Avengers: Endgame Is a Perfect Goodbye

This review avoids serious spoilers about Avengers: Endgame, but mild plot descriptions do follow.

The biggest surprise of Avengers: Endgame may be its leisurely pace. All right, perhaps that’s not the film’s most shocking twist. Considering the movie is the 22nd entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and that it purports to bid farewell to at least some of its major characters, Avengers: Endgame has a few bombshells. Given that the running time is a whopping 182 minutes, audiences might go in expecting something that feels like a slog. But the film earns its length not by overstuffing the frame with opulent action, but by slowing things down and basking in the charisma of its ensemble.

In the 11 years since Marvel began its experiment of creating an interconnected world of superhero movies with Iron Man, the studio has assembled an all-star cast of hunks, cult favorites, and Hollywood legends to play its leads, costumed and otherwise. Avengers: Endgame, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, lives up to its promise of providing a real ending for the series’ original crew, including Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the Hulk. But the movie also functions as a brag for how expansive the Marvel universe has gotten over the last decade—a necessary strength since the broader franchise shows no sign of concluding, just recycling and evolving as the box-office receipts continue to pile up.

After all, the Marvel movies can never really stop. This was a notion that Thanos (played by Josh Brolin), the big bad of the Avengers series, sought to challenge when he showed up in Infinity War, which was released almost exactly one year ago. Thanos, a giant purple meanie from a distant planet that was destroyed by overpopulation, entered this cinematic universe and declared it crowded. After assembling the mighty Infinity Stones, a collection of celestially significant jewels, he set about trying to thin the herd, killing off a few major characters and eventually snapping his fingers and turning half of all living things into ash.

Endgame is set in the aftermath of that devastating Snapture, with the galaxy’s remaining heroes struggling to pick up the pieces. Popular pals such as Black Panther, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and the Scarlet Witch have vanished, and the Russos (along with the screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) emphasize just how miserable life has become in their absence. Where Infinity War was all chaos, a frantic race to stop Thanos from executing his plan, Endgame is curiously static for much of its running time, thriving more on witty dialogue and the well-established dynamics of its cast than on CGI bedlam.

Of course, the story eventually shifts into epic mode, and the action has the usual bland competence of Marvel movies (something even outstanding entries like Black Panther struggled to dodge). But all the applause breaks and jaw-dropping developments only work because of the interpersonal bonds that have been strengthened over the years and that Endgame spends much of its time celebrating. After beginning with a mournful tone, the film turns goofier and livelier as the team’s wild gambit to save the world comes into focus; it’s to the Russos’ credit that they manage this transition with aplomb.

[Read: How Marvel is rewriting its world order]

Digging into the details of Endgame’s plot is a very tricky proposition. If you’re invested in the Marvel world, it’s best to go in knowing next to nothing at all. One should head to the theater armed just with the memory of what happened in Infinity War, as well as perhaps the briefest of refreshers on the details of the Infinity Stones. It’s not giving anything away to say that the film mostly focuses on the original team that headlined the first Avengers movie, all of whom conveniently survived Thanos’s magic snap. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and, returning from a mysterious sojourn, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) all gather to try and undo Thanos’s universe-wide genocide.

Their mission takes them on a winding course that touches down in the furthest reaches of the Marvel realm, referencing the best-loved entries from the series and as well as more overlooked chapters. If Avengers: Endgame were, for some bizarre reason, your first Marvel movie, it’d be a miserable experience. But for devoted fans, it functions as a greatest-hits clip-show package. It’s filled with hat-tips and winks to the audience—forgivable pieces of indulgence given the goodwill the series has built up with millions of viewers. The film works to resolve conflicts beyond Thanos, fights that were first kindled in movies such as Captain America: Civil War (which wrenched Captain America and Iron Man apart) or Thor: Ragnarok (which rent the magic kingdom of Asgard asunder). For viewers, much of the joy will come from watching the movie pull it all off, effortlessly tying most of the series’ narrative threads into a satisfying knot.

The biggest question the film leaves open is whether the Avengers—as a name brand in the Marvel Universe—should continue after this barnstorming ending. The Marvel experiment continues apace, with many (mostly untitled) new editions on the docket, and Endgame will make more than enough money to justify them. But it’s hard to know if the series will ever be able to replicate the peculiar magic of this movie’s finale, which had me realizing with a jolt, over and over again, how much I cared about the lives of these loud, wisecracking, CGI-bedazzled champions. The newer arrivals to the franchise, folks like Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), are similarly lovable, but who knows if the formula of “heroes assembling again and again until their contract options run out” can be repeated forever. All I know is that Thanos’s demand for a dramatic ending in Infinity War pays off here in all the right ways. The Avengers, as a concept, probably won’t be going anywhere, but Endgame still feels like a proper goodbye.

