and instigating a confrontation with a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

The lawyers for 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic high school junior who faced off with Omaha Nation elder Nathan Phillips on the steps of the memorial last month, have filed a $250m lawsuit against the newspaper.

“This is only the beginning,” said the lawyers, Lin Wood and Todd McMurtry, on their firm’s website, noting that it was the “first lawsuit” on Sandmann’s behalf.

The suit was filed in US District Court in Kentucky, Reuters news agency reported, and it states that the sum – which is for “compensatory and punitive damages” – is what Amazon.com founder and the world’s richest man Jeff Bezos paid to buy the newspaper.

The lawsuit claims that the newspaper “wrongfully targeted and bullied” the teen to advance its bias against President Donald Trump because Sandmann is a white Catholic who wore a Make America Great Again cap on a school field trip to the “March for Life” anti-abortion rally in Washington on January 18.

‘Vigorous defence’

The Washington Post’s Vice President for Communications, Kristine Coratti Kelly, said: “We are reviewing a copy of the lawsuit and we plan to mount a vigorous defence.”

In a photo from the incident that went viral, Sandmann is seen standing face to face with Native American activist Phillips. The teenager stares smiling at him, while Phillips sings and plays his drum.

The incident sparked outrage on social media.

A private investigation firm retained by Covington Diocese, the Catholic high school in Park Hills, Kentucky, attended by Sandmann, found in a report released last week no evidence the teenagers provoked a confrontation.

The students were met at the Lincoln Memorial by offensive statements from members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, the report said.

The investigation also determined that the students did not direct any racist or offensive comments towards Phillips although several performed a “tomahawk chop” to the beat of his drum.

The tomahawk chop is an arm movement most popularly used by fans of several baseball and football clubs.

The action, considered to be offensive to Native Americans, involves moving the forearm forwards and backwards repetitively with an open palm to simulate a tomahawk chopping, and is often accompanied by a distinctive cheer.

Phillips claimed in a separate video that he heard the students chanting “build that wall” during the encounter, a reference to Trump’s pledge to build a barrier along the US border with Mexico.

The investigators said they found no evidence of such a chant and that Phillips did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him.

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50 Cent was apparently offered $500K to attend Trump’s inauguration

President Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration wasn’t exactly the most well-attended event in history.

And now it would appear that Trump was aware that he had attendance issues, even before the ceremony took place.

At least that’s what Curtis Jackson, AKA, 50 Cent says. On The Late Late Show with James Corden, Jackson said that Trump’s people offered him half a million dollars to attend the inauguration.

“I was like, ‘woah’.” Jackson said. “Don’t bring me to fix the African American vote.”

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Vivo’s mid-range V15Pro puts pricey flagships to shame

The flagship, originally, is the ship (the maritime kind) that carries the fleet’s commander. In the smartphone world, the term has become synonymous with the best phone a phone company currently offers. Flagship is the most coveted by users and it gets the most attention from the media. Flagship is the phone you want.

But ever since Apple first put a $1,000 price tag on its flagship phone, things have started to change. Flagships are still the best phones around, but they’re hardly the best value. And the discrepancy sometimes goes so far that it’s getting hard to recommend a flagship phone when there are cheaper alternatives that are nearly as good.

Enter the latest phone from China’s smartphone maker Vivo: the V15Pro. It’s a huge phone with zero notches, and specs that kick the ass of any flagship you can think of. Its sole downside, on paper, is a Snapdragon 675 chip that places it into mid-range category. So I’ve gotten a hold of a V15Pro unit to see how this combination works.

Amazing set of features • Mighty cameras

Not the best UI • Micro-USB connector • really?

The specs on the V15Pro are a testament to just how much the smartphone industry has progressed in recent years. It’s an “affordable” phone (Vivo’s words) that has a 6.39-inch, AMOLED screen with no notch (the selfie camera shows up when needed via a pop-up mechanism on top of the phone) and just a tiny chin on the bottom. It comes with 6/8GB of RAM (the latter in selected markets only), 128GB of storage and an under-the-display fingerprint scanner.

