The Disturbing Appeal of the Punisher 

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’s second season is its most fascinating character, and a vigilante for our time.

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When the Punisher first entered the world of Marvel Comics, in a 1974 issue of

, he was supposed to be called “Assassin.” The series’s writer, Gerry Conway, envisioned the character as a villain who would eventually become an antihero, but Marvel’s Stan Lee advised against the name, saying it could never be used for a good guy. Lee, at least as he told

magazine in a 2005 interview, suggested “The Punisher” instead.

In both that 1974 issue and the second season of Netflix’s

(which premiered this month), the Punisher is undoubtedly an assassin, gunning down New York mobsters with impunity. But his appeal is all thanks to Stan Lee’s clever name: Here, finally, is a disciplinarian who will set the bad guys straight.

’s Punisher makes his intentions very clear from the start. Initially, when gangsters are first being murdered all over the city, he’s mistaken for a paramilitary organization with exceptional force, but it turns out that he’s just one man, with a lot of weapons and an extraordinarily deadly aim. If the mob has a meeting, he’s there with military-grade assault rifles. He occasionally stores the bodies of his victims on meat hooks. He has no sympathy for Daredevil (Charlie Cox), who’s been fighting organized crime in Hell’s Kitchen for a year now, deriding him as a “half-measure” and shooting him off a roof the first time they meet. Totally uncompromising in his mission, the Punisher is undoubtedly a hero for the Donald Trump era: a take-no-prisoners mercenary whose methods are remarkably simple and disturbingly easy to root for.

Perhaps that’s why the Punisher’s popularity has fluctuated so wildly since 1974. An immediate hit with readers, he graduated from pestering Spider-Man and Daredevil to getting his own comic-book title in 1986, one that sought to soften his murderous tendencies by retroactively explaining that he’d been under the influence of mind-altering drugs. Still,

was a harbinger of a brutal era in comics, where heroes toting massive machine guns were suddenly the norm and the death’s-head logo emblazoned on his costume became a ubiquitous cultural symbol, a sticker to plaster on a kid’s lunchbox. At the height of his popularity, there were four Punisher comic book titles:

advertised as featuring “His thoughts! His feelings! His weapons!”

This was a phenomenon of the late ’80s and early ’90s—villains-turned-heroes like DC’s Deadshot, Marvel’s Deadpool, and Image’s Spawn, people who weren’t afraid to kill and derided the caped do-gooders who were. Their bloody excesses fell out of fashion by the late ’90s, and Marvel eventually canceled all of the Punisher titles. But every trend comes back around, if only in a different medium. The long-running success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe owes a lot to a consistently bright, peppy tone across each franchise, and a reliance on quippy, handsome stars like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Pratt. But there had to be blowback at some point, and the massive success of the ultra-violent

on the silver screen, followed only weeks later by Bernthal’s Punisher, doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool at least tells snarky jokes as he chops his enemies into pieces. The Punisher (also known as Frank Castle) isn’t one for humor—that’s the kind of thing that falls by the wayside when you have meat lockers full of hanging bodies, perhaps. But he still manages to dominate season two of

, especially in the early episodes, when Cox’s Matt Murdock barely feels present in the story at all. After a year of watching him slowly dismantle the empire of the villainous Kingpin, it’s almost jarring to be faced with the Punisher’s approach, which just involves bullets—lots of them, mostly in the face. Like Daredevil, he operates by a strict code of justice, but unlike him, murder is right at the core of it.

It’s not uncommon for villains to be the real stars of superhero movies, especially in sequels, which

season two amounts to. Just as Heath Ledger’s Joker taught Batman the limits of his philosophy in

, the Punisher exists to undermine Daredevil’s brand of vigilante justice. What difference does beating up gangsters and tossing them in the slammer make in the long run? As the Punisher points out, they’ll be out and back on the street within a week. Meanwhile, Bernthal’s magnetic performance adds to Frank Castle’s appeal, while the series reveals his backstory (he’s a military veteran whose family were gunned down by the mob). As Daredevil embarks on side-adventures fighting dark ninjas with old flame Elektra (Elodie Yung), the Punisher’s arc becomes

One episode, where Irish mobsters threaten to torture and kill Castle’s dog, reminded me of another recent vigilante, the stone-faced former hitman John Wick (played by Keanu Reeves in the 2014 action film of the same name). There, a Russian gangster kills Wick’s dog, the final gift from his deceased wife, and awakens his murderous rage. The background villains of

exist in a similar binary form. They’re stupid, one-dimensional fools whose only intent is perpetuating street-level crime (weapons dealing, drugs, prostitution), and it’s easy to cheer for the Punisher as he’s wiping them out. While the show ostensibly wrestles with the morality of killing criminals, offering an extended debate between Daredevil and the Punisher on the merits of both their approaches, the fact that the Punisher is so much more compelling as a hero seems to favor a Trump-like, medieval worldview: Do unto criminals as they would do unto you.

Marvel is reportedly planning a spinoff series for the Punisher, who may also pop up in

season three. Either way, Bernthal is a breakout star for the brand, largely thanks to the dispassionate way in which his character fires shotgun rounds into people’s faces. It’s indefensible, yet there’s a simplicity to his philosophy that’s hard to deny. Don’t want to die? Don’t be a criminal, and definitely don’t touch the Punisher’s dog.

A photographer slows down his process to capture a population in flux.

The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.

Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are competing for caucus voters in the three states, where the senator will try to catch up with the former secretary of state’s  runaway lead.

There's more to life than leaving home.

This month, many of the nation\'s best and brightest high school seniors will receive thick envelopes in the mail announcing their admission to the college of their dreams. According to a 2011 survey, about 60 percent of them will go to their first-choice schools. For many of them, going away to college will be like crossing the Rubicon. They will leave their families -- their homes -- and probably not return for many years, if at all.

