In a disturbing repeat of last year, Japanese whalers returned to port Friday with the carcasses of 333 minke whales on board. Since 1986, a global moratorium has banned the hunting of whales, but Japan claims the killings are being done for “scientific research.”
Recently, Gizmodo space writer Rae Paoletta called Saturn “the golden retriever of the solar system,” and I’m not here to dispute that characterization. But it was a lot easier to think of Saturn as a golden retriever when the planet’s defining hue was, y’know, gold. Not blue. Not electric, alien protomolecule-blue.
iOS 10.3 dropped earlier this week, and when it arrived, it brought a bunch of new features with it. Massive updates like these usually include a good number of bug fixes, and iOS 10.3 was no different, patching out a rather major security flaw that first came to light in October of last year. The exploit was particularly seriously because … Continue reading
A major update for the game Pokemon GO is in the works, one that could change the way most players play the game. The game’s future could well turn from a solitary adventure to one in which collaboration is key – and in more than just battling Pokemon Gyms. An update that will come in the relatively near future includes … Continue reading
Democrats responded to reports that Michael Flynn is seeking immunity from prosecution over his ties to Russia by suggesting that the former national security adviser might be hiding something.
Flynn, who resigned following reports that he misled Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he’d had with the Russian ambassador, offered testimony to the FBI, the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to the Wall Street Journal. All three are currently investigating President Donald Trump’s contact with the Kremlin. The Senate committee turned down the request, NBC reports, and it’s not clear whether the other groups have responded.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said testimony from former acting Attorney General Sally Yates could shed some more light on Flynn’s alleged offer. Yates had been scheduled to testify in a public hearing this week, but the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), abruptly called it off.
Schiff has accused Nunes of trying to “choke off public info.”
“Generally, innocent people don’t seek immunity,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN. “I don’t want to hear from him in a setting where there are conditions.”
Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Calif.) also wasn’t very coy.
“Flynn asks for immunity,” she tweeted late Thursday. “Smoke = fire.”
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) also found Flynn’s offer suspect.
Flynn hasn’t confirmed whether the offer took place. But the president indicated he’d stand by Flynn even if the reports are true.
Flynn isn’t the only member of Trump’s inner circle to be accused of having improper contact with the Russian government. Former advisers Carter Page and J.D. Gordon, as well as former campaign manager Paul Manafort and longtime confidant Roger Stone, have also been been tied to the Kremlin.
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Husbands and wives, watch your backs because April 1 is upon us. And you know what that means:
Below, 14 April Fools’ Day tweets you’ll relate to if you’re married to a prankster.
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When al-Shabab controlled Mogadishu, women could be punished for playing sports. As part of our “Women and Jihad” series, we meet the young female ballplayers who are challenging lingering Islamist ideology in the city.
MOGADISHU, Somalia – Her name is Mulki Noor Mudey, but she introduces herself simply as Coach. Standing at the side of Mogadishu’s dilapidated basketball and handball stadium, her bright blue “Hagen” team jersey shimmering under the unrelenting Somali sun, it’s hard to imagine her as anything but an athlete.
Only a few months ago, Mudey had stood in that same spot, teeming with nerves. It was the Somali women’s handball championship game. With only four minutes to go and the stadium’s seats packed with spectators, the score was tied.
“When the game is happening, you’re so nervous and so anxious,” she says. “And as a coach, there’s only so much you can do.”
A slow 60 seconds passed. Then another. With two minutes left, a Hagen player scored, winning the championship game.
Thirty years ago, women playing sports at the Wiish Stadium was nothing remarkable. But over the past 26 years, Somalia has experienced a brutal civil war and the emergence of an extremist Islamic insurgency, both of which reversed women’s rights across the country. Today, as relative peace returns to the capital, the resurgence of female athletes is itself a symbol of defiance.