It’s got a triple rear camera, comprised of a 48-megapixel main sensor, an 8-megapixel wide angle camera, and a 5-megapixel depth camera. The pop-up selfie camera has a 32-megapixel sensor. The battery has a not-too-impressive capacity of 3,700mAh, but it makes up for it with Vivo’s ultra-fast charging tech. A lot of these features were rumored for Apple and Samsung flagships years ago, and they still haven’t arrived — and yet, the Vivo has them all.

New Settings menu, please

A list of specs is one thing, and how it all performs in practice is another. I’ve had the V15Pro a little shorter than I would’ve liked to, but in my time with it it performed admirably. The Snapdragon chip that powers it isn’t the best Qualcomm has to offer, but you’d never notice it in real-life usage — and I bet the 6GB of RAM helps with that, too.

Battery life was great — two days of intensive usage was typical — and it charges really fast, but only if you use Vivo’s charger. These days, I charge so many devices that I have a single charger/powerbank for all of them, so I didn’t get that benefit.

My qualms with the V15Pro aren’t with its raw performance, but rather its UI and the tiny glitches that stem from all the super-fresh tech the phone has. One thing that wound me up is the enormous number of settings, which appear to be group rather arbitrarily within the Settings menu. Each smartphone maker has its own way of doing this, but for some reason, I constantly struggled to find the right setting on the Vivo.

The fingerprint scanner worked better than any under-the-display scanner I’ve used, but it still wasn’t perfect. If I hit it just right, it’d work on the first try; often, I’d have to reposition my digit a bit, or press a little harder, to unlock the phone. The V15Pro, mercifully, also offers face unlocking, which worked a little better. That, however, requires the selfie camera to pop up every time you unlock the phone, and it was just a tiny bit slow for me.

There are other minor drawbacks. For example, the phone uses a micro-USB connector instead of USB-C, which is pretty odd these days. It also comes with a free case, which would be a nice touch if the case weren’t so damn ugly. On the flip side, the case is pretty rugged and probably offers better protection than your typical plastic case. Note that the V15Pro isn’t waterproof (I guess that Vivo had to save money somewhere), which might be the reason why the case is so rugged.

Almost a looker

The V15Pro is a bit of an odd bird. With that huge, beautiful screen, and all its gadgets (the pop-up camera, the fingerprint scanner that lights up in bright blue when you touch the screen), it should be a very attractive phone. Some details just don’t work, though. The triple camera setup on the back is placed on a pretty thick, black strip of plastic which calls to mind the ultra-slim standalone cameras of the naughties. The gradient blue background isn’t as nicely done as on some of Huawei’s phones, for example. The corners of the phone don’t really follow the curve of the screen. None of these are deal-breakers, but overall, this is not a phone that will make you want to throw your iPhone away.

On the bright side, the phone is very well built; it feels sturdy and solid in the hand, and the pop-up mechanism for the selfie camera doesn’t look like something that will break any time soon.

With the notch gone, the V15Pro is nothing but a huge, crisp, AMOLED display on the front, and, like most smartphone OLEDs these days, the display doesn’t disappoint. It’s not as bright as the one on the iPhone X and there’s a fair amount of color shifting when you look at it from an angle, but the blacks are deep and the image is crisp.

Flagship-level camera

In my previous experience with Vivo phones, the selfie camera was great and the rear cameras were pretty good but not the best around. The V15Pro is not very different, but its camera setup will occasionally produce truly stunning photos.

For example, in broad daylight you can set the camera to take 48-megapixel photos and they will turn out pretty great. Similarly, the ultra-wide, 8-megapixel sensor will let you take that group photo with ease — I’ve tested similar setups on many phone and I end up using the widescreen camera nearly as much as I use the main one.

The selfies are, unsurprisingly, incredibly crisp. And even the bokeh mode has improved from Vivo’s earlier models. For best results (as always), turn off the AI-assisted beautifier and just take standard photos.

Both the main and the selfie cameras often struggle in poor lighting conditions. Sometimes, an indoors shot will end up being too yellow. Sometimes it’ll be too red. I’ve tested the V15Pro against the iPhone X’s camera and while the iPhone isn’t perfect either, it’s at least consistently yellowish in dark conditions.

That’s not nearly all. The Vivo V15Pro’s cameras basically mirror every feature you’ll find on a flagship these days, including Huawei-like night mode and iPhone-like live photo as well as portrait light mode. I didn’t have the device long enough to thoroughly test every feature, but it’s nice to know they’re there.

