Friday, November 29, 2024
Musk’s Starlink ordered to cease operations in Namibia
Musk's Starlink ordered to cease operations in Namibia
Starlink, the satellite unit of SpaceX, operates in several African countries but has faced regulatory challenges in others and resistance from state telecom monopolies.
Starlink has submitted an application for a telecommunications service license in Namibia, however the regulator has not issued the license as the application is under review.
"Following an investigation, CRAN has established that Starlink is operating a network within Namibia without the required telecommunications license," CRAN said in a statement.
"On 26 November 2024, the Authority issued a cease-and-desist order to Starlink, instructing the company to immediately cease all operations in Namibia."
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The regulator also advised the public not to purchase Starlink terminal equipment or subscribe to its services, as such activities are illegal in Namibia.
Its investigators have already confiscated illegal terminals from consumers and have opened criminal cases with the Namibian Police in this regard, it added.
Earlier this year, Cameroon ordered the seizure of Starlink equipment at ports as it was not licensed.”
(Reporting by Nqobile Dludla; Editing by Rod Nickel)
Texas is gearing up in a big way for Trump’s mass deportation campaign - The Washington Post
Texas is gearing up in a big way for Trump’s mass deportation campaign
"The state’s Republican leaders say they’re primed for Texas to be both the model and epicenter as the incoming administration cracks down on immigration.
EAGLE PASS, Texas — While Donald Trump’s opponents denounce the president-elect’s planned “mass deportations” and border crackdown, this state’s Republican leaders are vying to make Texas the launching pad.
Gov. Greg Abbott and other top officials have spent the past four years positioning themselves as the Biden administration’s greatest antagonists — and heirs to the border enforcement campaign begun by the last Trump administration. Despite having no constitutional authority on immigration enforcement, they have used tools of the state to dramatically escalate anti-immigrant policy and legislation locally while steering a similar narrative nationally.
Among their moves: pumping $11 billion into Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border enforcement, busing migrants to distant states and targeting organizations that advocate for them. All marked a clear departure from the “compassionate conservatism” of a Texas GOP that once granted in-state tuition to undocumented students and resettled thousands of refugees.
And Trump’s imminent return to the White House gives the state powerful leverage.
“The leadership of Texas is trying to create a model for the federal government that is exceptionally tough and exceptionally cruel to immigrants,” said Daniel Hatoum, senior supervising attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project. “Texas is more than willing to let the Trump administration co-opt its institutions for immigration enforcement.”
That was the core of Abbott’s message during a joint appearance Tuesday with Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, an event held at a state military base on the border in Eagle Pass. The small city about 145 miles southwest of San Antonio became the front linelast year in the governor’s battle with the federal government over the “invasion,” as he called it, by record numbers of migrants.
“There is a change afoot as we speak right now,” the governor told scores of Texas National Guard troops and law enforcement assembled for a Thanksgiving meal. State officials are already conferring with Trump’s transition deputies about border security, he noted — on “actions, planning, preparation, schematics.”
Since the Nov. 5 election, state leaders have suggested they could reduce funding for border security, especially if the federal government takes over. On Tuesday, however, Abbott and Homan talked about working together to ramp up, not scale back.
Once Trump takes office, Abbott said, “we’re going to be doing more and faster than anything that’s ever been done to regain control of our border, restore order in our communities and also identify, locate and deport criminals in the United States of America who have come across the border.”
Homan, Trump’s former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, praised Operation Lone Star and its “unprecedented success in Texas.” The state’s approach, he said, is one that could be replicated as the next administration pursues mass deportations. “This is a model we can take across the country.”
Whether that administration will start reimbursing Texas wasn’t addressed. Abbott has requested $2.88 billion more for special border operations when the legislature reconvenes in January. Homan acknowledged the hefty price tag.
“It’s a shame the taxpayers of Texas had to spend billions of dollars to do the job [the Biden administration] failed to do,” he said.
Incoming "border czar" Tom Homan served a thanksgiving meal at the forward operating base in Eagle Pass, Tex. on Nov. 26. (Video: Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)
To the east in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham was making a separate overture Tuesday, standing in front of a stretch of the 51 miles of border wall that Texas has built without any federal assistance.
She announced the creation of “the Jocelyn Initiative,” named after a 12-year-old Houston girl killed earlier this year, allegedly by men from Venezuela who crossed the border illegally. The initiative, Buckingham said, would offer more than 1,400 acres of state-owned land to accelerate the deportation of “criminal illegal immigrants.”
“I will do everything in my power to help this administration,” she said. “Should you need land for a facility elsewhere in the state for the deportation of violent criminals, my office has identified several of our properties and is standing by, ready to make this happen on day one of his presidency.”
Indeed, Texas has ample land, detention space and resources to house and process immigrants. Yet its robust state economy relies heavily on undocumented labor, especially in the booming construction, agriculture and service industries. Abbott and other top Republicans here have not addressed the hit those could take. (Only California, a blue state inclined to fight the next Trump administration, has more undocumented immigrants.)