Scenes From Coachella 2019

The Fun and Frustration of Rooting for Lizzo

The Minneapolis-bred rapper, singer, and flautist Lizzo is proud to do things “Like a Girl.” The breezy empowerment anthem appears on her new album, Cuz I Love You, with a pre-chorus that sounds as though it were written solely to soundtrack the plush pink changing rooms of The Wing: “Sugar, spice, and I’m nice / Show me what you’re made of / Crazy, sexy, cool, baby / With or without makeup.”

“Like a Girl,” like some of Lizzo’s most popular songs to date, is a tad mawkish but nonetheless feel-good. So it’s not wholly surprising that the perennially positive singer sounded a bit defensive about the feminist-adjacent missive during a recent interview with The Cut, when she expounded upon its meaning: After being told the track, and its premise, sounded rather commercial, Lizzo quickly justified the song’s concept by suggesting that her goal was to take ostensibly basic concepts—including the brand-dominated territory of “women’s empowerment”—and broaden them to include previously excluded groups. “I’m trying to be inclusive,” the artist said. “Could this song be in a Dove commercial? Yes, but it won’t. They aren’t thinking about everybody.”

Lizzo’s infectious music does often sound like it’s made with everybody in mind. It’s meticulously universal, the kind of art that’s said to push boundaries both because of its content and by virtue of who is making it. It feels good to root for Lizzo—not just because of her undeniable talent, but also because of what and whom she represents. Lizzo is, after all, a fat black woman; she shirks easy categorization along numerous lines, including sexual orientation. Her music is celebratory. It’s defiant and boundary-pushing by necessity. It’s also fun: Listening to Lizzo can feel like taking a SoulCycle class without all the requisite shame.

There has never been a woman like Lizzo at her level of pop stardom—and her road to fame has come with no shortage of slights, often rooted in or amplified by overlapping forms of discrimination. She has utilized her expanding platform to address racism, sexism, and fatphobia in her music and media appearances alike. It’s endeared her to a legion of fans, many of whom feel like misfits in their own ways. Lizzo has managed to harness the isolation she’s felt at various points in her life and produce work that marries social critique with self-affirmation, all buoyed by bounce-heavy production. This savvy has also primed her for commercial co-option. In that same interview with The Cut, Lizzo bristled at the way she’s been crowned a queen, an Icon™ of the sometimes-fraught Body Positivity movement:

“[I]t’s not a label I wanted to put on myself. It’s just my existence. All these fucking hashtags to convince people that the way you look is fine. Isn’t that fucking crazy? I say I love myself, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s so brave. She’s so political.’ For what? … Even when body positivity is over, it’s not like I’m going to be a thin white woman. I’m going to be black and fat. That’s just hopping on a trend and expecting people to blindly love themselves. That’s fake love. I’m trying to figure out how to actually live it.”

This emphasis on her realness and authenticity has characterized much of the press Lizzo has received in recent months. Cuz I Love You reached the No. 1 spot on the iTunes chart over the weekend, ahead of even Beyoncé’s Homecoming live album. For many listeners, her ascent has been a welcome sign that artists—particularly women, musicians of color, and fat people—may not need to sacrifice their essential selves to find loyal audiences or success. In an entertainment landscape that often forces people to choose between valuing under-represented communities and producing commercially viable work, Lizzo seemed to be doing both. And winning.

It’s particularly disappointing, then, that the artist reacted to a mildly critical review, published on Pitchfork early Monday morning, with a series of tweets denigrating the writer, Rawiya Kameir, also a black woman. “PEOPLE WHO ‘REVIEW’ ALBUMS AND DONT MAKE MUSIC THEMSELVES SHOULD BE UNEMPLOYED,” Lizzo tweeted. She then followed up with a series of now-deleted disclaimers that attempted to both downplay the original hyperbole and further drag the writer in question for her perceived pettiness. (In one, she suggested that only people who cook well can judge her food.)