Since the appointment of the first special advisor to the United Nations secretary-general on sport for development and peace in 2001, sports have been recognized internationally as a means of peace building and reconciliation. In Somalia, basketball has been used to defuse clan rivalries and revive gender equality in the aftermath of the civil war.
But the country’s female athletes also play a role in the ongoing battle to delegitimize the claim by al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-linked terrorist organization born out of the rubble of Somalia’s civil war, that it offers a viable alternative to the federal government. On the crumbling concrete court in Mogadishu, the simple act of young women shooting hoops dilutes al-Shabab’s attempts to spread its extremist ideology, influencing the attitudes of the young men in the stands – potential recruiting targets for the terror group – in the process.
“Somali women, we have always been powerful,” says Ridwan Abdullahi Ali, her bright green headscarf draped over her Hagen T-shirt. “Our playing basketball is making people talk in our society about girls’ roles and how we can do these things, like physical things, that the boys are doing.”
Ali began playing handball and then basketball when she was 20, after she passed by the stadium and saw her neighbor, Fatuma Ahmed Warsame, a respected basketball player among young people in Mogadishu, playing with her team. After sitting down to watch their practice, Ali came back the next day, and the next, until Warsame convinced her to pick up the ball and join them.
“That day I just carried the ball with me. You need to dribble it, but I ran with it instead and people were laughing, telling me I couldn’t just run with it,” Ali says, smiling and bouncing a slightly deflated basketball expertly between her legs.
At 22 years old, Ali is part of a younger generation in Somalia that grew up during the country’s civil war, which began in 1991, and the subsequent rise of al-Shabab. The group once controlled much of Mogadishu and – despite the presence of roughly 20,000 African Union peacekeepers – still controls large swaths of the country.
Under al-Shabab’s rule, women’s rights in Somalia, once a beacon of gender equality in the region, were nearly completely reversed. Prior to the civil war and insurgency, women wore bikinis and sipped cappuccinos at Lido Beach, a popular hangout just down the road from the sports stadium. By 2012, at the height of the al-Shabab insurgency, women were banned from wearing bras, working and walking or talking in public with nonrelated men. In the large pockets of Mogadishu that were controlled by al-Shabab, women wearing pants – much less playing sports – was an offense punishable by death.
“When al-Shabab came suddenly, we were not allowed to play any basketball,” says Mudey. A veteran of the court at Wiish Stadium, she started playing basketball in 1982, when she was 15, and went on to play for the Somali national women’s basketball team. At that time, she would walk in her sports clothes, hair uncovered, to the court to play.
“Life was normal, people here were peaceful and open-minded,” she says. “That was a different era, very different from today.”
Now Mudey’s players walk to the stadium with their sports attire hidden under colorful abayas, their bright orange and yellow trainers peeking out from beneath long, loose-fitting skirts. At Lido Beach, women have to swim in their full dresses. The socially imposed dress code is a testament to al-Shabab’s lasting impact on the city. Though the group no longer controls many neighborhoods of Mogadishu, after African Union peacekeepers pushed them out of the city in 2012, religious leaders – who became hard-line at the height of the insurgency – are still speaking out against female athletes. Since the girls began playing again, Somali clerics have been releasing public statements admonishing young women for playing basketball, declaring the act “un-Islamic” and “a threat to their faith.”
“Some people still say … religion doesn’t allow a woman playing ball. Their argument is that the coach is a man, the referee is a man, the audience are men. That’s their justification,” says team captain Fadumo Ali Abdirahman, 30. “It is difficult for the community to accept us playing, but you need to force your way. Most of the girls you see here are probably sneaking out of the house to come and play.”
And with 70 percent of the country’s population under the age of 30, much of the discourse surrounding women’s roles in Somali society is being held not in the halls of government offices nor in soft-carpeted mosques, but in the parks and on the beaches and basketball courts where young people are once again beginning to gather and talk, as their parents’ generation did before the civil war.
