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Senators on both sides of the aisle are calling for the release of a classified memo that could give lawmakers—and the general public—a better understanding of the role Gina Haspel played in the CIA’s torture program. Haspel is Donald Trump’s nominee to run the spy agency, and a key Senate committee is set to vote this week on her confirmation, which could go to the full chamber before the end of the month.

A potential stumbling block to her appointment is the so-called Durham Report, written at the conclusion of an Obama-era Justice Department’s investigation into “whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations.” Haspel ran one of those secret prisons in Thailand for several months in 2002, and she oversaw the torture of at least one detainee: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was involved in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Three years later, she drafted a memo ordering the destruction of videos showing the interrogation and torture of detainees.

The full report has never been released, and a Senate memo describing the parts of the report that concern Haspel’s career is also being kept secret. The classified document, prepared by Democratic staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee, includes “details some senators and aides have found disturbing,” NBC reports, citing four sources familiar with the document.

“I have never in my life wished that more classified information could be available to the public,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) told a Huffington Post reporter last week after she’d viewed the classified documents.

McCaskill can see the documents because she’s a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will vote Wednesday on whether to recommend Haspel’s confirmation to the full Senate. But the rest of the chamber will be left in the dark, it seems, since the classified report has been removed from Senate servers in an apparent attempt to prevent leaks.

“It is critical that all senators have access to information detailing Ms. Haspel’s role in the 2005 destruction of videotapes belonging to the CIA,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) wrote in a letter to the Justice Department last week, requesting the release of the Durham Report. “It is critical that all senators have access to the same important, relevant information regarding the person nominated to the lead the CIA.”

Will the memo change the course of Haspel’s confirmation? Unnamed sources tell NBC that there is “nothing explosive” in the report capable of derailing her nomination, while The Intercept cites “people briefed on the contents of the memo” who say “it is not possible to read it and come away without serious doubts about whether Haspel ought to be confirmed.” It would be nice to be able to read it and judge for ourselves.

During her confirmation hearing last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pressed Haspel about whether she would object to the release of the Durham investigation.

“I haven’t seen it, so I haven’t read it, so I don’t know,” Haspel replied.

“So far, the American people have only been given information that is designed to help you get confirmed,” said Wyden. “Everything else has been classified.”

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are the only two Republican senators to declare their intent to vote against Haspel’s confirmation, but their opposition could be canceled out by two Democrats, Sens. Joe Donnelly (D-In.) and Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.), who say they will vote for Haspel. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee and potentially a key swing vote, announced today that he would support Haspel’s confirmation after getting a letter from the nominee clarifying her views on the torture program.

McCain’s opposition to Haspel is a both personal and political. A torture survivor himself, McCain says Haspel’s “refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying.”

In her hearing, Haspel admitted that she did not believe torture “worked,” but she blurred the line a bit by defending the long-standing claim that the CIA’s torture program produced useful intelligence and valuable leads in the early days of the War on Terror. Defenders of torture have long argued that it helped produce key details in the search for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, despite a lack of evidence to back up that claim.

“When bin Laden finally met the fate he deserved, the apologists for torture appeared in numbers on cable news shows and in the newspapers claiming bin Laden wouldn’t have been found without intelligence gained through the use of [enhanced interrogation],” McCain says in his just-released book The Restless Wave.

“In truth, most of the CIA’s claims that abusive interrogations of detainees had produced vital leads to help locate bin Laden were exaggerated, misleading, and in some cases, complete bullshit,” McCain writes.

McCain explains that he came to those conclusions—ones that “angered” him—only after being able to review other classified reports on the CIA torture regime. More than a dozen years after Haspel ordered the destruction of the interrogation tapes, it’s time for everyone else to have a chance to see the evidence.

“As public opinion has shifted toward legalization, rich white men like [former Rep. John] Boehner and the mega-corporations they serve are trying to cash in,” writes New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon. “We can’t let them rake in profits while thousands of people, mostly people of color, continue to sit in jail for possession and use.”

Those prisoners shouldn’t be sitting in jail. But Nixon goes off track when she starts looking for ways to help the black and Hispanic communities that have been disproportionately harmed by prohibition. Rather than just calling for full legalization, she calls for

models similar to those created in places like Oakland, which sets aside half of its marijuana licenses for low-income residents who have been convicted of a marijuana-related crime or who live in a community targeted by the drug war. And in Massachusetts, the new statewide marijuana equity program provides additional support, including loans and technical support to applicants from impacted communities.

