In a move that surely has anti-piracy experts thinking, “Argh, matey,” the world’s most popular file-sharing website, the Pirate Bay, has resurfaced after nearly two months offline, reports Venture Beat. The site shuttered in mid-December after police stormed its central data hub in Stockholm, Sweden, following a criminal complaint filed by Rights Alliance, a Scandinavian anti-piracy collective, which said in a statement that the Pirate Bay capitalized on infringing content from outside parties.

The raid left the future of the Pirate Bay—which allowed users to upload and download content via torrents—in the air. A few days after the site was shuttered, the Pirate Bay released a statement acknowledging that it didn’t know if the site would ever resurface. But it did begin slowly rematerializing, first with a reactivated domain in late December and then with a digital clock that was counting down until February 1, which users suspected was a re-launch date. The site is fully functional now, and the data saved on the site before the December 9 raid is intact.

Users have noted that the site’s familiar pirate ship logo has vanished, and the new one is appropriate: a phoenix, rising from the ashes of the e-void. But the relaunch may be ruffling a few feathers, too. A report from earlier this week says that the re-launch comes at the expense of downsizing, and the new Pirate Bay will lay off many of the moderators and administrators who were a core part of the team for the past 10 years.

Former staff member WTC-SWE, a senior administrator, insisted that the new launch is not the Pirate Bay that users remember. “Some dickhead decided to take TPB crew out of the picture,” he said in an interview with Torrent Freak. “He thinks a site can be run without any staff at all and at the same time keeping up with fake [links], internal issues etc.” He went on to say that former staff members are gearing up to properly re-vamp the site using a different domain.

Regardless of its level of authenticity, the new Pirate Bay will likely be tougher to shutter this time: the website is hosted by a series of virtual servers worldwide, contained in top-secret cloud storage, reports The Verge. Since the Pirate Bay doesn’t have a physical server room, authorities won’t be able to raid a specific location. What could possibly tear the Pirate Bay apart is a mutiny, but that remains to be seen.

Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists leaked a video on Saturday allegedly showing Japanese journalist Kenji Goto being beheaded, according to a Reuters report. The video shows Goto, 47, clad in an orange jumpsuit similar to those worn by previous hostages held by the Al-Qaeda-linked organization. NPR reports that the video was relayed by SITE, an intelligence group, but has yet to be verified by the government.

Goto was a well-respected freelance videographer and journalist. According to the BBC, he had traveled to Syria in the fall to attempt to help gain the release of Haruna Yukawa, a Japanese man who was beheaded by the same group less than a week ago. Goto’s mother had been exchanging emails with ISIS seeking the release of her son.

The ISIS member speaking in the video seems to bear the same distinctive British accent as the speaker in the terrorist group’s previous beheading videos, although Reuters notes that the scrublands in this video look different than the usual desert backdrops. In the video, the militant reportedly addresses the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, saying: "Because of your reckless decision to take part in an unwinnable war, this knife will not only slaughter Kenji, but will also carry on and cause carnage wherever your people are found. So let the nightmare for Japan begin.”

The news organization has not yet verified the video, nor have the White House or the Japanese government, reports Japanese broadcast media organization NHK.

Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman, said that the White House has “seen the video purporting to show that Japanese citizen Kenji Goto has been murdered” by ISIS, according to BBC. She went on to say that the United States “strongly condemns” the actions and called for the release of remaining ISIS hostages such as Moaz al-Kasasbeh, a Jordanian pilot.

On Tuesday, ISIS released a video warning that Goto had less than a day to live and Kasasbeh had “even less” time. Japan had been collaborating with Jordan to ensure the safe return of Kasasbeh and Goto.

The terrorists, who had asked for $200 million ransom for the return of both Japanese captives, had attempted to reach a deal on Wednesday: they would swap Goto for Sajida al-Rishawi, an Iraqi militant currently held by Jordan for a 2005 bombing that killed 57 people. BBC speculates that when Jordan demanded that Kasasbeh be freed simultaneously, the deal may have soured. The Japan Times reports that the conversations between ISIS and the respective governments to free the hostages had been "deadlocked" earlier on Saturday. 

There is no doubt that there will be a pre- and post-Charlie Hebdo era for France. The act of terrorism left a mark on the nation that will not fade anytime soon. But while France was changed by the event in many ways, what I believe will regrettably remain the same is the level of denial around the conditions that would set the stage for such monstrous actions.

So far we have refused to accept that what happened at Charlie Hebdo is a French problem. Only if we treat it as a French problem and learn from our mistakes will we be in a position to deter such acts of desperation in the future. France has to admit that it has failed to take bold actions against social injustice or to integrate citizens of migrant backgrounds.

Terrorist brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi were born and raised in France. They are not a case of imported radicalization. They were radicalized on French soil. The Islam they claimed to represent was imagined by two young men seeking an identity and a sense of belonging. Their actions have to be analyzed against a backdrop of exclusion and inequality.

I am by no means trying to justify terror—their actions were unspeakable. But one has to wonder how our country could produce people so desperate that they could only find salvation in a massacre.

The first step in fighting extremism is to break through our denial. The republic wants to think of itself as a place where minorities live in harmony with their society. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” are the principles we aspire to.

Well, I’m sorry to break the news, but since the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism—the first-ever response in France to a wave of racist crimes against people of Arab and African background—very little has changed.

There were demonstrations in the early ’90s and then riots in the mid-2000s in which youth from the suburbs of Paris and other French cities expressed their rage about social inequality, police brutality and discrimination. This anger and frustration went unheeded by our leaders.

It did not translate into concrete action to promote equal opportunities for all French citizens. It did not even lead to the most obvious acts of accountability and justice: The police officers responsible for the 2005 deaths of two French Muslims, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, were never sentenced. This is how you induce resentment among a segment of the population.

Since the tragic events at Charlie Hebdo, suspicion has become the number one threat to France’s national unity. Muslims are looked at as tacit accomplices to the crime of the decade. A friend of mine shared a story from her workplace. They were observing a minute of silence in remembrance of the victims. Being the only French person of Arab background in the office, her colleagues stared at her to ensure that she was really in solidarity.

It reminded me of my own experience the evening of the attack, when I appeared on a special radio program to comment on the tragedy. The discussion took an unexpected twist when Ivan Rioufol, a Le Figaro columnist, called on Muslims to unequivocally condemn the attack.

Did I really have to voice my opposition to convince my peers that being Muslim does not make me a terrorist sympathizer? I thought of the four to five million Muslims across France who would face suspicion and be accused of condoning the attacks—people who will have to prove that they are more loyal to France than they are to Islam. The repercussions of these divisions will be detrimental to the future of our country.

More than 50 Islamophobic incidents across France, including many attacks on mosques, have taken place since January 7. Even prior to the attack, many documented how the French police disproportionately target men of African and Arab origin for identity checks. This is a disturbing reminder that we are not all equal citizens, and our stereotypes can overtake our judgment.

I was always proud that France has the highest number of both Muslims and Jews in Western Europe. This will change if we do not work to promote social cohesion.

All communities are afraid and feel increasingly isolated. Anti-Semitic incidents have increased too, and many French Jews are afraid to go to synagogue or allow their children to go to Jewish schools. Many are considering moving out of the country. France will not be France if it forces its own people out.

The Charlie Hebdo atrocity is a test for French society and a lesson for French politicians. When the mother country rejects its children, the least stable will look for replacement parents. This is the time to learn from the past and create a common front, and for the government to acknowledge and tackle structural racism and social injustice—not cultivate fear and suspicion.

Rokhaya Diallo co-founded the anti-racist organization Les Indivisibles and is a board member of the European Network Against Racism. Both organizations have received support from the Open Society Foundations. This article first appeared on the Open Society Foundations’ website.

Scientists already know scent is a strong trigger for memories—more so than any other sense. Now, in a new study, researchers are hoping to put our smart noses to use in helping victims of violent crimes identify the culprits.

Everyone who has ever seen a cop drama is familiar with the eyewitness lineup: Victims, relying on visual memories, try to pick out the suspect from a group of randomly chosen strangers. But in recent years, more and more data have come out suggesting that eyewitnesses show a decreased accuracy in recognizing perpetrators visually, perhaps due to the trauma associated with a frightening event. So forensic scientists have been looking for new ways to help victims identify their perps.

A group of researchers from University of Aveiro in Portugal decided to test scent. The team showed videos of violent crimes to 40 student participants while asking them to take a whiff of a body odor sample taken from the armpits of a donor. Afterward, the students were given five different smelly glass jars and asked to try to ID the B.O. they had sniffed earlier.

They were successful 75 percent of the time—a significant increase from the 45 to 60 percent accuracy rate of the eyewitness lineup. It’s not clear why smell made such a difference in the experiment, although the researchers believe it might have to do with negative emotions experienced at the same time as the encoding of the body odor.

Larry Kobilinsky, professor and chairman of forensic science at John Jay College, who was not involved in the study, believes researchers will have a hard time getting this technique into the courtroom. Odor is complex, he explains, and can change from day to day: there are too many variables that weren’t accounted for in the study. “I’m not convinced that it’s ever going to be found admissible,” he says. “How many false positives and false negatives are this technique going to produce? In forensics you’re dealing with real life, and just think about the variation that might occur in odor over the course of a single day, let alone a week or a month [until the criminal is caught].”

The researchers point out that “every individual has a unique body odor, similar to a fingerprint,” and they did try to control for variation: Before taking body odor samples, they asked the volunteer donors to not wear any deodorant, cologne or partake in any activities that might change their natural smell. But in real life, of course, you can’t exactly ask a criminal to go easy on the aftershave. 

You can lateral a three-foot Silvery Wild Alaskan King salmon, but you can't heave it with a proper spiral. That's one of the things I learned yesterday while hanging out at the Pike Place Fish Market, Seattle's fish-flinging institution. The boisterous stall, situated in the nation's oldest continually operating farmers' market (established in 1907), is where fishmongers in wet aprons lob salmon, halibut and steelheads around with an elan worthy of Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson.

As if in anticipation of today's Super Bowl, the peddlers spent the afternoon huddling, hollering at each other and chucking slippery fish, which sometimes sailed 15 feet from ice-room to counter. The mongers' throwing prowess was developed over the decades as the easiest way to move the big fish around.

"Caution! Low Flying Fish!" says a sign on the wall. A fat Chinook eyes me from a display case. I eye the Chinook back. As we exchange gazes, a mackerel as wide as Marshawn Lynch's thighs hurtles overhead. A counterman catches the creature between head and tail fin as neatly as Richard Sherman picking off a pass. He slaps it onto a wrapping sheet.

Jackie Buttice

Six years ago the mongers performed their theatrics for the American Veterinary Medical Association's annual convention in Seattle. The fish were later served for lunch. The outraged president of PETA accused the mongers of celebrating cruelty to marine animals. "What if it was kittens?" she asked. "Would they throw dead kittens like that? I think not!"