The comments are troubling for a variety of reasons: Even without taking into account the bizarre invocation of unemployment in an industry already characterized by massive economic instability, this is a dubious kind of gatekeeping. To suggest that only musicians can critique music is a bizarre line to draw, an echo of the same sort of hierarchical thinking that much of Lizzo’s music and public persona has thus far explicitly opposed. The comments also betray a fundamental misreading of the purpose of criticism, which exists not just to rank artists against some imperceptible standard but also to contextualize art within the genre, medium, and world it enters.

It’s understandable that any artist would be, to quote a famously cantankerous musician, “sensitive about [their] shit.” And for multiply marginalized artists like Lizzo, navigating the boundary between shrinking oneself to fit repressive industry standards and over-marketing one’s own identity is tricky territory. Kameir’s review was a thoughtful assessment not just of Lizzo’s music itself but also of how the musician’s prominence affects the fans whom she is most beholden to: “Lizzo does have a genre, something like empowerment-core, and she offers songs for an astonishing array of demographics: thick women, independent women, women in general, anyone struggling with body image, people who are single, people who wish to become single, etc.,” Kameir wrote. “Lizzo’s music performs an important social function. The sound might disappoint, but there will be people moved to transformations of their own thanks to her songs. And that’s important, too.”

The Pitchfork review was by no means scathing, or even mostly negative—nor was it a mean-spirited attack on Lizzo’s musicianship. Rather, this kind of thorough analysis is rare; artists like Lizzo are too often either dismissed immediately or written about exclusively as “unapologetic” avatars of whatever identity is most convenient to name-check. Cuz I Love You, like much of the artist’s work, has been met with near-rapturous praise from critics. This reception, and her response to one perceived aberration, recalls Chance the Rapper’s reported outrage at MTV News for publishing a lukewarm review in 2016. The artist’s manager threatened that he would no longer work with MTV, prompting the publication to remove the post, which the writer David Turner later published on his own Medium account. (Again, the critic in question was black, a troubling detail for artists whose public personas hinge largely on championing their communities.)

In both cases, overwhelmingly beloved musicians—who gained popularity partly through their lovable music—lashed out at critics who were simply doing their jobs. It’s an avoidable shame that Lizzo’s reaction to a comprehensive, if also critical, response to her work has now served to distract from the music itself.

Cuz I Love You is, after all, an eminently enjoyable record. Even with its many soundtrack-ready bops, the album has no shortage of vulnerable, masterly songs with immense replay value. There’s the soulful ballad “Jerome” and the sexy ode to self, “Lingerie.” For every ad-ready “Like a Girl,” there’s an original, high-powered show of impressive vocal range such as “Crybaby,” on which she belts over brash electric guitar riffs: “I swore you’d never see this side / But it’s so hard to say goodbye / I don’t need to apologize / Us big girls gotta cry.” There are also funky anthems like “Juice,” a natural extension of the hyper-confident 2017 single “Truth Hurts.” (The latter track still has one of the most memorable lines in modern pop: “I just took a DNA test / turns out I'm 100% that bitch.”)

On the Missy Elliott–assisted “Tempo,” Lizzo is collaborative, sharp, and cheeky. The OAK-produced song’s chorus reminds listeners exactly what it is Lizzo’s music, at its best, inspires listeners to do: “Slow songs, they for skinny hoes / Can't move all of this here to one of those,” she sings. “I'm a thick bitch, I need tempo (Tempo) / Fuck it up to the tempo.”

What Ramy Gets Wrong About Muslim Women

This article contains spoilers throughout Season 1 of Ramy.

Hulu’s new series, Ramy, depicts a fictionalized version of the life of its star and co-creator Ramy Youssef (named Ramy Hassan on the show), a Millennial Egyptian American from a robust North Jersey Muslim community. Along with co-creators Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, Youssef explores the complexities of being a religious man from an immigrant family with wry humor and a dash of surrealism.

The series swings from topic to topic with ease: the ennui of living at home as a young adult; the misguided ways first-generation kids romanticize their family’s homelands; the difficulty of coming of age post-9/11. Also dispersed throughout the season are depictions of Ramy’s varied relationships with women, both platonic and romantic, as he seeks a partner. It’s in these scenes that the show reveals a more myopic perspective through its disparate treatment of Muslim women, characters often boxed into stereotypes with no recourse to develop as fully realized individuals.