Today, at the sports stadium, both the women’s and men’s teams practice together. As Abdirahman blows her whistle and the girls run to the side to huddle, a member of the boys’ team grabs the ball Nimo Abdullahi is dribbling, starting a spontaneous one-on-one game.
“You always have people who have that negative attitude about women playing, but when you play all the guys will cheer for you and clap for you,” Abdullahi says. “They are happy during the games.”
Al-Shabab’s hold on the capital may be diminished, but the group’s influence can still be felt everywhere. And the young men filling the stadium seats to watch the women playing are still at risk of being lured into fighting for the insurgency. But the hope for many in Somalia’s basketball community is that the more Abdullahi and her peers play ball with those young men, the less appealing al-Shabab’s extremist messaging becomes.
“A lot of change is coming,” Abdullahi says. “You’ll find in empty areas women are playing basketball now, more encouragement is there. A lot of things for women are starting to improve.”
This article originally appeared on Women & Girls Hub. For weekly updates, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list.
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Members of a resurgent hate group are being accused of violently attacking a Palestinian-American professor in Washington D.C. last weekend and of knocking another man unconscious.
Videos and photos from a protest outside the annual conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Council on Sunday show a mob of Jewish Defense League members ganging up on 55-year-old Kamal Nayfeh.
Nayfeh can be seen in one video being repeatedly punched, kicked and hit in the face with flagpoles, even after he fell to the ground, until police officers arrive and stop the attack.
“They beat him after they heard he was Palestinian,” Nayfeh’s daughter, Danya, said in a statement Wednesday. “He was not threatening at all, it’s perfectly clear that my father was brutalized simply because of who he is.”
Nayfeh, a father of four from North Carolina who teaches at a community college in Charlotte, was in D.C. to visit Danya, a 25-year-old law student at Georgetown University.
Danya told The Huffington Post she’s participated in protests outside AIPAC conferences for years. She was among several hundred protesters at Sunday’s demonstration organized by IfNotNow, a left-wing Jewish organization opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
Danya said her father and other family members had walked with her to the protest, but weren’t planning on participating. But when a Jewish Defense League protester shouted “something about there being no Palestinians,” Danya said, her father felt compelled to respond.
“I am Palestine,” Danya says her father, a Palestinian-American, calmly told the JDL protester. That’s when the attack started.
The five or so men who attacked Nayfeh, Danya said, were either carrying big flags or wearing black hooded sweatshirts bearing the clearly identifiable JDL logo: a Star of David with a fist. Also on the sweatshirts, she said, were the group’s slogan, “Never again.”
Metropolitan police later arrested two men in the attack. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington D.C., William Miller, told HuffPost that Yosef Steynovitz, of Vaughan, Ontario, was charged with a felony count of assault with significant bodily injury; and Rami Lubranicki of Howell, New Jersey, was charged with a misdemeanor count of simple assault.
“Both are free on personal recognizance pending court hearings,” Miller said, adding that the men were due back in court in April.
The criminal complaint against Lubranicki identifies him as wearing a “black hooded sweatshirt” during the attack. It also notes that he told a police detective he never assaulted Nayfeh, but was just trying to “pull his guys off the victim.”
Lubranicki was described on the right-wing website Politichicks as an “Israeli-born Jewish-American and a proud American patriot,” and the founder of the anti-Muslim group American Bikers United Against Jihad.
Reached for comment, Lubranicki denied being a JDL member and said he couldn’t discuss his case. Daniel Kovler, a lawyer for Steynovitz, also declined to comment on the case.
Nayfeh suffered “cuts and bruises all over his face and body,” according to a statement from the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a Palestinian rights advocacy group working with the Nayfeh family. An ambulance took the professor to George Washington University hospital, where he was treated for his injuries and released.
Danya told HuffPost she hopes the two men arrested are charged with a hate crime. (Miller, of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington D.C., wouldn’t comment on whether hate crime charges would be pursued, saying only that the case is “still under investigation.”)