Overall, the V15Pro is not the best cameraphone you’ll find but it does offer a pretty amazing set of features — I don’t think that any other phone currently has a 48-megapixel rear camera paired with a 32-megapixel selfie, pop-up camera. You may have to tweak a setting or two (the rear camera has a “pro” mode for fine tuning), but you should be able to take beautiful photos with this phone.

If the price is right…

Vivo could not tell me the price (except to say that it will vary by region), and the price is a key component of this phone. Given a low-enough price point, the V15Pro could be pretty awesome, as it matches (and sometimes surpasses) many expensive competitors on specs, features and performance. Unfortunately, I’ll have to reserve my final judgment until I know how much this phone will cost. For reference, the phone that currently sits on Vivo’s V line of devices, the V11, cost roughly $266; if the V15Pro is in that ballpark, that would be a pretty great deal.

The V15Pro will be available in multiple markets, though exact launch dates are still not publicly available.

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‘ISIL bride’ Shamima Begum says she might seek Dutch citizenship

Shamima Begum, one of the three British schoolgirls who left the UK to live in ISIL’s so-called caliphate, has said she will try to seek Dutch citizenship after being told the Home Office had issued an order to revoke her citizenship.

“I don’t know what to say,” Begum, who ran away when she was 15 to live under ISIL, told ITV News on Wednesday.

“I am not that shocked but I am a bit shocked. It’s a bit upsetting and frustrating. I feel like it’s a bit unjust on me and my son”.

The UK’s home secretary, Sajid Javid, wrote to her family on Tuesday informing them that he had made an order revoking her citizenship.

Citing government sources, the BBC reported that it was possible to strip the 19-year-old of her UK nationality as she was “eligible for citizenship” of another country.

However, according to reports, while Begum is believed to be of Bangladeshi heritage, she does not have the Asian country’s passport and has never visited there.

International law forbids countries from making people stateless by revoking their only citizenship.

‘I can just wait for him while he is in prison’

When shown the letter by ITV, Begum said: “It’s kind of heart-breaking to read. My family made it sound like it would be a lot easier for me to come back to the UK when I was speaking to them in Baghouz. It’s kind of hard to swallow.

“I heard that other people are being sent back to Britain so I don’t know why my case is any different to other people, or is it just because I was on the news four years ago?” she said.

“Another option I might try with my family is my husband is from Holland and he has family in Holland. Maybe I can ask for citizenship in Holland. If he gets sent back to prison in Holland I can just wait for him while he is in prison.”

After arriving in Raqqa in 2015, Begum then aged 15, married to Dutch fighter Yago Riedijk, 12 years her senior.

Her husband recently surrendered to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as they closed in on Baghuz, a small, remote village in Deir Az Zor province which is the last sliver of territory controlled by ISIL. His fate has since been unclear.

After giving birth this week in a Syrian refugee camp, Begum had said she wanted to return to the UK for the sake of her newborn.

She had previously given birth to two other children, but both died during her time in Syria.

“I’m a 19-year-old girl with a newborn baby,” she told ITV in an earlier interview.

“I don’t know how I would be seen as a danger. I’m not going to go back and provoke people to go to ISIS or anything, if anything I’m going to encourage them not to go because it’s not all as it seems in their videos.”

‘Unfair system’

Amal De Chickera, the co-director of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, said the baby’s citizenship “was also under a cloud”, saying this was “an additional concern”.

“The UK is following a trend across the world of giving itself the power to strip citizens of their citizenship,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Under the UK’s current legal framework, most of the options will now be down to her lawyer. The challenge however is that since she is not in the country that raises a number of questions about the arbitrariness of the decision, her access to justice and due process. It’s an unfair system balanced against her.

“The prospects are not looking great.”

Shiraz Maher, a leading academic and director at the International Centre for Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, also railed against the government’s decision to revoke her citizenship, calling it “racist”.

“I think it’s a very dangerous decision, it does create this perception that there is a two-tier system and a system that’s frankly racist,” Maher told BBC’s Newsnight.

“And this is the perception that occurring in Muslim communities across the country. It’s a dangerous situation the Home Secretary has created,” Maher added.