In the pilot episode, written by the trio of creators, Ramy goes on a first date with a Muslim woman named Nour (Dina Shihabi), courtesy of his mother’s machinations. Despite his low expectations, the date goes well, with the pair making plans to see each other again. Those arrangements, however, are upended by an intimate encounter gone comically wrong, when Ramy is taken aback by the lustful forthrightness of the woman he was initially charmed by. Incensed by his hesitation, Nour pointedly calls out what she considers the limited capacity Ramy expects her to occupy: “I’m in this little Muslim box—I’m supposed to be the wife or the mother of your kids,” she says. “But I’m not supposed to come.”

It’s a valid frustration. Implicit in Ramy and Nour’s interaction is the idea that Ramy’s reservations are not tied to a commitment to celibacy, but rather to his idea that sexual liberation (and impropriety) is reserved only for white women. Ramy’s experiences with Muslim women in the United States and Egypt prevent him from seeing them as autonomous individuals who have romantic and sexual agency. In rebuffing his mother’s initial suggestion that he find a partner at the mosque, he dismissively replies, “You can’t just walk up to a Muslim girl and like, start spitting game or something. What am I supposed to say? Like, ‘Hey, can I get your father’s number?’”

It’s an especially stark juxtaposition to an earlier conversation he has with a Jewish American woman named Chloe (played by PEN15’s Anna Konkle). Ramy admits trying to obfuscate his adherence to Islam in his romantic endeavors, telling her, “I’ve met girls who seem open-minded and then they’re not. Maybe you’d be into the idea of me being culturally different, but hate that I actually believe in God.” The empathy that he seeks from his non-Muslim love interests is the exact understanding that he denies his female Muslim counterparts.

As the series unfolds, Ramy freely processes his relationships with women while navigating the anxieties generated by his religious sins. In a scenario where he meets another potential partner, for example, Ramy spends the night with the woman during the twilight hours before the adhan call to prayer that kicks off the holy month of Ramadan. The rest of the episode is spent unpacking his guilt for such incidents as the month progresses, and examining the motivations behind his behavior. Yet the frame of reference for Ramy’s female Muslim characters is rather limiting, one that denies the significant power they hold within their own faith systems. And though scenes like the one with Nour are valuable because Youssef smartly recognizes the stereotypes applied to Muslim women and confronts them on the show, absent any narrative progress, these moments merely become a distancing device.

While Ramy’s family grants him the space to reconcile the aimless indulgence of young adulthood with his piety, his sister Dena (May Calamawy) struggles to establish her independence. In a capsule episode written by Bridget Bedard (Transparent, Mad Men), Dena fights to have the same free rein of life that’s afforded to her brother. Much of this double-standard is realized on-screen by comparing Ramy’s and Dena’s contrasting performances of sexuality, with Dena navigating the shame, policing, and fetishization that come with attempting to make the same choices as Ramy. As a result, she’s far more stunted in the area.

For instance, in a real-life fantasy-turned-nightmare, Dena’s asked by her romantic interest to come up with sex positions. She hesitates, then blurts out, “Whatever, I’m cool with like, any of them,” conjuring the false confidence of a pubescent boy bragging on a school bus. The episode’s rendering of her limited exposure to the basics of sex seems a bit unfeasible: Chastity and modesty aren’t synonymous terms. And there’s little reason she’d be oblivious to any sex positions—despite her virginity—given the ubiquity of popular culture and social experiences.

Moreover, the bulk of the dialogue within the episode is framed around Dena’s frustrations with her restricted life. The role is brilliantly performed by Calamawy, who imbues the character with a delicate balance of brashness and vulnerability. But the portrayal still leaves viewers with very little understanding of who Dena is beyond an outspoken personality exasperated by the barriers she keeps running into. Compared, for instance, to the show’s depiction of Ramy’s male cousin Shadi (Shadi Alfons)—a character introduced as a boorish party animal, but later fleshed out as a complex and problematic individual grappling with the trauma of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution—Dena’s character development is limited to the perceived albatross of her sexuality.

This is a pattern that continues as the series proceeds: Youssef dedicates an episode to Ramy’s mother Maysa (Hiam Abbass), in which she’s portrayed as a once-vibrant, worldly woman now reduced to an ignored and undesired housewife. Salma (Poorna Jagannathan), a mother at the mosque who Ramy has an extended affair with, is trapped in a loveless marriage with an absent husband, yet still expected to be a dutiful Muslim wife. Even Ramy’s ultimate romantic connection at the end of the season—with the first Muslim woman he takes seriously (Rosaline Elbay)— hinges on him “liberating” her from the restrictive dichotomy he feels she is bound to as a divorcée: consistently dealing with men who either, in her words, “want to marry a virgin or have sex on the first date.”