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, expects Texas to be the epicenter of the federal action and threatened mass deportations for several reasons.
“It’s not just recent border crossers. It’s people who have come in the past four years, and a lot of them are in Texas,” he said. Logistics will be a consideration, too. For Mexican and South American migrants rounded up elsewhere in the country, “South Texas is closer to where you’re sending people back to.”
Then there’s the political factor. Texas is the sole border state with a Republican governor and Republicans controlling the legislature and every major state office. When it comes to ensuring Trump’s enforcement efforts are not blocked locally, “having a cooperative state can matter,” Krikorian noted.
During past border buildups, seen in the family separations of the last Trump administration or family detentions under President Barack Obama, federal officials in Texas were able to quickly erect massive facilities for temporarily holding and processing people. They encountered little resistance.
“It’s a lot easier to unlock and dust off facilities that are already there,” Krikorian said.
In 2021, frustrated by what he considered President Joe Biden’s failure to secure the border, Abbott declared the situation a disaster. That allowed him to circumvent environmental and other state rules while loosening state purse strings to launch Operation Lone Star.
The undertaking blanketed the border with Texas National Guard troopers, law enforcement, concertina wire and other barriers. It also paid to bus nearly 120,000 asylum seekers and migrants from border communities like Eagle Pass and Del Rio to major Democratic-led cities, which struggled to meet the newcomers’ needs.
Texas created its own criminal justice apparatus for migrants charged under state laws, erected processing centers, cleared space to detain thousands of people in three state prisons — 232 were being held this week — and then prosecuted and deported them. The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas asked the Justice Department to investigate and sued last year on behalf of several migrants they alleged had been illegally held in prolonged detention.
“Operation Lone Star has been a civil rights disaster,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said Monday. “It’s basically a workaround to set up their own border system.”
Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton repeatedly sued to block Biden’s immigration policies. Paxton, a Trump ally, also sought to criminalize and strip the nonprofit status of immigrant advocacy organizations all along the state’s more than 1,200-mile border, even as an increasingly hard-line legislature passed measures empowering local law enforcement to arrest, detain and, with a court order, help deport anyone suspected of being in the country illegally.
Earlier this year, Abbott issued an executive order directing public hospitals to question patients about their immigration status, plus track and report the cost of treating those in the country illegally. The next legislative session is set to consider measures that would direct law enforcement to fingerprint undocumented children and track them in a database, potentially restricting their access to public schools despite long-standing legal precedent.
“We’ve been trying to raise a red flag here for years in Texas about what’s been happening,” said state Rep. Victoria Neave Criado, a Dallas Democrat who has chaired the Mexican American Legislative Caucus. “Militarizing the border, fearmongering and creating chaos in these communities doesn’t make Texas safer.”
Nowhere has the force of the border crackdown been felt more than in Eagle Pass, where state forces built their base and took over the city’s prized riverfront park. Texas officials restricted federal access to the Rio Grande, lining the riverbanks with razor wire and barrier buoys. When federal agents cut the wire, the state fought them in court. On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit limited the Biden administration’s authority to destroy the wire but also required Texas to grant agents access to the park.
Taxpayer dollars have gone to contractors who built the state base, Camp Eagle, and soldiers continue to patrol despite a precipitous decline in crossings following the Biden administration’s moves to restrict asylum and Mexico’s stepped-up enforcement.
State Rep. Eddie Morales, a moderate Democrat representing the area, initially supported Operation Lone Star but now worries that the governor is taking it too far, funneling money to favored contractors without sufficient checks and balances.
“We can’t spend our way to a solution,” Morales said.
Residents have watched the state tighten its grip here.
“Our park was the heart of Eagle Pass, and they took it away from us,” said Amerika Garcia Grewal. “We didn’t have any choice in the matter. They said it was ‘for our protection’ and tried to brainwash the community.”
Garcia Grewal, who holds a monthly vigil for migrants who die crossing the border, said Texas officials have figured out how to monetize pain by using her community as their laboratory.
“The cruelty is the point,” she said, “and they are making money off of it.”
Millions of Dollars to Protect Pandas Was Spent by China on Roads and Buildings - The New York Times
U.S. Zoos Gave a Fortune to Protect Pandas. That’s Not How China Spent It.
"A Times investigation found that zoos knew conservation money went toward apartment buildings and roads. But they wanted to keep displaying pandas, so nobody looked too closely.
Mara Hvistendahl reviewed 10,000 pages of documents and interviewed dozens of current and former zoo employees. She reported from Washington and from Sichuan Province, in southwestern China.
For decades, American zoos have raised tens of millions of dollars from donors and sent the money to China for the right to host and display pandas. Under U.S. law, those funds were required to be spent protecting pandas in the wild.
But the Chinese government instead spent millions on apartment buildings, roads, computers, museums and other expenses, records show. For years, China refused even to account for millions more.
Regulators with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the payments, have for two decades raised concerns about this with American zoo administrators and Chinese officials alike. The U.S. government, on three occasions, froze payments to China over incomplete record keeping, documents show.