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If Dems Don’t Buck This Historical Trend, Trump Could Win in 2020

For the past three-and-a-half decades, a glaring paradox has infected the quest for the American presidency. In an age when citizens on both left and right have soured on politics and treated incumbents with thinly veiled contempt, sitting presidents have rarely been booted out of office before their eight years were up. They have survived, despite the raging animus toward incumbents. The only president since 1984 who failed to win a second term has been George H.W. Bush, in 1992.

Why? One significant reason is that opposition parties have generally nominated bad candidates to challenge presidents running for second terms. Of course, incumbents have built-in advantages, including their claims to a growing economy, their use of the Bully Pulpit to pulverize their opponents, and their skill at blaming Congress for stymieing the people’s will. But it’s also true that opposition parties have nominated a string of enfeebled candidates who have greased the re-election path for prior presidents. If Democrats want to have a shot at unseating President Donald Trump in 2020, they should avoid making the same mistakes again.

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Consider the failed presidential challengers since 1984: Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, John Kerry and Mitt Romney. This list shows that, in the modern era, both Republicans and Democrats have tended to prioritize decades of government experience or deep party ties ahead of far more salient characteristics and considerations like youthful energy and fresh ideas. Rather than selecting future-oriented/anti-establishment candidates to carry their party’s banner, opposition parties have tended to nominate politicians next in the cue—leaders who have paid their dues, by raising gobs of money for other partisans, building chits among activists and elected officials and incubating relationships with Iowa and New Hampshire political operatives.

This has been a mistake. Maybe these candidates would have made good, or perhaps even great presidents—and we’ll never know whether better nominees could have ousted the incumbents these candidates challenged—but these candidates were weak. They have all lacked appeal to an electorate that loathes longtime politicians and they were brought down at least in part by defects associated with a stale politics rooted in their parties’ respective pasts. (The electorate might dislike longtime pols, but given a choice between two establishment candidates, one incumbent and one challenger, incumbent advantage wins.) They show us how parties can become ossified, reliant on their longtime leaders, and how primary voters and partisan leaders can blind themselves to the demands of the political moment.

In general elections, voters have tended to punish experienced candidates with records of legislative achievement inside the Beltway. Somewhat perversely, the most deserving, qualified nominees have had a harder time winning than their far less qualified competitors. And in those elections since 1984 when incumbency has been out of the question, and two new candidates have run against another, the forward looking/anti-establishment candidate has won every time with one exception—George H.W. Bush, who in 1988 tore apart Gov. Michael Dukakis as an unpatriotic, soft-on-crime, pro-big-government Massachusetts liberal. (Although Dukakis was ostensibly the anti-establishment candidate in the race, Bush tarred Dukakis with the brush of ‘60s liberalism and pegged him as an establishment throwback to an earlier era.) In 2008, Barack Obama, then a first-term senator, defeated the far more experienced John McCain (in fairness, almost any reasonable Democratic candidate would have prevailed given Bush’s two unpopular wars and the great recession), and in 2016 Donald Trump assailed “stupid” politicians and the infinitely more qualified and knowledgeable nominee Hillary Clinton as emblematic of a “corrupt establishment.”

The converse has also held true when in 1976 and 1980 opposition parties did pick forward looking/anti-establishment nominees who were able to defeat incumbents. In 1976, Jimmy Carter—his slogan was “a leader, for a change”—vowed to “clean up the mess in Washington” and ousted President Gerald Ford, who had taken power after Richard Nixon’s resignation and saved Nixon from possible criminal convictions by pardoning his disgraced predecessor. Four years later, the shoe was on the other foot. Although he had served as California governor for eight years, Ronald Reagan claimed the outsider mantle by pitching himself to voters as “a boy growing up in several small towns in Illinois” who had “seen America from the stadium press box as a sportscaster, as an actor, officer of my labor union, soldier, office-holder, and as both Democrat and Republican.” “I am what I always have been and I intend to remain that way,” he insisted when a reporter asked Reagan if he was repositioning himself in the political center in anticipation of his White House run.