The irony is that while Ramy puts Muslim women in a box, he similarly constrains himself as he vies for the attention of white women. He transforms into the most milquetoast, accessible, and understandable versions of his religious self for their comfort, to little avail. In a discussion with Elbay’s character in the final episode, Ramy recalls a conversation where he tells a non-Muslim woman he’s pursuing, “Child’s pose and prayer are the same position …we’re almost doing the same thing.” His tone in retelling the story is self-mocking, and it seems to be tinged with an awareness of the cost of his frequent overcompensation.

The illustrations of the majority of the Muslim women in Ramy’s life are focused on all the things they seemingly can’t do. These representations are divorced from reality: Muslim women are indeed varied and complicated, but portraying them as largely absent of agency, or somehow wholly separate from the temptations or crises that Ramy himself navigates, excludes them from the modern Millennial existence in a way that rings false. The lives of Muslim women aren’t exclusively dominated by forlorn conversations about potential suitors and their proclivities; women are mobilizing and advocating for their people in the face of rising oppression, breaking barriers in sports and modeling, and engaging in their day-to-day lives on their own terms. They are defining their identities in a world often committed to making them feel that they should be in despair. Ramy executes its male narratives with wit and precision. It’s unfortunate that, so far, the show fails to demonstrate that Muslim women’s stories can be more than a sympathetic canvas of unfulfilled dreams.

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Poets in the Press Box

CNN Is About to Host a Hunger Games Town Hall

On Sunday morning, Rudy Giuliani, as he so reliably will, made news on cable news: Appearing on the CNN show State of the Union, the president’s lawyer-turned-surrogate told Jake Tapper that—despite the Mueller report having found insufficient evidence to conclude that the Trump campaign had colluded with a hostile power in the run-up to 2016—there’s also “nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.” The revealing goal-post displacement got as much attention as you’d expect, and that meant that something else got attention, as well, as video of Giuliani’s comment pinged around the internet: the April 22 event that CNN has been advertising, in recent days, with gladiatorial gusto. “CNN PRESIDENTIAL TOWN HALLS: TOMORROW,” went the chyron underneath the viral “Giuliani: ‘Nothing Wrong’ With Getting Info From Russians” clip. The graphic helpfully informed viewers about the timing of that event: back-to-back town halls featuring Amy Klobuchar (at 7 p.m. ET), Elizabeth Warren (8 p.m.), Bernie Sanders (9 p.m.), Kamala Harris (10 p.m.), and Pete Buttigieg (11 p.m.). The coverage, CNN’s chyron promised at one point, via a countdown clock aired later on Sunday, is “25 HRS 45 MIN 20 SEC” away.

It wasn’t that long ago that cultural critics worried about TV’s way of turning politics into a form of amusement, coining terms like “infotainment” and “media events” to convey anxieties about what happens when the high stakes of politics collide with the low ones of daily distraction. Those days seem quaint now, and they seem quainter still when CNN spends weeks plugging the quintuple-header that it is hosting on Monday in conjunction with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Town halls, merging the intimacies of direct democracy with the implied distance of the TV screen, are throwback events that also neatly capture some of the tensions of politics as they’re practiced in the present: They marry versions of policy wonkery—discussions of healthcare, of immigration, of education, of gun safety—with the primary-colored flashiness of cable news. And they tangle the promises of American politics with the demands of American celebrity.

In the months-long lead-up to Monday’s combined event, Kamala Harris did a town hall; Cory Booker did a town hall; Bernie Sanders did a town hall; Elizabeth Warren did a town hall; John Hickenlooper did a town hall; Tulsi Gabbard did a town hall; Howard Schultz did a town hall; Pete Buttigieg did a town hall; Amy Klobuchar did a town hall. There have been many more. Each appearance has tested not only a given candidate’s stances on some of the issues that will be at play in 2020, but also broader questions: What does political charisma look like, now that the definition of that quality may finally be expanding? What does an American leader act like in the year 2019?

The town halls work, basically, like this: They put presidential candidates and potential voters together in a single room, to exchange ideas—a mass-mediated version of the flesh-pressing politics that used to be, and in some formats remain, the American norm. In CNN’s version, members of the audience, pre-selected for the opportunity, ask questions of the candidates, typically reading—and sometimes shaking with understandable nervousness—from slips of paper; the candidates answer the questions; the audience, often, applauds. (The crowds are often but not always self-declared supporters of the candidates.) The moderators of the events—CNN anchors such as Jake Tapper, Don Lemon, Erin Burnett, and Wolf Blitzer—occasionally intervene, asking their own questions or following up when a candidate has neglected to answer an audience member’s query.