The two mongers I interview—Taho Kaktutani and Scott Smith—think throwing fish is no more disrespectful than eating them. Taho grew up in land-locked Indiana. A 10-year veteran of the Fish Market, he’s been living in Seattle since 1999. Scott hails from Santa Barbara and settled in Bellingham 12 years ago. He fell out of love with the Oakland Raiders around 2008, when the Silver and Black started sleeping with the fishes.  “A clean divorce,” he says. “I’ve been a diehard Seahawks fan ever since.”

As we speak, fish fly every which way and the mongers chorus stuff like “KING CRAB IN THE AIR! KING CRAB IN THE AIR!” and “SEA…HAWKS!… SEA…HAWKS!

If the Super Bowl were held in a fish bowl, what species would play quarterback?

Taho: King Salmon—sleek, agile and on a mission.

Scott: King Salmon are by far the sexiest fish.

And of all the players in the NFL, who would you pick to call signals?

Scott:  I have to say Russell Wilson, our leader, would be my King Salmon.

What sea creatures would fill out the rest of the team?

Taho: Defensive linemen would be Dungeness crabs—stocky, low to the ground.

Scott: Monk fish, he’s all crazy lookin’ and scares people. I’d say he’s like Marshawn Lynch. Beast Mode! All these Sockeyes look real strong—that’d be the defense for me. And then Richard Sherman might be the octopus.

And the Patriot’s coach, Bill Belichick?

Scott: He’s pretty frumpy and looks pissed off all the time. So he’d be a Lingcod.

Jackie Buttice

What football plays would be better if run with fish?

Scott: Maybe a quick screen, a quick side screen. Because you can whip that fish real quick. If it’s a short distance—like under 10 yards—you can whip a fish real, real quick, maybe even faster than a football. Once you learn the techniques of catching these things, it’s really not that hard.

What techniques?

Scott: First, it’s got to be a good throw. If you’re working with a good throw, then the fish is flying at a 45-degree angle. If it’s at 45 degrees, you can practically close your eyes and catch it. Just get underneath and squeeze. It’s weird—over time I’ve been able to kind of see the fish in slow motion when it’s flying at me. So I can predict how to catch it by the angle I see it coming: If it’s coming in at 45, I just put my hands out. If its nose-diving, I have to bend down and get underneath. Kind of like The Matrix.

Do you ever fumble your fish?

Scott: Yes. Maybe once a day. We have these stunt fish we throw when it gets crowded. They’re real fish, but they’re kind of beat up.

What’s harder to grip, wet salmon skin or wet pigskin?

Taho: A wet football, for sure.

Jackie Buttice

Have you ever re-created the Legion of Boom with fish?

Scott: Ha! We actually did last week. We set the play, hiked it, threw it and then we had an interception run and celebrated. ESPN came down to film it.

Could a Seattle seahawk take down a Miami dolphin?

Taho: On the field, yes. Not on the Discovery Channel.

What would happen if a salmon were deflated?

Taho: It would definitely be easier to throw.

After spending more than 400 days in an Egyptian jail, Al Jazeera English journalist Peter Greste has been deported to his home country of Australia. As advocates for press freedom give a collective sigh of relief, focus remains on the two other Al Jazeera journalists—Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed—who were arrested alongside Greste and remain jailed.

Al Jazeera welcomes the news of @PeterGreste's release and demands the release of Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed. #FreeAJStaff

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) February 1, 2015

“A presidential decree has been issued to deport him to continue his punishment period in Australia,” an Egyptian interior ministry spokesman told the Guardian. “The foreign ministry co-ordinated with the Australian embassy and his plane took off at 4pm.” His first stop is Cyprus.

Greste’s deportation may have occurred under the terms of an Egyptian decree enacted in November that says the president “may agree to deliver the defendants and transfer the sentenced to their own countries, either for their trial or the execution of their sentence.”

The three journalists were arrested in December 2013 and jailed in June 2014 for allegedly spreading false news, belonging to a terrorist organization and operating without a permit during their coverage of President Morsi’s military overthrow. All were sentenced to seven or more years in prison. Rights groups have said the charges and the trial were a sham.

"We're pleased for Peter and his family that they are to be reunited. It has been an incredible and unjustifiable ordeal for them, and they have coped with incredible dignity,” Mostefa Souag, acting director general of Al Jazeera Media Network, told the BBC. He added: ”We will not rest until Baher and Mohamed also regain their freedom. The Egyptian authorities have it in their power to finish this properly today, and that is exactly what they must do.”

Thirty years ago this weekend, Leonard Cohen first performed a song called “Hallelujah.”*

He didn’t then know the song would wind its way into the deepest reaches of popular culture, spirituality and, uh, Shrek. He didn’t know the song would make much of an impact at all.

The album on which it appeared, the murky, mid-career Various Positions, had been rejected wholesale by Columbia Records in the U.S., and when it finally was released, “the song was still generally ignored,” as Alan Light notes in his 2012 book The Holy or The Broken.

Frankly, it’s no wonder: “Hallelujah,” as it sounds on that record, is a barely recognizable blur of ’80s keyboards and overwrought backing vocals that Cohen further confused by changing up the lyrics when he began singing it in concert. (He has said he wrote as many as 80 verses, then whittled it down to four for the album version.)

It was a spate of cover interpretations—first by John Cale and Jeff Buckley, then by dozens and hundreds of others—that lifted the song out of obscurity, though it was something more mysterious that cemented its status as a modern standard, appearing on American Idol and in synagogue services in equal measure. It has become ubiquitous. Tallying versions by Cohen and plenty of others, Light estimates “Hallelujah” has been listened to hundreds of millions of times on YouTube alone. It is “something of a musical Rorschach test,” Light writes, invented anew by all who attempt the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall...

Many of those renditions are great. Some are quite terrible. Here, we celebrate the 30th birthday of “Hallelujah” by listening to 60 notable recordings of it that are readily available online and ranking them from worst to best. This list is of course open for debate and is necessarily far from exhaustive, and we are primarily sticking to renditions that are commercially available, as well as a few notable live performances.

60. Jeff Gutt (A Detroit Christmas, 2014): Dreadful, straining delivery, disastrous AOR arrangement that somehow gets worse and worse (hear those chugging, sub-Creed guitar licks?). Naturally, it was a grand slam on The X Factor. —ZS

59. The Canadian Tenors (The Canadian Tenors, 2008): “This song is pretty much indestructible,” singer Regina Spektor once said of “Hallelujah.” This vomitously overstuffed murdering of the track proves her wrong. —ZS

58. Michael Bolton (Gems - The Duets Collection, 2011): From its opening string swells to its steel guitar flourishes and choir crescendo, Bolton’s “Hallelujah” is a miserable grab bag of elevator-core tackiness, with a key change that would make even Jon Bon Jovi grimace. Avoid at all costs. —ZS

57. RMaster (feat. Ingo Lass) (New Anime Nation, Vol 3, 2014): Information about this is quite sparse, but it appears to be several anime stars with throaty, horribly reaching voices performing “Hallelujah” on top of piano, synthesized strings and even some xylophone twinkles. Truly hellish. —ZS

56. Susan Boyle (The Gift, 2010): It is difficult to encompass every trite, melodramatic “Hallelujah” cliché in a single, four-minute rendition, but Britain’s Got Talent star Boyle succeeds. Cloying beyond mercy. —ZS

55. Peter Hollens feat. Jackie Evancho (Peter Hollens, 2014): If you traveled to 1985 and told Leonard Cohen that a terrifyingly saccharine a cappella version of “Hallelujah” would one day have 1.7 million YouTube streams, he’d have said, “What the hell is YouTube?” —ZS

54. Bird of Pray (More Sad Songs, 2011): Throaty, exasperating verses meet saccharine, choral-style refrains. At least it’s short. —ZS

53. Kelley Mooney (Tomorrow, 2011): Apparently, it’s not unheard of for Christian performers to swap out Leonard Cohen’s lyrics for their own. Mooney goes all out, axing every familiar verse in favor of worshipful musings like, “The soldier who had used his sword / To pierce the body of our lord / Said ‘Truly, this was Jesus Christ our savior’”— in the process obliterating both the rhyme schemes and the spiritual ambiguity that make the song work. —ZS

52. Alejandro Fuentes and Askil Holm and Espen Lind and Kurt Nilsen (Hallelujah - Live, 2006): Splitting the verses between co-vocalists is usually a mistake, and this gratingly oversung version by four Norwegian talents isn’t an exception. It’s a respite when the crowd takes over for the last chorus. —ZS

51. The Pitchforks (Refraction, 2012): An a cappella group from Duke University offers proof that “beatboxing” and “Leonard Cohen” do occasionally appear in the same sentence. —ZS

50. Jake Coco (Under the Covers, Vol 5, 2013): You’ve heard Rufus Wainwright’s emotive solo piano reading of the song (see No. 3 in this list)? Then you’ve heard this one, but far better. —ZS

49. Bon Jovi (Live at Madison Square Garden, 2009): Jon Bon Jovi & Co. grind Cohen’s song through the Power Ballad Industrial Complex and emerge, six minutes later, relatively unscathed. The same can’t be said of the audience. Violin swells and overheated “Wanted Dead or Alive”-style wails included free of charge. —ZS

48. Street Corner Symphony (The Sing Off: Season 3, 2010): Yes, certainly, the world needs another Christmas-y, TV-ready a cappella take on “Hallelujah”. Well, no, it doesn’t, but if you’re nodding along at home, this rendition, from NBC’s The Sing-Off, goes out to you. —ZS

47. Michael Henry and Justin Robinett (Simplistic Duplexity, 2011): The world surely doesn’t need another muzak-y piano duet of “Hallelujah" either, but this one’s blandly inoffensive enough. —ZS

46. Francesco Lazzari, Elena Ravelli (Love Stories, 2011): This cheesy version is sung in a thick Italian accent and pretty heavy on instrumental sentiment. But its goofiness is endearing, and it gets a boost for being titled “Hallelujah, Shrek,” as though the lovable green ogre were the song’s true spiritual forefather. —ZS

45. Ois Easy (Infinite Contemporary Lounge, Vol 2, 2014): “Hallelujah” has been translated into several languages, but here’s another foreign-language singer trying it out in English, a fact that becomes clear when “Bathing” rhymes with “Laughing.” The acoustic accompaniment is pleasantly restrained, but the vocals are nothing of the sort, stretching, wailing and convulsing in every needless direction. —ZS

44. Il Divo (The Promise, 2008): Imagine Jeff Buckley was a Spanish member of an “operatic pop” vocal quartet thrown together by Simon Cowell. Even that doesn’t quite capture the surreal effect of this delicate, Spanish-language version. The members hail from different countries but each knew Cohen’s song, a testament to its 21st-century popularity on Idol and other reality shows. —ZS