Ultimately, though, the candidates who failed to unseat incumbents since 1984—the bipartisan Mondale-Dole-Kerry-Romney quartet—underscore this anti-establishment dynamic and hold special relevance heading into the Democratic 2020 primary contest. Romney is arguably the most glaring example of how a weak challenger can hobble the opposition party as it seeks to unseat an incumbent. Although Trump has tweaked Romney for having failed to work hard enough in that campaign (a “choke artist,” he called him), Romney’s far deeper problem was that he became the personification of the age of economic inequality—the greedy, win-at-all-costs corporate raider who grew super-rich on the backs of struggling families. The problem was as much his longtime affiliation with the most elitist elements in the Republican Party as it was with Wall Street. Romney had had only limited government experience, serving four years as Massachusetts governor. Still, as the son of former Michigan governor and GOP presidential candidate George Romney, Romney had deep party roots. As the country struggled to rebuild after the Great Recession, Romney seemed someone out of the GOP of yore’s central casting—a 1930s-era titan of capital who helped define the party as pro-industry, anti-worker and dismissive of middle-class Americans. His nomination made it easier for Obama to win re-election by opposing what he said was Romney’s elitist, backward-looking economic approach.

In 1996, Senate Majority leader Dole failed to capture the hearts of the anti-Clinton right, came off as temperamentally cranky, and ran on a noble record of war service in a time after the Cold War had ended when voters prioritized other qualities in their presidents. Above all, Dole was quintessentially a wheeler-dealer, a career legislator and a party man to his core who had scant rationale for what his presidency would mean for most Americans. Lambasting Clinton as morally deficient (“Bozo’s on his way out!,” Dole assured one supporter after an October campaign rally in New Jersey), Dole communicated a bitter sense that Clinton’s moral defects had disqualified him for a second term—the antithesis of hope and change.

Reagan would have been tough to defeat in 1984 no matter whom Democrats had nominated. The economy was beginning to expand after a recession and tensions with the Soviet Union had diminished from the height of Reagan’s bombast and the war scares with the Soviet Union in 1983. Still, Mondale was easily caricatured as an unapologetic liberal with a static vision born of 1960s-big-government activism that voters had at least in part rejected in Reagan’s 1980 victory. Having served as Carter’s vice president and as a senator from Minnesota, Mondale ran on what he described as his government “experience” and his record as “the most active and influential vice president in history.” On Election Day, he carried only his home state and Washington, D.C., in the Electoral College.

Perhaps the strongest of the four challengers in question was Kerry, and he prosecuted the argument that Bush’s occupation of Iraq had failed with ardor. Yet his political experience and legislative record also became an albatross for him. He had served as a senator for decades, had voted for war in Iraq, and Republicans used his antiwar Vietnam activism and his patrician mien and background, a ‘wise man’ knowledgeable on foreign affairs and a symbol of his party’s establishment, to depict Kerry as vaguely anti-American. His career and class played into Bush’s structural advantage in the election as the incumbent commander-in-chief during wartime and made it easier for the Bush campaign to cast Kerry as unprincipled and a candidate of yesterday.

What does any of this recent history reveal about the Democratic Party’s prospects going into 2020? Trump plans to run for re-election by attacking “certain Democrats” and “politicians” who refuse to aid “women and girls…tied up in the back seat of a car or a truck or a van” in what he falsely labeled a immigrant-fueled crime wave, as he argued in his Friday remarks from the Rose Garden declaring a national emergency. Running against Washington may not be as easy for Trump as he wishes it to be. His norm-shattering presidency has squandered one of the advantages incumbents traditionally have enjoyed, as he has failed in his first term to persuade a majority of the public that the president is actually presidential. So it is thus conceivable that a nominee with deep experience—think former Vice President Joe Biden—may well be a safe harbor in a Trump-induced Category 5 storm. It’s not crazy to envision at least some significant slice of the electorate seeking a candidate with policy knowledge, Washington experience and a stable character, bucking the trends of the past four decades.

At the same time, the opposition party’s ignominious record since 1984 should factor in to any assessment of what is shaping up to be the deepest, most diverse crop of Democratic presidential candidates ever. The quartet of failed challengers reminds us that an electorate deeply hostile to Washington politicians will likely look askance at any Democrat whose legislative and political achievements define their quest for the American presidency. Democrats will need someone skilled at tapping people’s frustration with politics, someone credible on the central question of income inequality, someone who can speak to the party’s future rather than someone beholden to its past. Sadly, nominating the most qualified person to be president may squander a chance—perhaps the biggest since 1992—to oust an incumbent president.