Zoos, too, have known that the money was not always going toward conservation. But they worried that if Fish and Wildlife cut off the money altogether, China could demand the return of its bears. Zoos count on pandas for visitors, merchandise sales and media attention.
Ultimately, the regulators allowed the money to keep flowing and agreed not to check the spending in China so thoroughly, according to records and former officials.
“There was always pushing back and forth about how the U.S. shouldn’t ask anything,” said Kenneth Stansell, a former Fish and Wildlife official who traveled to China throughout the 2000s to discuss pandas. He said his Chinese counterparts argued that “it shouldn’t be of any concern to the U.S. government.”
None of this has been revealed to the public.
Where Did The Money Go?
Zoos in the United States pay about $1 million a year to get pairs of pandas from China, an arrangement that regulators allow under a provision of the Endangered Species Act. Animal-rights groups have sued over similar payments for elephants, rhinos and tigers, saying that regulators were distorting the spirit of the law.
Pandas have so far escaped such scrutiny.
Panda rentals have been touted as a major conservation success. But a New York Times investigation found that what the program has done best is breed more pandas for zoos. And the conservation money at the heart of the program has been spent in ways that zoos do not reveal when fund-raising.
The Times used two decades of financial reports, internal correspondence, photos and archival records to track more than $86 million from American zoos to a pair of organizations run by the Chinese government. Zoos elsewhere in the world have contributed tens of millions of dollars more. In wildlife conservation, that is a huge sum, far larger than what zoos have spent in overseas donations for any other species.
Zoos approve which projects get financed and then list them in annual reports to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Those records show that funds were allocated to build apartment buildings far from nature reserves. China also bought computers and satellite television for local government offices and built at least three museums with the money, according to the records.
And American money helped transform a panda breeding center in western China into a bustling attraction that, according to an architect’s plans, may soon welcome as many visitors as Disneyland.
Those payments represent only what was documented. Zoo administrators have at times struggled to persuade their Chinese partners to disclose the spending.
“You had to take their word,” said David Towne, who until 2016 was the director of a foundation representing American zoos with pandas. “China felt it was not our business — that we got the pandas, and we shouldn’t tell them how to spend the money.”
Early agreements gave zoos the right to verify funding on the ground. But contracts signed recently by the National Zoo in Washington and by the San Diego Zoo make no mention of checking how money is spent.
American zoo administrators have acknowledged, in letters to regulators, that the numbers do not always add up.
Zoos in Europe, which also rent pandas, reached a similar conclusion. At Edinburgh Zoo, where two pandas lived until last year, an administrator said in 2021 that its money couldn’t be tracked because “the funds from all zoos are pooled,” according to meeting minutes. As a result, the Scottish zoo could not identify any “specific works, projects or outcomes” that it had funded.
This has been a problem for decades. When Fish and Wildlife officials asked Memphis Zoo in 2007 to identify which Chinese areas would benefit from $875,000 allocated for panda monitoring, the zoo had no answer. It wrote in an annual report that its Chinese partner had provided “NO ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.”
In a statement to The Times, the zoo acknowledged problems.
“Memphis Zoo was not able to control the funding that was sent to China as, once it was there, it was no longer in the hands of Memphis Zoo officials,” the statement said. “And there was not always information provided regarding the funding once in China.”
Melissa Songer, a conservation biologist at the National Zoo, which recently welcomed two new pandas, said that China had put donor money to good use. “They have done so much in terms of setting aside protection and doing all the right things — stopping logging, investing,” she said. “And part of that money is coming from zoos around the world.”
The National Zoo did not answer written questions about funding. The San Diego Zoo declined to comment. China’s national forestry bureau and its zoo association, which together oversee panda exchanges, also did not respond to questions.
China has indeed expanded its network of nature reserves, and some American money was allocated for patrol trucks, small ranger stations, equipment and other items needed to protect land, records show. Mr. Stansell, the former regulator, said that, on visits to China, he did see some conservation projects. And Mr. Towne, the former panda foundation director, said that, even in the absence of hard evidence, he saw signs of progress, including more professional staff working in the reserves.
But pandas live on only a portion of that land, and their habitat is shrinking. China has built roads and developed tourism in and around nature reserves, piercing the natural habitat and leaving pandas isolated in ever-smaller populations, Chinese and American scientists have concluded.
Their report estimated that wild pandas have less territory to roam than they did in the 1980s, before the influx of funds from foreign zoos.
“It’s in everybody’s interest to portray these conservation efforts as great successes,” said Kimberly Terrell, who traveled to China while working as director of conservation at Memphis Zoo.
“There was never any real evaluation of the programs,” she added. “In some cases, it was really hard to see the connection between those programs and giant panda conservation.”
(Dr. Terrell, now a scientist at Tulane University in Louisiana, settled an unrelated gender discrimination lawsuit against the zoo in 2018.)
The Fish and Wildlife Service said it takes federal law “very seriously” and requires “sufficiently detailed financial accounting data” from zoos with pandas.