“Our entire family is shaken by this incident,” Danya said in her statement. “Communities can’t feel safe and secure when the JDL and other hate groups are emboldened by this new hateful atmosphere we’re living in.”
According to IfNotNow, the progressive Jewish-American group, a protester and group member named Ben Doernberg was also attacked by JDL members and “was diagnosed with a concussion after being beaten with a JDL flag.”
The JDL ― which has been relatively dormant for years ― was described in a 2001 FBI report as a “right-wing terrorist group” and is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “the JDL’s position with regard to Israel is denial of any Palestinian claims to land and the calling for the removal of all Arabs from the ‘Jewish-inherited soil.’”
“The group has orchestrated countless terrorist attacks in the U.S. and abroad, and has engaged in intense harassment of foreign diplomats, Muslims, Jewish scholars and community leaders, and officials,” the SPLC says.
Since its founding in 1968, JDL members have attempted bombings at a mosque and congressional offices, and assaulted members of Jewish organizations, including a Holocaust survivor.
In 1994, a JDL member named Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinian Muslims praying at a West Bank mosque. According to the SPLC, the JDL website defended the act of mass murder, saying “Goldstein took a preventative measure against yet another Arab attack on Jews.”
According to The Forward, the JDL has sought to reestablish itself recently, after “decades of inactivity.” In January, the group held a party in New York City to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.
The JDL did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday’s assaults in Washington D.C. but Meir Weinstein, who described himself as a JDL coordinator to the Washington Jewish Week, did post a Facebook Live video about his group’s actions.
He blamed “[anti-facism] and anti-Israel gangs” for antagonizing JDL members.
“We had to resort to a certain level of force and we made it very clear: the days of Jews being attacked and being docile, those days are long over,” he said in the video.
He said the JDL met with students from across the country at AIPAC who were eager to join the JDL. And he called on “all people with pride in your country, nationalist pride” to join the JDL and “stop these [anti-fascism] thugs from having their having their way.”
Weinstein also acknowledged that the JDL had “a couple arrests on our side” during the AIPAC protests. “We need your support and cooperation,” he said, “if there are any legal fees that need to be covered.”
IfNotNow accused AIPAC this week of cozying up to the JDL.
“We watched as AIPAC members walking into the conference shook hands with and vocalized support for the JDL presence,” the group said in a statement. “AIPAC therefore must take responsibility for the JDL violence. Until this moment, AIPAC leadership has been silent.”
Reached for comment, AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittmann told HuffPost: “We deplore all violence and any violations of the law that occurred outside of the convention center.”
America does not do a good job of tracking incidents of hate and bias. We need your help to create a database of such incidents across the country, so we all know what’s going on. Tell us your story.
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When Mindy Kaling’s show “The Mindy Project” premiered in 2012, few would have accused it of having an after-school special vibe. Her character, a Manhattan OB/GYN with a romantic comedy addiction and an endless parade of hot (and white) boyfriends, had no concerns outside of getting introduced to NBA players at clubs and running into her ex at a friend’s Thanksgiving. But over the course of five seasons, a move to Hulu, and myriad exclamations of “exsqueeze me??”, the picture has changed.
“When we first started the show, I think, at first, we weren’t talking about [social issues] as much,” writer Ike Barinholtz, who also plays the delightfully awful nurse Morgan Tookers on the show, told The Huffington Post in a phone conversation. “But I think the world’s changed a little bit.”
Season five of “The Mindy Project” wrapped up on Tuesday with (spoiler alert!) Mindy Lahiri’s just-okay proposal to boyfriend Ben (Bryan Greenberg). Soon after, EW reported that the sitcom would be returning to Hulu for a sixth season, which will also be its last.