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Brexit: Theresa May heads back to Brussels for further talks

British Prime Minister Theresa May is set to return to Brussels on Wednesday in a new effort to re-open the terms of the Brexit divorce deal.

With Britain due to crash out of the European Union without a deal in less than six weeks, May is due to meet European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker but EU officials say they will not restart negotiations.

“I have great respect for Theresa May, for her courage and her assertiveness. We will have a friendly talk tomorrow, but I don’t expect a breakthrough,” Juncker said on Tuesday.

May and the other 27 EU leaders reached a Brexit withdrawal agreement in November but the painstakingly negotiated deal was rejected by the British parliament on January 15.

Since the domestic defeat, May and her team have met with EU officials multiple times in a bid to restart negotiations in search of a deal that the British parliament would support.

May will try again on Wednesday, but on this trip she will not even meet President of the European Council Donald Tusk, who represents the leaders of the EU states.

She will meet with Juncker and Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, who have no mandate from Tusk’s council or EU leaders to renegotiate the deal or modify the Irish backstop clause.

Backstop

The backstop will keep Britain within the EU’s customs union until a way is found to ensure that a hard border is not reintroduced on the island of Ireland.

Brexiteers in May’s Conservative party see the clause as a trap that would keep Britain tied to the union indefinitely and have demanded a time limit or mechanism that would allow it to leave the customs union unilaterally.

But Brussels has consistently rejected such a move, which would be seen as a betrayal of EU-member Ireland.

Britain’s Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt said on Wednesday he is hopeful May’s Brexit deal would win support in the British parliament if the UK and EU could agree changes to the backstop.

“We can get this deal through parliament, if we can have a deal where the attorney general can change his advice to parliament. That is going to be key to unlocking it,” Hunt said in a video clip posted on Twitter.

“With vision and statesmanship on both sides, this can be done and I am hopeful it will be,” Hunt added.

May will meet President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker on Wednesday [Sebastian Gollnow/ DPA via AP]

On Tuesday, the government said that plans to find alternatives to the backstop as a way to avoid a hard Irish border had been dropped for now.

British Finance Minister Philip Hammond said on Tuesday “it is clear that the EU will not consider replacing the backstop with an alternative arrangement now”, adding that the plan should be looked at again during the transition period.

Instead, May is set to ask for legally binding assurances that the backstop will not be extended indefinitely.

British MPs backed May’s approach in a parliamentary vote earlier in February, but EU officials have shown no willingness to re-open the text.

“We cannot accept a time limit to the backstop or a unilateral exit clause,” Juncker’s spokesman Margaritis Schinas told reporters on Tuesday.

May’s spokesperson said the prime minister was “working hard to secure legally binding changes” to the backstop.

“The prime minister believes that she can secure changes in relation to the backstop that MPs want – there is a majority in parliament for a deal.”

If parliament does not approve the deal, then the UK will leave the bloc with no agreement or transition period to manage trade and economic relations.

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Shamima Begum’s family to challenge revoking of UK citizenship

The family of Shamima Begum, one of the three British schoolgirls who left the United Kingdom to live in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) armed group’s so-called caliphate, say they plan to challenge the government’s decision to strip her of her citizenship.

Her family’s lawyer, Tasnime Akunjee, said in a statement that they were considering “all legal avenues”, as a senior MP and a leading academic branded the government’s decision as “dangerous”.

“[Her] family are very disappointed with the Home Office’s intention to have an order made depriving Shamima of her citizenship,” Akunjee said.

“We are considering all legal avenues to challenge this decision”.

Citing government sources, the BBC reported that it was possible to strip the 19-year-old of her UK nationality as she was “eligible for citizenship” of another country.

However, according to reports, while Begum is believed to be of Bangladeshi heritage, she does not have the Asian country’s passport and has never visited there.

International law forbids countries from making people stateless by revoking their only citizenship.

According to barrister David Anderson, who previously served as a reviewer of the UK’s anti-terror legislation: “Those born as British citizens who are not dual nationals cannot be stripped of their citizenship in any circumstances.”

Begum had run away from her home in East London when she was 15 to live in Syria after the ISIL captured vast swaths of territory across Syria and Iraq.

After giving birth this week in a Syrian refugee camp, Begum says she wants to return to the UK for the sake of her newborn.