43. Jason Mann (Soul, 2010): It’s a competent enough guitar-and-voice reading, but why is the tempo so slow? And why must it drag on for six-and-a-half minutes? Or maybe those queries are related... —ZS

42. Sons of Serendip (single download, 2015): “Hallelujah” is frequently mistaken for an ancient religious standard rather than a pop song written in the 1980s. Church-friendly, muzak-y recordings like this one, from an America’s Got Talent quartet, don’t help matters. It comes complete with a harp, predictably irritating oversinging and strings that flutter all the way to the heavens. Cohen’s lyrics, meanwhile, are all too biting and bemused for this sort of soaring majesty. —ZS

41. Lisa Lois (Smoke, 2009): Yet another reality-show-performance-turned-studio-recording, this one from the Dutch X-Factor. Lois’s piano-based “Hallelujah” is capably sung but more showy than affecting. Studio flourishes are minimal, but catch that vocal echo trick at 2:59. —ZS

40. Baby Lullaby (Babies Bedtime: 100% Natural Sleep Aid &  Nursery Melodies for a Happy Newborn, 2014): From what little information exists online, this is exactly what it purports to be: an acoustic, pared-to-its-essence “Hallelujah” intended to lull your newborn into a non-screaming state. I am neither infant nor parent, so I cannot speak to its efficiency, but be assured—it’s instrumental, so there’s no need to expose your child to that “remember when I moved in you” line. —ZS

39. On the Rocks (Full Coverage, 2005): Among the earliest a cappella recordings of “Hallelujah.” Necessarily cheesy but tastefully done, with doo-wop touches and a full choral effect at the end. —ZS

38. Anna Clendening (America’s Got Talent, 2014): “Keep the bar low when it comes to expectations” is the rule on contest shows, and this AGT contestant starts by talking about her “anxiety and depression disorder” and being bedridden for a year--before knocking it out of the park. “A baffled king composing 'Hallelujah,'” indeed. —SE

37. Celine Dion & the Canadian Tenors (Oprah Winfrey Show, 2010): Yes, we had never heard of the Canadian Tenors either, and their earnest, heartfelt cover, redolent of hair product and facial tics, goes into overdrive when they are surprised to have their heroine Dion join them. That’s right, their heroine is Celine Dion. And no, love is not a victory march. —SE

36. Josh Vietti (Best of Both Worlds, 2012): Want to hear how an instrumental “Hallelujah” sounds in the hands of a virtuoso violinist? Okay, here you go.—ZS

35. Straight No Chaser (Under the Influence, 2013): An earnest enough a cappella arrangement for those who like their vocal accompaniment with plenty of breathy Ooohs, Aaaahs and Ba-dums. —ZS

34. Noah Guthrie (Hallelujah, 2014): A smoky, campfire-style take from a 19-year-old YouTube-famous singer whose voice sounds triple the age. An odd fit, but an A- for effort. —ZS

33. Rhema Marvanna (Believe, 2011): Okay, here’s a fun one. You hear those piano arpeggios and think it’s another uselessly uninventive “Hallelujah” until the vocals pop in and you realize the little girl on the album cover is not a ruse—she’s the one singing, and a quick bio reveals she was indeed born in 2002. The instrumental backing—key change and all—is a melodramatic mess, but Marvanna is a delight, especially the twang on her voice when she sings “The baffled king composin’ Hallelujah!” —ZS

32. Alexandra Burke (Overcome, 2009): The English singer has impressive pipes, and the song helped her win the fifth season of The X Factor. But the best “Hallelujah” covers operate on restraint, and Burke’s gospel-tinged, key-change-ready performance has none of it. —ZS

31. Dan Henig (Hallelujah, 2013): It’s all a fairly routine singer-songwriter-y “Hallelujah” until the beatboxing comes in—and doesn’t let up for three otherwise affecting minutes of wordless cooing. According to Wikipedia, Henig is “notable for his viral YouTube video cover of Get Low,” so this is a curious new direction. —ZS

30. Adam Sandler (12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief, 2012): An Adam Sandler parody of “Hallelujah” sounds unfunny enough. A Hurricane Sandy-themed Adam Sandler parody of “Hallelujah” is even less so, but it warrants a few points for (1) its Paul Shaffer accompaniment and (2) its rhyming of “Hallelujah” with “32-ounce Mountain Dew-ya.” —ZS

29. Kate Voegele (online single, 2008): One Tree Hill performer Voegele tells Alan Light, “I was like, ‘No, I can’t touch it—it’s an untouchable song.’ But eventually I decided to say screw it and do it anyways.” The result fits in some demilitarized zone between illuminating reimaginings and dreadful X Factor butcherings. It’s just…there. —ZS

28. The King’s Singers (From the Heart, 2010): One of the earlier and better a cappella recordings of “Hallelujah,” by an English sextet that’s been around longer than the song has. By the final refrain, these guys are reaching octave levels that would make Leonard Cohen blush. —ZS

27. Jai-Jagdeesh (Of Heaven & Earth, 2013): Performances of “Hallelujah” are nearly always dominated by white, Western voices, so it’s an impressive treat to hear Jai-Jagdeesh bring conventionally Indian instruments into the mix. Still, be wary of “Hallelujah” versions that carry on past the six-minute mark—the refrain is almost guaranteed to be stretched beyond its limits. —ZS

26. Allison Crowe (Tidings, 2004): If you are yowling at full throttle by the 30-second mark, your “Hallelujah” cover may be hitting its dramatic arc a bit early. This performance by the Canadian singer is solid but oversung. Its timing was interesting, following the Shrek appearance but predating the American Idol trend by at least a few years. —ZS

25. Popa Chubby (Big Man Big Guitar: Popa Chubby Live, 2005): A blues guitarist whose stage name is a pun on “Pop a chubby” wails about a “cold! and it was a broken! Hallelujah!” gasping each breath like it’ll summon the ghost of Stevie Ray Vaughan. At least it’s different. —ZS

24. Renée Fleming (Dark Hope, 2010): Hear opera soprano Fleming take on “Hallelujah” on a covers LP alongside titles by Arcade Fire and, uh, The Mars Volta. It’s an inventively airy, quick-footed orchestral arrangement, and Fleming’s vocals are blandly capable without overdoing it. —ZS

23. Willie Nelson (Songbird, 2006): The self-deprecating bemusement in Cohen’s verses (“You say I took the name in vain / I don’t even know the name”) is a natural fit for the country legend’s twang. But the melody—and the slow-building majesty of it all—is an awkward stylistic match at best. —ZS

22. Damien Rice (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Volume 10: 2008-2009): Performing at Cohen’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, the Irish folk singer competently if clumsily injects drama into the song where it already exists. It’s a callback to two superior versions: Rice’s voice is similar to Wainwright’s, while his guitar accompaniment owes to Buckley. —ZS

21. Justin Timberlake and Matt Morris (Hope for Haiti Concert, 2011): A song for all occasions, including earthquake relief telethons, Cohen’s opus still has the power to surprise the people singing it. When Timberlake sings, “Maybe there’s a god above,” he looks like he is allowing for the possibility for the first time. Yeah, and Charlie Sexton on guitar. —SE

20. Michael McDonald (Soul Speak, 2008): Soul singer McDonald slows things down a notch and substitutes the familiarly lilting vocal melody with his own R&B meanderings. The dude can sing, as Steely Dan will attest. Problem is, “Hallelujah” isn’t a sexy slow jam you can pad out with sultry blues guitar flourishes  —but the weird stylistic challenge of it all is striking and uniquely done. —ZS

19. Neil Diamond (Dreams, 2010): Yes, that Neil Diamond. Remember: “Hallelujah” was first sung by a 50-year-old Leonard Cohen and then a 40-something Bob Dylan before it was hijacked by youthful Idol contestants, so it’s curious to hear it back in the hands of an aging male vocalist. Accompanied by a clean electric guitar, Diamond’s recording is unadorned and largely unremarkable, though there’s some grace in its absence of fluff. Interestingly, Diamond changes up the vocal melody of the chorus but sticks to Cohen’s 1984 lyric sheet. —ZS

18. Jake Hamilton (Freedom Calling, 2011): Here’s an odd (albeit interesting) one. The Christian worship singer’s “Hallelujah” starts strong, with a driving rock approach that’s admirably unique in the “Hallelujah” canon. Then, a misguided and overwrought explosion that seems to hit climax before the song is half over. And a guitar solo! Then—wait for it—an ethereal interlude with Hamilton’s own inserted lyrics (“In a still and quiet place / We still can feel his warm embrace”). Another build-up. Another cacophonous guitar climax, some heady drum rolls, and a full 60 seconds of seemingly impromptu audience accompaniment. A truly bizarre marathon interpretation that is so entertaining it is worth hearing. —ZS

17.  Fadi Peter (YouTube performance, 2014): One of the great indignities of writing a song as memorable (and singable) as “Hallelujah” is that people use it to hang all kinds of stuff on. Like this Christmas carol version (“The shepherds left their flocks by night/To see this baby wrapped in light”), which must have surprised the Zen Jew Cohen. Got your wisemen three. —SE

16. Bono (Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1995): Dubby drum machines, faux-rap delivery and falsetto squeals, oh my. An amusingly weird, if not quite successful, attempt. In The Holy or the Broken, Bono apologizes for this sub-Zooropa bastardization (“I didn’t just let myself down, or my parents, I let the whole school down”), but it’s miles more fun than the thousandth American Idol run-through. —ZS

15. Jason Castro (Jason Castro, 2010): The dreadlocked American Idol star’s recording is stripped down and passable, even if it has little to add to previous versions. In 2008, the singer’s Idol performance reportedly shot Jeff Buckley’s cover up the charts. At least that’s a public service. —ZS

14. Meghan Gray (Just Pieces of Me, 2014): An entirely adept acoustic take from a largely anonymous 16-year-old singer with a smoky voice from Ware, England. Difficult to find much information about her online, but easy to find on Spotify. —ZS

13.  Chris Botti (Chris Botti in Boston, 2009): An easy-listening trumpet performance of “Hallelujah” sounds dreadful in theory, and yet I like the silky, minimalistic sound of Botti’s interpretation, and the odd liberties he takes with the melodic phrasings. Plus, he keeps it short and sweet. —ZS

12. Hannah Trigwell (The Cover Sessions, 2011): More proof that pretty much anyone with some worthwhile vocal range can upload a cover of the track and wind up with five million YouTube plays, the English singer-songwriter’s version is faithfully sung and sparsely accompanied in the style of Jeff Buckley’s immortal cover. —ZS

11. Brian Crain (Piano and Light, 2011): A muted and delicate instrumental rendering of the song for piano. Hard to mess this one up. —ZS