Dan Ashe, the agency’s former director, called the funding disagreement between China and the United States “a technical matter.” Mr. Ashe said that he had approved new reporting standards to maintain a program that he felt significantly benefited conservation. “We had to come up with a solution,” he said.
Mr. Ashe now heads the industry association for American zoos.
A Secret Compromise
In 2010, Mr. Ashe led a delegation of senior American wildlife officials to China for a high-stakes meeting.
The panda-rental program was on the verge of falling apart, records show. If he could not reach an agreement with his Chinese counterparts, pandas in Atlanta, Memphis, San Diego, and Washington might have to return to China.
The program’s finances had been rocky from the start.
Early money had gone to what Zoo Atlanta called a “drastic expansion and construction” of a panda breeding center in Chengdu, western China. Millions more went toward infrastructure in and around nature reserves, including roads, buildings, and water hookups — money that regulators questioned. One National Zoo project, a mixed-use building with apartments and office space, was 30 miles from a nature reserve.
“While we understand the need for establishment of an infrastructure in China, we feel strongly that construction of facilities alone will not accomplish the goal of enhancing the survival of pandas in the wild,” regulators at the Fish and Wildlife Service wrote to the National Zoo.
The zoo industry pushed back. “Conservation activities in the wild cannot occur if the infrastructure does not exist,” the industry group currently headed by Mr. Ashe, now called the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, responded.
The Fish and Wildlife Service ultimately approved most of the funds.
Then, in 2003, regulators froze money to China because of a lack of documentation, records show. But they soon gave in to Chinese demands for less detailed reporting.
“The service thought that was a reasonable way to move forward to keep the program going,” Mr. Stansell, the former agency official, said.
Back and forth it went for years, with the Chinese groups sometimes withholding information or spending money on projects with only loose connections to conservation, and American regulators periodically freezing funds.
Zoo Atlanta submitted a funding proposal for a 27,000-square-foot building, 48 sets of office furniture and 50 miles of road, along with computers and a copy machine, for “nature reserve infrastructure projects” in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu, records show. Zoo Atlanta declined to comment, saying it did not have information on old projects.
So, when Fish and Wildlife officials landed in Beijing in 2010, years of money issues were coming to a head. The Chinese groups had stopped reporting their spending altogether, and the American regulators had frozen $12 million in payments over two years, according to internal National Zoo documents.
The zoo’s employees acknowledged that they couldn’t verify spending and fretted about losing their pandas. “The goal is to find a compromise,” they wrote.
“This is a good opportunity to ‘update’ the process,” another document read.
The zoos disclosed none of this publicly. “All of that money goes back into conservation research in China,” Don Moore, a National Zoo administrator, told ABC News that year, even as the zoo’s payments were frozen.
Ultimately, the zoos got the compromise they wanted. Fish and Wildlife regulators agreed to reduce oversight. Going forward, zoos could approve Chinese funding proposals directly, rather than sending them to the agency for review, Mr. Ashe said in an interview.
“What it did was put the accountability in the right place,” he said. The zoos are “accountable to demonstrate that they are reporting significant and meritorious conservation projects, not the Chinese.”
Panda Disneyland
Even with more lax reporting requirements, problems persisted.
Three of the zoos paid for office equipment for local government forestry bureaus.
Other money went to captive pandas, rather than to pandas in the wild. Memphis Zoo earmarked hundreds of thousands of dollars for animal enclosures, bamboo and veterinary facilities at Shanghai Zoo.
In 2017, a Chinese government group failed to show how the San Diego Zoo’s money had been spent, records show. In a letter to regulators, the zoo blamed a change in leadership at China’s national forestry bureau.
Animal-rights groups and scholars say that the heart of the problem is lax enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.
“It’s really alarming that they’re approving these things in the first place,” said Delcianna Winders, an animal-law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “And then there’s no follow-up to track that the money is actually going to what it’s supposed to be going to.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service said that the donations were “an important tool to support conservation of endangered and threatened species.”
American zoos continue to advertise that they are saving a species in the wild. But in western China, where the wild panda ecosystem is more fragmented than ever, panda tourism is booming.
The Chengdu breeding center, which American zoos helped renovate two decades ago, now has 11 million visitors a year and its own IMAX theater. It is a zoo in its own right, one that controls a third of the world’s pandas. The campus is so large that tourists take shuttle buses from one end to the next.
On a visit in August, visitors thronged through the gate at 7 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the pandas before they retreated to air-conditioned enclosures.
The center is planning a satellite facility, its second. When complete, the complex expects to host 20 million annual visitors, more than Disneyland, according to an architecture firm’s plan.
The development is part of a larger Chengdu tourism push that includes new resorts and an international panda festival. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua said the goal was to “fully tap the brand value, cultural value and economic value of the giant panda.”
Joy Dong and Eve Sampson contributed reporting. James Lambert, Dylan Freedman, Kirsten Noyes and Muyi Xiao contributed research."