Using government licenses to privilege blacks and Hispanics over “rich white men” seems like a recipe for turning the industry into a tool of patronage politicians. There’s also a long history of white contractors gaming rules that are supposed to help minority-owned businesses (here’s an example from 1979 and another from 2013), and I don’t think applying that template to the cannabis industry is going to do any more to reduce urban poverty. Better to lift the caps and open the market to all.

And yes: As in most other licensed industries, legislators in legal pot states prohibit many people with criminal records from working in the marijuana biz. Nixon is right that those restrictions should be abolished, but why limit that action to marijuana jobs?

Nixon also criticizes the New York Medical Cannabis Industry Association for suing the New York Health Department to stop the agency from doubling the number of licensed medical cannabis growers. The association argued that New York’s law caps the number of growers at five, and that to expand the number of licenses (to 10) would make it harder for the incumbent license holders—backed by more than $50 million in venture capital—to turn a profit.

This kind of rent-seeking is infuriating, and she’s right to denounce the suit. Yet I’m not sure the racial problems that Nixon notes would be solved by doubling (or tripling or quadrupling) the number of licensed growers in New York and requiring that some of them be people of color. Denver has 720 retail cultivators and 509 retail dispensaries, and yet the city continues to disproportionately arrest black and Latino residents for marijuana offenses. The same is true in Washington, D.C., where pot arrest rates have fallen but black residents still bear the brunt of enforcement.

So long as there are laws around who can grow and sell marijuana, people of color will be arrested for violating marijuana laws. If there are abundant jobs in the legal marijuana sector (as in Denver) or no constraints on who can grow marijuana (as in D.C.), the police can still disproportionately arrest people of color for public consumption and underage possession. Diversity quotas for licensing and public financing for minority entrepreneurs are shiny, low-impact proposals for a problem that will likely outlive the drug war writ large.

Nixon comes much closer to proposing something genuinely radical when she quotes Michelle Alexander on reparations:

“Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big—big money, big businesses selling weed—after 40 years of impoverished Black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?”

“I think we have to be willing, as we’re talking about legalization, to also start talking about reparations for the war on drugs, how to repair the harm caused.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) tried to advance something like this in the Marijuana Justice Act of 2017. His proposal: a $500 million-a-year Community Reinvestment Fund, appropriated by Congress, to be spent on costs related to expungement as well as “public libraries, community centers, and programs and opportunities dedicated to youth.” I didn’t care for Booker’s bill because it contains provisions almost certain to drive conservatives and law enforcement away from the bargaining table. I also think the aforementioned fund would end up benefiting politically connected developers more than at-risk kids.

But I think we should at least debate the merits of (and mechanisms for) compensating people who have served time for drug offenses. Last year, transhumanist Zoltan Istvan made the case here at Reason:

It wasn’t just the defamatory criminal sentence many of us received. The government confiscated my Jeep Comanche and my beloved Honda motorcycle during the ordeal. What little money I had I spent on lawyers and judicial filings in our convoluted court system. My total financial loss a quarter of a century ago was $20,000 dollars. Had I been able to invest that money in the stock market, for example, I’d have over $100,000 now.

Some of us also want compensation for the financial damage forced upon us—for the literal theft of our property. Maybe that means a class action lawsuit insisting on government reparation for all damage caused, maybe in the form of tax credits or proceeds from the sale of unused Federal land, so as not to abuse the American taxpayer further over the drug war. It’s safe to say—given the damage caused and the lives affected—such a suit would likely be in the billions of dollars.

Jonathan Rauch wrote about reparations for Reason back in 2001, arguing that we should compensate blacks who were forced to attend segregated schools just as we compensated Japanese-Americans who’d endured internment. (The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which ordered compensation for living Japanese-Americans, turns 30 this August.) Rauch’s argument against reparations for slavery—that we cannot punish living whites for the sins of their dead ancestors—does not undermine the case for compensating prisoners of the drug war, who were incarcerated by the political choices of their free neighbors. Straight cash seems like the right way to go about it.

Tom Wolfe, the celebrated reporter, ethnographer, and novelist, is dead at the age of 87.

With his passing, we’ve lost the individual who more than any other writer transformed the practice of journalism since he first started writing for the late, lamented New York Herald Tribune in 1962. I’ll leave it to others to assess Wolfe’s contributions to literary style; the validity of his popular polemics on art, architecture, race relations, sexuality, and neuroscience; and the relevance of his caustic but illuminating feuds with such other major writers as Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving. These are all fun to talk about, but they are ultimately ephemeral.