She had previously given birth to two other children, but both died during her time in Syria.

‘Two-tier system that’s frankly racist’

In an interview with ITV News, she insisted that she was “not a threat”, despite not expressing regret for joining the armed group.

“I’m a 19-year-old girl with a newborn baby,” she said.

Conservative MP George Freeman denounced the government’s decision calling a “mistake”, adding it would set a “dangerous precedent”.

I’m afraid that for various reasons I think today’s decision to strip Miss #Begum of her UK citizenship is a mistake & a dangerous precedent. She was born here, educated here & is our responsibility. We should defend our system & she should be brought back to face the UK courts. pic.twitter.com/1BWYHhQKH7

— George Freeman MP (@GeorgeFreemanMP) February 19, 2019

Shiraz Maher, the director at the International Centre for Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, also railed against the announcement, adding that authorities should consider different steps in Begum’s case.

“I think it’s a very dangerous decision, it does create this perception that there is a two-tier system and a system that’s frankly racist,” Maher told BBC’s Newsnight.

“And this is the perception that occurring in Muslim communities across the country. It’s a dangerous situation the Home Secretary has created,” Maher added.

Asma al-Assad

Activists were also quick to point out that the UK had yet to revoke Asma al-Assad’s citizenship, referring to the British born wife of Syria President Bashar al-Assad who has been implicated in war crimes by the United Nations.

Britain stripping citzenship of a school girl who got sucked in by online ISIS propaganda is nothing shy of political race baiting.

UK hasn’t stripped citzenship of Asma al-Assad, the British born wife of this century’s greatest mass murderer.

Nor Brits who joined IRA.

— CJ Werleman (@cjwerleman) February 20, 2019

Earlier this week, Akunjee, the Begum family lawyer, said that the 19-year-old was being treated less fairly than Nazi war criminals.

“Our politicians are saying that she should be denied protections and due process that would have been granted to Nazis.

“The Nazis had the Nuremberg trials. They were given due process. This girl was a victim when she went out there at 15 years old.”

On Sunday, the United States called on European nations and other countries to repatriate and prosecute their citizens who travelled to Syria to join the ISIL.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) say they have arrested more than 3,200 ISIL fighters in the territory they control in northeastern Syria, with more than 800 believed to be foreign fighters.

In addition to the hundreds of men, the SDF also say they are holding more than 2,200 women and children.

The campaign against the ISIL is currently focussed on Baghuz, a small, remote village in Deir Az Zor province where thousands of civilians are trapped by the armed group.

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Vatican’s first summit on child sex abuse: What to expect

Pope Francis has summoned senior bishops from all over the world to Rome for a landmark meeting on sexual abuse.

From Thursday to Sunday, 190 Catholic leaders, including 10 women, will gather in the Italian capital at the pope’s request; the event marks the first time in history that a pope has called senior bishops to discuss sexual abuse.

Scandals have struck the Catholic Church for decades, with pressure increasing after journalistic and judicial investigations revealed patterns of sexual abuse and cover-ups.

Further cases in 2018 heightened the crisis – some senior bishops have said the issue puts the very credibility of the Catholic Church at stake.

What’s the summit about?

It’s a four-day gathering of about 190 Catholic leaders who will discuss how to resolve the issue of the sexual abuse of minors.

It takes place in the Vatican, in Rome, under the official title of “Protection of Minors in the Church”.

The Vatican’s press office has described the meeting’s goal as making “absolutely clear” to bishops how to act to prevent and deal with sexual abuse.

For survivors who have been around for 25 years, like me, this is an incredible achievement. Years ago, this was inconceivable.

Peter Isely, survivor

It focuses on sharing best practices in dealing with abuse, educating bishops on the problem, and on bolstering transparency, responsibility and accountability in the church. It will not, crucially, focus on canon law reform.

The pope has asked those invited to pray for the coming meeting.

The summit is important for at least three reasons.

First, although similar meetings have taken place in the past, it is the first time that a pope has summoned senior bishops for it.

Second, Pope Francis has given more voice to survivors of clerical sexual abuse – he has met some of them and has urged bishops to do the same in their countries before leaving for Rome. Some survivors will also give their testimony at the summit.

Finally, the Vatican has acknowledged that sexual abuse is a global problem in the church, and not only an issue in some specific countries, as it had previously downplayed it.