Opinion | Four Opinion Writers Visit Oz and Ask: Who’s Really ‘Wicked’? - The New York Times
Four Opinion Writers Visit Oz and Ask: Who’s Really ‘Wicked’?
"Maureen Dowd, Patrick Healy, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Lydia Polgreen
Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists Maureen Dowd, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Lydia Polgreen about the new movie “Wicked.”
Patrick Healy: I have a confession to make. While I love “The Wizard of Oz” and I love theater, I was never interested in the Broadway musical “Wicked.” I’d assumed it was for teenage girls, and saw it only because of my job (when I was The Times theater reporter). I remember enjoying its two biggest songs, “Defying Gravity” and “Popular.” But I didn’t feel very invested in the two main characters: Elphaba, who later becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and her frenemy, Glinda. So I am genuinely surprised to report that the new movie “Wicked” melted me. I was swept up in Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba and found myself crying almost every time her character cried. I felt righteous anger when Elphaba fought against a roundup of talking animals by the authorities and rescued a scared lion cub locked in a cage. A big-budget “Wicked” movie with a strong antifascist message? I did not expect that. What surprised you most about your experience with the movie?
Lydia Polgreen: I came to “Wicked” completely cold. “The Wizard of Oz” was not part of my childhood, nor was musical theater. My knowledge of the Oz story is entirely shaped by my wife’s exuberant enthusiasm for “The Wiz.” When Patrick asked me to join this conversation, I decided not to read or watch anything about the musical or movie and thereby play the straight man, as it were. So I had low expectations: Why would I be drawn in by a back story to a classic tale that never resonated for me?
I guess my surprise was mostly that … I loved this movie? It is a sly illustration of one of my favorite modes of creativity: using one form of art to remake and redefine an existing one. The perfect musical version of this for me prior to seeing “Wicked” was “Fun Home,” the wondrous Alison Bechdel graphic memoir-turned-musical. Musical theater does seem to be an ideal medium for such reinterpretations, and this is a particularly impressive one.
Maureen Dowd: I agree, Lydia, about flipping the script on classics. They’ve done this for a long time with monsters. John Gardner’s “Grendel” from 1971, took the “Beowulf” story from the monster’s point of view. “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys took “Jane Eyre” from the point of view of the Creole heiress who married Mr. Rochester and became “the madwoman in the attic.” And sometimes, it’s not a monster but a marginalized character. Percival Everett just won the National Book Award for “James,” reimagining the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of the enslaved character Jim. Then there’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” by Tom Stoppard.
“Hamilton” arguably does to the American Revolution and the early Republic what “Wicked” does to “The Wizard of Oz,” decentering the traditional protagonists — Dorothy must move aside, as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson must — and retelling the story beat by beat through a peripheral character, making that character more sympathetic. Both these musicals reorient famous American narratives with an eye toward 21st century identity politics.
Healy: “Hamilton” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” are my high-water marks for flipping the script in theater, Maureen. But “Wicked” drew me in like few revisionist tales have onscreen. It’s a good commentary on who we turn into monsters and heroes, and does so as grand entertainment. Tressie, you saw the stage musical of “Wicked” just last summer — how did the movie version land for you?
Tressie McMillan Cottom: The film is phenomenal. Its power comes from the comfort of a familiar moral trope: The Outsider becomes the Hero in an epic tale. Humanity has loved that story since we started storytelling around a fire. “Wicked” is an allegory for difference, and a pretty straightforward embrace of one of the feminism waves — third, maybe? It’s pro-female rage but with a lot of apologies for traditional femininity.
The story line about fascism and oppression was always there in the different “Wicked” versions. But a couple of things make that story line stand out in the film. First, casting the absolutely phenomenal Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba makes the story’s heavy-handed, but indirect message, about racism obvious. She is Black, which is like being Green. I am surprised by how many people apparently missed that note in the story’s 20-year run. Erivo’s casting takes away any pretext. That allows the authoritarianism critique to shine a bit more.
And second, we see the movie meaning that we need to see. Everyone in my world is still deeply distraught about the election. The election turned on propaganda about power and scapegoating of women and feminism. Frankly, we see the anti-fascism message clearly because we see fascism so clearly in our everyday lives.
Dowd: The movie was OK. It was preferable to watching the Sunday news shows. But Erivo was amazing. She’s such a good actress, she could act with her fingernails, like Barbra Streisand! Erivo’s manicurist said they wanted those nails as a nod to Black culture and because they were part of her magic.
Polgreen: I could not agree more about Erivo’s performance. I first saw her on Broadway as Celie in “The Color Purple,” and her performance of “I’m Here” is still a go-to when I feel like having a good cry. Just an extraordinary performer who can work in so many emotional registers, and my lord, the pipes on that one.
Cottom: Lydia, I could watch Erivo perform the phone book. She interprets songs like a blues woman. It is a real gift.