10. Jake Shimabukuro (Peace Love Ukulele, 2011): Any great song should be able to pass the ukulele test, and the Hawaiian-born Shimabukuro takes “Hallelujah” for a serious spin here, grimacing like Carlos Santana when he picks the opening notes before settling into some Segovia-like phrasing, and then crushing the chords like Townshend. Sing along if you like, Jake’s not going to. —SE

9. Paramore (The Final Riot!, 2008): Is this one even a cover? Sort of! More specifically: The popular Tennessee-based band performs an excerpt from the track on its 2008 live LP just before launching into its own track, also named “Hallelujah.” Vocalist Hayley Williams’s octave leap is impressive enough; you wish she’d finish off the track. —ZS

8. Leonard Cohen (Various Positions, 1984): Want a laugh? Play Cohen’s original 1984 recording of the track out of context for pretty much anyone who isn’t a Cohen devotee. “Who’s this guy and why’s he butchering the melody?” they might ask. “What’s with the talk-singing and the cheesy bass synth? He can’t sing it! And the lyrics are off!” (Regina Spektor says her reaction to hearing Cohen’s version was: “Why did he add all this other stuff?”) Here’s the thing: They’re not wrong! Various Positions marked a critical and commercial disappointment in Cohen’s career, and though the recording is a fascinating artifact, the singer turned out not to be the best performer of his own standard. Like "All Along the Watchtower" before it, “Hallelujah” is the rare classic song that remained somehow unfinished until the right interpreter came along and found it. —ZS

7. Brandi Carlile (Live at Benaroya Hall with the Seattle Symphony, 2011): Seems 2011 was a big year for “Hallelujah.” The pairing of orchestral string arrangements with otherwise spare guitar arpeggios is an interesting choice, and so are Carlile’s odd vocal syncopations on the verses. The climax is big but not cheesy, and obviously indebted to Buckley’s rendering. —ZS

6. Bob Dylan (various live performances, 1988): In the late ’80s, at a time when American Idol didn’t exist and Rufus Wainwright was in high school, Dylan was among the first to grasp the potential of “Hallelujah.” (One anecdote has him asking Cohen how long it took to write, to which the singer replied, “A couple of years.” Cohen asked the same of Dylan’s “I and I” and Dylan replied, “Fifteen minutes.”) Not knowing the song would later come to prominence as a theatrical ballad, Dylan began playing it on his 1988 tour as an uptempo blues-rock shuffle. Dylan’s gravelly, impatient delivery is a treat (“Halle-looooo-ya!”), and the version’s recklessness is charming, as is its total unawareness of the melodic phrasings Cale and Buckley would soon popularize. (Dylan never recorded the track, but you can hear two sample renditions here.) —ZS

5. k.d. lang (Hymns of the 49th Parallel, 2004): There’s no single tipping point when an international moratorium on “Hallelujah” started to seem like a good idea, but lang’s performance at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics is as good a guess as any. But when she recorded the song half a decade earlier, for 2004’s Hymns of the 49th Parallels, she became one of the last great contemporaries of Cohen to make the song her own—just before it slid into American Idol oblivion. Like most piano-driven versions, this one owes a lot more to Cale’s “Hallelujah” than Cohen’s (like most modern interpreters, she rescues Cohen’s abandoned “How to shoot somebody who outdrew ya” verse), but the vocal take is uniquely her own, a performance that is smooth and fluid as it slides up and down the scales, but never soulless. —ZS

4. Regina Spektor (concert for the Jewish Heritage Festival, 2005): Russian-born “anti-folk” star Spektor never actually recorded “Hallelujah,” which is a minor tragedy of its own. Her version, performed live at the Jewish Heritage Festival when she was just 25, is vulnerable, searching and understated in the best ways. Even the accompaniment is strangely muted and minimalist, though the staccato cello notes and increasingly prominent swells are a gorgeous touch. And instead of culminating with artificial climax, the song fades into near-silence. As “Hallelujah” chronicler Alan Light notes, Spektor’s version “attains some of the triumphant confusion that Cohen intends.” —ZS

3. Rufus Wainwright (Shrek: Music from the Original Motion Picture, 2001): Wainwright’s take is lovely, unadorned and efficient in tempo—and similar enough that hardly anyone noticed when it was swapped in for Cale’s on the Shrek soundtrack. (Cale’s pops up in the film, though legend has it producers wanted a Dreamworks artist for the soundtrack. The boost to Wainwright’s career was immediate, and deservedly so.) The timing of Wainwright’s recording marked a sort of watershed mark for the song’s popularity, and because of its soundtrack placement, it remains overwhelmingly recognizable among younger audiences. —ZS

2. Jeff Buckley (Grace, 1994): So many of the song’s fans believe Buckley wrote “Hallelujah,” and he may as well have, in a sense: He reimagined it in remarkable ways and brought it to popular light, even if he never lived to see the effect. Buckley’s unforgettable recording, which serves as the centerpiece of 1994’s Grace, opens with a literal exhale and closes with Buckley dragging out the titular exultation for 10 soaring seconds. In between, the singer deconstruct’s Cohen’s song as a trembling, achingly raw solo performance set to lilting electric guitar figures. There are highlights: the way Buckley’s voice threatens to crack on the “Cold and broken” phrase, the way his murmur rises suddenly to a shout around the six-minute mark, the way the ebb-and-flow guitar arpeggio first enters the track 47 seconds in. Buckley described the song as “a hallelujah to the orgasm…an ode to life and love,” and his version is a dreamlike gift that guarantees a lasting legacy for the late performer. —ZS

1. John Cale (I’m Your Fan, 1991): Sparse, haunting, and impeccably sung, the former Velvet Underground member teased out the song’s melody in a way Leonard Cohen never could. Though he didn’t write the song, Cale’s interpretation rescued “Hallelujah” from permanent obscurity and established what it could—and should—sound like, rescuing several deserving verses from the cutting room floor in the process. (Legend has it Cohen faxed him 15 pages’ worth of abandoned lyrics.) For the piano phrasings alone, Cale deserves credit (or blame) for every “Hallelujah” that has come since. —ZS

*A quick note: Though Cohen may previously have sung it in more intimate settings, Setlist.fm, The Holy or the Broken author Alan Light and 1heckofaguy.com moderator Allan Showalter—“arguably the greatest living Cohen expert”—each confirm that Cohen’s January 31, 1985 show marks the first known performance of the song.

The people who have spent decades arranging flights between the United States and Cuba compare the history of their industry to a roller coaster. The half-dozen or so charter companies are subject to the politics of two countries, plus opposition that is at times explosive—literally.

Since President Obama announced the return of diplomatic relations with Cuba in December, and the easing of travel and trade restrictions in January, business at the charter companies has been on its way up. But those cashing in on the detente fear that once commercial airlines start regular service, charter profits will go into free fall.

The charter company names are well known in Cuban-American circles—Gulfstream, Marazul, ABC, Xael, Wilson, Cuba Travel Services and others. Most are based in Florida and fly from Miami or Tampa, though some hold headquarters in New Jersey and California. Multiple companies claim to have been the first in operation, and many of the founders have had hands in politics for decades.

Air service agreements between the two countries date to 1953. Before last month’s changes, the U.S. limited air travel to Cuba to companies holding special licenses and operating non-regularly scheduled flight service. Starting in the late 1970s, when President Carter began easing travel restrictions, Cuban-Americans, exiles and other people established licensed companies to coordinate travel and charter flights. Over the years, as various administrations made it easier for Americans to visit Cuba under certain circumstances, those travel companies grew their operations to include arranging tours, booking hotels and leasing aircraft and crews from major airlines.

In the early 2000s, however, after President Bush put new restrictions in place, the charter companies scrambled to fill airplane seats.

“He hit us really hard,” Tessie Aral of ABC Charters says about Bush. “We had to lay off half our staff.”

Michael Zuccato of Cuba Travel Services says the company downsized to smaller aircraft at the time, and John H. Cabanas of C&T Charters, which stopped flying in 2012, says those restrictions made him go bankrupt.

Business began to improve in 2009, when President Obama eased restrictions on Cuban-Americans visiting family, and again two years later, when the president restored“people-to-people” travel categories.

Officials such as Josefina Vidal, director of U.S. affairs at the Cuban foreign ministry, have been working towards a long-awaited detente between the two countries.Stringer/REUTERS

Last month, the U.S. announced that while regular tourism to Cuba remains banned and travelers must fit into one of 12 categories, the government would no longer require case-by-case approval for travelers. Further, Americans visiting Cuba can now use credit cards there and spend larger amounts of money.

In the two weeks since that announcement, people have flooded charter companies with requests. “We have just been inundated,” says Bob Guild, vice president of Marazul, which has been around for three and a half decades and flies mostly between Miami and several Cuban cities. “I have gotten more than 1,500 requests for group travel in two weeks. That’s just way above the norm for us.”

In fact, Guild says he’s discouraging people from packing their bags just yet. “We’re telling everyone who is now licensed to travel to Cuba to postpone their travel until at least April or maybe even May,” he says, “because Cuba is already filled, as far as their hotels go.”

Zuccato, who runs Cuba Travel Services with his wife Lisa, says he participated in a travel show last week and, “I’m just now getting my voice back.” He estimates that business has increased more than 100 percent since the 2011 changes. Responding to the rise in demand, Cuba Travel Services will begin flying weekly from New York City to Havana in March. It also flies from Miami and Tampa.

Still, major airports are waiting to see the excitement translate into hard numbers. A spokesman for Miami International Airport says its number of chartered flights to Cuba scheduled for February is actually less than the number for last year. “For now we’re just waiting as everybody else is,” he says.

A spokeswoman for Tampa International Airport wrote by email that it is still reviewing the January numbers, but that “charter operators have indicated that they are likely to add flights in coming weeks.” The spokeswoman also wrote that traffic on the website GoToCuba.org has jumped since the government’s announcements. Before those, she wrote, the site received some 50 visitors per day; now the daily average is more than 800.

The Department of Transportation issued a notice on January 15 explaining its plans to renegotiate the 62-year-old air travel agreement currently in place. “The U.S. Government will engage with the Government of Cuba to assess our aviation relations and establish a bilateral basis for further expansion of air services,” the notice states, adding: “Nothing in this Notice is intended to interfere with U.S.-Cuba charter services.”

But introducing regular flights could spell trouble for the mom-and-pop charters. Several major airlines have expressed interest in recent days, including American Airlines, Delta, United, JetBlue and Southwest. Many, if not all, of those carriers have flown to Cuba through the charter companies.

Travel websites are also jumping on board. Kayak, a travel search engine, added Cuba hotels and flight information to its search results last week. “There was quite a bit of interest,” Chief Marketing Officer Robert Birge told Newsweek before announcing that addition.