In five seasons, “The Mindy Project” has been through more ups and downs than the average TV show; cancelled by Fox after three seasons on the air, the show was picked up by Hulu as a streaming series. There’s been no shortage of drama on-screen as well. Mindy Lahiri, the OB/GYN played by show creator Kaling, has been engaged (several times), had a child, split up with her son’s father, started her own fertility business, and now is poised to be a stepmother to a tween girl. In its first season, the show took flak from critics for being too surface-level, too girly and, oddly enough, too white (especially Mindy’s parade of pale boyfriends). On the verge of its final season, the show has quietly become a consistently political one.
That’s not to say that the show traffics in “Saturday Night Live”-level satire. The presidential election didn’t become a plot point on the fifth season, or even fodder for copious jokes. But increasingly throughout its run, and particularly during its post-Season-3 incarnation on Hulu, “The Mindy Project” has specialized in bold, high-concept episodes that push its protagonist and audience to grapple with race, gender and class privilege.
“I think in earlier seasons of the show, Mindy Kaling wanted to just present a normal sitcom about dating, when she is sort of a nontraditional sitcom lead,” “Mindy” writer Lang Fisher told HuffPost. In the show creators’ eyes, Kaling taking on the role of an adorable rom-com lead, when she doesn’t resemble the typical tiny blonde American romantic heroine, constituted the show’s most potent political message. Not all critics saw it that way.
“When she did come under fire for being conventional and yada yada, I think that was upsetting because she’s not conventional. No one else looks like her on TV, particularly when this show started,” said Lang. “I think it was very hard for her to be criticized for that when many other shows with all-white casts were never criticized.”
The show’s early treatments of race bear a whiff of defensiveness, or at least hyperawareness of its detractors. Barinholtz cowrote one of the first episodes that explicitly addressed race: “Mindy Lahiri Is a Racist,” which appeared in Season 2 ― after the show had been knocked around by critics of Mindy’s exclusively white male fellow doctors and romantic interests. “I remember in the writers room that summer, Mindy was like, let’s do a really really funny race episode,” he said.
The result: An installment in which an expecting mother endorses Mindy’s practice on her white supremacist parenting blog, inspiring the crunchy liberal midwives in an adjoining office to lead an anti-racism crusade against them. It turns out that it’s being accused of racism that brings out the doctors’ worst impulses: Dr. Danny Castellano (Chris Messina) indignantly protests that (unlike Mindy) he’s dated many non-white people. Mindy thinks her own race precludes the possibility of her racism, even as she talks down to the practice’s black nurse, Tamra (Xosha Roquemore). “Sometimes you can get a little ‘Downton Abbey,’” Tamra points out.
Somehow, it’s fratty white doctor Peter (Adam Pally) who salvages the practice’s reputation ― he wants to start a mobile service to bring women’s healthcare to underserved communities.
The episode teased out Mindy’s own deeply conservative (“she kind of notoriously thinks Chris Christie is right on,” said Barinholtz) and even racist tendencies. “I went to second base with my friend Korean Justin!” her character brags in front of a PR consultant brought in to fix the practice’s racist reputation. “His hands were so small, they made my boobs look enormous.”
But the episode also highlights the hypocrisy of the virtue-signaling white liberals around her. “Sister Tamra, you work at Shulman & Associates,” one of the white, male midwives urges Tamra at a rally. “Tell us how much it’s like 1950s Birmingham.” He’s not so much offering her a chance to speak as he is pushing her to ventriloquize his own talking points. And while the episode lightly jabbed at critics who seemed to expect far more from her than her white showrunning peers, it also honestly and hilariously explored the problematic beliefs that lie behind the tolerant, egalitarian faces social progressives put out into the world.
It turned out, though, that “The Mindy Project” had more to say about race ― on its own terms this time. Even as headlines about Mindy’s lily-white boyfriends were supplanted by hot takes on newer show, the sitcom was getting more pointed in its social commentary. The show was ready to expand its scope. “We’ve already made the point that she can have a conventional sitcom,” Fisher said. “So… what other points can she make as this character?”