Healy: Early in the movie, Glinda refers to Elphaba’s green skin as a “problem.” As Tressie mentioned, race and identity are subtext in “Wicked,” but the movie makes things more explicit by casting a Black actress, Erivo, as Elphaba. I went into the movie wondering if that casting would make the movie feel heavy-handed — like a woke “Wicked” — but Erivo’s mixture of resilience and vulnerability knocked that thought out of my head. Elphaba takes pride in who she is. I’m curious how you saw the treatment of identity in “Wicked.”
Cottom: So, “Wicked” in all its forms has always been a “woke” story — if I’m to accept the pejorative of the term from my ideological contrarians. It is a story that champions the marginalized, moralizes about our politics about difference, and makes it palatable for the masses. The only way to un-woke this movie is to have made something other than “Wicked.”
Casting Erivo and fading to her non-green skin in one early moment of the film seemed like a way to move beyond race as quickly as possible. I took it as a nod to racial pride and not wanting to have a Black actress spend more than two hours hating being Black. James Brown did not shout “I’m Black and I’m proud” in 1968 for us to still be tap dancing about racial shame in 2024. That’s a good move.
The identity politics of the film are arguably more about gender and liberalism. The long history of persecuting witches has been tied to political campaigns to acquire land, own the labor of workers and control women’s economic freedom. When Elphaba goes to Oz, the Wizard is a stand-in for that history. He basically proposes a gentrification plan for Oz! And he needs Elphaba’s labor, or magic, to achieve it. The gender politics don’t get more obvious than that. I thought about Silvia Federici’s classic book “Caliban and the Witch” throughout the movie.
Polgreen: Knowing nothing about this musical, I had assumed (wrongly, it turns out!) that the character of Elphaba had always been Black. Now I understand that green is a metaphor for difference, and I think there is something interesting in casting a Black actress. Given how Elphaba’s green skin is so explicitly rendered as a revolting form of difference, it has such power — especially in this Ozian world where Black-white prejudice does not appear to exist.
Cottom: There is a very sly critique of liberalism in the film’s characterization of Glinda. She is obsessed with being seen as good, but she frequently passes on chances to act in ways that would better people’s lives. Bowen Yang’s character in “Wicked” does these great “yasss girl” ad-libs that link Glinda’s behavior to the way white liberal feminism shows up in the world, more obsessed with status than change. Being “good” is morally vacuous, like Glinda, if you don’t do anything that matters.
Dowd: “Wicked” is about gender in parts, using old tropes in the plot: the women competing for a man, a prince no less! And a makeover to be more attractive and popular! But in other ways, the moral of the story is genderless. You can’t judge a book by its cover. All that glistens is not gold. The anthem, “Defying Gravity,” emphasizes the centrality of this as a story about “the other.” Marginalized groups have to leap over more hurdles to fly higher. The ultimate lesson of the movie is for everyone: Almost nobody is as good or bad as they seem. And the question the movie asks is: “Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”
Healy: Maureen, say more about this — how our culture and politics often build stories and narratives about women being good or being wicked, as if those two caricatures and extremes are all there is?
Dowd: Women get typecast by men into the “Madonna-whore complex,” perceiving them as either pure or wicked. The Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene. My older brother used to refer to “Wednesday night girls” and “Saturday night girls.” In old movies, like “Waterloo Bridge,” prostitutes had to die by the last reel. At least, in “Pretty Woman,” Julia Roberts could be carried off by Richard Gere, so there has been some progress.
But at the dawn of feminism, I naïvely thought we would move beyond catfight tropes. They’re bigger than ever, with “The Real Housewives” and “The Bachelor” franchises. Hollywood loves its vixens, and it loves frenemy stories. “Wicked” preaches that women are not monochromatic.
Cottom: I always thought that “Wicked” mixed some contradictory feminist messages in its story. Those contradictions are even more obvious in the film. Something about the scale of the production and the significant gap in performance between Ariana Grande’s Glinda and Erivo’s Elphaba made them really clear. These characters are mirror images. In one big music number, they literally pantomime each other. Erivo’s power comes from her rage, which she spends a lot of time struggling to control. Glinda’s power comes only from soft power — by manipulating how others see her. But I like female rage. I don’t want it tempered with social graces. I want Elphaba to burn down whatever she wants, including Glinda if she gets in her way. Women deserve rage. We have a lot to be angry about.
Polgreen: It’s funny, to me this movie just seemed so … queer? I guess that says more about me than anyone else, but there is something about the hothouse of same-sex environments (like Glinda’s super-girly dorm room) that will always read as charged with queerness. I joked to my wife that this was the second queerest film I’d seen this year, after “Conclave,” which we had seen a week or so earlier, coincidentally, in exactly the same theater in our local multiplex. But I think that the charged rivalry and the combination of repulsion and attraction of young female friendships is especially ripe territory in that regard.
Cottom: YES, LYDIA! SO QUEER! I would love Yang’s character version of femininity to intersect Glinda and Elphaba’s for a fun and critically-engaging take on what gender even means.
Healy: Can fairy tales change hearts and minds anymore, in this age of media oversaturation and political polarization?