Booking websites, however, must wait for the government negotiations to be concluded. A spokeswoman for the Priceline Group, which oversees Booking.com, Priceline.com and Kayak, says they’re eager to facilitate travel to Cuba as soon as they can. A spokesman for Orbitz, a competitor, says the same.

“We are in contact with our suppliers, airlines, hotels, cruise lines and others that are looking at getting into the Cuba market,” says Chris Chiames, vice president of corporate affairs at Orbitz. “We anticipate being able to sell travel for Americans getting to Cuba by the end of this year.

“It’s been a place so close, but so far,” Chiames adds.

Once the U.S. and Cuba revise a decades-old air service agreement, regular commercial air travel can begin. Here, a woman arriving to Havana from Miami.Enrique De La Osa/REUTERS

When major U.S. providers make it easier to book flights and hotels, what will become of the charter companies?

“The most logical scenario,” says Lillian Manzor, a University of Miami associate professor and expert on U.S.-to-Cuba travel policies, is that the influx of options will drive down ticket prices and the charters will struggle. However, Manzor says, cultural reasons may keep the major airlines from succeeding in that market. “Conducting business with Cuba is not simple. These [charter] travel agencies have a long experience and tradition of working with Cuba,” she says. “They have an experiential know-how that they’ve already had to deal with for 20-odd years that the [major] American companies don’t have.”

Zuccato also says major carriers may have trouble dealing with the nuances involved with Cuba travel. “These charter flights into Cuba have operated so efficiently over the past 20 years,” he says. “They’re able to take kind of a complicated process and make it really simple and easy for people…. We have the system down.”

Other charter executives, Aral of ABC and Guild of Marazul, concede that if necessary, they will focus on other aspects of their businesses, such as running programs and tours.

History shows that the competition could get messy. Companies have gone after one another in court; most recently, last October, Island Travel and Tours filed suit against Cuba Travel Services for setting ticket prices too low and therefore violating antitrust laws. That case is ongoing and attorneys for Cuba Travel Services have called the claim “meritless.”

Politics have caused problems as well. It is suspected that Cuban exile extremists were responsible for bombing the Marazul offices twice in 1988 and once in 1996, almost gutting the store and forcing the company to install bulletproof glass.

Francisco Aruca, the founder of Marazul—“the first American company to run charter flights to Cuba”—died in 2013. When he was a young man in Cuba, according to biographies, authorities arrested him for counter-revolutionary activities and sentenced him to 30 years behind bars. He apparently escaped and fled the country, eventually settling in Miami. There, he became a popular radio show host.

The name of another high-profile former charter company owner, John H. Cabanas of the now-closed C&T Charters, elicits colorful off-the-record responses from some, and praise as a “pioneer” from others. Cabanas, 72, says his ancestors came to Florida from Cuba in the 1850s. He says he’s dined with Fidel Castro, and he calls Raul Castro, whom Cabanas says once lent him 20 pesos for a haircut, “a terrific guy.”

Cabanas grew up in a political family, and after an arson attack on their home around the time he was 19, they fled to Cuba. Cabanas returned to the U.S. in 1988. These days, he doesn’t shy from talking about his political beliefs, and he has contributed more than $100,000 to both Democrats and Republicans over the past decade. Thanks to the renewed relations with Cuba, he says, now is a good time to be in the charter business.

“It’s a very romantic industry,” Cabanas says, “and I think it’s going to grow into an indefinite size.”

Most women have dealt with unwanted sexual advances. In fact, one national survey estimates that 65 percent have experienced some form of street harassment. But a study out of Southern Methodist University found that teenage girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after undergoing assertive resistance training in virtual reality.

While virtual reality is routinely used to train soldiers or treat anxiety disorders, training of this nature is new.

Virtual simulations “seem to be more immersive than face-to-face role plays,” said clinical psychologist Lorelei Simpson Rowe, the study’s lead author. “The participant is not thinking any more about being in a room in a psychology study with other people around,” she is “focused on what she is seeing through the glasses and what she's hearing.”

The study included 78 female students aged 14 to 18 from an all-girls urban high school. First, all were asked to fill out questionnaires related to their experiences with sexual violence and victimization. Next, the girls were split into two groups; 42 participated in the “My Voice, My Choice” (MVMC) training program, while 36 remained in the control group and received no training.

Each 90-minute training session was led by a female facilitator and included two to four young women. The group first discussed what assertiveness means and what it looks like, and then the bulk of the training was practicing these skills in virtual simulation.

“A lot of times when women engage in verbal standing up for themselves, it is very hard because we are pretty much socially conditioned to be agreeable,” said Kelli Dunlap, a doctor of psychology, JoLT fellow at American University and self-proclaimed huge gamer. “The idea of being in an environment that is building and practicing those skills so that you can take them into a real world scenario, I think that can be really helpful.”

In the simulations--a series of three role plays--a male actor would control a virtual avatar’s movements and voice in real time, allowing for a responsive experience. By pressing certain keys, the actor could make the avatar react in a variety of ways, such as smiling, frowning, throwing up his arms and turning away. The actor could also speak on the avatar’s behalf--acting angry or hurt when his advances were denied, but also scaling down his attempted coercion when the girls seemed to master assertiveness.

Screenshot of male avatar in virtual reality simulation. Image courtesy of Southern Methodist University

In the first and “easiest” of the role plays, the avatar tries to convince the participant to give him her phone number or go out with him when she doesn’t want to.

In the second situation, the avatar pressures the participant to drink and dance with him at a party, or is overly persuasive and doesn’t listen when she declines to have sex after a few dates.

In the last and most severe situation, the avatar aggressively tries to get the participant to have sex with him, cornering her and threatening her physically. The avatar never appears to touch the participant in any of the scenarios.

The study found that girls who went through MVMC suffered half the rate of sexual victimization in the three months following the initial assessment than those who did not go through the training. The study also found that MVMC participants who had a history of dating violence--a group that Simpson Rowe says often benefits less from prevention programs--experienced lower levels of emotional victimization in the months following the training.

Dunlap’s first reaction upon hearing of the program was that it seemed to place the responsibility on women. “I hope there is a brother program teaching dudes not to be creepy and rapey and make women uncomfortable,” she said.

Simpson Rowe sees it differently. “We don’t want to support victim blaming of any kind,” she said, “so what we emphasize instead are these are skills you can use to protect yourself, like locking your door...but the only person who is responsible for the occurrence of any kind of violence or victimization is the perpetrator.”

Simpson Rowe intends to replicate the program for women in college, but she doesn’t foresee a similar program being successful for perpetrators.

“One of the challenges with trying to prevent perpetration is that the majority of sexual violence is perpetrated by a small percentage of primarily men who engage in multiple perpetrations,” she said. “So, engaging in prevention that is targeted at all men has a tendency to really put people off. And of that small percentage of people who do engage in sexual violence perpetration, and they do that repeatedly, they tend to not be very responsive to efforts to get them to stop.”

Though Dunlap was skeptical at first, she later said, “I think [the program] is speaking to the sad reality that for the most part, women are responsible for their own safety. And breaking women out of the idea that they…need to entertain someone because they bought them a drink or they somehow owe men attention just for being men, I think that is a powerful thing that could get across.”

The directors of The Best of Enemies, a documentary about the 1968 debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, could have produced a riveting movie simply by splicing together old debate footage. This movie is about many weighty matters--politics, ideology, history, society and the media--but the delicious spectacle of watching two sexy men in their prime, with rapier wit, speaking in the accents of a gone American elite, slicing each other into fine ribbons, makes the film a guilty indulgence.

These two ghosts from a bygone era still make great television. It worked so well, in fact, that the series of debates, created by ABC to attach to the two 1968 conventions–Republicans in Miami and Democrats in Chicago–became the prototype for every television talking head show for the next half-century.

Sadly, no one has ever done it better.  

These were two aristocratic public intellectuals in their prime--each was an essayist and novelist--tossing off erudite commentary as they fought ferociously for their respective sides of the political divide. Buckley was, of course, the leading conservative intellectual of his day, while Vidal represented a swath of ideology to the left of conventional liberalism.

Fifty-five years on, the chasm between them has never really been bridged.

Buckley, in seersucker and fresh off the yacht, was the embodiment of conservative cool–a coolness that the right, to its everlasting dismay, has never regained despite the best efforts of a generation of pretenders. Casually cruel, entitled to his privilege, jaw locked, Buckley was also a caricature of the New York-Connecticut snob, scooting around Manhattan on a Vespa, yachting to Cozumel instead of doing his homework. But he was also something more than that. He was a defender of the rights of the privileged, founder of the National Review, always in favor of the forces of order--which essentially in the 1960s was the nuclear bomb and the truncheons and tear gas of the cops-bashing protesters, or, as Bucky would sneer, this mob. He even ran for mayor of New York.

Vidal,  no less aristocratic, the pansexual satyr with the sardonically lifted eyebrow, is equally seductive. Fresh off a bestselling book with a transsexual as the main character--later made into a film with Raquel Welch as the cross-gender hero--Vidal was steeped in the classics, practically an expat living in Italy. He deeply hated what Buckley stood for and actually did his homework.

Thus Vidal knew that Buckley had, among other things, supported nuking North Vietnam and Red China, and he called him “a bloodthirsty neurotic,” among other ad hominem insults for it. Buckley, less prepared, nonetheless never missed a riposte.  “We all know that your tendency is to be feline,” Buckley hisses at Vidal.

The casualness of their erudition, and their willingness to wield it, is one of the greatest differences between our era and theirs. Watching them, we see what has been lost. Vidal, warning that “these empires are dangerous things, as Pericles warned.”  Probably no greater a percentage of Americans in 1968 than today knew who Pericles was, but more of them would have recognized it as authoritative and wouldn’t have minded looking it up. Today, no pundit worth his pancake makeup or her hairspray would think of referencing a classical authority to back up an argument both because they don’t know it and their fear of seeming elitist. One can imagine a Sarah Palin crowd-pleasing eye-roll. "Pericles who?" The relevance of humanist education is a thing of the past.

The movie features a cast of commentators including Frank Rich, Christopher Hitchens, Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus and Vidal’s last magazine editor, Matt Tyrnauer. They help put the debates and references in context. Tanenhaus describes the left’s tendency to name-call the right, and how it put the patrician Buckley in a bad spot.  He was accustomed to but clearly uncomfortable with being accused of bigotry and greed.

In the 1968 election, “law and order” was code for race, code for fear of brown people marching on the streets and coming to take your things. At one point Buckley took this on directly, saying, “I wish you could say ‘law and order’ without critics saying, oh you are talking about race.” Buckley had taken on the racialist John Birch Society and felt himself to be anything but a hater.

He wasn’t afraid of referencing the use of violence. In other venues Buckley occasionally joked about socking people “in the goddamned face”–always followed by a laugh. But there was one epithet Buckley couldn’t brush off with his famous grin. When Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi” for supporting the Chicago police, Buckley lost his famous cool and–by extension–the debate.