Wolfe’s enduring—and fundamentally libertarian—contribution to contemporary discourse is the insight at the heart of his 1976 New York essay that christened the 1970s as the “Me Decade.” Writing during a time when most wise men (and they were mostly men back then) were obsessed with inflation, unemployment, and other measures of macroeconomic malaise, Wolfe was nearly alone in underscoring that consumer goods and lifestyle options had been radically democratized in postwar America. Forget the soul-killing depredations of the Cold War, giant corporations, cheap money, rising taxes, and government’s expansion into every nook and cranny of life, he counseled. Wolfe focused on the pent-up psychic demand for freedom, individualism, and meaning in a country that had recently withstood a decade-plus of Great Depression and World War. The only thing worse than the impending apocalypse due to nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, overpopulation, or the Second Coming was that the world wouldn’t end and we’d have spent our time on Earth punching the clock for a soul-killing job with great dental benefits. In the goddamn Bicentennial Year, Wolfe argued, Americans were done with building Maslow’s pyramid of needs for other people, especially their social betters. Who among us was going to follow slow-witted concussion-cases like Jerry Ford or lusting-only-in-his-heart Jimmy Carter into the twilight’s last gleaming? It was our time to shine, baby!

The postwar economy had

pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history. True, nothing has solved the plight of those at the very bottom, the chronically unemployed of the slums. Nevertheless, in Compton, California, today it is possible for a family at the very lowest class level, which is known in America today as “on welfare,” to draw an income of $8,000 a year entirely from public sources. This is more than most British newspaper columnists and Italian factory foremen make, even allowing for differences in living costs. In America truck drivers, mechanics, factory workers, policemen, firemen, and garbagemen make so much money—$15,000 to $20,000 (or more) per year is not uncommon—that the word proletarian can no longer be used in this country with a straight face. So one now says lower middle class. One can’t even call workingmen blue collar any longer. They all have on collars like Joe Namath’s or Johnny Bench’s or Walt Frazier’s. They all have on $35 Superstar Qiana sport shirts with elephant collars and 1940s Airbrush Wallpaper Flowers Buncha Grapes and Seashell designs all over them.

As he did later in his most (and perhaps only) successful novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe rooted his observations in detailed reporting on the reality of money and the trappings of class in everyday life. The passage above could never be written by other “New Journalists” such as Hunter Thompson and Norman Mailer because they were fundamentally obsessed only with themselves. Wolfe, like Joan Didion at her best, wanted first and foremost to understand and grasp social reality that transcended the self.

The turn to self-actualization deeply upset and offended both old-school, puritanical commies and starched-shirt Protestants who deeply believed in Max Weber even if they had never read him. Wolfe understood that the United States was shifting radically from a stratified, button-down society to one where everybody—rich and poor, black and white, male and female—not only had the means to live however the fuck they felt but had the moxie to do so. One of his early pieces for the Herald Tribune covered the introduction of macrobiotic dieting to the U.S.; it exemplifies his interest in how everyday people, long thought by eggheads and scolds not to have any autonomous interest in aspirational living, were starting to explore all sorts of freaky-deaky subcultures. His major works of the ’60s, including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, explored how people create meaning in a mass-cult world, sometimes by drug-fueled ecstasy and dropping out, more commonly by modifying production-line cars, clothes, and suburban activities such as grilling to their own individual desires.

My God, the old utopian socialists of the nineteenth century—such as Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, and Marx—lived for the day of the liberated workingman….He didn’t look right, and he wouldn’t…do right! I can remember what brave plans visionary architects at Yale and Harvard still had for the common man in the early 1950s. (They actually used the term “common man.”)…By the 1960s the common man was also getting quite interested in this business of “realizing his potential as a human being.” But once again he crossed everybody up! Once more he took his money and ran—determined to do-it-himself!…

Once the dreary little bastards started getting money…they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes…Me…Me…Me…Me….