Dowd: I think everything is more powerful with a mythic underlay. Hollywood has done this for a long time. “Ball of Fire,” a 1941 movie with Barbara Stanwyck, offered Stanwyck as Sugarpuss O’Shea — a gangster’s moll hiding with a group of professors, a spin on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” “Wicked” has a couple of the seven basic plots: the Quest, where you find buried treasure (Elphaba reading the Grimmerie), and it’s also the Voyage and Return, where the hero, or heroine, journeys to an unfamiliar place and encounters a lot of wonders, tests and temptations — like the “Odyssey.”
Polgreen: Maureen’s invocation of the “Odyssey” reminds me that one of my favorite allegorical films based on a myth about a journey, “The Warriors,” might be remade as a musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, no less. It is a perfect movie, so I wish him luck, and can’t wait to regroup with you all to talk about it.
One of the most powerful things about fairy tales is their ability to receive multiple meanings and interpretations. “Wicked” could be seen as an allegory for either side in our current culture war. Both sides think they are courageous truth tellers who are being oppressed by the powerful. So an anti-woke activist could see themselves in Elphaba’s battle for justice and truth against a would-be totalitarian just as easily as the reverse. Galinda’s transformation into Glinda as a tribute to the maligned professor she had never cared for makes for a sly critique of a kind of unreflective woke-ism. It is notable that this movie largely takes place in a university setting, the bloodiest battleground of our culture wars! And as Tressie noted, the Bowen Yang character seems tailor-made to puncture empty liberal pieties.
Cottom: The university setting is great, Lydia. That clearly put it in my wheelhouse. I never watched all of the Harry Potter movies (or read the books) but a fantasy set at a boarding school or college town comes with inherent politics. All college towns are liberal bubbles to the extent that college life is one of the few places where Americans experience some kind of social safety net. That it takes the bubble to tell a story about power and difference says something about us. We want to have these fights about identity and power through college campuses because those campuses represent a lot of American contradictions about social mobility, belonging and citizenship.
Polgreen: I wonder if, like “The Matrix,” this movie could be read by different audiences as an allegory that flatters their priors? The creators of that film, the Wachowski siblings, came out as transgender years ago. Lilly Wachowski has said publicly that it is a trans allegory, but that doesn’t change the fact that being “red pilled” is used most commonly these days as a synonym for conversion to a right wing point of view.
Healy: We’re seeing some divisions appear now on “Wicked,” Lydia, with some members of the MAGA movement dismissing the movie as if it’s an attack on them. The film has a pretty strong antifascist message, with the diabolical leader plotting to scare people and rally them together against a common “enemy,” and the roundup and arrests of opponents; the way that characters are cowed by authorities into silence; and the desire by authorities to spy on Ozians.
Dowd: Remarkably, some people on TikTok are comparing Elphaba to Donald Trump, saying that the green-faced girl is like the orange-faced man because she too is a victim of the Deep State (Jeff Goldblum in green boots). Most people, of course, will see shades of Trump in the Wizard, a con man with authoritarian tendencies who is set on uniting people against a common enemy. (“You’re not being told the whole story!”) The “Glicked” weekend echoes the election in tone — male vs. female — and a big gender gap. On opening night, according to The Ankler substack, the “Wicked” audience was 72 percent women and 28 percent men. The “Gladiator II” audience was about 61 percent male and 39 percent female.
Polgreen: Wow, Maureen — that is fascinating. And the Green/Orange thing is kind of perfect. At the end of the day a big part of MAGA culture is seeing liberals/the left as the REAL fascists. I do think that the story lends itself to a kind of ideological flexibility. It is human nature to imagine the choices we make to be the good and right ones, and to see ourselves as aligned with the hero. But to the movie’s credit, it doesn’t let either character stand in completely for good or bad, strong or weak. We need to understand where they both came from to understand how they ended up where they are.
Healy: Aside from Erivo, my M.V.P. award is split between Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, for bringing the humor while looking dreamy, and Peter Dinklage as the voice of the talking goat, Dr. Dillamond, whose tone of fury and despair was just right. You?
Dowd: I kept thinking Jonathan Bailey must be Rupert Everett’s son. He was appealing, but you didn’t care if his prince carried away either of the girls. I am in love with Peter Dinklage; he really is the GOAT.
Cottom: Patrick, I want Jonathan Bailey to play every prince. His Fiyero is delightful. He embraces himbo the way Ryan Gosling embraced Ken in the Barbie movie. I’m on record as a fan but Bailey is also delightful in “Bridgerton.” He is beyond delightful in the British comedy “Chewing Gum.” Have I mentioned that Jonathan Bailey is just delightful? His infectious energy even pepped up Grande’s Glinda at one point.
Polgreen: I loved Peter Dinklage as Dillamond. It was an interesting choice to make the Munchkins into people of slightly smaller stature rather than casting people with dwarfism, and it has, perhaps unsurprisingly, engendered some controversy.
Healy: The other lead, Ariana Grande, was an engaging Glinda for me, but her big number, “Popular,” wasn’t a home run in my book. There was a lot of directorial and set-design busyness that kept the song from building in power for me. How did you all feel about Grande?