The “cherry bomb,” as Christopher Hitchens called it, exploded Buckley’s customary cool. “Now listen you queer,” he seethed, “ I served in the war and you can’t call me a Nazi, or I’ll punch you in the face and you will be so plastered you won’t get up.”

The words were one thing, the rictus of hatred on the normally contained face was astonishing. The filmmakers helpfully scrawl the words on the screen and rerun the segment both with and without sound, the latter to allow the audience to better to absorb not just the the facial expression but the left hand--that effete, elegant, long-fingered hand, used to the typewriter and the martini and the jib--curling literally into a fist and unfurling and half curling back again, beyond the control of its owner, like a feral beast.

Vidal was as shocked as the rest of the world at his foe's meltdown, but onscreen, a satisfied smirk tugged at his lips, because, well, he had won. Buckley might deny ever seriously suggesting nuking North Vietnam or the Chinese, but here was the coiled, barely controlled fist–the hand that would, undoubtedly, if its owner were provoked in just the right measure, push the Armageddon button.

The loss of control haunted Buckley to his death. He sued Vidal. Vidal countersued. They carried on their argument for a few years in the pages of Esquire.

In one of the final scenes of the film, Buckley sits for a Ted Koppel interview before a studio audience. Koppel showed the clip of Buckley threatening Vidal, and when he asked Buckley about it, the old fighter for the right was uncharacteristically silent. Tanenhaus says that as soon as the cameras went off, he stalked to the back of the room and said he had been assured those tapes had been destroyed.

Vidal outlived Buckley and spent his dotage in a villa perched on the edge of the Mediterranean from whose vertiginous balcony he could, he said, “watch the decline of Western civilization.” Unlike Buckley he didn’t want to forget the debates. On the contrary, Matt Tyrnauer says, the aging Vidal was so fond of them that he played them against and again for his guests and for himself. His obsession, in fact, veered deep into Norma Desmond territory. That of course was the Vidal that inspired Buckley’s personal loathing–self-indulgent Hollywood narcissist.

As is perhaps fitting given its subjects, the movie is almost entirely peopled by white males. One single black man, a linguist, comments on the language, pointing out that “faggot” was one of the insults from that era that remains verboten in polite society. Not a single female comments on any of it. There are a few shots of Buckley’s wife Pat, in bouffant hair and caftan, and a scene in which the news anchor reports that “lady delegates” to the Republican convention who had been instructed to dress so as not to appear garish. When a young woman in one audience asked Buckley whether he approved of miniskirts, he leaned back in his chair, and after a beat replied, “On you, I do.”

So much has changed and both men lived long enough to see some of it coming: women graduating at rates higher than men, gays getting marriage, and, of course, a black president.

But this film isn’t concerned with those changes as much as with the fragmentation of the media, and the rise of the information bubble. The first two talking heads presaged the end, not the beginning, of the American public intellectual. As Vidal said, there are two things one must never turn down, sex and an invitation to appear on television. In the age of Internet, ubiquitous porn and online hookups, every human being on the planet within range of a phone or laptop is given those two opportunities every single hour of every day.

Spoiled for choice, we are sheep without sheepdogs.

After the screening at Sundance last night, directors Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon took a few questions.

One of the audience members asked, plaintively: “Can it go back to the way it was?" Meaning, can we, as a nation, expect to ever have political discourse that is authoritative, erudite and, above all, meaningful?

The answer from the podium was No.  

The Buckley-Vidal debates could be the high moment in the history of the televised American political debate. But the spectacle contained within itself the seed of the end too. Extreme civility was about to explode and cool William Buckley, whose fate it was to manifest that explosion, would regret it for the rest of his life.

During his State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress “to show the world that we are united in this mission by passing a resolution to authorize the use of force against ISIL [Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS].”

The White House has claimed repeatedly that such an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) is not legally required because the president already has the authority to conduct operations “against Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces” as provided in the 2001 AUMF.

Given that the United States began bombing Iraq on August 8, it is clear that Congress tacitly accepts this interpretation and is in no hurry to pass an updated authorization for ISIL, just as it has never made serious efforts to reform the 2001 AUMF.

Nevertheless, the White House officials demand a “right-sized, modernized AUMF,” not because it is in any way required, but because they believe“it would send a powerful signal to the citizens of this country, the citizens of our allies, and to our enemies.”

It is unclear why ISIL would care about the passing of such a transparently pointless resolution in the U.S. Congress. Moreover, the notion that the United States can send signals to friends and enemies, which are then heard and accurately interpreted in the manner that U.S. officials want, is highly dubious.

Bearing those concerns in mind, it was troubling to read portions of a new interview with Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. First, Dempsey endorsed the passage of a new authorization bill but made clear that it should be a blank check for which the military can do whatever it wants: “I think in the crafting of the AUMF, all options should be on the table, and then we can debate whether we want to use them. But the authorization should be there.”

Second, America’s most senior uniformed military official makes clear that this blank check should permit military operations anywhere on the face of the earth: “It shouldn’t constrain activities geographically, because ISIL knows no boundaries [and] doesn’t recognize any boundaries—in fact it’s their intention to erase all boundaries to their benefit.”

Finally, Dempsey contends that the blank check, geographically unconstrained AUMF should last forever: “Constraints on time, or a ‘sunset clause,’ I just don’t think it’s necessary. I think the nation should speak of its intent to confront this radical ideological barbaric group and leave that open until we can deal with it.” Last week, Dempsey opined about the fight against Islamic terrorism: “I think this threat is probably a 30-year issue.” As noted, this would make the war on terrorism even longer than the Cold War—1947-1989 vs. 1998-2045.

The Senate and House armed services and foreign affairs committees are planning to hold hearings in the next few months about what an AUMF focused on ISIL would look like. If it resembles the unbounded and infinite congressional authorization that Dempsey has outlined, that would indeed send a powerful signal to the world about America’s desire to remain in a state of perpetual warfare.

Micah Zenko is Douglas Dillon Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations website.

“Funerals are for the living. If there’s no one there, there’s no one to care.”

So says the unsympathetic boss in the Eddie Marsan film Still Life, about a funeral officer in London. It’s not the sort of job your high school counselor told you about. Marsan, as the enigmatic and largely silent John May, stages last rites for people whom time (and their families) has forgotten: derelicts and lonely old ladies who seem to have no next of kin and little left in the way of worldly goods to tell us what kind of lives they lived.

“I met three or four of these different funeral officers” in preparing for the role, says Marsan from his home in London. “When someone died they would try and find out something about the people. And it was very sad and poignant. They informed me a lot in making the film.”

May brings his work home with him—keeping a scrapbook full of the photos of the deceased, writing eulogies based on what he’s learned, even picking out the music (American gospel, Greek Orthodox) he imagines the departed would have liked. “He doesn’t express his thoughts, but he’s still thinking,” says Marsan of his character, and perhaps his method.

The successful character actor is probably best known to American audiences for his role as Liev Schreiber’s brother Terry in Showtime’sRay Donovan, or as the world’s worst driving instructor in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. “You don’t have to show a character; you just have to be a character. I believe the audience is with me and they enjoy it more if you’re not shoving it down their throats.”

Still Life, the second directorial effort of the Italian-born Uberto Pasolini, plays almost like a silent film, with Marsan’s vulnerable and sometimes feral expressions carrying the tale. “He could have been speaking any language—Italian, German, anything,” says the decidedly Cockney actor. “I thought of it as an Italian film about London...a fresh take on London.”

Marsan was born in the un-touristy district of Stepney, to working-class parents, and it is that side of the city that is presented in Still Life. “I get film scripts about London, and somebody is always being shot, someone’s being robbed, someone’s taking drugs,” he says. “So I like to make films about the London I recognize.”    

John May is called to life, finally, by the news that he is being made redundant (as they say in old Blighty)—and a chance encounter with the forgotten daughter of his last case, played by Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey’s Anna Bates). And a good thing; otherwise, his character would look as lonely as Father Mackenzie in “Eleanor Rigby,” wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave.

“He’s like a ghost,” says Marsan. “He wanders around London, and no one knows he’s there.”

Now we know. 

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is responsible for enforcing federal laws against employment discrimination. Along with enforcing these laws — most notably, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin — the EEOC tells employers how not to discriminate.

For example, the EEOC’s Best Practices for Eradicating Religious Discrimination in the Workplace instructs that an employer should “avoid assumptions or stereotypes about what constitutes a religious belief” and that managers “should be trained not to engage in stereotyping based on religious dress and grooming practices.”

It’s passing strange, then, that the government is now arguing before the Supreme Court not only that employers can do these things, but that they must, or face liability under Title VII, in the context of reasonable accommodations that companies have to make for religious practice. Discerning when such accommodations are necessary can be difficult, because people practice religion differently — and often in their own personal, non-obvious way.

Title VII has thus traditionally been understood to leave it to the employee to determine when a company policy conflicts with his or her religious practice and then to request an accommodation. This interpretation leaves employers free to pursue neutral policies up to the point that they have actual knowledge of such a conflict.

In the last several years, however, the EEOC has apparently taken the position that employers must pry into their employees’ religious practices whenever they have an inkling of suspicion that an accommodation may be needed.

Abercrombie & Fitch is one company that has found out just how impossible a situation this puts employers into. When Abercrombie decided not to hire Samantha Elauf as a sales associate based on her violation of the company’s “Look Policy” — a branding guide that, among other things, prohibits the wearing of clothing generally not sold by the store, like Elauf’s black headscarf — the company found itself on the wrong end of a government lawsuit.

A federal district court ruled for the EEOC, even though Elauf never informed them that she would need a religious accommodation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit reversed, holding that an employer must actually know about a religious practice before it can be held liable for discriminating on that basis. The Supreme Court took the case at the EEOC’s request and the Cato Institute has now filed a brief in support of Abercrombie.

We argue that employers must have actual knowledge of the potential need for a religious accommodation before they can be held liable for violating Title VII because the EEOC hasn’t offered any coherent alternative and because employers already know how to use this tried-and-true actual-knowledge standard.

In addition, the burden of identifying the need for accommodations has to be on the employees because, after all, it’s their religion, and thus they are in a significantly better position to identify conflicts than employers — who aren’t mind-readers and shouldn’t have to rely on crude stereotypes or pry into employees’ personal lives.

An opposite rule would create an awkward and uncomfortable scenario all-around. The EEOC’s position is short-sighted; if the agency somehow prevails, it will have done what federal agencies do best: turn minimal burdens for some people into heavy burdens for everyone.

The Supreme Court will hear argument in EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc. on February 25.

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. This article first appeared on the Cato Institute website.

On a raw, wet night in early December, Ravi Coltrane walked into the warm glow of center stage before a packed house at San Francisco’s SFJAZZ Center. He opened a notebook on his music stand and began to recite a poem. Through his tenor saxophone.