Not everyone agrees on the summit’s importance, but most people welcome it as a positive development.

“For survivors who have been around for 25 years, like me, this is an incredible achievement,” says Peter Isely, a survivor, critic of the Vatican and founding member of Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA) Global. “Years ago, this was inconceivable.”

Why is it happening now?

Two cases, in particular, have shaken the Vatican in 2018.

In the United States, the grand jury of the state of Pennsylvania released a report that revealed the sexual abuse and systematic cover-up of more than 1,000 minors over 70 years, implicating some 300 clergymen.

After its release, at least 14 other US states have launched similar investigations, suggesting that more scandals are likely to surface in the next few years.

People hold banners reading ‘Neither lefties nor fools, Osorno suffers, Bishop Barros, accessory after the fact,’ during a protest, as Pope Francis visits Santiago, Chile [File: Carlos Vera/Reuters]

The other incident took place in Chile, where bishops and high prelates have come under pressure for covering up a sexual abuse crisis centred around Fernando Karadima.

While Karadima was sentenced to a “life of prayer and penance” in 2011, his case came back under the spotlight after Pope Francis spoke in support of one of the bishops involved in the cover-up, in early 2018.

Realising the mistake, the pope has since apologised and called the Chilean bishops to Rome. They offered their resignations en-masse, and five of them have been accepted.

Karadima has since been removed from the priesthood.

If the summit turns out to be more of the same, survivors will keep fighting. It’s a tsunami that no one will stop.

Juan Carlos Cruz, survivor

“I believe the Chilean case was decisive [for calling the summit],” says Paolo Rodari, Vatican analyst for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. “It was a big blow for Pope Francis.

“My impression is that the pope realised that not everyone in the church grasps the seriousness of the problem,” he says. “It signals that the pope has understood how serious this is.”

Is the Catholic community supportive?

Almost entirely, although some are not convinced.

Some victims, for example, don’t support the summit because it doesn’t promise canon law reform. They have even called it a media bluff.

“For us, this summit is meaningless,” says Francesco Zanardi, a survivor who has campaigned on the issue for nine years. He is the president of Rete L’Abuso, an Italian association of survivors. “We are only going to Rome to protest.”

Inside the church though, there is little outspoken opposition.

“Everybody in the church is against sexual abuse, that is not the question,” says Rev Thomas Reese, a senior analyst with the Religious News Service.

“The question is that there are bishops, predominantly in the Global South, who don’t think it is a problem in their countries.”

He explains that this happens because scandals haven’t struck all countries, so some bishops feel safe. But this often happens because of social stigma on the sexually abused in certain countries, or because survivors are not encouraged to come out – not because abuses haven’t happened.

What can we expect to happen?

Actually not much, at least for now.

While this might lead to concrete results in the future, it’s unlikely to produce ground-breaking new protocols in the short run.

Pope Francis has warned that expectations around the summit must be “deflated”, and Vatican sources have called it a step in a 15-year journey.

These words have frustrated survivors and activists demanding an immediate end to clerical sexual abuse and cover-ups.

“Expecting a priest who sexually abuses a child and a bishop who covers it up to be removed from the priesthood is not an ‘inflated’ expectation,” says Peter Isely of ECA Global. “It’s a minimum expectation.”

On Monday, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s leading investigator of clerical sexual abuse, confirmed that “this is not going to be a three-day wonder” and stressed the importance of follow-ups on the summit.

What do survivors want?

Survivors demand zero tolerance – that the Vatican remove from the priesthood not only any priest guilty of sexually abusing a child, but also any bishops and cardinals involved in covering him up and shuffling them to other posts.

Other demands include handing over priest offenders to civil authorities and ending alternative punishment such as sentences to a life of “penance and prayer” or retreat in religious institutions instead of jail.

All survivors pledge to carry on their battle. “We’ve lived with a lot of disappointments,” says Peter Isely of ECA Global. “Expectation is not what drives us.”

Juan Carlos Cruz, who is among the people abused by Karadima in Chile and has also met Pope Francis to discuss the problem, said: “[Bishops who deny the problem] are on borrowed time. If the summit turns out to be more of the same, survivors will keep fighting. It’s a tsunami that no one will stop.”

Some interviews were translated from Italian.

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