For one thing, the show is ready to get a little weird. “The Mindy Project” follows the romantic comedy model, right down to Mindy’s own conviction that she’s perpetually moments away from finding herself the star in a real-life iteration of the form. The show has always been littered with bizarre meet-cutes and dramatic confessions of long-festering love.
“We’ve paid homage to these different rom-com tropes, and we kind of have just wanted to have a little more fun with some of the weird ones, like the ‘Sliding Doors’ and ‘Groundhog Day,’” Fisher added. Sometimes the lessons are romantic ― forcing Mindy to relive one day until she understands what she did wrong to lead her boyfriend Ben to dump her ― but other times, those tropes are repurposed completely.
In “Mindy Lahiri Is a White Man,” she’s passed over for a second interview for head of obstetrics at the hospital. All the second-round candidates are white men. Even though she eagerly assured the board ― in response to some truly horrifying and possibly illegal questions ― that she could balance the job with motherhood by working instead of exercising, and that she could keep her emotions in check to lead, she was ignored in favor of less-qualified male candidates. “I wish I was a white man,” she sighs before bed that night. And so she wakes up as a white man: Michael Lancaster, played by Ryan Hansen. Suddenly, her life is awesome. Michael’s ex takes care of their kids, and no one is worried that he can’t balance his role as a father with a demanding job. He can get ready for work and look professional in five minutes. He can pee standing up. Her coworkers listen to him respectfully and laugh at his jokes.
Unfortunately for him, Michael can’t really enjoy all this privilege; he’s too aware of the flip side. After another doctor, Dr. Irene Lee, covers for a procedure while Michael is hungover, he realizes that quiet, self-effacing Dr. Lee is a supremely competent and qualified candidate for the head of obstetrics job. As an Indian-American woman, Mindy asked Dr. Lee not to sit near her in the waiting room so people wouldn’t think they were an “Asian clique”; as a white man, he feels thrilled to have the power to get his colleague noticed. Michael coaches his new friend on speaking confidently, grooming herself and dressing herself more attractively, and insists that the board give Dr. Lee a second interview.
Still, Dr. Lee doesn’t get the job ― in fact, the board tries to offer it to Michael, impressed with his dedication to diversity. Apparently it takes more than one woke white man to fix systemic injustice.
“There’s a million great things about being a white guy, and that’s just counting the things you can do with your penis,” Michael/Mindy reflects that night. “But the sad thing is having the ability to help other people, and most of the time just not doing it. It’s just so easy not to. Your life is so carefree.” Unusually for a protagonist dealing with a body-switch scenario (see: “Freaky Friday” and “The Switch”), she’s realized that the other person’s life really is as amazing as it seemed to her. Nonetheless, she wants her life back ― despite the disadvantages, she realizes, she likes being an Indian woman.
The episode explores how being a white man both is and isn’t a silver bullet ― even a white doctor who’s losing it mentally and may have killed his wife is more likely to get a management job than an Asian-American woman (after all, his late spouse was “a difficult woman”). But a white man can’t fix oppression with the force of his convictions; it takes more work than that. Plus, it’s hard to remember to do the right thing when the world around you seems relatively pleasant and welcoming.
Ultimately Mindy takes a lesson away from the experience: She befriends Dr. Lee. Only hanging out with white men seemed safer, cloaking her with an aura of simultaneous chillness and importance in a way that being in an “Asian clique” wouldn’t. Now, she’s done playing that game; it didn’t work anyway.
In many ways, as the show takes pains to uncover, Mindy’s problematic views come from a misguided desire to identify with society’s power brokers, to shine as the one worthy woman. She’s driven to be hot, stylish, popular, chill and successful, all in one package; to be Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and the Gillian Flynn-esque Cool Girl. In another Season 5 episode, “Mindy Lahiri Is a Misogynist,” the male doctors at Shulman & Associates set out to hire another doctor ― a female one. Worried about losing her special spot as the only female doctor in the practice, Mindy tries to push a sweaty, sloppily dressed male doctor who has lost his medical school diploma as a superior choice.