From the bell of the horn came a clear cadence of syllables, rising and falling intonation, speech-like appeals. Piano, bass and drums churned up undulating waves of sonic support. Fellow saxist Joe Lovano echoed Coltrane’s phrases through his own tenor. The conversation grew urgent: call and response, faith and struggle, the black church and the blues. No one in the audience had heard the words Coltrane had been glancing at, but they got the message. The standing ovation lasted several minutes.

“You know, it’s kind of a heavy thing to do,” he said of the performance. Except when speaking through a saxophone, he’s a quiet guy, partial to understatement. It’s one way in which Ravi Coltrane is like his father, a man he never really knew but whose name and achievements have shaped and challenged his world.

Almost exactly a half-century before this night, the not-yet-legendary John Coltrane had recited the same poem for the first time—also through his tenor. He was making a new album with a dream team of players later dubbed the “classic quartet”: pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison. The poem served as the inspirational core for the fourth and final movement of a suite Coltrane had brought to recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. In a marathon session that evening of December 9, 1964, the quartet laid down the 33-minute album that startled and redefined not only jazz but other genres. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the release of that recording, often cited as one of the most influential artistic statements of the 20th century. The poem, the suite and the record share the same title, A Love Supreme.

For its power and innovations in structure and improvisational style, A Love Supreme is a piece that serious players study and revere—but rarely dare to perform. The subject was almost shockingly personal for a jazz recording: Coltrane’s offering of faith and thanks to God. In the liner notes he included the written version of the poem, which begins, “I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.”

Yet A Love Supreme quickly found a receptive audience far beyond jazz wonks and religion-minded listeners. Within a year of arriving in stores in late February 1965, the recording was named Album of the Year by DownBeat magazine and nominated for two Grammys. (The following year, Newsweek devoted six pages to the new “jazz revolution,” identifying Coltrane as a leader.) It is one of the few jazz records to go mainstream, going gold (500,000 copies sold) years ago.

Ashley Kahn, author of A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, says the recording inspired new trends in music and performance, from the minimalist works of classical composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley to the trancelike live solos of the Grateful Dead and the Doors. Among those who have pointed to the record as a source of inspiration, according to Kahn, are REM guitarist Peter Buck, poet/singer Gil Scott-Heron, Joni Mitchell and Bono. A Love Supreme has also become a modern meme. As a prop in Don Draper’s living room, the album cover’s brooding portrait of Coltrane helps evoke the simmering mood of the Mad Men era. Now playing regularly in contemporary movie backgrounds and hipster bars, the recording’s saxophonic keening reminds audiences that many of the old tensions are still on the stove.

It’s a safe bet John Coltrane never set out to disturb the trajectory of music. Low-key and introspective, he plied a dedicated path from unremarkable beginnings in the Philadelphia music scene of the 1940s. Over the years, he added to his church and R&B roots by apprenticing with bands led by Johnny Hodges, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Through Davis, Coltrane got interested in tunes with fewer chords stretching over longer periods. With Monk, he studied a compelling combination of catchy, jagged melodies with bald dissonance. Drugs and booze knocked him off track more than once, but he was also hooked on conjuring a new musical vocabulary.

Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, Coltrane signed record deals and gained attention. His 1961 soprano sax recording of the Sound of Music song My Favorite Things became a hit with mainstream listeners. In other settings, discerning jazz buffs were alternately mesmerized and baffled by his feverish, improvisational explorations and what seemed like public practice sessions of weird scale exercises.

By late 1964, having battled back from a series of dark binges and committed himself to staying clean, Coltrane felt the need to signal his gratitude to the higher being who he believed had saved him. It was a perfect creative storm, an obsessive musical quest colliding with a fervent spiritual urge.

With all the dissection inflicted on A Love Supreme over the years by historians and musicologists, virgin listeners might justifiably gird themselves for a dry, intellectual oeuvre. But in this anniversary year, give it a chance. It will agitate your ears.

Drummer Jones opens the first movement with the crash of a Chinese gong, clearly signaling this is not your grandfather’s jazz. Coltrane’s vocal chanting of the phrase “a love supreme” is followed by his tenor mimicking the words over and over in ever-changing tonalities; it’s hypnotic. Prepare to be shaken by frenetic blasts of his hallmark “sheets of sound,” then soothed by the short, prayerful utterances of the final, poetic movement. The entire piece is propelled by elements of the blues—intuitive harmonic backdrops, infectious melodic hooks and irresistible rhythms. Above all, like indelible music of any style, it is a flood of emotion. The rule of thumb is two listening sessions. By the end of the second, most newbies are hooked.

“Fifty years later, you turn it on and listen,” says Randall Kline, the SFJAZZ Center’s executive artistic director, beaming. “It’s as fresh as anything you might hear now.”

“It’s sacred music for us,” says Ravi, thinking back to the performance that included his psalm-like duet with Lovano. “None of us had ever played it before in a performance. There was a message on that album, something for us to receive from John. But to perform it ourselves and to redo it—it was a bit delicate.”

“The prayer we didn’t even rehearse,” recalls Lovano. “Ravi was just reading it, and I was just following and playing as if I was accompanying a singer. It felt really beautiful.”

Remarkably, the younger Coltrane and his collaborators played a new, ovation-stirring interpretation of A Love Supreme on every one of the festival’s subsequent three nights. A few days after the San Francisco tribute, he was back in New York rehearsing his regular quartet for a stretch at the Village Vanguard. No, he said, he had no plans to “take it on the road.” But he was confident that others would commemorate the piece through the year, and predicted people continue to listen “generation after generation.”

To Kline, the power and longevity of the music comes from its double whammy of challenge and generosity. No doubt it’s difficult at first—that is a saxophone reciting a psalm, after all. But isn’t the challenge part of the lasting appeal? “This is a piece that people would use to work through whatever they were wrestling with,” explains Kline, harking back to flower children and civil rights marchers, who both adopted the song as an anthem. Today its 50th anniversary arrives during another period defined by division and partisans turning a deaf ear. Think Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Charlie Hebdo...

“It’s about listening,” says Kline. “It’s an invitation—and a means—to listen outside your comfort zone. This is a time when we really need something like A Love Supreme.”

Each year, before Americans sit down to watch the Super Bowl, some preparations typically occur—friends are invited over to watch, beers are bought and various cheese-covered snacks are made. But for Super Bowl XLIX, in which the Seattle Seahawks are facing the New England Patriots, some fans are taking things to a whole new level.

Employees at Solstice, a Seattle-based medical marijuana retailer, were rolling 12,000 joints in preparation for the big game, NBC News reported. The joints were being rolled as part of a special “12th pack” promotion, a nod to the “12th man” nickname given to Seahawks fans for their boisterous support of the team.

Are you ready for Super Bowl XLIX Sunday? We’ve got something for you! http://t.co/zK3jb3rBzD#GoHawks#12thManpic.twitter.com/H6aiyiBvY1

— Solstice (@solsticegrown) January 27, 2015

The joints contain a special “Seahawks Blend,” deemed the loudest because when harvest-time comes around, the whole building knows. Solstice hopes the blend will become available by next season to recreational users in the Seahawks’ home state, where marijuana is legal.

This kind of promotional deal is nothing new. Last year, a marijuana delivery service called Green Umbrella offered a strain called "Beast Mode O.G.” that was named after Seattle running back Marshawn Lynch. This year, the company is rolling out Beast Mode 2.0, a new strain in his honor.

As Reddit users so aptly pointed out, the Seahawks have gone to the Super Bowl every year since the state legalized marijuana—so maybe the stuff is good for more than just calming mid-game nerves. 

Yep, someone made a Seahawks logo out of weed pic.twitter.com/QgAQHkYAcl

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) February 1, 2015

Abdullah Saeed argued in The Guardian that considering the number of injuries that occur and the spike in NFL prescription drug use, team doctors should be allowed to treat players with marijuana. He points to research showing that marijuana can reduce concussion severity and provide a safer and non-addictive alternative to opiates for the management of pain.

“It would mean fewer addictions, fewer brain injuries (and thereby less violent behavior resulting from brain injuries),” he said. “[I]t would demonstrate that the NFL prioritizes players’ long-term health over short-term effectiveness.”

Another strong advocate for medical marijuana is Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll.

“Regardless of what other stigmas may be involved, I think we have to do this because the world of medicine is trying to do the exact same thing and figure it out and they’re coming to some conclusions,” he said before last year’s Super Bowl.

While the Seahawks and fellow teams are currently prohibited from smoking, as per NFL rules, new drug policies scale back the punishment. There are now an incremental number of game suspensions for each offense before a player receives a more serious suspension on the fourth offense.

A Seahawks win may not exclusively be their own—it could boost-day after marijuana sales to fans looking to cure their hangovers, but also perhaps help change the league’s negative perception of the plant.

Lethal autonomous weapons systems that can select and engage targets do not yet exist, but they are being developed. Are the ethical and legal problems that such "killer robots" pose so fraught that their development must be banned?

Human Rights Watch thinks so. In its 2012 report Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots, the activist group demanded that the nations of the world "prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international legally binding instrument."

Similarly, the robotics and ethics specialists who founded the International Committee on Robot Arms Control want "a legally binding treaty to prohibit the development, testing, production and use of autonomous weapon systems in all circumstances."

Several international organizations have launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots to push for such a global ban, and a multilateral meeting under the Convention on Conventional Weapons was held in Geneva, Switzerland last year to debate the technical, ethical and legal implications of autonomous weapons. The group is scheduled to meet again in April 2015.

At first blush, it might seem only sensible to ban remorseless automated killing machines. Who wants to encounter the Terminator on the battlefield? Proponents of a ban offer four big arguments. The first is that it is just morally wrong to delegate life-and-death decisions to machines. The second is that it will simply be impossible to instill fundamental legal and ethical principles into machines in such a way as to comply adequately with the laws of war. The third is that autonomous weapons cannot be held morally accountable for their actions. And the fourth is that, since deploying killer robots removes human soldiers from risk and reduces harm to civilians, they make war more likely.

To these objections, law professors Kenneth Anderson of American University and Matthew Waxman of Columbia respond that an outright ban "trades whatever risks autonomous weapon systems might pose in war for the real, if less visible, risk of failing to develop forms of automation that might make the use of force more precise and less harmful for civilians caught near it."

Choosing whether to kill a human being is the archetype of a moral decision. When deciding whether to pull the trigger, a soldier consults his conscience and moral precepts; a robot has no conscience or moral instincts. But does that really matter?

"Moral" decision-making by machines will also occur in non-lethal contexts. Self-driving cars will have to choose what courses of action to take when a collision is imminent—e.g., to protect their occupants or to minimize all casualties. But deploying autonomous vehicles could reduce the carnage of traffic accidents by as much as 90 percent. That seems like a significant moral and practical benefit.