That was journalist Rod Dreher\'s path. Dreher grew up in the small southern community of Starhill, Louisiana, 35 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. His family goes back five generations there. His father was a part-time farmer and sanitarian; his mother drove a school bus. His younger sister Ruthie loved hunting and fishing, even as a little girl.

The billionaire candidate couldn’t have created more perfect foils for a candidacy built on resentment.

Had Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the White House somehow infiltrated the ranks of Emory\'s student activists and blackmailed the university’s President James W. Wagner, it could scarcely have orchestrated a spectacle more helpful to Trump’s prospects, or damaging to the values that protect vulnerable groups, than what they accomplished on their own this week. After someone wrote “Trump 2016” in colored chalk around campus, several dozen student demonstrators objected that the banal campaign message scared, upset, or offended them, and administrators responded by going Orwellian.

reports that Wagner will review footage from campus security cameras to uncover who made the chalkings. “He added that if they’re students, they will go through the conduct violation process,” the newspaper stated, “while if they are from outside of the University, trespassing charges will be pressed.” Ponder the precedent. An academic authority figure will use surveillance to track down and punish someone for urging support for a political candidate. If possible, he will marshal criminal law to do so. As Jesse Singal wrote at

, that is “extremely creepy, and a sign that something has gone seriously wrong.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December,

The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

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I am so excited for this severe threat looming on the horizon.

I just can’t wait to learn how I will fail to live up to my own expectations.

I lie awake, tight-chested, at 3 a.m., just really looking forward to what fresh hell that meeting will be about.

Don’t mind me, I’m just trying out a cognitive trick that’s supposed to help with anxiety. It’s called “anxiety reappraisal,” and it boils down to telling yourself that you feel excited whenever you feel nervous. It sounds stupidly simple, but it\'s proven effective in a variety of studies and settings.

It’s also counterintuitive: When most people feel anxious, they likely tell themselves to just relax. “When asked, ‘how do you feel about your upcoming speech?’, most people will say, ‘I’m so nervous, I’m trying to calm down,’” said Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied the phenomenon. She cites the ubiquitous “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters as partial evidence.

Zack Snyder’s latest film is an inconsistent, comically grim mess.

, ended: The titular Kryptonian is fighting his nemesis, General Zod, over the streets of Metropolis and, in the process, laying waste to much of the city. What we

know before is that down there, amid the rubble, is the billionaire Bruce Wayne, trying with limited success to rescue workers at a local branch of Wayne Enterprises from the collateral destruction.

director Zack Snyder took a fair amount of grief for the way that movie casually depopulated an American city, however fictional. In Snyder’s retelling here, Bruce Wayne (a.k.a., obviously, Batman) essentially becomes the voice of those critics. Is Superman

a hero? Or is he just some alien interloper who brought his extraterrestrial vendettas to our humble planet, knocking down an entire urban skyline in the process? In the hands of another director—the Christopher Nolan of the

films come immediately to mind—this and other moral quandaries might have been drawn out in intriguing ways.

The increasing darkness of Superman, Batman, and their brethren are indicators of the American public’s anxiety.

X-Men (2000), Roger Ebert begins with an evocation of the mythological gods of Ancient Greece, and ends with a plea to die-hard comic-book fans, whom he wishes would “linger in the lobby after each screening to answer questions.” Sixteen years later, viewed from a cinematic present overrun by the cape and cowl, Ebert’s words read as both prescient and portentous.

The rise of the superhero blockbuster, which began in earnest with the release of Spider-Man, in 2002, is comparably bifold, driven by two dissimilar but potent cultural forces: a civilization’s ancient, collective need for a self-defining myth, and the thoroughly modern drive to commodify that desire. Superheroes have become the contemporary American equivalent of Greek gods—mythic characters who embody the populace’s loftiest hopes, its deepest insecurities, and flaws. Between 2016 and 2020, an estimated 63 comic-book adaptations will receive a major theatrical release, with scores more scheduled to take the form of TV shows, video games, and every salable medium in between. The public’s appetite for these properties appears blind and bottomless, its stomach willing to rupture long before it’s sated. If American culture is indeed in a state of decline, these are the stories built to survive its demise.

Deep anxiety about the ability to have children later in life plagues many women. But the decline in fertility over the course of a woman’s 30s has been oversold. Here’s what the statistics really tell us—and what they don’t.

In the tentative, post-9/11 spring of 2002, I was, at 30, in the midst of extricating myself from my first marriage. My husband and I had met in graduate school but couldn’t find two academic jobs in the same place, so we spent the three years of our marriage living in different states. After I accepted a tenure-track position in California and he turned down a postdoctoral research position nearby—the job wasn’t good enough, he said—it seemed clear that our living situation was not going to change.

I put off telling my parents about the split for weeks, hesitant to disappoint them. When I finally broke the news, they were, to my relief, supportive and understanding. Then my mother said, “Have you read

Time magazine this week? I know you want to have kids.”

Historical precedents augur against Donald Trump—but perhaps the old rules no longer apply.

Historical context is a great asset. But is history always an accurate guide? Does past performance always give us the best predictor of future outcomes?

This election season provides a fascinating frame to see if the polarization in politics, from Washington to the states to the public, is no different than what we have seen in the past; if the angry populism evident especially on the right but also to some degree on the left, is no different from the populism that has emerged following every economic setback; if the surge for an insurgent, non-establishment candidate that has always petered out well before the primary process is over will follow the same arc; if the Republican Party will once again flirt with outside-the-box candidates before settling on an establishment figure; if the fact that every major-party convention since 1952 has been over before a ballot is cast will hold true again. Or, perhaps, if this time might be different.

From a moral standpoint, it makes the world worse.

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