Wolfe was not uncritical of the turn to “Me…Me…Me…Me…” but unlike such scolds as Christopher Lasch, David Frum, and Robert Putnam, who saw only narcissism and social pathology in the democratization of liberation, the rise to ubiquity of aristocratic privilege, and the assertion of a universal right of exit, he could laugh at its excesses while respecting and reporting out its various mutations. Wolfe’s is a world characterized by what later writers have identified as “bourgeois equality” (Deirdre McCloskey), “plenitude” (Grant McCracken), and “cultural proliferation” (me). It is individualism on steroids—or maybe on poppers, bio-dynamic wine, and grass-fed elk—but it also traffics in new ways of community, from the libertarian communalism of Whole Foods to the blockchain fantasies of your friendly neighborhood cypherpunk. Amid the breakdown of old institutions, modalities, and coalitions ranging from the Republican and Democratic Parties to NATO to old-line churches to broadcast media, we won’t be changing addresses anytime soon.

For all the problems of the world that Wolfe mapped for us, it is not only vastly preferable to what came before it—go ask your ditch-digger grandpas and piece-work grandmas if they lived fulfilling lives—it is fantastically more interesting and promising too. Tom Wolfe was the Amerigo Vespucci of our time and, like all important dead people, he will be forgotten even as we still elaborate the maps he drew for us long ago.

When Spotify introduced its new “hate content and hateful conduct” policy—which promises to suppress songs for violent or hateful lyrics or offstage behavior—I predicted that the streaming service would soon be caught between users wanting easy access to popular music and activists demanding that artists be scrubbed from the platform.

Sure enough, the feminist group Ultraviolet has now sent a letter to Spotify thanking it for the initial steps of removing R. Kelly and XXXTentacion from official playlists— and asking that the company go further.

“These two men are not the only abusers on your platform,” writes Ultraviolet’s Shaunna Thomas. “We implore you to take a deeper look at the artists you promote.” She goes on to call for the company to exile Eminem, Nelly, Don Henley of the Eagles, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, Chris Brown, rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, Ted Nugent, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“Every time a famous individual continues to be glorified despite allegations of abuse, we wrongly perpetuate silence by showing survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence that there will be no consequences for abuse,” says Thomas. “That has a cultural effect far beyond one individual artist.”

Let’s be clear: All these performers have done, or at least been accused of doing, awful things.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ lead singer, Anthony Kiedis, admits to having sex with a girl he knew to be 14 years old in his autobiography Scar Tissue. (He was 23 at the time, and the incident later became the inspiration for the song “Catholic School Girls Rule.”) Brown was convicted of battering his then-girlfriend Rhianna in 2009. Eminem pled guilty to a weapons charge in 2001. 6ix9ine received three years’ probation for charges stemming from a film he made of himself performing sexual acts with a 13-year-old. Don Henley, Steven Tyler, and Ted Nugent have all either admitted or been accused of sleeping with underage girls.

Let’s be clear about this too: Whether or not Ultraviolet is right that these musicians are “glorified” by virtue of appearing on Spotify-generated playlists and promotions, Thomas has a point when she argues that it’s inconsistent to refuse to promote R. Kelly’s music but not Brown’s or Kiedis’s. If the company is actually serious about this new policy, it’ll have to go a lot further than R. Kelly and XXXTentacion.

And I mean a lot further. Ultraviolet’s list just scratches the surface. Whether it’s Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13-year-old cousin or David Bowie taking the virginity of a 14-year-old, a lot of pop stars’ escapades don’t conform to modern norms of affirmative consent and gender equity. There’s no shortage of articles (start with this listicle from the Phoenix New Times) retelling tales of statutory rape and sexual assault by beloved rockers and rappers.

It doesn’t stop there. A fair number of rappers have been convicted of murder, manslaughter, or some other violent crime. Dig into the history of Norwegian black metal and you’ll learn that members of such foundational bands as Burzum, Gorgoroth, and Mayhem have been found guilty of church burnings, torture, and murdering bandmates.

And at least two out of four Beatles—John Lennon and Ringo Starr—were domestic abusers.

Needless to say, just because this kind of behavior is common in the music scene doesn’t make it OK. But it does raise the question of what a music streaming service can really be expected to do about it. Indeed, blacklisting these bands make many Spotify’s features functionally useless. What classic rock playlist would exclude the Beatles?

How to treat the work of artists who have done terrible things is a difficult question. It’s made no easier by the fact that fans often cheer on musicians’ worst behavior, even reveling in the idea that the violence and hedonistic excesses found in their lyrics is at least partially authentic.

It’s also a question that companies like Spotify are ill-equipped to answer. Acting as the moral arbiter, as its new policy requires, will only erode the value of its service while leaving individual listeners less able to make moral judgements for themselves.