"What matters morally is the ability consistently to behave in a certain way and to a specified level of performance," argue Anderson and Waxman. War robots would be no more moral agents than self-driving cars, yet they may well offer significant benefits, such as better protecting civilians stuck in and around battle zones.

But can killer robots be expected to obey fundamental legal and ethical principles as well as human soldiers do? The Georgia Tech roboticist Ronald Arkin turns this issue on its head, arguing that lethal autonomous weapon systems "will potentially be capable of performing more ethically on the battlefield than are human soldiers."

While human soldiers are moral agents possessed of consciences, they are also flawed people engaged in the most intense and unforgiving forms of aggression. Under the pressure of battle, fear, panic, rage and vengeance can overwhelm the moral sensibilities of soldiers. The result, all too often, is an atrocity.

Now consider warbots. Since self-preservation would not be their foremost drive, they would refrain from firing in uncertain situations. Not burdened with emotions, autonomous weapons would avoid the moral snares of anger and frustration. They could objectively weigh information and avoid confirmation bias when making targeting and firing decisions.

They could also evaluate information much faster and from more sources than human soldiers before responding with lethal force. And battlefield robots could impartially monitor and report the ethical behavior of all parties on the battlefield.

The baseline decision-making standards instilled into war robots, Anderson and Waxman suggest, should be derived from the customary principles of distinction and proportionality. Lethal battlefield bots must be able to make distinctions between combatants and civilians and between military and civilian property at least as well as human soldiers do.

And the harm to civilians must not be excessive relative to the expected military gain. Anderson and Waxman acknowledge that current robot systems are very far from being able to make such judgments reliably, but do not see any fundamental barriers that would prevent such capacities from being developed incrementally.

Individual soldiers can be held responsible for war crimes they commit. But who would be accountable for the similar acts executed by robots?  University of Virginia ethicist Deborah Johnson and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences philosopher Merel Noorman make the salient point that "it is far from clear that pressures of competitive warfare will lead humans to put robots they cannot control into the battlefield without human oversight. And, if there is human oversight, there is human control and responsibility." The robots' designers would set constraints on what they could do, instill norms and rules to guide their actions and verify that they exhibit predictable and reliable behavior.

"Delegation of responsibility to human and non-human components is a socio-technical design choice, not an inevitable outcome technological development," Johnson and Noorman note. "Robots for which no human actor can be held responsible are poorly designed sociotechnical systems."

Rather than focus on individual responsibility for the robots' activities, Anderson and Waxman point out that traditionally each side in a conflict has been held collectively responsible for observing the laws of war. Ultimately, robots don't kill people; people kill people.

Would the creation of phalanxes of war robots make the choice to go to war too easy? Anderson and Waxman tartly counter that to the extent that banning warbots potentially better at protecting civilians for that reason "morally amounts to holding those endangered humans as hostages, mere means to pressure political leaders." The roots of war are much deeper than the mere availability of more capable weapons.

Instead of a comprehensive treaty, Waxman and Johnson urge countries, especially the United States, to eschew secrecy and be open about their war robot development plans and progress. Lethal autonomous weapon systems are being developed incrementally, which gives humanity time to understand better their benefits and costs.

Treaties banning some extremely indiscriminate weapons—poison gas, landmines, cluster bombs—have had some success. But autonomous weapon systems would not necessarily be like those crude weapons; they could be far more discriminating and precise in their target selection and engagement than even human soldiers. A preemptive ban risks being a tragic moral failure rather than an ethical triumph.

Author’s note: Full disclosure: I have made small donations to Human Rights Watch from time to time.

Ronald Bailey is the Science Correspondent of Reason magazine and Reason.com. This article first appeared on Reason.com.

8:24 PM That's all folks. Newsweek endorses Missy Elliott for Super Bowl 2016.

8:23 PM There are dozens of back up dancers with lanterns below Perry and above her, fireworks went off. Quite a way to go out.

Andrew Weber/USA TODAY Sports

8:22 PM Perry sucks the Missy energy out of the year with "Firework," asking the Super Bowl audience if they have ever felt like a plastic bag. On the flip side, she is flying over the stage and there is an actual fire work going off above her head. (How is she changing outfits that fast?)

Katy Perry as a firework.Matt Kartozian/USA TODAY Sports

8:19 PM Perry's second costume change of the night is during "Get Your Freak On" with Missy Elliott, she breaks out a giant bejeweled 49 sweatshirt.

Recording artist Katy Perry and Recording artist Missy Elliott perform during the half time show in Super Bowl XLIX at University of Phoenix Stadium. Richard Mackson/USA TODAY Sports

8:19 PM Missy Elliott? Katy Perry rocking a 49ers jersey? Update: It's Super Bowl 49, duh!

8:17 PM Perry breaks out California Girl, the first track on which it seems abundantly obvious that she is lip syncing.

8:15 PM Perry brings dancing palm tress, surf boards, beach balls and singing sharks, onto the stage for Teenage Dream and changes into a rhinestone beach ball themed dress.

If I spent the rest of my life behind @katyperry in a shark costume I would die happy pic.twitter.com/tV6XLvjbOj

— Jenn Brady (@jennbrady_) February 2, 2015

Perry's sharks are the winning back up dancers of the night:

Katy Perry with sharks.Brian Snyder/Reuters

8:14 PM Girl on fire. Lenny Kravitz took the stage for 'I Kissed a Girl,' the stage is full of literal flames along with Perry's latex flame dress.

Katy Perry with Lenny KravitzJoe Camporeale/USA TODAY Sports

8:12 PM: Perry takes the stage wearing flames and riding a giant, cubic tiger. It has ruby eyes and an impressively gaudy gold chain. Of course, Roar was her opening number, as many expected.

Katy Perry Matthew Emmons/USA TODAY Sports

Super Bowl XLIX is a tie going into the half, with both the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks at 14 points. While the match up has been great to watch, the most important part of the Super Bowl is finally here: the halftime show.  

Katy Perry is headlining the Pepsi halftime show, Lenny Kravitz and Missy Elliot are set to join her on stage. She won’t leave with a ring or a trophy, but Perry is fulfilling a lifelong dream: According to her pre-Super Bowl tweets, Perry has been looking forward to this day since she was a little girl. 

Stay with Newsweek as we liveblog our way through Perry-Bowl 2015. 

Katy Perry's performance in one gif icymi pic.twitter.com/fofpxYHqcE

— Bendito (@SoBendito) February 2, 2015

The New England Patriots won the Super Bowl against the Seattle Seahawks in an emotionally final minute, the score was 28-24. The win came after Seahawks player Bruce Irwin was ejected from the game for instigating a fight. Patriots star Rob Gronkowski also threw a punch.

Seattle was up by 10 with just a quarter left to play, but the Patriots battled back, scoring two touchtowns to take the lead. The Seahawks weren't done. Aided by a miraculous bobbled catch, Russell Wilson pushed his team all the way to the 1 yard line.

In a call which is bound to be debated, Seattle tried to pass rather than go to their star running back, Marshawn Lynch, and a short pass bounced from a Seahawk to Patriots' Malcolm Butler.

The game wasn't over, although only a few seconds remained on the clock. As the Patriots tried to run down the final bit of clock, a Seahawks player appeared to lunge at a Patriots player. Referees then moved the play back five yards as a penalty. Then a larger fight broke out,  forcing ejections and ending the game with a whimper.

Quarterback Tom Brady was awarded the game's MVP, despite throwing 2 interceptions. 

It was the first Super Bowl win for the Patriots since 2004, but Brady's 4th. In the past few weeks, the team has been dogged by accusations it deflated footballs in an earlier game to make throwing and catching easier. 

For the NFL it was the season of Ray Rice—a Baltimore Ravens player who assualted his then girlfriend in an elevator, an incident that was caught on tape. Questions over when the league saw the video and how they arrived at Rice's suspension followed the league all season. 

South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and rebel commander Riek Machar signed another ceasefire agreement on Monday, edging them closer to a final deal to end a 15-month conflict that has ravaged the world's newest country, mediators said.

African diplomatic sources said the agreement, which has not been made public, sets out how the two leaders would share power once they formed an interim government. It is proposed Kiir would remain president while Machar would become vice president.

The warring sides also agreed to abide by a ceasefire deal signed in January 2014 but frequently violated.

The rebels, however, said many more details need to be ironed out before the deal can be labeled a "power-sharing" agreement.

After signing the latest agreement, Machar said the two sides would hold more discussions on the functions of the provisional government.

Few other details were revealed after frantic late-night talks. Regional diplomats had warned the warring sides that failure to come up with a new deal could see sanctions imposed on them.

The conflict in Africa's newest nation and one of its poorest erupted in December 2013 and has rumbled on since then despite several commitments by Kiir and Machar to halt the violence.

More than 10,000 people have been killed, about 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes and many in the oil-producing nation of about 11 million people are struggling to find enough food to eat.

Seyoum Mesfin, chief mediator of the East African IGAD bloc, said the two leaders had agreed to resume talks on Feb. 20.

"(Those talks) would be final and that would lead them into concluding a comprehensive agreement to end the crisis in South Sudan," Mesfin told reporters minutes before Kiir and Machar signed the latest peace deal.

Several previous peace deals and ceasefires that accompanied the agreements were swiftly broken.

The two sides need a transitional government in place by July, when Kiir's presidential term runs out.

Rights groups have said both factions have been responsible for ethnic killings and other abuses, driving the nation to the brink of famine. The fighting has largely pitted Kiir's Dinka ethnic group against Machar's Nuer group.

China warned the United States on Monday that it was opposed to any country meeting the Dalai Lama "in any manner" after the White House said U.S. President Barack Obama would attend an event with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader whom Beijing brands a separatist.

The White House said last week that Obama would deliver remarks at a Feb. 5 prayer breakfast in Washington about the importance of religious freedom. The Dalai Lama is due to attend.

"China is opposed to any nation or government using the Tibet issue to interfere in China's domestic affairs, and opposed to any country's leader meeting with the Dalai Lama in any manner," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a daily news briefing.

"China hopes the U.S. side abides by its promises on the Tibet issue, and proceeds to appropriately handle the issue on the basis of the overall condition of bilateral relations."

The White House, which said Obama had a "great relationship" with the Dalai Lama, did not announce any specific meeting between the two.

Obama held his third meeting with the Dalai Lama in Washington last February, infuriating Beijing, which denounces the monk as a dangerous "splittist" seeking to establish an independent Tibet.

China is usually riled by politicians meeting the Dalai Lama. In 2012, British Prime Minister David Cameron had to put his trip to China on hold after Beijing took offense at him holding a meeting in London with the Dalai Lama.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who fled to India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, says he simply wants autonomy for Tibet and denies espousing violence.