“Oh, this is fun!” Elizabeth Warren exclaimed during the town hall she held in March. The remarkable thing was that she appeared to have meant it.

For the audience, part of the appeal of the town halls comes from the fact that they can be much more than fun: They are also thoroughly high-stakes for the politicians participating in them. Pete Buttigieg has risen in the polls and in the national conversation in part because of his performance last month at his (first) CNN town hall, before an audience at the South by Southwest festival in Austin. “Buttigieg feels momentum after CNN town hall, with $600K raised in 24 hours,” a headline—from CNN—went, a few days after the March 10 event concluded, citing numbers from a Buttigieg campaign aide. CNN wasn’t alone in that analysis: In a piece explaining the recent “Buttigieg boom,” Vox traced the bump in attention and funding to the South Bend mayor’s “breakout performance at a CNN town hall in early March.” Google Trends agrees with the assessment: It records the search interest in “Pete Buttigieg” as spiking in mid-March—just after he joined Jake Tapper on CNN’s makeshift stage.

The town halls, in that way, can have the feel of a religious ritual: They profess a faith in the power of the political conversion experience. They assume that there are minds, among both studio audiences and those watching at home, that are capable of being changed. Last week, Bernie Sanders appeared at a town hall on the Fox News channel, an event co-moderated by the anchors Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, and the collision of left and right resulted in … a small political victory for the democratic socialist. “By the end of the town hall,” Vox noted, “audience members were booing the occasional Baier or MacCallum follow-up, even doing call-and-response with Sanders.”

For CNN, the town halls offer a different kind of proposition: They offer ratings without an overt admission of political partisanship. In March, CNN’s average audience between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET was 884,000, while Fox’s was 2.66 million and MSNBC’s was 2.12 million. The latter networks use that time for opinion shows that in turn bring in audiences. And the town halls, Reason’s Matt Welch notes, have offered CNN some fairly reliable ratings bumps: Kamala Harris’s first town hall, on January 28, brought in 1.96 million viewers; Amy Klobuchar’s brought in 1.17 million; Elizabeth Warren’s brought in 1.09.

And, so: As the Democratic field grows, so do the events that promise to showcase that field’s hopefuls to potential voters. On April 9, Kirsten Gillibrand participated in one with Erin Burnett. On April 10, it was the Washington governor Jay Inslee (with Wolf Blitzer). On April 11, it was the former Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro, with Don Lemon. On April 14, the network hosted a double-header with the businessman Andrew Yang and the author Marianne Williamson—the latter of whom is perhaps best known as Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual adviser. These are opportunities for candidates and for CNN itself, which also uses the events to practice a version of vertical integration. CNN hosts the town halls, using its anchors as moderators; it airs the events; and then it reports on the town halls’ happenings, dividing their action into video clips and sound bites and fact-checks and article-length assessments of the candidates’ performances. After Buttigieg’s town hall, a commentator praised his “star turn”; the commentator was writing for CNN.

It’s turtles, all the way down to Super Tuesday. And while Fox and MSNBC have run their own town halls, it is CNN that has most eagerly invested in them. (It has done so, sometimes, at its reputational peril: See the criticism the network received after devoting a town hall to the former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, the as-yet-undeclared independent candidate who has seemed to assume his chief qualification for a presidential run to be his status as a billionaire.) That might give the network a king (or, given this field, queen)-making power in a crowded primary; it might simply mean that CNN is adding to the noise of a hectic nominee-selection process. Or it may be that the town halls find a new way to call the culture’s bluff. While the town halls are ostensibly realizations of voters’ hunger for more substantive conversations with candidates, they can also double as showcases for the opposite: sound bites. Gaffes. Memes. Viral moments. The fireworks of the presidential debates, without presidents or debates.

“This is just a theory,” the MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace put it, leading a panel discussing Pete Buttigieg’s CNN town hall performance, “but I think as many people are watching and waiting for these moments … as are watching the polls.” It’s a good theory. And it helps to explain why, on Monday morning, CNN repeatedly cut away from its news coverage to show an empty stage in Manchester, New Hampshire: a set lit dramatically in red and blue, devoid as yet of actors or audience—an embedded advertisement for CNN that doubled, if you squinted in just the right way, as an ad for democracy.