Cottom: I am going to get pilloried for this but it has to be done.
Healy: Pouring my tea now.
Cottom: Grande’s Glinda was technically perfect and emotionally void. I don’t subscribe to that “never talk about bodies” philosophy. When bodies reflect politics in our culture, ignoring them is unproductive. It is fine to talk about bodies humanely but critically. The internet is abuzz with people commenting on how thin Grande is in this film. We are in the midst of a cultural reclamation of the ideal female body that is suitable for our conservative/authoritarian politics. Our politics are back to projecting thin, pale, weak bodies. Ideally, blonde, but that is occasionally negotiable. Being thin is never negotiable. This is a family movie, popular with girls and women. They’re seeing a body politics of gauntness in this film. It shouldn’t be ignored. Glinda’s physical frailty undermines the message of her idealized wholesomeness.
Healy: No question she is meant to convey an Ozian (if not American) beauty ideal. But I saw Grande as athletic more than frail, actually, carrying many of the dance numbers.
Cottom: Athletic! We will agree to disagree, Patrick.
Dowd: I agree with Tressie. She didn’t bring a sassy or satirical edge to the Dumb Blonde trope. (She was no Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday” or Lesley Ann Warren in “Victor/Victoria.”)
Cottom: Maureen, I would have settled for Elle from “Legally Blonde.” Anything to bring her Glinda to life.
Dowd: Elle Woods’s energy would have been perfect!
Polgreen: It feels a little unfair that Grande had to play opposite a powerhouse and future EGOT like Erivo. She was … fine? But this is no Kristin Chenoweth/Idina Menzel matchup (see, I’m learning!). I wonder how Lady Gaga might have done in this role?
Healy: I think Gaga would have pulled our attention too much as Glinda, and probably wouldn’t nail the perfect-pixie element like Grande did. What made Chenoweth so special was that she had a cutting edge as Glinda that she wasn’t afraid to show — her Glinda seemed in on the joke that this good-girl act was an act. I didn’t get that self-awareness from Grande, but I suspect that’s probably how she was directed to perform in the best-friend role.
Dowd: Grande must have known what was up by the time she was entered for the Oscars as Best Supporting Actress and Erivo was entered for Best Actress. Bad day for blondes!!
Cottom: Maureen, it’s never a bad day for blondes. Grande following Chenoweth’s iconic performance couldn’t have been easy. It is strange because Grande’s public persona has a lot of zany humor. She is funny on “Saturday Night Live,” for instance. I also wondered about how she was directed to play Glinda. Just playing a version of her own public persona would have been a better choice.
Dowd: Yes, Tressie, she does fab impersonations of other singers. But that sly, sardonic quality was missing.
Healy: I think any “Wicked” rises or falls on how you feel after its climatic number, “Defying Gravity.” I thought it was a smash in the movie — 10/10, no notes. What do you think?
Dowd: It was no “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Ariana Grande was no Judy Garland.
Polgreen: Again, Erivo just smashed it. Did Grande sing in that number? If so I have forgotten.
Cottom: Ouch, Lydia. LOL Grande did indeed sing in that number. But Erivo owns this scene, as she should. It’s a blockbuster moment in the stage play, but the production value and Erivo’s power took it to a different stratosphere. That last four or five minutes is one of the best film sequences that I have ever seen. The audience I saw it with stood up and cheered. I felt like an old woman at a Southern Baptist church revival, clapping my hands wildly. It was great.
Healy: Finally — this movie is just Part 1 of “Wicked” onscreen. There’s also a Part 2 movie coming out next year. If you could write Part 2 of “Wicked,” what would you have happen? I’d have a “Defying Gravity” reprise where Elphaba flies around with Glinda. I’d put Dr. Dillamond in charge of Oz. And I’d cast Liza Minnelli as Aunt Em in some sort of flashback.
Dowd: If I could write Part 2 of “Wicked” I would stuff it into Part 1. Ridic we have to wait a year for half-a-movie that could have been better told in two hours and change. (I’d have had less Shiz University.) When “Gone With the Wind” opened in 1939, it had an intermission long enough to grab a drink or a sandwich before the epic rolled on. That would have been more gratifying with “Wicked.” (Even though we know how the story ends!)
Polgreen: I am slightly annoyed with myself that after seeing the movie I read the whole plot synopsis on Wikipedia. It would have been much more fun answering this with no idea of what comes next! I am a sucker for a 90-minute movie, so this one really tested my patience, much as I loved it. I am pretty happy to wait for Part 2 next year.
Cottom: No one told me this was a two-parter! When the film credits rolled, I thought it stopped for an intermission. I went to the bathroom and actually came back. I clearly missed a memo. I don’t like cliffhangers. We can be different people by the time it is released. The cultural conversation will almost certainly be in a different place. Also, I’m getting too old for all of this.
Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. @MaureenDowd • Facebook
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd
Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the “Matter of Opinion” podcast for The Times."