“Mindy, every one of the female candidates was far more qualified than that walking MRSA infection,” Dr. Jeremy Reed (Ed Weeks) points out with withering calm. “Let’s face it: You’re kind of a misogynist.”
A new doctor is hired ― Anna, a gorgeous, chilly blonde ― and Mindy immediately clashes with her new competition, noting in a burgeoning rage that her devoted fan Morgan has already begun sucking up to the new woman doctor. When Mindy misses an appointment, Anna takes her favorite patient; Mindy’s supposedly egalitarian male colleagues snicker over the “catfight” between the two. By the end of the episode, she realizes that she’s only jostling with Anna because the patriarchy has socialized her to do so.
“I was raised in a system, created by men, that has pitted women against each other,” she proclaims. (You could imagine this Mindy flaunting a brightly colored “The Future Is Female” T-shirt.) She decides to forge a consciously feminist but tenuous peace with the new doctor. It’s not a friendship, but a small, determined step toward smashing the patriarchy. In “Mindy Lahiri Is a Racist,” she goes one step further: Not only is cutting down other women selfish and wrong, she realizes, it’s painfully clear that taking the side of white men didn’t offer her the status she thought it might. All it accomplished was cutting her off from having a support system of other women like her.
Barinholtz told HuffPost that the show tries to avoid “coming off preachy” when incorporating more serious issues into storylines. “I think that’s kind of the death of a sitcom,” he said. But Mindy’s awakening isn’t always subtle. Sometimes, if not most of the time, there are monologues. Mindy’s speech apologizing for mistreating her female colleague is perhaps the least subtle approach to a pro-feminist monologue possible. “I was taught to believe that men can only handle one woman at a time,” she declares. “So it’s not my fault that I was threatened by Anna. It’s the fault of the patriarchy.”
It’s impossible to miss and difficult to misconstrue the point the show is trying to make when Mindy delivers the moral; the humor comes mostly from hearing moral preaching from a character who is gleefully shallow, politically incorrect and often selfish. “The fact that she is on the wrong side of the issue is what’s surprising and kind of funny about her as a character,” said Fisher. “The moral is always correct, even if she has a hard time getting around to it.”
The essential flavor of the show has remained unchanged, despite its more serious bent. “I think the character is such a deeply ingrained creation of Mindy Kaling that it’s hard for her not to be consistent,” Fisher told HuffPost. “We all have absorbed that character in our bones at this point.” Season 5 of “The Mindy Project” opened with a typically flippant joke: The premiere episode dropped in the midst of election season, and was titled “Decision 2016.” It was about Mindy’s decision between two hot, white male love interests. The show barely touched the election, though other politically minded sitcoms did. Outside of the show, Barinholtz has suggested Mindy Lahiri might be a Trump voter ― and what about Morgan?
“I could see him getting very easily fleeced by Jill Stein,” he suggested. “I could see him writing in someone, writing in, like, Cesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer.”
After five seasons, “The Mindy Project” has never been more well-positioned to take on Trump-era politics. But how can the show make that funny? “Honestly… it’s just so sad,” said Barinholtz. “I think we had a joke last year where [Jody] was like, ‘And for the record, I think Donald Trump would be fun as president.’ That joke worked in like, October of 2016. In March or April of 2017, we’re seeing just how much has changed.”
It’s not just the political context; the show has changed too. Perhaps making the Trump presidency funny in a sitcom universe is impossible, but “The Mindy Project” has a good shot.
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Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Mahershala Ali, Amy Poehler and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Join us at 7 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 31 on Facebook Live.
You can support the ACLU right away. Text POWER to 20222 to give $10 to the ACLU. The ACLU will call you to explain other actions you can take to help. Visit www.hmgf.org/t for terms. #StandForRights2017
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